We have hail. Yep, little hailstones bouncing off the deck. If we're having hail here, there might be sleet up on Skyline Drive [CA Rte. 35]. But you never know with our microclimates changing the weather every few miles. Woe the commute in the morning.

I told my partner that I was logging off from Adium to allow my MacBookPro to restart after doing the three updates currently available, one is a security update, one for the changes to Daylight Savings Time in the USA and Canada, and one is a Java for MacOSX 10.4 update that also accounts for the DST changes. This prompted her to ask if there was an update for our Palm Lifedrives. After checking Palm, Access, forums and Google, I would have to say there isn't, at least not yet. I'm not sure how my Mark/Space Missing Sync with it's time sync conduit might handle this, once DST actually begins, but there is a related discussion going on in their forums, as well as one in the Palm forums.

As an aside, I am really interested in the Access NetFront Browser 3.5, which I found along the way, but that will have to wait for another day.

Adapting what Scott [SGruby] gave in the Mark/Space Forum, and what Alan Grassia gives in his blog, here's a manual solution for handling this problem. Hopefully, Access or Palm will come out with an update to resolve this issue. One thing to keep in mind is that while the USA and Canada are changing to these new rules, Mexico is not, and I have no idea what other countries are doing. And even within the USA, not all states use DST. You're going to have to adapt every city in your time zone database to get it right, especially if you travel a lot.

1. Go into Preferences from your Palm's application launcher
2. Select Date & Time
3. To the right of Location, select the last item in the drop down list "Edit List..."
4. Select a time zone by city, such as San Francisco
5. Select Edit, a screen will appear listing Name: cityName, Time Zone, a checkbox "This location observes Daylight Savings Time", Start and End.
6. To the right of Start:, select the rule shown and reset it to be the Second Sunday in March, by selecting March in the months listed at the top, then "Second" from the drop down list to the right of "Week:" and "Sunday" from the drop down list to the right of "Day:".
7. Select OK
8. Select to the rule shown to the right of "End:", and reset it to the first Sunday in November, by selecting November in the months listed at the top, then "First" from the drop down list to the right of "Week:" and "Sunday" from the drop down list to the right of "Day:".
9. Select OK
10. Check that the Start and End rules are what you need, Select OK
11. Repeat for each City of concern to you. For me, this was...
    • Berkeley
    • Chicago
    • Dallas
    • Denver
    • Los Angeles
    • Los Gatos
    • Montara
    • Montreal
    • Moss Beach
    • New York
    • Oakland
    • Pacifica
    • Palo Alto
    • Redwood City
    • Redwood Shores
    • San Carlos
    • San Francisco
    • San Jose
    • Santa Clara
    • Santa Cruz
    • Seattle
    • Toronto
    • Tulsa
    • Washington, D.C.
12. Select Done

You may note that I've added a bunch of cities. This is to better use the "location" feature in the calendar applications that I use.

On this rainy Saturday in Northern California, I'm going to make some "comfort" food, Maccheroni alla Chitarra con Polpettine, though actually I'm making more of a Ragù. Comparing this with spaghetti and meatballs from your local pizzeria would be just wrong. I've been wanting to make this type of ragù since I read Gianugo Rabellino's use of ragù in lasagna.

Maccheroni alla Chitarra is a slightly thick egg pasta, made by using a rolling pin to pass the sheet of pasta through a Chitarra - basically a wood frame strung like a guitar. The pasta is made just of flour and eggs, or, if necessary, you can use fresh, store-bought [COTS] linguine. I don't do anything different here, so I'll let you find your own recipe for this.

My meatballs are a bit different than even what my Grandfather would make, and Abruzzo Polpettine are smaller than those which with you may be familiar - some say about the size of the fingernail on your little finger, others go a bit larger and say the first joint of your little finger. I make them about half-way between those two gauges.

Let me start with the pesto controversy. What is a true pesto? From Giuliano Bugialli's Classic Techniques of Italian Cooking, classic pesto includes olive oil, walnuts, pignoli, basil, spinach, garlic, Parmigiana/Romano/Sardo and even pancetta. He has a full explanation of pesto in The Fine Art of Italian Cooking. For the good, old fashioned Genovese pesto, described with passion, see "The Sunday Post, al pesto" by Gianugo Rabellino.

I use a pesto in my meatballs, one of parsley (one bunch, leaves only), walnuts (12, shelled and toasted), garlic (3 cloves peeled), olive oil (1-1/2 cups), sea salt, cracked rainbow peppercorns, and Parmigiana (8 ounces).

I also make my own breadcrumbs. I keep a bread collection of various crusty peasant breads and baguettes. Grab one of these, and slice it about 1/8-inch thick, until you have a cup or so of bits. Since they're stale, they'll crumble somewhat.

To make the meatballs (polpettine):

1. soak the breadcrumbs in cream - just enough to wet them
2. stir in 3 tablespoons of pesto
3. one whole egg per pound of meat plus an egg
4. mix in 3/4 pound very good quality ground beef [I like Creekstone Natural from Piazza, if you're nearby]
5. and then 1/2 pound each of ground pork and veal
6. one-quarter of a medium red onion, diced and sautéed
7. grate nutmeg and ground in salt and pepper to taste [though please don't taste raw eggs or pork

Mix the above really well, roll in your hands to form balls about 3/16-inch in diameter, and brown in olive oil, bacon fat or grease from browning diced pancetta.

At your butcher, get 1 veal shank per person, and have it split in half [as for osso bucco]. Brown and set aside. Sear each piece of veal on all sides, and set aside.

I use a cast-iron, flat bottomed pan with high curved sides that make it look like a bowl - soft of like a Mediterranean wok to do all this sautéing and browning. To make the ragù, I leave the veal and polpettine in this pan, deglaze the pan with red wine, such as Montepulcianto D'Abruzzo, cover the meat with marinara, and bake in the oven for an hour or two. The marrow from the veal shank adds incredible richness to the sauce. Before serving, remove the oven, remove the meat and set in serving dishes, add a half-glass of heavy cream, and bring the sauce back to a boil on the stove top, toss in the just barely under-cooked pasta and cook another two minutes until the pasta is al dente, remove from the heat and stir in some ripped apart basil leaves.

Serve a salad, then the pasta covered with the ragù and meatballs, then the veal with a side dish of green beans sautéed with calamati olives & soffritto [find for soffritto in this post for a good explanation of aromatic vegetables stewed in oil and used for flavoring other dishes].

Enjoy.

I read through a lot of blogs in a given day, racing through RSSOwl, my feed reader of preference. Some I read to find a good item for our OSBI (Open Source Business Intelligence) Daily. Some to keep abreast of the what's happening to enable the TeleInterActive Lifestyle. And some for personal edification.

I was amazed today as to how often I came across someone using the word "grok". I've been happily seeing more adoption of this word, but today it seemed nearly every blog, article or news item I read had the word "grok" at least once.

It was always used correctly: "to fully and deeply understand"; but I can't help but wonder how many of the authors using "grok" grokked the word's origins. It's Martian and not from any Terran language at all. It comes from the fertile mind of Robert A. Heinlein, and was brought to Earth by Valentine Michael Smith in Heinlein's wonderful 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

The word "grok" is only poorly understood by us earthbound folk, as it is deeply related to the Martian religious practice of eating their dead while overseen by the spirit of the newly departed. Here's the best explanation I can find in the novel.

"... a Martian dies when he decides to die, having discussed it with and advised by his friends and having received the consent of his ancestors' ghosts to join them... One second he is alive and well, the next second he's a ghost with a dead body left over... his closest friends eat what he no longer has any use for, 'grokking' him, as Mike would say, and praising his virtues as they spread the mustard. The new ghost attends the feast himself... by which [ceremony] the ghost attains the status of 'Old One'..."
-- Jubal explaining to Duke, chapter xiii, in Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

Here's some of the places I've enountered "grok" today.

• Microsoft supports OpenID by Marc Canter
• The Megapixel Myth - You’re getting ripped off by Don MacAskill
• Yahoo’s Pipes Hard to Grok But Snazzy by Jackson West in GigaOm
• Fonality: Dialing the future by Matt Asay
• Mixed Japanese stuff by Gianugo Rabellino

And more, for a total of 23 different blog posts. I do hope they remembered the mustard, and used a good quality one like Sierra Nevada stout & stone ground.

Sometime ago one of my DirecTiVo units died with the message "Can't load boot kernel". Well, they are a Linux box after all, and close to seven years old. I'm guessing the hard drive failed, or maybe a cable since there isn't any grinding or clunking noises. But I pay for premium service, and as the service rep put it "I'm a class A customer". And DirecTiVo [/sigh no more, just DirecTV] sent out a "comparable" replacement unit right away. I thought comparable meant a RCA rather than the Sony that I have. But nope... 'tis a DVR+ R-15.

So, I phoned the premium service line and was answered right away by Matt. Matt apologized that some service reps think a DVR+ is the same as a DirecTiVo [yes, he used that term], but being a DirecTiVo user himself, he knew better. He put me on hold while he went off to make things right. He came back sounding more devastated than I. DirecTV no longer sends out DirecTiVo units.

I know that DirecTV and TiVo had their problems awhile back, but I thought I had read that DirecTV eventually saw the folly of their ways, and paid for more TiVo licensing, though they had withdrawn from the TiVo board of directors. What happened?

Oh well, Matt was quick to respond and sympathetic. I can't fault him, but I think DirecTV management needs to get back on the TiVo bandwagon.

No more seeing an ad for a movie, adding a wishlist, and seeing it pop up on the todo list, whenever it comes around. At least not on that TV. The other three Sony DirecTiVo units are still running. Hmm, where's that Hacking TiVo book that Bunkey gave to me a few years ago? Maybe I can put a new, bigger hard drive, clone one of the others, and be back to TiVo heaven.

That's a thought.