Quinoa, keeenwah.

As part of my recent dairy-free kick, and wanting to expand my diet a bit so that I have more options, I picked up some quinoa recently.

A couple of things about quinoa:
- It's gluten-free
- It's a complete protein source, and very high in protein for a grain
- Well, actually, it's a seed, I think, not a grain
- Anyway, it keeps well after being cooked. A week or so in the fridge.
- It's low-GI, although I don't yet know if it's diabetic-friendly
- It comes in different colours: black, white and red; I have red
- It's as versatile as rice or couscous
- It's one of those trendy 'superfoods' which means it's a lot easier to get a hold of now than it was 2 years ago.

To cook it, it's basically the same as rice. Add 2 parts liquid to 1 part quinoa, set to gentle heat, cook for about half an hour, you're done. Easy as. Oh, except the important part: soak or rinse thoroughly (or, hell, both) before cooking. There's a coating that doesn't taste very nice that you want to get rid of. So the internet tells me, at any rate.

Anyway, so far I've done two things with it.

First thing was to make up a fairly plain 'savoury' style. 1 cup quinoa, 2 cups vege stock, a bay leaf, a shake of random spices (cumin, tumeric, chilli, pepper). I had some of this as a lunch, by itself. Man, was it filling. Tasty; the quinoa itself is very mildly flavoured, unlike, say, amaranth (ew). It is also a very textured food - chewy and interesting in the mouth, much more so than rice or couscous. About the closest would be perfectly al dente pasta, but made as it is of smaller pieces, it's not the same at all (which is not a bad thing). I'd say maybe 1/4 cup would have been enough for lunch food, easily.

Based on this experiment, flavoured appropriately, I think it would do well with just about anything that has a liquid component - thai and indian curries, italian sauces (especially tomato-based), stews, casseroles, tinned tuna, that sort of thing.

The second experiment I've conducted is using the cooked leftover quinoa to make a griddle cake, as a substrate for my bacon and eggs, instead of bread. I must say, the results are ... well, not so great. I should probably have looked up some sort of fritter or pancake recipe first, instead of just mixing with egg and spices and whacking it into the pan any old how and hoping. Don't get me wrong, here; it tastes great, the flavours mix well, but it's not holding together very well. Scooping it up with a fork wasn't what I had in mind. On the bright side, this is the perfect excuse to experiment more, and get it right. Hmm ... I wonder what it would taste like mixed in with scrambled eggs?

Other experiments on the horizon: using quinoa to give a bit more texture to meatballs and pies. Making a porridge or congee equivalent, both sweet and savoury. Some form of salad. I'm curious to see how it would work in biscuits, bread, and muffins.

Money, damn money

Sigh.

I'm starting to resent the thought of going back to work. I know that once I'm in the groove, doing new things, learning stuff, getting along ... it'll be fine. But right now, going through the job-search process is just soulcrushing.

On top of that, is that I've just gotten into the swing of things with uni. I feel comfortable with my studies, keeping up with classes, doing assignments, etc. well, I would, if I didn't spend so much time being depressed about finding work. As I write this entry, I have a half-hour overdue assignment I should be writing. Oh, and I should be brushing up on my (very rusty, unused since last year) programming skills, so I don't totally screw up my interview on Thursday. The day before I move house. Two days before the next assignment is due. Oh, and an online exam I haven't even looked at the course material for.

It's a bit difficult to be cheerful just now. I'm trying. And not succeeding too well.

Swings and Roundabouts

Life's going well. Kind of. Sort of. Well, at least it's been very interesting.

I'm currently looking for work - full-time, part-time, whatever. Tech would be good, or fine food and wine.

The reason why?

We want to move house, as the lease is up. Which takes money. So it goes.

On the other hand, uni is going brilliantly. I'm in the middle of midsemester assessment, so there's a bit of stress, but nothing too horribly major. I'm looking forward to a few days up in toowomba doing the pracs for chemistry and biology ... well, chemistry, and hoping that biology isn't too bad.

Overall? I'm certainly feeling challenged, but that's not a bad thing. Hopefully I can land a job I can be happy in, even if I have to drop back to part-time study.

A change in direction

After the last year, with all its ups and downs (which I didn't blog about), I've decided to make a change in the direction I'm going.

I've enrolled in a new degree - Bachelor of Technology (Wine), studying externally from USQ. It's a bit of a change - but well, organic chemistry was my second love after computing, and maybe one day I'll be able to do some really interesting computational science R&D with wines.

In the meantime, I'm going to do my best to enjoy being a fulltime student again, and try and balance myself a little more.

Listening List

I've recently been able to use my pretty purple ipod nano, and I've started listening to podcasts. Currently on my listening list are:
- rails envy podcast
- pragmatic programmers podcast
- ruby on rails podcast

I'm looking for more things to listen to - I'm interested in minimalist design (of homes as well as code), languages (python, haskell and ruby primarily), coding best practices, books, wine, coffee and tea. Suggestions anyone?

ruby on rails brisbane brigade meetup

So I made it to the Brisbane Ruby on Rails Brigade meetup.

Talks for tonight and notes:
- Widgy by Flexa (sponsoring this meetup)
Javascript widgeting framework
Make doing interfaces easier, automate a lot of the coding involved. For eg, ajax uploader, dynamic data form widget.
Doesn't work well under IE, fine under firefox.
Data forms take a JSON object; properties are top-level entities. Makes referencing very easy.
Looking to open source soon, and looking for developers to volunteer to work on it.
http://flexa.com.au
http://flexaonline.org
facebook group: "Flexa"

A side note: apparently I'm not at #rorobne, but at #brrb. Learn something new every day, I guess.


- Intro HTML5 & CSS3 by Bo
HTML5 - Being drafted by W3C. Semantic and clean markup. New elements such as section, article, header, footer, nav, time, figure, audio, video.
Lots of new APIs for interactivity.
Browser-based validation.
CSS3 - More selectors. Media queries - context sensitive rules (eg, auto-mobile column breakdown). Multiple background images, rounded images, and multiple column flowing content.
(DrNic is That Guy who trolls and heckles in meetings).
HTML4: What's wrong with it? - It isn't semantic. Classes being used as style elements instead of descriptive elements. You can do it cleanly, but most people don't.
Semantic web is a lot easier to work with both as a user and a developer. Browsers can display information contextually. Graceful degradation of elements such as email, url, and date to text.
Good resource at http://camendesign.com

Damn. I'm going to have to learn HTML4 properly now.

- sort_by by Ryan
Apparently, this talk is a biblical epic.
Used for sorting tables. Hooks into will_paginate. Simple api, sensible defaults. Patches welcome.

- Javascript Testing by DrNic
Intro of cord wrestling.
Unit testing for javascript that is easy. Plugin by name of 'blue-ridge'. http://github.com/relavence/blue-ridge .
Rails generators, screwunit, and rake task for headless testing (without using a browser). Reproduction of errors should be a lot easier (eg, for IE errors). Quick demo of doing validation of a form prior to post. Must tell the guys at work about this. We use waaaaaaaaaay too much js and have waaaaaaaay too few tests.

- make_resourceful by Alan
Attempts to solve the non-DRY of restful methods which are basically empty. Interesting. Will have to look at that too.

- FutureRuby by DrNic
Will have to google this. Heroku mentioned, for deployment from git. He should write a blog post about it, I don't quite follow.

Running out of battery, oh no! May have to do a follow-up post after I get home.

- web based iphone by Nathan
Some quick tricks to scale your website nicely for display in iphone, including rotating.

- bundle updates by Greg
cd to bundles, loops through bundles, does .git, or .svn. He's been told to make a gist.

.... no battery left! Beer and food to come.

BarCamp 3: The Search for Flock

BarCamp Brisbane 3 was held on Saturday, 18th July.

Things about the day:

- The venue was good - having a variety of areas to have different clumps of people with reasonable sound isolation was good.
- The DIY whiteboard of post-it notes and butcher's paper was awesome.

Sessions:
On startups - examples of opposite methods was very interesting. Traditional vs http://upstarta.biz . Lawyers and when to get them involved, and how to work with them. How to analyse your potential product from a target-market PoV. Git basics.

People:
So many awesome shiny people! It was good to see many people I haven't had a chance to see since RailsCamp5. Also, meeting new people was very good - the lightning networking sessions were especially good for that.

Ideas:
Upstarta - non-traditional startups, which operate on a $0 budget, no VC, and have a very different approach to becoming a going concern. Starting up a group to share more ideas, methods, and perhaps incubate a few along these lines. Drop me a line if you're interested in attending.
RailsRumble - in a team, looking forward to the competition! Wonder if I can get rockstar to sponsor my team?
Lightning networking - perhaps doing this as a BoF at OSDC, or as a lunch/morning tea/short break feature activity. Will have to see if that flies with the organisers.

Many thanks to the organisers for putting together such an awesome event. I'll be sure to attend the next one.