Jay’s Realm

I’ve signed up to take Introduction To Marketing. Which I’m sure will steal away part of my soul, but ever since my management class that thought bothers me less and less.

I had to search high and low to find an older free version of memtest for os x. Apparently the guy who maintains it decided to start charging for it. That’s fine and all, but when you really need memtest and it is free for every single other platform this just feels morally wrong and a kick in the nuts. The buck forty he charges is another kick in the nuts as well.

After much searching I found a graphical front end that is downloadable and free called Remember that has the memtest binary inside the package. I ripped out the os x memtest because I like command line tools better than the GUI. He made a nice gui and all, but it’s not my style.

I decided I was going to try cooking with peanut sauce. Which apparently according to everything on the internet is made with peanut butter. Odd. Whatever. My first experiment isn’t going up here because I was starving and ate it as soon as it was done. I followed(ish) some instructions I found online that was a little bit of water, a big glop of peanut butter, and some side spices like garlic and lemon. I cooked up some chicken and snow peas in it and had it over pasta and it was ok. The chicken really took up the taste but the peas might as well have been microwaved separately because they stood so very alone. Overall it was far too… peanuty.

This time I decided I’d try something a bit different. So again, chicken in peanut sauce over pasta. This time I added much less peanut butter, more water, and some cream to calm the torrent of peanuty goodness.

Ingredients:
Chicken – Two boneless thighs (I’m unemployed and cheap)
Mushrooms – Handful
Creamy Peanut Butter – Spoonful (normal spoon)
Whipping Cream – 100ml
Garlic – Clove
Nutmeg – Pinch
Oregano – Pinch

Pre Sauce:
1) lightly oil pan
2) Strip chicken and fry on medium heat
3) Dice garlic and toss in with spices
4) Slice up mushrooms and toss in as well
5) Cook until meat is void of all possibility of salmonella

Sauce:
1) In same pan pour in a half cup each of water and cream
2) Add glop of peanut butter and stir well
3) Crank heat up until just the right thickness

I’m a big believer that food is made better only in small part by its flavor. The other senses must be engaged and delighted for a meal to truly transcend food and become an orgasmic explosion of delight. When all was said and done this dish was nummy. It was very soft in flavor, never anything overwhelming, yet rich enough make me feel like I was eating something. It was good, but it was so… monotone. I had tan noodles underneath tan sauce filled with tan-grey mushrooms, tan chicken, and flecks of tan-brown. Visually it was watching paint dry. No color. No life. It was boring.

Next time I’ll have to try it with something colorful like diced peppers or blue food coloring. I also have pictures, but it’s 3am so I’ll put them up later.

The good news is I think I grok monads. They make sense now. What was holding me back for so long was the syntactic sugar that masked what they were actually doing. It supplied an aura of magic which was really hard to cut through. Once I saw how the monad value was passed transparently in a sequence in a do construct it clicked.

The bad news is I still can’t get ghc for freebsd on amd64. I found some mailing list posts from mid/end of April on the topic. It looks like work is being done. It feels like it will be done quickly. But I hope I still have ambition to work in Haskell by the time that rolls around. It feels very much like a neat and powerful language with a lot of personality.

But I can actually do things in Python.

My mom sent me an email today and included a picture from where I grew up. I’m slightly bitter and jaded because of the isolation, but it really is a beautiful and magical place. For those who didn’t know, fifty percent of my english final was based on an essay about a place. I wrote about here and I lost only a single mark that I’m sure is from spelling or the like.