Category: Miscellanea

I’ve been making Macaroni and Cheese to roughly the same recipe of my mom’s since high school, and the result have been inconsistent. I tried making a creamier and less caserole-y version for Nadia compared to my usual-of-late proportions, and I thought I’d record it here.

I realized I had recorded one set of proportions here in the past and it looks like the proportions are almost exactly doubled:

• 3 1/2 cups shredded cheese, plus extra for crust for baked portion (mixing some in and then crust) – inexact as was using the ends of multiple pregrated sharp cheddar; about a cup was jack
• 2 1/2 cups milk, preheat to hot in the microwave
• Roux: 4 tbsp each butter and flour; mix together over low heat until a paste forms
• Add black pepper (one turn of pepper grinder) and MSG (1/2 tsp) to taste
• Add milk slowly, no faster than will mix in thoroughly with a flat-bottom whisk; this seems to be the main trick, as adding too much milk at once will lead to the roux clumping together
• When all of the milk is added, add 1tsp sodium citrate (optional, but makes for a smoother texture) and stir in evenly
• Add cheese slowly stirring, until thoroughly melted
• Cook pasta. This was 3 heaping cups of cellentani (ridged, corkscrew macaroni which ends up a bit less dense), a bit more than 3/4 of a box. I think for shells or smaller elbows 3 cups might be a bit much
• Drain pasta, put in a 8×8 or 9×9 glass baking tray
• mix in some extra cheese, cover top loosely with extra cheese
• Bake at 375f (coincidental; we’d had a take-and-bake bread in while the pasta was cooking), checking after 20 minutes, until cheese on top just starts to brown.

One of the odd things about having kept this up for ~15 years is that there is plenty of old stuff I don’t remember it all, like: https://www.cubiclehermit.com/archives/482

For the record.

I do not now, and I have never owned an iPod or Zune.

I’ve owned three MP3 players:
[….]
I keep hoping that battery life on my PDA/phones will improve to the point where it will not be necessary to have a separate MP3 player. Sadly, I see little improvement there, and my present phone (a new HTC Touch Pro) is something of a step backwards for music player use as they went from a semi-proprietary small headset plug to an entirely proprietary USB+sound+etc plug.

(Lest the basic reference not make sense)
For the receord, I do not now, and have never owned any Apple iDevices, nor any Intel Macs, nor any Microsoft portable consumer electronics (although I’ve had and have had a few keyboards, mice, and 3 generations of XBox.)

For that worth, it basically be be about another ~2 years before I got a phone that could “just work” as an MP3 player with adequate battery life. The HTC Touch Pro got replaced with a “Sprint Epic” (a 1st-gen Galaxy S with a slider keyboard) which also brought back proper headphone jacks.

(I’ve yet to succumb to a headphone-jack-less phone in the return of such things, but it seems close to inevitable… 🙁 )

Oh, and the dead WSJ link there seems to refer to this: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2270831/zunegate–is-obama-an-ipresident-or-not-.html

Out of curiosity, I decided to run some quick (and non-repeated, largely unscientific) benchmarks of a Gentoo (-march=native,etc etc) OpenJDK/IcedTea build vs. actual Sun/Oracle JVM builds. Interestingly, the Gentoo builds are slower. Unsurprisingly, the JVM gets noticeably faster across versions from 1.6->1.7->1.8

Apropos of nothing, but awesome in a “I didn’t know that” sort of way:
http://johnfinnemore.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/two-of-kind.html:

This is nice. In 1899, Winston Churchill was 25, an aspiring politician, and the author of a couple of books. He was not, however, the most famous Winston Churchill around. That was the now largely forgotten, but at the time best-selling, American novelist… Winston Churchill. Aware of this, the British Winston Churchill wrote to his namesake as follows:

The original blog post is worth reading for the brief correspondence between the two.

IO9 posted a nice homage to older porn parodies (back before they were just “This Ain’t (insert original film’s name here)” or “(insert original film’s name here): An XXX Parody.”

The Greatest Science Fiction Porn Movies of All Time: 1961-1991

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

From the Tulum ruins…

From Mexico, January 2008 photos

More to come, trying Google PicasaWeb

With a few minutes left to go (local time) in the first day of 2008… 🙂