The incomprehensibility of OpenID

Whenever I see OpenID in use, it confuses me. What does it mean? How does it work? It isn't intuitive. This is why I never sign up for, or log into a site which uses it.

One site that strangely insists on using it as the only method of authentication, is Stack Overflow. Often I have been tempted to participate, but the lack of an understandable form of authentication prevents me from doing so.

But today, there was a question about Stackless there. I gave in and clicked on the OpenID buttons. Stuff happened, I don't particularly understand what, and suddenly I am authenticated. I'm still confused.

Creating an account with a username and a password, or even just a password linked to your email address, is simple and comprehensible. Whatever this is, it is neither of those things.

Homebrand Licorice Pieces

I've always like licorice since I was a kid. My grandfather used to buy it for me and my siblings when we travelled down to the arse-end of New Zealand to visit him and my grandmother. He however, used to buy "Black Knight" licorice, which looks like a professional brand. "Black Knight" is still available today, but it is generally twice as expensive as this budget brand. And the ingredients look like they have cheapened and become less natural and industrialised over the years, where rather than sugar they use "glucose (from corn)."

When I used to go to Walmart to shop for groceries in the USA, I used to look at the back of the packets and if there were industrialised ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, I wouldn't buy it. Generally, the more natural the ingredients, the less that were listed. Anyway, the end result was that there were very few things that I could buy. Out of whole bread aisle for instance, there was maybe one brand of bread I could buy.

Homebrand licorice pieces only have something like 0.7% licorice extract in the mix, but they still taste okay for the price, and the list of ingredients looks natural (based on my consumer's eye).



Only one "piece" came in the bag.



The previous two times when I have bought this, the pieces have had a texture I can only describe as slimey! Eww. Thankfully this time, they had the rubbery texture that licorice normally has. I'm trying not to leave the packet on the desk so that I just eat them all without noticing this time.

Price: $2.89NZ

Home-made yogurt

Last time I took photos of my home-made yogurt, I forgot to take a photo of what it looked like after it had sat.. erm, yogurtifying or whatever they call it.



Generally, the yogurt solid looks like a big solid round lump under the whey. When I make this, I generally use a 2L bottle of milk, cleaning the bottle. Then I eventually pour the resulting yogurt into the cleaned bottle its milk came from. Because another ingredient is an amount of yogurt that provides the cultures for the yogurtification, I pour an equal amount of whey down the sink at the end, so that the remainder will fit back in the bottle. The whey is mixed back into the yogurt, giving a thin milky lumpy liquid. I leave this sitting in the fridge for at least 24 hours before touching it.

As I make more and more batches of yogurt, putting an amount of the previous one into the next, the yogurt is slowly getting thicker. The whey has stopped separating so much as well, which happened with the early batches, although that might be related to slight differences in how I made it.

I'd recommend making your own yogurt, it is a little time consuming, but it's well worth it.