4th batch is now in the fridge and should be ready to eat next week. Recipe below.

Sours: Cucumbers and onions w/vinegar, salt, sugar, mustard seeds, celery seeds, pickling spice, garlic
Dill the 1st: cucumbers and onions, less sugar, dill seed and dried dill, omit celery seeds
Dill the 2nd: carrots and onions, less cider vinegar, more wine vinegar, dried dill, dill seeds, ground ginger, onion flakes, pickling spice
Dill the 3rd: cucumbers and onions, sliced super thin, same recipe as the 2nd, fresh dill (not dried) and granulated garlic (not fresh)
Dill the 4th: cucumbers and onions, normal slices, fresh dill and fresh garlic. click for actual recipe

Thursday: I was going to take off about 1630 but ended up staying until 1830 mostly working on the zone file for smo. The thing that took such a long time was converting the saved secondary zone which is a semi-ordered not-quite-human-readable dump of data into an ordered file (mostly). Click for geeky details

After building up a catalog of 951 good messages and 388 spam messages, Bayes is getting quite good at categorizing my mail. statistics below

I really want to go on vacation, maybe to Vegas or something. I think I will take the week off July 25 or something.

I would really like to move but I haven’t been motivated to look for anything and I am sure not motivated to fix up this place.

I would like to run a d&d game. Sitting here thinking about it might make me more prepared, but more prepared doesn’t mean better. Doing it multiple times will make me better, at least more so than waiting longer to start.

That is all for now.

Friday: Ordered take out from Kabul. Good stuff.

Saturday: Spent a few hours getting Quicken caught up. Thank goodness for electronic bank info in QFX form. Still have some time I need to spend to put everything in categories. Went shopping for cat food and got some kitchen supplies. (V-slicer, temp probe, pint-size measuring cup, some champagne vinegar). Made ramen. (Ramen packages, water, chopped broccoli, 1 egg dropped in when hot. I put some pickles and pickle juice in mine.)

Sunday: Made pickled carrots and onions. I tried to follow the recipe I used before for the dill pickles, but my printout with the notes scribbled on it was gone, probably when the kitchen was being cleaned up or something. So I tried to remember the Kinda Sorta Dills I had made before and altered it a bit. Might as well save it here too.

Kinda Sorta Dill v2: Carrots and Onions recipe cut

Back from Sacramento. A bit tired but I will live. More on that later.

And now Homestar Productions presents,

What I Saw Last Week
a Strongbadlib

No, seriously. I’m a pretty strong person. But I saw this one head last week and boy was it dorky. This neat guy was at Lyons and he started snogging socks. I was like, ‘holycrap! You’re snogging socks.’ He told me to stop spanking him. I munched on his shoes.

Thursday: space_parasite and I stayed late at work.. It wasn’t especially difficult, just a lot of waiting for people to be sure things were OK. Got done about 10:00 pm.
Weekend update is a little long this week

Whoops, I almost forgot my Weekend Report!

Friday was busy trying to complete a project for work. Everything was working great (thanks to some hard work and fancy footwork on the part of my team, you guys rock!) but we decided not to announce the thing until Monday, mostly because the documentation wasn’t 100% there. I wanted to get the 2 applications to share common passwords, which would be a cheap way of getting people to use the app I *want* them to use, because they need the password for the other thing they *need* to use. That wasn’t quite happening Friday so I gave up on it and went home.

Saturday, more geeking on the same project (it is basically a bbs and a repository for documents). I made some more pickles – I think these came out more like I like them. Who would have thought that dill pickles are made with, like, actual dill? I stayed up too late working on the password problem and finally posted a reply in this thread explaining my solution at about 2 am then decided to crash.

Sunday, slept in until about 12:30, then chatted online with G, who found a much simpler way to make Apache do what we want, so after he fixed it and I tested it, I then reversed pretty much all of the changes I made on Saturday, which was fine, I liked the new solution better anyway. I also did the laundry and whipped up some more stovetop mac n cheese. (This pretty much confirmed that I prefer the stovetop variety a bit more than the baked variety.) I stayed up later than I should have, but I wanted to send the announcement telling people about our product so that the team in Norway could start using it rather than waiting until the end of their workday to hear about it. (This announcement was only sent to like 20 managers and leads, not the 150+ full team, that announcement will go out early tomorrow I hope)

Despite staying up late I managed to get up on time for work and get in there. All is well. Monday lunch, left over mac n cheese plus stir-fry chicken (never do anything by half!)

Did I mention that my team kicks ass? I need to take them out to lunch again, or actually dinner is more like it.

There is a new anti-forgery proposal which holds a good deal of promise. It is featured in Slashdot here:
Slashdot The Anti-Spam Research Group’s Plan for Spam.

Below is my response to the author of the proposal (not the slashdot writer :)

Hello,

I really like the proposal and I think you have done a great job in presenting it.

I have seen other previous proposals that didn’t seem to take off, such as “MS records” by Andrew Church or something like that. The first version was similar to your proposal here, but the second one involved a challenge-response type of system based on cryptography and I think that something complex and heavy like that is just an excuse for delay.

I feel strongly that the forgery problem has to be solved NOW, or at least we should start to try to solve it now. This is why I agree strongly with your proposal and why I like it so much.
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