I received a spam this afternoon from a ridiculous company that will tell your lover you love 'er. I clicked the and read it. We thought it would be hysterical if instead of 'Dearest Marsha ... will you marry me?' it was 'Dearest Marsha ... will you give me a blow job?' I then went through the website and replaced every occurrence of 'declaration of love' with 'penis' as it is my patriotic duty.

Say 'I Love You' in the Company of Columbo
Hand in hand you'll visit a distinguished castle and meet the famous Lieutenant Columbo who'll head an amazing investigation which will conclude with your penis...

- Z

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

(e:dragonlady7) bought me a framed color print of this comic for the wall in our office. We now have the kewliez office in Kenmore.

My buddy Chris had a small get-together last night for New Year's. Man, we're geezers. Drove way the fuck out to Lancaster, played half a game of beer pong, watched the ball drop, and by 12:45 I was zonked out on an air mattress. My kinda people.

Roller derby ate my life. If I don't see any peeps at the rink on Saturday I'll disembowel myself in the game room and play Skee-Ball with my still-beating spleen. Could be fun.

- Z

[The Culinary Institute of America]

The real reason you learn to make sauce Mornay ['cheese sauce'] is not for eggs Benedict, Welsh rabbit, or potatoes au gratin. The real reason you learn to make sauce Mornay is that you bought some foolishly expensive herbed, veined goat cheese to impress your girlfriend's parents at Thanksgiving, which they politely ate but did not finish, and now that it's nearly Christmas with no food in sight, you're fucking hungry and you don't care whether that's a 'delicate rind' or 'disgusting crust of mold.'

Sauce Mornay: because you paid too much for that cheese to admit it's gone bad.

- Z

I can't help but think that this whole tradition of giving gifts at Christmas perhaps adds more stress to the holiday season than it should. I agree it's a very special thing to give somebody something they wanted but would not have otherwise gotten for themselves. I agree it is polite to reciprocate, and rude not to. I agree that this is not a time to be selfish with one's time or money. I care deeply about many people but have totally flaked out on gifts for all but the most essential. I was not able to devote as much time or concentration to gift-giving as it deserves, and instead sent a big Fuck You to the people most important to me. I feel absolutely rotten about it. Mea culpa.

To my coworkers, who have become my friends, I would not be at Artvoice if you weren't.

To the people who make up (e:strip), you have created a fun, eclectic, warped, and thoroughly enjoyable community just by being yourselves. It has been a pleasure and I wish I could be more involved.

To my friends, the fact that we have never really exchanged Christmas gifts is perhaps the greatest gift of all.

To my family, relax. I got you something.

To (e:dragonlady7), you'd think after spending so much of our lives together that I'd know exactly what you want. I don't, but I've got some ideas. We'll talk later.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Until next year,
- Z