Puzzle

A while ago, I read about ninebows.com: a multi-puzzle challenge that had been around for months and still had not been solved. Even though I got a lot of hints by Googling "ninebows", I was able to solve up to the last puzzle. Since then, I've been putting together a few puzzles that relate to my own interests and just put them up for everyone to try. Check it out.

Tagliatelle bolognese

About a year ago, I posted about this awesome pasta Rich and I had in Cincinnati. Since then, I've been on a mission to replicate it.
I'd made fresh pasta before - but only as wrappers for raviolis or wontons. I'm always disappointed with the results because the crinkled edges never cook fully and there's always a hole that lets water in and filling out. But lately, I've been making pasta and cutting it into fettucce or pappardelle (strips from 1/4" to 3/4" wide). The first time I made it, I let the ribbons dry before cooking them. The only pasta sauce I'd made "from scratch" has been from a recipe Rich got in a middle school home economics class:

1/4 - 1 lb ground beef
1/4 c olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 medium onion, chopped
1 8oz can tomato sauce
1 6oz can tomato paste
6oz water
1 tsp basil
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp salt
green pepper, chopped (optional)
mushrooms (optional)
olives (optional)
canned tomatoes (optional)

Brown hamburger and remove from pan.
Add olive oil to pan and saute onion, garlic, and green pepper in it.
Add remaining ingredients and cook for 10 minutes.

It's really tasty, but I always end up with a really thick sauce and big chunks of meat - more like a chili than a sauce. The bolognese we had in Cincy was very meaty, but the meat was ground so finely, it wasn't overwhelming.
Rich and I went back to Cincinnati this weekend and were hoping to make a trip to Nicola's to have the tagliatelle bolognese again. We planned to go for dinner Sunday, but when we looked up their website to make reservations that afternoon, we found out that they were closed Sunday. And we wouldn't be able to stay until dinnertime on Monday. Instead, we left Sunday afternoon and stayed at Rich's mom's house Sunday night. We promised to cook dinner on Monday before continuing our trip home. So we made fresh pasta and tagliatelle bolognese. I used a bolognese recipe and a fresh pasta recipe, both from Martha Stewart.
We started early, around 2 pm. Rich's brother, Greg, is a senior in high school and can choose not to take his last class of the day, meaning he gets home around that time. I helped him with a couple calculus problems while Rich ran to the grocery store. Then Greg and I made balls of pasta dough, letting them rest while Greg finished his homework. Rich got back and started on the sauce, and by about 5 Greg and I were ready to roll out our dough (he, with a rolling pin and I, with a drinking glass). I boiled some water while Greg cut wide strips of pasta. By the time Rich's mom got home, the house smelled wonderful and we were ready to mix the sauce into the pasta and eat. A sprinkling of Parmesan cheese made the dish perfect. Not quite as good as Nicola's, but definitely my favorite homemade meat sauce.

Launchers

I first encountered launchers on someone's list of "essential Mac software". I had no idea what they would do, but I downloaded Quicksilver to give it a try. I've been hooked ever since. Here are, as far as I have found, the best Mac and Windows launchers out there:
MAC

• Quicksilver is what I use. You can change it's look, add commands (actions), and set tons of different preferences.
• Butler seems to have very similar features, and thus it's own following. I haven't tried it, so I don't have much to say about it, but with fully customizable menus, it looks like it may be better than Quicksilver.
  
• LaunchBar costs money. That means I haven't tried it and probably never will.

PC

• Colibri looks a lot like Quicksilver, but without nearly as many plug-ins available.
  
• Launchy also seems pretty basic, but it's open source, so there's a better chance someone will develop some more complex features. So far contributors have just created skins, though.
  
• AppRocket costs money, and doesn't seem to do more than Colibri or Launchy.
• PC-Com is just plain Windows-looking, but it does have a few extra features, like notes and reminders. Worth looking into if form follows function for you.
  
• SlickRun is also very Windows-looking, but it lets you create aliases for commands.

Browsers

I've been spending some time thinking about browsers recently. When I first got my Mac, I was so used to Windows that I used IE as my browser. Since then, I've switched to Safari, to Firefox, back to Safari, to Flock (a Firefox spawn I wrote about a while ago), back to Safari, and now back to Firefox. But today I ran into a completely unrelated article (about the prevalence of circular application icons), which mentioned several browsers I had never heard of. I decided to check them out: Of course, I'd recommend everyone (PC or Mac user) try Firefox. None of the browsers below will come close to having all the features you get through Firefox extensions. It's just an awesome browser. The rest of the browsers are Mac-specific:

• Shiira is based off of Safari, but has a few additional "cool features" like Page Holder and Tab Exposé. It mixes my favorite features from Firefox and Safari (I like to use Favicons as bookmarks in my Bookmark Bar, but Safari doesn't seem to support that, and I like that Safari puts a "close" button on each tab, while Firefox has one button at the end of the bar). All that's missing are Firefox's Live Bookmarks.

+

• Camino is a more intentional combination of Safari and Firefox - the idea is to create a browser with all the power of Firefox, which would be integrated into OS X as well as Safari (since Firefox is meant to be cross-platform, it doesn't integrate with Mac-specific applications like Address Book, for example). It, too, has what I consider to be "the best of both worlds" in terms of features (like Shiira), but with no RSS reader at all, it's hard to compare. However, it looks like Firefox-style Live Bookmarks are on their development agenda, so as soon as that's released, I'll be sure to switch to Camino.
• If you want to test and help code a browser while using it, try WebKit.
• Xyle scope loads HTML and CSS in editors alongside a webpage, so you can view and edit code as you browse.
• Sunrisebrowser is supposed to be "Light & fast. The open-source browser for web developer." It has several cool developer-oriented features like Auto Resizing Windows and graphical bookmarks, but it would take a lot of getting used to.

Oooh

So I saw this article on Slashdot today about a Web 2.0 browser coming out. Now, I'd read plenty of articles referring to Web 2.0, but I never ran across a concise definition of any sort, so I stopped paying attention. But I had to check out this new browser. It's called Flock, and it feels a lot like Firefox, but it has all these built-in capabilities like being able to blog without ever having to log in (a little window pops up that you use to put together your post) and built-in Flickr toolbar for adding your uploaded photos to any HTML-enabled text box I'm pretty impressed, especially with all the Firefox extenstions that are available.

Blogged with Flock

Snow

It snowed today. I woke up to about an inch and a half of the cold white stuff covering everything in sight. It wasn't the first snow this winter - that happened about a month ago when Rich and I were frustrated and lost on the east side of town, trying to find a place that was really on the west side - and which we probably passed on our way to losthood. In any case, I couldn't stop thinking that the snow had come really early - I was expecting it in January at the earliest. It has snowed at least once a week since then, and every time I see fresh snow, I have to remind myself that I'm not in Cincinnati anymore. I won't get off work when the forcast predicts an inch. I won't get to act like it's dangerous to be driving around in a snowstorm. And I don't get to complain that I have to walk between buildings in the cold - I'm pretty sure someone biked to work today. The other thing that's hit me is that I'm not just in the city anymore. Or really in the suburbs. I drive past farms on my way to work. And wild turkeys. And deer. Which only makes it cooler to drive to work when it's snowing. It's like living a scene out of a paiting just before my 9 o'clock conference call. Three years of college in a warmer place has definately made me a wimp when it comes to winter weather. But even if I never stoop to saving my parking spot with a lawn chair, hopefully I'll get used to Wisconsin winters...

Eh...

So I've had a couple posts in my mind waiting to be... well... posted. Something about my dad flying Rich and I over the lake and downtown in this little plane. Maybe a few pictures from along the way. Then something about me playing kickball (so a team would have enough girls to play) in the Madison kickball championship. I was really really bad. Like really bad, considering I played kickball a lot as a kid and played soccer since I could walk. But we won the first game and got to hang out for another game. I don't know if it was that they tapped the keg or just that it got cold, but we were shut out at the bottom of the seventh. Then this one guy was up to kick and bunted, getting to first just as the ball did. But when the first baseman fumbled, this guy sprints to second, where the ball flys past the second baseman, and he can round third to make it home while the rest of us were in awe. It was pretty sweet. For a beer league. Considering all I could stand was a couple sips, I'm not sure I'm planning on signing up any time soon...