Everyone knows you don’t put beans in chili.

If my dog can kill it, it’s not a real robot.

I came home from work tonight hungry for something tasty yet (mostly) healthy and was trying to stick with what I had on hand in the fridge. I came up with the following (with a little help from my Chinese cook book). Before I forget how I made it, here’s what I did.

Ingredients

• 2 skinless chicken breasts
• 2 large stems broccoli
• 1 onion
• 4 tbs soy sauce
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• 3 tsp cornstarch
• 2 tsp canola oil
• 1 or 2 tbs brandy
• pinch sugar
• pinch kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp ground chili piquin
• 1 serrano chili

Cut the chicken breasts into inch long slices more or less bite sized. Make the marinade for the chicken by mixing the soy sauce, brown sugar, corn starch, and oil (this was from my Chinese cook book). Combine with the cut up chicken and set aside for at least 30 minutes.

Cut the broccoli into flowerets. Cut the onion into bite size slices. Dice the serrano.

Heat a skillet to medium hot (it’s supposed to hot enough to make a drop of water evaporate immediately), add about 3 tbs of oil. When the oil is hot, toss in the broccoli and stir fry for 30 seconds or so. Sprinkle with a pinch or two of kosher salt and sugar, stir around for another minute then remove it from the skillet and cover it to keep it warn.

Throw the onions and serrano in the skillet and cook until tender. Add the brandy and the broccoli to the onions and heat for another minute. Remove from the skillet and cover to keep warm.

Heat the skillet up to medium hot again, add a little oil and the ground chili piquin, then add the chicken and marinade. Stir fry until cooked through.

Serve chicken and broccoli together with steamed rice.

My favorite development language/framework for the last nine months or so has been Ruby on Rails. At lunch today with my Dad and one of his buddies, the topic came up and I started thinking about how to get people up and running with Ruby on Rails. Here are my thoughts:

Getting it Installed

For OS X and various Linux flavors, I recommend getting Ruby on Rails from the main Ruby on Rails site.

Rails development on Windows is a little more of a challenge, but you can get a reasonable start (at least enough to try things out) with InstantRails.

Editors

You can edit Ruby code with any text editor. I prefer TextMate on Mac OS X, but Komodo and JEdit are reasonable and work on Windows and Linux.

Online Tutorials

This is a little tough at the moment, because Rails 2.1 hasn’t had as many “getting started” tutorials written as the 1.2x versions of Rails had.

There is a long tutorial at Tutorials Point which looks like a good start.

The main Rails site has a page of tutorials and documentation links.

Screencasts

Screencasts are a fantastic way to learn Rails. There is a huge wealth of information here.

Railscasts are a series of over 100 screencasts about Rails.

Peepcode has a number of great quality screencasts for $9 each.

Books

The two books that I recommend most are:

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt, and The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez.

These two books are a great learning and reference combination for Ruby on Rails development.

What are you waiting for? Get learning!

Anyone else planning to go to BarCamp San Antonio?

Virginia puts kids first.

Interesting article here about leaving on a real vacation right after getting laid off. Most of my life, I haven’t been in the financial position to do this and thankfully I’ve only been laid off once.

I love the idea – shows how much I need a vacation – but I wonder if I’d have the guts to do it.

To celebrate the release of my latest project at work, I suggested that our team take a trip out to the Landa Park Golf Course. I suggested this despite not having played golf in at least three to four years and I wasn’t quite sure where my golf clubs actually were.

First things first: the search for the golf clubs. I looked around my ex’s garage fruitlessly for a while. After giving up, my daughter Gabriela said she thought she knew where they were. She pointed at the bottom of a pile of boxes, paint supplies, trash, bike parts, etc. Sure enough there they were – out of plain site.

Playing the game was fun – if by fun you mean laughing at how shockingly badly we were. I just managed to keep from driving Becky and I into the Comal river on a couple of occasions. The highlight of the day was watching Nick hurtle towards the front of my cart. I was racing at top speed towards the cart he was riding in when unexpectedly (to Nick), Jim swerved to avoid a head-on collision with me. The image of Nick briefly airborne while I ran him down will be with me for a long time.

Later, while digging around in my golf bag I found the subject of this post: my first pocket knife. I thought it had been lost long ago. My parents gave it to me when we lived in Panama sometime in the late 70′s. It needs some tender loving care, but I’m glad to have it back.

For a number of work and personal life reasons, I haven’t worked on a new short film of my own for over a year. I’ve been playing with a few ideas in my head and I have a couple of partial scripts in various states of incompletion. I have the advantage of no deadlines and no one waiting on me, so I can play pretty freely with ideas for as long as I want to. Without giving away too much, the main ideas are:

• YAHM – Yet Another Horror Movie. Vampire flavor. This one is my most complete script and I think it’s the best I’ve written.
• A story of a man attempting to redeem an act of violence when only the perpetrator holds himself responsible.
• A commercial for a fine product that doesn’t yet exist.
• A compendium of some of the more stupendously bad dates me or my friends have been on.
• A pure action piece
• YAHM – Part Two. The Guadalupe River Monster

Gentle readers, what do you think? What would you like me to work on first?

Once I have the first idea locked down, script written and a moderate amount of pre-production done, I will reward myself with a Canon HV30, Letus35Mini, and a few Canon FD lenses.

I brought this post over from my dusty old MySpace blog.

Here we go…

• The Shining
• Evil Dead 2
• Alien/Aliens
• Silence of the Lambs
• The Thing (1982)
• Night of the Living Dead
• Jaws
• The Devil’s Backbone
• Pan’s Labyrinth
• The Exorcist
• Night of the Hunter
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street
• Phantasm
• Poltergeist
• Rear Window
• The Ring (2002)
• Serpent and the Rainbow
• The Believers
• Signs
• The Sixth Sense
• Them!