Aerogarden: Herbs year round? 
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
I love credit card reward programs. Pay off your card every month, and it's as close to free money as your likely to find. That makes it easy to spend those reward points on stuff you wouldn't buy otherwise. It's like Christmas!
Since I didn't get one for Christmas, I used some of my points on an Aerogarden. I'm hoping it'll solve the age-old problem of having fresh herbs in the winter. I may live in St. Louis, but we still get enough winter to kill or make dormant most herbs. My mom's a gardener and runs some grow lamps for herbs, but even she has trouble keeping them alive and bountiful all winter. Might have something to do with the cats drinking their water....
Well, I'm not a gardener, and the Aerogarden is designed for people like me. It's a small, self-contained aeroponics garden. It comes with grow lights, built-in timer, circulating pump, and a starter set of seeds in nifty pods. It even has little greenhouse lids for the pods to use while germinating. In theory, I should have plants sprouting in a week and I should be able to harvest them in about five weeks. Talking to my mom, that's crazy fast: if this works out, I'll be really, really happy!
Out of the box, it looks very good. It was packed very solidly, with very simple unboxing instructions right on the top. The box was even closed with a tab that shows they expect folks to rebox their Aerogarden in the summer, and they made it easy to do. The docs on assembly and starting the garden were very clear. Assembly consisted of "press A into B until it clicks", and then plugging it in. I have it set up in a corner of my kitchen right now... I'll report back in a about a week, when I should see leafy shoots coming up.
The value of variety
Sunday, December 9, 2007
It's a rare thing when I find out I'm part of a hot controversy in the food world. The New York Times had an article recently on the extinction of the entree.
"I think the entree has been in trouble for a long time," said the chef Tom Colicchio. "Eating an entree is too many bites of one thing, and it's boring."
More people seem to be ordering a bunch of appetizers instead of a single appetizer, to be able to try more tastes while eating the same amount of food. I've actually been doing the same thing for Thai takeout for some time. King and I has a lot of great Thai entrees, but I can resist getting some of the Thai ravioli, satays, and potstickers. Even getting a single order of Pad Thai is more than I can (or should eat) in a sitting.
Last night, I had a potluck and the pile of different food was fun in a much different way from my normal dinner parties. Usually, I'm a food control freak: I spec out the menu, select wines that would carefully coordinate with the food, hand-pick a selection of guests from different backgrounds. Last night, I just invited thirty folks I knew, told them all to bring some random food, and hoped it all worked out. It did!
We had Beef Bourguignon, thai-style peanut noodles, scalloped potatoes, butternut squash, wassail, an amazing but scary dip that seemed to go well with fruit, cheese, crackers, and anything else we put in there, baclava and pettifores, and more that I can list right now. It was a lot of fun and a big change from my normal pace.
Learn Common Lisp
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Sitting on my nightstand is a book. Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel. What is it? The best Common Lisp tutorial out there.
Sure, there are an awful lot of Common Lisp books you can buy, and a bunch more that you can find online. But Practical Common Lisp is both engaging and relevant. It focuses on writing actual programs of the sort that are actually used today. So it gets into the down and dirty stuff like file i/o that are too often ignored by tutorials in many languages. Seibel's examples conclude with a full web-based MP3 browser with Shoutcast streaming.
Which reminds me, maybe I should use his code as the bases for a replacement for my home jukebox.