Blog/October 2017/Oct 27th

October 27th

We were pretty busy this week, between work and preparing for our upcoming trip.

On the work side, though it’s past “tax season”, Esther’s still busy at her job. I guess people always have tax problems. She’s also trying valiantly to finish the sweater she’s been making for me for the past couple years. No pressure…

As for me, I made another release of 8th, and also published another ARM blog post, the first in a series I’m doing. I also had to update the way we work with PayPal, because too many transactions needed manual intervention (which does not scale well!).

Besides the usual bother of getting tickets, seats, papers, etc. — I spent some time getting some travel-rations put together. “Wait”, I hear you say; “don’t they have food on the planes?”. Well, they do on the international legs, but not on the domestic legs. And even if they do have food, they may or may not have packed the kosher food we ordered. And even if they did pack it, it may be inedible or unsuitable for some reason. Apart from that, I needed to make sure I would have something I knew I could eat, available when I needed to eat. So…

My first effort at “traveler’s bread”. Basically, it’s a yeasted whole-wheat enriched flatbread, baked so there’s not much moisture in it. The recipe I came up with: 1 cup of bread flour, 2 C of whole-wheat flour, 1/4 C honey, 2 tsp yeast, 1 tsp salt, 1 Tbsp crushed qeṣaḥ (black cumin), 1/4 C ṭeḥina, 1/4 C sesame seeds, 1/2 C warm water. Mix and knead, let rise 1.5 - 2 hours, punch down and roll out onto parchment. Bake at 180C for 20m, take out and cut to size; put back in at 150C for 20m (flipping over) and then flip again and bake another 20m.

Even if I say so myself, it tastes really good! And because it’s high in fiber, it’s also satisfying.

But since man does not live on bread alone, I also made two batches of “Lara bars”. One batch had some added chocolate, and the other had some added peanut butter. Both were excellent, and apparently “just like a Lara bar” (I’ve never had one, so I’ll take Esther’s word on it). And though they are high in calories, they’re also high in protein, fiber, and fat; so their glycemic load should be pretty low. They are really easy to make, too.

In other news:

• Munich has ‘major difficulties’ after ditching Windows for Linux. An interesting example of how not to do things.
• Your WiFi is encrypted, right? Well, the encryption has KRACKS. This is a pretty major problem, which all the big vendors are rushing to fix.
• You know those annoying “CAPTCHA” things on websites, which are used to supposedly determine whether or not you’re human? A new “AI” breaks them with ease.
• And how Israel caught Russian hackers. An interesting read.

The weather was pleasantly cool. In fact, October’s been 1.2C cooler than average, here in the Land.

This shabbat, Esther and I are invited out for a meal; for the rest, we’ll have:
homemade ḥallah rolls, vegetable soup, roast chicken, various salatim, and fruit.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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