food – Dan Q

Two Croissants

I woke up with this in my head and had to draw it.

Cadbury Giant Butt

Even this self-checkout thinks I’m eating too much chocolate.

Note #28940

Pub lunch by the river in the Spring sunshine. ☀️

Indian Food

On our last day out at our current AirBnB, we searched for a takeaway.

Google Maps found me a Chinese takeaway, but it had an unexpected suggestion when I asked for an Indian:

There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year’s 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.

Food divided by Distance

I was pretty ill yesterday. It’s probably a combination of post-flood stress and my shitty lungs’ ability to take a sore throat and turn it into something that leaves me lying in bed and groaning.

I spent most of the morning in and out of a fitful sleep, during which I dreamed up the most-bizarre application: a GPS tracker app that, after being told your destination and what you were eating, reported your journey progress to social media by describing where you were going and how much of your food was left¹.

I should be clear that in the dream, I wasn’t the one that invented this concept; in fact, I didn’t even understand it at first (maybe I still don’t!). In the dream I was at some kind of unconference event with a variety of “make art with the Web” types, and I missed a session by falling asleep². I woke (within the dream) right before the session ended and rushed in to see what was being presented, and only got the tail-end of the explanation of how a project – this project – worked, after which I felt rushed to try to understand it before somebody inevitably tried to talk to me about it.

But it could work, couldn’t it? If you’re one of those people who routinely tracks and shares their location (like Aaron Parecki, whose heatmapping inspired my own) or journeys (like Jeremy Keith does), it’s a way to add a bit of silliness to that sharing.

I’m probably not going to implement this. It is, in the end, the kind of stupidity that could (should?) only appear in the dreams of somebody who’s got a bad head cold.

But if you manage to take this idea and turn it into something… actually good?… let me know!

Or if you’ve just got a cool, “Web 2.0-ey” idea for the name of an app that tracks both your journey progress and your meal consumption, I’d love to hear that too.

Footnotes

¹ Under the assumption that its consumption would be evenly distributed throughout the journey. Because everybody does that, right? Counting the number of steps they make before taking another equal-sized bite. Right?

² Even in my dreams, I can dream of falling asleep. And, sometimes, of dreaming. A fever probably helps.

A Random List of Silly Things I Hate

So apparently now this is a thing, so here I go:

Websites that are just blank pages if the JavaScript doesn’t load from the CDN.¹
The misunderstanding that LLMs can somehow be a route to AGI.
Computer systems that say my name is too short or my password is too long.²
People being unwilling to discuss their wild claims later using the lack of discussion as evidence of widespread acceptance.
When people balance the new toilet roll one atop the old one’s tube.³

A nearly-full roll of toilet paper perched atop an empty toilet roll tube on an open-ended spindle. — Come on! It would have been *so easy*!

Shellfish. Why would you eat that!?
People assuming my interest in computers and technology means I want to talk to them about cryptocurrencies.⁴
Websites that nag you to install their shitty app. (I know you have an app. I’m choosing to use your website. Stop with the banners!)
People who seem to only be able to drive at one speed.⁵
The assumption that the fact I’m “sharing” my partner is some kind of compromise on my part; a concession; something that I’d “wish away” if I could. (It’s very much not.)
Brexit.

Wow, that was strangely cathartic.

Footnotes

¹ I have a special pet hate for websites that require JavaScript to render their images. Like… we’d had the <img> tag since 1993! Why are you throwing it away and replacing it with something objectively slower, more-brittle, and less-accessible?

² Or, worse yet, claiming that my long, random password is insecure because it contains my surname. I get that composition-based password rules, while terrible (even when they’re correctly implemented, which they’re often not), are a moderately useful model for people to whom you’d otherwise struggle to explain password complexity. I get that a password composed entirely of personal information about the owner is a bad idea too. But there’s a correct way to do this, and it’s not “ban passwords with forbidden words in them”. Here’s what you should do: first, strip any forbidden words from the password: you might need to make multiple passes. Second, validate the resulting password against your composition rules. If it fails, then yes: the password isn’t good enough. If it passes, then it doesn’t matter that forbidden words were in it: a properly-stored and used password is never made less-secure by the addition of extra information into it!

³ This is the worst of the toilet paper crimes, but there’s a lesser but more-common offence.

⁴ Also: I’m uninterested in whatever multiplayer shooter game you’re playing, and no I won’t fix your printer.

⁵ “You were doing 35mph in the 60mph limit, then you were doing 35mph in the 40mph limit, now you’re doing 35mph in the 20mph limit. Argh!”

Chapattidilla

Wanted a quesadilla. Didn’t have any tortillas, so substituted chapattis.

It went… only okay. The earthiness of the chapatti pairs with mature cheese less-well than the cornflour-sweetness of a tortilla does.

I tried it, so you don’t have to!

Note #28497

A lot of things are hard right now. But I appreciate that Spring has come and I can enjoy a cheese & pickle sandwich and a fake beer for lunch in the sun. All to the sounds of the birds singing… and, somewhere behind me, the dog excitedly demolishing a pile of pine cones.

It could be worse, right?

Flood of cookies

In sympathy for our flood situation, my sister baked and posted us a big batch of her fantastic raisin & oatmeal cookies.

I’ve eaten like six of them already. Turns out I stress-eat. Who knew?

Hollandaise Sauce

If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home.

I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior to what I eat as a holiday treat.

But maybe it’s just that my brain wants to keep eggs benedict as a signifier that I’m on holiday. That I can unplug from the world, stop thinking about work, and enjoy a leisurely breakfast with some creamy eggs and a long black coffee.

Maybe eggs benedict just has to remain “holiday food”, for me.

Who Is the Winking Chef?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

One of my goals was to uncover the origin of the ubiquitous Winking Chef. We’ve all seen him – the chubby mustachioed man wearing a chef’s hat and often making a gesture of approval with his hand. I dug around as much as I could – searching old magazines and websites looking for the origin of the image. Of course generic chef images go way back in print advertising but I was looking for one image in particular, the one I grew up with on my pizza boxes in New Jersey. Who was this guy? Was the image based on a real person? What’s the deal????

…

Scott Wiener, in Who Is the Winking Chef?

There are few people in this world who are more-obsessed with pizza than I, but Scott’s gotta be one of them. Since discovering this blog post of his I now really want to go on one of his pizza-themed walking tours of New York City. But you might have guessed that.

Anyway: Scott – who has a collection of pizza boxes, by the way (in case you needed evidence that he’s even more pizza-fixated than me) – noticed the “winking chef” image, traced its origin, and would love to tell you about it. An enjoyable little read.