The bin showed up today. The delivery guy, Steve, was very friendly and helpful, and I appreciated that they showed up at 5:30, when I was at home. However… I certainly looked at the list of items I would be receiving while on the website, but I suppose the actual quantity of food didn’t register with me. The contents of the bin were as pictured:

This is great looking food, and I’m all for supporting organic growers… but there’s really not much of it. At $20 off, it’s a good deal. But I must admit I have a modest income, and certainly can’t afford to spend $27 every two weeks on an arm-full of organic delights. I would normally pay less than $10 for this amount of food at Kin’s Farm Market… admittedly, not organic.

I’m sure if you’re one of those purchasing larger bins it might be more cost-effective, or if you’re one of those people too busy to shop, it may be worth it. But while I look forward to enjoying this food, I don’t think I’ll continue as a customer.

I picked up a great new non-leather belt from Nice Shoes, enjoyed dim-sum lunch at Whole Vegetarian, and ran into Janna of Astrosatchel Accessories. There’s also several new vegan/vegetarian bakeries in town: The Gluten Free Epicurean, Sprout Vegan Bakery, Sustainably Sweet, and a chocolatier, Zimt Artisan Chocolates. Of course, Edible Flours had a booth as well, and were so popular they sold out. Oh, plus a shout out to Karmavore for being there as well! I’m so glad to see so many vegan businesses starting and thriving in Vancouver!

The menu is very similar to what is found at Whole Vegetarian, but both represent traditional Chinese Buddhist cuisine: I saw many of the same dishes when I visited Buddhist restaurants and a monastery in Hong Kong. The portions are large, and you’ll likely want to take your leftovers home.

Meatless Mardi is an experiment for proprietress Alessandra, but one she seems passionate about, expressing a genuine concern about the environmental impacts of meat production. She has taken the concerns of vegans and others with specific dietary needs to heart in selecting the foods and ingredients used for the evening: the breads are dairy-free, and the main course can be veganized on request. She mentioned the possibility of making everything vegan by default in future.

Edible Flours started up earlier this year as a new specialty vegan bakery in Vancouver.

I’m adding a section to the site called “Veg-Friendly”, to list those restaurants that make a sincere effort to cater to vegetarians & vegans. It’s going to be fairly restrictive however. Nuba, sure! Chill Winston, not so much.

The Vegan Spoon is a blog exploring Vancouver’s vegetarian restaurants.

Daiya Cheese is now available from (of all places) Dussa’s Ham & Cheese at the Granville Island Public Market.

Very sad news for lovers of Chinese vegetarian fare: the Bo Kong on Main Street has closed down. Their Richmond location is still open though, and the nearby 3G Vegetarian, at Cambie & 18th, has fantastic Chinese veggie food!

One thing I’ve added to my own desktop, is the Zen poem posted daily on the website DailyZen.com. It took a little work to be able to do it, so I thought I’d post my script. This is based  on the script to fetch a quote from Encarta as posted on Flickr by barm, so credit goes to him for getting me started.

This can all be pasted into GeekTool itself, or you can create a separate shell script (eg. dailyzen.sh), which is what I’ve done, for easy editing. It’s a short one-liner, but there’s a lot going on:

curl -s http://www.dailyzen.com/ | sed -n "/<\!--Add Quote for correct day-->/,/<\/TD>/p"|sed -e "s/<[^>]*>//g" |strings|fold -sw60

curl of course is the Unix utility to fetch an URL, and grabs the contents of the front page of http://www.dailyzen.com/. sed then extracts the portion between the comment and the closing </TD> tag, which contains the poem. The second sed command strips all HTML tags. I used strings to reliably get rid of some stray carriage returns, and finally fold wraps the poem to a nice width without breaking words, as GeekTool would do otherwise.

The script is straightforward to add to GeekTool, it’s simply a Shell command (either pasted in, or calling the dailyzen.sh file). I set the refresh time to 21600; 6 hours is enough to make sure it’s updated in the morning. I used Book Antiqua Italic 20pt for the text, white with 20% opacity.

And here’s the end result:

My GeekTool Desktop, with DailyZen quote

The first step of course was to build a simple test environment: a page with several divs with ids such as “box1” “box2”  etc., JQuery and JEditable called, and JEditable configured to talk to a simple PHP script that simply echoes its input:

< ?php echo $_REQUEST["value"]; ?>

That was all straightforward enough, and replicated the basics of the client’s environment. The real trouble was the tab key functionality. Picking up a tab keypress is easy enough; with basic Javascript, or in JQuery:

$('div.editbox').bind('keydown', function(evt) {
        if(evt.keyCode==9) {
		//code
	}});

There were two primary problems:

1. Moving the focus out of the existing field being edited.
2. Activating the next editable field.

#1 took a fair amount of trial and error for me. JEditable creates a new input field inside the container element, and none of the JQuery selectors I was trying to use: children, sibling, etc. were working for me. Finally, I managed to get it this way:

$(this).find("input").blur();

I’ll be the first to admit that’s a little bit brute-force. If anyone has a more elegant way of selecting the created input in a JEditable element, please let me know!

Problem #2 evaded solution. I looked inside the JEditable code, and it is activated by an event; there was no function I could call directly, that I could see anyway, that would activate the next element. It took putting the problem aside for a few hours before it came to me.

JQuery nicely lets you create mouse events and other events. So the solution then became fairly obvious:

$(nextBox).dblclick();

Where nextBox is the next box in line. Note: JEditable normally takes a single click, so the “click()” function would be sufficient here. In this case, it’s configured for double-clicks.

It worked perfectly. Tab in one field would blur the current field, then activate the next field. Here’s the basic code, all together:

    $('div.editbox').bind('keydown', function(evt) {
        if(evt.keyCode==9) {
            $(this).find("input").blur();
            var nextBox='';
             if ($("div.editbox").index(this) == ($("div.editbox").length-1)) {
                    nextBox=$("div.editbox:first");         //last box, go to first
                } else {
                    nextBox=$(this).next("div.editbox");    //Next box in line
                }
            $(nextBox).dblclick();  //Go to assigned next box
            return false;           //Suppress normal tab
        };
    });

I’ve omitted some very straightforward code to detect if shift is held down, and go up and wrap around to the bottom. But this should be sufficient to get anyone started with adding tab key functionality to their JEditable based forms.

Chicake is a healthy, vegan cheesecake made by a local baker. It’s available at numerous locations throughout the Metro Vancouver area.

Saje Natural Wellness is a chain of Canadian-owned stores and boutiques specializing in all-natural, animal-product free health and beauty products. They have locations in Metrotown, Kitsilano, Robson Street, Surrey, Langley, West Van, White Rock, Coquitlam, and elsewhere in BC and Alberta.

The Libra Room includes several vegetarian items on their menu.

Liberation BC is a local animal rights and vegetarian/vegan advocacy group with several active campaigns. Check them out & get involved!

A UK Group, VeggieWorld, have done a series of videos about vegetarian restaurants in Vancouver, called Veggie In Vancouver. These short YouTube videos discuss the food at local restaurants and give some behind-the-scenes info about our local vegetarian and vegan businesses!