They started out as peanut-butter cookies (actually cashew-butter) but rather than press them with a fork as usual Laurel thought we should use this spatula that had square holes.  I observed that they looked like we’d used a fly swatter to press them so we put chocolate-chips as flies.  We had some roasted pumpkin seeds Laurel put on as wings.  Noah suggested we should put licorice for the handle (this would not go well in the oven so we used popsicle sticks).  The wings looked more lively before the oven but the end result looks more like the flies had been swatted.  Delicious.

The Wallet Pen

Apparently this is one of Oprah’s favorite things. Hand made of sterling silver, only 3″ long and with a curious action (press end to open, press tip to close) this is the most expensive option at nearly $50. It gets rave reviews from most users but take that with a grain of salt as people who spend more for something often deceive themselves to justify the expense. That being said I still want it and would gleefully accept a gift of one.

Levenger Walletini

Also only 3″ and with a clip very similar to the original wallet pen this one twists to open. Chrome plated instead of silver or stainless steel. The mid-range price of $32 makes me feel like it would make more sense to just get the silver one.

Derringer Wallet Pen

4″ long with a stainless steel barrel, this is actually almost identical to the Zebra Pocket Pen and even uses Zebra refills. A cheaper option at only $8 shipped.

Zebra Mini T3

It turns out Zebra Japan (and Zebra UK, and maybe every region except US?) still sells the pen I used to have. This and the remarkable similarity of the Derringer makes me wonder if there is some kind of licensing deal going on here. I’ve seen them for as little as $5 + shipping.

PicoPad Wallet Notes

This is a credit card sized notepad (15 sticky notes) with a tiny pen (really a pen refill with some wings stuck to it). I rarely need a note pad and the pen looks uncomfortable but maybe you feel differently. $3.

Conclusion

I’m quite happy with the Zebra T3. Zebra is well known for quality, the price is fair, and the 4″ barrel fits nicely into my wallet. They also sell a mechanical pencil, the TS3, of the same dimensions.

I still want to own “The Wallet Pen” some day. Please send me one.

Update: On a hunch I just discovered that the fan blade that the balancing weight eventually went on was the one exactly opposite the Hunter logo. Yay!

One of the lame things about buying a ceiling fan is the Energy Star label. Fans are rated for their efficiency in cubic feet per minute per watt. The range goes from 60 or so to around 185. You’d think that the EPA would grant the Energy Star label to fans that have a higher airflow efficiency but instead it’s granted only to fans that use compact-fluorescent lighting. Way to go EPA!

This reminds me of when Australia outlawed incandescent bulbs. Regulations ought to make sense. Instead of “no incandescents” the regulations should state “must produce at least n lumens per watt”. Then if someone comes up with an incandescent bulb that’s more efficient than CFLs we won’t have to go to congress to get permission to buy one.

This means I finally put the rest of the roadbase gravel into the garden and put the fence back together. No veggies this year, sorry. Hopefully next year some peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and maybe some garlic or something. Yellow squash may go in the front flower bed like we planned this year (but didn’t).

And I transplanted the irises. This was really a lot of work and we can only hope that they’ll survive the ordeal. I think I did just barely. Since I assumed they wouldn’t enjoy being out of the soil for two or more days I worked late into the night thinning them into their new home.

I am profoundly weary today but very satisfied with all we got done over the weekend. We even got to enjoy a delicious lunch with the Hughes’ at Saigon. Oh, and we bought us a ceiling fan for our bedroom. More on that when it’s installed (gotta gripe about “energy star”).

All three of our appliance images (LiveCD, VMware, and now VirtualPC) contain exactly the same packages, etc. In fact our .vhd is actually just the .vmdk from the VMware appliance built in SUSE Studio and converted using qemu-img (requires a recent version, possibly unreleased). And actually the .vmdk we provide boots just fine under other VMs such as QEMU and VirtualBox. Linux can be nice that way.

We hope this will make Mono even easier for .NET developers to use but you may want to use VMware anyway.  The VirtualPC appliance has some problems:

• There are no “VM Additions”.  They exist but they are not open source and IIRC the ones that exist don’t work on a recent Linux. So no handy stuff like drag-and-drop or mouse-in-mouse-out.
• Things can be a bit slow / choppy at times.  This clears up after a while or maybe after a reboot.  Not sure what’s going on there.
• We added some kernel parameters to make things run a little better: noreplace-paravirt i8042.noloop clock=pit. Joseph Hill dug these up on the Internet somewhere.
• On the new Windows Virtual PC (the one for Windows 7) you don’t get a network device by default.  As far as I can tell we’re the only project shipping a .vmc configuration file with our .vhd anyway so the expectation seems to be that you will configure your own VM.

Find this and other fine Mono products at http://go-mono.com/mono-downloads/.

The HT503 has an FXS and an FXO so that it sits between our phones and our land-line. This means I can pick up the phone and place a call on the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or on the Internet depending on how I dial. It also means that calls coming in from the Internet or the PSTN all ring the same phones. Thus I can try VoIP (and get my wife to try it) without disrupting our lives. (It can also do fun things like let me call in from the Internet and place a local call on my land-line but I don’t use those features.)

The dark side to this story is that my first HT503 completely failed it’s firmware upgrade and would not boot at all. Two more shipping charges later I had another HT503 which I upgraded far more carefully. Why would any embedded device not have some fail-safe recovery method? Dunno.

To add insult to injury when I finally got the new device configured I found that it would not dial on the PSTN reliably. I tried to tweak settings to get it working but I failed and had to pull the plug. Months later I saw that there had been many firmware revisions since my last try so with renewed confidence I upgraded and tried again. Sadly I got the same result: when I’d dial a ten-digit phone number I would get a message from Qwest that I had dialed wrong.

It turns out this was actually my fault (sort of). Recently central Utah was moved to ten-digit dialing to accommodate a new area code they decided to overlay on the same region. I decided it would be nice to have the device do the right thing when a seven-digit number was dialed, so I programmed the dial-plan to add 801 to the front of any seven-digit number. It turns out, though, that GrandStream dial-plans are not interpreted the way I thought they were. For some reason when I dialed a ten-digit number the device would truncate the number and slap 801 on the front resulting in a new, wrong, ten-digit number (801-801-5550 if I dialed 801-555-0123). I still don’t know how to write the correct dial-plan for this. After dropping the seven-digit rule everything works.

Actually there was one more brief problem where an incoming PSTN call would ring but when the person answering the call picked up they would hear a busy tone and the caller would continue to hear ringing. That problem went away. I’m not sure if I did something to fix it. When the HT503 makes a connection between it’s FXO and it’s FXS it does so by having the one port call the other on the local loopback interface. The answer to this mystery may be in that architecture somewhere. One thing it means is that if you select a lossy codec for both interfaces it seems to actually encode and decode the audio even though it’s on the same device.

Overall I’m actually going to hazard recommending this device. It’s compact, affordable, full of great features, and so far (apart from my own mistakes) has been very reliable.

Cut a green plantain into thick slices. Fry in oil on both sides until golden. Drain or pat dry. Smash flat. Fry again until just browned. Salt.

I was taught to bias cut them. I like to wear gloves when I cut them because the juices in them can be hard on your skin. I’ve also seen people rinse them (in salt water?) after the first fry. This is supposed to make them more crisp on the outside. You can flatten them with the bottom of a mug or something similar. A Dominican family gave me a device used specifically for this purpose called a “tostonera”. Like many Dominican kitchen products it’s made of cast aluminum. I think next time I make them I’m going to pulverize my salt first so it sticks better.

These things are delicious. Rebecca says they are a much better alternative than the sweet potato fries you find in some “fancy” restaurants. I strongly agree. Now I just need to find myself some good frying cheese. Oh, and there’s another delicious way to eat green plantains: Mangú (the plantain equivalent of mashed potatoes).