Had I even left? Here's a brain dump of the last couple days.

ITEM ONE: Food.

(e:dragonlady7) wrote about the things we have eaten recently. I will distill the knowledge:

1a. Chocolate toffee pancakes. Holy poop I thought I would be able to handle these but I had three and passed the fuck out. It was like eating chocolate cake for breakfast.

1b. We had some shrimp penne primavera last night that was very tasty but I'm really proud of my particular component, the shrimp. First off, Weggies has uncooked peeled/deveined shrimp which is so genius that I can't understand why you can't find them elsewhere. Second off, these shrimp are so easy, tasty, and aromatic, and you can probably put them in anything:

Get a wok or something, and put in 2 Tbsp each of peanut oil and dry sherry. Grate one clove of garlic into it. Heat that up until it socks you in the nose, the garlic looks tasty, and the sherry is reduced a little bit.

Some people are going to say look man, you can't mix the oil and sherry like that because the sherry will keep the oil from heating up. Maybe they're right, but shrimp cook so fast it can't make a difference. If they keep bugging you just make them stop and take a deep breath. Mmmm. Then kick them the hell out of your kitchen.

Add the shrimp and fry them until they're pink all over, not a second longer. Then, do whatever you want with them. (e:dragonlady7) used the garlicky shrimp-oil for flavoring the alfredo sauce, and that was a good idea.


THING TWO: A lament on HTML parsers

One of the things I do for the QCRG AV Club is to get the photos people take at the game and collect them in one place. Naturally people put their photos wherever they feel most comfortable, so that means that out of four photographers, two have used flickr, one has used Photobucket, and one has used MySpace Pics. I think 'download album' as a zip file is a pretty obvious feature but it seems the people in power don't agree. Photobucket at least has an RSS feed for each album. flickr does not have RSS feeds, but they have a pretty nice API.

MySpace Pics has neither [but did you even have to ask?] which means automated form submission & HTML scraping, with cookies. Enter Python: the urllib2 module has optional support for temporary or persistent cookies, and the HTMLParser module does a hell of a job on HTML 'as deployed' [which is to say: the opposite of well-formed & valid XHTML]. HTML4 is such a hugely popular format, and lexically speaking it's not significantly messier than XHTML ... it makes me wonder why HTML parsing libraries are nowhere near as ubiquitous as XML parsers.


THING THREE: Location-based services

I've believed for a while that mobile phones are theoretically capable of locating themselves without GPS by triangulating on cell towers. The new "Locate" button in iPhone Maps answers the question: yes, but it's not real accurate. Oddly enough, it seems to be more accurate where there are fewer towers. At home, it puts me on a side street within walking distance, and the margin of error goes from Colvin to Starin, which is not too bad. When I'm at work, it puts me within walking distance at Roswell Park, but the margin of error goes from Fort Erie on the west to Bailey Ave on the east, all the way up to Linden Ave on the north. That's like 85% of the city. [When I'm at the rink it puts me in the river somewhere.]


THING FOUR: Office 2008

I haven't bought it yet but I probably will eventually. The Home edition is only $150, which I think is pretty reasonable. The Standard edition costs $400, but as near as I can tell the only difference is in Entourage's support for Exchange Server and scriptability. An Exchange client is also built into Apple Mail, so are those two features really worth $250? The Standard license is also upgradeable, but the upgrade is still $90 more expensive than a full license for the Home edition.

And then there's this 'Expression Media' that is part of the Special Media edition. Is this different than the media databases that are built into iPhoto or iTunes, or Adobe Bridge? Is it really worth $100?

I think somebody messed up on the pricing for this one, is all I'm saying.


- Z