das loft

Some cheery photos to warm the soul. Enjoy.

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Arf.. Lots of salad today. I thought Meta was going to have some, but I guess she ate out somewhere. So I just ate the whole salad bowl. That is, the salad that was contained therein. It was good. Lettuce and arugula. Or something.

I'm balancing the salad with some chocolate mousse. Mousse is easy to make. It's just fiercely whipped cream with flavourings.

We've been getting an awful lot of white stuff around here over the last few days. An awful lot indeed. It's been quite wintery and cozy. I suppose all those people's dreams of a white Christmas came true for once. But hopefully we'll see some of that golden stuff again so it can thaw out the brown stuff. I need some of that brown stuff to fill some round stuff near that transparent stuff (which transmits the said golden stuff) and grow some green stuff to make some yummy stuff.

I'm making some rye stuff. Hopefully it will become some great stuff, as Mme. Joki would exclaim. But rye dough - that's some heavy stuff. Literally dense, heavy matter. I don't know how it will possibly be able to rise itself, although I know I've been able to make it work in the past. I feel sorry for the poor yeast, trying to squeeze open those little air bubbles under that incredible pressure.

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People should check out Enembius's blog, I think. It's rather funny. Inspiring even. He's one of Meta's blog buddies. So check it out. Be weirded out if necessary.

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I fixed Meta's computer, more or less. I reinstalled the operating system, Xandros 3.0 this time, and it works perfectly right out of the box. All the hardware works without any fiddling. It's quite nice. But it's still ugly as hell, and nowhere near Windows XP in cleanliness. But they're clearly not GUI or graphic design experts, so they can't help it. It's a great little OS for what little manpower they must have over there.

The first partition, however, still has a number of bad blocks, which I think has been gradually increasing (they said that would happen). So I've set up a cron job to make a backup of /dev/hda1 and another backup of /home/meta on a regular basis (ignorant man's RAID, I suppose). That should fend off most major disasters for the time being - at least until Meta can afford a new hard drive. I should probably have a look on eBay for one of those.

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I made a couple nice Christmas fruitcakes using a sourdough starter to raise them. I'm keeping one wrapped in a cheesecloth soaked in rum until Christmas day. The other I just poured rum all over after it was baked. It's most moist and most delicious! Traditional recipes tell you to first soak the raisins and orange peel and other dried fruit in rum for 3 days to 3 weeks. I didn't have time to do that, so instead I put in directly whatever suitable ingredients I had (raisins and dates), and also added some clementine and satsuma peel I candied. Covering the cake in rum afterwards probably has a similar effect to an initial soaking.

I also made organic egg nog yesterday. I still have never been able to reproduce the flavour of President's Choice egg nog, which I quite like. But this egg nog was good anyway. It's a cooked kind. (Maybe if I actually bought some egg nog from the store and compared the flavour, I could figure out the balance. But that seems like cheating, somehow.) I still find it strange that you can't buy organic egg nog in the stores yet. It's certainly easy enough to make.

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Sorry I haven't been posting very often. Much happening here. Trying to get Christmas tasks done before Christmas. I love it, mind you. I'm no Scrooge. :)

My uncle visited me and my sister at our apartment yesterday. It's always nice to see him. He dropped off my dad's Yamaha DX7 keyboard and drove us places to take care of minor errands that are just annoying to do without a car. Our studio is really coming together now. It feels good to be able to exercize my fingers again.

Yesterday Meta ran to get the phone and got her leg twisted in a cable connected to her laptop. As a result, her laptop dropped onto the hardwood floor. It's slowly recovering from the shock. Some of the keys were in a coma, but one by one they're waking up (I never knew keys could go temporarily unconscious until now). The wireless PCMCIA card sticking out the side got bent and its cover broke off, but I managed to make it good as new, and it still seems to work. The last thing that needs mending is the hard drive. It's likely that one of the heads got damaged when it collided with the floor, so the computer won't boot from the hard drive anymore. But I have a trusty Linux BBC bootable rescue CD that's allowing me to examine the extent of the damage and generate a list of bad blocks on the drive. It also let me back up all of Meta's important writings and artwork onto my computer (nothing lost!). Once I have a list of the bad blocks, I'll probably reformat her computer and install the new version of Xandros onto it (or perhaps Linspire, for a change).

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I made some really quite good sourdough bread yesterday. I'd been growing the starter for four or five days. It still wasn't doubling in size - not even one-and-a-halving - but I didn't have the patience to wait any longer, so I made a loaf. The advice on sourdoughhome.com says that if your starter can't double itself, then it can't raise your bread. Bilgewater! Never have I prepared a starter that's been able to double in size - not once. The highest it's ever risen is maybe a one-and-a-third times. Yet I've successfully baked many air-bubbly, delicious loaves of sourdough bread. This last starter was only one-and-a-quartering itself, and the bread turned out wonderfully. It's basically this recipe, but using molasses instead of honey. It's got an incredible flavour, it's moist, and not too dense. So I think some of the folks at sourdoughhome.com don't know what they're talking about.

I managed to unclog the print head of another bubble-jet printer - this time a Canon BJC-2100. The last time I had to do that was with my late Epson (God rest its soul). But with this Canon, I was almost about to give up. I'd run the print head cleaning utility dozens and dozens of times, but magenta and black were simply refusing to participate in the printing process. So I took the bottle of rubbing alcohol that I'd used the last time and sucked some of it up into a syringe, took out the ink cartridges and deposited some of the alcohol into the ink reservoirs in the print head. I ran the print head cleaning utility several more times, then absorbed the leftover alcohol into a paper towel. I replaced the ink cartridges and ran the utility some more. They still weren't unclogged. So I left it overnight. In the morning, I tested it once more, and everything was clear! I guess some time was needed for the alcohol to dissolve the cloggings. So I highly recommend this technique, in case you want to save that old printer of yours.

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We're slowly getting things in order around here. We're looking at couches at the thrift store on Kerr. They're so cheap - like $30. Ugly, too. But we'll cover it in a nice sari or other nice fabric. Ahh! listen to what I'm saying. I've turned into a house fluffer. Let's hope this ordeal is soon over. So now we just need someone to help haul it the short distance to our apartment. Theoretically, two people could just carry it. But a dolly would be a big help. Someone's SUV would work even better, dare I say it.

We got a Christmas tree. I just carried it home. What a delicious smell. I wish fir tasted as good.

I haven't managed to find organic basil or parsley seeds yet. In fact, I've found no seeds to buy whatsoever. Where do you go to find out-of-season things like that now? I'm sure my dad has some in his storage way out in Cobourg, but I'm not going to go all the way there to get some seeds. Does anybody have any seeds they can sell me? I will give you a piece of home-baked soft gingerbread.

Today we're supposed to get our Weekly Organic Wonder food box. I wonder how wondrous it will be.

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Meta and I have been gradually getting the apartment organized. Do we ever have a lot of stuff. We're up to our eyelashes in stuff. So we're trying to give away items that aren't terribly close to our hearts. We have a pile for the Sally Ann, a pile for selling, and several Christmas gift piles for our loved ones.

It's a very cozy apartment. The living room is nearly like a chapel nave. In fact, I've seen many chapels during my travels that are smaller than our living room. But wouldn't it be grand if we could transform the walls of this room into the aesthetic likeness of a chapel's. Then we would perform Maelic rituals every morning.

We've been living on curried vegetable stir-fries for the past couple days. It's so delicious and yet so very good for us. I love vegetables. I've ordered a box of organic veggies and fruit (local and seasonal selections whenever possible) to be delivered here every Friday through Weekly Organic Wonder Foods. It will be exciting. Plus Nathan will be delivering us fresh raw milk from a farm up north as often as he can. I will be making yoghurt and fresh cheeses. This will be the life.

Soon I'm going to start a living organic herb garden for my kitchen using the limited light that shines through the kitchen window. There's really nothing like freshly picked basil.

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So my sister and I moved into our new apartment yesterday. Steve and Jon were wonderful helpers. I owe them many things. If I were rich, I'd give them each a thousand dollars. It didn't take long either, considering how much stuff we had to move out of storage.

That evening Jon and I met our friends in Toronto for dinner and hanging out afterwards, sort of a birthday celebration for me and Nathan. It's always fun spending time with them. They're such smart and funny people, you know.

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[Note: The following videos had to be removed to save space on my server. If you want to watch them, please e-mail me.]

I've finally compiled my Europe trip videos into a stupid film for all of you to watch. Choose your version:

• Europe bike trip video - 56 kbps (56k dial-up)
  ...very low quality, but good enough for you dial-up folks ;)
• Europe bike trip video - 128 kbps (ISDN/GPRS/cable/DSL/etc.)

Note: You need RealPlayer to watch these videos. Warning: It's 42 minutes long.

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I just have to say that Macromedia Flash MX 2004 is a terrible program. It's chock full of bugs. Undo rarely works for very long, not even in the latest update to Flash. At some point during a string of undos, it will miss a step and your flash file will gradually get more and more corrupted. Eventually, once it's confused itself to the limit, Flash will crash. ActionScript, the scripting language, seems to be a few bricks short of a load. Functions don't behave as documented. In particular, I think loadMovie was never really fully coded, and they probably just didn't bother testing it to realize that. The UI of the program is horrendously awkward and unintuitive. Pen and fill colour manipulation is particularly disgusting. The pen tools cause endless headaches (they tried to rip them off of Photoshop, but clearly failed miserably). And so on. I wish I didn't have to use it.

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So Meta and I most definitely got the apartment. We signed the lease today. The rent was even slightly less than I suspected, so that was a pleasant surprise. Since the move-in date is Dec. 10, the landlady gave us a discount on December's rent, but more than she had to. We're not sure why she's being so nice. It's so refreshing to meet people like her.

Yesterday I visited Jon's house in Oakville to get started on this software project he's working on for a friend of his. We weren't very productive, but at least now I have a better idea of what needs to be done. So I'm going to do whatever I can/want to help him.

Steve's cat is really sick. I'm not sure what she has, but it's definitely serious, and she's probably had it for a while. I feel so sorry for her. That's been making everything a little bit depressing around here. The good news about the apartment is welcome.

I'm working on the songs page of Corvus Mae. I'm going to make it really, really nice. I have some nice ideas for visual nothings. Inconsequential nothings, really, but nothings nonetheless. And there will be secrets throughout the site. Lots of them. I will add more and more over time.

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