churrascaria, noun, a restaurant specializing in churrasco

churrasco, noun, a South American method of grilling meat on a wood or charcoal fire, esp. in Argentina and Brazil; also, a dish of food cooked this way

I just finished deleting some quite strange comment spam from around the site. The links pointed to a number of websites on food and Australian beaches but the keywords in every comment were:

ratcatcher unsped angelophany undabbled bingle hawer grader unrestricted

No idea why these key words were chosen. Usually, the logic is apparent but, sometimes, search engine optimization really is a black art.

I recently installed and started using Chickenfoot, a Firefox extension which lets the user write simple scripts that are executed on webapages. The scripts can be triggered automatically or run manually. Either way they manipulate the webpage after it loads.

Chickenfoot is similar to Greasemonkey except that Greasemonkey forces you to use properly formed Javascript and to actually understand the elements of the DOM to manipulate the page while Chickenfoot helps you along. It comes out of an MIT research project on Computer-Human Interaction so it recognizes common form elements and provides shortcut commands to manipulate them.

Parsley Oil

• 100g parsley
• 8 Anchovy Fillets
• 2 Cloves of Garlic
• A couple of peppercorns
• A tsp of Sherry Vinegar
• 200ml Olive Oil
• A pinch of salt

Pound together in a pestle and mortar or blend in a food processor. I use it to bast fish for the BBQ.

Originally printed in Times.

Bloviate, verb, to speak pompously

Dystopia, noun, a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Coquette, noun, a woman who flirts lightheartedly with men to win their admiration and affection; flirt

I just finished putting a page up to test the Quintura search widget.

The process is quick and straight-forward. You register your site. Quintura crawls it and provides you with a search widget to embed where ever you like. Here is the widget I made for Assorted Wisdom.

It is easy but the results are strange. The initial results from Quintura include li, ul and ol. I admit that these HTML tags are common on the site but I think a search engine should be smart enough to disregard them.

Disabuse, v., to free (a person) from deception or error.

After a long hiatus, I have returned to Assorted Wisdom to continue playing with technology. Some immediate changes:

• In the time since my last post, YouTube took removed a video I had embedded so I removed the post about it.
• I installed a Wordpress blog. I am curious how it compares to Drupal and MovableType. So the blog has use, I will right a post for every bottle of wine I drink this year. Or, at least, that is the plan.

UPDATE: I just fixed the URL for the wordpress blog.