git is a pretty interesting source control tool that was originally created by Linus Torvalds the creator of Linux. In fact he got so frustrated with maintaining the code base for the linux kernel, (and the inadequacy of current source control tools available), he decided to write his own, git.

git is a distributed source control system. In fact the current linux kernel is maintained using this. The philosophy behind it is that merge should occur often, in fact as soon as you started making changes on a new branch, you should try to merge. The more you merge, the less likely you are to have issues during integration. you should create as many branches as you like.

anyways, here is a tutorial to get you started on git.

~pali

now if I say ‘Ommastrephes Bartrami’, what does that mean to you?

My cousin the other day brought over some air-tight bags containing suspicious slices of … you guessed it, Abalone!

Looking over the covers of those bags, it had giant chinese writings which roughly translates to the “Empress’ Abalone”, little did my cousin nor my mum knew that the little english word that stood out like little footnote to a giant novel that said ‘imitation’.

Obviously I am stating all the above facts retrospectively. And by now I had cooked up quite a nice ‘abalone’ soup with hair-thin noodles. The revelation only came after Phyllis had commented how great it tasted and we must do it again. Only then did I consult with the rest of the abolone, and saw the word imitation.

Then as any food lovers would, a range of emotions surge through me… anger, betrayal and above all a sense of disappointment like a child suddenly finding out the secrete behind a magic trick.

Now this ties nicely to the title of this post. As we began to hypothesising as too what could give it that abalone-like texture and taste. Looking over the back of the pack, amongst the usual suspect of salt, water and abalone extract (oh must have abalone extract), then this word jumped up ‘Ommastrephes Bartrami’.

A little search on the internet turned out this is the scentific name for squid. As I am know confident that a nicely cooked squid soup would be just as delicious and wonderful, perhaps without the price tag of ahem Abalone.

It is a little sad, that we humans have such pre-occupation with things rare and hard to find, so we only decide to mass-produce something that is an imitation of something rare and hard to find, only so that we could reminisce on how rare and expensive the real deal is.

I told mum about this when she came home today, and then she told me the market price for abalone is roughly $200 per kilo.

~pali