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My Mum is English by ancestry, and has for a number of years been making one of her family’s traditional recipes to go with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. I think it’s really yummy, so I asked her if I could share it.  Here it is, mostly verbatim – I just separated out a list of ingredients for easier shopping.

English Bread Sauce

Ingredients

• 10-15 cloves
• 1 medium onion
• 3 cups milk
• 1 tsp salt
• 1-2 cups bread crumbs (the ones you can get pre-made at the grocery store work, but bakery ones are better :) )
• butter

Directions

• Stick the cloves in the onion.
• Add onion to milk in a saucepan.
• Simmer for about one hour on low heat, so that milk is infused with the onion-clove flavour. Do not boil.
• Remove onion and discard.
• Add salt and about 1 cup bread crumbs, and simmer over low heat.  Again, do not  boil.
• The crumbs will swell up, and the sauce should have a thick consistency. If it is too runny after simmering for a few minutes, add some more bread crumbs.

Serve with turkey, ideally with more bread crumbs, these ones fried in butter.  About a half cup should be enough – use whatever you have left.

I had the following exchange a bit ago on twitter:

and the reverse:

The line-dancing totally makes the second one.

And now back to your irregularly scheduled program which will not contain random videos too often, I promise. These were just too awesome not to share :)

-Leigh

Two of the most important books I’ve read in my entire life are Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s “Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation – and Positive Strategies for Change” and the follow-up “Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want“.

They’ve inspired me to make significant changes in my life – negotiating the salary for my first “real job”, challenging contracts and business practices that I didn’t think were fair, and generally making my life way more awesome by asking for – and nearly always getting – what I want.

Yesterday, for example, I sent a note about the MOO cards I ordered to their support desk asking for a replacement set of cards because they had misprinted mine.  It was a small issue, and they offered me a half-off coupon, but I insisted that they send me a whole deck – and guess what, they did.  Kudos to them for solving the issue, and to me for asking, and then asking again.

I’ve created a Twitter account called @askdaily, inspired by these books and this particular incident, to share this kind of “happy negotiation moments” – mine was little, but I’d love to retweet people’s (particularly womens’) successes with job negotiations and promitions, contracts, car repairs, sales negotiations, housework splitting, whatever the happy moments that people get from asking for what they want out of life.

-Leigh

My browser was behaving strangely when I tried to log in to the TD Canada Trust online banking server, so just to be paranoid I decided to change my password using another machine.  I then realized that it was just me being dumb – my user agent was set to IE as I had been testing something earlier.  Oops!

However, it did all lead me to discover this gem epic failboat of a password policy:

When changing your password, please remember that it must be between 5 and 8 characters in length and should contain both letters and numbers. Special characters (e.g. #, &, @) must not be used as they will not be accepted by the system. Passwords consisting of all letters or all numbers are not recommended. Although TD Canada Trust does not require you to change your password, we recommend that for security purposes you change your password every 90 days.

Okay, wtf people.  5-8 characters seems awfully permissive, and doesn’t let me put in a nice long password… but not requiring numbers and letters?  Just recommending it?  And their system doesn’t support punctuation in passwords?  Yeesh.

It gets worse.  I decided to play around with it, and was able to change my password to the following:

• foobar
• 12345
• 11111
• aaaaa
• the first 5 characters of my bank card number (which is the username when one logs in, and is common to many TD customers).

Obviously I’ve changed the password to one which is as secure as I can make it given their crappy constraints, but it really angers me that I’m paying through the fees I pay them for this kind of asinine security policy.  It almost makes me want to go through the hassle of switching banks… but I’m sure the others all have similar issues on one level or another.

Some days, though, this industry just makes me want to set things on fire – today is one of those days.

-Leigh

I signed up for the CCC CTF yesterday.  Team name: Pink Pwnies.  Mascot: Adorable.  See:

I’m going in for a tonsillectomy tomorrow morning, and will be more or less offline for a couple of days.  I’ll be checking email and maybe replying to some of it, but everything will be a little slow.

Adult tonsillectomies are a weird business.  It’s considered pretty minor as a kid because they bounce back quickly, but adults seem to have a much harder time with it.  It’s apparently a 40 minute procedure, followed by 1-6 hours of observation.  I’m being given an alternate paralytic agent rather than sux (best pharmaceutical name ever!) because my uncle had a reaction to it as a kid which is potentially hereditary, but aside from that I’m an uber-routine case.  This gives me hope for my recovery being reasonably swift.  Well that and my still being pretty young and in decent health :)

I’ve found some good advice (warning, giant comment thread which recently got spun into a full-on forum) on the recovery process.  After the consult with the anesthetist this afternoon, I stocked up on non-sharp food , meal replacement drinks, ice cream, Gatorade powder, and some lovely teas.  I’ll be in the capable care of my favourite internet farmer this week until he heads off to Minneapolis for the IETF meeting, after which my favourite acquirer of pink things is coming up from Seattle to keep me company.  I’m not sure when I’ll be able to have visitors, but I’ll post here again when I regain some measure of lucidity.

Wish me luck!

-Leigh