Just don’t go around carrying the bread mix in your wallet.
— Ryan 
I dunno, Ryan. I think there are much worse ways to confuse condoms and a bread machine. I’ll leave it up to your imagination.
— Adam
Oh. My. $DEITY. There I was not expecting commenters to go.
Anyway, yes, yeast spoils; it’s a bunch of leetle tiny living critters, and like most living critters they aren’t over-pleasant when they become ex-living critters.
Keeping it in the fridge extends its life somewhat. FYI.
I’ve been told by a friend that if I’m going to get serious about auto-bread, I should invest in a jar of Fleischmann’s Bread Yeast and keep it in the refrigerator.
— Mark
My grandmother was telling me about this. She said that when she was little, people’s mothers would have yeast populations. You’d have a bowl of yeast sitting on the counter, and use a little bit of it to make bread. Yeast is alive so it would reproduce. You’d always have yeast for bread AND not have to invest in yeast.
Apparently there were like, really good yeast populations that made better bread.
Yeah, the yeast for bread can get to be pretty hardcore. Especially sourdough bread. The Silverbow bakery up here in Juneau, AK has sourdough yeast populations that have been around since the AK gold rush. That’s 100+ years.
Blows ones mind a little bit, eh?
— d chalmers
But does the machine have a SOAP interface?
I invented sourdough, you know.
— Definitely Not Dave Winer
As a home beer and wine brewer, I can be one to tell you that yeast is utterly important. Yeast should be thought of like any other creature that we rely on to survive. Give it what it needs, and it will reward you with the goodness of fermentation. When I brew, I start with a tube of live liquid yeast, not just a packet of dessicated yeast that can barely pull itself out of its languid sleep period. I prepare a liter of nutricious malty fluid for it to feed on. I nuture it for days. Then I add it to my brew, and, pleased with how well it is being treated, it foams up in a vigorous orgy of fermentation, creating delicious beverages for me. I don’t abandon it when the brew is complete. I harvest the yeasties and set them to work on another brew. They live their entire lives in the fermenters, eating, living, having children and families. I keep them well fed, keep them warm and safe.
I love you, Yeasties!
Yeast is one of the most important aspects of any brew or dough! Use the highest quality yeast you can, treat it well, and it will bring you delicious joy.
Oh yeah, and my first sexual experience involved a very old condom. It broke as I was putting it on, to my shock and horror. I suppose I’m lucky it broke then, and not two minutes later. Fortunately, a fresh replacement was found after an embarassing request made to the roommate.
— sam
Mmm. Bread.
Re: !Dave, I have to say that the last thing I want in my Bread Machine is soap. Really. Now, an XML-RPC interface that sends SMS when the bread is done…
(Put the hammer down, I’m joking).
But, er, yes. Bread Machines Rock.
— Aquarion
> a French bread setting (surely to be renamed Freedom bread in the Breadman Titanium 2010)
You should try Daniel Glazman’s Freedom bookmarklet on your Breadman the day this happens : http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/newarchive/2003_04_20_glazblogarc.html#s93114075
http://www.la-grange.net/2003/05/div-100pc-test.html
I don’t know if it was what needed and I don’t know if it works everywhere
— karl
Karl, I think the problem was specifically with elements contained within other elements that had no explicit height defined.
— Mark
For anyone interested, I made my own CSS tabs with inspiration from Dan Cederholm’s Simplified CSS Tabs:
http://unraveled.com/joshua/projects/css_tabs.shtml
Does anyone know of an MT plugin which would send an XML-RPC call or something to validator.w3.org so that if I stuff up and forget an end tag, then it would immediately say so, before posting the post? This would allow me to revert (yes, revert) to XHTML 1.1, because then Mozilla wouldn’t stuff up everytime I forgot an end tag because I wouldn’t, because the plugin would warn me.
— snippers
Probably your best bet is to install MT-Validate and do your validation locally. That’s what I plan on doing, to avoid embarassments like this:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/05/05/why_we_wont_help_you.html#c001814
— Mark
Machine-baked bread always look so… dull. It’s all square and just non-human, non-baked by hand, which is a good deal of the charm for me in eating a freshly baked baguette. I used to be afraid of my neighbor’s bread machine when I was little.
Remember to only use recent ingredients, yeast we forget. [Bdum schh.]
Comments without moronic puns may now proceed.
— Jesper
For comment validation in MT, be sure to read this post by Jacques Distler:
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000155.html
— Evan
I agree with Jesper. Technophiles and young urban professionals think bread machine bread is “homemade” but it tastes nothing like real homemade bread. Anyone who works from home can learn to get their hands full of flour!
— Anonymous
Actually, I am a bit of a technophile, but there’s always a place to draw the line, and I’m not looking forward to when/if computers control everything.
— Jesper
RE: validation. I’ve had very good luck with an MT plugin called Validable:
http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/validable.php
It fixes some of the most common validation errors, but not all of them. The rest of them, I take care of by defining what HTML is allowed in my sanitize spec in Configuration > Preferences.
Isn’t Paul Graham the author of “Hackers and Painters”? Or Paul Hammond and Paul Graham are really the same person, and I somehow missed that fact?
Re: Paul Graham. Fixed! Good catch.
— Mark
Yes, but can you hook it up to your blog? The bread machine that is.
Nice to see “yummy yummmy” without being prefaced with “Fruit Salad”.