emotionalmarkup

There’s a queer sensation I get when about to write something that someone else will be reading - even if the probability of my words touching the retinas of another human being is far less than that of George Lucas creating a summer blockbuster about Jar Jar Binks - I draw up a blank. I don’t know what to write. It’s like eating soup with chopsticks.

So, picking up on an exercise I once read, whereby, instead of staring at you monitor wondering why the BBC hasn’t updated its RSS feed in the last five seconds, you describe the torment of your writer’s block and hope to uncover a terrific idea or unleash a flow of something legible and interesting. The theory is that through simply initiating the process you are “warming up” your writing muscles in preparation for exercise. (Actually I prefer the Hemingway method whereby you lubricate your brain cells to a level sufficient for creative output).

Alas for me, it just makes me want to shovel out nonsense in the hope that I may avoid articulating an opinion, or forming an argument about something that arrested my interest ten minutes ago but which has now become as interesting as the Wall Street Journal is to a blind dog with no anus (just in case the dog in fact could read or wanted to shit on the paper, circumstances in which it could be argued that dogs might find the WSJ interesting), or fly shit is to just about everyone. That being said, I do admire those who can so deftly compose a rounded essay on a topic with engaging facts and just enough humour to raise an eyebrow or piss oneself hysterically, depending on the location of the reader. Hundreds of said articles are written every day. Can you find one? It’s a great waste of company time.

How do they do it I wonder? “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working” - some mildly famous painter once said. So I decided to draw a picture of SuperGeekess in black biro. Still waiting…

“Adapt or perish”, “turn new corners”, “invest in people”: yeah ok, enough already. If you haven’t already heard about the rise and rise of online news then you may not have had the pleasure of hearing such responses to the perceived challenge of the internet from media executives. But if all the hysteria and rapid investment in the web by media companies is any gauge, then there is actually some substance to what they are saying.

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The Número de Identidad/Identificación de Extranjero (NIE) is a necessity in all fiscal or legal matters in Spain and pretty much anything else. It’s not difficult to get, if you know what you’re doing.

Unfortunately I didn’t.

But after listening to many variations on the correct procedure, shipping myself around the city in a sweat of panic and waiting in impossibly long queues, I finally cracked it. Now I pass this information on to you, oh brave traveller. For those who are interested, this is how I got my NIE in Barcelona – the quick way.

Although it’s somtimes a chore, I love making gnocchi and love even more to devour them with a light bolognese sauce, cheese and olive oil. So I thought, as well as sharing the simple yet delicious recipe my great-grandmother passed down to me, I would attempt to devise a format for dishing out recipe data in XML. Logical, no?

I use XSL to doll up the XML data mostly to keep it relatively platform indepedent, that is, no PHP or JavaScript, but of course a XSL parser wouldn’t hurt of course. For a recipes application however, using simpleXML and some Ajax magic would go down as well as these floury balls of joy do with a crisp verdelho.

There are some fantastic recipe sites and books available but alas I didn’t spend much time researching the market. I’d rather be eating. Rather it was a quick and dirty way of providing the means to share my love of food and be a complete nerd at the same time.

So if you like traditional Italian food and don’t mind getting your hands dirty in flour and XML, dig in and mangiati quanto vuoi!

Gnocchi recipe