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homegrown
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2006-09-26 22:34 UTC
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| I just braved the heat and moquitoes of... my front yard, to pick a batch of chile tepín peppers. Tepíns are, by many reports, the hottest peppers in the world b by weight, but I don't believe it. They are so small, though, that eating one isn't so bad. They are nearly spherical, and so picking them is easy: you just gently pinch and rotate them and they pop right off. There are still many unripe ones, and several had dried on the plant - the dry ones are harder to pick than the fresh ones. Some people say that dried peppers are hotter than fresh ones - I think that's misleading, because it's almost certainly true by weight - that is, an ounce of dried peppers is hotter than an ounce of fresh peppers, because it takes many more dried peppers to make up an ounce. But taking a fresh pepper and drying it out doesn't make it any hotter, and I suspect that it becomes a little less hot. |
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Those tepíns are hot, and maybe hotter than red habaneros (but maybe not), but because they are so small, they don't have the stopping power that a good habanero has. My red habanero plants are long dead, alas (this picture is from a happier time), so until I can grow new plants from the seeds I jealously guard, it's tepíns for me. |
| Another plant that's thriving in the yard is a kaffir lime (tree?bush?) - the leaves are an ingredient in many Thai dishes, and when you crush them, they smell and tast amazingly good in a citrus-y kind of way. I understand that the plant will eventually produce limes, so I'm looking out for those. I just had to prune the plant, because it was growing like crazy. Not sure how visible they are in the picture, but the plant has nasty inch-and-half long thorns that you have to watch out for. A lot of lime-bearing plants have these. |
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/food
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wc3 validation
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2006-09-26 22:33 UTC
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Do you make web pages? Sure you do - everybody does. Ever wonder whether your pages are "standards compliant"? The World Wide Web Consortium provides a free service that takes a URL and validates it. This page fails with 8 errors, mostly because of an incorrect tag in the images (there may be 7 errors after this post, because it doesn't have a picture, and will likely knock a picture off the bottom). That really doesn't bug me.
I took some criticism about the spamgourmet page, and got it to be compliant some time ago, and it still is. I wonder whether I should have sweated it too much, though - I just checked yahoo, google, cnn, apple, microsoft, and a couple of others: fail, fail, fail, they all fail. www.wc3.org passes :)
update: couldn't *stand* it, so for now this page is passing
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/tech
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a eggamuffin
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2006-09-26 22:31 UTC
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New macs come with a program called Garage Band, which is a music editing package - I'm starting to get the hang of it - Apple did a great job of making what's normally difficult into a user friendly thing. (seriously, if this were a review, I'd be gushing and slobbering about it - it's really good)
We've accumulated a bunch of guitars and amps, and to fill out the set, I picked up a cheap electric bass guitar at a nearby pawnshop. I've never really played one before - at first I was tempted to use a guitar pick, but I knew that most bass players don't use one, so I set out to learn how to use my fingers. Plunged into it with no instruction or internet research on technique, which is kind of dumb. It's not at all easy - fatigue sets in fast. I'm a right handed (six-string) guitar player, and my left (fretting) hand does pretty well on the bass, but my right hand, doing the plucking and slapping, has a way to go.
I picked up an instrument -> USB cable at Target, which let's you go straight into the computer - not bad, but there's some noise on the minimac (to be embraced, rather than regretted) - maybe it's better with more upscale models. With the levels set right, it does sound surprisingly good.
Here's a mp3 made with the stuff (unabashedly ripping off the main bass riff from Bob Marley's "Stir it up").
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
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/music
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