Monday: Labor Day

Which meant staying home and eating hot dogs.  Then Julie sent me a picture of hotpot, and now I want hotpot.

Eight years ago I was in Belfast.

• Hotpot.
• I was watching NHK, and they were talking about Sarushima.  "Wait, isn't that just 'Monkey Island'?"  Yes.  It is.
• Adventure Time ended.

Seven questions?

1) What Adventure Time character is your favorite and why? 

Ice King. Because he has Wizard Eyes. He also has the best backstory of anyone on the show.  

2) What's the perfect New Year's Eve dinner menu? 

Stromboli?  That's a bit silly, but it sounds good.  Plus it can be sliced up into appetizer size bits (or just made that way to start).  Crab cakes are also a good idea.  Basically, a lot of tiny small bites, instead of a proper meal.

3) If you could go back in time and change your major, what would you change it to? 

I don't know. Archaeology/Classics? That's kind of even less useful than astronomy. Even though I do a bunch of amateur economics, I'm not really sure I'd enjoy doing it full time (and hated the class in college).  However, I really enjoyed the classics classes I took.  It's a shame that MSU doesn't offer most of those anymore, but again, "even less useful than astronomy."

4) Who makes the best chili-cheese fries? 

These were pretty good.  I guess I don't usually get chili cheese fries that often.  

5) What's been your favorite book you've read this year? 

Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning.  Kind of a let down, I know, but there's a lot of really useful math in this book that I've been trying to get coded up.

6) What vacation spot would you want to visit in the U.S. in 2013? 

Kauai, probably. It's next on the list of Hawaiian islands that I haven't been to.  I think it's kind of a long weekend thing, whereas the other islands (Molokai, Lanai) seem like they're just day trip things.

7) cake or pie? recipe for your favorite.

Does cheesecake count?  I'm not totally sure this is my absolute favorite, but I have a picture of the recipe ready to go.  It's really super rich, so you have to cut the slices fairly small.

Friday: Grumble grumble blogger images grumble grumble

I'm still annoyed by this picasa crap, but it seems that resizing images allows me to upload them.  Still totally a pile of shit that this is required.  In any case, I now have a script that does this resizing semi-automatically:

#! /usr/bin/perl -w                                                                                                    

foreach $image (@ARGV) {

    $out_image = $image;

    $out_image =~ s/\.jpg/_resize\.jpg/;

    unless (-e $out_image) {

        system("convert -resize 50% $image $out_image");

    }

}

Ok, here are yesterday's food pictures.  First up, the ham.  Spiral sliced and fully cooked before I got it.  Yes, that's super lazy.  Still, lazy was kind of the theme for this year.  I made a "rack" out of apples, and added the required water.  Unfortunately, the apples weren't really usable after this, but the ham came out nicely.  I've had this kind of ham before, and they can be super salty.  This one wasn't though, instead having a nice sweet hammy taste.

SS hams are nearly impossible to move after they've been cooked.

Plate picture.  I really like cooking things in ramekins.  Sticking with the lazy concept, I mixed everything directly in storage containers, and just cooked single servings for my meal.  This also saved a lot of time since I didn't have to wait for the casserole and pudding to fully cook.

I kind of wish I had more twice baked potatoes, though.

One problem with cooking this giant ham is that I have like 5 pounds of leftovers.  I have the impression I'm going to be eating ham sandwiches a lot this week.  This leads to the problem that right now I'm kind of hungry, but not for ham.  I'm also thinking that I'll use some of the larger unsliced chunks in a soup soon.  My thought is some sort of potato-ham-cheese soup of some sort.  There seem to be a good variety of recipes to choose from.

This is a 1.8 liter puppy.

I was going to post this yesterday, but had the image problem.  My question: what is up with the Atom?

• Brad DeLong vs. My Favorite Orange.
• More comic book complaints: WTF is Lady Shiva thinking?  Who braids their hair around knives?  How does that not just cut her own ass up everytime she moves?
• Angry Birds: Star Wars: Fighter Pods: Jenga: Death Star. OMGWTFBBQ?  They've been advertising this all day on CN, and it seems like it has at least two too many brands associated with it.
• Lamb anti-theft boxes.  Which leads to this story from my trip to Belfast: I was waiting for a bus tour to begin, so I looked around to try to find someplace to get something to drink.  I saw this place named "Iceland" which seemed to be a grocery store.  I went inside, only to find that half the lights were turned off.  I found the cold drink case, grabbed a coke, and paid.  It was at that point that I noticed that everyone else was buying nothing but frozen food.  It was immediately the most depressing place I've ever shopped.  Upon returning, my British coworker said something to the effect of "Iceland is an absolute mockery of grocery stores that only stays in business because it sells everything so cheaply."  So yeah.  Anti-theft boxes for lamb.

Belfast!

Just a few pictures from Belfast.  I've been largely stuck at the conference, and so I haven't been taking too many.  I figure I'll catch up in London.

A statue of Lord Kelvin.  Yes, that Kelvin.

The "Palm House," a greenhouse in the park. I think it's been closed everytime I walk past.

Memorial angel statue at the QUB entrance.

City Hall, where we met the Lord Mayor of Belfast.

Galileo. He sits in the entryway you take to get to the great hall.

The tiny, tiny shower  have to work with. Stupid tiny shower.