Last weekend I decided to spend some time in the kitchen baking with my crappy oven and made a four layer German Chocolate Cake. 
I do most all my baking with directions from Cooks Illustrated and if you are up for the work, as a Cooks Illustrated recipes are work, you must try their German Chocolate Cake with Coconut-Pecan Filling. It was pretty much heaven on a plate.
I just about laughed so hard I was crying this morning when I saw a hilarious look at how rumors get started for new Apple Products. If you do not have a sense of humor and/or are a huge Mac zealot you may not want to read it. Some great quotes for those to lazy to read the whole thing:
I took a little time today and upgraded my WordPress install to version 2.3.3. Though some mistakes are just too much fun to make only once I managed to upgrade the site without taking it down this time.
On another note I will be talking about my favorite database PostgreSQL tomorrow at MUG. I plan to talk about the histroy of the project and then get into all the super hot new features. After that I will also shamelessly plug Penguicon.
I typically prefer to read the book before I go to the film version of a story and this is the case with The Golden Compass. It all started out innocently enough; I decided to read the book and once finished planned to see the move. I read the book and was totally sucked in! I did see the movie after completing the first book and I was disappointed.
The movie would have been better if they had tried to cut more of the story out or had made a 2+ hour film. The problem was that they tried hard to jam as much as they could in the 113 minutes they had. The scenes were too short and the story seemed jumpy, it was hard to follow even with my short attention span. The end result was a movie that had a lot of eye candy but a story line that disappointed. Another bad decision that got me a little wound up was the fact that they cut the whole last chapter out of the movie. This was a great setup for the next book and I believe it should have been in the movie. Maybe they knew there would not be a second movie???
Fortunately for me the movie letdown did not end things. I jumped right into the second book, The Subtle Knife and hardly put in down. I completed Book Two Superbowl Sunday and just got my hands on the third book, The Amber Spyglass. I am going to dive into Book Three tonight and will not be surprised if I complete it this weekend.
Philip Pullman’s whole trilogy His Dark Materials trilogy is just fun to read and I recommend it to anyone who likes a fun book but be warned, it will suck you in too.
I am a cook and most people who have tasted my cooking are gracious enough to tell me that my cooking is not bad, some would even say it is above average. One thing on my side is that I am always using the best tools I can get my hands on. For most of the kitchen tools I use in my cooking I have researched for many hourse and spent some times weeks tracking down the best and most high rated item. Unfortunately this is not the case for my stove!
The stove came with the house and it does have one redeeming quality, it is a gas stove. For people who have cooked on gas you will know what I am talking about. The stoves oven is where I really have problems. It would seem that day-to-day the temperature control knob has nothing to do with the real oven temperature. If there was just a simple offset then I could work with that. I am not the smartest guy but can usually remember if an oven is 25 or 50 degrees hot.
For an example of my oven challenges I only need to look at today. I baked a cake at what was supposed to be at 350 and then roasted a chicken at what was suppose to be 450. To bake the cake I ended up setting the dial at 250, when just a few days ago I set the dial at 400 to get 350. Then a few hours later when it was time to make dinner I had to set the oven to 500 to get 450. To top it all off I have to check the oven about every 10 minutes because the oven will just swing 200 degrees at a time. I know this because I have a nice Kitchen-Aid oven thermometer that I have calibrated with my infrared laser digital thermometer, did I mention I am a nerd.
I think I may move up my timetable for a new oven, perhaps I will spend my tax refund on a fancy new Viking stove.