(no subject)

[which_chick]

Dinner this evening -- You know, Livejournal and Blogspot and whatever have created a nation of Pepys... the interesting things about Pepys were that he kept a pretty regular journal AND that it was one of the very few day-by-day records of the times. It was a window inot the small history of London from 1659-1669, a long and fairly detailed window into the past.

Big history, people know about that. It gets recorded and there really aren't that many Look on my works, ye mighty folk around the place. If you were Big History (tm), you probably made it into the books without Pepys. The stuff that used to get lost was the day-to-day crap of how people actually lived, and Pepys did that. Now, we've got a nation of Pepys, each telling what they had for dinner and who they beat at cards.

I'm happy to do my part.



Dinner this evening was instant-pickles (half a cuke, quartered lengthwise, deseeded, and sliced, put into sugar and cider vinegar) followed by half an acorn squash roasted in the oven and topped with crispy roasted acorn squash seeds. Yum. There may be popcorn later, if I am really good and make decent progress on the HoHI.

Comments

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

Wait, how long does it need to sit in there before becoming a pickle?

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I let it sit just long enough for the sugar to dissolve and not-be-gritty. These aren't real pickles (which take usually seven days or so), they are instant-pickles, which are a different breed of cat.

Cukes with vinegar-n-sugar are an esteemed local ethnic food item. You can also do 'em in sort of a sour cream sauce, with onions, but I like them better in vinegar-n-sugar.

Some people feel that instant-pickles are better having been salted (to wilt) and having sitten in the vinegar-n-sugar stuff for like an hour. I like mine crunchy so I don't salt and I eat 'em right away as soon as the sugar is no longer gritty.

It might help if you think of this as "sweet and sour cucumber salad" instead of "instant-pickles".

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

(Other people who eat cukes in vinegar-n-sugar, please back me up here that this is a real food item and that you've eaten it.)

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

Ah. I was hoping this was some magic way of making your own pickles that I had never heard of.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

My cousin, Sector_R's mother always makes them in our family.

We used to eat them at every family event.

[sector-r.livejournal.com]

The lucky thing is that we still have Pepy's writings because they were written on paper which--although burnable, fragile, and edible by vermin--can survive for centuries if left undisturbed.

However, the tragedy is that all this electronic journaling will just go *poof* when the New Internet Hotness appears (as it inevitably will) and LJ finally pulls the plug on this site.

This is the knowledge that dwells on my packrat mind. I keep around a lot of physical paperwork that has no immediate use with the rationalization that it might someday have new value to someone.

I'd hazard a guess that most electronic records are never backed up and are therefore just one hard drive crash away from being lost forever. Even the people who've lost everything once in a hard drive crash still never seem to back up their new information.

backups

[ardvaark99999.livejournal.com]

I'm paranoid about backups. Partly because nothing works. Got some old backups of letters written in Wordperfect 5.1 circa 1990? Good luck using them.

I have a ton of office work that gets backed up from our RAID 5 server with hot swaps (and two spare drives sitting on top of it) onto a raided USB hard drive. The backups happen every night via a nifty little utility. Every so and when, the server is backed up to a USB drive that is stored off site in a safe deposit box. When the safe deposit box is opened to put in the USB drive, the other USB drive comes out for use, so there's always one at the safe deposit box with at least all our data from 2 weeks ago (at worst).

My worst issue is with stuff at home from digital cameras and the like. I'm settling on having books made of the best of it (lulu.com or something similar) but it's exposed to hard drive failure or house fire even though there are multiple copies at home on USB drives and computers.

I suspect that I am at the fringe of this and that many SOHO places would be in lots of trouble if the wrong two hard drives fail. I know I learned that the hard way when I put off fix0ring a bad drive in a a RAID 5 array precisely 2 days too long.

[ksleet.livejournal.com]

I assume you've seen this (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)?

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Yep. That's one of the things that got me to thinking about LJ and what I post there. It's also one of the sites I went to to check data and such. My LJ posts are carefully edited and drafted and only contain one to three typographical errors of the bloody obvious sort...

I'm all about the kwalidy, here.