avablog

I haven’t heard back from Dan about whether he ever took the plunge on a new stereo system, but I hope he got some use out of the information I passed along.

Now A.J. is looking for an HT setup to go with his huge Sony TV. He started out with a Bose system but never even took it out of the box, thank God. I encouraged him to shop around for some good sound at a reputable A/V dealer rather than throw money away on Bose.

I started out trying to point him towards an Axiom setup that looked really nice and got great reviews, but it was out of his price range. As luck would have it, Paradigm has just come out with a new Cinema CT Series HT kit that looks like exactly what A.J. wants. The high-end package comes in right at $800, and the speakers use the technology from Paradigm’s widely-acclaimed Monitor series. So I kicked A.J. some contact info for a shop near him that deals in Paradigm. Hopefully he’ll get out and give these things a listen; I’m certain he’ll be impressed if he does.

PS — If you’re spending $3,500 on a widescreen TV, you should really be prepared to spend at least half that on your speakers. You can always save up and get a bigger TV later, but a really nice, quality set of speakers will last you for a long, long time.

Hot off the presses. Our friend and trusty source of drama Annette (via her new friend Andrew, as it happens) just sent this perverse recipe for a sushi parody that is easily one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen this week (this doesn’t bode well for the rest of the week).

To the four readers of this blog, I promise you: I will never, ever make Twinkie sushi. I’d sooner sit a group of toddlers down in front of a big bowl of sashimi.

All of Ava’s parties will feature organic nuts and berries and filtered water, with party favors comprising laminated excerpts from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. If she has any friends left by junior high, I might consider adding pure fruit juices to the menu. Perhaps even low-fat cottage cheese and veggies!

I was winding down in front of the tube last night after dinner when I came across one of my favorite movies: The Quiet Man (1952).

I suppose I’ve seen The Quiet Man 15 times or so over the years. It has much to recommend it, including John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, and an Irish countryside that’s shot so lovingly it nearly overwhelms the two leads. The story goes that Wayne’s Sean “Trooper” Thorne, a prize fighter, has killed a man in the ring back in the States, so he gives up the game and packs for the Isle of Innisfree to take up in his childhood home. Shortly after arriving — now known as Sean Thornton to cover his pugilist past — he meets O’Hara’s Mary Kate Danaher. She’s a fiesty, green-eyed redhead (no, really) who lives with her overbearing brother, Will.

Sean and Mary Kate hit it off immediately, but he soon discovers that there’s a very strict code of conduct for courting a lass of Innisfree. Sean enlists the town drunk, who is also the official matchmaker, to help him with the details as he embarks on the winning of Mary Kate. Yet, alas, Will Danaher won’t hear of this brash American getting anywhere near his sister, and he resists Sean’s efforts at every turn.

The Duke is at the top of his game here. John Ford’s direction is perfect. The romance between Sean and Mary Kate is deftly portrayed with all of the wit and passion you quickly come to expect from the main characters. And of course there are the wind machines. No doubt you’d be able to find a film of the period — or any other, for that matter — that uses wind machines more capriciously than The Quiet Man, but it’d really take some effort.

But you have to have the wind machines if you expect to get a scene as iconographic as the one portrayed on this movie poster. Sean has just arrived at his family cottage to find it in a state of disrepair. But there’s a fire going, and someone has been sweeping the floor. In the shadows, Mary Kate watches Sean inspect the home; she’s scared and intrigued. Without giving any outward signs, Sean quickly realizes that it’s Mary Kate who’s in the house. He gives a tremendous yell and throws a stone through a window to flush Mary Kate from her hiding spot. She bolts, but before she can make it out the door, Sean grabs her by the arm and pulls her back into the living room, for a moment casting them both in a dancer’s pose as the wind howls into the living room. He then pulls her to him and kisses her, earning a slap to the face for his trouble.

My words don’t do the scene justice. It’s breathtaking to watch. And that’s saying something, coming from me. Ordinarily, if it doesn’t involve gunplay, an explosion, or a vehicle with a hyperdrive, I ain’t interested. Actually, it’s a shame. This is a movie I think Leah would really enjoy if she’d take the time to sit down and watch it, but since it has that patina of pre-1990 cinema, she resists it. It’s difficult to imagine two people having more divergent tastes in movies. I foresee a huge battle over the fate of Ava’s cinematic soul coming up here before too long. Let’s hope the powers of light prevail!

On the walk into work this morning I saw two Robins. They looked a little tired, and hungry, but it was great to see those flashy red breasts and think about warmer weather.

A bit later on, closer to the river, there was a small group of Cardinals sitting together in a tree. They were chirping and flitting about the branches, excited, it seemed, at the prospect of spring on its way. I hope the Cardinal that’s been nesting near our house for the past couple years comes back this spring. I suppose I should also get the Wren house cleaned out so it’s ready when they hit town again.

A couple days ago I discovered that one of the cables supporting our garage door had snapped, mainly because it was just plain old. I called the good people at Dan’s Overhead Doors (and more!), and a “technician” came out to the house this morning.

The repair was fairly simple and something I probably should’ve done myself, but I wasn’t going to be able to get to it in Leah’s timeframe, so I called in the pros.

The fellow who showed up was very nice. We looked over the door, particularly the rails and wheels, which were grabbing and binding even after the cable was replaced. I’d painted the garage last summer, and pretty much all that’s holding the door’s bottom panel together is a good thick layer of paint. The wood is rotten enough that the ground squirrels who take over the property in the summer have no problem chewing their way into the garage. The cable holding up the other side of the door is starting to fray and would need to be replaced eventually, for another $80. Before too long, we’d have to start replacing panels, too, and that just wouldn’t be any fun. After we talked for a bit, the tech and I decided it might just be best to get a new door. I called Leah at work and presented the situation, and she agreed with our assessment. So, sometime in the next two or three weeks, we’ll get a new garage door to go with our new opener.

Marcia was telling me the other day about some pork chops she made. They sounded good. So I decided to make a facsimile for dinner tonight.

Very simple. Four chops breaded in bread crumbs and parmesan cheese. I think Marcia just pan fried hers, but I fried mine and then baked them at 375 for about half an hour. They turned out nicely. Whether it was the tasty organic pork or the breading, I can’t say.

I do know, however, that God never intended sugar snap peas to be eaten in any other form but raw, right off the vine. I steamed some, and they were terrible. Living and learning.

Thought I’d just make a quick entry about a project Kevin recently worked up for my mom.

Her ISP’s spam filters were choking on some e-mails she was trying to send with very long recipient lists. Their suggestion was to break the lists up and send multiple messages. Probably not a terrible solution, but why bother when you can set up a new mail account on a low-traffic server in Madison?

Which is just what we did. Kevin made a user account for my mom on his Linux box, and everything seems to be working great. It’s a win-win situation: Kevin gets to play with his mail server app, and my mom can carpet bomb the Internet with free lunch e-mails.

Kevin also sent me a link to a cool php-based app that provides system info. It was a breeze to install and works really well. Next up is ntop, which looks like a really nice way to track server traffic in about a thousand different ways.

Well, the knock on the head was worth it. Mark’s Headbanger White Chicken Chili took the blue ribbon among six other contestants today in the office chili cookoff. Even better, Becky’s pecan pie took first in the pie category, so it was all blue ribbons for our department!

I actually voted for a different chili that had a nice heat to it and included corn and pork. It was great.

Here’s the recipe I adapted for the contest (I made 1.5 times the recipe so I could get to 6 quarts):

Mark’s Headbanger White Chicken Chili
(4 qts.)

1 jar + 1 can northern beans
1 large onion, chopped
2 whole chicken breasts (with skin, bone-in)
2-3 C. chicken broth
2 t minced garlic (I crushed four big cloves.)
3 t cumin
2 t chili powder
1 t pepper
2 t salt (I used even less. Actually, I didn’t add any.)
2 t oregano
2 t coriander
1/2 t cayenne pepper
1 – 2 cans green chilies
8 oz. Sour cream

Boil chicken breasts until done. Cube when able to handle.

Strain broth for use in the recipe (I used canned, low-salt broth).

Chop onions and saute with garlic.

Combine everything but the sour cream in a roaster and simmer for 30 to 45 minutes.

Add sour cream.

So I’ve entered this chili cookoff at work. No big deal. I’m making a white chicken chili recipe of my mom’s, which is quite tasty.

I find out yesterday that the guy at the office who’s widely considered the chili champ is also making a white chicken chili. I suppose I can only hope his batch suffers some catastrophic damage before the tasting goes down tomorrow at noon. And that mine doesn’t.

Leah and I attended a Mardi Gras dinner last evening at a friend’s place. Leah came home early to feed Ava and get her ready for bed. I got back to the house around 8 and started the oven so I could begin baking the chicken breasts I need for my recipe.

It was only a couple minutes before smoke started pouring from the oven. Apparently there were some drippings on the bottom of the oven from the lasagna we had two weeks ago, and they were burning away. A couple seconds after I noticed the smoke, the fire alarm went off right outside the door where Leah was trying to calm Ava for bed. Stricken, I grabbed a chair from the dining room and hopped up on it to pull the battery out of the fire alarm, in the process whacking my head really, really hard on the top of the door frame. Numerous barely-muffled profanities followed as I put the chair back at the table and staggered back to the kitchen.

I shut off the oven and ended up boiling the breasts instead, which turned out fine. Leah came out after a bit and spread some ointment on my wound (which never did bleed). Apparently Ava never even stirred in all the commotion.

This chili better win the competition tomorrow.

The coolness of Apple’s products is only surpassed in measure by the geekiness of the people who use them. Some freak turned four Shuffles into a 1.2GB array using a four-port USB hub. I love it.

So there’s no arguing that our house is really very nice. It’s a bit on the small side, sure, but it’s got loads of charm and it’s in a good neighborhood.

The only complaint I have — and this is a relatively recent complaint — is that our master bedroom has a rather unfortunate HVAC layout. In particular, the room’s sole outflow vent blows directly over the side of the bed that’s always inhabited by yours truly. In the summer it’s a blast of cool air when the AC is on, and in the winter it’s a warm, dry gale that whips across my sleeping face and sucks the breath right out of my lungs. In the morning I wake up with a tremendous thirst and a ferocious case of windburn on the right side of my face.

I’ve tried turning my back to the vent, but sleeping on my side all night has given me a seriously sore neck. I told Leah that I’m going to fashion a small baffle out of cardboard and duct tape that will redirect the air so that it blows into the side of the bed and not over my body. I’m sure it won’t be pretty to look at, but then no one will ever see it unless they come around to my side of the bed.

My friend Dan approached me today with a challenge: Find a good stereo setup, comprising a receiver and speakers, for around $1K.

I haven’t shopped for honest-to-goodness stereo equipment for quite a while, so I’m looking forward to digging around to see what I can find. My first thought on speakers was to go with either Pardigm or Axiom. I’ve loved the Paradigms I’ve had, all of which have been from the Monitor series. I’ve not listened to the newest models in that line, but they sure do look slick.

For a receiver, I’m sure Dan could get a good Denon or Marantz from eBay for a pretty good price. I’ll keep this post updated with what I find.

Whew, this thing is a challenge.

I’ve got PHP5 and MySQL 4.0 installed on the Cube. Due to the (apparently) bleeding-edge version of PHP I’m running, I have to install a number of changefiles for phpBB2.0. As if that weren’t enough, I’m having some issues figuring out how much I need to do to the database phpbb needs during its install. Do I need a user table? Do I just need a blank database? Who knows. This’ll be a good test of phpbb’s support.

I’m not even sure what I’ll use the bb for if I ever do manage to get it installed. Could be I’d take all the computer talk out of the blog and move it there so as to better keep track of the issues I have with installs and configurations. There are all sorts of possibilities.

I’ve been messing around with the CSS for WordPress and Gallery, and I’m getting closer to having a consistent look through the three major pieces of the nicheplayer.net Web site.

I chose nicheplayer.net as a nod to Apple, the computer industry’s perennial whipping boy (SCO notwhistanding). Rather than have little “Made On A Mac” gifs all over the place, I figured I’d let the domain name do the talking for the site. At $6/year, it seems like a pretty reasonable deal.

Really all that remains to do is to modify the headers in Gallery to include links back to my home page, which I think I can do without too much trouble. Also some little font reworkings, and everything will be ready to leave alone for a while.

Leah really seems to enjoy the iPod Shuffle already. I stopped by the iTMS last night and picked up an album’s worth of Top 40 tunes. Those, combined with the music Kevin’s sending along, will be a good starter package for her.

Even cooler than the Shuffle, though, in my book, is the Style Master CSS podGuide, a great little package that lets you browse the entire CSS spec from the comfort of your iPod screen. I installed it and toyed with it a bit last night, and it’s impressive. Now all I have to do is find a couple of uninterrupted hours to sit down and spend some QT with my CSS test page.

Leah’s early birthday present came today. The 512MB iPod Shuffle arrived around 1 via FedEx. I’d ordered it about an hour after Steve’s keynote at MWSF, and I understand there’s a bit of a wait to get one now.

Hopefully Leah will find it useful for working out, though we have to work on getting some of the music she likes to fill the thing.

I took a couple shots of the packaging before I wrapped the box this afternoon. As usual, Apple paid great attention to detail here.

It’s been a long day of messing with CSS for a Web site I offered to help with for the local free lunch program. I just copied most of the CSS from this site and stuck some text into it, and voila, a new site. It’s not much to look at, and there are sure some things I’d change if I knew how, but it’s an excuse to start getting my hands dirty with CSS. Here’s the site.

One of the things I’d really like to do is split the page into two columns after the centered info at the top. The smaller column on the left would hold a couple links to other agencies and notes about Web hosting services donated by Avalon Networks. They’re good folks. The second column would hold the bulk of the page text. It’d actually look something like this WordPress page, but it wouldn’t need to be quite so fancy.

I probably should’ve just done the page in straight HTML and not messed with the CSS, since I only anticipate there being one page at this site. But what the heck.

I’m running between three different computers and two different platforms as I collect information on configuring WordPress, so I thought I’d just make a post here that collects some of the best notes I’ve found from various places. Mostly, these notes deal with plugins, hacks, and CSS code for including images in WordPress posts.

The two images I’ve included to date were pretty basic. The first, of the quilt, is just a link to a sized image in my Gallery albums directory. That’s pretty simple, and it represents what will probably be my preferred method of image linking, at least for shots I’ve taken myself. If you’ve got two different tools (in this case, WordPress and Gallery) that each do one thing particularly well, why not just use both rather than try to shoehorn a gallery into WordPress?

I found this link pretty helpful when modding my wp-layout file to enable placement of images within posts.

Exhibit looks like it’ll be a great way to browse for images and bring them into a directory within WordPress. I may end up having duplicates of some images on my hdd, but I’ve got plenty of room on the server. The key thing about Exhibit looks to be that it’ll let me browse my image directories from a post window, which beats the heck out of trying to remember the names of all the folders I created in my Gallery.

This is just a post to check and see if my changes to the wordpress database worked OK. Turns out the default install of WP 1.2.2 (Mingus) fails to create a needed row in the wp-options table that allows the user to save an entry for the offset of GMT, which in my case is -06. Simple directions for the fix can be found here.

Now, at least, the timestamp for posts from this one forward will have the correct time on them.

If you’re like me, you’re usually scouting around for interesting music. Whether new or old, major or indy, there’s more good listening floating around out there than any one person can get a grip on in a lifetime. My SLiMP3 library is sitting near a measly 6,000 songs, and there are genres I haven’t even touched.

Which makes album or artist recommendations from trusted friends all the more valuable. I was fiddling with my iPod in the car this morning in the driveway, trying to queue up something for the ride to work, when the scroll bar landed on Steel Pulse. True Democracy has been one of my favorite albums for a long time. It ain’t your grandfather’s reggae, but all the songs are great, and the production values are fantastic. I’ve taken this CD with me on more than one occasion to use as a demo disc when auditioning speakers. There are plenty of nice, deep, crisp lows and sharp, tangy highs.

I see this thing is selling for under $10 at Amazon. I wouldn’t be surprised if your local used CD store has a copy of it sitting around, assuming your town has at least one drug addict who’s crazy enough to have sold this gem for a fix. If you see it, grab it. Then rip it. Stick it on your iPod and enjoy. (My favorite track is #8, “Your House.”)