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So day 1 of the new layout has been OK, maybe a little chaotic. I’m working on adding some more icons, basically I actually launched in a bit of a hurry because of TheBarProject.

Mind you, chaos doesn’t help when I feeling like a _dope_ at work.

Will the person that knows about “Now Wat Just A Second…Seriously, anyone can post stories? Or am I not supposed to know about this page?” please contact me? I assume I’ve got a bug somewhere (safe to say), one that I would like to know about. You can find what amounts to an email address to contact me at here. Alternately, I may have fixed it already, could you try whatever you did again?

Well, since we’re apparently getting some brief traffic from the good folks at Geeklife I figured I’d post up a bit of quick content. Again.

Anyway, I give you Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger!

Right click and save as for maximum fun!

Also for our Geeklife guests, you may recognize this game as one in a long line of penguin abusing sports games.

Well, seeing as 24601 is sharing a new slanty.net version with us plebs, I thought that I would display my latest desktop picture. I think that it falls within the ideals of slanty.dom…

It is my observation that programming is a far more relaxed occupation wearing a toque and sipping a scotch and soda.

Jody’s been away for a couple of days, so my routine has become very late nights cradling the drink of my choice (whatever is in the house), sleeping in (its a relative term), and working on the computer as much as I can stand.

(I’ve set it up so that Dave’s crashed site, The Bar Project has a home here (it might not work right now).)

Drank today (Monday): Scotch and soda, beer
Drank t-1 (Sunday):Red wine, scotch and soda
Drank t-2 (Saturday):Red wine, beer
Drank t-3 (Friday):Beer
Drank t-4 (Thursday): Beer
Drank t-5 (Wednesday):Actually, I don’t remember for certain. I’m pretty sure I was at home, so red wine is a good bet. I do know that its been a long long while since I went more than one night in a row without at least of glass of wine with dinner.

I wonder if I can blame health researchers for being my enabler??

Going thru my head: Superman (Cry me a river remix) — Great, I’ve got Eminem and Justin going through my head. I need to have another drink now.

Vancouver Sun headline: Sleep deprived hospital MDs bad for our health, study says.
Seriously, are there any surprises here?

So, with my wife’s new aquisition of an iPod a few questions arise. Like just how big a collection of music is 15 gig of music? 40 gig? Quite frankly it boggles the mind. There really isn’t a very good way, for my mind at least, to comprehend the difference between 1,000 albums and 1,500 albums. My wife and a friend at work decided they needed to know how high that would be in terms stacked lps to get a grip on it. So of course, since I have lots of work to do today, I loosely figured it out. My stats (and let me know if you think I’m off base on these, they’re all pretty much off the top of my head):

Width of an lp (including cover): 5mm

Average size of an album in mp3 format: 50 meg

So for a 15 gig iPod should hold 300 albums by my count, a 40 gig would hold 800. Giving us comparable stacks of music that would be 1.5m and 4m high respectively (that’s about 5ft and 13ft for you American folk). Conveniently about a meter per 10 gigs. Leave a note in the comments if you can find anything more specific about these measurements and I’ll update the article.

So, that then begs the question, how high would your stack be?

I love my food. My tastes run the gamut, from eat-with-both-hands-and-a-napkin barbeque to excuse-me-did-you-want-extra-pretension-with-that French cuisine. Recently, I arranged a “Dine-out” evening with friends, to challenge our cooking abilities.

The Challenge : (aka “What is “Dine-out”?)

“Dine-out” is an attempt to civilize the savage Slanty, moving our gustatory adventures over and beyond nachos, chicken wings and beer. It is not a mere ‘dining event’ or ‘eating experience’ (both overused and tired cliches), instead it is more accurately described as a ‘culinary movement’ or ‘dining revolution’. Indeed it would be called an epic paradigm shift in the way one experience’s food; if that, too, wasn’t already a horribly over-used cliche.

Of course, when you start with recipes like this, anything edible is an incredible change.

The goal is basically an excuse to cook, and cook well. Got an
overpriced mint-condition cookbook authored by a hoity-toity chef, more description than recipe, glaring at you from the back of your bookshelf? “Dine-out Slanty” can help you. Need an excuse to shop for organically grown local ingredients from people so close to the food, they can tell you exactly what the weather was on the day of harvest? “Dine-out Slanty” can help you. Need an excuse to practice your balsamic reduction, your cappucino-foamed cream of celeriac soup, your apple-mint coulis? “Dine-out Slanty” can help you.

The Format

Three couples total. Each couple will be responsible for one main and either an appy or a dessert, so this will be a six-course meal. Each couple will also be responsible for bringing a bottle of wine (types to be discussed after a menu has been set).

Six courses. These are _small_ portions, people, we’re aiming for divine flavor. (We might miss, but thats what we’re aiming for.)

Notes, comments, challenges to the chefs: With six dishes, we have
enough leeway to work with dietary restrictions. I think we should aim such that everybody is able to consume at least four of the six dishes (thats aiming low) within their dietary restrictions, and of those four they should be able to have an appy, a main and a dessert. Also, some dishes may be prepared with “ingredient X on the side”, thats OK too.

We’ve got one vegetarian, so of the six dishes, a maximum of two (one main, one appy) should have meat. Somebody else has allergies to raw fruit, raw carrots, raw celery, so same sort of idea, we should aim such that she is able to have at the very least one appy, one main and one dessert. Some of us have issues with century-old egg. To the best of my knowledge, the guys are walking, talking, eating, drinking trash-cans who will be happy with pretty much anything.

The results
In short, delicious and a wonderful evening. Its a really nice format, with nobody being stuck in the kitchen for overly long. That’s not to say that its easy. There’s a lot of prep work to do for any nice dinner, and when you have six dishes the number of little things that you need to setup ahead of time is considerable.

Once you get started, things really roll along. We served one dish approximately every 20-30 minutes. The ‘cook of the moment’
has to be ready when her turn comes up. In the time between dishes, the others can mingle but may be required to wash dishes (there’s a lot of flatware that goes into serving six courses). One recommendation is to set up a “dishes” station, where clean dishes and cutlery are placed and a separate “food prep” station.

Appetizer: Broiled tomato with pesto and arugula

Appetizer: Squash gnocchi with baby bok choy in a mushroom consomme

Main: Seared red snapper with a mustard seed curry, lemon mashed potatoes on the side

Main: As above

Main: Roasted vegetables wrapped in phyllo

Main: One cat, smoked black cod and a vegetable medley (including chantrelles, roma tomatoes, and spinach)

Dessert: Sherry-poached pears

Main (not pictured here): Seared scallops with green pea ravioli in a truffle butter sauce

Not that I think many people were checking it, but TheBarProject is going to be done for a short while here. My computer kicked the bucket over the weekend so until I can get it up and running again you’ll have to make do with regular Slanty reading. I think it was either the power supply or the mother board. Here’s hoping it was just the power supply…