The Right Stuff

My crazy roommates decided to give me these six kilos of goodness as my birthday present. This piece of Serrano ham has to be kept dry and dark now in our larder. I've already tasted some slices, you bet it's been delicious!

Some misconceptions about high quality ham:

• White dots appearing on the ham's surface are not mold, but show the quality of the meat as proteins begin to surface in the course of the drying process.
• Even real mold doesn't impair the quality of the meat. Most of these are harmless. Wash it with hot water and brush off the mold using a stiff vegetable brush.

According to the fact sheet that came with the leg ham isn't just delicious, it's a valuable component of your diet: Ham is rich in vitamins (namely B1, B2 and B3), contains many proteins and plenty of minerals.

Now playing: New Order - Waiting for the sirens' call - Guilt is a useless emotion

• 1 Aldi Frischkäse
• 1 Thunfischdose + 1/2 Öl der Dose
• 1 kleine Zwiebel ganz klein geschnitten
• Salz, Pfeffer, etwas Zitrone

Rühren, durchziehen lassen, fertig. Am besten auf frisches Brot oder Baguette auftragen.

Thomas Wölfer describes how to view the entire source of e-mail messages in Outlook (in German). This is something I've craving for since I started using Outlook in 2003. Outlook Express provides this functionality for years. I've been suprised that the more complex PIM needs a registry hack to enable it. This may be due to space considerations since the registry key (see below) indicates that Outlook saves things twice.

A quick recap of Thomas' how-to:

1. Open regedit.exe
2. Browse to the following key:
   

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

   If you have an older version of Outlook, replace 11.0 with the appropriate version number. I'm not sure if this works on other versions than 2003, but you may give it a try.
3. Create a new DWORD value named SaveAllMIMENotJustHeaders and give it a value of 1
4. Close the Registry Editor
5. Restart Outlook

You'll be able to view the complete source of all e-mail messages received after the registry key has been set. Right-click a mail item and choose "Options..." from the context menu. The source code is displayed in the lower part of the window.

Now playing: Madonna - Confessions on a dance floor - I love New York

That's what you come across when you're surfing the net late at night. I don't even remember how I found this Russian site.

More images of those two can be found in the full post.

Now playing: Thievery Corporation - Versions - Nouvelle Vague - This is not a love song

I finally decided to install FolderShare, a file synchronization service acquired by Microsoft as a part of their Windows Live platform. The installer has been sitting on my machine for some weeks now. There where no files to keep synchronized until a week ago, so there was simply no purpose using it. But still an interesting project, similar to Plaxo, which synchronizes Outlook contacts over the Internet.

Now to the knowledge management part: Last week I found TiddlyWiki via Scott Hanselman's Hanselminutes podcast. TiddlyWiki is a light-weight open source Wiki implementation that comes in just a single HTML file with lots of Ajax-y JavaScript code. There are absolutely no server components needed, just open the file in a browser and start editing Tiddlers (Wiki articles are named like this).

The Wiki itself is highly customizable by editing some special predefined ("shadowed") Tiddlers. This way you can translate the Wiki to any language and customize layout and styles. The list of features goes on. I've borrowed my layout from the GTDTiddlyWiki, a template for implementing Getting Things Done. The GTD-version is based on an older version of TiddlyWiki, so I decided to exercise my CSS skills transferring GTDTiddlyWiki's visuals to a standard TiddlyWiki. Using the various Firefox developer tools I've gotten pretty far. Right-click, Save As this link to get my version.

This single-file Wiki is an ideal candidate to synchronize between my work and home machine using FolderShare. I've been ready to take off in about 20 minutes, including download and install. FolderShare's usability could be a little better, but I'm sure this changes since it's currently beta and runs PHP on the server side. Microsoft will certainly change this to ASPX.

Now playing: Stuck Mojo - Pigwalk - The sermon

I found a nice quote that describes my feelings about Firefox pretty well. Who needs IE 7?

More than anything else, this is the smartest aspect of what Mozilla has done with Firefox: It's a realistic browser, a worthy successor to the Navigator line. It's a browser that inspires an emotional response. You don't have to learn to like it with your left brain; you just like it.

As you may have read somewhere else, Microsoft has decided to put the Consolas font (as included in Vista) online for download.

For those of you who haven't got the chance of peeping into Vista (and copying the font files) but like to write the occasional program/markup in a neatly presented manner, take a look at this beautiful fixed-width font. Best to be displayed on a ClearType-enabled display.

Besides changing the monospaced fonts of your IDE, browser and text editor I recommend changing the font of the console window in order to make things consistent.

Now playing: Talc - Modern sleep over

Ein schönes Rezept meines Freundes Markus, passt sehr gut zu selbstgemachten Waffeln.

Für ca. 200 ml Soße braucht man:

• 70 g Butter
• 100 g Zucker
• 5 cl Schnappes (mit Billigrum (40%) hats jedenfalls gebrannt wie Zunder), leckerer ist wahrscheinlich Cointreau
• 7 cl Blutorangensaft (z. B. vom Penny-Markt aus dem Kühlregal)

Butter zerlassen, mit Schneebesen schaumig rühren und dann den Zucker hinzugeben. Alles weiterrühren, bis alles noch schaumiger wird und der Zucker anfängt zu karamelisieren. Jetzt den Schnaps in den Butter-Zucker-Schaum geben und sofort anzünden, ein toller Spaß! Wenn alles ausgebrannt ist (und die Küche noch steht) den Blutorangensaft hinzugeben und weiterrühren. Die Suppe solange einkochen lassen, bis die gewünschte Konsistenz erreicht ist. Es sollte nicht ganz zäh sein, aber auch nicht so dünn wie Wasser.