I posted my portfolio today, and then, converted it to a page, using the lovely "p2pconverter" plugin (http://www.briandgoad.com/blog/p2pConverter). So, if you came here looking for it, please move on to the new home of my portfolio. Thanks for stopping by 
So, a while back, my bro Nabsy (who has appeared in my blog FAR too often over the years) invited Kerri and I and MsEldest over for one of his favorite treats. Namely, Challah French Toast. I had never had challah before, but Nabsy explained that it was a lot like brioche, with which I am WELL acquainted (NOM!!).
We've had rather a trying couple of weeks, what with all our packing to head overseas, and thus I made the decision last weekend that I would spoil me/us as much as possible this week. None of this "no soft drinks they're bad for me", or "no, I shouldn't have another cigarette", etc etc. This week, in between copious amounts of packing and organizing, has been about indulgence. We've had too much caffeine, too many smokes, and hopefully far too much sugar. What we haven't had is any knock-down-drag-out stress fights.
WIN.
Today, we REALLY needed to get going again after a couple of days of very little progress. So, I decided to turn up the spoiling and make use of the brioche that I bought a couple of days ago, in hopes of getting us motivated. My normal cooking caper is to get a recipe off the internet and use it as a guide. In this case, however, I simply skimmed the contents of one recipe and jumped in head first (I've made french toast with normal bread thousands of times, just never tried doing it this way). What follows is my own, very rough, recipe.
Brioche French Toast (ala, 4ft!)
Ingredients
1 Brioche Loaf, at least a day old (it's better if it's not fresh, takes the batter better and doesn't break up as much)
2 large, free range eggs (that's right, free range, otherwise it will taste like evil)
125ml Thickened Cream
125ml Milk (skim, full cream, who cares, you're mixing it with eggs and cream)
1/2tsp Vanilla Essence
Powdered Cinnamon to taste (I'd normally grind my own, but I was in a hurry today and used some pre-powdered. I'll address the quantity a little more thoroughly below)
Sugar to taste (I used a rough tablespoon for this quantity. Some people would use none at all. Remember, I'm spoiling here.)
Making the batter
Put the milk, cream, eggs, vanilla, sugar and cinnamon (everything but the bread, in other words) into a mixing bowl and beat just enough to break up the yolks. Beating too much will dilute the cinnamon too much. This is where the cinnamon quantity comes in. You want it to look like the batter picture above, where there are still clearly some fair sized bits of yolk floating around in there, along with the clumps of cinnamon. You HAVE to be able to see those bits of cinnamon. If you have to, add a few more bits of cinnamon. In my experience, with french toast, it's very hard to have too much cinnamon.
Once the batter is ready, pour into a wide flattish dish for bread dunking. For brioche, you'll find you need something of a goodly size. You don't want to be bending the bread to get it in or out, otherwise it can fall apart quite easily. I use a glass pie pan, but a foil one would obviously work as well.
Slice the brioche nice and thick -- about 2cm. You'll want it to be hefty enough to hold itself together when it's full of batter, but not so thick that it doesn't cook through.
Then, the easy part: cook! I cook each slice on it's own. It's just easier that way. Dunk the slice in the batter, then, fairly quickly -- this will take some experimentation! -- turn it over, and then pop it straight into a hot buttered frypan (I use about medium heat on our gas stove). You don't want your pieces of french toast to be TOO soggy. Think of it like dunking cookies; wet, but not so wet that the cookie breaks off and winds up at the bottom of the glass of milk. An overdunked slice is a BITCH to turn, and winds up being soggy in the middle. Blurgh. Cook them as dark as you'd like them, or until they look a lot like medium dark toast (see pic!). Serve, with maple syrup (NOT maple FLAVORED syrup) and fruit, and revel in the complements!
That's pretty much it!
My personal touches, however, include:
This will take some experimentation to get right. But, it's entirely worthwhile. I'm lucky in that I actually enjoy the over-dunked slices, and other fuckups, because they're generally covered in hot butter, maple syrup and cinnamon. It's pretty hard to go wrong there.
Good luck, and happy eating!
Sorry, had to get in on the fun.
Attention! Nerd alert! This post is almost strictly intended as a write-up of some recent web code stuff I did, so if you're here for my normal ridiculous stream of cat / chocolate / kid pichurs or rantings, you may be left wanting:
I haven't posted code here in ages. That's a shame, actually, because I love sharing my code so people can school me on how much better it could be.
I apologize for the near incoherence of this. I'm suffering one of my classic bouts of insomnia, and my penchant for tangents and over-punctuating tends to be a little overwhelming when I'm like this. I wasn't going to post this tonight but I'm afraid that if I read it in the light of day, I'll never post it. Screw that.
Part 1:
(Warning, unapologetically high whinge factor in some places.)
So, I had kind of a shit day working.
I recently blogged about the fact that I'm now freelancing. How's it going? Not TOO badly, but it definitely could be better. Let's recap:
I started working on my first site whilst I was still employed with the crappy day job. Site went live in plenty of time, even though it was kind of a pain in the ass, working day and night. No worries. I knew it couldn't last, and a little hard work and lack of sleep never hurt a geek (particularly a career sysadmin nn/ ).
A week later, a whole bunch of changes come through for said site, which ended up amounting to an almost complete site redesign. Fun. The first time around I had taken over for another developer who just couldn't ship the bloody thing, so a major part of the work was that I had to get the site fixed, and ship it in a very contracted time frame. To make up for the lack of time, I wound up papering over cracks instead of actually fixing a lot of things. This, of course, was extremely stupid, and came back to bite me in the ass when I had to completely rework the site and deal not only with some of the awful stuff that I didn't find the first time, but also deal with the hacks I put in place the first time around.
Sigh. So I wound up writing a new template from scratch (this is Joomla, btw) to help avoid some of the snafu's from the original site. This helped a lot, and the redesign got done fairly quickly, although still late (I was still working full time for the crappy day job then too). Luckily, I was able to maintain good communication with my client, and the lateness was not a big deal. All was well.
Straight away after that, I did another site -- same client, different sub client (client of my client, long story) -- which has yet to launch, due to some other difficulties, which is another post (or novel) in itself. The past few days, however, I've been working on a new site, for the same "sub client" as the original site.
This new site is much simpler than the last couple I've done, and in fact it really only involves re-using some custom Joomla code -- nothing fancy, just a couple of views and a slight plugin modification -- that I wrote for the original site, along with a new template to suit the new site. Sounded easy, and it has been easy, aside from the fact that they want the site up yesterday -- don't they all -- but they can't give my client a list of req's, only keep asking for a few more things every day. So, it's made the hours go WAY over my original quote. Luckily my client realizes all this, and is cool about that.
Today, though, sucked it hard. I ran into a considerable problem, which cost me a few hours (which is a lot of time in freelance time). I was suddenly, around 4pm, just when I was starting to THINK I might be done working before dinner time (HAH!) got sent a link to a 50M mp3 file, hosted on one of those idiotic "file sharing" services (y'know, the ones where you have to "wait 60 seconds for your download to begin!"). The site I'm building is a site for local DJ's and people who like to go see local DJ's -- I've requested free tickets 
-- and the mp3 is apparently a full live set (I have yet to listen to it). So, I labored through the bizarre sequence of clicks to get to the file (someone please explain to me why this is a good idea for these services, is it so they can scroll through more ridiculous porn ads??) and finally got the file to my machine. Then, the good part: I needed to get the file to the server where the client hosts all their customer sites. I knew this would be a challenge, because of the extreme suckitude of their server, but wow.. This went well beyond anything I could have imagined.. The FTP server doesn't support multiple streams, the FTP server doesn't support resume, and, to make all this really interesting, the stupid upload dies repeatedly at the 100% mark. Yay. Tried several different clients, a few different methods. Yada yada. 4 hours go by!!
Finally, over a cigarette -- where all good geek ideas, peace treaties, and movie scripts are born -- I thought of an actual solution. I plucked it from the tree of inspiration.. (read: pulled it out of my ass): If their server is too feeble to let me upload a fucking 50MB file (y'know, less storage than your average remote control) then why am I repeatedly trying to make it so do? Host it elsewhere. But where? My web server? Fuck that. With my luck, they'll actually promote this stupid site and I'll wind up serving 5000 hits an hour of this bloody file. So.. What? File sharing site? Not bloody likely, try streaming a file from one of them (I actually did try, I had to make sure). Then, in desperation, I did it; I searched google for a solution. I should have just done it straight away, I know.. Shut up. Anyway, I quickly found ourmedia.org. It's pretty cool. The thing I really liked is that they have an upload client for Mac. Plus, I liked their site design. I don't trust flashy websites (and my threshold is fairly low, twitter even bugs the shit out of me some days). Somehow a simple, functional website is something I find trustworthy, but, I digress.. The funny / best thing about their download client, though, is that is also has an option to upload things to another site, other than ourmedia.org, which brings us to..
Part 2.
In this age of social-media-2.0-ajax-restful-web-servicey-RoR-googley-goodness (I know that made no sense, and is absurd, that's the point) we (read: "I', and, yes, I reserve the right to project my stupidity, among other things, on to you, dear reader) tend to forget the simple things. The sites and services that, while possibly not buzz-worthy, are still doing good, useful, amazing work out there, in many cases -- and this is one of them -- for absolutely nothing. This gem of a "web .1" site, has been quietly sitting there doing it's thing -- including such services as "the wayback machine" -- for 12 years (see: this link from the world's most reliable source of absolute truth) and we -- that's me, and, by extension, you -- completely forgot about it. In case you haven't guessed, or clicked the link back there, I'm talking about the Internet Archive (IA, for short). How we -- Ok, fine, "I" -- could forget about this is beyond me. The IA in short -- see the link above for the long version -- houses any and all sorts of "free" content (as in, publicly available, non-copyrighted -- they by the way do a much better job of explaining their mission than me). This was the perfect solution to my problem and, thanks to the handy-dandy upload client from ourmedia.org, and the fact that my client only wants to share live, non-copyrighted material on their site, makes this solution a perfect fit. I can easily handle the uploads for them, and thanks to a little joomla view I wrote, the links to their mp3's will automagically be displayed using the lovely 1pixelout media player. Awesome (well, let's hope the client think so, they're having a look at it tomorrow).
So, now my mind is reeling with possibilities. How, oh how, can I, we, you extend and make user of this resource in our daily lives and code.. My mind is still boggling, and I haven't really had a chance to brainstorm effectively (plus, I'm friggin tired) so I'll mainly leave the question open, with a couple of small exceptions of things you really should check out on the site if you haven't already:
There's a lot more, and I wouldn't spoil it.
For homework, go to the site and find something you like. I can almost guarantee that if you haven't visited before you'll find something amazing. Also, tell me if you have any cool ideas of how to "wrap" the groovy content on the IA into something that is buzz worthy!
Dairy Milk, baby.
Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster
I love dairy milk chocolate. It's 3am, I seem to be code-blocked, and I need a grin. Chocolate and a cigarette. Yeah, baby.
Jack in a box. Really.
Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster
The simple pleasures of a cat
The ancient shrine of secret wisdom.
Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster
I <3 my coffee maker.
And, this is what comes out:
http://brad.globeproductions.com.au/twitter_side_down
This may be the most pointless web app, in history, second only to the original app from whence I stole the javascript for the upside-downey-ness (at least mine posts updates to twitter! 
).
I wrote it as an exercise in teaching myself to use the twitter API in PHP apps, which turned out to be ridiculously easy (thanks to this link). But, who knows, it may turn out to be a little fun as well.
Anyway, if you’re crazy enough to try it or, like me, want to create a new account and have some upside-down fun with twitter, go for your life!
Smoke break with the dogs
Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster
