I don’t think it’s particularly likely that people would stand around and wait to use one sink given that the other was unoccupied. I can’t give a specific reason, aside from that it would be “weird” and maybe “creepy”, but whatever the case generally socially unacceptable. It stands to reason, then, that either we only ever have one person using the restroom at a time, or that people will deliberately stagger themselves as they depart from the urinal or the toilet to wash their hands.

We must all be embarrassed at the pure, concentrated evil that we’ve left behind.

No, really. I baked a pie.

It was delicious.

Pie Notes:

This is the… okay, I’m at work and forget what it’s called, but it’s something to the effect of “Brown Sugar Apple Pie” recipe out of that book I mentioned earlier. I just ordered myself a copy so that I can return my mother’s and not feel helpless in the face of pie.

When I make a plan about how to cut the apples, I need to follow that plan. I read somewhere (perhaps in the recipe) that you can get a lot more apple into your pie if you cut the apple into uneven pieces. I had it all planned out so that I’d get big pieces and small pieces and then forgot and did them all the same size. While not a major problem, it did cause the pie to settle a little more than I’d have hoped, leaving the top crust well above the filling.

Cortland apples work very well; one apple is approximately one cup of apple.

Apologies for the formatting; I can never seem to make so-called WYSIWYG blogging front-ends put images where I want them.

I’m not sure whether it’s all the time I’ve spent watching Alton Brown on TV or some sort of natural talent, but it really didn’t seem all that difficult. Really, you just have to kind of know what a decent dough feels like and how not to overwork the fat into the flour.

Anyway, the recipes from the aforementioned book have been fantastic. One of the reviews on Amazon suggests that the book itself is great as a recipe book but contains substandard advice on technique and is somewhat short on more traditional recipes. There’s definitely some truth to that; I was looking for an apple pie recipe for my family’s Memorial Day thing and couldn’t find a plain old normal version. What I wound up with was a brown sugar apple pie, and it was delicious.

I took pictures, because I’m a dork like that. When I’m home for lunch today, I’ll see what I can do about showing them off. The pie was tasty, but it looked even tastier than it tasted. It looked almost, and playing games online I don’t use this word lightly, professional.

I haven’t seen Prince Caspian yet, but I kind of sort of mean to. I haven’t read the books in years and years, so I’m not as emotionally invested in the idea of a movie version as some people. That said, the first one was pretty good and I do remember enjoying the books. Maybe I’ll see it and be inspired to do some reading.

Tonight, I get to see the new Indiana Jones movie. I had really meant to watch (or re-watch, I don’t even know anymore) the first three movies, but somehow ran out of time. In anticipation, I offer you a most tautological statement: I hope it’s as good as I want it to be. Be good, Indy! Be good!

My guild took pity on me and went back to kill Kael’thas. I got my [Thalassian Wildercloak] and my [Telonicus's Pendant of Mayhem]. I’m eternally grateful.

Edit: Okay, it looks like WordPress strips out script tags and everything within them, which means that I don’t get to have my links Powered By Wowhead. Sad times.

I think the problem I’ve had blogging before is that I have it in my head that blogs should be directed at one particular audience, but 1) my life isn’t interesting enough to justify blogging about it regularly, and 2) I’m not particularly good at trying to write with a single audience in mind. Apologies in advance if you read something and get the completely wrong impression of what I’m going for here.

This is for me. Get your own blog.

That said, I’m trying to get the wowhead tooltips working and I can’t find a straightforward way to do it.

Last night, I made a sort of variation on chicken cordon bleu. I took chicken breasts, cut a pocket into them, stuffed said pocket with honey mustard and cheddar cheese, and wrapped the whole thing in a thin slice of prosciutto. I then applied an egg wash, some panko, and pan-seared the things before putting them in the oven at 400F for 20 minutes.

They came out fairly well, but I’d definitely keep a few things in mind for next time. First, I probably want to get the prosciutto more thinly sliced. I’d never worked with it before, so I had no idea what exactly to expect; the flavor was great but a little too salty, and it was hard enough to cut with a knife that it just slid around on the chicken. The chicken itself was delicious, and I don’t need to salt it at all, as it will get plenty of that from the prosciutto. I think I’d stay away from extra-sharp cheddar next time as well, although I’m less sure about that.

I also think that next time I try something like that I’ll borrow my mother’s meat pounder (I’m not sure where she got it but it’s very similar to this) to see how I like that approach. The previous times I’ve stuffed chicken, making sure that nothing leaked out hasn’t been a priority, but the cheese pretty much melts out and causes a mess and I’m wondering if maybe it would be easier to deal with that if I had more control over the shape of the chicken. I guess I should also probably use a mix of cheeses that will melt more nicely as well, but that’s research I wasn’t at all willing to do last night.

All-in-all, it was a reasonable first try. There are definitely some things I could improve on the next time, but I think it was successful enough to warrant said next time.

Recently at work, we’ve been a lot more aggressive about making efforts to unit test everything. I have to admit, while it was stressed as a rather good idea in school I was never really very fond of unit testing. After all, I had to be doing something along those lines anyway the whole time to make sure the product worked, so why should I spend the extra time to formalize the process? I’m rather unwilling to accept “because your boss/manager/whatever said so” as a worthwhile answer, so the whole time I’ve been writing said tests, I’ve been trying to find the redeeming value in them.

If nothing else, they’ve forced me to more carefully examine what it is that each specific method is supposed to do. Sure, I’ve placed a lengthy comment ahead of the method describing what its inputs are and what it does and I’ve manually “tested” each of them so that they do what I think they ought to do, but going through the process of writing up individual tests has helped me to ask myself a lot of the questions that QA might ask instead, and answer them in advance. Let’s say I’m writing a parser that’s supposed to return a match on any “printable character”. What, exactly, defines a character as printable? Are white-space characters “printable”? What about control characters?

I haven’t found and fixed any bugs as a result of my unit testing, but I have made the documentation of my code more precise. Has it been worth the time? I’d have a hard time saying yes, but at the same time, I couldn’t say that it hasn’t.

I have chosen a new theme. It doesn’t have sidebars so I can put off dealing with widgets, and also it’s green.