mockriot

Some sort of stir fry sauce

I came up with this sauce for a stir fry the other day using what I had in the house.  It was quite tasty, so I thought I’d share.

Just mix together the following:

1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tsp. brown sugar
1/4 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp. sesame oil
1/4 tsp. lemon juice
1 tbsp. corn starch
1/4 tsp. salt
pinch black pepper

You can use this sauce over whatever you want to stir fry.  When I made this, I used a mixture of veggies: asparagus, snap peas, carrots, yellow onion, and yellow pepper.  I chopped up the vegatables into bite sized pieces stir fried them in peanut oil in a wok. I poured the sauce over everything at the end and cooked a few minutes more.

Creamy Wild Rice and Barley Stew

I made up this recipe tonight for dinner, and it came out well, so I thought I’d share. Feel free to let me know how it went to suggest any changes.

1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup pearl barley
1 cup long grain and wild rice
4 cups vegetable or chicken broth
2 cups water
1 vegetable or chicken bullion cube
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 tbsp. dried parsley
1 tsp. dried basil
1/2 tsp. hot pepper flakes
salt and pepper

Sauté onion and garlic in olive oil or butter until translucent.  Add barley and cook for 1 minute.  Add broth, water, bullion cube, cream of mushroom soup, rice, parsley, basil, and pepper flakes.  Bring to boil and stir to combine.  Reduce heat and let simmer for 25 minutes, stirring occasionally (or until rice and barley is cooked).  The soup will reduce and get very thick, so if it reduces too quickly, you can add more water (or a little bit of milk).  Salt and pepper to taste.

(Note: The only wild rice my supermarket sold was in a long grain and wild rice mix kind of like rice pilaf.  I just used that and tossed the seasoning packet.)

TigerLaunch is cool

A few days ago I posted about my experiences with my new(ish) Mac.  I wrote a long list of things I really dig about it, and things I am not so keen on.

One of the things I was less than thrilled about is that there is no easy way to access all of your applications.  Browsing the Apps folder is clumsy, and the Dock quickly gets overcrowded. (I especially don’t want launch icons cluttering the Dock for applications I only use once every few days or so, such as Skype or VLC or iDVD or Transmission.  I want my Dock reserved for the applications I use every day: Thunderbird, Vienna, TextMate, Firefox, Photoshop, Adium, Preview, Word, etc.)

A lot of people suggested that I use QuickSilver, which is a text-based app launcher.  However, instead I ended up giving TigerLaunch a try.  TigerLaunch comes from the NewsGator folks and adds an editable applications menu at the top of the screen near the clock. Perfect!  Just what I need.

QuickSilver seemed like overkill. I don’t need a way to more quickly launch apps — the Dock works fine for my needs since once I have my core set up apps open I generally leave them open all day.  What I needed was a way to more quickly find and launch the apps that I only use once in awhile. TigerLaunch fits the bill.

Now, my only gripe — TigerLaunch has no built in option to have it launch automatically on startup.  I am sure there must be a way to tell OS X which programs to launch when the computer starts up, but that’s not something I know how to do.  Anyone out there have an idea?

Update: Kelli showed me how to do it. :) Thanks, Kelli!

My Mac

I’m hesitant to call myself a “Mac convert” — I used Macs when I was film school at Ithaca College and was the “support guy” in the Mac lab at the Unversity of Rhode Island, plus I have not developed any sort of fanboyism or brand loyalty to Apple.  I did, however, recently purchase my first Mac.  I early September I bought a Macbook (a plain vanilla white one with an extra gig of RAM, a couple of weeks before the refresh).  Now that its been a couple of months I thought I’d put a few impressions down on paper.

I am willing to admit that I really like the Macbook — I am not willing to say I am a Mac users for life.  I fully intend to check out Windows 7 for my next laptop, and from reading early reports I’m pretty excited about it.

Things I love about my Mac

1. It wakes up from sleep mode almost instantly.  Vista and XP — not so much.  Coming from the PC world I am used to having to wait 30-60 seconds for my PC to rebuild the desktop from saved data and then about 15 seconds to connect to wifi.  With my Mac, as soon as I open it, it wakes up from sleep mode in an instant, and connects to the nearest wifi network in just a few seconds more.
2. Spaces. I only just found out about this feature, which I guess comes from Linux.  I haven’t had a chance to use it too much, but what I have done has been very useful.
3. Hot corners.  As nice as alt+tab (er cmd+tab) is for switching windows, I am finding that the show and hide windows hot corners are great.  Use them all the time and miss them when on Windows.
4. Battery life and wifi.  This isn’t Mac specific, but compared to the Sony laptop I was using, my new MacBook has a much better time getting (and staying) connected to weak conference wifi and has awesome battery life (about 3.5h on average — compared to 1.5h on the Sony).  That was a godsend at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September.
5. Cool software.  There is definitely some cool Mac only software (like Scrivener and Textmate) that Windows users miss out on.
6. MagSafe power connector.  That really is quite nice.
7. Two finger scroll.  Also really cool.  And I am guessing that the multi-touch on the new Mac laptops is also pretty awesome, but I haven’t had the chance to duck into the local Apple store to check it out (the mall is really crowded this time of year and no fun to be in).

Things that I don’t like so much about my Mac

1. No Start button. There’s no easy access to all your applications on the Mac.  The dock gets cluttered really quickly if you add too much to it, and accessing the Apps folder isn’t quick.  Yeah, I guess I could add an icon for the Apps folder to the Dock — but that’s messy.  The Start menu is very handy and easy to miss when you don’t have one.
2. Dock gets in the way. I find myself accidentally clicking on icons on the doc and opening programs I don’t mean to open all the time.  Maybe this is a learning curve thing — just training my brain not to click on that side of the screen until I am sure what I am clicking on — but that doesn’t happen when you launch programs from the Start menu.  I didn’t happen with the Quick Launch bar either, since windows never occupied the same space as the task bar, as they can with the Dock.  The same accidental activation thing happens with hot corners as well — thankfully, their use out weighs that annoyance.
3. Can only resize windows from the corner.  Really, that gets annoying, though it’s a very minor issue.
4. Not enough cool software.  Yeah, there are some great Mac-only programs I wish I had on windows, but also some great Windows only programs I wish I had on Mac.  I still haven’t found a feed reader to replace FeedDemon (NetNewsWire sucks, trust me).  Right now I am using Vienna, but it’s not as good.  I have Parallels installed, and it is okay for occasional use, but was too much of a pain in the ass to get working (i.e., getting links in FeedDemon on Windows to open in Firefox on Mac consistently, or getting images saved in a graphics editor on Windows to appear on the desktop on Mac).
5. On the topic of software, Word 2008 on Mac is nowhere near as nice as Word 2007 on Windows. And Excel is barely usable.  Good thing I have a couple of Windows machines and Office on all my computers.
6. Hovering the mouse over images doesn’t give information about them.  Another minor one, but something I do miss from Windows.
7. No true Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn keys on the MacBook = stupid.
8. Case scratches if you look at it funny.  Seriously, what are these things made of, butter?  I guess this has been fixed with the newer aluminum model, but my previous generation MacBook was covered in scratches almost as soon as I got it home.
9. Less of a minor deal: one button is not as good as two buttons.  Why can’t Apple learn that?  I miss my right button.  Two fingers + click is not the same thing.  Cmd + click is not the same as middle click.   They’re usable, and I am used to them, but it’s not the same, and not as good.
10. Lack of “Show Desktop” button.  The hot corners thing to hide windows is, as I said, awesome.  But it just slides the windows off to the side. Sometimes I want to minimize all windows, so then I can easily maximize a single window and interact with it and the desktop (like drag files between a folder and the desktop).  I haven’t found an easy way to minimize all windows on a Mac (and without grouping on the Dock as there is on the taskbar, I am not sure I would always want to!).  Instead, the best solution I have found is to use Spaces and open another desktop and just open the windows I need over there.

There are are probably other pros/cons that I am just not thinking of right now, but that’s a quick list.

Suffice it to say: I am happy with my new Mac, but certainly not a “convert” yet. :)