I haz shiney

[pecunium]

My Canadian Girlfriend Loffs Me.

Which is, I suppose, what one should expect. commodorified came to visit me after visiting fairestcat and going to WisCon. This is good. I get to introduce her to my father/sisters, and show her Eastern Tennessee.

We went shopping last night, and I bought bread flour (King Arthur's), and checked the local brands. White Lilly's all purpose is 2 percent protein. That's the same as Swan's Lake Cake Flour. I'll have to get Maia's banana bread recipe and see how it does with the softer flour.

She also brought be a birthday present, a bright; newly reconditioned, iPod Nano, which iclysdale was kind enough to load up with 7 gigs of music; mostly strange to me.

I've loaded the songs onto my machine. I'll have to sort it out (right now all the song titles are four-letter strings ABBA, ABRD, CBGB, etc.. But the artists/albums are correct). First step, make the folders non-hidden.

Second, import the songs to my iTunes. Third... synch the iPod to my iTunes, so I can build a library I wan't to take with me for amusement when I head to SF at the end of the month.

Life is pretty good right now.

Comments

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

Aha! I met commodorified at WisCon and friended her. I had a feeling I had seen her around this blog. You are a man of excellent taste. :)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

She had nice things to say about meeting you (something about hotness, and pleasant to hug).

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

Both of those were entirely mutual sentiments.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

She blushes.

[kd5mdk.livejournal.com]

One thing that a lot of people (geeks) get uptight about is that they spent dozens of hours arranging their music *just so*, putting folders for genre and artist and album and naming the file stuff like C:\Musical Files\MP3s\1960s\Rock\Beatles\08-Beatles-Abbey Road-Come Together-128k.mp3 and then iTunes goes and uses the song tags and ignores all their hard work. Depending on if you use the default setting, it will also rearrange all your music into its own folder structure rather than keeping the one you have. And if your tags are mostly missing or wrong, it will take a while to revise that.

However, all said, once you get your tags right iTunes is very easy to work with.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I have no problems with the generic nature of iTunes (I've had it on the computer for year, or so. I installed it when the Army issued me an iPod).

I am perfectly capable of Making playlists.

What I was worried about was (as I pretty much expected) a non-issue. iTunes had no problem repopulating ABBA as it's proper self.

[ckd]

Yup. It uses the tags, so as long as everything on your iPod was properly tagged, it doesn't care if you import it from a file named WKRP.m4a or Total Eclipse of the Heart.m4a...iTunes will put it in what it (and I) consider the right place.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The thing which caught my eye is those letter names were generated by iTunes. They were titled properly on the parent machine, and they are titled properly on the iPod, and they are now properly titled in my iTunes, but in the folders (copied from the iPod), they have completely non-identifiable titles.

As to what it calls things, if I change all the data, it will keep the new data.

[ckd]

Yeah, the iPod uses a database to translate song titles to those funky short names. I'm not sure if it's an attempt to stop the simplest ways of getting files off the iPod, an efficiency hack, or both.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That's what I figured, but when I got this iPod, it had music. If I just synched it up, I'd lose that music, so I copied it to disc, and the names were all jibberish.

Which, had I not been moving it to iTunes, would have been a problem. Now I can synch it up (I may lose some songs, which were duplicates, since purged), but I don't lose all the new stuff.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's pretty low-protein, soft-wheat flour--because that's one of the secrets to really tender biscuits. Martha White's another local brand. My mother claims there's a line across the country, running out to somewhere around Oklahoma or Texas--on the south side is hot bread country (biscuits and cornbread) and on the north side is cold bread country (yeast breads and rolls). This may not be totally accurate, but a good southern cook used to learn to make biscuits before they learned to make yeast bread.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The distinction is actually, almost certainly, the other way round. The make biscuits in the south because the local wheat wasn't hard enough to make good breads.

Toss in a bit of Irish/Scottish types (who also had soft wheats at home, or were working with low-gluten flours like oat) and biscuits/johnnycakes/soda breads are pretty much a given.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

That last sentence should be interpreted as "this was what you learned at your mother's knee", not an observation on the development of baking in the entire region, although it could work either way, and you're right about people settling on the best methods for the materials they had available--it had to have been the second half of the 19th century at the earliest before the big flour mills like Pillsbury got into flour distribution on a national level, and by that point the biscuits and cornbread inclination was well-established. Southern urban areas probably showed a difference, but then these were the areas that both had immigrants used to working with and preferring hard wheat and yeast breads, and the purchasing ability to bring in what they needed. Biscuits and cornbread are still very much a "country" marker, and a lot of people who either are rural, or who strongly self-identify as having rural backgrounds will express a preference for these, even when they eat a lot of yeast bread.

I think the pattern reinforced itself--start out with soft wheat/corn meals as your working materials, toss in people with ethnic cooking backgrounds who are more accustomed to soft wheat and non-wheat baking, and they're likely to stick with what they're accustomed to baking and what they're accustomed to working with, absent any substantial change agents.

The thought of oat griddle cakes becoming corn griddle cakes on this side of the Atlantic is an interesting thought.

Here are a couple of other regional brands to look for Weisenberger Mills is a Kentucky family business; House-Autry is a North Carolina concern that specializes in corn meals.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Well, there are irish in Boston (though they, mostly, came later) and they do bread. I'd say it's because they can (just as Heidi saved up the white rolls to take to Grandmama). Bread was a status marker.

This very morning I made corncakes with House-Autry corn meal. A bit softer/finer than the stuff I get back in Calif. (but not as sweet as the stuff I made myself back home). Takes the moisture better.

Flavor wasn't that much different. We'll have to see how it does at cornbread.