avablog

I made this recipe (doubled) for the recent progressive dinner we had with a group of friends. It turned out well. I wish I would’ve had some real mayo and white wine on hand to use in place of Miracle Whip and lemon juice, but it was tasty all the same. Served with an assortment of crackers. From The All New, All Purpose Joy of Cooking.

Baked Artichoke Dip (About 2.5 cups)

Preheat oven to 400
Stir together in medium bowl:

1 C mayo
1 C grated parmesan
1/2 C finely chopped onions

Pulse in a food processor until finely chopped:

One 13 3/4 oz. can artichoke hearts, well drained

Stir into the cheese mixture along with:

1 T fresh lemon juice or dry white wine
1/4 to 1/2 t ground black pepper

Scrape into a small baking dish or ovenproof crock.
Combine and sprinkle over the dip:

3 T dry unseasoned breadcrumbs
1 t olive oil

Bake until top is browned, about 20 minutes. Serve with:

Crackers or toast

Now that the site is up and running reasonably well (stupid, lingering MySQL host problem notwithstanding), I need to think about how to modify the look of this blog, which as of this post is pretty much at its default settings (I’ve modified the color of the header to match the background color in Gallery, but that’s about it. I’ll add some CSS code to handle placing inline images, but I’m not too inclined to do much tinkering beyond that. As it stands now, this page loads pretty quickly and is clean. There’s room for tweaks, sure, and I’ll probably make them, but you’ll likely never see a lot of fancy background images, huge font sizes, and wild colors here. At least not until Ava learns CSS and takes over admin of the site.

That said, this could all fall under the “famous last words” category as soon as I run out of other things to mess with.

UPDATE: Turns out my stupid, lingering MySQL host problem was not, in fact, a MySQL problem at all, but it was stupid. I went in and updated my httpd.conf file and uncommented #ServerName so that Gallery and WordPress now properly point to palmberg.homeunix.net. I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I’m persistent, which evens the odds, in the end.

I received my copy of “Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days” from Amazon today. It looks really interesting. What will I do with it? I dunno. But my understanding is that Perl is a pretty easy language to get the hang of, and taking 21 days out of one’s life to learn something new can’t be all bad.

I wonder if that’s 21 eight-hour days, or 21 24-hour days? I guess we’ll find out. I already did my first one-liner on the Cube, and it worked, so I suppose I’m underway. Tomorrow, the world!

One of the things that I find frustrating about working up Web stuff on my Cube is that I can usually get most things working to a usable degree, but there are often a couple niggling little issues that make my installs less than perfect. In this most recent case, WordPress and MySQL are conspiring to give me small fits.

I made the mistake of installing some software updates on the Cube last night and restarting the machine. After it booted, I restarted the MySQL server. And for some reason, the passwords for users at my locahost were changed. This isn’t a HUGE deal, as I can get in and change the passwords back using phpmyadmin, but as it stands now, running MySQL only shows me my test database. This blog is still working, though, which was the whole point of installing MySQL in the first place, so I guess things could be worse. Still, it would be nice to have everything working the way it should.

Hey, I could be stuck still using blosxom, which makes WordPress look downright trouble free in comparison. Sure, I had the base, default install of blosxom running for a while, but every time I’d go to install a new plugin or modify blosxom’s config file, I’d get 500 errors all over the place. There was just too much fight and not enough love. The downside, I guess, of being too stupid to learn Perl. But I don’t feel too bad about it when I go to blosxom developer Rael Dornfest’s site and get server errors there. If it’s not working right for him, I don’t stand much of a chance.

Now we’re getting somewhere. bOINGbOING comes across with a story today on a Danish unit that’s released a beer recipe under a Creative Commons license. I’ve always toyed with the idea of brewing my own beer, but when I had the time and freedom to do it (college), I was living in a house subject to wild swings in temperature, which is not good for brewing. I suppose now I could have a setup in the basement, which is relatively stable, temp-wise. I’ve got enough empty New Glarus bottles sitting around now to bottle a couple batches of beer, probably.

Well, it’s MWSF day, and S.J. kicks off his keynote address in about two hours. Should be interesting. It’s nice to be in a situation where I’m not presently lusting after any hardware or software. Of course, Steve and crew have a way of creating tech appetites in me that I never knew I had. The important thing is to remain calm. Breathe. Don’t get too carried away with all the MacWorld hype. I’ll just sit back and watch the keynote unfold on a site like MacMinute. They usually have a pretty good stream set up for keeping track of Steve’s address, minute by minute. Major rumors making the rounds are a sub-$500 headless Mac, a flash-based iPod (perhaps without a screen?), and all sorts of software goodies. No boubt there’ll be a big Tiger teaser figuring into the keynote somewhere.

UPDATE: Whoa. Mac mini, iPod Shuffle, and iWork. Cool.

Wow. It’s amazing just how slick everything can get, and how helpless we all are, when an ice storm hits. We left Ava with Grandma Mary this morning and slid into work. I assume the part we need for the Volvo is not going to make it here from C.R. today, so add another day to our stint without AWD. Handy.

It sounds like the weather isn’t apt to improve much over the next 24 hours. I blew through a whole large bag of sidewalk salt and a couple pounds of sand in under five minutes this morning, and that’s pretty much all I have. I still can’t decide whether I’d rather deal with 12″ of snow or 1/4″ of ice when I wake up….

After much fussing with a couple differrent blog packages, WordPress finally seems like it’s going to work. It was a long road, much of which I’ll describe in a subsequent post, just to consolidate my notes. Suffice to say, setting up my own blog on a home server was not the cakewalk I was anticipating.