Monthly Archives: May 2009

Moar foods

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I made salsa chicken today. It’s really easy: bake a chicken breast at 350 for 25 minutes. Place on a microwave-safe plate, douse in salsa of your choice, and lay thin strips of cheddar across. Microwave for 30 seconds to melt the cheese and heat the salsa. Nom nom. Tasty and pretty, since the cheese gives it stripes.

I also made the blackberry muffins again so I could take some into work tomorrow. I cut the blackberries into thirds (crosswise, so each piece is a little disc) and they came out much better. I also got one less muffin out of the process, but this makes sense, since there is less room for air when you don’t have lots of whole blackberries in each muffin. I topped each one with a whole blackberry and they look rather nice, as well.

I made french toast for breakfast. It always surprises me how simple such things are to make (muffins, pancakes, omelettes/breakfast sandwiches, french toast) and how much of a premium they can fetch in grocery stores or restaurants ($1.25 for a preservative-laden muffin?! $5 for an omelette?!). Besides, cooking is fun and tasty.

Today Dan and I went to see the How Weird fair (which, appropriately, is on Howard street). It was rather tiny, but amusing… there were 5 or 6 different DJs in various areas, arranged such that their music never overlapped. There were also a bunch of weirdly dressed people. Overall, it was smaller than I think either of us were expecting, but still interesting. I just wish I had taken my camera and attempted to shoot with it :P

Mmm food.

Muffins!

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I made blackberry muffins today, since Safeway has blackberries for $1 this week. However, I wanted something relatively healthy, so I made them without oil or egg yolk.

1/2 cup fat free milk
1/4 cup + 2 tsp unsweetened applesauce
2 egg whites
1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 container (~6 ounces) blackberries

Beat egg whites and mix in milk and applesauce. In a separate bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. Combine the liquids and dry ingredients, stirring until well mixed. Stir in blackberries. Fill cupcake cups and bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes.

They came out really tasty.


Cooked blackberries look more like raspberries than blackberries. Weird.

Changes I would make after eating 3 (they’re really good and I can’t stop ahhh):
Cut up the blackberries so the muffins don’t end up with huge chunks in them.
Grease the pan and bake them without the paper because they are really difficult to peel off.

Lately I’ve been making tasty sandwiches for lunch with ham, spinach, and cheddar cheese. They’re really simple and really delicious.

Also, our rent is going down next year by about $240/month. That’s pretty nice.
The $120/month I save will almost cover food for me… since I’ve been cooking more often (I’ve eaten out once in the past 2 weeks), I’ve been spending far less on food and eating healthier. I suppose part of this is that I plan my meals around whatever is on sale that week and always save at least 50% on my bill each shopping trip, and stock up on nonperishable basics (soup, canned veggies, pasta) when they go on massive sale. Yay food.

Tomorrow I will be making salsa chicken II: baked chicken breast covered in spicy salsa and cheese. (Last time was salsa verde over chicken drumsticks.) I should go buy some rice to go with that or something.

…I wonder what would happen if I substituted applesauce for oil in things like rice-a-roni. This might be worth an experiment to see how terrible it is.

Life is awesome.

plsql fun

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Here’s a fun little question for those of you who aren’t experts at plsql…

Given this plsql code

procedure helper_method(
   iChange IN boolean,
   oValue OUT number
) IS
BEGIN
    IF iChange THEN
        oValue := 2;
    END IF;
END helper_method;

procedure do_test(
    oValue OUT number
) IS
BEGIN
    oValue := 1;
    --Checkpoint 0
    helper_method(true, oValue);
    --Checkpoint 1
    helper_method(false, oValue);
    --Checkpoint 2
END do_test;

and this java code (assuming the right frameworks for calling into plsql)

public void doTest() {
    IntOutParam out = new IntOutParam();
    sqlCall("do_test", out);
    System.out.println(out.getInt());
}

what is printed out when you replace the checkpoint comments with a RETURN; statement?
The answer surprised me… I actually stumbled across this at work today and it took me a while to figure out.

Replacing checkpoint 0 with RETURN; prints out 1, as expected.
Replacing checkpoint 1 with RETURN; prints out 2, as expected.
Replacing checkpoint 2 with RETURN; prints out 0. Huh?

Can you spot why and what the fix should be?
Hint: Swapping the order of the true/false calls would result in outputs of 1, 0, and 2 respectively.
Huge Hint: At checkpoint 2, the value of oValue is actually null.
See comments for the solution.

So yeah, now you know something to watch out for when programming in plsql :)

Freebies!

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I’ve been following consumerist lately, and have gotten quite a few free coupons. Today, I got a free 8×10 print at Walgreens, free 2-piece grilled chicken meal at KFC, and a free Kashi frozen meal at Safeway. Safeway also has a few good deals this week, including $1.77 milano cookies and $1 blackberries. Yay for cheap-or-free food-or-things. :D

Work has been exciting lately. I’ve been working on reskinning the login page for the past few days… it’s made me realize how behind I am on new webdesign paradigms. Apparently, everything nowadays is done with CSS and the HTML itself is very minimal (sometimes to the extent that the page without CSS looks like a plain text file–unformatted black text on a white background). This is all fine and good except it often involves hardcoding pixel values in the CSS. Unlike tables, which will grow to fit larger text, CSS-styled divs will do strange (and often undesirable) things. This led to a few hacks that I ended up doing to get stuff looking right after localization. Meh. I really need to do webdesign again.

Life has been good. I’ve been working a bit on a redesign of Student Wars v2 to make the cards cleaner (AKA less text). Eventually, I’m going to release the game freely (instead of behind a password) so more people can play. Whee.

Photo Firsts (Zach)

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Life has gotten an update that finishes it up until yesterday (May 1, 2009). Now I’ll need to go back and tag high school photos to keep updating. Bleh.

My first photo of Zach:

July 8, 2007 in front of Purnell/Warner.

Also, I’ve gone through and updated stats for everyone who has photo firsts so far and switched over to the new 4-month block format.
Edit: Those stats can be found here