Category: 沒有類 / Uncategorized

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2005/02/01/2003221789/print

(If you don’t get the joke, you’re too young or too old or something.)

Made up a batch of 5 dozen oatmeal raisin cookies. Maggie wants to try selling them to her customers, so this is a trial run. The feedback I got from the batches last week is that they were too big, and they didn’t like chocolate too much. But everyone liked the sound of oatmeal raisin, so this time made that and made them the smaller 2.5-3 inch diameter size. We’ll see how these ones go over.

Maggie brought home some cookies from another bakery that I thought weren’t nearly as good. They had a bit of an off flavor like they used bad oil or something. And the brownie they had once again was quite disappointing. But in any case, that kind of gave me a baseline idea of what to compete against, and how much handmade cookies go for here (it was more than I expected).

I was able to find American style brown sugar (the soft kind) at Wellman’s in Tianmu, but since I still had a bit left from the open package of the Taiwanese kind, most of the brown sugar in this batch was still the local kind.

God knows I’ve been to enough McDonald’s in a lot of different places. Besides the core menu items being pretty much the same everywhere, the other constant at McDonald’s is that the Number 1 meal is the one with the Big Mac. I honestly can’t remember it being any other way. So color me surprised when I amble on over to the local McD’s today and notice that they’ve renumbered the menu here. They’ve done it in ascending price order, which means that the Big Mac meal now rings in at Number 4. The Number 1 place is now occupied by the McChicken. While this may seem like a little thing, I wonder how much sales of Big Macs will decline with this change?

Besides that they’ve also gone and copied Mos Burger and added two rice burgers to the menu. A rice burger uses patties of rice instead of a bun. The new ones are fried chicken breast and spicy chicken breast rice burgers. Given the complete and utter failure of their curry rice dishes last year (mainly because they tasted awful), I’m gonna stick with Mos Burger when I want a rice burger.

I’ve been to quite a few Taiwanese wedding banquets, since my wife seems to know about half of Taiwan. But thus far I had not experienced one of the rich cultural traditions of Taiwanese wedding banquets that I’d heard about. But today I was finally able to experience this part of Taiwanese culture: wedding strippers.

That’s right, Taiwanese tradition has it that no wedding banquet is complete without a few young girls gyrating to cheesy dance music before getting completely naked and then running around tables soliciting tips in exchange for a special dance and a close inspection of her implants. I’m happy to report that besides the copious amounts of 台灣啤酒, 清酒, and Matisse, this little bit of culture makes it well worth sitting around on a little red plastic stool for hours.

Finally got to installing the stuff I bought a couple of days ago. The shuttle box looks really slick now with the CD-ROM and keyboard all black to match the rest of the case. One thing I didn’t notice is that the model I bought is a ‘QuietTrack’ model designed to be extra quiet during operation, and I’ll say they did a good job at it. That combined with the quiet power supply and variable speed fan means the box is really really quiet. I’m almost tempted to make it my desktop and turn my current desktop into a fileserver. I’d need to upgrade to an AGP video card though.

The mouse is really nice as well. I exaggerated a bit in the previous post claiming it has 20 buttons. It’s only actually got 7, but that’s more than twice what I’m used to. Besides the standard left, right and middle/wheel buttons, it has two buttons on the side that by default do forward and back in your web browser. Above and below the wheel are ‘cruise up’ and ‘cruise down’ buttons that let you go up and down a page at a time or you can hold it down to scroll up and down really fast. And below that there is a button that by default lets you jump between apps quickly, but I reprogrammed it to do a copy instead. And on top of all the buttons, it also feels more responsive and smooth than my old mouse.

I had my new headset for Skype hooked up to the headphone jack on my speaker system and the microphone port on my sound card via an extension cable, but this left me having to plug in the headphone jack before answering a Skype call. Today I realized, duh, I have a sound card on my motherboard that I had disabled when I installed my add-in sound card (M-Audio Revolution 7.1, great sounding board). The sound quality of the built-in sound card is pretty mediocre, but for Skype it’s more than adequate. So I went into my BIOS and re-enabled the built in sound card, rebooted, reinstalled drivers, then made sure the default sound card was the M-Audio one but that Skype was set to use the internal sound card. Voila, it all works, and now I can use my headset with Skype independently from the rest of the system which uses the good sound card. In fact earlier I was talking to my friend Greg in Vienna using Skype with the headset at the same time Emily was watching Dora The Explorer on the main speakers. Pretty nifty.

Today I got my ticket to see Dreams Come True in concert in Nagoya. My sister-in-law’s friend in Tokyo helped me get it. I was hoping for the February 22 date since that would be more convenient, but it’s February 23 instead. Now I have to figure out how to get from Kyoto where I’ll be for the APRICOT 2005 conference to Nagoya for the concert. 🙂

I looked at a few different peanut butter cookie recipes on the net but none of them really were to my liking, so I took a few different ones and kind of averaged them out. They turned out pretty good for just winging it. By the way, I said earlier that I don’t like nuts in cookies, but the one exception is peanut butter cookies. They should be made with crunchy peanut butter so you get the bits of nuts in it.

Peanut Butter Cookies

1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick or 1/4 block) butter
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter (crunchy recommened)
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla

Sift or thoroughly mix together flour, soda and salt, set aside.

Cream together softened butter, sugar and peanut butter. Add egg and vanilla and mix well.

Slowly mix in the flour mixture and mix well.

Place tablespoon sized chunks on ungreased cookie sheet.
If you prefer thin cookies, flatten them with a spatula.

Bake at 350F for 12-16 minutes. Let cool on a wire rack.

This is my Mom’s Oatmeal Cookie recipe I used yesterday. She also has another recipe called “Famous Oatmeal Cookies” which I’ll try later. Also want to make the traditional Oatmeal Raisin Cookies at some point. For this recipe I omitted nuts and used a 100g (7 ounce) packet of chocolate chips.

Oatmeal Cookies

1 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup shortening
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups rolled oats
1 cup nut meats (optional)
1 small pkg of chocolate chips (optional)

Sift flour, measure, then sift again with soda and salt

Cream shortening with sugar, beat in egg, mix in vanilla.

Stir in dry ingredients, then add oats, nuts, chips.

Drop by teaspoonfull on cookie sheet in 350 degree oven 10-12 minutes.

hserus says, “bouncing baby girl born 8:33 PM Indian time (+0530 GMT)”

Made about 4 dozen jumbo cookies today (about 4 inches across). First batch was peanut butter and second batch was oatmeal chocolate chip. For the first I used a recipe off the net and tweaked it a bit. The second I used one of my mom’s recipes. No notable oven mistakes this time, thankfully.

hserus just IM’d me that his wife has gone into labor. Everyone wish him luck!

Just to start out with, for all of you’s been bugging me to get Skype, well ring me up as user jameslick.

Today and yesterday has brought us fantastic weather here. You’d almost think it was spring already.

Yesterday my wife decided that the TV upstairs in the office needed to have cable. Previously it was just hooked to a DVD player and that was fine for me. But somehow that wasn’t good enough, so a couple of guys come over and string a cable over the roof and down the side of the building, and now I can watch all the crap on TV again. Whoo-whee.

Today I went down to Subway for lunch and afterwards went over to the Sunfar 3C store to get some random computer stuff. That’s where I got a headset/mic for Skype. I also got a new mouse since my old one is flaking lately. I got a Logitech MX510 800dpi optical mouse that has something like 20 buttons on it. Some CD sleeves cause I’m running out. And for my Shuttle SB62G2 box that runs Solaris 10, I finally got a CD-ROM with a black faceplate and while I was at it I also got a black mini-keyboard. That Shuttle system has a really nice black aluminum case, but when I installed it I just threw in a standard beige CD-ROM drive. It shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but it just looks pretty uncool to have such a sweet looking box with a lameass beige drive ruining its funk. And besides, CD-ROM drives are practically free these days. (The new mouse cost 2.5 times the CD-ROM drive price.) And the black keyboard was even cheaper, so might as well just complete the whole makeover. After I get around to installing it I can finally ask the question “It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.”

I’ve been playing with openvpn a lot lately. I’ve gotten it to the point where I have a pretty solid VPN link between my Taipei and Santa Clara networks. So now I can finally talk direct IP between any machines on the two networks even though they are 6500 miles apart and both behind firewalls. Pretty cool stuff. Previously I was doing ssh tunneling or squid proxying, depending on what I wanted to do, but that’s always kinda of a pain. Setting up openvpn is a pain too, but once it is working, it just plain works.

By the way, if you have a 64-bit Solaris system, the right way to install the tun driver is to compile and install the 32-bit version and install it normally, then compile the 64-bit version (for gcc just add -m64 to flags and recompile) and install it in the sparcv9 directory under where you installed the 32-bit one. There’s sites that tell you to compile just the 64-bit version and install it where the 32-bit drivers are supposed to go, but they are wrong. You always want to install both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers in case you ever need to boot into 32-bit mode.