Concern

• Enough steak to serve.
• Olive oil.
• Coarse sea salt.
• Ground white pepper.
• Tomato paste.
• Cooking sherry.
• Common spice blend (garlic and onion salt).
• Ground cayenne pepper.

Dash salt and pepper on steaks; brown whole steaks in oil, in a medium frypan; when brown, remove from heat and slice into 1/4 inch slices; combine meat, sherry, tomato paste, spices (cayenne pepper to taste), and a dash of water into frypan; simmer for about 10 minutes, or until steak is cooked through.

It tastes a bit like chili, but a little more sour thanks to the sherry. Fresh onions and garlic could probably be added, and you could thin the sauce more with some beef stock or something. I only used a touch of cayenne pepper (you can’t take it out, after all), so it wasn’t that spicy. A bit like a curry (rice or noodles would be a fine side dish), but with a different kind of taste.

I dubbed it “antigoulash” because I set out to make a goulash-like dish, but had none of the ingredients. It winds up looking a bit like goulash, but tastes completely different.

Sigh. Even after adding the answer-a-math-question plugin for WordPress, I had a spat of comment spam this weekend. All of them were from AOL, so it’s unclear if this is a smart bot, or a legion of AOLer’s doing some dirty work.

Completely forbidding any post from AOL, ever, would be a fine solution as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t see any way to do that. Instead, I’m just forbidding anyone from using the word “ringtone” in any comment. It won’t get moderated, I won’t be notified, it will just be silently deleted.

So don’t offer me any ringtones. I have an inoffensive one for my phone, and I’m happy with it.

I installed Ubuntu today, over my non-working Fedora install. It is, in brief, zee oh em gee easy, in comparison with every other Linux distribution I’ve ever tried.

Let’s count the obvious plusses:

• You download one CD image. Not six, and not a DVD. One CD. This took all of about an hour to bittorrent.
• You get the option of installing it as a server. I don’t even have a monitor that I’ll connect to this machine, only a borrowed LCD with very limited capabilities, and I don’t want the hassle, or even the time, it takes to start X11. It also means that it won’t automatically misconfigure X11, and then only try to boot into a graphical shell.
• It, oh wow, it created a regular user during the install! Yeah, that there is damned useful.

The only point that was a little confusing was the partitioning step, because I wanted to preserve one of the partitions. I had to learn, on the fly, how their UI worked, but that was pretty minor.

I switched mail readers from Apple Mail to Thunderbird, today. This was, mostly, a really manual process, because you need to convert Mail’s emlx-style into an mbox file, then copy that to where the Thunderbird maliboxes live (there’s a little utility that helps you do this).

I’ve always liked the way Mozilla mail apps work (well, the Communicator 4 thing sucked, if I recall); the interface is clean and simple, yet very easy to manage lots of email and lots of accounts. The GnuPG support, Enigmail, is great, too (much better than the hacky one available for Mail.app). I’m pretty impressed with the current version, indeed; Apple Mail is good, but it feels almost like a rip-off of Thunderbird and Mozilla mail readers, and it’s a lot slower.

Also nice is the built-in RSS reader — it has the nice feature where you can choose to display the RSS summary, or the page the entry is referencing. This is great for feeds that only provide a summary or excerpt, and don’t include the entire post in the RSS content.

Edit: Oh, well, OK. The Thunderbird RSS reader is still completely broken. But maybe one day they’ll release a new version, with a fix for this (and, will maybe change mail formats in the meantime, and break upgrades). In the meantime, I’ll keep using Vienna.

My four-week vacation has come to an end. For the most part, all I did was sleep until noon, sit on my ass, and write code. I can’t personally think of a better way to spend a vacation.

But now, back to work on Monday. I don’t much enjoy having to go back to the ‘Gate, but yeah, I gotta do it.