Apple crisp sounds delicious. Mmm.

Oh Suela, I'm sorry. My kneejerk reaction is that she may be free to insist on her own misery, but she doesn't get to demand yours too.

I'm still amazed by what the cleaning lady and her sister pulled off in not that much time, so I'm in that honeymoon period of cleaning up after myself. It's both not that hard, and doomed to failure. I suck that way.

I just skimmed the comments on the article about outing the Reddit troll. I gave up before I got to any surprising ones, though. You know, I don't think I've ever been to www.reddit.com. I mean, the front page. I've just followed other people's links to specific posts. And seeing all those stats laid out like that...whoa. I feel like I've been walking around the elephant in the room without even noticing it was there. Yeah, it's the place gawker ganks for its articles, but I've never gone to just link. I think I'm gonna, maybe.

While looking for a possible recipe for these muffins, I noticed that Google is content aware to recipes too, now. I like that it's parsing the results, and not my search terms--I didn't put recipe in, but that's primarily what I got back. Look down the left column, and where the options to restrict your image search by size would be, are options for ingredients and cooking times and calories. Dude.

I got a gushy fan letter to the provocateuse tumblr. She was all excited I was putting social media buttons on the pics, and wanted to know if I was planning to do that on all the sites, not just venus. I so very rarely see one-button-share link for Tumblr image posts--usually if they're there (which they're not), even if the source is an image, it will be creating a text post. So I'm glad I chose Tumblr first, even if just for that one woman. Now I just have to get the facebook button to line up with the rest...

Okay, CSI did a ridic piece of forensic. It's not as bad as picking out a reflection from an eyeball (I wish I could remember the details of that doozy...), but they zoomed and enhanced (natch) a digital photo (I don't recall the resolution, if they mentioned it) and caught a clear reflection of the Flatiron building in ridiculous clarity in a beer bottle. I mean, it would have to be in the same room as the victim to look like that, and the photo taken with a ... the Hubble telescope, clearly.

I just read this sentence in an article:

The Kindle dominates ebooks, a growing industry; the Kindle Fire is one of only two serious competitors to the iPad; and for a lot of people, "Amazon" has become to buying media what "Google" is to searching the web.

Does anyone know the Kindle/Nook/Kobo market breakdown? I have a sudden craving--I loves me some pie (charts). Also, if you were going to stipulate two iPad competitors, which is the other one? Colour Nook?

I was fondling tablets in Fry's the other day, and I get why the prices jump like they do, but I don't know the fancy e-readers. They only have one camera, they're heavy and awkward, you get the conviction they'l be on Android 2.2 forever But when you make the jump up to iPad-like prices--to the Asus Transformer, the Sony, Lenovo--they look and feel nice, and I'm assuming they have decent vendor support. They not catching on, or is it market fragmentation and there's no clear leader? I hope it's the latter, because there is some nice stuff out there. There should be brisk competition. It's good for the tech. But I can see where Kindle and Nook bring people in for their specific function, even though one can run both on on iOS or Android anyway. I don't know about B&N, but Amazon is selling at cost, and Apple and Samsung are clearly not.

Where were you apple (I initialy capitalised that...) picking, Kat?

I am going apple picking tomorrow!

ita !, Apple's supposed to be putting out an e-reader-sized iPad within the next month, which I'm finding a really compelling idea, and the Microsoft Surface will be coming out before too long, so I think the landscape will be changing some in the near future.

Someone got a ridiculous sunburn watching the runners today.

Ow.

ita, we went to pick apples just because. I grew up in a place with apple orchards and a cider press in town. I have a very strong memory of going to see the press operate and how it smelled and how the cider was amazing. I'd love for my kids to have those memories too but it's impossible here.

We picked stayman winesap, which I love but K was meh on. I mean, I think winesap are delicious, non mealy, balanced between tart and sweet apples. We could have pressed our own cider because they had a hand press. It would have been fun for the kids, but it does require actual work.

Instead we looked at horses and bunnies and mini pigs.

At the mill we stopped at (and I grew up in a town with a flour mill in addition to the cider mill), they had about 40 different varieties of apples for sale, including pink pearl, which are small apples with red flesh -- amazingly good. They also had 3 types of cider that they pressed, including a delish raspberry apple cider. Nom. Also, cider donuts.

I think I better open the gallon of cider in the fridge and have a small glass. If ever one questions the amazing life of the apple, read the chapter on apples in the Botany of Desire. They rock.

pink pearl apple tart: [link]

I can't wait until the MS tablet comes out. I really want to see this new OS, both on PCs and tablets. I'm fascinated by the different ways to do things. I mean, I look at the Apple suits against Samsung, and I can't work out if it was because they were the closest competitor at the time, or what. I admit, I didn't do due diligence on this one, but the cherry picked examples were they obvious-in-retrospect sort of thing.

I have an HP Touchpad. I like the OS. But, sheeit. There could not be fewer apps for it. I know, unsupported, but still...I paid 99¢s; for an alarm clock app (it honestly came down to that) and the free one I downloaded at random for my Touch is so much better. In fact, I'm running a clock on the Touchpad, but it has no alarm, so in the background the alarm clock software is running, but its clock is so horrible...

I haven't started looking on Android yet. But Clock that came from the vendor is a decent start.

From poking around the market, I don't actually feel any need to replace the Galaxy. It's thin, light, and *way* versatile. I *do* want the multi-window functionality, but I am not sure I'd like it in real life--touch screens are fidgety enough to start off with (uh, the Asus isn't a Galaxy replacement--it's a supplement, and it was deeply discounted. And has a keyboard and 16 hour battery life).

Because of the 80 degree weather in March that caused everything to bloom before the bees were awake and about and then frosts after that killed the blossoms, we are having a massive apple shortage here. It sucks. A lot of the local orchards aren't even opening because there is nothing to pick. Apple cider is ridiculously high - $6.00 a gallon (compared to around $3.00). It has hurt a lot of our local orchards and by extension, the local economy is hurting a bit.

Kat, have you ever read John Fowles novel Daniel Martin?

Aside from being a great novel (John Gardner considered it a masterpiece. I can vouch that is a very pleasurable read), it has a longish bit on apple varieties in London that's lovely.