In ‘Net News
Digby’s place, Hullabaloo, is currently unreachable. There is a legacy referral to “haloscan.com” somewhere in her template, and Haloscan is pining for the fjords. I assume that that the last remnants expired overnight.
The BBC had a nice piece on Steve Wilhite’s campaign to get people to pronounce his creation, the Graphics Interchange Format [GIF], the way he intended “JIF”, a soft “G” or “J” sound, not the hard “G”. As is often the case with acronyms, the meaning was created after the abbreviation. Wilhite was paying homage to his favorite peanut butter, Jif, but was forced to use a “G” for it to be plausible.
The articles says that Pepsi, Jif, and Doritos were the principle foods of the coders. It must be a graphics thing, because I always went with Coke, Snickers, and Fritos. Of course, I changed to coffee and doughnuts as I got older.
12 comments
“Pepsi, Jif, and Doritos were the principle foods”
Awwww, c’mon. You know programmers have no principles!
If one has to consume a brand-name peanut butter, Jif extra-crunchy is better than most. It’s what Stella buys on the (rare) occasions that she does the grocery shopping. I buy it too, in part to avoid domestic strife over mere peanut butter…
He was working for Compuserv, so there may been a corporate tie in 🙂
I like making my own because it is easy to do down here and you don’t have all of the HFCS added, just dry roasted peanuts, peanut oil, and a little salt. I had to use olive oil in Europe and it isn’t as good. When you make it yourself, you determine how crunchy or smooth it is, and the overall consistency.
just dry roasted peanuts, peanut oil, and a little salt.
i learned about this in college and have worn out 2 or 3 blenders over the years since then. fortunately the local natural foods co-op has an industrial-strength grinder topped by a huge hopper of peanuts – you put the container underneath the spout, press the on button, and presto! fresh-ground peanut butter! they added a fresh-ground-almond-butter machine a few years ago too.
if you ever have to resort to store-bought, smuckers is pretty decent actually. i always have some on hand for hurricane food every year.
Regarding peanut butter, if I have to buy store-bought, I try to buy crunchy. It at least has something in it that resembles peanuts. The fine-whipped store-bought stuff I always look at with suspicion. No telling what that is. I’ve seen stuff of that consistency coming out of the back ends of my cats when they eat something that gives them the runs. Squick.
Fresh artisan bread and peanut butter… two things that are indisputably better homemade, and also two things that one is less likely to make at home if s/he lives 2½ blocks from a Whole Foods. That proximity sometimes makes me forget my political differences with the owner.
Steve, I lived a couple of blocks away from an updated “Super Safeway” that had fresh artisan bread and peanut butter. Yes, definitely better than the processed stuff.
Off the topic of peanut butter, I found today that Java 1.7 breaks the SSL code in our GUI, SSL code that’s been working just fine since 2004. It breaks my standalone SSL client code too that I wrote based on SSL tutorials on Oracle/Sun’s very own web site. Java. Write once, run maybe. Sigh.
Most of the commercial stuff doesn’t use peanut oil, because it is expensive, and that changes the taste. I found a coffee grinder and a follow up with a mortar and pestle works great if you want smooth, otherwise the grinder alone will do it.
That system you describe sounds addicting, Hipparchia.
Fresh baked bread makes everything taste better. My problem is that when I do bake some, I eat half a loaf with just butter before it cools off. It is safer for me to buy it in a bakery already cool.
It’s hard to believe that one of the selling points for Java was that it was more secure than C, and then that you didn’t have to update it. I still have a coffee mug that was an early promotional item. Yeah, Badtux, I think that I have had up to three Java updates in the past month, after months without one. There must have been a serious problem discovered.
when I do bake some, I eat half a loaf with just butter before it cools off.
well… the fix for that is to take the other half of the loaf the next day, slather it with garlic butter, heat it up in the oven, and polish it off.
on-demand fresh-ground peanut butter, and somebody else assembles the ingredients and cleans and maintains the equipment – what’s not to love? now if only the store were stay open 24/7/365….
Stuff the loaf with thinly sliced ham or roast beef topped with Jarlsburg and put it under the broiler for a couple of minutes – reminds me of toasties in the bars in Amsterdam …
Everything definitely tastes better if someone else washes the dishes.
Stuff the loaf with thinly sliced ham or roast beef topped with Jarlsburg and put it under the broiler for a couple of minutes
that sounds wonderful! starting on my shopping list now…
Not all bar food is terrible, but I never understood why it was hard boiled eggs and boiled shrimp in southern Spain. I couldn’t make the connection, any more than I could understand why the bar workers all seemed to be Irish.