Wanted: Stable Web Hosting

I finally have my appointment at the questura to get fingerprinted & whatnot for my permesso renewal tomorrow. I was neatly informed of this via SMS, which was a pleasant "Hey, nifty!" moment, seeing as the online webportal for seeing at what point your renewal request was at has gone tits up at various times.

I should note that the tits up moments were usually panic inducing errors that said "Invalid User Number" or the like. Calling the info line during those times got one a busy signal 9 times out of ten, and I usually resorted to Googling & scanning various expat forums to see if there was news of problems. So the SMS and the corrisponding entry on the webportal was cheering in the thought that maybe the tech problems were getting sorted out.

Today I was putting together all the various copies of docs that I need to take with me tommorrow. Since the registered letter informing me of the appointment has yet to arrive, my plan was to print out the webportal notification to show alongside the SMS.

Good ol' Murphy's Law: the portal has been tits up all day. And this time, tits up means TITS UP. Nothing was coming up, and a traceroute showed an unreachable destination in the Poste's servers. Oh joy.

I just now managed to pull the site up, and I've gotta laugh.



The immediate, facile snark would incorporate Microsoft (the portal is ASP), the Poste and 'recipe for disaster'. But really? I get the feeling that the massive infrastructure needed for this 'new' procedure was either poorly thought out, executed poorly, not tested enough, or all of the above. And when one of those options happens, somebody's going to be frentically patching holes 'till the cows come home. You'd almost feel sorry for whoever's doing the patching, until you think about how much money the government's tossing at tech. (article is in Italian by noted comic-cum-activist Beppe Grillo)

Surely there's enough money somewhere in there to buy a few more hard disks for the webservers, n'est pas?

Kitchen Geek

One of the coolest things my mom ever did was make a family cookbook for her daughters. She printed up or scanned the handwritten index card of favorite family recipes, put a photo of the relative above the recipe, and slapped 'em into a type of photoalbum-cum-binder with plastic covered pages.

And today, prompted by a metafilter post about various foodstuffs, I've got another 20 bookmarks of recipes I'd like to try out. Which prompted me to search for recipe managment software as the recipe folder of my bookmarks is getting unweildy.

Recipe software reccommdations have been requested numerous times on ask.metafilter. Problem is, I don't want to download and assload of free-trials to see if they that special feature I'm looking for:

Conversion between American & metric measurements.

Everytime I'm cooking from a recipe, I have to hit GourmetSleuth and 'translate' each ingredient adn temperature. Pain. in. the. ass. Soemtimes I can 'eyeball' it, but I only do that when making stuff I know by heart, like Grandma's ragu. Anything involving baking or dough from scratch, I need measurements.

A bonus feature for this dream software would pull ifno from the Cooks Thesarus - because buttermilk & cheddar cheese can be neigh impossible to find here.

So, for all five of you who still read this blog, know of any decent recipe software?

I'm not really limited to a specific OS, as I have Linux & WinXP, while the Fiancee's laptop is a Mac. But I would like to avoid the latter as I don't want to have to steal his laptop everytime I want to stick in or look up a recipe.

Bush Visits Rome, Romans Respond

I'm unable to link to the original photos as La Repubblica has recently changed their photo galleries to some non-standards compliant Flash bullshitwidget, hence the screenshots.

Typical Roman sayings? Ok...



And...



Loose Translation: "Oy Colombus. Couldn't you have just minded your own fucking business?"

To Frou-Frou or Not To Frou-Frou...

...that is the question.

Diverting myself from work for a minute or 30, I've been looking at the wedding dress collections of a store on Corso Vittorio that always caught my eye even when I was thoroughly single and poo-pooed the idea of ever being officially hitched. The window display is always striking and the unique dresses would appeal to almost every girl's inner principessa.

Perusing the collections on the website, however, I find myself torn. Said inner principessa always loved the intricate costumes from the ballet days of yore, the yards of tulle and embroidery and what have you frou-frouery.

But the total slut side is saying, "There's no way in hell you'll be able to get a quick shag in the cloakroom while wearing a bell of tulle, darling."

Waiting for an update?

So per usual, am rather busy. In addition to the usual stuff, though, I moving into some uncharted teritory as well.

Yo, I'm engaged.

There was no big proposal, merely a discussion* initiated by him about desired particulars of one's dream wedding. And if I was being graded, I would have totally failed Girly Girl 101 as the only wedding-type thing I ever contemplated growing up was that I wanted to wear a tutu (complete with pointe shoes) as my wedding dress. Obviously this was from the Bunhead Years, and just seems rather idiotic now.

So discussion was made, and I knew it was really offical when the next day he told me The Lads wished us well.

Anyone who's not familiar with this blog might wonder at that curious statement. The SO has proposed a few times before, both the first time we dated as well as this incarnation of our relationship. If we count the times he's said Voglio sposarti mid-coitus, I think we might actually approach the double digits, but I'm not quite sure. You try to keep count when your eyes are crossing from orgasm. Not that easy, eh?

Anywho, previous proposals had the lasting power of a soap bubble for various reasons, mainly our combined immaturity. And none had ever featured The Lads being informed, nor anyone come to think about it.

No ring**, no date, no place, no fucking idea of anything really. And if I think about it enough, the idea of planning a wedding gives me capital H Hives, what with coordinating our various family members spread out across the globe. Plus my dad's never met him, so at some point the poor bastard will have to run our Family Gauntlet, wherein the oh so Catholic American-Italian males of the family line up to flog the target with merciless questions such as "What are your intentions towards my daughter/niece/cousin/this marriage" etc.

I've already warned the SO that it'll be like Meet the Parents, but all the interrogation stuff won't involve the convienent plot point of a former CIA spy. And the sub-title would be Hell has never looked so inviting.

Actually trying to wrap my head around the idea of planning a wedding, I've surfed a few web sites and immediately wanted to hurl from the overdose of frilly frou frou crap. The only thing I have decided is that my bridesmaids & maid of honor will be wearing this fabulous creation at the ceremony.

At which point the ceremony will become my funeral, my life tragically ended by a swath of shiny spandex wrapped around my throat.

* He's been rather persistent with this theme for a few months now.
** We're actually sweating the post wedding stuff, like buying a house. Rather difficult when one is rather broke, let alone two broke people. So yeah, a ring ain't even on my list of priorities.

Calcio: not the sporty kind

Calcio:

1. (a) kick
2. Football, or soccer for us Yanks
3. calcium

Tap water in Rome is probably some of the best tasting water in the world. It has none of that chemical taste I associate with tap water in Texas and is highly rich in calcium, which mean my nails and hair are stronger than at any previous point in my life and grow pretty fast as well. (Or rather the former do and the latter would if I'd get over my hairdresser phobia and get regular trims.)

There's just one tiny downside:



After 8 months of unfiltered use, your hot water heater will have somewhere in the vicinity of 2.5 kilos of crystalised calcium blocking up the works.

Adding insult to injury...

Bacco got sterilized the day after I left for the Dallas Hols 2006. I got back last night and discovered that the procedure apparently involved painting his butt with some blue substance that I assume was an anathestic or something.

Insult to injury: not only do your balls get snipped, but it looks like you were ass raped by a Smurf.