Roland’s wife, who speaks no English, seems to have a green thumb for Florida plants. For instance, she shaved and manicured the loose bark off my palm tree. Here is the promised shot of the coconuts. Nobody knows if they are edible, I say they are. It’s a coconut and who ever heard of a coconut you can’t eat?
No visit to JP’s, I’m really serious about conserving cash for job-hunting. I’m getting correspondingly less done since all the Canadiens arrived but I don’t mind. Everybody has to stop and talk for five minutes. Then again, I’m the only one around who has any idea what or where Quebec is. What turned out fine was the coincidence of Adam, Jose and myself all being year-round because, it seems that between us we have every small tool in the world. We all have bicycle spare parts, my role in that is the tires, pumps, valves and tubes. That makes sense since I get the most road time and thus the most flats. I showed them how the leaky valve stem is the one time the underwater test can trick you. There is a way it will only leak when it is on the bicycle. It is caused by a slightly loose stem being touched by the inside cavity of the valve cap. Right? You normally take the valve cap off when putting the tube underwater, so there is no “leak”.
I didn’t feel up to doing anything, so I stayed around home, where the coffee is better than Starbuck’s anyway. One thing I read was a list of items called PHP variables. Consider them to be placeholders that most interactive web pages use to pass values. They are different than the more familiar animation scripts. For instance, Craigslist uses PHP to pass an artificial e-mail address whenever a post is made. Replies go to pseudo-addresses that conceals the original poster’s e-mail. That means PHP.
So here’s a million dollar idea. Create a simple new site called “Craigslost”. Anybody who gets flagged is likely steamed, yet some of that flagged material is truly excellent. Craigslost would be a place they could click and repost anything flagged, but the new site would prevent any flagging. I’ll wager ten thousand people a day would go there to read such posts, including whatever they added.
The current Craigslist is primitive, easy to defeat and is becoming a disseminator of junk mail, auto-replies and on-line scams. Where it seems every system from eBay to hotmail seems to have ignored the possibility of abuse, I would overlook no such thing. Chances are, I just came up with an idea somebody else will make millions at. Again.
I also read a description of what is really contained in commercial cake mixes. I had earlier been surprised to learn that the reason the housewife adds an egg is to give her a “feeling of being in control” (The Secret House, D. Bodanis, Simon & Shuster, New York, 1986). Looking at the list of ingredients does not tell you where glycerol monostearate (GMS) comes from. It is a byproduct of soap-making. Cake mixes took off when GMS was discovered because it makes most anything it is mixed with puff up to twice the volume.
That is what I was after, information about where the ingredients come from. Aerated pig and fish fat is the primary ingredient of cake mixes. It is made by compressing the corpses. Flour, the sweepings from factory floors, is just 5% of the total weight. It turns out this rancid flour is still the most expensive ingredient. I think I’ll be baking my own treats from now on.
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