[mod.recipes] mod.recipes notes and errors

reid@decwrl.UUCP (02/17/87)

Whenever I get involved in a big or deadline project, the error rate in
mod.recipes seems to go up. When the recipes come out error-free consistently
for weeks, you can probably be confident that I'm goofing off on my job or
neglecting my children.

Anyhow, there were two errors that slipped through in this week's batch of
recipes. In "cherrycheese-1" it called for 1/3 cup of granulated sugar, but
used a nonexistent troff macro \(13. Since there's no such macro, the line
has to read:
	.IG "1/3 cup" "granulated sugar" "60 g"
In the "hobbit-pie" recipe, I accidentally left out the hobbits. Uh, er, I
mean I accidentally left out the onions. After the mushrooms, add these lines
	.IG "2 cups" "onions," "300 g"
	chopped fine


If you don't want to be bothered running an actual text editor over your
recipes you can use the archive server to retrieve fixed copies:
	To: archive-server@decwrl.dec.com
	send recipe hobbit-pie
	send recipe cherrycheese-1

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I note that there is a fairly heavy use of the archive server from Europe.
This seems silly to me. It costs a lot of money to send those things over the
Atlantic. At one time there was a European archive server running in England,
but the gentleman running it seems to have switched jobs and I haven't heard
back from him. There are people in Europe who have most or all of the recipes
(I know that Tempere University in Finland has all of them). If somebody
would like to run a European archive server, either using my archive-server
code or using something simpler, please let me know so that I can advertise
it. My code is a bunch of /bin/sh scripts and awk programs and crontb entries
that work under BSD/Ultrix, and can probably be made to work under other
Unix systems.
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As part of the big USENET name sanitization effort, the official network name
of mod.recipes is going to change sometime soon. I've asked for the name
rec.mod.recipes or rec.recipes for the new group (we have to give up the
"mod" prefix). The people doing this renaming are probably children of the
folks who, during World War II, renamed bandaids "bandages,plastic,sterile"
and renamed the Jeep "vehicle,utility,general-purpose". I understand that one
of them is likely to take a new job with CBS soon and as his first job will
rename "Dallas" into "soap-oppera.evening.wealth-and-glamor.texas" 

In any event, this silliness is going to happen sooner or later, so you
should be prepared for it. I am not going to change the internal name of the
newsgroup, or the instances of "mod.recipes" in the various macro packages
and shell scripts. I'm going to keep calling it "mod.recipes" because that's
what it is. But you will have to start receiving it wrapped in a wrapper with
another name, so don't be surprised when it happens. I haven't heard from the
categorization police whether the name will be their first choice
(rec.food.recipes) or my first choice (rec.mod.recipes) or something else.
If they stick us with rec.food.recipes I think I will launch a month of
nonfood recipes as a protest; I have in the queue (in various stages of
readiness) recipes for shampoo, dog food, laundry soap, leather conditioners,
fertilizer, and shaving cream.

Time to get back to work.

Brian