First Successful Pattern Generated
After learning a few new tricks in flash, a positive result! What had taken me a solid ten to fifteen minutes to draw, I can now produce... sort of. Not everything works as it should.
After learning a few new tricks in flash, a positive result! What had taken me a solid ten to fifteen minutes to draw, I can now produce... sort of. Not everything works as it should.
We made some more pesto for dinner, which made us wonder why we don't have it every night. While at Whole Foods picking up the basil, fighting small children for the free samples, I had some white bean dip that was pretty tasty, so, after dinner, Nicole and I attempted a modified version of the dip.
I'm not sure what I can do with this right now, but I feel it could be useful sometime later on. 9.1 hours of daylight today in Boston.
I made pizza for dinner tonight. It isn't the cheapest meal to make, and ordering a pizza is probably cheaper, but I like homemade pizza. It is very satisfying to make, particularly because it is not hard to make (with store bought dough, I suppose), and yields a delicious meal.
Sautéed Bell Pepper and Onion PizzaI had a lot of trouble with the dough the first few times I made pizza. I kept stretching it out, but once it went on the pan the whole thing shrunk back to about half the desired size. I also don't have a great location to put flour on the dough without getting it everywhere. I realized, however, that putting the flour into the bag of dough allowed me to prepare the dough without making a big mess. At the end, the dough comes out, nicely floured, and the bag can be thrown away with whatever extra flour was left. It also allowed me to handle the dough more thoroughly and to figure out the best way to stretch it out. The rest is pretty easy. Butter a cookie sheet, throw the dough on, spread a small amount of pasta sauce on, and layer some provolone cheese. We're tried different cheeses, but provolone works and tastes best. While the pizza is baking, the onion, garlic and bell pepper can be sautéed with olive oil with salt and basil. When the pizza is ready, the toppings are distributed on and the whole thing cools for a minute so it is easier to cut.
The picture isn't great, but the pizza was delicious. I misplaced our grocery receipt, so I can't break the ingredients down by price until later.Nicole and I went to Passim last night to see a killer show. Stephen Kellogg performed this year's annual new year's (holiday?) show. It was fantastic; definitely one of the best shows I've been to this year. The music could command a much larger venue, but Passim made for a more personal vibe and really made all of the crescendos much more climactic.
I figure this is a good time to see how posterous handles two videos: Adam Ezra, someone who was unfamiliar to me, opened, apparently as a spontaneous fill-in for a canceled original opening act, and was excellent on his own. I really am appreciating the movement I've been seeing of artists offering up their CDs at a sliding scale. I now have some new, good music to listen to that, at full price, I would have had to pass up, but was able to pay half the suggested price for. Instead of forgetting about him, I'm actually more prone to suggest his songs to other people and to talk about him.
I cashed in some rewards points I had from my bank and got a three cup food processor and called up my ma to get her pesto recipe.
Mom's Pesto
I’ve spent the last few days working through some beginner’s tutorials about creating applications and games using ActionScript. It has put my mind in an object oriented state, as I’ve been grappling with the concept both while writing code and during a lot of the time I am not at my computer. I took a Java programming course back a few years ago back in Buffalo and I remember getting as enthralled with the concept as I am now, so it is nice to revisit.
There is no really clear definition readily available for object oriented programming, only things like:
“A style of programming that defines data as objects with attributes and methods that are applied to those objects, and which can be inherited by other objects.”
In example, I’ve been thinking about creating a simple program available through a webpage that can be used to save recipes from a user’s input and give the recipe a standard format to be displayed in a separate webpage. Say, as a quick sketch, the first screen of the program has text boxes, ten or so, to allow a user to enter in ingredients, and perhaps some other boxes to allow for amount, and pulldown menus to choose measurement type (tsp, tbsp, oz..). I’ve just made scrambled eggs for the first time (they were awesome!), and so I’d put in:
- Eggs
- Butter
- Pepper
- Salt
What I want the program to do is take each one and save them for use later. I would be able write a single function, an object within the code, and call that function for each ingredient. Instead of giving each box its own code, I can just invoke the one instance I wrote, as an object.
Simple concept, but it actually it gets really complicated when there are a ton of objects being called, with multiple pages calling other pages that call other pages, it becomes a bit harder to follow.
Language can be viewed in a similar way. Single words represent tables of definitions with only certain definitions invoked through context. Generally we try to stick to single definitions, and ambiguity is beaten out of writing. We use adjectives, possession and structure to clarify objects in a sentence. If you’re talking about multiples of the same noun, for instance, you’d clarify that it is his or her vehicle, or the silver vehicle, etc.. For nouns, it isn’t a problem, usually.
“She saw Julia walking into the building while talking on her phone.”
In this case, a section of the sentence is ambiguous, as we don’t know who is talking on the phone. There are many ways to clarify this, which is pretty nifty.
The phrase though, “while talking on her phone,” is itself a sort of object. Within it are five base objects, the five words, but also higherobjects, the combinations of those words in the particular combination, which in turn, get combined to form the whole phrase, the highestobject here (though, that will then be attached to the sentence in a few possible positions). ‘While,’ defined as a conjunction, acts as the bridge to the other parts of the sentence, but also demands a certain structure from the other words and also sets the tone. ‘And’ would be an alternative and may actually clarify the sentence a little more (though it sounds a bit off, “walking into the building and talking on her phone”). ‘While’ requires something to be happening, in this case talking. In contrast, ‘and,’ is not as limited and could be followed by a noun in other situations. For this sentence, what would follow ‘and,’ would be limited by what went before ‘and,’ as consistency in lists is desired. ‘Talking,’ requires a preposition, something like ‘on, at, to, into’ in order to make sense, and so, the two, ‘talking on,’ get grouped together before the whole phrase is constructed. The same goes for ‘her phone,’ but in this case, her, as a possessive requires something to own. ‘Phone’ needs something before it, an article or possessive noun.
My brother introduced me to posterous, and I have to say, so far, I am really impressed. My wordpress account is still up at www.ideacrank.net/writing, but I going to transfer the posts from there soon and begin using posterous only.
