Erich T. Wade

All you people who live in places like California and Japan have permission to laugh at me, because this probably barely counted. It didn’t even bother to knock anything off my shelves. But for the record:

Northwest Arkansas. Earthquake. My desk shook. It was annoying, because I was trying to bookmark something via drag-and-drop at the time.

Also: I am aware that we have actually had several earthquakes in the area over the last several years. Somehow I managed to not notice any of them, which was honestly pretty disappointing.

I knew I wanted to blog about the changes to Google Reader as soon as I saw them, but I also knew that I would need a few days to cool down. So I waited until today to write up my reactions. I got to the end of a thousand words or so, looked it over, and realized that I hadn’t waited long enough to cool down. So you don’t get to read that. For now, suffice it to say that though Reader did need a rework and the ability to share to specific circles was a much-needed feature, we also need to be able to read shared links in an RSS reader.

If you, like I and many other people, are annoyed by the new interface, I recommend the Greasemonkey script Google Reader Absolutely Customizable. I test-drove several and liked this one best because of its customizability. I recommend you also visit the Custom CSS thread and poke around. I dropped in the link recoloring, because the gray links on black text were going to drive me mad. Here, have a before-and-after.

You can actually use that script to make it much more compact if you wish, but I like the bits I didn’t hide.

Sharing is not as easily fixed. There’s a Chrome addon and (for Firefox) Greasemonkey script that seems to restore the old functionality; I don’t know how it works, so I’m hesitant to recommend it in case it relies on db access that Googles going to revoke or something, but I’ll happily test it if anyone else is interested. You don’t want to use it in conjunction with the aforementioned script, as it duplicates much of the functionality in a much-less-customizable way and they don’t always play nice. Also, at least on my ‘Fox, sharing and unsharing items doesn’t work; it seems okay on Chrome though.

Long-term, I think the best bet would be to find a way to import links shared in Google+ as an RSS feed, with links to the relevant discussions as well as to the articles, though I can think of a few issues with doing so off the top of my head. The truth is, sharing to different circles is just too important a change to let go of, but reading through shared links in Google+ is pure hell.

Oh, and one last thing: At first glance it looks like Google Reader only lets you share if you publicly +1 the article, which would be boneheaded for too many reasons to list. It turns out that if you click the “share” button in the top-right, on the black Google bar, it lets you share the currently selected article to Google+ without +1ing it. A “Share to Google+” bookmarklet would be nice, too; I only rarely shared from within Reader.

It’s almost Desert Bus time again. Sweet.

. . . Why does it have to be in November?

Where does the time go? I mean seriously, that just happened. And now it’s happening again.

Now I have to decide whether I’m going to take a stab at a NaNoWriMo book this year. On the one hand, the answer should be “No, I need to finish the book I’m on.” On the other hand, the answer should be, “Yes, I’ve been wanting to take another stab at it for years and this looks like a pretty good year to do it.”

I guess I’ll see. It’s not like I don’t have a half-dozen ideas in the I-could-totally-start-that-now stage.

Hmmmm.

Last night’s dream: I dreamed that the dream I was having had a writer, who was outside the dream (in the fashion that creators are generally outside their works). However, the illustrator was a character inside the dream, and had no existence in the meta-dream in which the writer existed. She was jealous of the dream’s main romance plot, so she locked the writer up in a cell in order to force him to rewrite the dream with one of the characters falling in love with her instead.

As if I don’t already have enough worries about characters taking on lives of their own.

On an unrelated note, Kat wants me to issue a clarification to yesterday’s post. Summer and I were vibrating like hyperactive gerbils: she went into a sugar coma and slept for several hours. I hereby blame my misrepresentation on vibrating like a hyperactive gerbil.

I swear this isn’t just spontaneously a food blog. I’m sure I’ll blog about something else soon.

An old Lifehacker tip pointed me to Recipe Matcher, a site where you can type in what’s in your pantry and be directed to recipes that use those ingredients. Given my current goal, this is really freakin’ cool. And it pointed me to a ridiculously simple peanut butter cookie recipe: all you need is peanut butter, sugar, and an egg.

These are really tasty.

A few notes:

• I took pictures. I swear I did. Apparently the sugar high from these things was so intense that it hit about fifteen minutes ahead of time, because all the pictures look like they were taken by a hyperactive vibrating gerbil.
• The recipe doesn’t say to grease the pan, and I assumed that the oils from the peanut butter would keep the cookies from sticking. This was correct.
• These cookies are really, really soft and crumbly, especially right when they come out. I thought I hadn’t cooked them long enough at first (I went for the low end of the cooking time), but as it turns out I nearly burned a couple of them.
• These cookies are incredibly rich. I accidentally made myself sick on them, and it didn’t take long at all. Also my whole family is vibrating like hyperactive gerbils.

Right! So the stewe was delicious.

It was savory, had a nice mixture of textures, and some stuff that doesn’t apply to all stews as well. The bits of zucchini squash were especially good. I almost didn’t notice the apple in there, but appreciated it when I did. There was a slight spicy aftertaste – this is not a spicy-hot dish, my wife had no issue with it, but the taste was there. I’d recommend it. I’d do it again, but given how I tend to experiment with dishes like this, I don’t think this exact stew will ever come out of my kitchen again.

Here, have a before-and-after-cooking shot of the crockpot:

Our plan had originally been to eat dinner around six or seven, or whenever depending on when we got to go look at a house, but looking at the house got postponed and we got hungry. In the end we ate about 4 PM, the stew having crocked for about 5 hours.

Current Music: Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel. This has been stuck in my head for about two and a half days now, and I think I may forfeit my life if I play it again sans headphones near my wife any time soon.