The Woman in the Window (1944) was quite good, very noir. I see
there's a new film of the same name, but it's not a remake. The
shortbread biscuits went alright. I broke my electric beater,
possibly mis-use, or maybe just aging 50 year old plastic (it looks
pretty 70s - suits the rest of the kitchen actually) - one of the
beater bits came off the shaft. Should be easy to fix with some
epoxy anyway. The biscuits themselves turned out quite nice. They
took twice as long in the oven as the recipe said though, maybe
they were using one of those fan-forced ovens, although I'm not
really sure what effect those are supposed to have anyway. The
mechanical oven timer turned out to be broken, and the light, but
it heats up so that's all you need, and the scrap sheet metal bits
made good enough baking trays, after I spent ages washing all the
bird poo off them.
In terms of cost, they are a fair bit cheaper to make by weight
than buying the biscuits available now, though probably not much
cheaper than the discount ones I used to buy. The rolling out seems
overly laborious, although my using a cardboard tube wrapped in
baking paper as a rolling pin is no doubt part of the trouble
there. I'm trying to work out a way to use a mould, but the
consistency probably won't suit that very well.
I wrote a post a few days ago but it ended up a bit too personal.
It was in fact all about my latest business plans and failures, and
somehow that is truely the most personal and emotive thing I can
write about these days. That's a sad personal fact in itself. In
fact it's probably not so much that I care too much about making
money, but I just don't care that much about everything else. Then
there are times like tonight when I really don't care about any of
it.
In a way there's nothing more lonely than telling all the world
your deepest troubles anyway. Plus this phlog thing has me wondering
sometimes whether I'm just playing a silly game of stacking words
together. Billions of humans all stringing the same words in
sequence, what's the point of it all? Does anyone ever really say
anything, or is it just jibberish to be read by other minds that
make it mean whatever they desire? Words don't need to have
meaning. "I love grapefruit" can just as easily mean "I hate
penguins", and if you want it to mean one thing, then what matter
is it to anyone else either way?
I did discover that some Chinese bloke is making replacement
motherboards for old Thinkpads, so I've added info on that at the
end of my PiMoBo idea in the Ideas section. They're not for Pi
compute modules but actual current-model x86 processors and
peripherals, which is impressive, though as noted there not really
the sort of thing I was thinking of myself.
There's also some bits of an American tourist guide to the
"Night-Life and Shopping" of Hong Kong in 1971, over in the History
Snippets section. I think it's facinating. Really.
