godream

Bought this very nice fondue pot on heavy sale at the outlet mall with beat_the_beaver and blueeverglades and one of my apartmentmates the other day -- said apartmentmate and I just broke it in.

It came with a wide variety of recipes; we of course did not have the ingredients for any of them and had no desire to go to the store. We did however have a fair amount of leftover cheddar and Gruyere from the New Year's party, raspberry ufo for the alcohol component, a bit of kirschwasser, cornstarch to thicken, and slightly crusty french bread for dipping left from a dinner we cooked several nights ago, plus roommate broke out a bottle of riesling on the grounds that I need to learn to like wine someday and we were informed in Switzerland that fondue must be consumed with black tea or white wine or else.

It was pretty fantastic. I was really skeptical at the amount of fruitiness we were dumping in, between the raspberry beer and the cherry brandy, but it worked very nicely, and somehow the liquid to cheese proportions came out nicely in spite of my halfassed recipe halving. Hurrah! The next trick will be coming up with an excuse to have people over to do it again with an audience... who wants fondue?

I bake a lot, but I rarely cook anything complicated -- I make kickass chili and a mean swedish meatball and awesome (but always different) mac and cheese, but I've always been intimidated by slabs of meat. I mean, what if I screw it up?

Tonight I got home from work early, hungry, and decided to give it a shot. I guess part of the joy of having an income is that the concept of ruining a $4.50 steak is a lot less intimidating. I scanned around online, learned what to do, went to the store, shelled out money, came home.

Sprinkle salt and pepper, plus a little garlic powder and a little rosemary, slathered in olive oil. Three minutes in a hot frying pan on one side, while I'm cutting up a quarter of an onion and half a green pepper to distract myself from the fidgeting I always want to do when I cook. Three minutes on the other side, pulling out a glass pan and tossing the leftover veggies into the fridge. Three minutes in the 400 degree oven in the glass pan, while the veggies fry in the leftover oil and juices of the frying pan, as I'm pouring out a glass of milk and cutting a slice of the bread I baked yesterday. Done in fifteen minutes in time to tune into my dorky tv shows.

And oh my god it works. Yum, yum, yum, and no photos because it went straight into my stomach. Crisp seared outside, tender juicy inside, probably would have been even better if I let it rest a bit like you're supposed to. Good steak really is that easy -- there's no trick. SCORE. I am totally going to come home early and eat steak every night from now on (or at least until my attention span runs out).

Note to self: learn to do new things more often, because it's awesome.

Fellow course 6 geeks (especially the crypto-leaning ones) will either get a kick out of the following or else have already seen it -- Bruce Schneier facts, a la Chuck Norris Facts. (Or for more awesome per click hop striaght to ten random facts.)

Including such gems as: "Bruce Schneier's birthday collides with nobody's", "Bruce Schneier can see SHA-256 collisions by holding a hash up to a mirror and crossing his eyes", "When God needs a new secure certificate, he uses Bruce Schneier as the signing authority", "Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition", and of course "Bruce Schneier knows your private key".

I have nine siblings, two parents, and two stepparents composing the bare minimum of my holiday gift-buying routine (before I even start thinking about extended family and friends) which means the holiday gift-buying routine must start terrifyingly early in order to be a non-stressful process. (Although I'll admit the year my sister and I hit up Threadless and bought all the kids on my mom's side of the family t-shirts was great. Maybe we should do that again. Maybe I shouldn't talk about it here if we're going to...) I'm not a particularly brilliant gift-giver, and I really wish I were. My usual uninspired-ness does make the occasional perfect choice super exciting to me though...

In other news, having neglected to get my wisdom teeth pulled out, I'm pretty sure at least one is starting to come in, and it kinda hurts. Ow. Now I understand why little kids cry all the time while teething. (Exaggeration -- it's not that bad.) I'm not sure if this is normal tooth-breaks-through-gum hurt or the kind of hurt that indicates I should probably get them out soon, but it's further incentive to go see a dentist like I should have ages ago.

... or if you're just wondering where your friendly local bottomless pit would come out:

http://www.antipodr.com/

(Southwest of Australia for me.)

I've been working late, getting frustrated over what I'm doing, and stressing out (as I tend to do), but there are many awesome things about work, some of which I'm now going to enumerate to remind myself that I have a pretty sweet deal going here.

This whole access to unlimited food and drink, including dinner, while working late? It's good stuff.

Three of the five engineers on my team have decided that periodically wearing paper party hats with fake flowers sticking out the top is a totally brilliant idea. They look like Pikmin. (I informed them of this but sadly they did not know what Pikmin were.) When someone asks them why they are wearing these things, they insist they have no idea what that person is talking about.

The site director for my office really honest to god seems to care about how I'm doing here.

There is an office D&D game starting next week.

There is yoga two nights a week.

If you decide the best use of your time is to go listen to a talk on something completely unrelated to your work, nobody questions it.

Office mailing list conversations are liberally laden with both really smart comments and really dumb internet injokes, and sometimes both at the same time -- for example, when questioning some sketchy science, "Peer reviewed journal or it didn't happen."

And finally, when I go in tomorrow and ask for help because doing pagination with a variable number of items per page is an enormous pain and I can't figure out how to do it elegantly if it even *can* be done, people are going to tell me asking questions is good and not chastise me for not knowing how to do it well, even though I am madly behind and we are up against a (semi-self-imposed) deadline.

Work is great, apartment is great -- super busy.

( Blah. )

Shipping cookies to my brother tomorrow, who richly deserves them for his help when I moved out of EC. I've been promising them to him for weeks, I'll bet he'll be surprised that I actually finally followed through. Hopefully they will survive shipping.

Speaking of shipping, my team lead says I totally have the new office record for shortest time from start date to having code in production. He was probably kidding, and if not, it's still more about the circumstances than about my ability or lack thereof, but I am enjoying doing real stuff and having parts of a real product be mine (already!). Hurrah for the constant release cycle of web products...

I was dangerously near learning enough about the project I was on to actually get something done, when my boss came over to talk to me yesterday before lunch. "Got a minute?" he asks. "Sure," I say, and he leads me over to a conference room (which is how I know it's serious).

Turns out I'm getting moved over to a different project -- I have the impression that if I'd thrown a hissy fit I could've prevented it, but hey, the new project is interesting too, one of my favorite things that the company is doing, and I'd rather look like a mature, flexible person (possibly at the expense of not looking like a passionate, committed person? who knows).

So now I've got a whole new chunk of codebase to learn before I can be useful, that'll be fun. I spent Friday getting started on that and it seems like it's going faster than the first time through this routine, undoubtedly because now I've learned some of the company-specific stuff I can apply it to both. Hopefully.

Sublet is fine -- small, but I knew that. Next weekend is Cape Cod, and the weekend after is moving, so I'm tempted to just sort of chill this weekend: tv, bike rides, reading, maybe beach, maybe cooking (gotta ask temporary roommates about dishes), maybe home. Hurrah for an excuse for a lazy weekend. :)

So I'm back from week 1 of training for work at the main campus. By happy coincidence, the company picnic was this week -- very similar in a lot of ways to the company picnic of a different company that I went to last summer, but I feel like the big philosophical difference was that this one was held on a weekday...

They filled me and the other engineers starting this week with terrifying statistics that we're not allowed to talk about, pretty awesome stuff in both the "dude!" way and the inciting-awe way. Also filled us with delicious food -- I feel thoroughly spoiled. Favorites included the pesto pizza with beef, some sort of fried banana concoction, char su bao (pardon my probable misspelling), peach/strawberry crepes, and an incredibly classy bacon-stuffed-meatloaf (I am completely serious about all parts of that).

I start at my real office on Monday -- orientation did make me a little bit less nervous about everything, I think. At least it convinced me that they don't *expect* me to know everything about everything right off the bat -- or helped me believe that a little more. (Gave it the ring of truthiness?) I'm actually pretty psyched -- the folks on my project are pretty excited about it, and I guess that's rubbing off. Sweet.