I am getting much happier with my own cooking lately.  I am starting to cook the way I used to, back when I still lived at home.

I made a breaded chicken breast tonight, with much success.  No recipe, just instinct.

I made the breading out of about a half cup of  some leftover bread crumbs, added some freshly chopped parsley, freshly chopped thyme, finely chopped/minced 3 cloves of garlic, about a table spoon of minced onion, a few squirts of lemon juice for moisture and flavor, and some lemon pepper. 

I beat some Dijon mustard, about a table spoon, and a little flour into an egg for the egg wash.  Stole that from a breaded pork chop recipe that I tried recently.  It creates a thicker breading that sticks better, and adds extra flavor.

The rest was just a typical 3 step breading.  Cut the breast into two in order to make two servings, rolled it in flour, the egg mixture, then the breading.  375 for 30 min.

It was excellent.  Christine said it had lots of flavors, which I took to be a good thing.

Tags: chicken, cooking, food
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: satisfied

inoah  had an interesting idea last Saturday night.  Create a Twitter account that spews nonsense, based on the input of users it follows. 

A day later, I created the Twitter account named BlaBlaBloblo.  Originally, the code was a shell script that called dadadodo but I soon after implemented the whole thing in Python in order to be better suited for 140 character output, and renamed the twitter account to DinDaaDaa, giving it a name that had more meaning to me.

So now I have dindada.py, a program that accesses a Twitter account, uses the tweets of those it follows to form a Markov chain, builds one or more sentences from the chain, and posts a tweet back to Twitter.  Tweets that are read are accessed through the Twitter JSON API, and saved to a local pickle, as to help build the Markov chain over time.  Words are weighted by frequency in order to produce better output over time.

The funny part is that this account already has 21 followers.

I now wonder if I should create a new LiveJournal account and do the same thing.

Tags: blablabloblo, dadadodo, dindada, markov chain, noah, twitter
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: tired

Just in case you are ever curious and need to check:  Is Harrison Ford Alive?

Tags: harrison ford, memes
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: silly
Listening to: Señor Coconut - Da da da ich lieb dich nicht du liebst mich nicht

My friend Rachel pointed me to Yacht Rock recently.  There are only 11 episodes, and it does not look like they are making anymore, but it is seriously funny stuff, if you have ever listened to any "Yacht Rock".

I am up to episode #3.

Edit to Add:  Also found "The Bed and Breakfast Club" on the same site.

Tags: easy listening, music, yacht rock
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: amused
Listening to: Kenny Loggins - A bunch of stuff

Don't forget to print out your Presidential Debate Bingo cards before the debate tonight.  You can usually fit two cards on one sheet, and if you have people coming over, you can print a whole bunch at one time.

• Barack Obama Bingo!
• John McCain Bingo!
• Presidential Debate Bingo!
• Build Your Own Card!

Enjoy!

Tags: bingo, buzzword, debate, game, mccain, obama, presidential
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: scared
Listening to: Pink Turns Blue - True Love (After All)