While you can always peruse my slashdot cookbook for tofu recipes, I find that I typically just wing it when it comes to cooking tofu. Here are some ideas based on my experience.

First of all, you need to pick a vegetable to cook with it. Bok choy or napa would be ideal, spinach also works quite nicely. Swiss chard would probably be good but I've never tried it. Kale is ok, but not great. You can experiment with various leafy greens here, but bok choy, napa or spinach should be your baseline against which to experiment.

To cook: start with some minced garlic and ginger, maybe some scallion or shallot or just plain old chopped onion. Stir fry until the onion begins to soften, then add your green vegetable. Cook until it starts to wilt, then add the tofu.

Next comes the spices, which obviously will be very personal. I tend to pick two or three from the following list on any given day: soy sauce, hoisin sauce, brown or yellow bean sauce, rice vinegar (or white vinegar), chili garlic paste, sugar. Add salt and pepper to taste. You may need to add a little bit of water, not more than 1/4 cup, less if you used soy sauce or vinegar.

Mix it all up real good, cover, and let cook for a couple of minutes.

Some other things you might want to try adding: sliced water chestnuts, snow peas, chopped carrot, mushrooms, bamboo.

As to which type of tofu, soft, firm, silky, I personally prefer firm purely because it tends to stay together better. Silky tofu always totally breaks apart on me so I avoid it, but other people can cook very successfully with silky. Soft is somewhere in between - I lose some chunks to disintegration, but others survive. Try each in turn to decide which one is for you.

If you find yourself with the option of getting dried, spiced tofu, that can be cooked in a very similar way, but you have more vegetable options to cook with it besides just leafy greens, particularly various Chinese gourds and squashes like opo. I've seen "oiler tofu" available but never tried it - you're on your own if you want to buy that.

Good luck :)

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
Yo ho, it's hot
The sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth there'd be no life
Without the light it gives

We need its light
We need its heat
We need its energy
Without the sun,
Without a doubt,
There'd be no you and me

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

The sun is hot
It is so hot that everything on it is a gas.
Iron, copper, aluminium, and many others.
The sun is large.
If the sun were hollow, a million Earths could fit inside,
and yet, the sun is only a middle-sized star.
The sun is far away
About ninety-three million miles away! And that's why it looks so small.
And even when it's out of sight, the sun shines night and day.

The sun gives heat
The sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun's atomic energy

Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine.
The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of
hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=39945&in_page_id=2

Brothel owners in Bulgaria are blaming global warming for staff shortages.

Ok, since everything that is happening in the world today is a direct result of global warming, we must conclude therefore that islamic terrorism is a result of global warming. Anybody care to take a stab at making that connection?

Since we are assuming the connection exists and only merely needs to be clarified, that's all you "liberals" out there need to get the "conservatives", especially the "neocons", to join Algore in fighting Global Warming - by thwarting global warming, you'd be defeating the terrorists!
BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Seriously. The world needs a LOT more of this:

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54570

Muslims try to change Islamic killing machine
'To live in the Middle East and say what we're saying is a death sentence'
Posted: March 6, 2007
2:10 a.m. Eastern

By Art Moore
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - A group of reformists from Muslim societies who have become accustomed to death threats upped the ante yesterday with a declaration they hope will spark a popular movement across the Islamic world to "fight back" against fundamentalist interpreters of the faith.

Secularists such as Ibn Warraq, Nonie Darwish and Irshad Manji helped formulate the "St. Petersburg Declaration," which seeks to do no less than eliminate traditional understandings and practices of Islam that conflict with universally accepted human rights.

Clicky link for full story.

It is common to point out how first-world countries with socialized medicine spend less and have better health compared to US health care spending. Couple of questions in this:

1) Are you confusing cause and effect? Might it not be that other countries people live healthier lifestyles and thus require less health care spending? I would expect (not going to take the time to look it up at this very second) that the US has the highest rate of obesity, and with that comes extra health problems that non-obese people rarely have. More health problems per person means more health care spending per person, the source of health care funding doesn't enter into it.

2) Also, we have tens of millions of people coming from Central and South America and SE Asia and Southern China, bringing with them diseases that otherwise wouldn't exist in the US, adding to our health problems beyond what would normally be the case. And many of these diseases are very expensive to treat, including the drug-resistant stains of common disease, like TB, that are becoming increasingly common in the third world. We have as many immigrants in the US from these areas as some countries have their entire population! Something like 25 million ILLEGALS from Mexico alone, millions more from Asia, who knows how many from South America, to say nothing of the legal immigrants. Canada has a population of, what, 33 million? Our entire illegal population is probably larger than the entire population of Canada. Do any of the health care cost studies normalize for this?

3) Also, what about psychological problems and addictions? Are these numbers consistent across countries when looking at reported health care costs? Are they consistently included or not included? If included, at what level of treatment are they included and can that be normalized meaningfully?

4) Even more troublesome is cosmetic surgery, particularly elective vs. reconstructive, and to what extent one or the other or none or both is or is not included. Is this accounted for in comparative analyses?

5) Also, are you considering ONLY the cost of treatment, or also the cost of health insurance? I'm not entirely certain it's intellectually honest to add into the comparison the cost of private insurance versus government paid insurance when examining the total cost of health care, but I am having trouble putting into words exactly why that is. It just doesn't compute to my mind.

6) Are pharmaceuticals included? While only a relatively small portion of the total cost of health care (maybe around 5% in the US), our drugs here in the US cost a lot more, both because our government doesn't just dictate the price companies are allowed to charge (as is the case in Canada, for example), and also to support our research industry (which is non-existent in most other countries, and even German firms, a country historically noted for its pharmaceutical industry, has moved most of their research to the US since the research laws in Germany are far more highly regulated and restrictive and more costly). How are these factors incorporated into cost comparison studies, if at all?

I don't want to get into the question of whether it is "right" or "wrong" or "morally imperative" or what not to have a nationalized health care. We've already had that discussion in my journal in the past, so I consider that totally out of bounds for this JE. I'm purely looking to the question of how "normalized" are the cost comparison studies that exist.

There are no doubt many other areas I missed that require normalization, but let's just start with the above six. Inquiring minds want to know!

"If all you mean by education is teaching people to read and write, then all you will accomplish is to create a mass market for trash literature."

Was he ever right about that...

Or as Voltaire said: "It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books."

I keep wanting to write a novel, but every time I start I feel like what I've written is so cheesy bad that I stop. Then I read some other published novel and I'm like "My work is waaaay better than this piece of crap!" Of course, when I worry about my own writings, the kinds of novelists I'm comparing my own work against is among the likes of Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Goethe, Kafka, et al. Perhaps not very fair, but then again, if I can't write that well then what's the point of publishing an inferior piece of crap? There is a remote chance it could make me some money, but it wouldn't be anything I'd be proud of. Bleh.

So, we have this IBM 3590 enterprise tape drive that was giving me a "FID1 95" error. Of course, IBM stopped supporting this drive in September 2006. And just to be doubly annoying, the upgrade path is the TS1120, which is NOT backwards compatible, i.e. it can't read tapes written by 3590.

Anybody have any experience with these 3590 drives that might be able to give me a pointer as to what this error code could mean? The only documentation I found that mentioned this code said only that you need to contact the service department to get it repaired, but gave no hint as what the possible cause of the error might be.

So, I'm driving to work when the story comes over the news about a bus falling of an overpass over on the other side of town:
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N02374944.htm

I'm listening to WSB and they get a reporter on-site pretty quickly, but the reporter literally had to go off-air because the scene was so distressing to him he just couldn't continue.

Reminded me of Herb Morrison's reporting of the Hindenburg crash.
http://www.otr.com/hindenburg.html

So, http://helium.com/. Scam? Legit but not worth the effort? Or actually worthy of a few hours a week?

I'm trying it out myself, fiddling with different channels to see which ones generate the most interest, since I have no idea yet just what kind of crowd reads helium, if any.

In the food and cuisine channel I have an article posted: Chinese foods - Ever wonder about where certain foods come from? What food is native to which part of the world? This article explores foods native to China and Southeast Asia.

Over in politics and government I posted: The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy - Comparing the VLWC to the VRWC we've heard so much about in recent years.

In the history channel there's my article: America's Warrior Kings - A look at generals turned presidents in US history.

And finally, in the role-playing games channel I've got up: Character generation tips for Fading Suns

There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom!

Being disintegrated makes me angry! Very angry, indeed!

The Earth? Oh, the Earth will be gone in just a few seconds.

Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them.

Oh goody! Another Illudium PU-38 Explosive Space Modulator! Isn't that lovely? Now we can blow up the Earth!

I set my alarm clock radio to radio mode instead of alarm, so I wake up to the morning news on 750 WSB every morning. This morning, I wake up and catch the announcer saying the Taliban tried to kill Cheney. WTF?

I have to wait a good 15 minutes before that story comes around again. In the mean time, every other headline for the morning has been repeated like 3 times in that 15 minutes. But an assassination attempt against the VP by the enemies we are currently fighting a war against? Apparently that's not considered very worthy news, eh?

Which is shocking considering the extent to which "news" agencies will desperately try to stretch out certain two second "news" stories into a 24 hour wall-to-wall coverage for weeks on end (*cough*Anna Nicole Smith*cough*). But when it's an actual, bona fide real NEWS story (note no scare quotes!) I actually want to hear something about, they gloss over it as quickly as they can rush the words out of their mouth and move on without reporting ANY details at all.

Figures.

Or at least funny to me.

Take your favorite meat loaf recipe, but instead of baking it in a loaf pan, bake it in a cup cake pan. Meat cup cakes! :-D

What does it mean when I can successfully connect to server A via ftp from server B, but am unable to ping server A from server B.

But I can successfully ping server A from server C, as well as connect to it via ftp. I can also successfully ping server B from server C no problem.

There's no problem with ping on server B, since I can successfully ping server D from it, just not server A.

I'm so confused...

And another problem I'm having:

I am try to unzip this file on a linux box and am getting:
unsupported compression method 99

As per here: http://members.tripod.com/~petlibrary/ZIP.HTM

I have this one file where byte 8 is "63" but compression methods are values supposed to range from 0 to 8? It isn't clear if each nibble can have a separate value of 0 to 8 and thus there can be four compression flags (one for each nibble in bytes 8 and 9), or if 63 is just not a valid value here.

Otherwise bit 1 of byte 6 is set, which, if we assume the compression value of 6 is indeed what is meant by the first nibble of byte 8, then that would mean:
if compression method 6 used (imploding), 8K sliding dictionary.

UPDATE:
fsck me, I'm running into the little endian vs. big endian thing. Gotta do some byte swapping to match up to the documentation... Grrrr....
http://www.pkware.com/documents/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT

UPDATE:
And that's it:
AE-2 with 256-bit encryption key using the deflated compression method.

Bleh.

UPDATE:

7za can decompress/decrypt the AE-2 format.

Just in case you're wondering.

The info bar in my vi session says:
foo.csv 40000 lines --100%-- 40000,1 Bot

% wc foo.csv
    39999 160742 2521858 foo.csv

Why are these off by one? The last line of the file is NOT a blank line, it has just as much data on it as every other line. This isn't the first time I've noticed it, either. Why can't vi and wc agree on the number of lines in a file?