Elspeth's New Place

Across from the convenience store at the corner of Frederick and Filbert Streets in Kitchener. It's big, beautiful (in a 70's, smoked glass / dark hardwood floors kind of way) and best of all it makes her happy. I wonder how best to modify my route to the cottage to swing by her place?

Cluster Filesystems

Apparently these things are out of the lab and ready for production. Or at least that's what the marketing departments are saying. I'm going to use this post to keep track of investigations into the following file systems, with the hope of separating reality from hype. Eventually this might even turn into a proper article. But probably not.

1. ADIC SNFS
2. IBM GPFS
3. CFS Lustre

If you know me, then the goal will be obvious: finally a reliable, scalable, high performance file system upon which to host high availability PostgreSQL databases.

Look, it's me, drunk... in Cuba!

Scary Delicious Wines

I'm only going to list the absolute best of the best I've ever tasted here. 1999 Shiraz: Penfold's RWT (Red Wine Tasting) ? Port: Quinta do Vale Maeo

Jamie Kennedy's Comments on Basic Beef Stock

Last week, I took Mom, Robin and Aunt Weasie out to the Jamie Kennedy Restaurant for dinner. I had the rib-eye steak for dinner. It was a decent steak, but the sauce which came with it was fantastic. Being the inquisitive guy I am, I decided to ask the chef how he made such a fantastic sauce which lead to the following revalation on stock making. Roast before you render. In retrospect it's so obvious. No wonder my stocks have lacked the flavour and complexity I've wanted. Jamie had a number of other thoughts on the process, but I figure crawl before you walk. I just took a batch of beef bones (say that 3 times fast) with a couple of onions out of the oven (350F convection for about 1.5 hours). Too bad I didn't have any carrots or other root-veggies on hand. I'm gonna let it render overnight and see what it tastes like tomorrow morning. Well, it came out smelling incredible, no surprise. I plucked out the bones and put it through a sieve to get the big stuff then set it on a rolling boil to reduce. I figured that reducing it would take a good 3 or 4 hours, but boy was I wrong. I scorched some of it to the bottom of my stock pot after only about 2 hours on the stove, a real tragedy. Not to mention a real pot-scrubbin workout too. Ah well, I salvaged some of the stock and am looking forward to trying it out next time I make some soup.

Google Integration Found Irresistable

The fact that I have created this blog is yet more proof that I'm a pathetic Google fanboy. I tried out a livejournal and ended up not using it for anything. But I've got some ideas about what to put up here. Aside from (just) pointless posts about the trivia of my life I though that perhaps this would be a good place to keep track of recipes. I used to have a recipe website but it died when the hard-disk for that server bought it. Naturally I didn't have any backups, for which I offer no excuses beyond the classic "well, I guess I should have made backups". Recipes will be tagged with the "recipe" label. Brilliant, I know. Other generally useless content will include ubre-brief book / song / movie / $[art] reviews which will no doubt illuminate my rather limited analytical skills. There's a reason I changed my major away from English after second year, but I'm not contemplating essays here. It's more to keep me reminded about what I have and haven't read. This might help me avoid the somewhat embarassing situation of getting part way through a book and realizing that I've already read it. Embarassing because I've probably bought another copy. Label "review" seems fitting. Oh, and I should also throw in brief descriptions of movies, books etc that had trailers or back-covers I found interesting so that I get around some day to. Perhaps a "todo" label? In fact, general I might even put up general todos! Wow, I'm feeling very excited about the prospects. I'll end here with the prospects of getting my life organized ahead of me. Very positive and upbeat stuff that. I wonder if I can attach some kind of cutsey little icon to this post. That'd rock.