for charles' birthday, and really, because i'm happy to bake at a drop of a hat, i made a hazelnut chocolate torte this evening. the recipe was from epicurious.com, which i only recently discovered and which is also the Best Food Web Site Ever. check it out. recipe, minorly adjusted from the epicurious one, is behind the cut.
definitely recommended, especially for lovers of Baci, aka Your Supreme Chocolate Overlord.

The sad thing is that I've been waiting for months to write this post, hoping for a working proof-of-concept to come online at my office before I recommend the setup to anyone else. Well, let it never be said that the Wheels of Commerce turn quickly. Compared to the Wheels of Wanting To Avoid Driving Out To Fix Your Mom's Computer, they barely turn at all.

See, my mom lives in Annandale, and a month or so ago she acquired a new computer. Being tech support to the world, I have to work on this a lot. Worse, I stupidly got her an iPod shuffle, making my duties as a filial technophile that much more hopeless. I needed a way to get to her computer without getting to Annandale. I found a great solution; maybe you'll find it useful, too.

So what I'm about to outline is a secure way to remotely access your home network using only free software. The secret to this is a great piece of open source software called OpenVPN. Not only is it free, it's in many ways preferable to commercial VPN products that use the overly complex and problem-ridden IPSec specification. With OpenVPN set up you can securely use any resource on your LAN, be it a file share, FTP server or printer. You can even remotely control your computers by using another free application called VNC. It's this application that lets me manage my mom's computer by remote, so I'll cover installing that, too.

so, did anyone else think that "the aviator" was, like, THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE?

good lord in heaven. what a waste of three hours.