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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress » The Five-Ingredient Cookbook

Prefab Cole Slaw Kit, Improved

So, I buy these "cole slaw kits" in the supermarket for a couple of bucks. They're basically a bag full sliced cabbage & a little grated carrot, and include a generous plastic squeeze packet of cheap, chemical-y, over-sweetened Italian dressing. It's enough for 2-3 side dishes, or one decent bowl for one person which can sub for a meal if you're not that famished.

Here's how I fix it:

1. Dump the slaw mix in a bowl. The stuff I buy mostly fills a 16oz soup bowl.
2. Squeeze in 1/2-3/4 of the included "dressing", to taste. I prefer less rather than more.
3. Put in a generous dollop, a pretty big forkful or two, of mayonnaise.
4. Give it a couple of decent tablespoons of vinegar. I use white but red might work. Try to err on the side of not overpowering it... you don't…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Code & Algo Works In Progress
Posted inReference Info Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressFileMaker ProGeek StuffGrody Technical Details

Separation model drawbacks

This is a work-in-progress inspired by a recent conversation.

In the "separation model" in FileMaker, where data tables live in separate files from an "interface file" containing visual layouts that display the data to the user, used to be widely recommended as a development convention. However, many developers have found that it has significant drawbacks. This is a scratchpad list of those drawbacks as I encounter them.

1. Duplicate relationship graphs

In practice, relationships depend on context, and this is provided by table occurrences that layouts are built on. You may need a portal on a layout... that means the relationship must be in the interface file. But you may have a calculated field in the parent record that counts, summarizes, or otherwise performs an aggregate operation on the related records. That means the relationship must be in the data file. Neither of these is unusual at all. So you…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress
Posted inWriting Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressKvetchingPoison PenTechnologyUI Design

Mike’s Rules Of Design

This is a scratchpad for jotting down the various design rules I use, mostly as I run across violations.

1. No making people read hieroglyphics for core functionality

Somewhere along the way, a lot of people picked up on Steve Jobs's worst idea and ran with it: User interfaces should emphasize looking like something that would look "cool" in a movie, rather than focus on usability. Icons, which were originally meant as a visual cue to help you quickly distinguish functions without having to read text, became monochrome, uniform, abstract, unhelpfully difficult to distinguish from each other, and descriptive text went away so you couldn't know at a glance what they did, leading to millions of man-hours wasted mousing over 20 buttons in a row trying to figure out which one was the "import" button. As a design language, icons went from unique and identifiable to the visual equivalent of…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress » The Five-Ingredient Cookbook
Posted inRecipes Posted in genresWork-In-Progress

Easy Good Fake Custard

A favorite snack of mine—feels like junk food, but not too bad, filling, and super-easy.

Take about 12oz vanilla yogurt. I use cream-top full-fat yogurt.

Add a couple of splashes chocolate extract. You have to be careful, unlike real chocolate, more chocolate extract is not better... it's a little tart. Ideally I suppose you could just use unsweetened cocoa powder, I'm particular to the Hershey's unsweetened dark cocoa, but the store over here has been out lately.

Two reasonably heaping teaspoons of coconut flour.

Mix it all together really well.

And that's it! The coconut flour gives it rich texture and a nice flavor, which combines well with the chocolate and vanilla. I like to eat it with a very small spoon, so I can savor it. It's not that much like custard, but, it manages to hit enough of the same notes that it's a pretty…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress
Posted inI Can't Believe It's Not Poetry! Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressHaikuTomfoolery

Haikus

Haikuity

This would be haiku,
But it only has two lines.
Oh, wait — nevermind.

This is a haiku.
You can tell because it's, uh,
not everything else?

This, too, is a hai
ku, even though it's labored
I still got it right.

Someday maybe this,
too, will be a haiku, dude,
but it just ain't now, man.

Ere, now I follow
the plain footsteps of Basho
but without his skill.

Indieweb Haikus

Occasionally I visit the Indieweb Chatroom when nobody is there and leave haikus.

the lone web dev sighs
soft, in the empty chat room
indieweb haiku
  8/9/2025

The empty chat room.
The placid textarea
bears no hacker wit.
  11/20/2025

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress
Posted inWriting Posted in genresWork-In-Progress

Laws Of The Land

This is my placeholder scratchpad for what will be my page of rules of thumb, natural laws, and other such handy guidelines.

1. Child rearing

Keep a parent's vigilant eye, and keep the kid away from high stuff and sharp stuff and hot stuff and anything with teeth and no training. You'll do fine.

2. Kupietz's Henriksen Conjecture

As described on my movie reviews page: Lance Henriksen will be the last to die in any horror movie he is in.

I'll be adding to this as I remember these, until it grows into an article.

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress » The Five-Ingredient Cookbook

Ketoriffic Tuna Pig Salad au Gratin (with non-keto variation)

This is a regular snack around my place.

Ingredients:
1 large (7oz unopened) can tuna, drained
2 thin slices ham
healthy dollop or two of mayonnaise
red Tabasco sauce
black pepper
optional: lemon pepper
powedered garlic
shredded cheese of your preference

1. Put tuna in a large bowl
2. shred ham slices and add
3. add healthy dollop or two of mayonnaise
4. Several dashes of Tabasco sauce. This is one of the exceedingly rare instances where you don't want to overdo it with Tabasco sauce... just a dash or two. This is because we're about to overdo it with the black pepper, and surprisingly, they don't mix.
5. Add garlic to taste... I like a lot.
6. Add pepper. Now, I have a standard rule of them for how much black pepper you need to add…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Visual Works In Progress
Posted inPhotojournal Posted in genresTravel & AdventureUrban Exploration

Subterranean SF: Fort Mason Tunnel

This is a placeholder to remind me to post the photo album of exploring the hidden Fort Mason rail tunnel.

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Visual Works In Progress
Posted inPhotojournal Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressTravel & Adventure

Everybody says she’s the brains behind Pa: Wendee’s Farm

This is a placeholder page to remind me to post my gallery of photos from Wendee Key's plantation.

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Code & Algo Works In Progress
Posted inCode & Algorithms Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressGeek StuffTo-Dos

Software Index Placeholder

This is a placeholder page left here to remind me to set up a single-page index of links to all my various software projects.

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Code & Algo Works In Progress
Draggable Elements WordPress Plugin
Posted inCode & Algorithms Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressLive DemoWeb DevelopmentWordpress Coding

Nothin' But A Drag: Draggable Elements WordPress Plugin

First, the demo

This is a brief demo page for my KupieTools Draggable Elements WordPress plugin, which dynamically adds interactive draggability to any page element, based on CSS class names (or, really, any CSS selector).

Here's some boxes:

Drag Me Horizontally Drag Me Vertically Drag Me Anywhere Drag Me To Corners

If you select "View Page Source" on this page in your browser, you will see that the above four DIV elements, as defined in the page HTML, are just ordinary DIV elements with a single classname, an ID, and some visual styling. The KupieTools Draggable Elements plugin adds draggability to any arbitrary page element, by simply specifying a class name or other CSS selector for it in the plugin. (If you use your browser's Inspector instead of View Page Source, you'll see the current state of those elements, with any changes or additions the plugin created…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Code & Algo Works In Progress
Posted inCode & Algorithms Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressWeb DevelopmentWordpress Coding

Customization Is King: KupieTools Custom WordPress Plugins Overview

Pardon My Placeholder!

This page is a placeholder listing my various Github repos containing my custom WordPress plugin work, loosely branded as "KupieTools", as I work on more detailed pages documenting them.

kupietools/ktwp-wp-plugin-caching-toolkit A plugin providing functions for WordPress developers to implement PHP function caching for performance. kupietools/ktwp-wp-plugin-cli-mode WordPress plugin supplementing my CLI.html text-based web browsing front end. Adds a little icon on wordpress pages to allow users to switch to a javascript-based terminal emulator providing web page browsing commands via the keyboard. kupietools/ktwp-wp-plugin-debuggery-toolkit WordPress plugin providing handy debugging functions particular to the author's needs. /kupietools/ktwp-wp-plugin-draggable-elements WordPress Plugins allowing developers to make any previously existing page element draggable freely, vertically, horzontally, or constrained to corners, by adding the element's CSS selector to the plugin code. kupietools/ktwp-wp-plugin-editor-codefolding WordPress plugin adding code folding (disclosure triangles) to the built-in editors on WP's admin…
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Workshop » Works In Progress » Code & Algo Works In Progress

Friend-Of-A-Friend “Chart Art” Project

This is a placeholder to remind me to write about this project. This was what I called "chart art". These are social network graphs created by querying a database of friendships between real people in social media, showing the relationships between two people, with coloring used to indicate closely-associated social groups.

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress » The Five-Ingredient Cookbook
Posted inWriting Posted in genresHow Mike DoRecipes

Oatmeal á la K

Written by request from espresso martini influencer

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress
Posted inWriting Posted in genresMisc. Hobbies & Interests

Go

Among my fascinations and frsutrations is go. This is going to be my page for organizing my thoughts on it as I learn.

I get the sense that Go is not a game but a field of study.

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress
Posted inWriting Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressLanguage & Vocabulary

Vocabulary

[could probably have a whole website section on words & language]

This is a placeholder for a page suggested by captJamesG in the Indieweb writing group meeting at https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-02-04-writing : "Writing challenge for anyone interested: write about a word or words that you use but may not be widely known." Agita, vehagedah, sennsucht, and I'm sure I have a bunch of English ones

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress
Posted inWriting Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressArtificial IntelligenceTechnosociology

Insert Clever phrase here: Artificial Stupidity thoughts & references

I write down a lot of thoughts on AI but have never gathered it into a cohesive essay or collection. This is the beginning of loosely collecting my thoughts and saved references for that.

  • On Emergence and actual intelligence: People are talking about current technology, which relies on matching statistical profiles of strings of words, like true intelligence could emerge from it.I look at it this way: AI video generation is getting really impressive. You could feed it tons of video of basketballs bouncing, and pretty soon it would be able to generate videos of basketballs bouncing realistically through all kinds of extraordinary scenarios, because it had seen enough visual, external data to create incredible simulations of how a basketball bounces. It would truly, profoundly have a grasp on how basketballs appear to bounce.And never, in any of that, would it have even a glimmer of a clue as…
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Workshop » Works In Progress » Visual Works In Progress
Work-In-Progress Preview—#WrappedInPink
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genresAI Generative Illustration

Think... Nah, Not Gonna Say It: Work-In-Progress Preview—#WrappedInPink

They've been doing this "#WrappedInPink Challenge" generative art meme on LinkedIn. Here's just a preview of studies of some things I've been working on for it. Not entirely sure what direction I'm going to go in yey.

 

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Visual Works In Progress
By Request, Wild SF & Wild NYC (Work In Progress)
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressAI Generative Illustration

More Wild Styles: By Request, Wild SF & Wild NYC (Work In Progress)

A cousin of mine was helping work on a volume of poetry and asked if I had more images specifically of San Francisco or New York City in the style of “Wild California” Studies — AI Generative Art gallery that they could consider for inclusion. I didn't, but I whipped some up.

I'm pretty fond of how a lot of them turned out, but, as with so many of these projects, I wound up making many that are visually striking but don't really have much artistic value beyond that, and the work remains to be done to winnow down all the striking images to the ones that really are special.

Until then, I'm so fond of them, though, that I thought I'd give a preview. Here's the complete output of those experiments, awaiting the best of it being culled down into the final presentation.

Right now…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress » The Five-Ingredient Cookbook
I AM DA CHEF OF DA FUTURE
Posted inWriting Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressBachelor Survival 'n' Style

Dinner For Schmucks: The Five Ingredient Cookbook — Kitchen Survival for Schmoes

Mostly sticking this placeholder into the "works in progress" section to remind me to pull all my recipies together and work on my cookbook.

At a certain point in my bachelorhood, I realized I was subsisting, in my home-cooked meals, on almost the same 5 ingredients. Tough to recall at this late date what those ingredients were... I think there was tuna fish in there, mayonnaise, ramen, I can't remember the other two. I had this idea at the time that it would be fun to put together a bachelor's cookbook of all the different things I made out of those few ingredients.

Over time my culinary palette grew, horizontally if not in terms of sophistication, but the idea never left me. Now there's an air fryer on my counter (or, as I call it, the "meat microwave"), probably more than 5 things I use regularly on my spice shelf…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Visual Works In Progress
Revisions of Johanna — AI-Assisted lyrical illumination
Posted inImage Gallery Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressAI Generative IllustrationIlluminated Lyrics

Gallery: Revisions of Johanna — AI-Assisted lyrical illumination

I have to be honest. I don't know about this one.

I set out to do another set of AI-assisted lyric illustrations, this time all of one song in its entirety... Bob Dylan's "Visions Of Johanna".

I got a little ways into it, and it was going well, when a few times in a row the generative algorithm overemphasized cats I had added as incidental background elements in the prompt, to interesting effect. So I had the brilliant idea: let's illustrate the whole song with cats. I backtracked and started over again.

It was an instructive lesson, one that didn't turn out as well as I had hoped.

It's just hard to get a lot of variety out of the Stable Diffusion XL algorithm when the main subject is cats. Turns out, visually, cats are really not a very expressive medium. And especially…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Musical Works In Progress
Michael Kupietz Live (And Almost In Tune) on Pirate Cat Radio, 5/28/2009
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressFull AlbumFolk & BluesAcousticky GuitarLive Performance

Album Preview: Michael Kupietz Live (And Almost In Tune) on Pirate Cat Radio, 5/28/2009

Back in 2009 my old ex-friend Rick Abruzzo, whom I'd met some years earlier during a mutual effort to resuscitate the soggy corpse of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, invited me to come down with my guitar and fill some airtime on Baghdad By The Bay, his show on San Francisco's Pirate Cat Radio. A few unruly friends tagged along to egg me on, and in addition to going out live over the wires, the ensuing off-the-cuff, improvised hour of chaos was recorded for posterity on Pirate Cat's state-of-the-art low-quality direct-to-mp3 recorder. This is that chaos. It may or may not have passed for showmanship—you be the judge.

This is basically a nearly-finished live album, warts and all, and creeping up on 15 years after the fact it just awaits on a little bit of final production gloss and mastering for me to…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Musical Works In Progress
गोल्डन यात्रा • The Golden Yatra
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressFull AlbumDrone

Album Preview: गोल्डन यात्रा • The Golden Yatra

This one is finished except for the final production and mastering... it needs some studio gloss on it.

This a a drone album I did in early 2023. I created the basic audio for this with the wonderful Bento analog synthesis emulator, then arranged and produced it in my hated enemy Logic Pro.

Unlike a lot of my music, I would actually present this as worth a listen, for anyone open to things this far from conventional musical ideas. Dim the lights, put your headphones on, and drift downstream through my inner space for 80 minutes. You may like it or you may not, I never would have expected to. I certainly wouldn't ever have thought that a 80 minute piece of music with only one note could be engaging all the way through, and especially not hold up to repeated listening. But I'm pleased to…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Musical Works In Progress
Five Themes In Uncertain Times v.0.89.05
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressFull AlbumZetetic MusicProgressive / Art Rock

Album Preview: Five Themes In Uncertain Times v.0.89.05

Posted with great reluctance, my perpetually unfinished magnum opus, likely to someday stand as my failed masterpiece, a ponderous 65-minute arabesque of serialist post-rock instrumentals which, after 7 ongoing years of work and no end in sight, is at this point holding up the completion of 8 subsequent albums.

I wouldn't make a recommendation as to whether anybody should listen to this or not. This isn't actually intended for anyone to listen to, this one in particular I'm really just making to suit myself, writing it for its own sake. You're welcome to check it out, but that's as far in as I'll welcome you.

Some degree of patience may be of help to those who do care to venture into it, because it does something longer, quieter, and more deliberate than it may at first…

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Musical Works In Progress
Early Experiment: Monster Zed / Night Of The Living Zed 0.5a
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressZetetic Music

Night Of The Living Dread: Early Experiment: Monster Zed / Night Of The Living Zed 0.5a

An early experiment in the serialist style I've been developing, which I was once told by a figure in a dream should be called "Zetetic Music". 2017. This is not a listenable or enjoyable album nor a particularly interesting piece of music, and is posted here primarily for the historical record. There are many other things on this site much more worth listening to.

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Workshop » Works In Progress » Musical Works In Progress
Ethay Eaday Illstay Eamscray (“The Dead Still Scream”) — Music From The Imaginary Motion Picture
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressFull AlbumSoundtrackProgressive / Art Rock

Album Preview: Ethay Eaday Illstay Eamscray (“The Dead Still Scream”) — Music From The Imaginary Motion Picture

Imagine if an esteemed Pig Latin cinema auteur filmed a classic 1970s horror movie entirely in his native tongue. Then, imagine if I had been picked out of my second-grade class by that auteur to create a vintage electronic progressive soundtrack to that film. Now, imagine that soundtrack was unearthed and finally saw release as an album in the 2020s. These are the work-in-progress demos for what someday will be what would have been that legendary classic film score.
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Workshop » Works In Progress » Musical Works In Progress
The Strutbutter / The Great Game Show In The Sky, v13.15
Posted inMusic & Sounds Posted in genresWork-In-ProgressElectronic MusicCover Songs

Demo: The Strutbutter / The Great Game Show In The Sky, v13.15

I've been putting together an album of goofy electronic arrangements of classic tunes. Here's one I'm still working on at the moment, a medley of classic favorites, called "The Strutbutter / The Great Game Show In The Sky".

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