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Ingredients:

1 chicken, cut into 8 pieces, or whatever bone-in chicken you have laying around

1 bottle of your favorite BBQ sauce

———-

Start the grill.

Dump the bottle of sauce in a pot. Fill the bottle with water, shake it up, pour into the pot.

When it’s boiling, add the chicken. Cook for 20-25 minutes or sostirring occasionally,  until the chicken starts to fall of the bone a little.

Throw the chicken on the cooler side of the grill, if you can do indirect heat, otherwise make sure the grill is on low. You don’t want it to stick.

Brush some of the sauce on the chicken and cover. Wait a bit, brush more sauce on, wash, rinse, repeat until there’s like 1/4 of the original sauce left in the pot, and the chicken has some nice chariness/crispiness to it.

Throw the chicken back in the pot to coat w/the sauce and serve.

I borrowed heavily from a link my Brother sent me for this one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/dining/25mini.html?ref=dining

but when I tried it on the kids recently they gagged. Soon after they all got sick, really sick, and have stayed home from school most of this week.  So I tried it again with different ingredients:

3 bullion cubes (Beef, Veg, Chicken, whatever)

Bag of noodles (not Italian pasta–using that for anything non-Italian kinda grosses me out)

2 Scallions, sliced up super thin

Boil a big pot (fill halfway w/water) and a small pot (3-4 cups) of water. Add the noodles to the big pot and the builion to the small pot. Drain the noodles when they’re soft, throw them back in the big pot, pour the builion over the noodles, and dump in the scallions.

You can add more stuff if you want, but remember–gag-risk increases exponentially with number of both ingredients and kids.

I’m researching plugins that will auto-post to FB and Twitter accounts. Most plugins force you to create facebook “apps” to do the FB thing, a process that I despise. This one is called “social”, and it apparently doesn’t require an app.  I’ll report my findings at the next Buffalo WordPress Users meetup tomorrow evening. If you haven’t joined the meetup group yet, what are you waiting for? It’s free! http://www.meetup.com/Buffalo-Wordpress/

After my macbook fried and my xp box got infected beyond repair, I decided to start all over with linux. I’ve never used it before, so here are some initial reactions from a long time computer user, both in windows and mac environments, starting fresh:

1. It’s the most user-friendly environment I’ve tried. It combines the best of windows and mac in one interface. Open folders and files along the bottom (the tray?) is such a natural thing that I always liked about windows. The intrusive dock is something I’ve always disliked about mac. Everything is crisp, the system fonts are legible, and working in it from a gui standpoint is very satisfying.
2. I love discovering how it works. At first, it’s annoying to deal with package installations and terminal commands, but after a while you get a feel for how and why they work.  There are strange icons nestled into the various static bars on the top and bottom of the screen (menu bar? task bar? Again, I need to learn the lingo), that do cool stuff when you click them.  For instance, in the lower left is an interesting one, that nicle hides everything on your desktop when clicked. I know os x does this and much more with the f9 f10 f11 keys, can’t think of what they call it at the moment. But all I ever really need regarding windows is a quick way to see my desktop. Each time I find something new in it, I feel a sense of accomplishment (wow I am a geek).
3. It seems no faster or slower than osx or windows at the moment (maybe a little bit faster, I’m using a dell 4600 with 1.5 gb Ram).
4. I wish the windows were anti-aliased. Probably a memory saver, but I’d turn it on if I knew how.
5. It came with some interesting apps. So far, I’ve used gimp (graphics), rythmbox (music management), firefox (web browser), picasa (photo manager), and Kino (video editor). Some thoughts:
   • Gimp sucks. Gimp is such a horrible name for software anyway; it connotes a crippled, inferior entity, which Gimp unfortunately seems to be. I need shape layers, I need precision zooming, and I can’t imagine Gimp has Photoshop’s anti-aliasing prowess (see my previous post), so I’ll do my icon work on my old mac for now. If you don’t have an old mac with photoshop 7 on it to use, then I guess gimp is for you.
   • Rythmbox with built in lastfm is cool, and I’d love to get better at it. Unfortunately, my ipod/iphone centric life would need some hardware adjustments.
   • Firefox is fine, although one of my sites looked weird, maybe due to font issues, which I’ll address in a future post.
   • Picasa is really critical. I have every photo I’ve taken in the last 10 years on the second drive of this machine, and it was all managed via picasa running on xp before I wiped the first drive and installed ubuntu. It seems that picasa won’t recognize the 2nd drive. I briefly checked for answers via google and hit the wall (future post). You would think it would be easy for picasa to pick up where it left off, but no luck yet.
   • Kino imported the .mps files from my camcorder, but made them look weird. Need to investigate.
6. I miss Georgia, more than anything. Nothing reads like that font. Please, Matthew Carter, if you ever read this, get me some Georgia on Linux.
7. Using Linux makes you feel free, in general. But Inkscape and Gimp just ain’t Illustrator and Photoshop.
8. FTP is perfect. I don’t know why OS X doesn’t build it in like linux. FTP programs are pointless when you can just mount a remote server like any disk.

There is a huge need for something that would make it easy to design tutorials. As I see it, a tutorial is a step by step document leading the viewer toward completion of a goal, whether it be the design of a graphic, a game, some code, or any process realting to graphic and web design.

The system I envision would present the author with a series of nodes that could be text, image, or video. Text would be written instructions/links, Image would be drag and drop or upload from computer, Video would be screen capture-either a selected window or the entire screen.

The tool would allow authors to create tutorials as needed, store them, present them, password-protect them, even sell them.

The biggest issue with tutorials is that they are difficult to make and wildly inconsistent-two tutorials on the same subject can contain a completely different structure. This tool would  make it easy and establish a framework for tutorials.

I been working on my coconut shrimp:

• 1 pack 25-35 frozen shrimp, e-z-peel®™©
• 2 tb Flour/2 tsp Old Bay mixed together in a bowl
• 1 Lime
• Handful Sweet Shredded Coconut
• Handful Bread Crumbs
• pinch red hot pepper flakes
• 1/4 cup Milk/cream
• 2 eggs
• 2 tbsp Mayonnaise
• 3 tbsp Orange Marmalade

1. Throw frozen shrimp in some cool water for 1/2 hour or so or whatever
2. pull off the shrimp shells and chuck ’em
3. heat up pan with 1/4 inch oil on medium/high
4. dry off shrimp in some paper towels and chuck em in the flour/old bay mix and dredge those bad boyz
5. coat the dredged shrimp in a whisked mix of egg/milk/beer
6. Toss coated shrimp in the coconut/bread crumb/pepper flak mix
7. Whisk mayo/marmalade, squeeze 1/2 lime in it and whisk more
8. Throw shrimp in pan for 3-4 miutes, turn
9. Wait 3-4 minutes, place cooked shrimp on paper towels
10. When cool enough, serve with mayo/marmalade dip. Toothpicks are good to have at this point.