Recent Acquisitions

My family has spent Christmas at the Bavarian Inn Lodge and Restaurant in Frankenmuth, MI for years. It's become a family tradition. The inn is reasonably priced and close to home. Only takes us an hour's drive.  The inn also has several indoor pools, a water slide, put-put golf, and game room. This is nice when the weather is nasty, we can stay indoors at the inn and still have some family fun time. The restaurant has a great family style broasted chicken dinner that is to die for. My son would eat the bowl of buttered noodles alone if we let him.

Downtown Frankenmuth has lots of shops but by far the best known is a huge Christmas store called Bronner's CHRISTmas Wonderland. The store is so huge, they measure it in football fields. It's five and a half football fields of indoor sales floor space, all in one building.

This was this year's first purchase.

THIS is how Santa looks in our home.

I also found this kilted Santa but passed on purchasing it. Maybe next year.

Things From My Desk: Grumpy Coffee Mug

There are many things I find necessary to function each and every day. One of these is caffeine. My preferred delivery system is coffee. Tea is okay, but I still like a double strong, double sweet cup of joe.

This mug has a couple of nice features. First of all, it's huge. It's almost impractically large for your standard mug shape receptacle. It's kinda heavy, and unless you guzzle it down, the coffee goes cold before you can quaff it. Secondly, it has a prominent image of Grumpy from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on it. The text running around the edge says "Grumpy from morning to night."

I don't use it very often. When I do, you'd rather leave me alone until it's empty.

Grumpy needs more coffee!

Knead Free Dinner Rolls

I stopped making these after I got a KitchenAid mixer. They are great rolls if you don't have time to knead. Here it is as I found it on the Internet years ago.

Melt-in-Your-Mouth Holiday Dinner Rolls

This is a traditional recipe from my wife Nancy Spence's family. These dinner rolls are a big hit during holiday meals - where a double recipe served 24 people, including seven under the age of seven, last Christmas! The little people loved 'em.

Ingredients:

1/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 pkg. dry yeast
1 egg
3 1/2 cups flour

Directions:

In a large bowl mix the sugar, butter and slat into 1 cup of boiling water. Let cool to lukewarm. Dissolve yeast into 1/2 cup lukewarm water. Beat egg. Add yeast and egg to first mixture, then add flour - don't over-mix. Cover, let rise, poke down.

Turn half of the dough out onto a floured board. (NB. The dough is very sticky - don't give into the temptation to add flour!) Roll out to form a rectangle roughly 8x4 inch. Brush with flour, roll up jelly-roll fashion and slice off 1-inch pieces. Place slices into buttered muffin tins and brush the tops with butter. Repeat for balance of dough. Let slices rise in the tins once more. Bake at 375 degrees F. for 15 minutes or at 400 degrees F. for 10-12 minutes. Makes about 16-20 rolls.

Note: you can refrigerate this dough after preparing the rolls in the muffin tins and before the second rising. You can then pull the rolls out 2 to 2 1/2 hours before baking to let them rise the second time. This procedure works well for busy holiday meals - the dough can be prepared the day before the big day and set aside (if you have enough refrigerator shelf space!) Then pull the muffin tins out a few hours before serving to sit at room temperature and rise before baking. They are best served straight from the oven to the table, where the delicate butter and yeasty aromas help them live up to their name.
- Contributed by Ryck Lent

Things From My Desk: Lunchtime Edition - DiBella's Subs

This is a special lunchtime edition post. I'm starting to run out of somewhat interesting things from my desk.

I decided to try out one of the local sub shops. Ann Arbor has many great restaurants, but it can be a challenge getting to them from south of town. Fortunately, I'm near Zingerman's Bakehouse. The selection is great but limited compared to their main deli location. But, I've been there several times and want something different.

Yelp pointed me to DiBella's Old Fasioned Subs just a short hop over the expressway from my office. Reviews were pretty good so I decided to give it a go. In short, it makes Subway look like a kiddie sandwich shop. I had the Godfather - Genoa Salami, Capicola, and Spicy Ham on a Everything bun. The bun is a bit like an everything style bagel. Nice crusty exterior with a semi-soft interior that holds up well. I can't go there often as I'm trying to lose weight, but I'll definitely be back!

The Godfather

Things From My Desk: Start Trek Next Generation Pez

A friend of mine mentioned seeing this at her local Meijer store last weekend. An hour later, I was in the check out lane. Goes great with my Star Trek TOS Pez.

Next Gen Pez

V7/x86: Adding the current subdirectory to the prompt

The .cshrc script for the C shell in default guest account in V7/x86 is pretty spare. One of the first things I wanted to change after switching over to C shell is the prompt. I'd like the prompt to display the current subdirectory as I navigate the file system.

I want to go from this:

% cd src
%

To something like this:

/usr/guest% cd src
/usr/guest/src% 

The Unix V7 "pwd" command returns the current directory path. We can use this in our .cshrc script to include it's output in the prompt.

% pwd
/usr/guest
%

A great reference that helped me figure this out is the Unix FAQS at http://www.cs.albany.edu/~wuye/unixfaqs.html

Open .cshrc with the "vi" editor and move to the bottom of the file. Add the following text and save.

# add the current directory path to the prompt
alias setprompt 'set prompt="`pwd`% "'
setprompt
alias cd 'chdir \!* && setprompt'

The "alias" command gives us to create a new command that is composed of other commands. We've created the command "setprompt" so that we can use it twice without accidentally changing it between each use.

On the next line we call "setprompt" to display the current path when we login.

On the third line, we create a new alias for the "cd" command that will change the directory and reset the prompt to include the changed directory path.

Editing the .cshrc script

Logout and log back in and you'll see the following:

It works!

V7/x86: Changing the User's Shell

"And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time." - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The default shell in Unix V7 is the Bourne shell (sh). It replaced an earlier shell and has itself been replaced by a long line of shells over the years. V7/x86 also includes the C shell (csh).

The computing history has produced a lot of wordplay like this. For example, GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!", YACC is Yet Another Compiler Compiler, and GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. I had once created a PHP based template processor years ago called YATP - Yet Another Template Parser.

The C shell included several improvements over the Bourne shell. The script syntax was more like the C programming language whereas the Bourne took its inspiration from Algol 68. There were improvements in history tracking as well as others, you can read the details in the link above.

The user can drop into another shell from within a shell just by executing the desired shell program. For the C shell, just type in the following command. The prompt will change from the Bourne shell '$' to '%'.

$ /bin/csh
%

This is convenient for occasionally switching shells, but what if we want to change the user account default shell?

User account information is stored in the passwd file found in /etc. Passwd contains the user's login name, password, and other information including the program to use as shell. You can read more about it in the passwd man page.

Changing the user's default shell is pretty simple. Switch to the root account with "su", edit the /etc/passwd file with "vi", find the line for the desired user account, and add the path to the shell program at the end of the line.

guest::7:3::/usr/guest:/bin/csh

Change the shell for "guest" to "/bin/csh".

Exit the root account, logout of your account, and log back in. You should now be in the new default shell.

Running the C shell by default