De File

I've used Live Journal in my teaching, with varying degrees of success, over the past three years. But I often wished for software that would allow me to create a closed social network without resorting to the whole friends-only approach, which some of my students inevitably failed to mater. Do any of you know about Elgg? It sounds promising, though I probably lack the skills to make it work without technological assistance. I'm wondering, for example, whether it might be possible to run an interactive publication with this sort of software.

I'm going to do something I almost never do: ask for help. I was excited to be able to embed non-YouTube video material in my entries, but realized that the code I'd copied for my entry of earlier today was making the Westinghouse refrigerator infomercial play every time it was loaded. And that's not cool for "Friends" pages.

I've put the video behind the cut for now. But I don't like to use LJ cuts unless an entry is really long. Actually, I don't like to do LJ cuts period. What I'd rather do for circumstances like this is find a way to modify the embedding code so that it doesn't play unless you click first, a la YouTube clips embedded within LJ entries. Here's my question. Do any of you with more coding experience than I have -- it has been a long time since I was messing around with Modula-2 -- know how to realize this goal? I'll present the code I used earlier today, taken straight from the Internet Archive:

I've never seen this "lj-embed" tag before. The only thing I know about FlowPlayer is that it's the one that the Internet Archive uses, presumably because it's open-source. Anyway, I'd greatly appreciate any assistance you can provide. In the interim, if you see an LJ cut on one of my entries, it will most likely have video embedded behing it.

Given pieces of identical size, it takes considerably longer to reheat sea bass than salmon in the microwave. Also, the former is less likely to acquire an unpleasantly fishy odor.

I can't get my Mail program to open at work. It was working fine. Then I started to get this error message:

I'm not sure what this means. My hard drive has nearly 66 gigabytes of free space. My home folder contains 18.73 gigabytes, but seems to be working without a hitch with the rest of my applications. Has anyone out there experienced this problem before?

In an effort to reign in spending and reduce the amount we waste, I've been trying to do a better job of eating what we already have instead of buying new comestibles or going out. Sometimes, though, what we have is not in optimal condition. For example, we had some TJ's greens that, while not hopelessly slimy, were well on their way to lassitude.

In the summer I'd put them out for the tortoises. At this time of year, though, I would once have simply tossed them out. I mean, who wants uncrisp lettuce? But then it struck me. Why not treat the greens the same way that I'd treat "real" greens of the Southern sort?

I washed them off, sorted out the leaves that were too far gone, and heated them in a non-stick pan until they were reduced to a heap of limpness. Then I got out the cast-iron pan and started heating it on low. I then tossed in a cut-up onion and two turkey andouille sausages sliced into rounds, waited until the edges of the onion pieces started to brown, added a little olive oil and a couple frozen Israeli garlic cubes -- also from TJ's -- and simmered the mixture until the onion pieces started to separate into transparent scallops.

At this point, I poured in a little white wine to deglaze the pan, then let most of the liquid evaporate before adding the greens. While the cast-iron pan continued simmering, I used the non-stick pan to fry up some sunny-side up eggs. When the yolks were firm enough on top to permit me to transfer the eggs to my plate without having the still runny interior spill out, I scooped the greens-sausage-and-onion mixture out of the cast-iron pan and slid the eggs on top.

The result was much better than I'd expected. And I was expecting the dish to be pretty good based on smell alone. The greens had enough residual bitterness to taste like "real" greens. The andouille and onions were the perfect flavor partners. And the yolks, once punctured, seeped into the bed of dark pseudo-Southern goodness with aplomb. Total cost? About $5. But when you figure that I would have thrown the greens out otherwise, it feels like a bigger savings.