Zobar's Journal

07/18/2006 18:37 #37361

fotosjøp
Category: contest

I finally got around to installing The Gimp on my new laptop. [I would have gone with Photoshop, but I haven't yet installed any pirated software on this computer, and I didn't want to start now.]

So now [is this too corny for (e:strip)?] I want to start a Photoshop [..., Gimp, MS Paint, ...] contest on the theme of this photo of (e:dragonlady7) 's dad:

The only rule is, keep it clean [consider it a test of your sense of humor]. Here's the first entry to get this train wreck

a-rollin':

Winner gets ... beer?

- Z

metalpeter - 07/18/06 19:21
I don't have photoshop so I'm out but i look forward to seeing some really interesting pictures, I can picture a couple in my mind but would have no idea how to do them.

jessbob - 07/18/06 19:08
Have you ever seen SomethingAwful's Photoshop Phriday? :::link:::

theecarey - 07/18/06 18:46
haha this is hilarious! Great photo to take advantgage of here. Hope people jump on it.. I can just imagine the possibilities!

Do we get to know what he was really looking at?
:)

07/17/2006 13:49 #37360

god damnit
Category: potpourri

Now we've got these weird fuckers popping out all over the place. [see previous post]

- Z

jenks - 07/17/06 22:46
hahahahahahha that's hysterical

kara - 07/17/06 15:17
To kill your afternoon:
:::link:::

07/17/2006 13:18 #37359

city of dis
Category: potpourri

We used to have an air conditioner in the office, but it didn't work very well. This morning we replaced it with a convenient portal to the underworld.

Last night I made spaghetti with a very flavorful magic red pesto.

Ingredients:
1/4c extra-virgin olive oil
1/3c sun-dried tomatoes in oil [chopped?]
1c fresh basil
2+ cloves garlic
1/3c parmesan cheese
1lb thin spaghetti
Use your imagination.

Instructions:
Use your imagination on the olive oil. [Your imagination doesn't have to be very good if you have a lot of it.] Filter the olive oil into a food processor, along with the sun-dried tomatoes, basil, garlic, and parmesan. Process until finely chopped. Cook the spaghetti. Drain the noodles, saving 1/2c of the noodle water for the pesto [I'm not sure why it has to be noodle water, but that's what the recipe says]. Add the noodle water to the pesto, mix, and toss with the noodles.

- Z

zobar - 07/18/06 22:58
Interesting. When I was living at college on about $5/day I came up with a pretty decent sauce made almost exclusively from my roommates' nonperishables I scrounged out of the cabinets. I really didn't have time for formal processes and mother sauces - just dump it all on angel hair [cooks faster than ramen] and enjoy. It was different every time I made it, but usually involved combinations of olive oil/butter, rice vinegar, soy sauce/salt, parmesan, oregano, and fresh ground pepper. It's super-weird, but I dig the way the soy sauce and parmesan taste together, especially with the pepper. Sometimes I still make my pasta like that [or use it as a salad dressing] but now I've got fresh herbs from the garden as well.

- Z

mrdt - 07/18/06 21:29
well, given the fact that I'm staring at about 40 cookbooks or so, and am completely passionate about food let me provide some culinary education for you...

In classic french tradition we are given 5 mother sauces: the veloute, which usually is a roux thickened fish stock; the bechemel, which is the well known cream sauce; hollandaise, which is the egg emulsion; espangnol or brown sauce derived from animal stock; and the tomato sauce, which you don't like. All of these sauces can be used to create a set of secondary sauces and in one way or another have found their way to the noodle. The veloute is the primary sauce for the secondary sauce Provencal and the bechemel is the primary sauce for the secondary sauce Mornay, which is a cheese sauce used in Macaroni & Cheese or Philly Steaks (although don't tell the guy at Pat's that his canned sauce is actually a Mornay).

Most sauces start from what we call a fond, which is french for foundation. This fond is often a stock that has been cooked with animal bones and aromatics slowly for hours and hours. You can't expect to make a good sauce with out a good foundation. Whether fresh eggs and cream or a well reduced gelatinous white chicken stock this is where sauce making begins.

Another rule about saucing pasta that I leave you to explore for yourself is: The thickness of the noodle determines how thick your sauce should be (ie, angel hair vs. pappardale).

Some of my most treasured cookbook are Julia child's & Simon Beck's Matering the Art of Frenck Cooking, Janques Pepin's Complete Techniques, Tom Colicchio's Thinl Like a Chef and Mario Battali's Simple Italian Food.

I urge you to explore the exploding world of cuisine and don't let something you are not particularly fond of prevent you from trying some extraordinary cooking. You never know - the food might be prepared better and fresher than the first time you tried something.

zobar - 07/18/06 08:03
Not really chimichurri. I wouldn't really consider it a pesto either, but that's how it's filed in Joy. The point of it is that I don't really like tomato sauce all that much, so I'm always looking for different things to put on my noodles.

- Z

mrdt - 07/17/06 23:00
so you kind of made a chimichurri with pot? What for?

As far as tha pasta water in the pesto, I've never heard that. My binder comes from the the open chemical chain in pine nuts. After I have an emulsification from the initial ingredients I add the pine nuts to secure everything. This is the same principle behind dry mustard in viniagrettes.

zobar - 07/17/06 14:19
I think it becomes technical-virgin olive oil.

- Z

dragonlady7 - 07/17/06 14:17
I don't think the olive oil counts as extra-virgin if you've sauteed a half-pound of freaking marijuana in it for an hour.

leetee - 07/17/06 14:07
I beleive the basic idea on using the water from cooking noodles or pasta is that it contains starch that will help the sauce bind together better, while providing needed moisture at the same time. But i'm not a food scientist... i just watch too much of the Food Network.

07/16/2006 11:12 #37358

bloggers unplug for an offline picnic
Category: news

'Buffalo's bloggers took a break Saturday from criticizing Joel Giambra, Wal-Mart and the Buffalo Sabres' proposed new logo to eat some barbecue and meet their cyber peers.'

'only about a dozen bloggers ... attended'

'Saturday's event is the fourth BloggerCon meeting for members of the area blogging community.'

'The social-networking aspect of blogging just comes with the territory," said Derek Punaro'

WTF?! WNY Media has a get-together once a year and, out of their less than 20 members, half show up. What's the deal, call a roast pig a 'conference,' and it'll make B1 in the local paper? We've done more get-togethers in the last four months than they've done in the last four years, usually on less than two days' notice, and there's usually at least a dozen people there each time. And furthermore, we have no offline picnics because when we unplug ... we're still online.

(e:strip) - The Jimmy Olsen of the Buffalo Blogging community.

Who's the new PR director? You need to send the News an angry letter to the editor. I have it on good authority that they'll print anything.

- Z

ajay - 07/16/06 15:39
Actually, I think it is a _good_ thing that newspapers contradict themselves. This means there's no single voice dictating things; a plurality of voices has an outlet. Their job is to report news.

I would be scared of a news source which spoke with one voice (like Faux 'News').

boxerboi - 07/16/06 14:38
The Buffalo News, like the NY Times, will print anything. Even if it contradicts what they said less than 24 hours earlier. When I was a senior in high school, my journalism teacher pointed this out and I started looking for the inconsistencies. Pretty soon I had a huge pile of highlighted articles.

If it wasn't for the Bon-Ton coupons and the crappy "around WNY" thumbnail at the bottom of the front page, I'm not sure anyone would bother picking it up.

paul - 07/16/06 13:14
I started writing a response to this and it ended up being an article instead so I posted it over on the news journal (e:news,897)

07/14/2006 17:01 #37357

how to deal with disgruntled employees
Category: management

The air conditioner for the back office is busted and it ain't getting fixed.

I feel kind of bad about it, partially because I'm in the back office but mostly because I'm on the outs with management w.r.t. the air conditioning situation (e:zobar,68) [woops].

So today I went out and got a 6-pack of icy-cold Sam Adams for the back office. [It is important to know that the back office and the front office are separate enough that we may as well be in separate buildings.] Later on, the assistant music editor came back to chat about our upcoming citywide battle-of-the-bands thing (e:zobar,79) . Of course I offered him a bottle, and of course he accepted. I did not expect that, after the meeting, he would come back with two 6-packs of icy cold beer of his own for the office. Now Video and Editorial are in on it, and nothing is getting done.

Now we've got AirTunes

set up in the back office and one of the front office people is djing for us. I got a link to Bar Stool Racing

and we got videos of dudes taking on four other dudes and winning

and the whole place has just gone to hell. This is kind of a crappy company to work for, but where else could you get away with this much fucking around?

Wally

is my hero. Perhaps that's a bad thing.

- Z

chico - 07/14/06 17:22
One lousy six pack of Sam started all that Friday goodness?! That may be the best $7.99 + deposit that you ever spent, my friend.