nouvelle découverte

You can go years and years with something sitting right under your nose, and because you didn't have the smarts or the initiative to check for it, you can spend years quietly suffering (maybe suffering is too dramatic a term) without it.

Today, I was just about to visit the Play Store to download a second countdown timer onto my phone when I saw the AI god's advice that all I need to do, to call up a second timer, is just hit the "+" symbol to add another timer. What? All this time?

This is relevant to people who cook certain things where timing is important, e.g., when baking or when making boiling pasta, where a difference of a minute or two can mean going from correct to overcooked. Earlier today, I had the A/C on and was using the timer to count down from 45 minutes. As the A/C was chugging along, I got the idea to bake some more cookies since I had a bunch of cookie dough left. When I did a batch the other day, I set the oven temp to 191ºC and did an initial bottom-burner-only bake for 7:30 after letting the oven heat up a bit. I used a timer to track that. I then did another 3:30 of baking with both the top and bottom burners on to make sure the top got cooked enough. Normally, when I use my biggest baking tray and place only eight lumps of cookie dough on it, the cookies almost always come out perfect. Let them cool for six minutes, then remove them from the pan and let them cool the rest of the way. That's what I did with my Wednesday batch (originally meant for Charles, but I baked it too late), to great success, and that's what I was wanting to do this evening—another batch.

So the thought occurred to me, as the A/C was running down its 45 minutes, that I would need a second countdown timer to be able to time the cookies while the A/C's timer was still running. What I often do in such cases is use an "online egg timer." But it's inconvenient to have one timer on my cell phone (set for 45 minutes) and one timer on my desktop monitor (set for 7:30). I'd rather have two concurrent timers on my phone. So when I asked AI about downloading a second countdown timer from the Google Play Store, the AI suggested—since I had named my phone's model (Samsung Galaxy S21)—that I could just create a second timer right there by using the "+" symbol and go to town.  Well, fuck me dead.

It's now much later in the evening, and I still haven't baked that second batch of cookies. I'll do it tomorrow since I've got no one to bake the cookies for. Charles specifically said not to give him anything since he's about to shove off to the States, and he and his wife are emptying out their refrigerator. I ended up giving the Wednesday batch to the four concierges who take turns working downstairs in the lobby, manning the front desk 24/7 except when they do their sunchal/순찰 (patrol). I had a small batch of eight cookies to give away, so I told the guard I saw that the four staffers could have two each. I trust that this concierge will be honorable about doling out the cookies. There's one guard down there who strikes me as a bit of a greedy hoarder, and I know he likes the cookies and cakes I've given to the staff before.

Anyway, that's the story of today's discovery. Sometimes, you learn the damndest things—things you should've learned years earlier.