I did a quick search for Conky for Windows this evening and found a few options. I’m trying out O&O for now. I’d like to be able to edit an .ini file to customize the options, but I’m going to see how this goes for now. I always liked Conky when I was farting with Linux.

Rhonda and I took Aaron for a tour of Drexel University today. It was a carbon copy of the trip I took with Joe two years ago. It was rainy and cold, so I didn’t get any good pics on campus, but lunch was a nice adventure after.

Chuan Kee Skewer

I found this joint on Eater Philly, and it sounded good. I had three places in mind, but this was the consensus due to hot pot… or so we thought. They didn’t have it on the menu, and the server seemed befuddle₫ when I showed him pics of the dish (on Chuan Kee’s Yelp page). So we got some grilled stuff, dumplings, and ramen.

Reading Terminal Market

I didn’t realize how close this was, so we walked from Chuan Kee. Cannoli from Termini Bros!

Rays Coffee and Tea House

They still make siphon coffee, but I ordered the house blend before I realized it. Next time.

I read somewhere that to find work you don’t mind doing, you have to figure out what problems you like to have. That’s an interesting angle to take on the problem of work, if it is a problem. It speaks to the fact that no job worth your time is going to be effortless; it’s worth expanding that notion to say that life isn’t particularly rewarding if you’re not in the active process of solving problems. I think it’s fair to say that even crossword puzzles and notionally fun things are often problems to solve; this keeps your brain healthy and active. AND: using cognitive energy burns calories.

Here are some things I don’t mind tangling with:

• Computer problems: I like troubleshooting tech issues. I don’t solve all of them, for sure, but I am able to figure out most things. People always ask me how I got “good” with computers, and it’s a simple answer: motivation and Google. (And by Google, I mean AI and YouTube and Stack Overflow and Reddit and you get it.) I like when people ask me how to do things at work and at home, I even liked troubleshooting my kids’ Windows issues when I was a die-hard Mac user.
• Certain mundane household tasks: I like folding towels (but nothing else). I like folding up foil for chickenbags. I like making pourover coffee, measuring everything, creasing the number 4 Melita filter paper, dampening it with hot water before adding the freshly ground beans. I like slicing chicken breasts into three thin cutlets with my razor-sharp Henckels 10″ knife. I like sharpening my chef’s knives and cleaver. I like crafting our nightly preprandial, currently Manhattans: I measure everything to the gram, thinly slice orange garnishes, and crack big ice cubes with due care.
• Writing this blog: I get a great kick out of writing here at Uncorrected. I need to do a couple of things before I settled in: I had to decide what it was about (it’s about nothing… it’s about whatever catches my eye… it’s about tech, cooking, exercise, ephemera). It is, in the classical sense of a blog, about a person with a penchant for writing doing just that. I like to think, and writing is thinking. It gives me great pleasure sometimes to just go back and read what I wrote. I like it so much more than social media. It’s the original social media, and maybe I’m just a crufty middle-aged guy, but that’s me. I write here; I think here. I like having a draft open before me, uploading media to WordPress. I like mulling over a post while I’m mucking about outside. I like dropping ideas into Todoist for later inspiration.

Sorry about missing Serial Sunday last night; it was Easter Sunday and while dinner was plenty early, I was vegging on the sofa and not feeling enumerative.

1. Momofuku Black Truffle Chili Crunch: This is one of David Chang’s excellent chili crunch varieties. It’s good on just about everything, but I always put it on my grilled chicken. It’s calorie dense, so keep an eye on your usage. It’s just delicious; we’ve had the regular, extra spicy, and hot honey, too.
2. Typora: Typora is a no-frills markdown editor in the style of iA Writer. I’ve been using it on Windows, as iA can be slow and looks out of place on Windows. It’s got a long free trial, and is only $15 for a license. Runs on Mac, too. Best of all, there are plenty of themes. I’ve been a sucker for “cobalt” themes since using TextMate many moons ago, and there are lots of nice cobalt flavors to choose from.¹
3. OLFA Blades: My dad always has the coolest, most bespoke tools, and he’s who I learned about OLFA blades from. I always have one or two around and spare blades at the ready. They are good for any precision cutting, or just zipping open a plastic bag.

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^{1It does not, like iA Writer for Mac and Android, publish to WordPress. This feature is omitted in iA Writer for Windows, too. Like RSS readers, the Mac is an embarrassment of riches for bloggers. No so on Windows.}

Hot on the heels of eggbag, I bring you: chickenbag. Arguably another portmanteau, chickenbag is a bag fashioned from aluminum foil that I use to store chicken, hot off the grill, for service (ie dinner). We have grilled chicken breasts about once a week, but sometimes it’s just something I make for Joe when the rest of us are having beef. I tear off a big sheet, crimp the fold and sides into a seam, and leave the top open for chicken to go into after it’s done. I can cook in batches and move it off to the side until dinner is served.

An example of what you can accomplish with a sous vide wand: this is a cheap roast Rhonda picked up at ShopRite for around $25 bucks. Fed four with leftovers. I put it in the tank with salt and pepper for a few hours then finished it on the grill.

Here’s my top-five 10k rows:

Fairly linear trend in the desired direction, although slow going for sure. I am sure that my decline in performance in December and January was due to my second COVID infection, from which I did not suffer any serious or long-term symptoms, but nevertheless. Happy about this!

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Logitech MX Master Mouse: I bought my first MX Master during Covid, when a solid and functional seated workspace became important. I still use my original MX Master at my desk at home, but after trying a few cheaper mice at the office, and seeing the gen 2 of this venerable mouse on sale on Amazon, I sprung for a second device. (There’s a third generation for sale now, hence the sale.) It’s really big and I thought that I wouldn’t like the first iteration, but it helped me realize that, for seated computing, a big arc in your palm is just the thing you need.
2. Tostones: Tostones are fried green plantains. Rhonda has been making these excellent (and cheap) pork roasts for taco nights, which even Joey eats. I started making refried beans from dried beans in my pressure cooker (Rhonda, perhaps rightfully, fears the quaking pot), and they have been a big hit. Aaron pulled a green plantain out of the pantry and asked about making it. The trick with these is to fry them in warm oil after cutting the plantain into one-inch slices, and then dropping them into cold water for a few minutes. Once your pan (and oil) is hot, you smash them and fry them a second time. I used the Blackstone, so these were less oily, and I was able to smash and fry at the same time. We only had one, but would have eaten more.
3. Portmanteau: This might actually just be a blend word, but in any event: I’ve been making sous vide egg bites every Sunday for the work week for Rhonda and me. I make ten bites, but we only have nine mason jars at this point. I put the rest of the egg mixture in a sandwich bag and sous vide it alongside the jelly jars. It has come to be called “eggbag,” and we always recognize it apart from the other bites. I always eat eggbag. Eggbag is not capitalized, outside of starting a sentence.

A typically dense read from The Marginalian:

…neuroscience affirms the body as the instrument of feeling that makes the symphony of consciousness possible: feelings, which arise from the dialogue between the body and the nervous system, are not a byproduct of consciousness but made consciousness emerge.

and

Consciousness… is a particular state of mind resulting from a biological process toward which multiple mental events make a contribution… These contributions converge, in a regimented way, to produce something quite complex and yet perfectly natural: the encompassing mental experience of a living organism caught, moment after moment, in the act of apprehending the world within itself and, wonder of wonders, the world around itself.

Organisms progress from “minding”: create images from sensory experience, to thoughts: rendering the internal world in the same way.

I Feel, Therefore I Am: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on Consciousness as a Full-Body Phenomenon

One app on the Mac that I love and use all the time is Yoink, a digital shelf for files. Example use case: I grab a screenshot, grab the thumbnail in the lower right corner of the screen, and then drag it into Yoink’s shelf. From there, I can drag the file into an email, iMessage, or MarsEdit.

There’s a Yoink-like app for Windows, it turns out: DropShelf. There are some differences between DropShelf and Yoink, but it is functionally equivalent. I do not, for example, like how DropShelf is activated: You select a file or files in File Explorer, and shake your cursor. The gesture requires a lot of “shaking” to the point that I think the invocation doesn’t work. It should work just by dragging, as does Yoink.

I took the ServSafe test for work; it was not at all a requirement of being a special education supervisor, but we opened a cafe at the local community college for our students to work in, and we (the leadership) team agreed it would be helpful for as many of us as possible to have the certification.

I will say that this test is much harder than I expected, and I wasn’t sure I’d passed it when walking out. Add to that that I had a class to attend that I forgot about and missed the first 45 minutes of the testing session.

Time to glove up!

Today I found myself about a mile-and-a-half from the Sly Fox brewery’s Malvern location, so I just had to stop in. The original Sly Fox was my college haunt back in the late 90’s; it was in nearby Phoenixville, and (usually) Mike Walter, Jeff Henning, and I would find ourselves extracting a sawbuck each from the nearby Mac machine, and having three pints (at three bucks a pop) and leaving a buck for the bartender. We didn’t do the noisy sports-bar, plastic-cup-of-Natty-light, ten-cents wing thing very much, if at all, and preferred the quiet peace of the Sly Fox.

Things have changed a fair bit for the Sly Fox since those days; they now distribute their beer in cans in the region, and have multiple locations. I mentioned that I used to hang out at the Phoenixville location to the bar tender who pulled my stout this afternoon, and he knew of the original location, and filled me in on the new building across the street from the original, as well as two locations in Pittsburgh.

I can’t say the food was terribly exciting, but it was neat to step into an evolved version of my history, when the Sly Fox was one of the newest options for discerning drinkers popping up on the East Coast.