Report on the June 22, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place for the next two weeks.

It looks likely that there will be a meeting elsewhere on July
13 — stay tuned for details.

Daikon radish purée with sesame oil

This is one of the first ideas I stumbled on when I started
getting a farm share, and having vegetables I hadn’t thought of
cooking arriving in a box. I like daikon radish fine in small
quantities in stir fries or roasts, but if you have a meal-sized
portion, I think it’s good to take some of the bite out of it.

I braise it in water to cover (a lot will evaporate before it’s
cooked through). You can use stock if you like, but I don’t find
it necessary.

While it’s cooking to fork tenderness, you cook
some kind of grain to put it on. Here I like something that adds
a bit of flavor. I used quinoa today for lunch. Today, I had
garlic scapes, so I snipped one into small pieces and added it to
the braising liquid, after the daikon was starting to be cooked.

When the daikon is fork tender, you add a generous splash of
sesame oil and season with salt and pepper, and then mash it up however you
would make mashed potatoes. I use my Cuisinart
Smart Stick Hand Blender.

I don’t usually have enough daikon radish to make this for
company, but the one time I did, they raved about it.

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Report on the June 15, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place for the next three weeks.

It looks likely that there will be a meeting elsewhere on July
13 — stay tuned for details.

Cloven tree

We had a violent storm a week ago. I’d been thinking about
taking Sunny to the dog park, and I noticed it was getting pretty
dark, so we went after the storm passed, and half a tree was
down. I haven’t gotten used to having the camera in my pocket
yet, so I didn’t take a picture of the part that was down, but
here’s what was left after the city had come by and cleaned it up
the following day.

[tree after storm]

Maple tree after losing half its volume in storm
[tree after storm, detail]

detail of Maple tree after losing half its volume in storm

Playing Lassus

My recorder teacher John
Tyson, had his student recital yesterday morning. The room
was chosen for the acoustics rather than the lighting, so the
person I handed my pocket camera to got a lot of fuzzy or oddly
colored ones. But this one isn’t too bad.

[Playing Lassus]

Playing Lassus

I played two Renaissance duets with John, and a Brazilian Choros
with my sister on organ.

Report on the June 8, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We’ll be having dropin meetings as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45
PM, at my
place for the next four weeks.

It’s starting to be vacation time — it would help my planning
if people who come regularly would let me know if they know for
sure they aren’t going to be there.

I’m going to be out of town for the July 13 meeting, so we can
either take that week off, or someone else can run and/or host
that meeting.

Sweater for Teddy

I’ve been reading Knitting
Ganseys, and one of the suggestions (with pattern) is
that you make a small sweater, for a doll or a teddy bear, that
uses some of the techniques that are a little hard to envision
when you don’t actually have yarn and needles in your hands.

So I made the pattern sweater for my sister’s teddy bear:

[Teddy in his new sweater]

Teddy in his new sweater

Here’s a shot with a better view of the pattern (the back and
the front are the same:

[back]

Back, showing pattern detail

Doing a small sweater is a good idea — there were several
things about the pattern that I understood better doing them than
reading about them, and on the small sweater it didn’t take very
long, and wasn’t so difficult to rip out a few rows if you got
something wrong.

For instance, knitting the shoulder strap is a lot like turning
the heel on a sock, and it’s hart to see what’s going to happen
until you do it:

[arm detail]

detail of arm top and shoulder strap

There are some conventions for making sweaters for humans about
things like what percent of the chest stitches you want at the
neck. They don’t all work for teddy bears, so I had to take out
the decreased neck gusset because I couldn’t get the sweater over
Teddy’s head. It was still a tight fit even with no decreasing —
if I were doing it again, I’d leave more stitches at the neck and
fewer at the shoulders.

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Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I seem to have the problems on the laptop worked out about as
well as I expect to for the near future, so I’ll probably be
installing it on the desktop soon.

On the other hand, there were more of them than I would expect,
and there was less support for working through them than I would
have hoped for.

So I still recommend Ubuntu, on the grounds of the highly
supportive and large community, but if you hear of people
abandoning Ubuntu in droves for something else, you might want to
consider leaving with them.

Here’s the list of problems I hit with pointers to the
solutions:

  • I installed an early beta version, and expected there to be
    some problems, but just as the things like the cursor going away
    when you closed the lid were starting to be fixed, they released
    a kernel version that caused my laptop to boot to a black
    screen. This is still not fixed in the official version — I’m
    working around it by using an unreleased kernel version. The
    details are <a
    href="here
    and <a
    href="”>here.
  • I had been using wicd instead of network-manager, since I
    never figured out how to configure my wired connection with
    network-manager. On 10.04, there’s a problem with the wicd
    configuration. The symptom is that when you boot, although the
    networking is configured, dns doesn’t work. If you disconnect
    and then reconnect the wired configuration via the wicd GUI, it
    works fine. I never figured out
    how to fix it — I’m working around it by uninstalling
    both network-manager and wicd and writing
    /etc/network/interfaces the way I want it. This will be a
    nuisance if I ever take the laptop anywhere else and want to use
    a wireless configuration, but since the battery is dead, I
    probably won’t. If you just want to use DHCP and a wireless
    configuration, 10.04 seems to work exactly the way you want it
    to out of the box.
  • A relatively minor problem was that the xmltv underpinnings
    of freeguide were incompatible with the freeguide distributed
    with 10.04. So a program that worked fine on 9.04 upstairs,
    wouldn’t download listings on the downstairs laptop. I’m
    working around this by installing the xmltv stuff from Debian
    unstable, as explained here.

So the upshot is that I seem to have a working laptop, over a
month after the official release of 10.04. But it’s by no means
by way of a completely standard install. And this is a system
that really doesn’t have to do much. So I’m still nervous about
putting it on my desktop. I’m sure I’ll get around to it before
they stop doing support for 9.04, but I’m going to be very wary
about installing another non-LTS version.