Cooking for Rowan's Birthday

It's been far too long since I've posted, but the last few weeks have been crazy with Rowan studying for quals for a month, then taking two weeks of exams, and now the aftermath (ie, doing nothing). In the middle of all this craziness, Rowan's birthday came up. Being unemployed as I am, it didn't feel right to me to buy any expensive gifts, but I am fairly handy with baking, and am slowly becoming a better cook, so I decided to put together a culinary delight as a birthday present. It started out with cinnamon rolls. A fairly simple thing to bake and I always enjoy kneading the dough. They turned out wonderfully, and though you can't taste them, I hope the pictures help to convey just how delicious they were. For the main course, Rowan asked for scallops and bacon in a white sauce over pasta. This one was a little more tricky, but the local grocer had some nice frozen scallops and I found a recipe for a white wine sauce to go with scallops, and then just added some bacon. Again, pictures are included below, and as you can see, Ong-Bak was really really into the scallops. The dessert was a thick, moist chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. I made the cake completely from scratch (no packages of cake mix for me). By all accounts, it was an excellent cake, it took the two of us almost a week to get through it, but it was superb. Finally, Rowan's family had some flowers delivered for Rowan's birthday. Strangely, by the end of the day these flower had still not arrived. Serena (Rowan's mum, for those that don't know), called up the company and it was discovered that the flowers were left in some flower bed outside of the manager's office. I didn't even know we had a manager's office! The next day the flower company called me and explained where they delivered the flowers. It was out front of the apartment outside a set of stairs that lead to the basement of the apartment. They were sheltered by some plants, and were still in good condition, so all was well. Anyways, should be more updates soon!

Lookie! I knit some socks for myself :)

Hi everyone, look what I made. Today I finished this pair of socks. I also dyed the yarn myself this past summer when I was at the Martindale's. Let me know what you think. Yes the colours are crazy, but I love them.

Geek Tip of Day: sharing iTunes metadata

So one of the big issues with trying new OS's is invariably that you have some things set the way you like them and sometimes it's a royal pain setting that up again. Well, for me iTunes is one of the biggies. It might have to do with enjoying structure, organization, and useless information, but over the last 2 years iTunes has kept track of my vast library of music, recording ratings, play counts, lyrics, ablum artwork, and all kinds of other fun information. One of my worries has been what will happen the next time I need to reload windows or, as it more presently applicable, try out Windows 7? So my situation is that I am now dual booting between Vista and 7, and I want to be able to play music via iTunes and have the metadata library kept up-to-date and synchronized between the two systems. Today I have learned the solution. My music and the metadata for iTunes is stored on my D: drive, which is accessible by both systems. The trick that I learned is when starting iTunes, if you hold down the shift key it asks you to either start a new iTunes library or to direct it to an existing one. Doing this while in Windows 7, I was able to get iTunes to work with the same library file that it uses while in Vista. Now I can happily go between Vista and 7 without the stress of having to keep everything up-to-date manually or the horror of unsaved and unorganized music :) Which, considering I have about 25GB of music, would be annoying, to say the least.

For the computer geeks out there: Windows 7

Earlier this week, I downloaded and installed the beta for Windows 7. Having previously read a number of posts from fairly respected websites concerning Windows 7, I wanted to see for myself just how Microsoft's new OS was shaping up. I was hesitant at first because I thought it only worked as an upgrade (overwriting my Vista install), but then found out it could be dual booted, so I was good to go. Install was pretty fast, maybe 30 minutes, and painless. Upon first boot, Windows didn't have some drivers, but almost immediately found, downloaded, and installed them (it did ask me first). Then after one last reboot, I was good to go. My first impression was, "This is what Vista should have been like". It didn't feel clunky like Vista. The interface, while not an enormous change from Vista, just feels better and works smoother. The first image here shows what you see when you first load up a explorer window. I think this is a vast improvement over Vista. Much cleaner and more useful, giving immediate access to harddrives, important folders, and the usual other stuff. Also note the "Libraries". This is an interesting new pseudo-file structure. I haven't used it much yet, but it seems to be a good way of organizing and accessing files in a way that you want to, without actually moving them around. Essentially, you can put files and folders into a library, and then by going to that library, you can easily browse through them all. Next, notice the taskbar has changed. It's a bit fatter than before, so you loose a little desktop space to it, but otherwise I think it's another improvement. No more text labels, just icons. Also, multiple windows of the same kind are stacked by default. Which leads to one of my favourite new things, the previewing features. Take the example in the screenshot below, I have three Chrome windows open. By mousing over the icon, I get previews of all three windows. Then if I move over one of the previews, all of the windows on the desktop go transparent, except the one being "moused". That's a lot of writing and describing, but using it felt very intuitive to me and was actually a great feature. For certain applications, it gets even better. With Internet Explorer, it is also aware of tabs within a window and shows a preview for each tab just as if it was it's own window. I'm sure this will come to the other web browsers in time. I think I mentioned this already, but Windows 7 just feels faster than Vista. Granted this is not necessarily a hard task to accomplish, but it's a step in the right direction for Windows. I wasn't able to install FireFox initially, but it ended up not being a Windows 7 problem, I just needed to clear the cache from a botched previous attempt. So while I am interested in playing with the new version of IE (which, btw people using older versions of windows are free to try, as it is out in Beta form), I prefer other browsers. Anyways, just thought I'd give my two cents on this topic and highlight a few of my favourite new things. If there are any requests for programs or features to test, ask away. *After post edit* I forgot to mention another cool feature. Maximized windows can now be dragged away (and automagically unmaximized) by the title bar. Unmaximized windows can be maximized by dragging them to the top of the screen and made to fill half of the screen by dragging them to either side of the screen. Another nice usability feature. Oh and Paint has been snazzed up a bit. Check it all out in the following screenshots.

"At long last" or "The weekend and other updates"

I'm rather poor at telling good stories, but maybe that's just because my memory is terrible and I can't usually remember any of the exciting stuff or the details. Anyways, I don't think anything too exciting has happened since my last post. That is, except that Rowan and I rented a car to get some much needed stuff. Some items much needed and others just because they would be great to have. The most exciting of these (in my opinion) was a glass display case to show off Rowan's rock and mineral collection (and a few items of my own). It looks amazing and does its job wonderfully. Hopefully these photos capture the sparkle and beauty on display. Also of note, previously I wrote about a bump on Ong-Bak's face. Well, it's pretty much all better now. No more puss, just a hardly detectable bump that is getting better each day. Hurray! I'll probably post more stuff later if I think about it, but that's all for now.

Calgary Zoolights

Last night we (Branwen, Logan, Rowan, Bill, and myself) went to Zoolights at the Calgary Zoo. Hopefully the pictures give you an idea of what we saw and experienced there. Essentially, a section of Calgary Zoo is decorated with Christmas lights and you can wander around there after nightfall to enjoy the sights. As one can imagine it was difficult to take photos under these conditions (nevermind the -10 C temperatures), but I think my G5 did admirably. For those that care, I mostly operated my camera on full manual: aperture at F2.0, shutter speed 1/40s, and ISO 400. All of the photos are direct from my camera.

Update from Calgary and walking with Rocky

Hello again astute followers of the Flamie Blog. Just wanted to let everyone know that life is proceeding very well in Calgary with the Martindales. It has been a wonderfully relaxing time with good company, food, celebration, music, and ofcourse lots of presents. No particular event stands out, but it has just been excellent here. During the giving and receiving of gifts I was blessed with a wonderfully warm and comfortable hand knit sweater from Rowan, lots of new music, some comics based on Firefly, too many other wonderful gifts to mention here, and an iPod Touch! Holy crap, I didn't expect to get that. It is amazingly cool. I suspect the initial fascination with the touch screen and the accelerometer stuff might wear off, but it is still an amazing useful toy. With wifi and applications available to do almost anything you could want, it is so much more than just a portable music device. Fun fun fun... Anyways, today I went for a short walk with Rocky (the Martindale's dog). There was fresh snow on the ground from this morning and it was very misty/foggy in the low areas. All in all, a very refreshing walk.