• Okay, I know it’s only January and all, but I think we may have the bug of the year: “The Welcome screen may be displayed for 30 seconds during the logon process after you set a solid color as the desktop background in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2” (via Lifehacker)
• Backup or Export Your Facebook Account talks about how to do just that — but the subtext is, most of the information you’ve put into Facebook is public, regardless of your privacy settings.
• The dates for YAPC2010 have been announced: June 21-23. See you there?
• Grass-fed meat, eggs, and diary in Maryland — need to check these out…
• Fed Up: School Lunch Project — a public school teacher eats the public school lunch offering every day for a year, and blogs it. (via Eric Wagoner’s twitter, IIRC…)
• Monsanto GMO corn causes organ damage in mammals — also, pretty much throughout the American food supply at this point. Yummy. (via Eric Snowdeal’s twitter, IIRC…)

Motivated by a desire to take my lunch to work much more frequently, but realizing that the morning chaos isn’t going to get better anytime soon, and inspired by a couple three recent threads on ask.metafilter, I decided to whip up a batch of freezer burritos. I based things off this breakfast burrito recipe, but ended up making some substantial changes.

Obviously, I was looking for lunch burritos, not breakfast, so the eggs were right out. (Also, not a big fan of the egg in general…) Also, I knew that if I made 20 of the exact same thing, I was going to get bored before they were all gone — so I decided to mix it up a bit, and make some chicken, some steak, and some plain bean burritos, then freeze them all together (unlabeled). Now lunch is going to be an adventure every day!

First up, I got a medium-sized chicken (about 3.5 pounds) and roasted it, using this recipe (there is a recipe down there, under the rant). For the cavity, I used a quarter of a large white onion and about 6 smallish garlic cloves. Aside from peeling the outer layers off both, I didn’t do any additional prep there. Cooked for a little over an hour, and it turned out great — I think I’ll probably use this recipe again as the actual meal. This time, however, I pulled all the meat off the carcass, doing some random quality control inspection along the way. (TASTY!)

While the chicken was cooking, I started a skirt steak marinating. I was working off this recipe, but I rapidly went pretty far afield. I crushed 4 good sized garlic cloves, and then mixed in 3 tablespoons lime juice, 1/4 teaspoon cumin, and 1/2 teaspoon salt to make a thin paste. Slathered that on both sides of the steak, and tossed it in the fridge for several hours. Took it out, brushed both sides with olive oil, grilled it for about 3-4 minutes on each side on a very hot skillet, and that was that.

I also whipped up a batch of white rice using a knock-off Chipotle rice recipe that TheWife found. This is really only meh; if and when I do this again, I need to find a better rice recipe (or improve my technique with this one, or something)…

The other component was a bunch of plain canned black beans, rinsed well and drained. Again, if and when I repeat this, I think I’ll take the trouble to start with dry beans and cook them up; it’ll give a bit more control over the spicing and flavor.

Anyway, once all the meat was prepped, actually making the burritos was pretty easy: slap down a spoon or two of beans, a spoon or two of rice, add the meat (or some salsa for the bean variety), add a handful of a shredded cheddar/jack mix, and wrap it up. Once I had a batch rolled, I wrapped each one in plastic wrap, tossed them all in a freezer bag, and slung that into the deep freeze.

I’ll try to report back in a week or two on how this is working out. I’ve also got my eye on a calzone recipe for the next round of mass cooking — maybe some time next month…

Previously if one was a writer or artist or scholar or otherwise historically/culturally significant, one would give one’s writings & ‘collection’ to a university library. What do we do with our websites & blogs past the time we can pay for them?

How can we know now what might be significant for study 100, 200, 500, 1200 years from now? How do we archive bytes?

Some folks are printing out their blogs to custom ordered books, but this is not necessarily the best solution, as what will the children or grandchildren of our friends and families do with those books? Will they end up at flea markets along with 78rpm acetate records? But maybe that is good, the randomness of the find.

By choosing to engage in the frontier online space, we have chosen to some degree to toss the long term to the wind. The suggestion of the Library of Congress, or other institutions that function as a cultural respository, may be a good bet for the long run in terms of keeping an archive of text|image|ephemera, as after 2 recessions, I don’t trust the market to keep a reliable archive.

If we can now register our copyright with the Library of Congress or the Copyright Libraries (such as Trinity, Oxford, etc), and we can get an ISBN or periodical number for our blogs, how do we start to archive the actual posts and images to a repository.

Do we lobby our congress|political critters to set aside resources for blogs that are periodicals to be archived [or] as Matthowie suggest do we donate to an institution such as the Archive.org foundation and make sure that it can function as a cultural archival NGO?

msjen

and

joeclark writes that “the earliest bloggers are old enough to die”, and the knock-on is that the earliest blogs are old enough to die with their creators, and not through graceful retirement. Reaching back to Brad and Rebecca and Derek doing Fray and Leslie doing Smug and so many others, they were all a kind of conversation that I followed from the periphery, and which mattered way more than the corporate webmonkeying I was doing in my spare time, because it was about what the web might be good for, if you cared about it enough.

Conversations are transient (though their products ought not to be) and social memory has its own big role to play, so I’m not a stickler for completeness, but it was always a writing and building both in the moment and for posterity, especially at that point when Blogger made it easy to keep the new stuff up front and preserve the archives. It’s just that there wasn’t quite the sense of what to do when posterity came around, and that’s what we face today, along with an apparent powerlessness to stop their vanishing.

As the New Year rolled in, Tom was calling blogs “the vinyl of social media”, and though I know he meant it with a smile, it reminds me now that vinyl isn’t just an old medium: it’s a repository of so much that never made it to digital.

I hadn’t visited Brad’s stuff regularly in years, though I passed by though the occasional link, and in nostalgic moments. It was good to see it still there, a prompt for those warm memories of someone at the heart of that weird new blogging thing. So, one last thought: if you were around ten years ago, maybe pay a visit to those places you used you cross off your daily list, just to see if they’re still around, and if they are, glance through what you’ve missed and say hello.

holgate

Lots of interesting fodder towards the bottom of that thread for webloggers of a certain age…

Anyway, the numbers for 2009:

Books read in 2009: 80

Books started in 2009, still being read: 3 (Getting Things Done, an annual re-read; Learn C On The Mac, a brain refresh (and not as platform-specific as I’d have liked); Keeping It Real, trashy fantasy)

Books started in 2009 and abandoned: 3 (Study War No More, a reread that I couldn’t get in to; Code Complete 2, had to leave it with $OLD_JOB when I quit; Dive Into Python, just couldn’t seem to push through it… again.)

Non-fiction/fiction split: 18/62 (22.5% non-fiction)

Library books/own books split: 15/65 (18.75% library books)

Reread/first read split: 33/47 (41.25% rereads — rather higher than normal, but I reread a lot of paperbacks this year prior to donating them)

Longest read: The Art of UNIX Programming, started 19 Feb; finished 21 May.

By month:

• Produce Before You Consume, via Rasterweb
• Make Your Mockup in Markup
• If you eat ground beef — like, fast food hamburgers, say — you may actually be consuming ammonia-treated fatty trimmings, otherwise known as “pink slime”. There’s lots more coverage of this story at Flutterby and MetaFilter. I can’t express how disgusting this is.
• Reading the above has me seriously pondering what we’d need to do to buy a quarter or half of a cow from a local smallfarmer; if anybody local to MoCo MD has info on that, yell.
• Lake Superior State has released the List of Banned Words for 2010. Includes “bromance” (sorry Medley…), “toxic assets”, and “friend” as a verb.

• Science Clouds
• Gitalist is gitweb re-written in Catalyst
• RJBS on Dist::Zilla — Dist::Zilla is towards the top of my “I should really work out how to use this one of these days…” list
• Racism Is Not Crafty
• If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly word
• How to center a div vertically and horizontally on a page (for wonkden)
• Critters, even simple ones, are complicated
• All the sysadmins in the house are watching the SysAdvent Calendar, right?
• Speaking of sysadmins, Genehack strongly endorses a list of dumb things to check
• cope colorizes common CLI outputs
• Things I Won’t Work With is like closing down a bar with a group of bitter old organic chemists. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
• The Data Liberation Front wants you to be able to get your data back out of Google’s apps. This is a Good Thing.
• Anybody planning on going to Webapps ‘10? Just up the road in Boston…

Related: Cryptome has been posting various cable co and ISP “lawful interception” guides recently. Interesting reading.

Update: Bruce Schneier responds. Note that Bruce Scheier is so cool that he’s responding from 2006!

Anyway, here’s the list of stuff I picked up. Not all of this is for Thanksgiving and there will be some stuff at Thanksgiving that gets pulled out of the cellar that isn’t on this list — but this was tonight’s haul:

• Mikeller/Brew Dog Devine Rebel — fantastic barleywine, this is going into the cellar to age for a bit
• Schlafly Reserve 2008 Barleywine
• Ommegang Three Philosophers — I really like this Quad/Kriek combo with the turkey
• Stone/Brew Dog bashah Black Belgian-style Double IPA. Has a bottled on date of 12/19/10. I have beer from the future, people!
• Tröegs Mad Elf Ale — had a couple of these already this year, it’s pretty tasty
• Weyerbacher Riserva — Ale with raspberry puree added; aged in Oak. Curious about this one…
• Southern Tier Old Man Winter ale — already had one of these this year; this one might not last the night…
• Founders Backwoods Bastard — all the label says is 50 I.B.U/10.2% ABV. It might not see the dawn either

TheWife also wanted some wine:

• Langmeil Hangin’ Snakes Shiraz-Viognier 2006
• Bohemian Highway California Merlot 2007
• Terra Andina Sauvignon Blanc 2008

If I remember, I’ll try to get some tasting notes Thursday and post those as a follow-up…

How much trouble is it to bend something like MT/OpenMelody to that end? Or just whip up something specialized? Call it a ‘golb’ — the reverse of a blog — people writing posts on your site.

This may be a Thanksgiving weekend coding project, let’s see…

(N.b., you probably wouldn’t want to let just anybody post, because the spammers would make you a smoking hole in the ground about 30 seconds later. Make people have OpenID and maybe pass a captcha or something…)

Anyway, just a crazy rainy Tuesday morning idea that I thought I’d throw out for people to run with if they want to…

• Web 2.0, Please Meet Your Host, the Internet
• Infrastructure As Competitive Advantage
• Multisourced Production Infrastructure
• Automation is the Cloud
• The Admin Zen (via solarce)

Contrast the above links with the first talk at the November London RUG meeting: “Is Your Sysadmin Dumber Than a Hamster? How to automate your sysadmin out of a job, and into a more interesting job.”

From what I can see, the Ruby community oscillates between ignorance and outright contempt for ops people, which is sort of depressing…

• LART your resume
• Genome quilts
• Installing a perl with a minimal, collapsed directory layout
• We’re about 5.5 weeks away from 2010. It seems like a good time to re-point to Jack Kerouac’s New Year’s Resolutions
• Simple Guidelines for Workday Quality Over Quantity (Original Photo). Also The Cult of Done Manifesto (via elf)
• London Fixies Photo Collection There are some really awesome shots in here, I particularly liked this one — that is one bad-ass fixie.
• Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why. $NEW_JOB has involved getting ramped up on clinical trials — designing good controls for these things is hard, and that’s before you start trying to account for stuff like this…
• Wall Street’s Naked Swindle — profoundly depressing.
• “Do I have the right to refuse this search?” — equally profoundly depressing for the same underlying reasons. Which is depressing.
• Weird? — hell yes.

The hit of the evening for me was the first opening act, the blues duo of Cedric Burnside and Lightnin’ Malcolm. (That’s a MySpace link; there’s also a Facebook page.) They play a mean, nasty North Mississippi hill country drone blues, and they lit up the stage. Burnside was pounding his snare so hard it was literally jumping around the stage and Malcolm was doing evil things with his guitar. Here’s a couple YouTube videos of them in action: Stay Here In Your Arms and My Sweetheart. I picked up their latest release, 2 Man Wrecking Crew, at the show, and it’s awesome. Check these guys out, and try to catch them if and when they’re in your area.

I was less impressed with the second act, Amy LaVere. She was slapping an upright bass, backed up with a drummer and a guitarist, doing a servicable rock and blues thing, but I just couldn’t get into it. I think I would have enjoyed what she and her band were doing a lot more if they were the opening act; as it was, the letdown in energy level after the outstanding opening act made it a bit too hard for me to focus on what they had to offer.

Lucero, well, what can I say there. The boys were in fine form, the horn section that they’ve added for this tour fit right in with the show, even on the older songs, and the drunken frat boy contingent wasn’t nearly as obnoxious at this show as they were at the last one at the Black Cat (modulo the one fight that interrupted a song). It doesn’t look like any fan video of this particular show is up on YouTube, although Vimeo has three videos in the process of being uploaded. I know DC Live Tracks was there taping, so hopefully that will be up soon too. (In the meantime, the site has recordings of the last Black Cat show up…)

Lucero’s still in the early days of this tour, they’ve got remaining dates in the upper MidWest, the Pac NorthWest, the SouthWest, and the South proper. They are well well worth their usually sub-$20 ticket price, so check ‘em out when they’re in your area.

Aside: NPR has a live in-studio performance that you can stream for free. If you play that real real loud, get a bunch of friends to crowd around you and spill beer and maybe a little Jamesons on you, it’ll be like being at a show (only, you know, not…) UPDATE The version of Tears Don’t Matter Much that starts around 25:00 in is incredible!

(EDIT I originally had ‘Black Cat’ in the title instead of ‘930 Club’ — doh!)

(EDIT #2 Fixed the NPR link)