Posts by Stephen Judd

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  • Hard News: Food and drink,

    Danielle: we have an ancient Alison Holst recipe book with oaty pancakes in, and share your enthusiasm.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

  • Hard News: Food and drink,

    Yeah, I used to scoff at my partner's habit of soaking oats overnight before porridge, but it makes a huge difference. In particular those big coarse "Old Fashioned" Harroways oats become fluffy and delicious. I am eating some RIGHT NOW NOM NOM SNARF THLAWP MMM.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

  • Hard News: Food and drink,

    Bourgeois? Crikey, for someone who slings Marxist terminology around the place that's a peculiar rant.

    Most of the world would like food that is cheap, hot, not actually nasty, and abundant. The kind of food you idolise is the bourgeois luxury.

    Meanwhile in the rich countries, people don't cook from scratch because they're tired, the ingredients for good simple food are expensive, they may never have been taught how, and their tastes have been trained by a lifetime of marketing that what they buy is a packet is real food and what they make themselves is fake. And your response is to blame them for being bourgeois? I guarantee, no one is more fucking bourgeois than boring from-scratch foodies. I should know, I am one.

    Your ire ought to be directed at the real culprit, which is a society that relies on the mass of people trading their time for money at a rate of exchange such that they end up poor in both, hoping that they don't die before they save enough to join the tiny class of rentiers who do have time and money.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

  • Hard News: Food and drink,

    You mean you don't ferment your own soy?

    Considering I have gone so far in recent times as to bake my own bread, smoke my own beef, roast my own coffee, ferment my own pickles and make my own yogurt, I'm afraid that is more a tempting thought than a zingy putdown...

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

  • Hard News: Food and drink,

    My standard dahl recipe includes an injunction to simmer over a low heat for about an hour. I wouldn't have thought the lentils would cook through enough in 20 minutes.

    Red lentils that aren't hopelessly old should cook in 20-25. Ditto mung dahl, those little green puy ones and the little black Beluga ones. I never ever touch the big coarse green brown ones -- they taste and feel like cardboard.

    I suspect the real secret to a lot of tasty prepared sauces is glutamates, if not as MSG then as the mysterious "hydrolysed vegetable protein." It's umamilicious. I keep meaning to buy some MSG from the local Chinese supermarket, and forgetting.

    sure they are,
    they grow on sham rocks!
    next to the faux pauas : )

    I'm awestruck. Oar-struck, even (it's the next step after gob-smacking).

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

  • Up Front: Public Address Medical…,

    Oh the waiting waiting waiting... we have been through that and hate it. Roll on instant diagnosis.

    Anyway, may what doesn't kill you CONTINUE NOT TO DO SO.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

  • Hard News: The Short and Long of It,

    A friend has just alerted me to Te Papakupu Māori, which is a plugin for Thunderbird and Firefox. It's not tested enough to be part of the main FF distribution yet, so if anyone at PAS were to download and have a play with it AND submit bug reports, that would be a great thing.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

  • Hard News: The Short and Long of It,

    Dunno what life is like in Microsoft country -- I was never fully naturalised there and left for the last time years ago -- but in the computing land of the free, I just install dictionaries for whatever language I like, and when I'm composing email (using Evolution) I tell it what language I'd like it to use when checking spelling. There's a bunch of checkboxes and I can ask it to check several languages. I use this all the time when composing messages to Brazilians in my pidgin Portuguese.

    I don't know of a suitable packaged Māori dictionary available right now, but I for one would be interested in helping create one. If you know where a suitable lexicon is to be had, unencumbered by copyright, let me know.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

  • Hard News: The Short and Long of It,

    We can add that field.

    I hate harping on about Metafilter, but another rather nice feature it has goes like this. Members have profile pages, and when you create your profile, there is a large list of "social" sites (Librarything, LastFM, Linkedin, whatever) and you can add all the ones that you belong to if you want. So rather than having "a field", you have a little set of records for each user. That's nice, because it's extensible, and when the new hotness that everyone wants to join comes along, you just make it another option, and Bob's your uncle. Eg, this is mine. When one feels like a spot of harmless stalking, it's just the ticket.

    In the past, when I have brought up Metafilter, other people have poo-poohed it, for reasons which I understand even if I don't agree. Anyway I think it's good to look at other community sites if only because it helps you to more clearly articulate how you're different, and why you've chosen to be that way.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

  • Hard News: The Short and Long of It,

    I'm not entirely sure what threading is

    Judging by what people are writing, I think threading can mean two different things.

    1. messages grouped by a category. Like your classic bulletin board or forum software. So here at PAS, there's one thread per blog post, but maybe people would like to be able to spawn lots of threads attached to each post.

    2. a way of displaying messages so that if you reply to a message, your reply sort of nested or indented under it.

    Advantage is that then it's very clear visually which original message someone is responding to, disadvantage is that the newest responses aren't necessarily at the bottom, but might be tucked up under an early message so that you skim past them. Old-school mail clients and newsreaders favour this kind of display, and make it work with bolding and outline/tree controls -- which don't (to my mind) translate very well to a web-browser interface. Anyway, this is what I usually understand "threading" to mean, but I think other people are thinking of bulletin board type approach.

    For PAS, I'm against both.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report

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