Lifestream

Very late to the party on this one but I finally made @alisoneroman 's anchovy shallot pasta and I am shocked at how mellow this stuff is, considering it has a shit ton of shallots and a whole jar of anchovies. Good stuff!

I will never understand three-seat sofas with two cushions.

My God, what have I done?

TIL I learned that "boat", "bait", "bite", "bolt", and "bitter" are all cognates, from a PIE word meaning to strike or split (the connection with boat appears to be that one used to make them by hollowing out split tree trunks).

TIL that the "-ly" suffix commonly added to words in English to denote an adverb comes from the word "like" (still existing in the word "ladylike", for example). So "slowly" came from "slow-like" and "carefully" came from "careful-like" (possibly explaining the double "l").

TIL that "marshmallow" is actually a very old word, derived from the Old English word "mersc-mealwe" describing a "kind of mallow plant (Althea officinalis) which grows near salt marshes."

I always wanted to be G.I. Joe villain...

Grilled cheese experiment: olive and brunost, Norwegian brown cheese. Was good, if a little odd.

Sexy, sexy pumpernickel

Am I the only one bothered by the term "black IPA"? Like, y'all know what the "P" stands for, right?

TIL from @englishhistpod that Wales and Welsh both come from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "foreigner", which is ironic given that the Welsh were the native Britons and the Anglo-Saxons were the invaders.  Also: the wall in Cornwall and the wal in walnut mean "foreign" as well!

Possibly unpopular opinion: Martinis do not taste very good.

A piece of gingerbread, slightly lopsided. Still delicious. I used Anna Olsen's recipe.

Pot of misir wat, Ethiopian spiced lentils. Delicious.

Annoying how most recipes calling for condensed milk call for a 14 oz can, while the cans in Canada appear to be 300 ml (10 oz).

Cannoli pound cake. Really just an excuse to use leftover ricotta. Smells amazing.

The pandemic will be over when I can eat in a crowded restaurant again.

I wonder about combining static site generators and photo galleries.  I know it's a thing, and yet it feels a bit off, especially when you have 10GB of photos.

I attended my first IndieWebCamp session last week, on the subject of "gardens and streams", otherwise known as wikis and blogs. Given the current global situation, the entire thing was remote; I participated via Zoom. It was fun! I'm glad I got to meet everyone.

Wikis, and how they differ from blogs, is a topic that interests me. You may not know it, but my domain sports a wiki, powered by MoinMoin. I mostly use it to store technical notes and recipes.

(Edited 2024/12/25: I no longer use MoinMoin, opting instead for an org-roam based digital garden, but the concepts are the same)

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So it has come to this.

Jan-Lukas Else recently asked the Hacker News community why most of them don't have blogs, and published his thoughts on their answers to his own blog. The conversation was interesting and got me thinking about my own motivations for maintaining this site.

The first thing that stands out for me in the responses is the number of people who said that they quit blogging because they didn't have any readers. It was more than I expected. I don't think I fully realized how important readership was to some people in the technical community, probably because I think can safely say that it's not of great importance to me.

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Did you know that the word "Westmount" comes from the Greek meaning "land of houses that Desmond will never own"? :P

It ends. Finally.

I love how comiccon isn't cancelled, it's just "postponed" until next year.

Carrot cake, cut through