Cooked another batch of frijoles de la
olla today. Time to reconsider the recipe. As it stands, I want 480 g (an 800 g
can) of tinned tomatoes for 1 kg of beans (frijoles negros). But where can you
buy 1 kg of beans in this metric country? They come in 375 g packages, so normally I cook
750 g at a time. And ¾ can of tomatoes is annoying.
So a whole can it is. I tried something similar with baked beans in the past and it proved to be too
much. But in that case there were many more tomatoes and tomato paste. We'll see.
Apart from that, why put lard into the beans? The recipe called for 60 g of lard for what
would become 16 portions, or rather less than 4 g per portion. Each of those portions is
then fried in about 15 g of lard. Why bother in the first instance?
And then there's epazote. Once
that was hard to get, and I was careful with my quantities: only 8 g for the batch. But
that was long ago. Since last autumn I have so much of it that I don't know what to do with it, and in various
Mexican recipe videos I've seen large handfuls go in. So today it was a large handful, more
precisely 30 g.
I won't eat the first portion until Tuesday, but I'll be interested to see what it turns out
like.
One of the prerequisites of taking my analemma photos is to know the time of mean solar noon. My GPS navigator tells me
that my location (well, the post outside my office) is at -37.80061,143.75168. You can
calculate mean solar noon easily enough from the longitude: multiply by 4 minutes and
subtract from UTC. That gives me 01:24:59.6 UTC, close enough to 01:25 to not make any
difference.
Sometimes web sites want to know my location. I've grumbled about that in the past: they
won't take my word for it, and instead go via some IP address or another. Which address?
Depends on the service. Today we discussed the matter on IRC. The results:
There were others, but not reported accurately. Alastair Boyanich was in the middle of
Sydney Harbour, and
geoiplookup also put me in “Francfort” (really Griesheim) and in
Echo Lake, California. Clearly it's not looking at the IP address at all, but the
address of the web proxy. Why should that be related to the location of the system?
It's interesting how many locations are in the middle of parks or lakes. On discussing it,
Alastair came up with a couple of links: an innocent victim of a lone house in Kansas, also the subject of this article.
In summary, then: I've been grumbling about this inaccuracy for some time, but others are
also hit by it. Why don't people like Google do something about it?
Today was one of those days where lots of little things go wrong. It started with making
breakfast. Time to mix up another batch of Curry laksa. That needs 200 g of
coconut milk, which I had in the deep freezer. And somehow I had forgotten to label it, but
then, coconut milk is easy to recognize. Took it out, but it wouldn't melt! Instead it
flaked: it was frozen wonton skins. I couldn't find any coconut milk.
OK, open a new can. One half with solid coconut extract, one half with liquid. So I had to
mix it, which first meant heating it up.
Finally that was done, and I added my 200 g. But for some reason the weights didn't match
up. Added more water than seemed right, but when I moved it I discovered that the scales
had fouled the stove, so I had 200 g more than I needed.
Later I took my weekly house photos.
Out to the first position, where I discovered that I had the wrong glasses on. Back to get
the right ones, turned the camera on... battery empty.
Back to get a new battery. Turned the camera on, but the remote control wasn't working.
Batteries (2 AAA NiMH) discharged! Three trips back to the house where none would be
needed.
The batteries for the remote control are interesting. They seem to last for ever. I don't
know when I last changed them. But when I measured the voltage, something that I do as a
matter of course now, I found what I have so often seen: one had 1.25 V, in other words
reasonable charge, while the other was 0.82 V. It's surprising how often that happens.
Spring is progressing well. But today we suddenly had a top temperature of 26.2°. Only 2
days ago it was 14°. Time to do some garden work. What did I do? Nothing, unless it's
marking a Freesia in the nature strip towards Progress Road:
So the marker is there to find it again after it has finished flowering.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
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