Good evening from Iasi! After dinner tonight, I took the camera out with the Gorillapod for some night shots. You can click on them to make them bigger.
Now I’m tired, so I’m going to bed. Big day tomorrow and the rest of the week, actually. You might not hear (see?) from me again here until after I get home on Saturday.
Prior to my trip to Romania tomorrow, I wanted to get a haircut. I’d been having very good luck at C&M on the corner of Am Römling and Ludwigstraße and their 11 € haircuts. Two quick, thorough, and very professional haircuts in a row done by the pleasant, if weird-looking Matthias, had me convinced I’d found a new favorite barber.
Third time wasn’t a charm, however. Matthias was busy with other clients (and I don’t know how to ask for a particular friseur — or whether they even do that, since this place works on the take-a-number FIFO format). I got a pleasant young-looking woman. I asked for a trim down to my usual 6mm and I thought all was well until suddenly another stylist came over to exlain that we had a problem. It seems the original one had cut a swath shorter than 6mm into the back of my head down by the neck and the only way to fix it was to cut that section of my hair down to 3mm or so and fade it longer up into the 6mm on the rest of my head. All staff members were apologetic and immediately offered to do this cut on the house due to their mistake.
But that looked dumb. So I had them do the whole head (barring the top) down to 3mm. OK, I like it short. But that made my beard look dumb. Once I got home, I tried trimming my beard so that it was shorter than the hair on my head, but that also looked less than optimal. So I trimmed the whole beard off (see below). I am kind of sad to see it go and return to the daily or nearly daily shaving regimen.
So, two points to ponder for the future:
Lolspeak is dead. D-E-D dead. Long live Lolspeak.
This is the proof.
This is the reason we tell everyone to come visit in May.
I took both of these shots from the outdoor section at the Kona cafe on Sankt-Kassians-Platz. I’m already in full-on t-shirt, shorts, and sandals mode, but as you can see, not everyone else is.
I had high hopes for Kubuntu 8.04 (the Hardy Heron) with regard to bluetooth transfers from our mobile phones to our computers. Apparently it got better for most of the world from 7.10 (the Gutsy Gibbon) to the current version, but not for users of Symbian-based phones like our Nokia E50 and E61i models.
Then I noticed apparently receiving bluetooth file transfers from our Mac mini to our Kubuntu Linux machine running 8.04 worked just fine — so why not from our phones? Was it related to our phones or to the software on our Linux machine?
It’s apparently related to the bluez-utils package in the Ubuntu repositories. A user posted on launchpad.net (original post here) that using the bluez-utils package from the Debian “sid” (unstable) repositories worked for him.
So, get the unstable bluez-utils package from here, install it with
sudo pkg -i bluez-utils_3.30-3_i386.deb
reboot, and that’s it…at least, that’s how I did it. I hope I’ve saved someone some self-hair-pulling and googling.
We’ve been living here for four years now, so we finally decided it’s time to finalize the move from back in March 2004. That is to say, we’ve gotten rid of as much of the crap left over from the move as possible — mostly cardboard boxes. Our collection of big pieces of styrofoam has also grown over the years from purchases of items like lamps and television sets and printers and computers and all that stuff, and we decided this was the right time to get rid of it. And some big furniture items not elegible for street-level pickup.
So we
I was a little nervous, not knowing much about town dumps and stuff like that in general, let alone in deepest Oberpfalz, but we took a co-worker’s advice, were super-polite to everyone we encountered, and we got along just fine, dumping all our stuff into quite precisely labeled dumpsters and compactor machines. Check out the pictures snapped by Sarah with her phone.
If you’re good at sorting your trash at home, you’ll be fine here. It’s the same concept, but simultaneously more specific and more flexible:
It was, for both of us, oddly exhilarating. Probably for at least one of several reasons:
Or maybe not. We still get worked up about stuff like this (below). Click the pictures for a bigger view and our comments on them.
¡Hay unos locos en Wisconsin!*
Holy crap: Pledge of Allegiance. Public school. Spanish class. One day a year. “Freedom isn’t free.” Call centers with non-native speakers. “Nationalist oath.”*
Now go read this: http://www.progressive.org/mag_wx042908
Yeah. You read it correctly. Playing the “ultimate sacrifice” card in conjunction with your overdue Chase MasterCard payment or getting that cute top from Land’s End in one size dumber and a vocabulary exercise for a high school class that happens once a year.
Sarah’s observed before that apparently some people are out looking for reasons to get offended. Life must be pretty sweet in Edgerton, WI if a Spanish class exercise once a year is big enough news to cause a ruckus. I am intrigued to see how they tie it into the gas prices next.
Kudos to the school system for standing their ground.
I don’t think these should really even be considered cupcakes - they’re just astonishingly rich. Which is awesome. But I think they probably work better as individually-sized flourless chocolate cakes. I imagine they would rock with some raspberry sauce drizzled on top. I found the recipe here. I bought all of the ingredients for the accompanying frosting, but I can’t imagine the sugar shock the combo of these things and frosting would induce. They’re pretty easy to make, but there’s a lot of waiting and you have to make sure you have room available in the fridge.
1/2 c water
1/4 t salt
3/4 c white sugar
18 ozs bittersweet chocolate, chopped into pieces (I used 5 100g bars of 85% cocoa content chocolate)
1 c unsalted butter, room temperature
3 eggs
3 egg whites
Heat oven to 300° F/150° C. In a small saucepan over medium heat, combine water, salt and sugar until everything is dissolved and set aside. Melt the chocolate and pour it into the bowl of an electric mixer. Cut the butter into pieces and mix it into the chocolate one piece at a time. Next, beat in the hot sugar water. Finally, beat in the eggs and egg whites, one at a time. Pour batter into lined cupcake tin (it must be lined - these will not come out without cupcake papers), filling cups about 3/4 full. Place cupcake tin in a larger pan and fill the larger pan halfway with boiling water. Bake cupcakes in their bath for 30 minutes. Remove from oven (centers will look wet) and let them rest for about 15-20 minutes, then put the cupcake tin in the fridge. Don’t remove cupcakes from the tin until they’re cold - otherwise they will lose their shape.
Today, on Tammy’s brother Mark’s last day in town, the five of us piled into their car, drove to Kelheim, hopped aboard a river cruise ship and cruised upstream to Weltenburg for lunch. We had to cut the trip short, unfortunately, because Matthias felt ill. But it was still fun and at least we managed to be under the awning for lunch while it was raining.
Notables counter-clockwise, from top left:
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