March 10th weekend – Homemade Chicken Strips

The recipe for this one came from one of the cookbooks we got for our wedding.  The breading used a mix of corn flakes, Parmesan cheese, and lemon pepper.  Sarah really enjoyed this one.  If I were to do it again, I’m not sure if I’d use lemon pepper, or at least I’d cut it back.  Also, the recipe called for cutting each chicken breast into three pieces.  Personally, I found the pieces too big, but then again, maybe I had larger pieces of chicken to start.  Finally to note when breading chicken, the less handling, the better, as the more you try to bread them, the more you scratch the breading off.  Probably tossing the breading mixture rather than the meat would have been more effective.

March 17th weekend – Mozzarella Stuffed Chicken with Wild Forest Mushroom Couscous

I found the chicken recipe while house-sitting at my parents’ house.  The couscous came from the grocery store.  The recipe involved cutting the chicken breasts open and stuffing them with mozzarella cheese.  The outside was coated with flour, Parmesan, parsley, paprika, and pepper.  I was quite under-impressed by the chicken.  The cheese melted out from the inside, and the outside coating was somewhat flavourless.  As for our first experience with couscous, I didn’t find it as satisfying as I hoped.  It was very light, and left me hungry.

March 24th weekend – Cinnamon Apple Pork Tenderloin

I’ve wanted to do something with pork and apples for a while now.  For this one, we invited my parents over to try it with us.  All positive reviews.  I did make a few deviations from the recipe, based on user reviews.  Some of the feedback mentioned the pork lacking flavour, so I used three apples rather than two.  I put one of those apples through a food processor to chunk it up small.  The rest of the apples were sliced and were prepared by the recipe.  Other reviews noted that the pork ended up dry, so I put the chunked up pieces on the bottom of the pan, along with 1/2 cup of water.  I also kept an eye on the second part of the cooking process, and ended up pulling the pork after 12 minutes, rather than the 15-20 minutes.  Of course I used a meat thermometer to ensure I hit temperature.  The end result was a moist and flavourful tenderloin.  Of the recipes I’ve tried so far, I think I liked this one the best.  However, I usually do tenderloin on the barbecue with pork spice.  It’s far less effort, and I think it’s a better result.

As for next week, I’m not sure yet.  Sarah’s thinking Chicken Parmesan, which would be different than the two other chicken recipes.  Sounds good, but I’d like to branch into another meat possibly.  Maybe beef, maybe something completely obscure.

What gets me about these causes is that I almost feel bad if I don’t take part because it makes me come off as an insensitive person. “Why don’t you have a purple profile pic right now? Don’t you care about saving the raisins?” Truthfully, if anyone asks me for a donation to some sort of charity, I usually throw a few dollars their way. I take part in work fundraisers, and although I don’t volunteer as much anymore, I get involved where I can. I’m not insensitive. I just think the way causes are done on Facebook are just a pile of crap.

I use Facebook for one reason only, to keep in touch with friends and family. Not to change my profile picture every week to bring “awareness” to some sort of cause. To be honest, most of the time when I see someone doing something cause-related to their profile picture, they don’t mention why, so the cause they are supposedly bringing awareness too is lost. But they look great with a green tint!

Here’s a video from Penn Jillette about this very thing. He’s quite vulgar (NSFW), but the message is simple. If you really want to help with a cause, do something real!

Between the overwhelming number of advertisements, and the annoying uninformative headlines, its a waste of time trying to find the content that is truly important.  The news.  Take SooToday for example, one (if not, the) top source for online news.  See the red square?  That represents the news area on their front page.  It is almost invisible for the advertising.  And with headlines like, “How many turns does it take to open the penstock valve?”, and “Things we bet you didn’t know about makin’ snow”, it’s next to impossible to figure out at a glance what’s going on, and what’s worth reading.  People seem to love the mystery in reading the news.  Me, not at all.

SooNews.ca is just as bad.  The content area on the main page is larger than SooToday’s, but still, the page is jokey headlines hidden by overwhelming advertising.  I understand the need for advertising, but when there is more of it than actual content, there’s a problem.

On the radio last week at work, I heard the announcer mention visiting them online for up-to-the-minute news.  Looking at what’s there, I’m impressed.  It’s inspired me to create a list of the best online news sources in Sault Ste Marie.

EZ Rock / Q104

This is the news page for a local radio station.  Nice and clean news in a blog format.  Meaningful headlines.  A large area of things I care about, right on the front page (as circled in red).  They even have RSS.  This is a model news site.  My only gripe is they don’t split the stories into paragraphs.

The Sault Star

This is the news page for the local newspaper.  A bit more clutter compared to EZ Rock, but still a large content area with article summaries.  Once again, headlines that mean something.  Plus, there is still a lot of exclusive content that only appears in the newspaper that you can read here.

So, as you can see here, the best online news sources aren’t mainly online news sources at all.  Interesting that these mediums that are sometimes said to be “behind the times” are actually the onces who do it best.

Sarah called our local branch that night.  They were equally confused, and requested her to bring it in.

After a meeting at the bank, and a couple follow up phone calls at home, we finally figured out what happened.  TD, you need to update your code.

When an investment rewards its interest, it has to go somewhere.  For some reason, the target account was not set for the investment.  I guess this investment rewarded twice in the past already.  (We never noticed.)  The first time, the interest landed in our savings.  The second time, the interest landed in our chequing.  And this, the third time, it could not decide a target account, so defaulted to a cheque.

We were told that three attempts are made to identify a target account, with a cheque as the last resort.  Hearing this makes my programmer head hurt.  A lot.  This is a bank.  They deal with our money.  Cudos for a default cheque case, but when nothing changes in your account structure, why would the target account ever be completely random?

I can only assume their target account identification code looks something like this.


String getTargetAccount (String investmentAcctNum) {
     AccountHolder person = getAccountHolder(investmentAcctNum);
     int choice = rollDice();
     switch (choice) {
     case 1, 2:
          return person.getCheckingAccounts()[rollDice()];
     case 3, 4:
          return person.getSavingsAccounts()[rollDice()];
     case 5, 6:
          return null;
     }
}


For you non-coders out there, they basically roll a dice, and pick an account based on the result. If they don’t get an account result after three rolls, they send a cheque.

What the code should look like:


String getTargetAccount (investmentAcctNum) {
     AccountHolder person = getAccountHolder(investmentAcctNum);
     Account[] savingsAccounts = person.getSavingsAccounts();
     sort(savingsAccounts);
     if (savingsAccounts[0] != null) return savingsAccounts[0];
     Account[] chequingAccounts = person.getChequingAccounts();
     sort(chequingAccounts);
     if (chequingAccounts[0] != null) return chequingAccounts[0];
     return null;
}


What makes this code great is that is should work the first time, due to its non-random nature.

TD, please update your code. Restore some of the confidence I had in you.

Monday

That Night

• 8:00 – 8:30 – How I Met Your Mother (CBS)
• 8:30 – 9:00 – Rules of Engagement (CBS)
• 9:00 – 9:30 – Two and a Half Men (CBS)
• 9:30 – 10:00 – Mike and Molly (CBS)

Tuesday

That Night

• 8:00 – 10:00 - Biggest Loser (NBC)

The Next Day

• Glee (FOX)

Wednesday

• 7:00 – 8:00 – Dragons’ Den (CBC)
• 8:00 – 10:00 – Hell’s Kitchen (FOX)

The Next Day

• Survivor (CBS)

Thursday

That Night

• 8:00 – 8:30 – Big Bang Theory (CBS)
• 8:30 – 9:00 – $#*! My Dad Says (CBS)
• 9:00 – 10:00 – Grey’s Anatomy (ABC)

The Next Day

• Community (NBC)
• The Office (NBC)
• Outsourced (NBC)

PlayStation Web Media Players.

Ok.  My name for it kind of sucks, but imagine.  From the XMB screen, select Web Media.  A list of channels appear within the menu itself.  New channels are available through the PlayStation Store.  Select a channel to see a list of available shows.  Select anything, start watching.  Simple.  Easy.  Wonderful.

The concept isn’t new.  Boxee does it.  Sony could just as easily do it too.  They’ve already started with Major League Baseball.  The problem, I don’t watch MLB.  Networks is what we need.  YouTube, Revision3, and other online video sites.  And something for Canadians!  I’m tired of Canadians being second-class citizens for web content.

Sure you could use the web browser on the PS3 itself, browse to the website, navigate to what you are looking for, and ultimately watch the show.  With Flash support, it’s not impossible, but it sure is clunky.  A clean, nice interface for it would be great.

Sony, hear my call.  Build more web media tie ins.  Maybe even talk to Boxee about putting the whole Boxee platform on the PS3 itself.  That would accelerate the whole process.  And while you are at it, movies in the Canadian store would be awesome as well.

It’s a question that sounds like it should be easy.  On a scale from 1 to 10, how hot is [insert name here]?  Well, if you play this game long enough, you’re bound to run into an issue.  If A is an 8, and B is an 8, who’s hotter of the two?  The two are dramatically different in appearance, but there is no clear way to decide who is really hotter.

That is because sometimes A isn’t so much “hot”, as she is “cute”.  It’s because some people like ‘em “hot”, some like ‘em “cute”, and some like ‘em somewhere in between.  The simple 1 to 10 hotness scale is outdated.  With so much diversity out there, and so many pretty faces for so many different reasons, the scale needs a reworking.  May I present, the Y-shaped attractiveness scale.

This new attractiveness scale solves the problem of ranking within a rank by adding another dimension to the ranking process.  When two people share a rank up and down, they likely differ in rank from left to right.  A might be an 8H (an 8 on the hot side), while B is more of an 8C (an 8 on the cute side).

My wife sometimes sets me up, asking me if I find one of her friends attractive.  I usually answer honestly, admitting that they are attractive, but no match to her.  She never believes it, but it is true.  Personally, I like my girls tending towards the cute side of the scale.  Yes, she may be hot, but I’ll take my cute wife any day.

I’ll try to make the scale more clear with an example.  Here are three celebrities that are seen as attractive today.

Megan Fox tends towards the hot side of the scale.

Isla Fisher tends towards the cute side of the scale.

Jessica Alba falls somewhere in between.

College Humor has it figured out with the Cutest College Girl, and the Hottest College Girl rankings.  Try it yourself.  You’ll find more people can agree on the same ranking when there is some range within the ranking.

I work for my municipality in the IT department.  There, I maintain existing in-house and third-party systems, develop new systems, and support city employees who use the systems.  My official title, Systems Analyst/Programmer.

That said, work went quite well today.  My day was without meetings, so I was able to tie up some outstanding work from last week. I was also able to make some good progress on my web project, and answer a few user requests. I really felt productive.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous.  My office is right on the water, so on my lunch, I took a nice stroll on the boardwalk.  I almost didn’t need a jacket.

Things took a turn when I got home.  Sarah had plans with the girls, so I thought I’d watch Community and The Office, and try out the new PS3 firmware.  Unfortunately, my hopes were dashed.

According to the release notes for the 3.21 PS3 firmware, its pretty much just a security update, at least from the PS3 Silm perspective.  I was really hoping for more video formats, but that didn’t happen.  That was just wishful thinking anyways.  I’ve decided to wait until tomorrow to do the update.

As for TV, seems like this week is between seasons.  Yesterday, no Dragons’ Den, today, no Community or The Office.  Sarah’s shows, Survivor and Grey’s Anatomy are new, but not mine.  So instead, I’m watching reruns of The Office.  I probably could watch my Revision3 shows, but I’m thinking of watching The Marriage Ref at 10, so it’s a little late now.

The good news is, I have a four-day weekend ahead of me.  Not too sure what I’m going to do with it yet, but I have it.  I’m still not too used to having days off.  I’ve only been at this job for a couple months.  In my previous job, we were extremely short staffed, so holidays were workdays without client calls.  Now, a day off is a day off.  Maybe I’ll go for a bike ride.  It’s supposed to be nice out.

• There is some ice cream left in the fridge.  After this post, I think I’ll have a bowl.
• I have a pretty important deadline at work that has been consuming a lot of my time, and everyone else’s work depends on.  Once it’s done, I can get back to my web project, and I won’t feel so under the gun.
• PlayStation is coming out with a firmware update for the PS3.  It removes the Linux functionality from the older models.  I have a newer one, so that doesn’t affect me.  Nothing else is said in the announcement on the PlayStation Blog, but there has to be something more to it.  I’m hoping the update may support other video formats.
• Four day weekend!

In April:

• The weather is getting nicer.  That means more boardwalk strolls at lunch.
• My birthday is in April, and there are a few things I’ve wanted, but have been told to wait.  Maybe in April.

In the few months after:

• I actually get vacation at work this year.  This may be the year for our honeymoon.  Two years late, but better late than never.