FATS Trail Work Party

Posted on 2006-08-26 by frank

This morning I met up with about a dozen other people to do some trail maintenance on the Fork Area Trail System, a really nice network of several intersecting trails just across the river from my house. This was my first work party, and it was fun, hard work. It was nice just to be out in the woods. I used a hand saw to remove a small downed tree that was sitting across the trail at about head height, then worked with a more experienced mountain biker and trailer worker named David to clean out a few dips where water had been pooling after heavy rains. We used a couple of shovel and axe-like long tools to cut out the downhill sides of these dips — hopefully the water will now run off across the trail rather than sitting there making ruts in the dips of the trails.

After a good two hours of work, David offered to show me one of the loops, The Skinny, which I appreciate because I’ve never ridden with a more experienced mountain biker who knows the trails. It was a lot of fun and I’m definitely heading back out there again soon! Maybe not tomorrow because with the combination of shoveling all that clay around and riding the mountain bike, both activities I haven’t done in a long time, I’m pretty tired and sore right now.

What’s with the cute names they give all the mountain bike trails? Road bikers tend to give pretty boring names to our rides, like Harlem Backwards. I may have to work on that when I eventually get a CMS up at ccrides.

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Macports is trickier than it should be

Posted on 2006-08-25 by frank

macports, formerly Darwinports, looked to be a good, easy way to install and maintain a bunch of unix-based libraries and applications. After using it for a while, I see it has either design flaw or a documentation flaw. My use case is simple: I want my macports system to have installed and active only the latest version of each package. The older versions can be deleted. I don’t mind if dependencies need to be rebuilt during a package upgrade to satisfy this condition.

However, the port command seems to be broken because it doesn’t want you to uninstall a port for which another version is installed and active if any other ports depend on that port, even if the dependent ports were built against the installed, active port for which you’re trying to remove the inactives. Ugh!

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Debugging cascading style sheets

Posted on 2006-08-24 by frank

While trying to figure out the style sheet’s on Andrea’s blog last weekend, I poked around Safari’s debug menu, thinking, they interpret these things hierarchically for rendering, so how hard could it be to build an inspector for it that would associate the rendered elements on the web page, the source as presented to the browser, and the style being applied?

Bingo! Thanks to the WebKit team for developing and releasing this, and thanks to Google for helping me find it! This is going to save me a lot of time and aggravation.

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Sweet potato salad

Posted on 2006-08-22 by frank

We FINALLY brought a dish to Grandma’s birthday party that someone ate besides us:

Sweet Potato Salad
From: The Thrill of the Grill

4 medium sweet potatoes (about 2 pounds cut into uniform large pieces
1/2 red bell pepper, seeded and diced small
1/2 green bell pepper, seeded and diced small
1/2 large red onion, diced small
4 T finely chopped parsley

For the dressing
3 T Dijon mustard
3 T ketchup
1 t minced garlic
3/4 c olive oil
4 T cider vinegar
1 T Worcestershire sauce
2 T lime juice
Salt and pepper to taste

Bring salted water to boil and boil sweet potatoes 10-12 min. You should be able to pierce them with a fork, but still feel some resistance and they shouldn’t fall apart. Don’t over cook!

Prepare ice water bath in your sink for potatoes.

When potatoes are done, drain in a colander and plunge into ice bath. Then drain well.

Add peppers, onion and parsley.

Make dressing by combining mustard, ketchup and garlic. Whisk in olive oil. Add vinegar, Worcestershire and lime juice, salt and pepper.

Pour dressing over potatoes and serve or refrigerate.

The recipe says this will keep for 5 days, but I’ve noticed that the vinegar seems to break down the potatoes into mushiness after a day. Try adding cayenne or something else spicy.

It’s tempting to double this recipe because it uses so many halves of veggies, but we’ve always had leftovers-even from large gatherings.

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Pregnancy

Posted on 2006-08-21 by frank

Today it’s been hot in Evans — a high of 92 degrees fahrenheit and relative humidity of 65%. I could use a lot of cliches to describe the combination, from the sauna to the great beast that drives residents of southern Louisiana to eat spicy food, but I’ll just say it was nasty out.

The only reason I wasn’t surprised when I came home to find a huge enameled cast iron pot of french onion soup simmering away on the stove with its requisite bread-toasting and cheese-melting oven broiler action was because I already knew it was coming. How did I know it was coming? Well, Andrea’s been on a ‘hearty food’ binge the last several days, so I’d come home late last week to a big pot of braised beef ribs, which left us with a good quantity of beef stock. I knew we were due for something built around beef stock, and I certainly can’t complain for two reasons: I hate wasting good food or ingredients; and more importantly, that onion soup was damn good even if it was 92 degrees F outside!

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