It's true- I do a lot of cooking. It's also true that, when it comes to cooking, I revel in the unique ingredients, methods, and tools. It is true that creativity can lead to epic failures but more often than not expanding your culinary horizons will take you one step closer to earning the coveted title gourmet. Here's a list of things that I've found to make cooking simply, well, better- healthier, more flavorful, and more fun...

Finally! argh... Ok- so here's the thing. Sometime last winter I decided that I wanted to do some fishing during the coming summer. It was something that I've dome in my past- when I was about 11 or 12 fishing off the various sea-walls on Selfridge but, even more memorably, those many fishing trips with my Dad that make for the best times of a young boy's life. Ok, so I never paid much attention to the actual fishing when I was younger, but I did enjoy the trips...
...and fast-forward to present day. It's a funny thing about fishing- it's not the catching of fish that's the best part- it's the possibility that this trip might be the good one, that this cast might be the one to land you the monster that you're sure is lurking, mostly unseen, a cast-length away from you...

I think that the fishing season at Stoney Creek is starting to mature somewhat. Instead of most of my previous hits, which I'm now pretty sure were just rocks snagged on retrieval, today actually saw me take a few good hits...

The very next batch of homebrew is now underway! Maybe I'm starting to get a good reputation for this, or maybe not, but this is the very first batch I've made that has people waiting to try it! That, in and of itself, it an exciting proposition. The variety: Cherry Wheat. This is the beer that I wanted to make for both the Cantaré party and the Renaissance Festival brewing competition but just didn't start in time. That's alright, though, because I'm just happy to share the fermented fruits of my labor with any family and friends...

Well, another year of the Cantaré Ensemble has passed. Before I go too much further, I want to take the time to thanks everyone involved for your uniquely irreplaceable contributions. It takes a whole lot of people to pull off what we do on a weekly basis and I am humbled to be in the presence of so many talented and dedicated individuals. I know that I've gone head-to-head with many of my fellow musicians over various little things in the last couple of years, so I would like to apologize if I've caused anyone undue grief.
I would also like to thank Paul for agreeing to host the end-of-year bash to his home once again this year. With a little luck, the weather will remain pleasant and no one will have to leave to tend to a fallen tree and an insurance claim (again). For the party last year, I made a special batch of homebrew- an Orange Wheat- which went over with solid reviews- a good review being 'seconds', not just pity-bottles. I had intended to follow that performance with a new signature batch for this year- a Cherry Wheat, but circumstances and the swift passage of time got the better of my ambitions. This is not to say that I'll come empty-handed! I've gone through my cellar and chosen a collection of beers which I feel should serve to enhance the celebration. In no particular order, here they are...

I'm about to embark on a new batch of homebrew and I want to take you along for the ride! I'll be documenting my entire process from start to finish so that you can follow along (with great interest, I'm sure!) or use this as a tutorial for your own homebrew projects....

If you're reading this article, then you're probably interested in trying homebrew for yourself. Fantastic! There are a few things that you'll need to learn, including some terminology, but I can assure you that it's really not that bad.
Before we can get started with the brewing process, let's take a look at some of the equipment that you'll need...

Posted by popular demand, here's my recipe for battered fried mushrooms. This is actually less of a recipe than just a list of suggestions with quantities and steps. As with just about all of my recipes, feel free to adjust pretty much any of the ingredient ratios as, to be honest, I just threw everything together one very fun evening...

This chickpea salad is a pretty standard Mediterranean-type of salad which is very healthy and extremely easy to make...

This recipe is going to be the next breakfast comfort food- I'm sure of it! It's very simple but makes use of several of the best comfort and soul food ingredients we've got- collard greens, bacon, eggs...

Here's my recipe for Dark Chocolate Chip Cherry Walnut Cookies. These cookies are an explosion of flavor and texture and can be made either moist and chewy or crisp...

Ricotta doesn't get a lot of credit. Having eaten store-bought ricotta most of my life, I can understand why- its mostly flavorless and rather grainy. That being said, my mother can make a mean lasagna with the tub-variety stuff! The convenience of the grocery store, much as it does for other foods, disguises the fact that ricotta is actually very easy to make yourself and tastes far better if you do...

I don't use pork very much. It's a staple food here and abroad but, unless it's coated in sugary sauces, I've always found it to be too dry for my tastes. As much as I like those sugary sauces, you know deep down that they really aren't any good for you. They are almost universally filled with little more than food coloring, high-fructose corn syrup, salt, and "spices"....

This recipe is an amazingly easy Italian-inspired stir fry dish with a bit of a kick from the chilies. It's not overly spicy but rather just spicy enough to make you take your time when you enjoy it...

Ok- I like mustard. A lot. It is one of the extremely under-rated condiments which, given its ubiquity, seems surprising. Unlike most foods I'm fanatical about, I'm very happy to squeeze Plotchman's Yellow Mustard on my sandwich as I am to spread the fanciest mustard onto sauerbraten.
For those of you who may be new to the idea that products can be made, not just bought, homemade mustard is an excellent gateway project. It requires no cooking, easy to find ingredients, can be made in just a few minutes, and is infinitely extensible. The recipe here is for a basic spicy brown mustard. It has a slightly horseradish-y tasteand is fantastic with strong meats like ham...

You know how it works: the sign-up process for a service is remarkably painless and quick; the process to cancel is much more difficult. I've had NetZero for many years as a dial-up Internet Service Provider (ISP). I signed up many years ago- well before I moved into my current residence. At the time, I simply needed a service provider and dial-up was my only option (DSL, while gaining ubiquity, hadn't yet made it into my home and I, a poor college student, could only afford the $10/month fees that many dial-up ISPs offered). I was happy with the service- in my experience the billing was accurate, the perceived connection stability and speed was more than sufficient- sufficient enough for dial-up, at any rate. All in all, I would recommend NetZero to anyone who needs a simple dial-up ISP account and nothing more.

The truth, though, is that I haven't actually connected into the web via my netZero service in something like three years. Just like going to the dentist and cleaning the basement, I've been meaning to cancel for some time now but just never got around to doing it- until today...

Ok, software companies. Why are you trying so hard to get me to install your 'free' software? It's one thing to send me lots of emails about your other products when I have to go online and register your 'free' products. I can live with that (although I'd rather not). It's bad enough when the checkbox to receive "emails from someSuch company" is prechecked. In my experience, though, fewer and fewer companies are doing this little trick...

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MooTools 2 Auto-Suggest

Auto Suggest for MooTools is now on SourceForge! Project tracking, feature requests, bug tracking, etc. can all be seen on the project's homepage: https://sourceforge.net/projects/autosuggestform/


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Here's a nifty little tool that you can use to help calculate your expenses:
PaycheckCalculator^Beta

This tool will allow you to enter your expenses and compare these expenses to the paychecks you receive. It is useful in numerous cases, especially for trying to track down where all of your money went every month :) and evaluating possible salary offers ("is this salary really enough?").
If you like it, let the world know below!

Object-oriented languages are great, aren't they? It does get tiring, though, writing all of those method stubs for the getter / setter methods for object member variables. In keeping with Larry Wall's 1^st virtue of a programmer, I've created the Getter & Setter Generator. You can simply enter a white-space delineated list of member variable names and the tool will generate the method stubs for the getter and setter methods for these items. At present, only PHP is supported but additional languages will be added as I find a need to add additional languages.

...and for the uninitiated, Larry Wall's 3 virtues of a programmer should be memorized...

Have you ever needed to compute the hash of a string? Perhaps you were looking for a good random sequence of characters to generate a password? This tool is here to help! With the Hash Generator you can take advantage of PHP's built-in hashing functionality. As you type characters into the text box, the hash of this string using numerous algorithms is returned and displayed below.
Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Leave a comment below!

PHP ORM consists of two components which work together to streamline the database connection portion of your web site development. PHP ORM relies on PDO and a collection of classes which encapsulate and simplify tedious database connection details such as logon credentials, query result set handling, error handling, and object-relational mapping. The components of PHP ORM (database connections & object-relational mapping) were designed to be used together but it is also possible and very easy to utilize the database connection portion alone.

Details about this framework can be viewed at: http://phporm.thewittyrejoinder.com/
Current Status: Early Beta (0.0.1)
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Many CRUD applications display long lists of search results- perhaps showing all rows in a table. Pagination, or splitting the search results into pages, is a great way to assist users so that they don't get a mile-long list of items and saves database processing power, too! Here is a simple method for paginating search results...

Here is a simple function to recursively analyze a given directory and print hyperlinks to all of the files in each directory. Directory names are printed but not hyperlinked.
<?php /** * This function recursively reads through a directory and prints hyperlinks to the files in it and in all subdirectories * example: To print all contents in the current directory, use: <?php read_directory('.'); ?> * @param $directory string the relative path to the directory to search * @param $delim string a string to be printed to the left of each directory and file. * @param $repeat integer the number of times to repeat $delim at each directory level * @param $depth used only in recursive function calls * */ <?php function read_directory($directory, $delim = '-', $repeat = 5, $depth = 0){ if ($handle = opendir($directory)) { while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) { if ($file != '.' && $file != '..') { $path = $directory . '/' . $file; if(is_dir($path)){ echo '' . str_repeat($delim,$depth * $repeat) . '' . $file . "/<br />\r\n"; read_directory($path, $delim,$repeat, $depth + 1); } else { echo str_repeat($delim,$depth * 5) . '<a href="' . $path . ' ">' . $file . "</a><br />\r\n"; } } } closedir($handle); } } ?>
This function should work on both *nix and Windows hosts.

Here's a short script which can be used to generate dynamic menus and change the CSS style of a given menu element based on the current page. New elements can be added to the navigation menu by adding them to the $menu array; this array can be easily generated via database calls or configuration files. When generating the menu, a different class name will be set for that menu item corresponding to the current page. This isn't a fool-proof method and works best for small sites with simple navigation (i.e., every page has a navigation link).
<?php $menu = array(); $menu['Home'] = 'index.php'; $menu['News & Events'] = 'newsAndEvents.php'; $menu['Photos'] = 'photos.php'; $menu['Comments'] = 'comments.php'; ?> <ul> <?php $i = 0; foreach ($menu as $key => $value) { ?> <li class="menu_item<?php echo(strripos($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'],$value) > 0 ? '_highlighted':'') ?>" id="header_<?php echo $i++ ?>"> <a href="<?php echo $value; ?>" class="header"><?php echo $key; ?></a> </li> <?php }?> </ul>