wiredfool

Today was the first time that we’ve seen eagles from the house. Many times before on the island, and even at the end of the lane, but never here before. Rose spotted one circling low above the trees, soon to be joined by another. One circled a while at treetop (100′) or so over the yard for a while, but soon they caught the thermal coming off the trees to the north.

By the time I had the camera out, they were small specks – pretty soon we identified 5 just taking in the thermals to get some altitude. This is all 5 of them in one shot.

Hummingbirds seem to be attracted to my office. One flew in and knocked itself out a month ago, on Friday another one flew in. This one didn’t manage to knock itself out. He just wanted to leave the office through the skylight.

Rule #1 in hummingbird rescue. Lock Jasper in the house. He had an attitude like “Hey Hey, what is this little morsel?” and was quite annoyed at the ejection from the game.

After that, it was a simple matter of catching the bird in my hands, getting down off the desk, and letting him fly away.

Once you go past the first 20 minute screencast…

• On OSX, just install Locomotive. Prior to this, I had installed 2 copies of ghostscript, one extra ruby, two copies of rails, imagemagick, and one copy of libgd in an attempt to do some image manipulation. Locomotive gets it in 2 downloads, one for the base system and one bundle with imagemagick. And it just works, mainly by simply including everything you need in one massive download.
• Certain actions Just Don’t Work. Like render. Render2, yes. Render_dammit, yes, but it won’t be professional. Guess render’s a reserved word or something.
• You might expect scaffolding to do something useful when presented with a has_many/belongs_to relationship. (I.e, 1:many). It won’t. And has_one means the other object has one of you, not that you have one of it.
• Somehow I’ve ended up with [object] and [object]s views. some are populated, some aren’t. But the populated ones were done via scaffolding, and they need to be edited because of the usefulness of the 1:many relationships.
• We’ll see if it turns out to be less work than PHP or Python. Big wins so far, I didn’t have to choose a python web framework. And once imagemagick is working with ruby, that is quick and painless, far better than I’ve done with php so far.

Cause this was good enough to write down.

Preheat the broiler, rack should be in the second to top notch.

In a 10″ nonstick broiler safe fry/omlette pan, Cook a diced sweet onion, add a couple handfuls of choped mushrooms. These should cook till the onions are soft and dark, the mushrooms should be rather reduced. Put aside.

Puree a can of tomatoes, make sause with a little cayenne peper and salt.

Wilt 5 oz or so chopped spinach. This was two large handfuls from a salad bag. Put aside, let the pan cool a bit.

Scramble 6 eggs, 1 cup ricotta cheese, then add the mushrooms, onions and spinach and mix. Heat the pan on medium with some olive oil, add the egg mixture and cover. Cook for a while, till the bottom is browned and it’s solidifying in about an inch from the edge.

Put in broiler, watch carefully till it’s starting to brown, add some grated mozerella and let it start to turn brown. It whould be firm and not runny at all by now. Pull out, let sit for a couple minutes. Remove from the pan, cut, and serve with tomato sauce.

Bonus unrelated recipie.

1 Avocado, mashed. Add a bit of soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, and hot pepper oil. Serve with Udon or Soba noodles and tofu. Might also be interesting with a touch of wasabi.