An anonymous tipster spotted this van in DC. Not sure what the Native American theme is about, but after watching the Olympics all week, I thought the guys on the right (in the last photo) were gymnasts working on the high bar:
Friday Aug 22, 2008
Saturday Aug 09, 2008
In the background, a Micropolis 2.1GB differential SCSI drive. In the foreground, a 2GB MiniSD card. The difference between them: 15 years, something north of 5 pounds, and $900. Go Moore's Law! In retrospect, I'm surprised my beige box PC had enough juice to spin that thing.
I wish I recorded the startup sounds that drive made prior to extracting the platters, head assembly, and rare earth magnets. I recall it sounding something like a crash and helicopter. Would have made a great music video.
I wish I recorded the startup sounds that drive made prior to extracting the platters, head assembly, and rare earth magnets. I recall it sounding something like a crash and helicopter. Would have made a great music video.
Thursday Jul 24, 2008
This very slick trailer for PixelJunk Eden reminds me a bit of World of Goo (who need to update their blog more often, hint hint), Gish 2, and Line Rider.
Sunday Jul 20, 2008
I wish I had a lens that wasn't smudged by a sticky baby hand prior to snapping this, but the contrast is still pretty striking in front of this cabernet vine. We don't get many dragonflies in this area (let alone ones of this color), so its a treat when the stop to hunt in the backyard.
Saturday Jul 19, 2008
Tonight's dinner was prepared with no dishes (minus the cutting board)- by oiling, salt&peppering, or marinating right in the bags the food was purchased in:
The end result- served with a delicious $7 bottle of Ferngrove Sauvignon Blanc-Semillion blend:
The end result- served with a delicious $7 bottle of Ferngrove Sauvignon Blanc-Semillion blend:
Sunday Jul 06, 2008
This recipe was so good (slightly modified), I had to capture it for posterity.
Ingredients:
- 2 beets, scrubbed
- 1 bunch mache, rinsed and dried
- 2 fresh peaches (preferably slightly tart), peeled and sliced
- 2 shallots, finely chopped
- 1/3 cup pistachios, chopped
- 5 oz goat cheese, crumbled
- 1/4 cup walnut oil
- 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
- pinch of dried mustard
- salt and pepper to taste
- Double wrap beets in foil, bake at 375F for 60 minutes. Rinse under cold water to remove skin, quarter, then slice thinly.
- Toss mache, peaches, beets.
- Sprinkle over shallots, pistachios, and goat cheese.
- Shake oil, vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper until emulsified. Pour over salad and serve.
Friday Jun 20, 2008
Linda's giving me some grief- again- about my thermometer collection entry, but I think its just a thinly veiled bout of jealousy. Hey Linda, do you know the temperature of your koi pond to the tenth degree fahrenheit? I rest my case. :-D
I would like to see her get some rest before the weekend though (as opposed to nervously refreshing the stats counter like we both did far too long around our 100k blog entries milestone. So if you're a Sun employee and don't already have a blog, now's your chance to earn yourself some delicious interweb fame.
I would like to see her get some rest before the weekend though (as opposed to nervously refreshing the stats counter like we both did far too long around our 100k blog entries milestone. So if you're a Sun employee and don't already have a blog, now's your chance to earn yourself some delicious interweb fame.
Thursday Jun 12, 2008
As of Nevada build 90+, you can boot from a ZFS root file system. Woot!
Note that this option is only presented in the Solaris Interactive Text mode, not the GUI installer.
Friday Jun 06, 2008
Eye-Fi is bragging about one of their cards "phoning home", when in reality, the thieves just "happened to have left their network with the same default Linksys name". Hey Eye-Fi, if you just allowed the cards to connect to any AP, rather than the ones you call out by name, you'd probably have a lot more happy customers and wouldn't have to resort to bragging about coincidences. Care to explain why you don't allow this?
Saturday May 31, 2008
With 21 hours of downtime for the month of May, I've lost faith in Twitter and am struggling to see any remaining value. Sure- when the site was stable, it was great. But now that its floundering with no end in sight, its really quite useless. If I can't share and consume things on a whim, whats the point of Twitter?
So after running across an interesting tumblr account (via a source I no longer recall) I thought I'd revisit my account, setup a while ago but left alone when it seemed to offer nothing I didn't already have via Twitter, Flickr, this blog, and my personal Galllery2 site. With Twitter (potentially) out of the picture, I would need to fill that void for the micro-blogging scenario. My recent experience with Pownce suggested it was not stable itself, so why not Tumblr?
In my brief exploration of it so far, my only gripes are that the Mac widget and bookmarklet are crippled (you can only share text), I couldn't seem to find anyone I know there to follow, and that the 'quote' and 'chat' sharing options are fairly useless- I'd much rather ditch the audio/video sharing only options and have the ability to share any file type. Tumblr could be the killer app if it allowed sharing of anything.
So- anyone else on Tumblr?
So after running across an interesting tumblr account (via a source I no longer recall) I thought I'd revisit my account, setup a while ago but left alone when it seemed to offer nothing I didn't already have via Twitter, Flickr, this blog, and my personal Galllery2 site. With Twitter (potentially) out of the picture, I would need to fill that void for the micro-blogging scenario. My recent experience with Pownce suggested it was not stable itself, so why not Tumblr?
In my brief exploration of it so far, my only gripes are that the Mac widget and bookmarklet are crippled (you can only share text), I couldn't seem to find anyone I know there to follow, and that the 'quote' and 'chat' sharing options are fairly useless- I'd much rather ditch the audio/video sharing only options and have the ability to share any file type. Tumblr could be the killer app if it allowed sharing of anything.
So- anyone else on Tumblr?
Sunday May 25, 2008
I setup a wireless video camera over the weekend (a Panasonic BL-C131A) to keep an eye on the baby without being in the room. The idea being to teach her to work things out herself since she'll feel like she's alone, but still be able to watch her progress (and know when a cry means "I'm overtired and don't want to be here" versus "my leg is caught in the rails again!")
Curiously there are no affordable networked video cameras that do better than 640x480- and this one is pretty laggy when you try to do over 320x240. But even with the horrible pixel count and poor low-light performance, its satisfactory as a baby monitor. These snaps were taken showing the phases our kid goes through before finally falling asleep:
Trying to crawl to freedom:
Flailing about wildly:
Mooning the camera:
Dropping the pacifier onto the floor the wailing, knowing one of us will come to retrieve it (now that we've caught her red-handed in this manipulation, we've gotta work on nipping this):
Then finally collapsing:
Curiously there are no affordable networked video cameras that do better than 640x480- and this one is pretty laggy when you try to do over 320x240. But even with the horrible pixel count and poor low-light performance, its satisfactory as a baby monitor. These snaps were taken showing the phases our kid goes through before finally falling asleep:
Trying to crawl to freedom:
Flailing about wildly:
Mooning the camera:
Dropping the pacifier onto the floor the wailing, knowing one of us will come to retrieve it (now that we've caught her red-handed in this manipulation, we've gotta work on nipping this):
Then finally collapsing:
Friday May 23, 2008
My friends Tom, Igor and I have a good laugh whenever we see another comment on this old
entry questioning the realism of the show Man Vs Wild. It seems he's got a vast legion of supports, largely women and military men. O RLY?
With the start of this season, each return from commercial break opens with this disclaimer:
no doubt as a response to the wave of criticism that the show is portrayed as genuine when in reality much of it is staged, or safety precautions put in place beforehand but never shown to the viewer (such as ropes and harnesses).
Now my beef has never been that he has help. Its very clear there's at least one camera man following him at all times- so he's never truly out on a limb. Its that he opens with the statement that he's going to (paraphrased) show you how to survive in dangerous situations, when in reality he takes what would be very unnecessary risks that he probably wouldn't even do if there weren't that off-screen safety net. Certainly makes for entertaining watching, but surviving? No.
So I was pleased to see this recent entry on Les Stroud's blog talking about the first shoot of Survivorman season 3! And better yet he's doing something that might actually occur to normal people: simulating a lost backpacker in the Sierra Nevada. I can't wait. (and yes, I will continue to watch Man Vs Wild. Who else is going to climb the waterfalls and dig up the porcupines?)
With the start of this season, each return from commercial break opens with this disclaimer:
no doubt as a response to the wave of criticism that the show is portrayed as genuine when in reality much of it is staged, or safety precautions put in place beforehand but never shown to the viewer (such as ropes and harnesses).
Now my beef has never been that he has help. Its very clear there's at least one camera man following him at all times- so he's never truly out on a limb. Its that he opens with the statement that he's going to (paraphrased) show you how to survive in dangerous situations, when in reality he takes what would be very unnecessary risks that he probably wouldn't even do if there weren't that off-screen safety net. Certainly makes for entertaining watching, but surviving? No.
So I was pleased to see this recent entry on Les Stroud's blog talking about the first shoot of Survivorman season 3! And better yet he's doing something that might actually occur to normal people: simulating a lost backpacker in the Sierra Nevada. I can't wait. (and yes, I will continue to watch Man Vs Wild. Who else is going to climb the waterfalls and dig up the porcupines?)
Tuesday May 20, 2008
After 7 years of having an indoor cat, I've finally found the grooming dream team: a
FURminator for the undercoat and a
Zoom Groom for the outer coat. Combined, they remove an insane amount of fur in short order-- well worth their prices (although the FURminator seems awfully price gouge-y. If you've got a defunct hair clipper and are handy, you can probably turn one of the blades into your own comb. They look like the same part to me.)
Wednesday May 14, 2008
I couldn't let a month go by without some sort of update, even if its rambling. So whats new? Nothing terribly interesting in itself, but in the past week I've:
- Been bitten playing basketball (ok, had someone's teeth pushed into my arm).
- Did my first home demolition work. The sketchiest part was pulling down the wall around the main power panel.
- Picked out tile and fixtures for the new bathroom. This was way easier than many led us to believe.
- Celebrated Mrs R's first mother's day.
- Learned a lot about German Riesling. Trying to find something to cellar a case of for a decade or more (most likely a Spätlese). I'll be cracking these at the end of the week, and trying them over the course of several nights to try to get an idea of how they will age: 1994 Schloss Schonborn Johannisberger Klaus Kabinett, 2002 Carl Schmitt-Wagner Longuicher Maximiner Herrenberg Kabinett, 2005 August Kesseler Rüdesheimer Berg Roseneck Spätlese Gold Capsule, 2005 Dönnhoff Schlossböckelheimer Felsenberg Spätlese, 2006 Selbach Oster Zeltinger Schlossberg Spätlese.
- At Levi's request, here are some quick tasting notes on a couple of bottles I cracked this week. 2002 Heitz Cellars Napa Cabernet Sauvignon: subdued, great balance, surprising amount of fruit given its age. And a 2006 Strong Arms (R Wines) Shiraz South Australia: looks, smells like aussie shiraz, but lots less dust and way more acid. Can't wait to try it again tonight after its had some air.
- Took around 50 photos- uploaded maybe 15 of them. Fell back in love with my Nikon f/2 35mm lens.
