Tim Danner

I recently returned from Tanzania, Africa, where I went for my sister’s wedding and 7 day safari on the Northern Circuit. I went with her company Duma Explorer who did a fantastic job. I went to Tarangire National Park, Lake Manyara, Serengeti National Park, and the Ngorongoro Crater (the largest unbroken caldera in the world). We saw tons of lions, a few leopards (one walked right next to the car!), cheetahs, elephants, zebra, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, vultures, 10s of 1000s of wildebeests (yes, those are gnus for you geeks out there), and many others. We got to see lionesses hunt, a cheetah hunt, and at one point she jumped on top of our car for a better vantage point! It was incredible.

I have posted a crapload (but a small portion of what I took) here. Check them out and enjoy! If you choose only one park to look at, pick the Serengeti folder - lots of great cat shots in there. Tim is on safari right now with the rest of my family (I had to go separate and come home early to start residency), and then he will be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. I am sure he will have some amazing photos so be sure to check back for those.

Here’s a bunch of seamless pictures reminiscent of Escher (particularly his tesselations): part one, part two. This blogger most likely just stole them from some art site, but they are fun to scroll through. The second page in particular reminded me of the movie I watched last night, Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle. (via MetaFilter)

While I was eating the pizza described here, I was being very impressed by the technology on display here. Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and lead architect of C# (and, previously, Delphi) presents the current state of XLinq and DLinq to Jon Udell. LINQ is the headline feature for C# 3.0 (which is just a language and library update, not a runtime update); it stands for Language-INtegrated Query. XLinq is the implementation of LINQ for XML data and DLinq is the implementation for Database (SQL) data.

As you see towards the end of the lengthy (nearly an hour) video, you can mix them together. This means that you can write a query in C# that joins XML and SQL data. The LINQ engine will formulate a real SQL query to get the relational part of the data and send it off to the database for execution, then do the necessary joining and filtering with the XML part and return a set of strongly-typed objects. The amount of code required to do this is quite small, assuming you sweep the auto-generated object-relational mapping code under the rug.

I’ve always loved pizza. From Papa John’s late at Rice (delivering till 2 A.M.!) to Collina’s to Two Rows, all pizza is good (except Mr. Gatti’s). But my favorite is the stuff I can make myself. Tonight’s was especially tasty, though Carrie may dispute that once she reads the topping list.

Dough

Mix 3½ cups of all-purpose flour with 1 cup bread flour and 1 tablespoon of kosher salt in a stand mixer with the dough hook attached.

Proof 1 tablespoon active dry yeast in 1½ cups 100°F water with 2 tablespoons of sugar.

Add 3 tablespoons of olive oil to the yeast and pour it slowly into the flour with the mixer running.

Let the mixer run for ten minutes, then pull the dough off of the hook, put it back in the bowl, and let the mixer run for a couple more minutes. Make the dough into a ball and put into an oiled bowl. Cover with plastic. Let it rise for one hour. Divide it into three chunks using a bench scraper and put each one into a plastic container. Put the containers into the fridge overnight.

Toppings

Toppings vary, of course. Tonight’s pizza had:

• Boboli pizza sauce, since I didn’t bother to make the real stuff.
• “Polly-O Gourmet Mozzarella Cheese” — the best I can find for pizza. It comes shrink-wrapped in 8 oz. balls. I slice up about half a ball per pizza.
• A roma tomato, sliced thin.
• A few pitted Kalamata olives, sliced.
• One garlic clove, sliced.
• One slice of Black Forest Ham (like for a sandwich), chopped.
• A little bit of kosher salt (not much, since the olives and ham are already fairly salty).
• Fresh ground black pepper.
• A drizzle of olive oil around the edge of the crust. (On pizzas that don’t have any meat among their toppings, I also add a light drizzle over the whole thing.)
• A few basil leaves, chiffonade. This doesn’t get added until after the pizza has been baked.

Baking

Preheat the oven as hot as it will go (mine goes to 550°F) well in advance of making the pizza so the stone has time to heat up too. If the dough was refrigerated, give it at least half an hour to come to room temperature before trying to stretch it. Put some cornmeal on the pizza peel, stretch the dough, and put it on the peel.

Top.

Slide it into the oven and bake for 5–10 minutes. You have to keep an eye on it. Pull it when the cheese starts to bubble and the crust starts to darken around the edges.