Just a personal reminder, here’s a bunch of rides around Saratoga.
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Pickin’ & Grinin’
Black Raspberries
Mandy & Jack headed out with some other folks from the playgroup yesterday and came back with these beauties from a farm just up the road from our house. We’re planning on making a cobbler and possibly some jam out of them, if they last that long. Next to mulberries, these are my favorite for pickin’ & eatin’.
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Archives are back
After a long, winding and thorough hunt, I’ve finally managed to locate the archives from my old blogging software. There were encoded in a strange dialect (DasBlog’s XML) so I had to write a little tool to do the conversion to WordPress. The converter is just a bit of C#; If you want it, lemme know.
Along the way, I realized that I needed a better way to exhibit all of these wonderful articles from the past. I don’t really like calendars and most archive pages seem to involve too much paging, so I borrowed a page from Mark Pilgrim’s book and put up one page with everything, separated out by year and month. I rather like it.
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The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie
The New York Times has a great article up on the Quest for the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie.
All this crossbreeding begs the question: Has anyone trumped Mrs. Wakefield? To find out, a journey began that included stops at some of New York City’s best bakeries as well as conversations with some doyens of baking. The result was a recipe for a consummate cookie, if you will: one built upon decades of acquired knowledge, experience and secrets; one that, quite frankly, would have Mrs. Wakefield worshipping at its altar.
The keys? Resting the dough for a couple days, great ingredients, competent technique and making sure to add a bit of salt. If you want to try it at home (I know we will), the Times has an adapted recipe available.
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Black Death: Installing XP over Ubuntu
I have an oldish ThinkPad (a T42p) lying around that I decided to use as an Ubuntu playground on for a while. I learned a lot playing with it, but now I do most of my Ubuntu-based work in a VM running on my fancy multi-core desktop, and Mandy could use a little portable Diablo II game machine, so today I went to reinstall XP.
After sticking the install disc in, I see the familiar "Setup is inspecting your hardware…" prompt and then… nothing. Just a black screen. Hard drive light is stuck on, the CD eventually spins down and nothing happens. /me scratches head.
After a bit of searching around, it turns out that the Windows XP setup program really doesn’t like it if you have odd partitions on the hard drive, where in this case, odd is defined as the default partition layout as set up by Ubuntu.
So, after a quick download of GParted and a wipe of the hard drive, the install is now cruising along, merry as can be.
Update: Thanks to Will for pointing out a Microsoft Knowledge Base article on exactly this subject.