Downtime

One skill that I have recently acquired is baking bread. As I type this, I have two batches rising. The first batch is destined to become a couple of wholemeal loaves. It's a basic recipe from an old Good Houskeeping cookery book that my wife has had since the year dot. The second, is an enriched dough (by that I mean I've replaced some of the water with soya milk and a couple of eggs), which I'll use to make bread rolls for Christmas. Most of them will be destined for the freezer. I have some ideas for the rolls, for example, incorporating some stilton and walnuts into some of them.

You may be wondering what all this has to do with IT. Well, two things: first, as the proverb says, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" and second, kneading dough gives me a great opportunity to ponder things that need to be "background-processed", such as the look and feel of my next project, which framework and so on.

Talking of frameworks for PHP, I'm going to have a look at Symphony and will probably install that tomorrow, along with Netbeans, as I think my current PHP editor, Bluefish, could be better. A full IDE will make me much more productive.

Anyway, I think my first batch of dough is ready for knocking back and putting into tins ready for proving.

TTFN