Just thinking out loud here, plz ignore

Hellfire, I am still not getting the hole structure right in this ciabatta. What's the secret? Am I spending too much time on the initial mixing? Is the dough not wet enough? I wonder if it's absorbing too much flour from the resting/fermenting surface? I think next time, I'm gonna try making the dough as wet as I can get it without having it collapse into a puddle. No idea what that will do, but at least it should provoke a reaction!

(Also, my french bread is still weak, and I keep forgetting to slash my baguettes! I think I actually like the flavor of my french rolls better than the ciabatta (and the rolls are definitely better than the baguettes), but the crust is unimpressive. Higher oven temp? Longer baking time? I definitely want to shoot for a European bake instead of the lighter American style, but how to get the lustre I want...?)

I never realized baking was so much like getting a piece of code to work. It's like a puzzle! I must figure it out!

(no subject)

At work yesterday, I was talking with the co-workers about the Somali pirates, and dropping some science I'd heard several months ago about how they started off as basically a freelance coastguard after the government died, and how they didn't get into the more traditional violent hijacking game for a good while after that. jwz linked to a cool-looking article about that today, so I thought I'd share with all of you, too.

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And as I'm checking my friends page, it looks like Amazon.com is stripping the sales rank info for GLBT books, including totally innocuous stuff. (It sounds like Heather Has Two Mommies got on the too gay for sales-rank list?! WTF!) It looks like someone's collecting links to stories about it over here, and you may have already seen other roundups elsewhere. (It sounds Neil Gaiman's on the job now too?)

I don't have the juice right now to go off on a proper disdain-and-fury tear, but Dear Amazon, THIS IS NOT OKAY. It is, in fact, bullshit, so CUT IT OUT.

EDIT: Oh, I should have just phoned Candy about that one—Smart Bitches is totally doing the googlebomb thing on ye olde Amazon Rank.