Scents

Grandma Asher’s Deadly Brownies

• ¼ lb butter or margarine
• 2 oz unsweetened (baking) chocolate
• 1 cup (or a little less) sugar
• 2 eggs
• ¼ cup flour
  This is not a typo. Just a quarter cup of flour holds these brownies together.
• 1 tsp vanilla
• dash salt
• 6 oz chocolate chips

Directions

Melt butter and unsweetened chocolate in a pot over low heat. (Heating in a glass dish in a microwave works also.) Cool to around room temperature.

Add sugar. Add eggs, mixing after each one. Add flour, vanilla, and salt, mixing thoroughly as you do so. Add chocolate chips. Mix.

Pour into greased and floured 8×8 pan (or other baking dish with similar surface area – the brownies must be thick.

Bake for 40 minutes at 325°. Cool, cover with foil, chill in refrigerator 3 hours, then cut. DO NOT EAT HOT! The brownies are not ready until they’ve been chilled, not just cooled.

Freezes very well. Recommend doubling recipe (use 2 8×8 pans).

printable recipe (PDF)

anagrams for MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS:

A SCHMUCK FERRYING TRIMS
ASCETIC SMURF KING: MYRRH
SIGH, MY NUTCRACKER'S FIRM

What happens if you break a watermelon into chunks and mix it up with javascript?

the completed quilt

I’ve been doing some maintenance work on Scents today, and noticed that I’ve somehow failed to ever mention my being interviewed by Sanrio back in 2003 about the Badtz-Maru quilt!

…..

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Cameras should have a third shutter button position.

halfway: prefocus
all the way: fire

pushing as hard as you can: “goddamnit, no matter what mode you’re in, open the shutter RIGHT NOW and take a picture with the focus you’ve got and the light you’ve got”.

I was standing in the narberth train station. It was lightly snowing. Along the middle track comes a cargo train running around 30mph (pretty fast for cargo), being pushed backwards (i.e., the engine was at the back of the train). the frontmost car was just a pallet – nothing on it, just a flatbed.

not so unusual, right?

except that standing on the pallet was a man in a leather flight suit, foot to head, with goggles. Feet spread and braced, arms out wide, shouting “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Looked like he was having the time of his life.

anna points out that switching to manual focus accomplishes this. my point is that I’d like to not have to fuss with anything beyond just jamming the shutter as hard as i can when i see something like that going by me at 30mph.

I have a theory. I keep on dismantling more and more of the 3edges custom built services I’ve created over the years, in favor of using standardized, well-supported software. This trend started years ago, when I tore down Horizon, the weblog software I wrote for Beth’s weblog, and rolled out Movable Type instead. Last August, obviously, the big move happened, when I moved 3edges off of the dedicated colo box and onto Dreamhost.

I’ve moved a lot of my custom self-organization things out of self-built perl scripts (some of which I wrote a decade ago, while at Simon’s Rock; they’ve been chugging away in the background, out of crontab, ever since) and into 37signals Backpack… I moved from my handwritten Photoweaver to Gallery, and then to Flickr… and now, qotd has been replaced by a WordPress install and a plug-in or two.

So the theory is this – as soon as the last bit of my custom-written code is gone, the last piece of code that only I understand …

that’s when i’ll die

There is a place where the gentle breath of the ocean whispers its gifts upon the shore and the ebb and flow of the tides lovingly caress the silver sands.

There is a time when the diverse elements of the universe come together in harmony and unite the quintessence of all things.

This is the time and place of Cerulean Seas.

—the side of my salt shaker

me: sarah figured out what web 3.0 is going to be all about
me: purple gradients
Ben: THROBBING purple gradients
me: the world won’t know what hit it
me: oh man
me: you’re absolutely right
me: they will throb
Ben: and the metaphors!
***Ben faints

Also, 3e.org’s logo, if it were all Web 2.0: