It’s Sunday night, November 28. The CBC is playing the last episode of its Greatest Canadian series. There are 10 candidates, all in the process by popular nomination and previous rounds of voting. The concept was taken from a BBC series, and like the BBC series, it is an entertainment with a populist subtext.
My sentiments – I don’t think this program pretends to have any clear criteria for judging greatness – are with Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau, Lester Pearson.
Cajun Recipes
In the course of making a crockpot jambalaya, I wondered if I should add file powder. I searched gumbo file and jambalaya and found the basic definitions and several recipe sites. Both dishes are classified as cajun or creole recipes within Southern US and Caribbean recipe classifications.
Dalmation Chili, v. 1.0, Crockpot
No dogs are harmed in making this chili. It uses pork, and it’s based on a recipe in one of Mable Hoffman’s books, called Black and White chili because it uses black and white beans. The basic recipe is kind of bland and I have adapted it. Claire asked about Dalmations when I mentioned it. It has a bit of heat, but is basically mild. Very tasty though.
It’s a crockpot recipe and would have to be adapted for stovetop cooking. It uses canned beans, which is simpler than soaking and cooking dried beans. There is some processing at the beginning, and then it cooks at the low heat setting for 6 hours.
Tinkering
I have changed the appearance of this blog by importing a stylesheet called Tiny Green from Movable Styles. I also got around to upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type.
Monkey Taunts
More on soccer fans acting like dumb monkeys.
Firefox notes
I have been trying to see which browser functions are slower in Firefox than in Windows IE. Some of the interface with MT seems to be as fast as when I use IE, but some pages are slower in Firefox. Some of the administrative pages that build a list – the comment approval/editing list, or the Blacklist item list – seem to take a long time compared to the same page in IE. But Firefox seems to build an entry list very quickly. WTF?
Minimalist Blogging
Steve has simplified his blog by writing his own basic CMS. No trackbacks, comments submitted by php mail, no spam. Just content. He makes writing his own CMS sound as easy as installing MT. He could market his CMS to engineers as Nano-blogging. The word minimalism may not register with engineers. His choice to blog lite is appealing when I look at the grief Randy is having with his blogs after he upgraded to MT 3.121. Imperfect CSS, pages not displaying in any browser …
Snowfall
Yesterday Mike and I rode through Assiniboine Park and St. Charles. The ground was dry, except for a few places where condensation had formed ice on the road. The temperature was around zero (C) and the wind was about 20, gusting to 30 kph. Not too cold. We had numb toes by the end, but otherwise our gear held up to the conditions.
Spanish Simians
My RSS feed to BBC World news today has two stories which mention England, Spain, racism, football (soccer), monkeys, apes, and paleontology.
Firefox Redux
It was the ads. I became furious at the ads cluttering the pages I was reading. In the early versions of Netscape, I could turn off images to speed up page loads, which was handy when I was using a 14.4 K modem, and even a 56 K modem, on a dial-up account. That capability has disappeared in modern browsers, and setting a browser to ignore images would ignore content. There are hosts of pop-blockers but no effective ad blockers for IE. Ad blocking in IE is generally limited to blocking new windows (pop ups) and banners – images of specific size at the top of a page. There is a product called Webwasher which tries build a blacklist of banned sites which was promising but configuring it was a problem. There is a free classic version, with no help files and the full version is not cheap. Finding a real IE ad blocker on Tucows or the Web is just a nightmare. Lots of cookie-cutter pop-up blockers, lots of shareware from little.wannabe.dot.com ventures.