April 2005 Archives

I love Chinese food. I love rice casserole with stinky dried fish. I love roasted duck. I love steamed fish with scallions and ginger. I love beef with sour melon. I love noodles with just about anything in it. I especially love dim sum(although I can do without the chicken feet, sorry...but I am starting to eat tripe).

However, I think I have some kind of weird mental block with cooking and eating Chinese food. I don't know what it is, but it's extremely difficult to motivate myself to make any kind of stir fry or soup or whatever. Occasionally I'll buy some greens from Chinatown, or frozen dumplings, but that doesn't really count. I like cooking. But I can't choose to make Chinese food in my house on a regular basis, and it's not like it's any more diffcult to make it than any other cuisine. If you asked me how to make stir-fried noodles, I'd just give you a blank stare.

Maybe it's the fear of messing it up - like I have my grandparents and parents invisibly watching me over my shoulder, and I have all that to live up to. You'd think that it would be easier to cook Chinese food, considering that my grandfather owned a Chinese restaurant and would chop up lobsters for us on Saturday nights when I was a kid. My parents fed Chinese food to me and my sisters while we were growing up - even when we complained about not getting pizza, and they made us black bean pork instead.

Maybe it's the nostalgia. It just doesn't feel right to eat Chinese food without my family. Even when I go out, I'll choose just about any other Asian cuisine over Chinese any day. I only have a vague idea of which restaurants are good in Chinatown, and I haven't done much exploring. And it seems like I only go for dim sum when another family member is present.

Maybe I don't appreciate it as much as I should. Although, as a child, I disliked most of the food that I listed at the beginning, so at least it's a step. Perhaps because I've been eating this food for all my life, it's hard to get perspective on it. Like I'm too close, and it's not something that I think I desire. I was introduced to other Asian cuisines (Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese) much later in life, in college. It was something new, exotic. So I think my relationship to those kinds of foods is different.

Or maybe it's that I'm afraid that whatever Chinese food I'll have will never live up to my expectations. It'll never compare to the memories from my childhood, of what those foods were like. Or maybe they just remind me too much of my childhood - that I rejected these foods in the first place, and I'm just feeling too much guilt.

Perhaps I'm analyzing this way too much.

So for the past month or so I've been in search of a content management system, and it's been driving me up a wall. I've been trawling forums, checking out demos, reading documentation, examining comments, and generally making my head spin with too much information. The idea is to put together a portfolio site for a group of artists that I'm a part of, to show what we've done, plus have a private forum for discussions. I want everyone to be responsible for uploading their own images, with descriptions for their work.

I swear that there is nothing out there that meets my requirements, or at least in a form that won't take weeks worth of work to get it to do what i need it to do (I don't have the time to play Administrator all day), or not confuse the hell out of the people that will be using it.

I know what my requirements are, and I feel like so many people out there are looking for the same thing. Is it that difficult to have

1. A system that's XHTML compliant and uses CSS for layout?


2. an EASY interface for novice users, like users who have no idea what HTML is or does, or even really care what it is? (So no copying of image tags or any such things...uploading images through a web interface can already be a problem)


3. a simple, integrated image gallery? (i.e., ONE LOGIN FOR ALL FUNCTIONS)


4. a simple integrated forum?


5. the ability to separate private from public sections? (i.e., forums that you would only see when you're logged in)


6. Little or no cost? (open source, baby)

I've been looking at blogging-type systems, and they seem to have some advantages. I feel like the new version of Movable Type might be able to do the job, also as I'm familiar with using it so the learning curve would be smaller, but I don't have $100 right now to plunk down (there are 11 authors). I would love to lean towards Wordpress or Textpattern, their strong point seems to be the interface and the ease of modifying the templates, but image support is poor without some kind of plugin. I don't want to deal with a Coppermine plugin, it seems to defeat the purpose of choosing a system that's known for clean XHTML and CSS. Plus there's no native forum, although supposedly there's a plugin for PunBB in Textpattern.

I've also been looking at full-blown portals, such as PHPWebsite, e107, Mambo, etc. And I've decided that they are completely BLOATED. ugh. They have so much extra crap (do i really need to take a poll of how my socks smelled yesterday?) that is useless, and I can't stand the boxy layout. And it seems almost impossible to eliminate all of those useless bits and get away from a boxy layout without spending, oh, five hundred hours trying to decipher how exactly the whole damned interface works.

Sorry about this rant, but it's been bugging me for weeks. Is there really nothing in between that will work?

So I'm starting to use this little app called Flickr to upload my photos. Thanks to Wayne, I have a Pro account so I'll be posting images to there for now. So have a look at the photos of the OK Go concert I went to a few weeks ago!

About two weeks ago, I was watering my jade plant, Thelonious, and I noticed white cottony stuff hanging out on his leaves, and some of his leaves were falling off. I looked closer and realized there were these nasty little bugs that were eating him (OK, I don't really know if my jade plant is actually male) up! Thanks to the miracle of the internet, I found out that Thelonious had been invaded by mealy bugs, but the horticulturist suggested getting rid of the infected plant because it's extremely difficult to get rid of the damned things.

However, Thelonious has a special place in my heart. I got him as a gift, a tiny little plant, from the campus greenhouse my first year in college. Everyone received a plant their first year. Somehow, through all of my moves and trips, Thelonious has not only managed to survive, but thrive, and is now going on 10 years. He is gigantic, almost tree-like, at this point. So I couldn't just let him die, or throw him out with the trash.

So yesterday we did major surgery. We cut off the most damaged leaves, and took one clean looking cutting to try to propagate it. Then we took Q-tips dipped in rubbing alcohol and tried to remove all the evil mealy bugs on the main plant, as best we could.

Only time will tell. Thelonious, you must live!