Lost Symbol

After much prodding by a friend I read Dan Brown's Lost Symbol and it was good to see him target someone other than the church.  I recently read it a second time, to ensure I hadn't missed any subtle nuances.

Much like the Angels & Demons or The Da Vinci Code, conspiracy theorists will have a field day as our symbologist, Robert Langdon, looks into the secrets of the Masons. Runing around Washington DC to ensure the safety of its inhabitance, our protagonist tries to decode the secrets and symbols  and solve the mystery presented to him.

My friend and I each had an additional laugh because we each live near a Mason Hall in our respective cities. There are many reviews of this book on the net if you care to read them detail, and even a few spoiler sites to ruin your fun.

If you have liked any of his previous books I would say give this one a browse as well.


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G

Chocolate Crepes de Gregorio

Sometimes as an alternate to my Desert Crepes, I make a chocolate crepe instead. 

• 1 Cup -- All Purpose Flour
• 1 1/2 Cup -- Milk
• 1/3 Cup -- Dutch Proccess Powdered Cocoa
• 2 eggs
• 2 Tablespoons Sugar 
• 1 Tablespoon cooking oil
• 1 Teaspoon Vanilla
• 1/8 teaspoon salt

I sift all dry ingredients into a mixing bowl, I mix the liquids, then gently whisk everything together until it's fully mixed. I let the batter rest for a period of time, then I make the crepes per every other recipe.  Sometimes, I make them a little richer by substituting chocolate milk for the milk.

You can fill these with what ever your heart desires. Often I use a mixture of fruit jam, and cream cheese.

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G

NB: I think I learned this recipe via Better Home and Gardens Cookbooks, but I don't recall.

Blog Migration Update.

Well good readers, I have about 30 posts left to go, I've dropped any post dealing with the technology changes of my self-hosted services. Man it was a lot of work to get to where I am, but I have a couple of small things left to go.  Biggest issue, is doing a lightbox in my blogger blog, for my serendipity it was a simple plug-in.  Under blogger they don't have that specific one.  I can add the javascript and CSS, but it is a matter of time.

I will be posting about that as well, so I don't have to remember how to do it in the future.

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G

Desert Crepes de Gregorio

Often when I cook for friends or when I have a hankerin' for them, I make Desert Crepes.  Here is my basic recipe that I learned and keep comming back to after many years of trying.

• 1 Cup -- All Purpose Flour
• 1 1/2 Cup -- Milk
• 2 eggs 
• 2 Tablespoons Sugar 
• 1 Tablespoon cooking oil
• 1/8 teaspoon salt

I sift all dry ingredients into a mixing bowl, I mix the liquids, then gently whisk everything together until it's fully mixed. I let the batter rest for a period of time, then I make the crepes per every other recipe.  Sometimes I make them a little richer by substituting cream or half-n-half for the milk.  It's also important to use a neutral flavoured oil, not olive oil, or a nut oil etc.

Sometimes I will add a splash of vanilla, or a touch of cinnamon for variety.

You can fill these with what ever your heart desires. Often I use Ricotta mixed with egg and cinnamon.  Fruit, or Nutella rank high on my list of favourites.  If you are feeling nostalgic and want something classical, Crepe Suzette.

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G

NB: I think I learned this recipe via Better Home and Gardens Cookbooks, but I don't recall.

World Cup 2010 -- Cards and Bookings

I've been very confused by the bookings in the 2010 Edition of the World Cup.  I thought there was an unusually high number of yellows and reds throughout the matches I've seen.  But, when I looked at the Fifa Stats page, there had only been an average of 3.9 cards per match (as of June 22).  The 2006 Edition of the world cup set the record for the most bookings over the period of the tournament.  Using the info from wikipedia, there were over 340 yellows and 28 reds for the whole 64 game tournament, over 5.4 cards per match!!  This astounded me.

Granted the we are only 2/3 done the group matches, so there is an opportunity to exceed that number.  Conversely I have been also surprised by many of the non-bookings as well.

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G

Biographical Movies, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens

Over the weekend 2 of my favourite biographical movies were on the tele:

• The Buddy Holly Story
• La Bamba 

When they are on they also always seem to be back to back so I can get a few hours of entertainment from them, even though as Don McLean referred to it in American Pie, the day music died, is recounted in these as Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper, died in a plane crash, Feb 3, 1959.  The movies aren't too campy, and do justice to the lives of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Always worth a watch....


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G

Hero Rats...Way Cool!

Hero rats is an orginization that is training African Pocket Rats to sniff out land mines.  Way Cool!!  The rats are lighter then dogs and less likely to trip the mine. 

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G

NB: This was originally from my old blog as Way Cool.... 2007-06-28 13:19

Co Co Di Restaurant Is Open Again!

After over a year of waiting, Co Co Di Restaurant has a new home 11454 Jasper Ave.  They were one of several restaurants lost when the building at Rice Howard Way burnt down.  This happy little shisha bar and restaurant was a place I had frequented often for my tabouli and shawarma fix.  They also had a beautiful Lebanese style baklava.

My inaugural meal, a marinated chicken & tabouli salad, with a pot of mint tea.  They didn't have any baklava ready or I would have been noshing on that as well.  I also ran into some long missed faces and had an opportunity to get caught up on a year plus of gossip.  A very nice evening.

I don't know if they will still have weekend belly dancers, but I am glad they were able to recovery from  their misadventure. I will head back and have to provide a more indepth review of the new digs.

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G

World Cup 2010 -- Less Confusion

After watching more matches, it seams that the referees have becoming a bigger x-factor. I've seen some pretty incredible calls, and some even bigger non-calls.  I expect officiating to play a part in football matches, but in this World Cup it's a bigger part than normal.

I'm not asking for video replay, but maybe could do one thing similar to the NHL. The NHL has added a second referee in addition to the two linesman.  I don't expect a single referee to see the entire pitch the entire match, but an additional set of eyes couldn't hurt.

Let the players decide the outcome of the match not the officials.

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G.

My Appologies, Blog Migration Update

As some of you may have noticed I've been a bit of a twitter and facebook spammer.  It seems that feedburner doesn't really honour the date of the post, and shows new content at the head of the queue.  It's kind of nice that new people are going to see some of my legacy gems, but there is a slightly higher signal-to-noise ratio.

I'm going to drop some of the dated product announcements as part of the migration but I still have in the order of 130 posts to come.  Some of the posts I will add an NB post my salutation, if the info has been superseded by something more relevant.

Thanks for your patience in feeling my pain.

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G.

World Cup 2010 -- The Land of Confusion

WOW!  The 2010 Edition of the World Cup has me befuddled.  I'm less than .500 on my picks for the matches. World Cup 2006, I called 39 of 48 in the round-robin, 6 of 8 in the round of 16, 3 of 4 in the quarters.  My 2006 World Cup went pear shaped in the semis.  But the 2010 Edition!?!?! Makes me wonder if I even knew anything about football.

• Spain loosing to Switzerland
• Greeks winning over Nigeria 
• Americans drawing England

I didn't call some of the other drawn matches, there is still a lot of football to play but, I have to re-study my data, and will reset my thinking for the next rounds...

There has been some very exciting football, but just not what I expected or predicted... Time to watch more matches....

For now ¡Vamos México!

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G.

Problems of Blog Migrations

I mentioned, I've just had a forced migration of my services.  Now the adventure of migrating data begins, as well as getting little things like the search engines to find me again.  My serendipity blog had over 300 entries of use(ful/less) nuggets of goodness.  Many food recipes, windows and unix server tuning tips (that I relied on having available)  are currently hiding in the ether.

People that can do a staged migration can allow the old blog to exist or install a redirect. I did not have that option, but will accept my fate, and hope my gentle readers will forgive the temporary disruption until my data gets re-populated, and re-registered with the search engines.

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G.

Don Antonio's Mexican Foods... Yummy!

I've popped into Don Antonio's Mexican Foods a few times now, and it reminds me of a number of little family places I visited in San Luis Potosí and Monterrey México.  It's a family run place with grandma cooking in the kitchen the daughters serving tables.  It's different from Mexico Lindo, a smaller number of dishes, but everything I have tried has been wonderful.  Don't get me wrong I love the food at Mexico Lindo and will go there every chance I get, but it is nice to have a choice for Mexican food.

If you have a hankering for some real Mexican food prepared with a grandma's loving hand, I highly recommend you give it a try.

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G

PS... If you like your food to have some kick you need to let them know otherwise they will tame it down for the  salt and pepper is spicy crowd.

Bye Bye Uniserve

MTY-2010-05-18-Canon EOS-1D Mark III-0043
Originally uploaded by trollkarlnet

After 4 days of not being able to get the internet access fixed at my flat, I finally had to say goodbye to my DSL connection. I was willing to give them a partial pass because my 10 year old business-service's paper work was lost in the 4 migrations it had gone through (WorldGate -> Compusmart -> Interbaun -> Uniserve, all Telus VPOP providers). I never was dealing with Telus directly except at WorldGate where I was a part owner and tech.

As a partial interim solution, I picked up a Telus internet stick, to use for a couple of days but not 4. Via the internet stick, I started the transfer of my DNS services from my servers hosted at my apartment, to GoDaddy. Migrated my blog from my self-hosted serendipity install to blogger. Email from my self-hosted server to google-apps.

On the 4th day, while I did have DSL connectivity, I didn't have IP connectivity. I asked the tech-support person to have Telus rebuild by PVC,  I was on the first generation DSLAM but paying for the second generation services; I hadn't yet scheduled an outage of my service to migrate from the generation one to generation two technology. When the Uniserve help desk person told me they could ping the static address of my firewall (which DOESN'T allow ICMP echo-request packets), I knew it was over.

Welcome to my new blog

Well after some grief with my other Internet service, I've moved my stuff to be hosted on blogger, I will migrate my older content as I have time, because exporting from Serendipity into blogger isn't quite a trivial task.

I hope, that I will be able to keep this up on a more regular basis than myself hosted serendipity install as well.


More Later...
G.