Lily’s Blog, Dragon Absconded!
Baking Until I Drop

According to Greendot they still fixing the stuff and the tech support guy seemed surprised we had email.
Well.
Before the call, I emailed them to ask what service it is. Two days without and now it’s back and it’s barely 1/4 our proper download and no upload and I can’t upload pictures to flickr and facebook.

Well, after I called and found out well “we have no internet yet” I replied and said well…we still like cash-back and I find they taking long to fix it. Maybe I should’ve apologised explicitly (I don’t mean badly…I mean actualy write out I apologise. But I still vexed).

We’re inviting family over and cooking.
When’s the last time we did that?
I DON’T KNOW!

I wish Chennette was here, but we’re balancing the timing because although Big Sis is due end of the year, people are thinking she can come ANYTIME!
And Chennette isn’t coming until say….the 1st?
So, we can’t wait.

So I made the baklava last night (a bit too soggy…maybe too much butter and too much syrup?) The top is fine but the lower layers…are a bit soggy.
Regardless it tastes good.

Mom loves Rose Levy Beranbaum’s recipe for pizza so much that we sprinkled zatar seasoning on it last time we made and had zatar bread. The only thing missing was the shankleesh (stinky cheese!)
Zatar has sumac, oregano, thyme, black seed and who knows what else….sesame seeds…
So this time, I put the rest of the zatar into the dough itself and mom will make a fresh batch in the morning which we’ll sprinkle on top with a touch more olive oil maybe.
So, it’s in the fridge and for two hours tomorrow I shall be shaping, spreading and baking on the stone with a new peel!

And since Chennette got us tahini and we have channa, lime juice and garlic we shall make…HUMMUS!!! for a dip.

Mom has already made and assembled the beef kibbe. All that is left is to BAKE IT!

Mom also is going to do a kinda pot grill beef and make a chicken biryani.

We’re going to make a fresh salad (ordinary tomato, cucumber and lettuce) and also a coleslaw…tart or sweet? Well it depends if i forget the lime juice or the honey. I always forget *something*. I’m really sad we’re out of horseradish…:-(
Anywayz, mom likes it however I make it sweet or sour :)

If we had corn we’d boil it and lightly coat it with garlic butter but no corn so well…hummus and garlic, right?

Maybe somebody will bring ice-cream?

I’ll try to remember to take pictures tomorrow and actually get them off my camera and you know….upload them somewhere…
Pity I haven’t learned Chennette’s lesson yet.

And in non-food-related news, guess what I’m typing on?
Oh, yeah! and now guess the specs! :)

PS I don’t look forward to clean-up…and wait I’m still up after 3 am … will I sleep? Ah well, at least I finished grading and entering marks and let’s hope…that it’s all good!

Laterz!

It’s not mine…

You know you’re really desperate for a new computer when the ones at PriceSmart are starting to look good.
Talk about instant gratification.

My powerbook isn’t quite dead yeat but it has vertical red lines running through it from start-up and then when (if) it loads the GUI there’s a box of vertical hashes following the mouse pointer along and when (if) it loads the console lots of the output is fuzzy.

Sometime during start-up it halts for five minutes and then recommences. I checked the dmesg (I think that’s what I check) and I think that’s just before or just after it starts doing things to the graphics card/video adapter (I forget precisely). And then 5 minutes later it continues in the log. I figure if it’s the graphics adapter and not say the display or whatever then it’s toast regardless.

I really need a new computer.
Now.
But I wasn’t ready for my powerbook to die.
*sob*

*sigh*

Remember when last month the Daring Bakers made Lavash and I complained. I could’ve joined them. I actually made lavash from the same recipe that month.

Well guess what they baked this month!
See here!
Pizza.
From Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.

Yeah.
We all know what I have sitting in my freezer, right?
right?

In case you don’t know, let me refresh your memory:

And I still am not a Daring Baker.
*sob*

You thought I forgot about Linux, didn’t you?

Well, a while ago I trashed my linux install (I may have posted about it, I don’t recall) and had Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora Core installed on my desktop, but only the last one, Debian was bootable (and even that took some finagling). So, I still had major sorting out to do with all the partitions and files and unifying them and getting rid of the bad /boot and such. A month or so before my brother, sister-in-law and niece came, I backed up the files, wiped it all and installed a fresh Debian Lenny. I got wireless working and everything was pefect. I didn’t bother deal with audio because…well, something had happned to the speakers in the interim so it wasn’t necessary.

A couple weeks ago my sister returned my powerbook (hopefully for good). It’s been acting very slow. Things take long to load and programs to switch. I had plans of installing linux and linux alone for a while now so, I backed up all my files (you try backing up files on an 80GB harddrive from another 80GB harddrive…*sigh*). And then…installed Debian Lenny and got the wireless working and yay.

Well of course the audio wasn’t working out of the box. I think I had to install alsa-base or alsa-tools or alsa-utils or something.

But even then the mike wasn’t working.
I wasn’t surprised.
I don’t think I ever got the mike working.
But I figured I would try. Some people seemed to have reported their mike working. Things have changed. Even though I can’t skype from LinuxPPC, I could at least dedicate some time getting the mike working so I could record dear niece when she feels like it.

So, I did some googling and found this from a iBook G4 user on Ubuntu. He or she said that nothing recognized his built-in microphone until he installed gnome-sound-recorder (aptitude install gnome-media) and then he launched that and selected Mic as the source and it recorded audio.

Furthermore, all the other programs he was trying to use to record sound also now recognized his mic.

Wow!

So, I figured it was worth a try.
I did it and wooohooo! My microphone works. Maybe I’ll upload the first audio recording from this powerbook on Linux.

I have no idea why it works and why it didn’t before.
I didn’t really do *anything*.
And his post to ubuntu was since November 2006…a year and a half ago! Oh my!

I’m thrilled.

Now, back to the linux box that I built that resides downstairs that is used by my brother and his family. Of course he wants to listen to Qur’an and lectures and such on it. He woke me up one morning looking for headphones and of course took the better of the two in my storage. Of course!

Later that day when I came downstairs it wasn’t working.
I again installed alsa-*.
And it still wasn’t working.
He had it in the wrong connector.
But…to be honest, he’d tried them all. I just hadn’t checked that he had it in the wrong one when I started fiddling.

So…sound output works.

Now, I’d succeeded with the powerbook input the night before so I installed gnome-media and other things one time. Of course, if I didn’t have speakers and headphones downstairs, do you think I had a microphone? NO!

So about a week later (ie today), I unearthed a microphone and went downstairs and plugged it in and launched gnome-sound-recorder and… RECORDED SOMETHING! and heard it playback. Maybe I’ll upload that clip too later.

ECSTASY!

And the skype test call worked too. There was nobody online that I knew with whom I could skype.

Can you believe the mics work? What’s been going on in Linux while I slept?

Of course, I may have to mess with settings and such because the feedback on the powerbook is kinda horrible. I think the downstairs computer is better but it could be because it’s using headphones and not speakers.

Regardless I am happy.
This I can manage.

Thanks!

Well I searched.
The last post I made about our ISP was in January 2007…when we downgraded our package from 256k/64k to 128k/64k.

Whoa it’s been a long while.
Well eventually we sorta got okay service. I mean it was around the 128k download. The upload as usual sucked…it was closer to say 40 if I was lucky.

Some months ago (February? or was it end of last year? … hmm February when the babies left the house and I went to Guyana) they started offering their TT$201/month for 128k/64k package. It was a promotion. Mom said lots of people at work signed up.

Well we were then paying TT$316.25/month for the same so we got a call about the new pricing (wow!) and did we want to remain at 128k or stay at TT$316.25 for 256k. Mom said wait til I get home but let’s try your 256k for a month.

So we tried it for a month and it was okay. Faster. They did things to try to get our upload okay. They also did things to try to get our download okay. (Anthony?)

So we’ve been on it for a few months. I’ve never felt compelled to check after the first month. But i did a speed test tonight.

And as usual the upload sucked. It sucks worse now tho. So I will check it a few times.

Here it is!

I was considering upgrading to a higher package for the “summer” influx of people to the house. We shall see.

I guess we might have to sort out all our billing issues first.

If you read this you might have an idea.

:-)

Anywayz…not much going on here…we baked the other day…in the middle of loading pictures on flickr.

Arabic exams coming soon…very worried…*sigh*