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December 06, 2006

   Went to dinner at Zen's house and attempted to make an other loaf of Italian bread like I did on the 29th last month.  Unfortunately, it just didn't want to rise fast enough so we could eat it at dinner.  Instead, we had some of my standard bread.  Afterwards, we had some pumpkin cheesecake, which was the first cheesecake I ever made.  It turned out pretty good, but I don't think my blender will survive if I try to use it to mix the filling again.
   Pictured are some of the U-rock kids playing Magic.

December 04, 2006

   Checking over the log file for November, I discovered something I didn't like.  The Chinese search engine "baidu.com" is ignoring my robots.txt to has indexed my image gallery.  Visitors are showing up from search results, so I can only conclude the image search has a cache of my images.  Looking through the log, it appears the site has selectively looked through my image galleries; only the sizes 300x300, 600x600, 900x900 and 1800x1800.  The bot did not appear to be interested in 75x75 or 150x150 images.  It's questionable weather or not this was intentional on the bots part and it is hard to see how or why a bot would index in this manner.  The bot did manage not to fall into the rat trap.  From the logs, it appears image indexing happened more or less at one time, November 3, and the bot didn't index too many.  There is a chance something happened to cause the bot to malfunction, and since it did not spend a great deal of time harvesting images, it eluted the ratrap.  However, logs show a continual request of the root page of DrQue.net every hour for many days.  It just seems suspicious.
   Regardless of weather or not the bot is malicious, it has clearly ignored the robots.txt, caching copyrighted artworks against the author's wishes.  Therefore, the IP space belonging baidu.com has now been permanently blacklisted.
   Pictured is Izzy reading

December 01, 2006

Happy December!

First Snow

First Snow

    It's December, and the month kicked off with about 9 inches of snow! To help commemorate the winter months, I've updated the theme of DrQue.net to something a little cooler. What do you think?
    After the DRR party last night, I had all but forgotten about my appointment with my school consoler to talk about classes. I found I can take my Trigonometry class over winter break. That means I can start Calculus I in spring. Since I need 3 calculus classes in order to transfer as a math major, this is a good thing. Unfortunately, this means I have to drop my Digital Photography class, since it will be at the same time. I can take it next fall though.  This means I have to find some other class I need to take in Digital Photograph's place-- hence, the meeting with the consoler.
    Anyway, I jumped out of bed to find it was quarter to 8:00am.  I got ready and then looked outside to see a massive amount of snow.  It wasn't long before I realized there was no way school was going to be open in this weather.  Roni, Talion spent a snow day at the Garage, watching movies and hanging out.
    Pictured is about 6 inches of drift snow against the door when I opened it this morning.

November 30, 2006

DDR party

Aztalan

Aztalan

    The day started off with a field trip to Aztalan State Park up by Jefferson, WI for my anthropology class.  Despite the last couple of days being very moderate, the temperature plummeted to the low twenties and a strong wind developed.  Our tour of the park didn't last very long and was bitterly cold.  I might have been okay, but I had forgotten my scarf at home.
    This evening was an other  of Altered Realitie's DDR parties. Gaming was underway by 7:00pm and we played until around 2:00am. Again,the bunk/loft was used for a second gaming area.  Adric brought his Xbox 360, were I proceeded to bring on motion sickness by watching them play (curse you first person shooters!).

November 29, 2006

   This is my experimental loaf of Italian bread I completed this afternoon.  I've read through a good deal of the website The Fresh Loaf and tried a couple new things.  First was the technique of making a preferment.  I mixed up some yeast, flower and water and let it ferment over night.  When I got up, I added the rest of the ingredients-- more water, flower and yeast.  I also threw in some olive oil and an egg.  The oil is suppose to enrich the flavor as well as soften and help preserve the bread.  The egg I just tossed in 'cuz I like egg and figured a little protein couldn't hurt.  I didn't use much yeast-- 1 teaspoon for the 3 additional cups of flower.  The site recommended having a rather wet dough, so I make it pretty wet.  That was imposable to kneed, so I ended up adding more flower to dry it out.  I allowed the dough to rise twice, each time giving it an hour.  I tried to shape the thing, but it was very sticky and unruly.  So I just let it be a blob :) 
   For baking, I first prepared a cooking sheet with some grease (this dough was extremely stick-- normally I don't grease Teflon cooking sheets) and sprinkled a tablespoon of cornmeal even across the top.  Then, I mixed up two egg yokes, cornmeal and some water and basted the top of the dough with it.  I preheated the oven to 550°F-- as high as the oven would go, and tossed in a pan with a big chuck of stone in it.  When I put the dough into the oven, I pored several cups of boiling water into the pan, over the hot stone.  The idea of the stone was to hold heat and help vaporise the water.  The idea was to create a lot of steam for the initial few minutes the bread was in the oven.  I'm not sure the stone helped much, possibly because it had an irregular shape and didn't hit a lot of the water.  Next time I might find a flat stone.  Anyway, after 5 minutes I dropped the oven temp down to 350°F.  I basted the top again after 10 minutes and cooked it for a total of 30 minutes-- 5 at 550°F and 25 at 350°F.
   The results: a fairly tasty bread.  Thin, fairly soft crust with good texture.  The inside was soft and chewy.  I made up a plate of pasty and gorged myself.  And it was good :) 

1 comment has been made.

From Myrtle Beach (http://myrtlebeachtours.com)

myrtle beach

December 01, 2006 at 9:25 PM

Yummy looking bread!

November 28, 2006

   I got back my anthropology paper and did very well on the draft, receiving all 30 points.  I was a bit surprised, since I thought the paper was pretty awful.  Reading over it again, I'm sticking by my original assignment-- it needs a lot of cleanup.  However, it clearly covered enough of the topic, and that makes me very happy.
   In math, on the other hand, did quite bad on the homework.  Turns out I missed an entire section.  That doesn't surprise me, since I got confused about assignments and couldn't figure out how to work school's website.  The website is suppose to have the homework for my classes listed.  After figuring out what I messed up trying to find the location homework is listed, I understand why I didn't find it. Apparently, you have to be logged in.  Thus, my google searching turned up nothing.  That's the 4th different system with a username and password the school has.  The others are e-mail, class scheduling/finance and wireless network access.  By the time I have it figured out, I should be done with my degree ;)
   Pictured is Roni