Willamette Week’s Back Cover is a cross section of Portland at it’s best and worst.
This weeks ads:
Years from now anthropologists and sociologists will be able to pin point Portland easily. Kinky freaks who recorded themselves while giving guitar lessons on refinished wood floors that were also used for yoga and dancing while eating tatooed pizza, and working on a Mac.
Grilled Steak Recipe
For those who don’t know the meaning of the word “Vegetarian.”
I usually cook this on a charcoal grill. (with real charcoal, not briquettes the extra buck in cost per a bag is well worth the taste difference) But you can also use Alton Brown’s method of cooking in a cast iron frying pan although it doesn’t work as well in my opinion.
Ingredients:
About 1/2 pound of meat per person.
Fresh Ground Pepper
1 1/2 TBS of Soy Sauce (buy from an Asian store, most the US stuff is too weak.)
1 1/2 TBS of Teriyaki Sauce (as above – if you can’t read the label it’s good stuff)
2-3 pieces of garlic cut into slivers
1/4 cup of Apple Vinegar (helps add liquid to the soy sauce and teriyaki sauce and starts breaking down the meat making it more tender)
With a sharp knife poke holes into the meat. Insert garlic slivers into each one. Mix the rest of the ingredients and pour over the meat. Turn the meat until each side is covered. Place in fridge for 15-20 minutes. I usually do this while the grill is heating up. Take this time to also prepare a piece of aluminum foil into a bowl shape. Fill half way with water and place on the grill, usually away from the hottest part.
After the grill is sufficiently hot (test by holding hand 3-4 inches away and count. You want to count to 3 or 4 which will be about 400 degrees F) shake the excess moisture off the steaks. Place on the hottest part of the grill. Wait about 5-6 minutes then turn over. The bottom side should be a reddish brown. 5-6 minutes more pull them off.
Between the vinegar and the water you should have a pretty tender and moist piece of meat. Buying organic meat helps a lot too.
Garlic Blue Cheese Sauce:
Make a basic white sauce base, milk, flour, little butter heated in a frying pan. Add garlic and crumbled blue cheese. Mix well but be sure to not over heat and melt the blue cheese. Makes a good topper for the above steak, fried potatoes, stuffed tomatoes, even a pizza dip.
Sausage Jalapeños
Ingredients
8-12 large Jalapeños
1/2 pound ground Mild Italian Sausage
1 “tub” of plain Cream Cheese
Strawberry, Blackberry, Marionberry, or Raspberry Jelly (home made of course!)
Directions
Fry sausage in frying pan. Cut Jalapeños in half and gut them out. Discard seeds (or use in my stuffed tomato recipe.) Fill the Jalapeños with the cream cheese. Top with the cooked sausage. Cook in oven at 375 for about 8 minutes, until the sausage is crispy and the cream cheese starts to turn brown. Serve warm with the jelly on the side for dipping.
Variations include using a good Serrano Ham, or chopped Apple/Garlic Andouille sausage instead of the Italian Sausage
How To: Disable ._ Files and .DS_Store on Network Shares
In heterogeneous networks of Macs and Window users, few things tick off Windows users then the “droppings” Macs leave behind in the form of files with . or ._ in front of them. These files are known as resource forks on the Mac side and store all kinds of really nifty information that makes OS X interact with files quicker and more efficiently. Among their uses they store metadata about files such as keywords, file size, and preview information.
None the less for various reason Windows (and to a lesser extent, Linux) is not able to always ignore these files and automatically sorts them to the top of the file view list. These files tend to be confusing if one is not aware of what they are. Or worse yet cause problems in directories with thousands of files present.
If on a small network with only a few Macs there is a program that takes care of this automatically. For $13 BlueHarvest works just perfectly.
Of course there is a simple trick to disable .DS_Store files. In Terminal run the command:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
If the network is Leopard only, then editing nsmb.conf is a good trick too. In /etc/nsmb.conf look for the following line: streams=no and change to streams=yes .
If the file does not exist, then it can be created via TextEdit or VI.
These files are only viewable under very certain circumstances but they can cause a lot of coworker friction, and worse yet even cause management to question the usability of OS X in the work place. These simple tricks will go a long ways to resolving those issues and making work much more friendly.
I’m still a huge fan of Apple’s Safari Browser. I feel it’s faster (and much less of a memory hog) then Firefox.
But, the 3.2 Updated introduced a strange bug. Whenever I use tabbed browsing, it started crashing a lot. Clearing Cache and deleting preferences have not fixed at all. Even Onyx didn’t seem to help.
I was able to find a nice utility called AppleJack that really helped a lot. It can be downloaded from this VersionTracker Link: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19596
Once AppleJack is installed reboot the computer. While it’s restarting hold down the ‘s’ key to go into single user mode. type (as an admin user): applejack auto restart
The computer will do a bunch of stuff cleaning up files, checking disks, etc, then reboot automatically. After this, Safari should all be good to go.
I have also heard that reinstalling Safari totally with the stand along installer off of Apple’s website fixes this issue.