so for some reason today, i was reading through emails that i'd sent to tommy, friends and family when i was in italy. in one of the emails i'd talked about a party we went to very early on in the year, a potluck. the girls and i were poor, had no idea how to cook, and didn't know what the hell to bring.

but someone came up with the brilliant idea of making baked brie. it was super easy: we just needed cheese and filo dough and we were totally set. if you've ever had to make a last minute appetizer or something to bring to a party, you might have done baked brie. it's the easiest thing out there and people always love it.

i didn't have a party to go to tonight (except my own personal pity party i'm throwing myself on occasion of my 22mile death run tomorrow morning), but i felt like making baked brie. one, cause it's yummy, and two, cause i am obsessed with cheese. it's literally my favorite food.

anyway here's my little recipe:

you need filo dough (or actually, pillsbury crescent dough things work really well too) and a chunk of brie. and maybe something to put on top. you can make baked brie either sweet or salty, depending on what you put on it. i usually go for sweet, but i've seen recipes with prosciutto or pesto or nuts, etc. today i went for sliced pears for one minibaked brie and this awesome fig spread from whole foods for the other. and you need an egg white.

all you've got to do is lay out the filo dough, plop the brie in the middle, put your topping on top (oh yeah, strawberry jam is a good one too), wrap the filo dough up by sticking the corners together, brush the outside with the egg white, put the concoction on a slightly buttered baking dish, and bake it for about 15 minutes at 350.

for parties, you can get a big old wheel of brie and wrap it up. for my personal minibaked bries, i used only a wedge, sliced lengthwise through the middle, with the rind face down on the dough.

If anyone's interested and can bear it, Bob Wright has posted a reply to Dan Dennett's complaints that he's being misrepresented. Really, though, it's just Wright digging himself a deeper hole. If you haven't seen the video of the interview that started all of this, let me summarize it for you: Wright builds his case with a series of rapid fire points, getting Dennett to agree to it piece by piece (e.g. "Okay... yeah"), and ignoring the qualifications that Dennett adds to each point to which he agrees. Then at the end, Wright literally claims victory, cuts Dennett off and moves on to a new topic.

In the response above, Wright quotes from the transcript of this interview in "gotcha!" fashion, essentially saying "but you said this! you're committed to it!" Now, I'm no expert on this, but I don't think philosophy is usually conducted by videotaped deposition. I think the traditional way to win a philosophical grudge match is to prove that the other person's position is logically incoherent. Or just be the last combatant to commit suicide -- either way. You certainly don't win these arguments by pointing to a transcript and telling people what they think.

Wright seems very intent on pushing this Gaia-theory-ish business of his, about the planet evolving into a living entity according to some let's-not-say-so-but-secretly-he-thinks-maybe-divine plan. Bob, hey, I like living planets as much as the next guy -- particularly when they're evil, voiced by Orson Welles, and accompanied by a bitchin' hair metal soundtrack. But I don't think Dennett is ready to join the club, and you probably shouldn't try to force him.

A couple of gmail-related technological tidbits:

• As part of their new features, gmail is offering a downloadable tool that sits in your system tray and lets you know when you have new mail. Pretty slick, if you ask me -- this effectively mitigates the biggest complaint I have with web-based email. Requires win2k/XP, for now. I'm sure someone will whip up a Mac equivalent by and by.
• Via paragon-of-nerdiness Kevin Rose comes a way to actually take advantage of your gmail account's gigabyte of space: gmailFS, a utility that turns your gmail account into a new hard drive entry under "My Computer". There are some restrictions on filename size (40 characters) and individual filesize (10 MB), but these will likely be fixed in future versions. Again, no Mac version, but there's a linux version here, if that's your thing.

Finally, I'll mention that Xbox Media Player has really evolved into a powerful application. It happened without my noticing -- with an install of MythTV handy, there was never much reason to pay attention to the copy of XBMC that came with my modified XBox hard drive image. Now that I've ditched MythTV for TiVo, though, I can see that that awkward MPlayer port has grown up into a beautiful young, uh, media application suite.

If you've been looking for a good way to get those DivX files you shouldn't have been downloading out of your PC and onto your TV (without having to move the files themselves), you might want to give it a shot. You can put together a modded XBox for just over $150 -- not a bad deal for what XBMC can do, and a great deal if you have any interest in XBox games, emulation, or soldering tiny wires together.

Hey, if you feel like hearing some firebrand democratic rhetoric on the floor of the US House (and who whouldn't), be sure to check out this speech from Rep. Tim Ryan (PC, Mac). Links via Daily Kos.

The real reason I mention it, though, is that I programmed his shitty website. It looks horrible. All I can say is: it's not entirely my fault. And you'll just have to take my word on the fact that the scripted ASP/MCMS integration is top notch!

I started out this job doing data entry on archived press releases for a Republican congressman. I spent a lot of that time wondering whether it would really be so bad if the vast quantities of anti-Clinton demagoguery that I was entering were lost to the ages. But with folks like Ryan -- and, for a little while longer, Chris Bell -- on the client list, I'm actually feeling like maybe my day job is tilting a little closer toward "good" than "evil" -- although if we can add a second dimension to that graph, my data point will shoot straight up on the "useless" axis...