My Etymotic ER-6 Isolator earphones arrived today. Preliminary thoughts: they rule. They reduce outside noise to a pretty negligible level and the audio reproduction is pretty good to my very much not audiophile ears. I'll post more after my next flight.
Two more CD purchases since I last wrote - the Interpol album, "Antics", and the latest The Delgados, "Universal Audio".
The Interpol album is good, but I might prefer the prior release because of its relentlessly downbeat tone. Interpol, however, is still some what guilty of having that "We know how to write one song" vibe because of the vocalist's timbre + style and the unique instrumentation backing it up. Luckily, it's one song that I like.
The Delgados album is nice middle of the road, pop-rock gathering of songs. It's a bit less grandiose than anything off of "Hate", but I think the songs are better for it - they seem a bit tighter and less meandering than any of their direct analogues on the previous albums.
I also attended a Stephen R. Donaldson book signing for the first book in "The Last Chronicles of Thomas Convenant". Donaldson was an entertaining speaker because he didn't hold back out of politeness when hitting out at more questionable aspects of the publishing industry (e.g. Lester Del Ray's insistence that you cannot have a female protagonist) or other undeservingly popular SF/Fantasy authors (e.g. Terry Brooks becoming the Shannara only author).
I picked up Donaldson's latest book, but I haven't cracked it open yet. Instead, I've been going through "The Daughter of Regals and Other Tales". The title story was a nice little fantasy piece with a nice lycanthropic twist on magic. I'm now in the middle of Gilden-fire, which is an outtake from "The Ilearth War". Given the amount of uninterrupted reading time I'll have over the next few weeks, it'll be much easier to digest short stories. Plus it doesn't hurt that I've become a bigger fan of the short story format.
Please note that all of these opinions are subject to change on further examination so take these scratchings only as snapshot opinions.
I made my first Cocoa app today. Instead of the ubiquitous "Hello World!" application that most books make you create, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X actually has you create a graphical random number generator. Since this is the first time I'm doing any Mac OS or NextStep programming, it was a bit interesting to see how things work. Xcode and Interface Builder are nice, but it's a bit strange to do interface building and coding in separate apps. Having spent most of the time doing .NET/Java development, it's a nice breath of fresh air to try something new out.
Today's dinner experiment was the fine, fine dish of Phở. When I was in San Francisco over the summer, I picked up "Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table". Of course, I didn't know then that it'd take this long to actually put it to use. Aww well...that's life for you.
The total process took about 3 hours. Most of the prep work is pretty simple - the garnishes are all fresh, and the noodles almost tend themselves. The broth does require a few steps - an initial boiling before transfer to the final broth water, charring ginger + onions, adding the star anise/clove spice ball at the proper point and lots and lots of SKIMMING. However, it seems like the broth steps are just long enough to allow for getting everything done in time.
The end product was quite delicious. The broth needed to be a bit saltier and probably could benefit from a bit less fish sauce, but it still did the job. I really liked that the recipe had two different cuts - chuck & sirloin - and two different levels of wellness - fall apart soft & quick cooked in broth - for the beef. Thankfully, my two willing guinea pigs both liked it. Plus we were all utterly stuffed because the recipe was for 6 meal-size portions. I'm definitely going to make this again in the future.
