Tag Archives: books

New iPhone Apps

John | June 7, 2010 - 11:47 pm

Today is a great day to write about some iPhone apps, because Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, announced the iPhone 4 today.  It’s a sensational update, and the good news is that the new iOS 4 software will be a free update for 3G and 3GS iPhones.

It might seem a little odd, or at least conflicting, that I’m writing about the new iPhone apps I bought last Saturday night, on my blog pages, when I have a page dedicated to iPhone apps on my home website.  The difference is that in my blog posts I mostly write about current or recent happenings and thoughts, such as the purchase of two new iPhone apps a few days ago.  By contrast, in the iPhone Apps page on my home website, I’ve mostly written about apps after I’ve used them for many months and find them invaluable, or especially interesting (such as the Remote control for iTunes on the computer).

The thumbnail image for this post is a scan of the front cover of the Mark Bittman book “How to Cook Everything” which I’ve had since it was first published in 1998.  It’s a big book – 944 pages.

Mark Bittman is a columnist for The New York Times who writes under the heading of “The Minimalist.”  You can read about him on his blog at http://markbittman.com.

In the past year or so when I’ve seen his book on the shelves at Borders and other bookshops I’d noticed that the cover was now red instead of yellow, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.

Well, not until last Saturday night, when I discovered that the Mark Bittman book is available as an app on the iPhone.

It’s not the yellow cover book that I bought in 1998.  It’s the 2008 completely revised 10th Anniversary 2nd edition, with a red cover – and 1056 pages.  There are whole chapters of the 1998 book that are not in the 2008 book – such as the chapter about Beverages and other drinks.

You can read more about Mark Bittman at the New York Times website at

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/mark_bittman/index.html

* trying recipes

* app features such as search, filters and shopping list

The iPhone app is great and a delight to use, and it has features that the books can’t have, such as searches with filtering, and a built-in timer in the recipes.  When the recipe calls for you to heat the frypan for one minute, you click on the time in the recipe,  and up comes a timer set for 1 minute.  The timer alarm sound is worth the price of admission.  A very useful feature is that if you’d like to cook a recipe that sounds tempting, you can click on an icon to add its ingredients to a shopping list.

So far I’ve tried three recipes.  One was for fried eggs, which I’ve been cooking for 45 years, but Mark Bittman’s way of doing it was different to the way I’ve always fried eggs in the past.  It’s such a simple dish, and I’ve always loved bacon and eggs for breakfast since I was a child (when Mum did the cooking).  But in my retirement I’ve only cooked bacon and eggs a few times a year because it has always given me indigestion for a few hours and has tended to ruin my day.  I always vow never to have it again for breakfast, but months later I forget the discomfort and try it again.  Perhaps it’s the way I’ve fried the eggs, so I’ll try it again one day using the Mark Bittman method, as the result of my first trial was very pleasing and tasty.

The second iPhone app I bought last Saturday was Things.  It’s a task manager with a difference.  It’s also a project manager, in which your tasks can be broken down into all the steps needed to implement the project.  Things is the iPhone app of the week on the iTunes App Store this week.  However, it’s the type of app where I wouldn’t post a review until I’ve been using it for many months to see if I’ve found it genuinely useful – or whether I don’t bother looking at it and have, in effect, I’ve stopped using it.  For example, MS Outlook has a To Do list section which I entered all my task into last year – and this week was the first time this year that I looked at it.

Tonight I used my Kuhn Rikon  frypan pressure cooker to cook rice in 4 minutes, and then use it to cook stir fry beef and vegetables.  It’s so convenient and time saving.  It reminds me that one day I must write a blog post about pressure cooking.  Perhaps I should make a note about it in Things.  Smile

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Learning Italian 8

John | May 17, 2010 - 12:13 am

The thumbnail picture for this post on my blog home page is a beautiful view of Florence at sunset.  I’ve never been to Italy, but I did fly over it on my way home from London in 1993.  And in my childhood, from age 5 to 8, I grew up in Mount Gambier, South Australia, with an Italian prisoner of war in our home.  His official job was as a labourer on our 5 acre block of land, of which about 3 acres were devoted to all kinds of vegetables, a glass house for tomatoes, a passionfruit trellis, a 100 foot long bean and pea trellis, sand bed for asparagus, a maize patch, fruit trees, a big walnut tree and fowls.  The other 2 acres were a paddock for a cow or two.  Tony was treated like a member of our family, and to me was a friend and company.  We all liked him, as did our family friends.

The following photo shows another admired Italian – the beautiful 2010 Maserati Quattroporte.  I find it more exciting than a Ferrari.

I have many reasons to want to see how much of the Italian language I can pick up this year.  But early last week it crossed my mind that as we grow closer to the half year mark, I haven’t made all that much progress.  I forget most of the words I learn about an hour after learning them (not just the Italian word, but even the English word that I’ve forgotten the Italian word for).  I can’t yet construct even a simple sentence in Italian.  And I’m still struggling with the basic pronunciation of Italian words because of the inconsistent explanations in all the sources at my disposal.

This week I went into the city CBD for the first time this year, and as fate would have it, twice.  I took this opportunity to visit the Foreign Language Bookshop in Collins Street where I became interested in two books on my first visit.  I ended up buying them on my second visit, after researching their reviews on Amazon.

It did cross my mind that I already had enough books and iPhone apps about learning Italian, and I didn’t need any more.   But these two books each had a different “teach yourself” approach that appealed to me.

As I mentioned above, my main concern has always been pronunciation, as I’ve noticed many variations in my different books when it comes to vowels.  And quite often the words spoken by supposedly native Italian speakers in my iPhone apps have confused me even more.

One of the new books explains where your tongue should be when pronouncing vowels and consonants.  That’s taken me back to primary school days when one of the subjects was English.

The other book talks about language similarities on page 1, and in doing so, it struck a chord with me for the first time, when I realised that there is often a pattern between English and Italian words that would help me understand the Italian words in print (but not in speech, as the pronunciation is greatly differently).

These patterns are helping me to remember many words, such as the Italian for “slowly” which I first learned in January.  I’ve tried to recall it many times over the past four months (to use in the phrase “please speak slowly”).  I’ve looked it up every time, but I’ve never been able to remember it afterwards, even at the beginning of last week.  But now I’ll remember it always, as I’ve known the Italian for “slow” since the age of eight in my pianoforte and music studies.  Lento.

The pattern to turn the adjective “slow” into the adverb “slowly” is to add “mente” to the end of the Italian word.  Lento becomes Lentamente.  The o changes to an a,  but that doesn’t matter as it reminds me of the actual word.

Correct pronunciation of Italian remains my greatest stumbling block, as I want to get this sorted out before I proceed further.  But in the past few days I’ve now begun to wonder if this is really as far as I want to go.  I get a great kick out of my new found ability to pronounce all Italian words reasonably well, even if I have no idea what they mean.

I’ll be very surprised if I’m ever able to speak or understand spoken Italian, but I’ve totally enjoyed my studies so far.  However, I’m currently thinking that my real interest is not in learning Italian to be able to converse in Italian, but to get an understanding of another language.  I’ve found that this fascinates me.

So, I’m now thinking of doing some basic German and French studies to get a bit of an inkling into those languages and their pronunciation.  I’d like to be able to pronounce German and French words better than I can now.

I’ve seen a book on Amazon about French pronunciation that I’ll keep a lookout for in local bookshops, as it goes very deeply into pronunciation, which I expect applies to all languages.  It explains the complexities of pronunciation whereby the mouth and tongue change shape and position for, say,  c or k, which have the same sound, in expectation of what follows in say, cool and keel.

I learned a new Italian word today – barista.  And I was surprised to discover that in Italian it means barman (in the case of a male) or barmaid (in the case of a female).  The plural has a different end vowel in the case of males and females  (mixed groups take the male plural ending).  Oh dear.  I know a qualified barista who would be horrified to be told that it only means barman in Italian.

This send me looking up barista in English dictionaries.  The big Shorter Oxford defines it as someone who serves coffee.   The big American Heritage does not list the word.  The Australian Oxford defines it as someone who makes coffee (especially espresso) professionally.

The 20 volume OED (Oxford English Dictionary) has the following entry:

barista, n.
Brit. /ba“ri;st@/, /b@“rIst@/, U.S. /bA“rist@/, /b@“rIst@/  Plural baristas, (rare) bariste, (irreg.) baristes.  [< Italian barìsta (plural barìste; 1939–40) < bar (see bar n.1 28a) + -ista -ist.]

A bartender in an Italian or Italian-style bar. Also spec. (orig. U.S.): a person who makes and serves coffee in a coffee bar (the more frequent sense in English).
In spec. sense, a proprietary name in the United Kingdom.

1982 P. Hofman Rome, Sweet Tempestuous Life 24 A good barista can simultaneously keep an eye on the coffee oozing from the espresso machine into a battery of cups, pour vermouth and bitters+and discuss the miserable showing of the Lazio soccer team. 1988 Boston Globe (Nexis) 13 Dec. 61 A feisty but cordial competitor to the larger caffeine chains the [Boston Coffee] Exchange has unfurled a help-wanted poster titled ‘Learn to be a coffee barista’. 1990 Atlantic Nov. 157/2 This ritual unites all the baristas in Italy. But not everyone accomplishes the layer of light-colored crema, or foam, that is the pride of an expert espresso-maker. 1999 Dominion (Wellington, N.Z.) (Nexis) 24 Feb. (Business section) 24 New bariste undertake an intensive training programme which covers the philosophy, history, and science of coffee, and the psychology of service. 2001 Times 7 Mar. ii. 5/1 The key to a good espresso lies in the barista+and whether he or she cares enough to do it right.
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Cooking an omelette

John | May 5, 2010 - 12:16 pm

The blog home page thumbnail image for this post looks the same as the image on the post page, except for the colour of the book cover.

But take a closer look.  The main author is Julia Child but the co-authors are different in the two books.

The red book is Volume 1 which was first published in 1961.

The blue book is Volume 2 which was first published in 1970.

I bought both books in a set from David Jones at Chadstone at a cheaper price than Borders.

I also bought the DVD of the movie Julie & Julia starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

I’ve long wanted to see this movie since I first heard of it, as I have a keen interest in cooking.  But I’ve never had any interest in Julia Child’s cookbooks until now.

Last week I watched the DVD movie Julie & Julia and apart from the story and the food, I wondered if the way Meryl Streep spoke was camping it up or playing a caricature of Julia Child.  But I’ve now seen the late Julia Child on YouTube and the following video answers that question.

The AWW Cooking School says that you should equip yourself with the right pan for cooking an omelette  if you don’t want the result to resemble a dish of scrambled eggs (which my omelettes have in recent years).  That advice and the above video caused me to buy a new omelette pan as my previous pan only had a 5 inch base and it was not smooth (a Circulon pan) to allow the egg mixture to slide in the pan.  My new Analon pan, with a copper/stainless steel/aluminium bottom has the 7 1/2 inch flat base recommended by Julia Child.

Yes, the larger pan makes for a different cooking experience because much more of the egg mixture comes into contact with the pan straight away to start cooking.  But I wouldn’t shake the pan on top of the stove like Julia does, as it’s like scraping a fingernail on a blackboard for me, and not good for the pan or the induction cooker surface.  I lift my pan off the cooktop when I shake it.  This of course causes the induction cooker to start beeping as there is nothing on it which it can cause to heat.  In this respect a gas stovetop would be better as it the flames would still heat the pan.  But in any event, I prefer the method of tilting the pan and pulling the egg mixture back during the cooking process to allow the runny mixture to run down onto the bare pan surface.

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Learning Italian 3

John | March 16, 2010 - 12:49 am

Once I had my iPhone dictionaries, I then began to realise that I needed a more structured approach to learning Italian, and I brought out The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian (1st Edition) which I bought from Amazon in 1998. This book almost got tossed out during my big purge and cleanup two years ago, but there was something about it that told me to keep it.

From there I moved to some iPhone apps with spoken Italian words and phrases, a book on Italian grammar, and a book on English grammar for students of Italian, and eventually the Concise Oxford Paravia about which I wrote in an earlier post. If you want to read that post, which is more about prices of books at Borders, search for Paravia in the Search box in the navigation bar above.

Ralph was right on the ball when he suggested that I watch the Italian news on SBS TV, to see what I can learn. This is one of the suggestions in the Complete Idiot’s book. But at this stage, I can’t distinguish any of the words when Italian is spoken at conversational speed. It’s just a string of sounds.

Last night I watched part of an Italian movie on SBS, with subtitles, and once again it sounded foreign to me (that was a joke). The only Italian word I could distinguish was signora. However, I already know enough about the Italian language to recognise that the SBS subtitles were not literal translations of the Italian words spoken.  I suspect the sense of the sentences are translated and paraphrased as they might be said by English speaking characters.  That’s not much help to me and only confirms that I don’t ever expect to be be able to converse in Italian.  But that’s not my aim anyway.  All I’m doing is seeing how much Italian I can pick up over the course of 2010.

Some readers might question that I’m using the 1998 version of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian on Your Own as the basis of my study course. They could be right. I am  not, after all, un perfetto idiota  o un completo imbecille. I’m more of a lavori in corso (work in progress).

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My New Interest – Eat Real Food

John | February 15, 2010 - 11:39 pm

A few weeks ago when the Apple iPad was announced, a friend of mine showed some interest in it as a way of buying and reading books.  She’s an avid reader of books, and I got the impression that her main interest was that electronic books don’t take up any space in your home or add to the clutter.  They’re also cheaper and more eco-green-friendly.

I’ve been reading books on my iPhone since I bought it in November 2008.  In fact, in the past year, it’s the first time I’ve read any novels since my teens, at home in Mt Gambier, before television.  There is one exception, The Da Vinci Code, which I read when it was the book of the day.  I also read two small novels (for ladies) written by a lady friend of a friend of mine.

The iPhone has opened up my reading because I’m retired and like to have a variety of ways to fill in my day, apart from things I have to do because I don’t have a wife.  The iPhone app written up on my website provides a selection of 200 classic books that now sell for A$2.49 for the entire collection.  When I bought it, I paid A$12.99 for only 50 books. But at least I haven’t been charged for the updates that have brought it to 200 books.

I also think that my new interest in reading novels is also partly due to the fact that my home in Melbourne does not have lighting that suits reading for pleasure – but reading on the iPhone has it’s own lighting, and you can set everything to make it easy to read.

Anyway my friend’s interest in the iPad for reading books lead me to discover Kindle for the iPhone, and I couldn’t resist giving it a try.  The Kindle app is free, and it makes it easy to buy modern books that are not in the public domain, which you can buy and download from Amazon.  I bought two books, and the one I’m going to write about is “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan (a journalist).

I’m not going to review the book, or even tell you what it’s about.  You can find all this out for yourself by looking up the book on Amazon.com and read some of the pages, and readers’ reviews.

What I am going to tell you is that reading the book has had an impact on me.  The Publishers Weekly describes the book as a “treatise” on the industrialised Western diet and its detrimental effects on our health and eating culture.  It is  particularly aimed at the American food industry, nutritionists and the processed foods that many American apparently eat; but much of it applies to Australia and the food we eat.

You only have to look around our supermarkets and perhaps in your own pantry and fridge to see many examples of processed food.  Did your bread come already sliced and packed?  It only takes flour, water, yeast and salt to make a dough from which a loaf of bread is baked.   If your bread came already packed, try counting the number of ingredients in your bread.  How many of them do you would your grandmother’s generation recognise as food?

When reading the book, I wondered if it is a work to be taken seriously, or if it was a journalist’s rant about a subject in which he has no credentials or formal training.  Should I ignore the advice of my doctor to avoid butter and only have skim milk; or go back to eating butter and full cream milk because they contain more nutrition, and butterfat which Pollan says helps the body absorb the nutrients.

Pollan goes into detail about the milling of flour and the industrialisation of bread making in the 1800′s, with the removal of many of the nutrients and vitamins from the flour.  But I did some research and I think he writes about this piece of history with a slant towards the general thrust of the book, rather than as an objective observation.  I understand that the industrial revolution saw a move in the population from rural areas to the cities and jobs in the factories.  This created problems in feeding the city populations, and this lead to innovation, in a time before anyone know of the existence of vitamins and nutrients.  White flour. I suppose, was seen as good flour that didn’t turn rancid.  In his more recent book “Food Rules” Pollan warns against white bread and states “the whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

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Match and beat

John | January 30, 2010 - 7:42 pm

This evening I changed the Word Press theme I’m using from a magazine style layout to a classic blog style where each blog is seen in full on the blog home page and follow one another in chronological order. As always, you can search for something in the Search feature in the navigation bar at the top of every page, or click on Categories or the tag cloud in the sidebar. To make a comment on any post, click on the title of the post (it changes colour to indicate a link) and you will go to the post’s own page where there is a comment section at the bottom which allows you to make comments and shows other comments made – and you can reply to those comments as well as my post.

Last Monday I went to Borders at Chadstone shopping centre to see what English-Italian learning books they had in stock. They had three copies of the Concise Oxford Paravia Italian Dictionary – but all had different covers and different prices. One had a cover saying it was Second Edition and it had a red sticker stating it was NEW and had colour. It was $93.50. One had no edition information, and the price was $92.95. Another stated it was Third Edition and was $71.95. I might have the prices mixed on the last two books. The Third Edition had less words (175,000) than the Second Edition marked as NEW (180,000 words). All in all I was confused, and I didn’t expect the staff at Borders could explain the difference between the editions, even if I could find any staff.

So in the next two days I did some research on the Internet and even sent an email to Oxford University Press in South Melbourne. It turned out that the Third Edition was a 2003 edition of the dictionary with a CD that used the 3rd edition of Symbian S60 to power the CD-ROM (I suspect), and the Second Edition marked NEW was released only two months ago.

I also discovered that Borders advertised the new Second Edition on their website at $71.95 (not $93.50 as marked on the book at Chadstone). So I printed out the web page and took it to Borders on Wednesday, got the book and took it to a sales counter where I showed the price on the book and the price on their website. I couldn’t believe the response I got.

“We don’t price match.”

“I’m not asking you to price match. It’s the price on your own website.”

“We don’t price match. Not even with our own website.”

Today my faith in human nature was restored when a very pleasant young man knocked on my front door, identified himself, and began explaining the savings advantages of changing from AGL – the default electricity and gas retailer for my area – to Australian Power & Gas. Karlo was soon joined by George (his boss) and Josh (a trainee), and George over for a while to further explain the savings. He also stated that it was a 3-year contract to sign up with Australian Power & Gas, but if during that period another party made a lower priced offer, they would “match and beat” it.

I’ve made a previous post about serendipity, and the two stories above seemed to point to me appreciating an offer today for a contract that would price match (and beat) any other offer during the course of the contract.

I’ve got a cooling off period of 10 days from next Monday to check it all out, including the advice (from Judge Judy, I think) that “If it seems too good to be true, then it probably isn’t true.”

I’d appreciate any comments or thoughts or experiences.

So what does the picture at the head of this post have to do with the content of the post? Absolutely nothing. But it’s from an era that I remember fondly, when I used to ride my bike into town every Saturday morning to visit the Mount Gambier Institute Library and browse the wonderful overseas magazines on the reading tables. It was post war, and in Mount Gambier we didn’t see any of these amazing goods advertised in the Saturday Evening Post, LIFE, National Geographic and  Popular Mechanics from the USA; and The Illustrated London News and Country Life from the UK.  I have great feelings of nostalgia for those days, and seeing the adverts again that I used to drool over arouses those old feelings again.

Posted in Experiences, General, Italian | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments