Amazing invisible bookshelf

I walked into my room today and saw a stack of books floating in the air with no visible means of support.

The magic spell to make books float is "Boccaccio!" ^*

No lah, it's actually the Umbra Conceal bookshelf. The horizontal part goes inside the back cover of the bottom book, and you can see here that there are two small lips that hold the edge of the cover up (which is why the bottom book has to be a hardback).

It cost ten dollars on sale and was very easy to install, two screws only. I had to drill three pilot holes at the same latitude before I found a stud (wooden upright beam) though...it turned out that the slight ridge in the wall which I thought signified a stud, was probably a seam between two sheets of drywall.

Seriously, when I was younger I thought Americans were very strong because I would read in novels of a character punching a hole in a wall. Then I went on a Habitat for Humanity trip and discovered that American house walls are essentially made of half an inch of chalk between two sheets of thick paper.

I bought The Ruby Dice because I was on a Catherine Asaro kick. Another female SF author I'm trying out is Karen Traviss, second from the top. I've read a Star Wars novel by her which is about 40 years ABY (After the Battle of Yavin) and am really confused. The last thing in the Star Wars universe I've read was I, Jedi, which is only 11 ABY. Aside from my being out-of-date, Bloodlines is so-so. I'll have to see if Traviss is better with her own universes and characters.

George Lucas actually has a guy whose full-time job is managing continuity between the huge number of Star Wars films, novels, cartoons, computer games, online universes, etc. Therefore everything that's published with "Star Wars" on it is canon, unlike some other universes like Star Trek.

By the way, the Wookiepedia article on I, Jedi says Stackpole retconned some of the events in Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy Trilogy. Good, I hate Anderson. He's a hack. I once tried reading StarCraft novels and there was one by a Gabriel Mesta that was really awful...I had to struggle to finish it. I only found out after finishing the book that it was a pseudonym of Anderson's.

Also, have been reading way, WAY too much Lovecraft. I'll have to track down Neil Gaiman's parodies later. But, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a masterpiece as a dream-epic. Just that one novella rivals the breadth of Gaiman's The Sandman series. It's true what Lovecraft wrote in The Silver Key though. At least for me...I've stopped dreaming as much as I've gotten older. Life swamps you.

* Actually "boccaccio" is something that Richard Merrill, alias Mairelon the Magician, mutters while searching for the latch to a secret passage behind a book-case in someone's country house. His hireling - and later, protegee - Kim, being a street child and not classically educated, develops the impression that it's a spell that opens a magic door.

Random lists of things

Things I own or owned that are older than me:

• My mum's swimsuit (it was actually quite nice-looking)
• My dad's Bible (pocket-sized copy of the NIV)
• My friend David's mum's old bike (a Motobecane Nomade, mixte-frame road bike. The photo in the Wikipedia entry is mine, actually.)

Things I like:

• Skinny boys (must work on Steve!)
• Sharp knives (I have 14 bladed instruments in my tiny apartment at last count, ranging from a foot-long Filipino bolo to a #11 craft knife)
• Medium-sized dogs
• Cats except brachycephalic breeds (e.g. Persians, which look like they've been punched in the face)
• Rainy days
• Broccoli, green peas, Chinese/Napa cabbage, Chinese radish/daikon
• Boston Cream doughnuts
• Automatic microplate washers
• Watching animals interact without human intervention
• Lindt and Dove chocolates, and those fancy Guylian hazelnut praline seashells
• Fireworks of any type
• Lego
• Complex but gramatically well-structured sentences
• My immediate family and most of the Hwa cousins
• White mice
• Wensleydale cheese
• Char koay teow and Penang laksa
• Microwave ovens
• Evolutionary psychology
• Thick copper wire, like the kind in the solenoids of ceiling fans

Things I don't like:

• Indexed shifters on cheap bikes (because the "clicks" on the shifters don't line up properly with the gears)
• Running
• Pipettors that take weird-sized tips
• Mustard greens
• Toy breeds of dogs (especially since working at a vet clinic in college)
• UMNO politicians
• Girls/women who wear a lot of makeup and expect males to carry things for them
• Radical feminists
• Ultracentrifuges (because I'm scared the rotor will come off and fly through a brick wall)
• Cotton rats, because they bite and they're tough bastards to catch
• Oscillating fans
• Cheap chocolate with palm oil or other vegetable oils substituted for the cocoa butter
• Whiny accents, particularly Malaysian Chinese-school-educated and the US "Valley Girl"
• Powdered latex gloves
• People who are stupid because they're lazy and/or arrogant (people who are stupid because of innate skill level are fine, it's not their fault...and they often act more sensibly than the former type of stupidos)
• Chee cheong fun ("pig intestine noodles")

Food for lazy people

I tend to spend a fair chunk of my time at home cooking and doing the subsequent cleaning up. This is more because I'm inefficient, not because I'm a big gastrophile like my friend Nick. However, I do prefer to cook my own food when I can, even though it's only marginally cheaper than buying frozen prepackaged meals in this part of the world. That means I usually end up eating extremely un-fancy meals: usually rice with stir-fried veggies (always ALWAYS with garlic) and some kind of meat.

Whatever I cook has got to be straightforward and not take too much attention, not because I'm an incompetent cook - to quote Dr. Aiken, "If you can't cook you're not worth a damn as a biochemist" - but simply because I'm lazy. So, here are some quickie recipies for lazy people.

From me: pork souffle

1 large	egg
200g	ground pork
1 tsp	sesame oil
pinch (ok, 0.5g)	salt
1/8	large onion

Beat the egg in a bowl. Mix in the pork, sesame oil (for flavour; my mum puts it to add fat to the minced lean pork but seriously, you don't need it if you bought ground pork), and salt. Steam either on a metal rack placed over water in a covered wok, or if you're cooking rice, just chuck the bowl on top of the half-cooked rice. While it's steaming, chop the onion roughly (domestic violence!) and fry until brown. Sprinkle on top of pork/egg mixture. Mmm, porky, eggy, oniony comfort food.

From Angela: leche asada (translates loosely as "baked milk")

1 tin	condensed milk
1 small carton	heavy cream
1 tin volume (i.e. use the condensed milk tin)	regular milk
4	eggs

Mix everything together, pour into baking dish, bake at 425F for about 50 minutes. Makes a solid custard, quite sweet yet not too sugary.

An aside: Baked custard is super easy to make. It's the [misnamed] "boiled" variety that's so hard - you have to heat the pot very very gently - NOT boiled - otherwise the egg will coagulate instead of remaining suspended and cooking into a nice colloid. I always screw this up becuase I'm impatient.

From Aba: milk caramel - so easy it's almost idiotic

1 tin

condensed milk

Boil UNOPENED tin of condensed milk in a large saucepan full of water for 3 hours. Open tin, roll caramel into little balls.

---

Lotta new things in my life this month...new house, new boyfriend, new school, new lab, new computer...new wok!

It came with instructions on several ways to season a wok - something that my mum's never done at home - and I'm fairly amazed at how well the process works, even though I just used the stovetop seasoning method. The bottom is pretty much as nonstick as Teflon. I've decided to stop using Teflon-coated frying pans due to my tendency to burn stuff (usually a combination of overenthusiasm and laziness). With a steel wok, if the oil coating burns, you can scrub off the black bits and reseason.

I'm really curious as to the chemistry behind this...the layer of "seasoning", whatever it is, is bonded pretty well to the surface. It doesn't come off with dilute dish detergent.

One old thing that's still with me is my good friend the Xenomorph (21st birthday present to self - 21st birthday was very lonely). He's taking up abseiling as a hobby.