Ras Trent

I once posted a rant about NBC pulling their videos from YouTube. (I’m too lazy to go back and find the link; do a search, if you want to find it.) But their site has gotten much better; you can now view the videos—even if you’re in Canada!—and you can embed them. For example:

Construction Season is almost over

How do you know when winter is starting? Because serna’s lips are chapped all the time. I need to get some better lip balm. Blistex just isn’t cutting it anymore.

P.S. You’re welcome. I know all of my blog readers have been fervently worrying lately, saying to themselves, “When oh when will serna post about the state of his lips?!?”

A comedy of BBQ errors

As planned, I cooked a roast on the BBQ last night, and used the side burner. It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, but it did work.

First of all, here’s how I cooked the roast: It’s called the “indirect method” of cooking on a BBQ. You turn on one side of the BBQ, but not the other, and you put the meat on the side that’s not on. In other words, it’s not the heat from the flames that is cooking the meat, it is the indirect heat inside the BBQ. So you do the following:

1. Season the grill. (It’s a good idea to do this every time you cook—although I don’t always do it. I didn’t last night.)
2. Get a drip tray, and put it under the BBQ racks, on the side that will not be on.
3. Turn on the other side of the BBQ, on medium heat.
4. For best results, you should be using a meat thermometre, which will tell you when the meat is done. I have a nice one, from President’s Choice, that I just tell I’m cooking beef, and I want it cooked “medium” (vs. well done, or whatever), and it knows what internal temperature the meat has to reach. It’s got an end that you stick into the meat, and an electronic part that sits outside the BBQ (connected by a wire which must be burn-resistant). If you’re using one too, you should stick it in the meat.
5. When it’s up to temperature, put the meat in the BBQ, on the side that isn’t on (above the drip tray).
6. Wait for the meat thermometre to tell you that the meat is done.

If you follow these steps, you’ll end up with a great roast. Also, you should resist the temptation to keep opening the BBQ, to look at the meat, because every time you do, heat escapes. Just let the thermometre do its job.

But here’s what happened to me:

First of all, I turned on the BBQ, and then, just for fun, I decided to try the side burner. I wasn’t ready to cook the potatoes, yet, but I figured I’d give it a shot. And to my great chagrin, it didn’t work. (Didn’t I just write that yesterday? Every time I want to test it, it will work, but every time I want to use it, it won’t.) Luckily, though, I grabbed a lighter, and was pleased to find out that I can start it manually; it’s just the lighter button on the BBQ that doesn’t work. (Even though I can clearly see the spark, whenever I press the button.)

So I put in the meat, and went inside to… I don’t remember what I did. Watch TV or check my email or something. Maybe I was peeling the potatoes. And a little while later, I went out to check the meat, and saw that it was lightly raining. I figured I’d better cover the electronic thermometre, so I went inside and got a little plastic bag, which was the perfect size to put on top of the thermometre like a little tent.

Now, my back door doesn’t open directly onto the back yard, it’s too high. So there is a set of wooden stairs that goes down to the lawn. On my way back into the house, the bottom stair—which has been getting ready to give way for a long time—finally broke. So now, any time I use the stairs, I have to bypass that step.

A little while later, I went out to check on the food again, to find that the little plastic bag tent had blown off the thermometre. So I went back in the house and got something to rest on top of the bag, to hold it down in the wind. (There wasn’t a lot of wind, but a bit.)

A little while later, I went out to find out that the bag had blown off again—but this time, it blew onto the BBQ, and melted against the side! I pulled off what I could, and then ran inside to find something to try and scrape off the rest. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get it off. (Plus, since it was raining out, I tracked water and mud all over the kitchen.) The bag was red, so I now have a big red rectangle on the BBQ. I hope it’s not going to smell every time I turn it on.

I went in and got another plastic bag—although I wasn’t able to find one small enough, like the last one had been—and got more (and heavier) weights to hold it down.

By the time I was ready to put on the potatoes, there was no more drama to be had for the night. I started the side burner (with the lighter), and put them on to boil. They actually boiled and cooked quicker than they would have on the stove, even with the rain. (I put the cover on the pot, so that the rain wouldn’t get into the potatoes too much.) And I did a pretty good job of timing it, too, because I got the potatoes to finish just as the meat was finishing. When I took the pot off and brought it inside I realized that it was covered with black soot, but that came off easily in the sink.

And as for the roast? It came out beautifully.

The BBQ again. I hope this isn’t going to become a saga…

I wrote that the side burner on our BBQ wasn’t working. On Saturday, Andrea and I finally got around to borrowing her dad’s van, so that we could bring it back to the store, and either get it fixed, or get a refund. (Or rather, she finally made me get my butt in gear to do it.)

But before we did, I decided to try it one last time. We’d look pretty dumb if we got there and it worked, eh? Well, fortunately or unfortunately, it worked fine. So either:

1. It was too windy the first time I tried to use it
2. God just doesn’t want me to use the side burner on our BBQ, and it’s going to work every time I test it, but not when I actually want to use it

So we’re planning on cooking as many meals as possible on the BBQ for the next week or two, to keep trying it out. (If it works, but only intermittently, we can still take it back.) Tonight we’re going to try doing roast beef, and I’ll cook potatoes on the side burner. (I hope it’s not windy tonight.) (I also hope it’s not cold tonight.)

Google Talk

I regularly praise Google products on this blog, but that doesn’t mean that they’re perfect. I’ve been trying for a few days now to get Google Talk working, but it just… won’t. (I have a friend who has got a new job where he can’t use MSN Messenger anymore, but can use Google Talk. I thought I’d give it a shot, so we could keep in touch. Well, other than email, I mean.)

My problem is that I already have a Google account, but not a Gmail account. I use my regular email account as a sign-in name, and use that for the Google services I use (Blogger and Google Docs, mostly). So can you use Google Talk if you don’t have a Gmail account? Google says yes; according to this page:

If you’d like to sign up for Google Talk for an existing Google Account:

1. Sign in with your Google Account email address and password at https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?service=talk.
2. Enter your desired Talk username and click check availability! If your chosen name isn’t available, you can select from the suggested alternatives, or enter another username and try again.
3. Optionally, enter your first and/or last name in the appropriate fields. If you enter a name, it will show up on your friends’ Talk contact lists instead of your username.
4. Click Continue.

Sounds good—except that it doesn’t work. When I click the link, I don’t get prompted to enter a username, and I don’t get an option to enter a first name or last name. I just get… well, not much of anything, really. I get a page called “My Account” where I can’t really do anything.

So if I’m going to keep in touch with my friend, I guess he’ll have to try and configure MSN Messenger to work through his proxy. (Eric, have you tried using Pidgin? It can connect to MSN Messenger—even through HTTP—and Google Talk, and probably any other chat services you use.)

Joke

I know, I haven’t posted in a long time. At least, not here. (I have been posting to the Bible Blog—although a bit less than usual—and to the Book Blog.)

And I still don’t have anything to say. (It’s my SOP to only say something when I feel I have something to say. Which isn’t a good way of doing things when you’re a blogger—isn’t it a blogger’s duty to fill up the internet with incessant garbage?) So I’ll try to make up for my silence by posting a joke that I heard recently.

There are two older gentlemen, let’s call them Roy and Bob. Roy is telling Bob about a great restaurant that he was at the night before.

“It sounds great,” says Bob. “I’d love to try it out. What was the name of the place?”

“Hmm… the name, what was the name?” Roy says to himself. “Red flower… red flower…”

“Carnation?” replies Bob.

“No, red flower with thorns…”

“Oh, you mean rose.”

Roy’s eyes light up. “Yes, rose, that’s it!” He turns to the woman beside him. “Rose, what was the name of the restaurant we went to last night?”

Nuit Blanche

We went to Nuit Blanche on Saturday night. It was… disappointing. If this is the state of Toronto’s art scene, I don’t expect us to be leading the world when it comes to art. (Not that I consider myself an expert, of course, so don’t just take my word for it.)

However, we managed to have a good time anyway, even without the art. For that matter, since I’m not a big patron of the arts, it might not even have made a difference if the art had been magnificent.

Flickr

A colleague of mine was having trouble sharing her photos in Flickr, and, since we weren’t too busy this week, we spent quite a bit of time working on it together. (I believe she’s got it all set up properly now, in case you were worried.) She made me a “contact”, and I’ve spent hours watching her pictures. (I say “watching” because when I’m in a conference call where I don’t have to do much, I go to one of her picture sets, and just turn on the slideshow, and let it go by while I listen to my call.)

So now that I’ve been watching all of her photos, I’m starting to think that I need to go on vacation again soon, so that I’ll have more photos to put up in my Flickr account—which, these days, is mostly consisting of book covers from the serna Book Blog. Not that I expect that to happen any time soon; no vacations planned for a while. Maybe I should finally go and scan in my wedding photos, and share those…

BBQ redux

I finally got a chance to use the side burner on my BBQ last night—or so I thought. We decided to make curry, the very thing I’d wanted a side burner for. I got everything prepared, and went into the back yard to start up the BBQ, only to find… that I couldn’t get the side burner to start. The main burners started fine, but the side burner wouldn’t. (I did test it, when I first put the thing together, and it worked at the time.)

The thing is, though, that I don’t know if it’s defective, or if I just didn’t hook it up properly. Either one, in my mind, is very possible. It’s a cheap BBQ, but I was never really sure from the beginning if I’d hooked up the side burner properly. (It seems like the venturi tube might not be connected correctly—there’s a big gap which may or may not be necessary, although I can’t see any other way to hook it up—but I can’t find any instructions/diagrams on the net to help me figure out if it’s connected properly or not.)

I tried using the main burners, but the pot was too far away from the flame, so the oil wasn’t getting hot enough. I had to resort to bringing it back inside, and doing it on the stove.

A shindig, and getting my writing analyzed

Andrea had a “thing” to go to last night, and I went along too. It was for some organization that works with non-profit organizations in Toronto; if they want a space to do a fundraising event, this group can provide a space for free, and hook you up with deals for food and drink. Seemed like a good deal, at first glance, although I’m not posting the name of the organization, in case it turns out that it’s a rip off.

The space itself was excellent. Top floor of a downtown building, with an amazing outdoor patio that goes all around the building. (Actually, now that I think about it, I think it was only three sides of the building. But still, it was really well done.) It was weird being there, though, because it was supposed to be for non-profit organizations, and everyone there looked… well… rich. They obviously weren’t grassroots organizations; they were the big organizations, that everyone has heard of. (The ones that have so much money they don’t need this type of service.) Just watching them all interact, and seeing how they were dressed, it seemed a lot more like a bunch of CEOs getting together than people working for non-profit organizations. So of course I was uncomfortable, because I’m never comfortable around rich people.

But one of the things they had set up was a woman who will analyze your handwriting, so Andrea and I gave it a shot. Of course, everything that she told me is what I’d expect to be told; I’m intelligent, I’m independent, I’m a leader not a follower, etc. I’m pretty sure she’d say the same stuff to everyone. (You’ll never hear her reading someone’s handwriting, and say, “Oh! You’re not very bright, are you?”) And, since she did both Andrea and I together, it turns out we’re perfect for each other. (Again, although I’d find it hilarious, I doubt she’s ever talked to a couple and said, “wow, you guys might as well just break up right now.”)

She did tell me one negative thing, though: The paper asked me to write my favourite saying or philosophy of life, and I put “Nothing is ever easy.” (If you know me in real life, you’ve probably heard me say that. Many times.) She thought that was too pessimistic, so she crossed it out, and wrote, “everything is always easy”—which is just silly. We all know that everything isn’t always easy.

Anyway, I hope that the organization turns out to be good for small organizations, and that Andrea ends up hosting some events there, because I wouldn’t mind going back.

The BBC Lost Land of the Jaguar series

Because Andrea and her family are Guyanese, every once in a while I get sent a link to some Guyanese-related site, or show, or whatever. We recently got sent a link to a BBC series, called Lost Land of the Jaguar, which someone has helpfully put up on YouTube. (The preceding link is to the BBC’s website, not YouTube.) It is absolutely fascinating, having to do with the Guyanese rainforest—perhaps the only above-ground place left in the world where nature is still untouched by modern-man. (If not the only, one of the only.)

Andrea and I watched the first two episodes last night, and will probably watch the third episode soon (schedule permitting). Unfortunately, YouTube limits you to about ten minutes per video (unless you sign up for a paid account), so the episodes are in ten minute segments; however, I’ve created a couple of playlists, which should make it easier to watch them in one contiguous group:

• Episode 1
• Episode 2

I haven’t yet created a playlist for Episode 3, because I’m not sure if it’s fully uploaded yet. When we’ve watched it, and confirmed how many pieces there are to that episode, I’ll create a playlist for that one, too. (I guess you can watch out at my YouTube profile page, for the next playlist to show up.) The first episode was seven videos, and the second one was six, so I’m not sure how long the third one will be.

I would have preferred to simply link to the BBC iPlayer—so that I could be sure that the videos wouldn’t get taken down, as they might on YouTube—but they don’t seem to have this show available online.

Quantum of Solace redux

There is another trailer online for QoS:

Unfortunately, based on the two trailers I’ve seen so far, it seems like a great action movie, but it doesn’t feel like a Bond movie. Hopefully I’m wrong—after all, I’m only basing these feelings on a couple of trailers.

Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

I found this blog entry to be very interesting. It’s about a paper that has been written on distinguishing those who can program from those who can’t. (The blog entry contains a link to the paper itself, too, which is here.)

I should say that the intent of the paper is not elitist. “We can program, and you can’t, so don’t even bother to try.” But programming is something that people seem to have either a natural ability for, or… well… don’t. As the authors of the paper say:

Learning to program is notoriously difficult. A substantial minority of students fails in every introductory programming course in every UK university. Despite heroic academic effort, the proportion has increased rather than decreased over the years. Despite a great deal of research into teaching methods and student responses, we have no idea of the cause.

It has long been suspected that some people have a natural aptitude for programming, but until now there has been no psychological test which could detect it. Programming ability is not known to be correlated with age, with sex, or with educational attainment; nor has it been found to be correlated with any of the aptitudes measured in conventional ‘intelligence’ or ‘problem-solving-ability’ tests.

That quote is followed closely by this sentence, which I rather enjoyed:

We point out that programming teaching is useless for those who are bound to fail and pointless for those who are certain to succeed.

The authors talk about three significant hurdles that students encounter, when learning to program: assignment and sequence; recursion/iteration; concurrency. They then go on to say this, which I found very interesting:

…. Assignment and sequence … hardly look as if they should be hurdles at all: storage of / remembering information and doing one thing after another are part of everyday patterns of life and thought, and you might have expected (as at first do most teachers) that students’ experience could be analogised into some kind of programming expertise. Not so: it is a real hurdle, and it comes at the very beginning of most programming courses.

I’m sure, when I was first learning to program, that I became frustrated with fellow students, when they couldn’t figure out how assignment works. I guess this paper explains both sides of the coin: why my fellow students couldn’t get it, and why it seemed so obvious to me.

But enough preamble. Let’s talk about the test itself. It consisted of questions such as the following (click to see a bigger version):And the authors found these results:

We could hardly expect that students would choose the Java model of assignment … but it rapidly became clear that despite their various choices of model, in the first administration they divided into three distinct groups with no overlap at all:

• 44% used the same model for all, or almost all, of the questions. We call this the consistent group.
• 39% used different models for different questions. We call this the the inconsistent group.
• The remaining 8% refused to answer all or almost all of the questions. We call this the blank group.

We did not interview our subjects to determine anything about their group membership, so we do not know whether students chose consciously or unconsciously to follow one strategy or another, nor how conscious choices (if any) were motivated, nor what any particular choice meant to a subject who made it. We have no information about how group membership correlates with earlier education, employment experience, age, sex, marital status or indeed anything else.

The great thing about the study is that the test was administered twice: Once before the students had had any computer programming studies, and once after they had completed their first course. (The authors aren’t really sure whether it was planned to give the test prior to instruction, or if it was a happy accident.) They found that the results were fairly consistent: People who fell into one of the three groups before taking the course tended to fall into the same group after taking the course.

Interestingly, the authors then talked about using these groups to predict who would be good programmers, and who wouldn’t. I would have expected that the “consistent” group would be the most successful programmers, but I would have been in the minority:

Speculation is part of science, though, and those to whom we have recounted this tale have usually been ready to try it. Told that there were three groups and how they were distinguished, but not told their relative sizes, we have found that computer scientists and other programmers have almost all predicted that the blank group would be more successful in the course exam than the others: “they had the sense to refuse to answer questions which they couldn’t understand” is a typical explanation. Non-programming social scientists, mathematicians and historians, given the same information, almost all pick the inconsistent group: “they show intelligence by picking methods to suit the problem” is the sort of thing they say. Very few, so far, have predicted that the consistent group would be the most successful. Remarkably, it is the consistent group, and almost exclusively the consistent group, that is successful. We speculate on the reasons in section 7.

And what do they feel are the results of this study? First of all, they feel that they have a predictive test, as to who will be a good programmer, and who will not.

[One of their graphs] suggests that it is extremely difficult to teach programming to the inconsistent and blank groups. It might be possible to teach them, if we concentrated on trying to persuade them to see a programming language as a system of rules (though the evidence in section 6 below seems to suggest otherwise).

The consistent group seem to be much easier to teach. We speculate that they divide into two groups: the very successful ones find programming easy and may perhaps be those who ought to follow a conventional computer-science education, with lots of formal content; the moderately successful perhaps are the software engineers, those who can program but can’t imagine that they will ever enjoy it, and are content to submit to management discipline and to be drowned in UML (ugh!).

As a side-note, why does everyone hate UML?

I don’t know how scientifically accurate this study will turn out to be, or if the authors will attempt to try it in a larger experiment with more subjects, but I found it interesting nonetheless.

Quantum of Solace

The new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, is coming out in November. I don’t know a whole lot about it, but the trailer is up on YouTube. (It was actually put up way back last June, but as always, I’m behind the times.)

It doesn’t grab my attention the way the previews for Casino Royale grabbed my attention, but I’m looking forward to it.

Finding Parking in Toronto

Every once in a while I have to drive downtown, and my biggest hassle is usually “where can I park?” Unfortunately, my first impulse is to go to the Green P Parking website, but it turns out that their site is lousy. I’ve never satisfactorily been able to use it to find a parking lot near where I’m going. (It’s been a pet peeve for a while, and I finally sent them a long-winded email with suggestions to improve their site.)

However, just as my blood was getting its hottest, I found a great site: StopFinder. It’s a mashup that uses Google Maps; type in your destination, and even what time you’re going and how long you’ll be staying, and it will give you:

• All of the parking lots in the area—something that the Green P web site cannot do, I can’t stress that enough—with the closest lot highlighted for you
• Prices and hours of service for each of the parking lots
• Colour-coded rankings of the lots’ prices
• Bus and subway stops in the area, with links to the TTC schedule, so that you can figure out when the bus will arrive

It looks like this:Of course, now that I’ve put up a specific destination in that screenshot, knowing my luck they’ll tear down the club that’s currently there, and build some kind of sex club or something, that will last for twenty years. And anyone who comes to this post will be wondering, “why did serna put up a link to a sex club?!?”

So there you have it. If you’re going somewhere in Toronto, and want to know where to park or how to take the TTC there, try StopFinder.

Grilled Asparagus

Wow, this is my third post of the day. I’m on a roll!

I’ve already posted a recipe for some great burgers. Now it’s time to post a link to a recipe for grilling asparagus on the BBQ.

Actually, there’s nothing revolutionary about it. I’m finding that when it comes to grilling vegetables on the BBQ, the steps are usually the same:

• drizzle the veggies in olive oil, usually combined with lemon juice
• grill them on medium heat, usually about two minutes per side

And this asparagus recipe is the same. (No lemon juice, in this case.) The only thing I did differently from the recipe was that I didn’t use as much salt as the recipe’s author had suggested—even though s/he said to “trust” him/her that it wouldn’t be too much.

Some day, I’ll post my instructions for grilling the perfect steak. Unfortunately, I tried it again last night, and, although it came out great, it still wasn’t perfect.

Chrome

Since I’m always behind the curve when it comes to writing about new stuff, I guess I should mention—a day or two after everyone else has—that Google has introduced a new open-source web browser, which they call Chrome.

Now, you might ask yourself: Why has Google built its own web browser? Isn’t there already an open-source web browser, called Firefox, which by most accounts is pretty darned good? And if you want to do something interesting with the browser, couldn’t you do it by creating a Firefox plugin? (e.g. Ubiquity.) And Google expected that response, and put up a page saying why they did it.

But the thing is… I still don’t get it. I mean, I read the page, but it didn’t really answer the question, in my mind: Why did Google feel that they need their own browser? Why couldn’t they build on something like Firefox? I went through the little demo videos on their features page, and although it seems like a great browser, it also seems like it’s just a series of incremental improvements over Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. Not something revolutionary.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely not saying that I think this is a dumb idea. Most of the folks over at Google are a lot smarter than I am, and I’m betting they had a good reason for doing this. And I’m also thinking back to when Firefox first introduced tabbed browsing, and how I didn’t think it was such a big deal, because that was only an “incremental improvement” over having multiple browser windows open. (“You’re just trading multiple buttons in your Taskbar for multiple tabs in your browser,” I thought, “What’s the big deal?”) But now I can’t imagine not having tabs in a browser.

In any event, I’m downloading Chrome, and will give it a try. (I’ve written too many love letters on this blog to other Google products not to give it a try!) I’m prepared to be blown away, but expecting to find “just another browser”, maybe slightly better than Firefox. Time will tell.

Coincidences

I’d thought I’d posted about this before, but apparently I haven’t. So I’ll do so now.

I get a lot of coincidences in my life. (e.g. see this previous post, for a perfect example; I’m often thinking of a particular Simpsons episode, only to turn on the TV the next day and find it playing.) I’ve sometimes thought of creating a “serna Coincidence Blog”, to document all of the many coincidences I encounter.

Knowing me, the following will probably happen:

• I will hesitate for a long time—mostly because I won’t be able to settle on a blog template to use.
• I will finally do it, because for some bizarre reason I love creating blogs, and I just won’t be able to help myself.

So… yeah. Stay tuned for that.

The BBQ: working great

Well, it’s been over a week. And how’s the BBQ doing? As a matter of fact, it’s doing quite well. Unfortunately, the very first thing I tried was steak, and it didn’t come out well. (A bit more well done than I like, even though I followed instructions which should have made it medium. It wasn’t bad—I still enjoyed it—it was just too well done.) We’ve also done lamb burgers from President’s Choice, which were great, lamb skewers (also President’s Choice, also great), zucchini and eggplant, chicken with BBQ sauce, salmon steaks and salmon kebobs, and finally, burgers. Everything has been great.

Speaking of which, if you want a really good recipe for making burgers, see this recipe. You won’t regret it.

What I haven’t yet done, but hopefully will soon, is try making curry on the side burner. As it is, I’m too busy enjoying the flavour of the BBQ on my other foods, but using the side burner for curry was one of the selling points of this BBQ for me, so I owe it to myself to give it a try.

BBQ

We finally—finally!—bought a barbeque. We’ve been living in our townhouse for over three years, and all that time I’ve wanted a BBQ, and now we finally have one.

One of the main things holding us up was that Andrea’s dad had a used one, that he had volunteered to give us, but we never got around to digging it out of his garage. So we finally went and picked it up on Sunday. (Actually, we went on Saturday afternoon and wiped and hosed it down, to get rid of the dust, and then picked it up on Sunday, after it had dried off.) Unfortunately, it turned out that it didn’t work. The burner wasn’t connected properly to the hose from the propane tank, and I couldn’t figure out how to connect it properly. Plus, it was pretty rusty in there. So we decided to go and get a new one, because I didn’t want to mess around with propane connections. Which, in retrospect, I’m happy about, because we also wanted a side burner, which the free one didn’t have.

I had been thinking about getting a Weber. That seems to be the cream of the crop, when it comes to BBQs. However, although Weber BBQs last forever, they are also very expensive. So, after much soul-searching, I decided that it wasn’t worth the money; even if a cheaper BBQ didn’t last forever, it would probably still be cheaper in the long run.

Once I’d made up my mind to get something cheaper, I actually thought about getting a President’s Choice BBQ, from Fortinos. For about half the price of a Weber, I could get a BBQ with a side burner. There was a good chance that it would be a piece of crap, but, on the other hand, President’s Choice is pretty good, so there was also a chance that it would be a good, lasting unit. But we finally gave up, and got a Sterling, which is even cheaper. Who knows how long it will actually last; I’m hoping it’s not a disposable BBQ! (Obviously, if we have to buy a new one every year, we would have been better off getting a Weber…)

Anyway, you probably don’t care about all of that. I got it put together on Monday night, which wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe. It took an hour or two, but very little cursing. (I did end up with one extra nut and bolt, which I couldn’t attach; the holes in two pieces of metal that it was supposed to connect together wouldn’t quite line up. But there were three other sets of nuts and bolts keeping them together, so I don’t think it will cause any problems.) I also couldn’t get the lighter button to work, but wasn’t overly worried about it, since we have a lighter.

I had been hoping to fire it up on Tuesday, and cook something. (I’d been further hoping that the “something” I cooked would be a nice, juicy steak.) Unfortunately, we had leftovers in the fridge that we had to eat out. And, since I’m an adult now, and I have to make mature decisions, we decided to eat the leftovers first, and maybe cook something on the BBQ on Wednesday. I did take the opportunity to season the grill, though, and I also figured out why the lighter button hadn’t worked. (I’d missed connecting a wire. And it’s a good thing I figured it out, because the wire was within the BBQ—or very close to it, anyway—and probably would have caught on fire or something.)

I’m crossing my fingers, hoping to be able to cook something tonight. (I’m also crossing my fingers that I’ll be able to cook it well—it will seem like a terrible waste of money to have bought a BBQ, if it turns out I have no BBQing skills.)