We did quite a few things today in Branson, MO. If you know anything about Branson, you're probably horrified that we're here. However, it was important to me to show Kerri what it was about - if she's going to live in the midwest, it's a good idea for her to experience the WHOLE GODDAM thing. Branson is an integral part of midwestern life. Any kid who grew up around here (like I did, 'til I was 13) got dragged here at least once.

So, we came down for a day and two nights (I have three day weekends now for work, and it's only a five hour drive). The idea was that if we were miserable, we at least wouldn't be here long.

For better or for worse, our timetable, and everything else, turned out perfectly. Rather than opting for one of the hackneyed ex-superstar theater shows, or one of the hokey-beyond-belief redneck musical shows we decided on a) The Sons of the Pioneers and b) a magic show (I picked the former, she the latter).

We also made time in our one day to fit in a trip to the Hollywood Wax Museum (I'd never been to a wax museum -- which turned out to be funny as I forgot about my irrational fear of life-size figures, which I managed to overcome enough to have a lot of fun). The wax musem was excellent, and even more exciting than I thought it would be (getting my picture taken with Leatherface rocked serious ass).

Our hotel has been excellent (it's actually attached to one of the theaters in town, not to mention a *Bucks, which works out nicely). It's also got an indoor pool, which we've made judicious use of. Given the time of year, with most kids back in school, it's actually been nice to be able to use the hotel pool in relative peace. The free breakfast was excellent (I love the waffle machine). Branson has somehow managed to be charming on occasion, when it's not being gaudy enough to make you puke (or, perhaps I'm just getting *that* old).

The shows we saw today/tonight have been the thing that has made the trip perfect. Turns out the Sons of the Pioneers (ask your grandpa, or wikipedia) are still as amazing as they were when Roy Rogers founded them. It was weird being the only two people in the audience under 70 and over 18, but aside from that it was phenomenal. If you're shaking your head right now, clucking about "country music", then you need to learn the difference between country music and cowboy music. I was stoked to hear the lead of the group mention this fact as well. They performed for two hours, and the supplied dinner of barbecued chicken and brisket beforehand turned out to be awesome, if a dire threat to our cardiovascular health. I definitely shed a few tears during the two-man guitar-and-fiddle version of "Wichita Lineman", not to even mention the stunning rendition of "Streets of Laredo" by their amazing specialist tenor singer. The harmonies were as gut-wrenchingly-beautiful as any fan of their work would expect, and the musicianship was second to no act I've ever seen. There's nothing like seeing true professionals playing great music. Their big finish of "Happy Trails" was perfectly fitting, and beautifully executed. I'm still humming it (along with "Tumbling Tumbleweeds", of course).

Upon the conclusion of the show, about 5 minutes to 7, we ran for the car to make it back to our hotel room for a map check and then run on to the 8 o' clock show of "Kirby VanBurch", the "Prince of Magicians" (yeah, the name's a worry). If you think seeing a magician sounds in any way corny, then don't go see one. If you still have enough of a sense of childlike wonder to stare in awe at a magician for two hours, then I highly recommend doing so. He also performed for two hours, including a few short intervals from two other performers who, as well as acting as assistants to Kirby during a few illusions, performed their own act which included the female of the pair climbing one of those double ribbon things (hello, Cirque du Soleil?) and his talents as a crossbow shot, which included shooting an apple off his own head using a series of six or seven crossbows (he threw the apple to yours truly after the trick was done -- there'll be a picture posted online by Kerri shortly I'm sure). The highlight of the show, besides the illusion involving a full-sized helicopter, was Kirby's collection of big cats -- which is what we went for in the first place. For a few dollars extra, we even got to take the backstage tour after the show and visit the cat compound, which turned out to be kind of a like a horse stable for cats (we have it on good authority that when it's not showtime, they have much more room to move around).

Long story short, it's been a HUGE and massively fun day. We managed to take Branson with a sense of humor, and wound up having a much better time than we even thought we might. Kerri even raided one of the local year-round xmas stores and went ornament crazy, which is always a good day for her.

So, yes, Branson is still rather a nightmare. I won't miss driving around everywhere at 20mph, behind navigationally-challenged septugenarians. I won't miss ALL THE GODDAM NEON. I would, however, come back and see the Sons again anytime. Tomorrow, back to STL.  Sorry I didn't get more pictures while we were here. I'll update here with any more I find.

I posted my portfolio today, and then, converted it to a page, using the lovely "p2pconverter" plugin (http://www.briandgoad.com/blog/p2pConverter). So, if you came here looking for it, please move on to the new home of my portfolio. Thanks for stopping by :)

So, a while back, my bro Nabsy (who has appeared in my blog FAR too often over the years) invited Kerri and I and MsEldest over for one of his favorite treats. Namely, Challah French Toast. I had never had challah before, but Nabsy explained that it was a lot like brioche, with which I am WELL acquainted (NOM!!).

We've had rather a trying couple of weeks, what with all our packing to head overseas, and thus I made the decision last weekend that I would spoil me/us as much as possible this week. None of this "no soft drinks they're bad for me", or "no, I shouldn't have another cigarette", etc etc. This week, in between copious amounts of packing and organizing, has been about indulgence. We've had too much caffeine, too many smokes, and hopefully far too much sugar. What we haven't had is any knock-down-drag-out stress fights.

WIN.

Today, we REALLY needed to get going again after a couple of days of very little progress. So, I decided to turn up the spoiling and make use of the brioche that I bought a couple of days ago, in hopes of getting us motivated. My normal cooking caper is to get a recipe off the internet and use it as a guide. In this case, however, I simply skimmed the contents of one recipe and jumped in head first (I've made french toast with normal bread thousands of times, just never tried doing it this way).  What follows is my own, very rough, recipe.

Brioche French Toast (ala, 4ft!)

Ingredients

1 Brioche Loaf, at least a day old (it's better if it's not fresh, takes the batter better and doesn't break up as much)
2 large, free range eggs (that's right, free range, otherwise it will taste like evil)
125ml Thickened Cream
125ml Milk (skim, full cream, who cares, you're mixing it with eggs and cream)
1/2tsp Vanilla Essence
Powdered Cinnamon to taste (I'd normally grind my own, but I was in a hurry today and used some pre-powdered. I'll address the quantity a little more thoroughly below)
Sugar to taste (I used a rough tablespoon for this quantity. Some people would use none at all. Remember, I'm spoiling here.)

Making the batter

Put the milk, cream, eggs, vanilla, sugar and cinnamon (everything but the bread, in other words) into a mixing bowl and beat  just enough to break up the yolks. Beating too much will dilute the cinnamon too much. This is where the cinnamon quantity comes in. You want it to look like the batter picture above, where there are still clearly some fair sized bits of yolk floating around in there, along with the clumps of cinnamon. You HAVE to be able to see those bits of cinnamon. If you have to, add a few more bits of cinnamon. In my experience, with french toast, it's very hard to have too much cinnamon.

Once the batter is ready, pour into a wide flattish dish for bread dunking. For brioche, you'll find you need something of a goodly size. You don't want to be bending the bread to get it in or out, otherwise it can fall apart quite easily. I use a glass pie pan, but a foil one would obviously work as well.

Slice the brioche nice and thick -- about 2cm. You'll want it to be hefty enough to hold itself together when it's full of batter, but not so thick that it doesn't cook through.

Then, the easy part: cook! I cook each slice on it's own. It's just easier that way. Dunk the slice in the batter, then, fairly quickly -- this will take some experimentation! -- turn it over, and then pop it straight into a hot buttered frypan (I use about medium heat on our gas stove). You don't want your pieces of french toast to be TOO soggy. Think of it like dunking cookies; wet, but not so wet that the cookie breaks off and winds up at the bottom of the glass of milk. An overdunked slice is a BITCH to turn, and winds up being soggy in the middle. Blurgh. Cook them as dark as you'd like them, or until they look a lot like medium dark toast (see pic!). Serve, with maple syrup (NOT maple FLAVORED syrup) and fruit, and revel in the complements!

That's pretty much it!

My personal touches, however, include:

• Adding a little -- less than half a teaspoon -- cinnamon on each slice before you turn it. Like I said: no such thing as too much cinnamon! Your tastes, and those of your audience/guinea pigs, may vary.
• Buttering each slice as soon as it comes out of the pan. Melty goodness. Need I say more?

This will take some experimentation to get right. But, it's entirely worthwhile. I'm lucky in that I actually enjoy the over-dunked slices, and other fuckups, because they're generally covered in hot butter, maple syrup and cinnamon. It's pretty hard to go wrong there.

Good luck, and happy eating! :)

Sorry, had to get in on the fun.

Attention! Nerd alert! This post is almost strictly intended as a write-up of some recent web code stuff I did, so if you're here for my normal ridiculous stream of cat / chocolate / kid pichurs or rantings, you may be left wanting: I haven't posted code here in ages. That's a shame, actually, because I love sharing my code so people can school me on how much better it could be.

Read the rest of this post »

I apologize for the near incoherence of this. I'm suffering one of my classic bouts of insomnia, and my penchant for tangents and over-punctuating tends to be a little overwhelming when I'm like this. I wasn't going to post this tonight but I'm afraid that if I read it in the light of day, I'll never post it. Screw that.

Part 1:

(Warning, unapologetically high whinge factor in some places.)

So, I had kind of a shit day working.

I recently blogged about the fact that I'm now freelancing. How's it going? Not TOO badly, but it definitely could be better. Let's recap:

I started working on my first site whilst I was still employed with the crappy day job. Site went live in plenty of time, even though it was kind of a pain in the ass, working day and night. No worries. I knew it couldn't last, and a little hard work and lack of sleep never hurt a geek (particularly a career sysadmin nn/ ).

A week later, a whole bunch of changes come through for said site, which ended up amounting to an almost complete site redesign. Fun. The first time around I had taken over for another developer who just couldn't ship the bloody thing, so a major part of the work was that I had to get the site fixed, and ship it in a very contracted time frame. To make up for the lack of time, I wound up papering over cracks instead of actually fixing a lot of things. This, of course, was extremely stupid, and came back to bite me in the ass when I had to completely rework the site and deal not only with some of the awful stuff that I didn't find the first time, but also deal with the hacks I put in place the first time around.

Sigh. So I wound up writing a new template from scratch (this is Joomla, btw) to help avoid some of the snafu's from the original site. This helped a lot, and the redesign got done fairly quickly, although still late (I was still working full time for the crappy day job then too). Luckily, I was able to maintain good communication with my client, and the lateness was not a big deal. All was well.

Straight away after that, I did another site -- same client, different sub client (client of my client, long story) -- which has yet to launch, due to some other difficulties, which is another post (or novel) in itself. The past few days, however, I've been working on a new site, for the same "sub client" as the original site.

This new site is much simpler than the last couple I've done, and in fact it really only involves re-using some custom Joomla code -- nothing fancy, just a couple of views and a slight plugin modification -- that I wrote for the original site, along with a new template to suit the new site. Sounded easy, and it has been easy, aside from the fact that they want the site up yesterday -- don't they all -- but they can't give my client a list of req's, only keep asking for a few more things every day. So, it's made the hours go WAY over my original quote. Luckily my client realizes all this, and is cool about that.

Today, though, sucked it hard. I ran into a considerable problem, which cost me a few hours (which is a lot of time in freelance time). I was suddenly, around 4pm, just when I was starting to THINK I might be done working before dinner time (HAH!) got sent a link to a 50M mp3 file, hosted on one of those idiotic "file sharing" services (y'know, the ones where you have to "wait 60 seconds for your download to begin!"). The site I'm building is a site for local DJ's and people who like to go see local DJ's -- I've requested free tickets ;) -- and the mp3 is apparently a full live set (I have yet to listen to it). So, I labored through the bizarre sequence of clicks to get to the file (someone please explain to me why this is a good idea for these services, is it so they can scroll through more ridiculous porn ads??) and finally got the file to my machine. Then, the good part: I needed to get the file to the server where the client hosts all their customer sites. I knew this would be a challenge, because of the extreme suckitude of their server, but wow.. This went well beyond anything I could have imagined.. The FTP server doesn't support multiple streams, the FTP server doesn't support resume, and, to make all this really interesting, the stupid upload dies repeatedly at the 100% mark. Yay. Tried several different clients, a few different methods. Yada yada. 4 hours go by!!

Finally, over a cigarette -- where all good geek ideas, peace treaties, and movie scripts are born -- I thought of an actual solution. I plucked it from the tree of inspiration.. (read: pulled it out of my ass): If their server is too feeble to let me upload a fucking 50MB file (y'know, less storage than your average remote control) then why am I repeatedly trying to make it so do? Host it elsewhere. But where? My web server? Fuck that. With my luck, they'll actually promote this stupid site and I'll wind up serving 5000 hits an hour of this bloody file. So.. What? File sharing site? Not bloody likely, try streaming a file from one of them (I actually did try, I had to make sure). Then, in desperation, I did it; I searched google for a solution. I should have just done it straight away, I know.. Shut up. Anyway, I quickly found ourmedia.org. It's pretty cool. The thing I really liked is that they have an upload client for Mac. Plus, I liked their site design. I don't trust flashy websites (and my threshold is fairly low, twitter even bugs the shit out of me some days). Somehow a simple, functional website is something I find trustworthy, but, I digress.. The funny / best thing about their download client, though, is that is also has an option to upload things to another site, other than ourmedia.org, which brings us to..

Part 2.

In this age of social-media-2.0-ajax-restful-web-servicey-RoR-googley-goodness (I know that made no sense, and is absurd, that's the point) we (read: "I', and, yes, I reserve the right to project my stupidity, among other things, on to you, dear reader) tend to forget the simple things. The sites and services that, while possibly not buzz-worthy, are still doing good, useful, amazing work out there, in many cases -- and this is one of them -- for absolutely nothing. This gem of a "web .1" site, has been quietly sitting there doing it's thing -- including such services as "the wayback machine" -- for 12 years (see: this link from the world's most reliable source of absolute truth) and we -- that's me, and, by extension, you -- completely forgot about it. In case you haven't guessed, or clicked the link back there, I'm talking about the Internet Archive (IA, for short). How we -- Ok, fine, "I" -- could forget about this is beyond me. The IA in short -- see the link above for the long version -- houses any and all sorts of "free" content (as in, publicly available, non-copyrighted -- they by the way do a much better job of explaining their mission than me). This was the perfect solution to my problem and, thanks to the handy-dandy upload client from ourmedia.org, and the fact that my client only wants to share live, non-copyrighted material on their site, makes this solution a perfect fit. I can easily handle the uploads for them, and thanks to a little joomla view I wrote, the links to their mp3's will automagically be displayed using the lovely 1pixelout media player. Awesome (well, let's hope the client think so, they're having a look at it tomorrow).

So, now my mind is reeling with possibilities. How, oh how, can I, we, you extend and make user of this resource in our daily lives and code.. My mind is still boggling, and I haven't really had a chance to brainstorm effectively (plus, I'm friggin tired) so I'll mainly leave the question open, with a couple of small exceptions of things you really should check out on the site if you haven't already:

• The aforementioned wayback machine. See apple.com as it appeared in the imac era, see sites you yourself developed many moons ago. SO much geeky fun.
• Their amazing library of freely available music (including a lot of cool bootlegs)

There's a lot more, and I wouldn't spoil it.

For homework, go to the site and find something you like. I can almost guarantee that if you haven't visited before you'll find something amazing. Also, tell me if you have any cool ideas of how to "wrap" the groovy content on the IA into something that is buzz worthy!

Dairy Milk, baby.
Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster

I love dairy milk chocolate. It's 3am, I seem to be code-blocked, and I need a grin. Chocolate and a cigarette. Yeah, baby.

Jack in a box. Really.
Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster

The simple pleasures of a cat :)