The Pumpkin Report

The results are in. Deep fried pumpkin pie is yummy. The pie itself didn't end up being changed too much. There's too much oil in it for it to really develop much of a crust. But the pie crust, on the other hand, wound up being very crispy and flaky. With the warming effect on the rest of the pie, I'd say it's a win. (Though I'll confess that a pie made from scratch with an already flaky crust and then warmed up before eating would likely be just as good.)

Deep fried banana fritters were also surprisingly good. My stepdad made up a simple batter in which he dipped the bananas before deep frying them. With a little syrup, they were quite excellent.

Conclusion: it's a damn good thing I don't have a deep fryer at home. I'd have to buy new pants, the kind with elastic waist bands.

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Amazing Application

Go check out Jason's Amazing Race Application. It's both clever and hilarous. I can't decide on my favorite part, but I think it's when Chris says, "What I like to do for a hobby is produce raw thermal energy."

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Sorry, arteries

I've just confirmed with my stepdad that we get to try deep fried pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving (not the whole pie, just a slice or two). It came up during one of those, "everything's better deep fried" conversations, and I'm eager to test it out. My stepdad has a deep fryer, and said we can try other foods, too. He's a fan of deep fried bananas in some kind of a syrupy batter, but I'm not so sure about that.

What would you deep fry?

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Idea man

Looking for new ideas? There are several at Omniscium, free for the taking. It's sort of like the Global Ideas Bank, but they're all the ideas of John, a former co-worker of mine. He is not to be confused with John, John, or John, who are also former co-workers of mine. Or John, a present co-worker. Or either of my friends named John. Or my uncle John.

And I thought there were too many Jess(i)e's running around.

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But where do they go?

Over the course of the last year, I have gone through at least 40 pens between home and work. In addition, our office goes through a fair number of boxes of pens for an office with five people in it. Everybody I know has had similar experiences with pens -- it's as though they actually hop off to some crazy pen world that we don't know about. I'd like to find this place and get my pens back.

Actually, my real theory is that Bic, in order to ensure that people will continue to buy pens all the time, has developed self-destructing pens. If left idle for more than a week, a pen will vaporize, leaving no trace.

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I don't want to

I'd like to avoid working for awhile. You see, I've finished the bulk of the development on a new file upload and image resizing system. It's pretty sweet, especially since the previous incarnation was the biggest piece of crap I ever coded, though I blame part of that on the fact that I was new here when I started working on it and inherited the framework from other people (though I should have had the wherewithal to scrap that other code and start over, I fully admit that). At any rate, it feels really good to never have to fix bugs in the old code again AND have something that's pretty cool in its place.

Which brings me to the work avoidance part: new development is fun and sexy. Tightening the screws at the end of a project and/or maintaining it? Not so much. So there are a few tasks left, a list of seven or eight things that remain to be done before it's truly complete. But the big work is finished, and that was the fun part. Now comes the dragging of heels and the scouring of the bug reports for anything else to work on. I've fixed six non-related bugs today.

But, by the end of the week, the last of the remaining items should be done and I'll move onto another project. For that to happen, however, I'll have to get back to it.

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Good advice

I can't stop talking about Alan Alda's Never Have Your Dog Stuffed (And Other Things I've Learned). It's so charming and well-written, I didn't want it to end. Also, despite never having really been a M*A*S*H fan, I just found myself putting the first season in my Netflix queue.

Alda began life as the child of an actor/comedian working the burlesque circuit. His early years were fascinating, and he developed into your typical home school dork. But, obviously, he managed to break out of it. It's just a great collection of the things Alda's learned over the years -- it's the kind of book that tells a story, introduces some pretty neat concepts, and makes the gears in your brain start going. I highly recommend it.

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Speaking of RSS

Google is getting in on the blog/news aggregator bandwagon, and it's kind of neat. If your site doesn't have an RSS feed, get one! Then I can subscribe to it and keep up with your blog in the laziest manner possible. It will be wonderful.

I may be falling into the brainwashed category of "if Google did it, it must be cool" here, but I think they're off to a good start with their aggregator. It's kind of slow at times, and can obviously use some work -- definitely needs some way to set preferences for how many items to show from a particular feed, but it's still in beta. I'm going to toy around with it as my home page for awhile and see how it goes.

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RSS feed's a go

I have finally managed to complete the RSS feed for the whole two of you who actually wanted such a thing. In addition, you may have noticed that the little "link" link is back. This is because I've also been working on the archives. It's exciting stuff around here at nerdygirl.com. Both of these proved to be fairly simple additions, but time consuming. And they're the sort of time consuming simple things that nobody ever notices unless I point them out, which is, I suppose, the whole point of this post.

As you were.

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Musical cities

I may have sung along to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in my car before, belting out the lyrics while traveling along some highway or another. But I've never sung them into a microphone, never in two different keys just to see the difference. Never with tips on how to scream properly. In a sound booth. And I have to say, it was damn cool.

The Experience Music Project is pretty amazing. We were late getting up to Seattle, so we didn't have as much time to play as I would have liked. But we did get sound booths for vocals, keyboard, and guitar. I plunked my way badly through the keyboard parts to "Born in the U.S.A." and mangled the guitar parts to that ubiquitous Nirvanna tune. The Seattle grunge scene features heavily in the museum's offerings. But what an excellent way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon! I highly recommend the trip if you're anywhere near Seattle.

Then it was back to Portland for some much needed sleep. I cheated and started sleeping in the car on the way home. Apparently, I did not snore or drool, though I'm pretty sure my mouth was hanging open for at least fifty miles or so. Pretty.

The weekend ended with me finally (finally!) getting to see They Might Be Giants. It was excellent. I was surprised that they're still playing songs they're surely tired of by now. Surprised and happy. It made me think back to that wonderful day, back in 1988 when I first heard the absurd "Ana Ng" on Live 105, and the euphoric day when I finally caught it in time to tape it off the radio. How wonderful to finally hear it live and in person.

Another thing I really enjoyed about the show was the crowd. It was such a nice, nerdy crowd. With such nice, nerdy musicians. It was as if someone had posted a "no jocks allowed" sign on the front door -- not that there weren't probably a few jocks in the crowd, but there weren't any meatheads, if that makes sense. It was wonderful to see the skinny arms of 17-year-old geeks throwing the horns -- right next to the skinny, slightly hairier arms of 35-year-old geeks.

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Incidentally...

...I am working on getting some of my vacation photos up on the web. You should also start to see them rotating through on the upper left-hand side of this page.

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All good things...

Today is the first November 1st in five years that I haven't had the number 1667 repeatedly popping up in my thoughts. Because for the first time, I just don't want to. There was the November two years ago when I had just met my sweetie and only managed to give NaNoWriMo a token effort. But the other three years, I did it. I wrote 50,000 during each of those three Novembers. I used to sometimes think to myself, "I write novels in November." I liked the way that sounded.

This year, however, I don't have it in me. I spent some time last year trying to clean one of those three novels up into something useful, but got kind of bored with it. Writing, as a hobby, has been something I haven't managed to make time for recently. Most compellingly, however, is the fact that I already took a month off from my life once this year. I don't think I can manage it again so soon. On the other hand, I'm totally down for some karaoke novelling with Josh, Yolanda, and Tom. Hopefully one of us can get that organized. I nominate Josh.

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