Eating at McDonald's

Whenever I am in foreign country (in my case those are all countries that are not Croatia) I usually get my first touch with any food at McDonald’s. I definitelly cannot say that they are best possible choice. I cannot even call them cheap choice. But I always counted on them as being safe one.

I always valued McDonald’s as place where I can get same food no matter in which country I am in and I could always count on that food to be of certain quality. I am sorry to say that my belief has been quite shaken lately.

I made an error when I went to Berlin east train station. It was late and I figured that McDonald’s is better choice than some local fast-food stand. To make long story short – I got cold Big Mac, with cold fries and cold Cola – at least they were consistent. I was hungry and I ate it. That was my mistake. My stomach wasn’t well to begin with, after 5 hours of train, 2 hours of airplane and few hours of waiting in-between, this was last straw of patience.

In my town of Osijek there is also one McDonalds. They got me used to fresh hamburger, good fries and clean environment. I cannot remember that I ever ate stale food there.

With little care you can avoid making too much things in advance and still serve all your customers without too much waiting. I am sad that their coworkers in Berlin haven’t learned the same lection.

Team Foundation Server Does Not Like Encryption

I got my laptop from repairs and I got puzzled with Team Foundation Server not working. At once I saw one reason - SQL Server would not read from database files. Tracing back my steps before repair, I just decrypted files and everything was fine once more.

However, although I could see my collection in Team Foundation Server Administration Console I could not connect to it neither through Visual Studio 2008 neither through Visual Studio 2010. I just received message “Unable to connect to remote server”.

After confirming that indeed my server was down, I tried to start it back up from IIS Management Console. That failed with message that two additional services are stopped too - Windows Process Activation Service (incorrectly refereed to as Windows Activation Service) and World Wide Web Publishing Service.

Working on a hunch, I decrypted inetpub directory. After that was done, both services could be started once more. With that my Team Foundation Server went back among living.

Lesson of a day: be careful what you encrypt.

Core Configurator 2.0

For those that use Windows Server Core installations there is new candy in store - Core Configurator 2.0.

Not only that this collection of scripts will help with quite a few of administration tasks, but it will do it with basic graphical interface.

Lovers of GUI, rejoice.

Google Public DNS

Few days ago Google announced new project. This time, DNS is thing they wish to change.

What they decided to offer is public DNS service for anybody willing to re-configure his IP settings. Since having DNS at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is quite easy to remember, there is no problem to change it at all computers that you use.

What Google gives here is promise of speed and I must say that they deliver. Their DNS is quite speedy and stable. While I cannot say that I would miss it much if they decide to pull a plug, I must say that I had no issues with it. And little bit of speed is not a bad thing.

How to Make Sausage

Here is recipe that I use for making sausages. These sausages can be made with pure pork, but I like to also add some beef meat.

First step is to grind meat in meat grinder. Pieces should be small, but not in paste-like form. If you don’t have meat grinder just ask your butcher to grind meat for you. Or buy minced meat. Just don’t use food processor because it will completely destroy meat texture.

Spread salt, pepper and paprika (both sweet and hot) over minced meat. In another bowl add garlic into boiling hot water and leave it to rest for fifteen minutes. Filter garlic out and pour hot water over minced meat with spices. Mix thoroughly.

After all spices are distributed evenly take a taste of meat. This step is quite necessary since hot paprika can vary from batch to batch. If it is not hot enough, just add hot paprika. During smoking sausage will loose quite a lot of water and hot paprika will surface so don’t go too wild.

Once you are satisfied with taste, fill casings (I usually use salted pig casings). You will need sausage stuffer for this step since consistency needs to be quite dense.

This sausage mix is intended for smoking and I would not recommend frying it. However, if you wish instant results, you can cook it with water on medium fire for fifteen minutes.

Ingredients:

• 7.5 kg Minced pork
• 2.5 kg Minced beef
• 200 g Salt
• 20 g Black pepper
• 25 g Hot paprika (ground)
• 250 g Sweet paprika (ground)
• 250 g Garlic