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Taste is still weird, but improving - steak is a ways away: I need a bigger stomach first. Tonight's supper was 7 sous vide King Prawns in Marie rose sauce * with two small slices of Olive Bread, and even that was filling, possibly too much food. Tasty, but "Big". I'm working on it - Steak au poire, with triple-cooked chips (fries for our American cousins) and roasted vine tomatoes is looming big on my menu when I can eat a reasonable size! At the moment, I'd struggle loads with a quarterpounder ... 
* I.e. a deconstructed Prawn Cocktail without the rabbit food that might be hard to swallow.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
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OriginalGriff wrote: Steak au poire, with triple-cooked chips (fries for our American cousins)...
I understand chips vs fries but what's this triple cooked thing? Problems with leftovers?
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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No, no, no, no, no!
Triple cooked chips are incredibly wasteful: you might get four chips from single reasonably sized potato!
You cook them three times to basically dry them out, they start off big, fat, an inch thick, and end up eight or ten hours later half that, but with a golden outer that is like glass and an inner so light, flavour packed, and fluffy that they are a positive joy to eat.
Very, very brief instructions:
0) Use the right potato: Maris Piper is a good choice, but you definitely want a floury type, not waxy.
1) Peel, cut, and rinse the chips in cold water for a couple of minutes, tossing them as you go to ensure each surface is washed. Cloudy water indicates the chips are still starchy.
2) Simmer in boiling water until the surface starts to break up - a little further than you'd go for Roasties, but not so far they fall apart completely when you pick them up. Forom hear be really slow and careful when moving them.
3) Drain, separate onto a cooling rack, let cool completely.
4) Fridge, 5 hours min. This dehydrates the outside, when they come out, then will be a lot smaller.
5) Fry at 130C 4 minutes, gently moving then basket around every minute or so. Don;t crowd the basket - do them in batches if your deep fat fryer isn't big enough. Mine is: it's called Stephen, and holds 8L of cooking oil, or better Beef Dripping (but that's a PITA to clean out and store for next time).
6) Carefully back to the drying rack, and complete cooling again. Back in the fridge for at least two hours! They will not take on colour at this point.
7) When they come out, they should be a load smaller than when they started ...
8) Heat the deep fat fryer to 180C. Cook for the final time - up to 8 minutes, but keep an eye on them, you are looking for colour here, as well as "heated through".
9) Drain on kitchen paper (I use a a bowl lined with a double layer) and serve hot!
It's a lot of palaver, but the results are worth it! (For special occasions, it's just too much effort for "everyday". For that, cheat and buy McCain Gastro Chips[^] which you slam in the oven and turn over half way through. Not quite as good, but a load less effort and pretty spectacular results if nobody knows any better.)
Have a look here: Heston Blumenthal Triple Cooked Chips[^]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
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Sounds like an expensive restaurant 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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It's less "skill" than "loads of time".
But it's worth the effort for special occasions like Herself's birthday and so on. The result really is spectacularly good, for a chip.
Like the difference between a "Chip Shop Chip"1 and "McVomits Fries"2.
Actually ... no, forget that comparison.
1: Or the "soggy bag of pus" as it's also known.
2: Not known to contain any potato or other recognisable ingredient.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
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First: I'm really, really happy you're OK.
Second: please keep up the reports. This sort of first hand info is way more interesting / relevant / useful / informative than the stuff the news are blaring. I know you're only a data point but I'm living vicariously through your experience here.
You're still using gloves: is that to not frighten the natives, or because you can't be sure you're still not viral shedding, or because you can't be sure you won't get it (or something else, given your weakened state) again?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Quote: “You're still using gloves: is that to not frighten the natives, or because you can't be sure you're still not viral shedding, or because you can't be sure you won't get it (or something else, given your weakened state) again?”
Nah it’s cos he lives in wales and it’s f***ing freezing.
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cheers
Chris Maunder
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Mask to protect them from me. Technically, officially, without-a-test-I-can't-be-surer I'm not infected, infectious, or in any way capable of giving this to others. But ...
Gloves for two reasons: to protect me from them, and to help maintain "zones".
Hot Zone: shops, everywhere other people are, everything they touch.
Warm Zone: inside the cabin of my car - not Hot, not Safe.
Safe Zone: home.
The idea is I transit from Safe to Warm, and need no additional protection - no mask, no gloves. Then I get to the shops, and everything is Hot - starting with the trolley handle (if only because the cleaning station is generally inside the store, and the trolleys are parked outside) and continuing with the produce. So Hot protocol applies: gloves, mask, touch nothing you don't have to, and then use only your right (gloved) hand. Use the cleaning station, (right hand again), and shopping list / contactless payment is left hand operation only to preserve it's "warm at best" status. Produce goes in trolley using right hand only, bags are touched only by left hand (since they came from Safe Zone). Contactless payment using phone in left hand.
Shopping goes in boot - all of it, it's Hot goods and the cabin is Warm.
Mask goes in boot, gloves are binned at shops.
Transit from Warm to Safe with Hot means handwashing, dried on a new set of teatowels that are then bagged and disinfected using this wash aid: Dettol fabric antibac[^]* more gloves and Isopropyl Alcohol (normally used for cleaning the 3D printer, but 99.99% IA kills everything very quickly, and leaves no residue on food packaging). Bags, mask can be recycled after 3 days if not separately decontaminated.
That was the regime before we got it, so I've continued it after just in case. All the research I've done - and I've had a lot of motivation to do this pretty well - says that you can't catch it twice, then "double infections" were probably bad data / dead virus / poor testing conditions. But ... this is a new virus, and it mutates, as they all do. The common cold is a disease caused by up to 200 different viruses: rhinovirus, coronavirus, influenza virus, adenoviruses orthopneumovirus, enteroviruses, human parainfluenza viruses, and human metapneumovirus and people catch that every damn year! If I can prevent a mutated version getting us, then when Herself returns to work, I can help prevent us infecting the residents with another version.
And despite this, we got it ... from Herself's work where insufficient PPE was provided despite changing from street clothes to work and back again, gloves, aprons, full face screen, ... and one breathable mask that had to be hand washed every day ... one tiny chink in the armour is all it needs, one trace that someone else left by touch on a door handle several hours ago ...
* Normally, I use this for Herself's uniforms when they have D&V in the home since they can't be boil-washed and we haven'y had that get us since she started working there over ten years ago. But it says on the bottle "Kills 99.99% of viruses and bacteria, laboratory tested on Influenza H1 N1; RSV; Coronavirus; Herpes Simplex Type 1" which doesn't mention Covid-19 but it probably helps: 15 minute soak kills the lot in theory, so 30 minutes soak, followed by as hot a wash as the teatowels can stand.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
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Three things: First, great to hear you're continuing to improve (though I think we could tell that from your posts)
Second, time seems (to me) to be passing very quickly at the moment. Weeks fly by - it seems only a couple of days ago you went down with this thing.
Third, importantly: If your O2 levels are low, please don't drive. In fact, if they're that low, please don't even go out. As you've found, you can become confused as your oxygen levels drop. But alongside general confusion, comes a distinct and significant loss of risk awareness. This is sometimes reported by high-altitude climbers and may contribute to the number of deaths of experienced climbers when they don't have sufficient oxygen. Please be aware of this issue. Driving while hypoxic is, I believe, as dangerous as driving drunk.
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Did you know that if you export contacts in Outlook CSV format from Google Contacts, Outlook can't read it?
No, seriously.
And why? Because it's stored with "\n" as the line separator instead of "\r\n" and Outlook doesn't like that, not at all.
A windows app (Chrome) writes a text-based file that another Windows app (Outlook) can't read because the line terminator is Windows standard rather than it's preferred format. I thought we killed that in the eighties!
Guess what, Microsoft? Excel can read it. Excel reads it fine provided it's got any type of line terminator ... 
[edit]
OK, it's a trivial change:
string inPath = @"C:\Users\PaulG\Downloads\ToConvert\Contacts\GoggleContacts.csv";
string outPath = @"C:\Users\PaulG\Downloads\ToConvert\Contacts\GoggleContacts2.csv";
string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines(inPath);
string appended = String.Join("\r\n", lines);
File.WriteAllText(outPath, appended);
but it shouldn't be necessary, not at all ... not this century.
[/edit]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
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Probably they used
Environment.NewLine ... but you are correct, they should know better.
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\r\n is Windows standard (also ASCII standard)
\n is Unix/Linux Standard
\r is (was?) Apple Standard
Truth,
James
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This post alone sums up everything about the notion of "standards".
[There is probably an obligatory XKCD also to be included here].
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There sure is! xkcd: Standards[^]
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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 I knew it !
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Ah, I see you wrote a small application - I used to do that also, when I was still in development. 
Today, Text editor -> Ctrl+H -> replace "\r\n" with "\n" 
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Actually, for most text editors, it should just be
Load, Save
Truth,
James
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Many plaintext editors default to preserving the newline convention detected when reading the file. So, between the reading and writing, you may have to change the newlinesetting before saving the file.
I did write a similar mini-program a few years ago, doing not only newline changes, but also tab expansion (where you could specify a sequence of tab stops), transformation from a specified DOS codepage to ISO 8859-1, etc. Today, I do not encounter such a variety of text files; besides, I believe that Notepad++ can do 95% of what my program did. Today, I use Notepad for such tasks.
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Since were all programmers:
Open the file in VS, File -> Advanced Save options...
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: were all programmers
Almost all, Jörgen, almost...
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True, I understand some are managers.
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I still am in development & I'd be using my editor (VSCode, where you just click on the 'line ending' item in the status bar and choose LF or CRLF...)
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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Just use Excel. Load the file and re-save it. That should work unless Outlook is fussy about quoted strings - Excel always quotes strings in CSVs even if the original Griff string was unquoted and unchanged.
Anyway, glad to hear that you are on the mend, albeit slowly. Take it carefully.
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