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Gallery: The Central Coast
Posted 1:11 AM, Apr 30, 2007 |
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
I was away recently, hence the lack of updates.
No, really. The EC and I went up the coast to Morro Bay and then on to Monterey, through the winding highway between Morro and Big Sur, right along the coast. Despite each of us having our own separate illnesses of varying degrees and a rocky camping night, a good time was had by all. I took a ton of photos, resulting in this gigantic gallery. Enjoy the bonus coverage.
The Central Coast
After all the wine tasting we did, I had to do surprisingly little rotating of these photos to straighten them out. But any mistakes are still due to the excellent wine.
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New #1 (Part Two)
Posted 6:39 PM, Apr 29, 2007 |
This website takes it’s name from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and the cloud-and-blue-sky theme does the same, riffing off the cover of IJ. This was all decided back when Infinite Jest was my favorite book.
But now, put that down, if you’ve been reading it just to satisfy me, and pick up Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and start reading that instead. You should’ve been reading it already, of course, as I’ve talked about it many times in the past.
Don’t worry, I’m not moving this page over here, and I’m not going to make the page look like the bottom of a well, war-torn Manchuria, or a mysterious bird. Everything here is staying just the same.
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Gallery: Squaw Valley
Posted 12:26 AM, Apr 24, 2007 |
I was recently away, hence the lack of updates. (It’s okay if you thought it was just my normal level of activity, or if you hadn’t noticed.) I was at Squaw Valley, up near Lake Tahoe on the California / Nevada border, for a conference. Of course, I took some pictures.
Squaw Valley
You know, there’s lots of mountains and stuff. So there’s lots of pictures of mountains. But they’re pretty.
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Carl’s Jr: Buffalo Chicken Sandwich
Posted 2:13 PM, Apr 20, 2007 |
This sandwich costs almost $5.00 where I live, but considering it’s from the home of the original six-dollar burger (one of the most backwards promotion ideas ever - it’s $6, it’s a fast food burger, so it must be good), the buffalo chicken sandwich from Carl’s Jr. must be a bargain. Right?
I have a long history with the buffalo chicken sandwich, primarily the one served at Grandma’s restaurants in Duluth and Minneapolis. Grandma’s isn’t good for much, but their buffalo chicken sandwiches are the best, bar none; they’re spicy enough that simply inhaling the air near one induces a fit of coughing, and that’s how food should be.
So I was excited, anyway, is the point, when I saw an ad for Carl’s Jr’s Buffalo Chicken Sandwich.
I didn’t eat mine until about 10 minutes after I got it through the drive-thru, but it was still nice and toasty warm - it was a little smooshed from the transport.
The buffalo sauce isn’t really spicy at all - it has almost no kick to it. To me, buffalo sauce isn’t about the flavor as much as the kick, but I guess if you’re the other way around, then it’s probably good, because it tasted like buffalo chicken. It just lacked that kick, that full-body meal experience.
Also, because the chicken was really thin, from an emaciated chicken, and covered in this slippery sauce and then bordered by tomatoes and lettuce, it was a slippery devil. I had a hard time keeping it in the bun, something that never really happened with the Grandma’s buffalo chicken sandwich, although that had lettuce and tomato, too. Maybe their chicken was a little more textured.
One nice thing about Carl’s Jr’s buffalo chicken is that it’s a big sandwich. It definitely filled me up (with the small fry and Coke I got with it). So that’s good, but balled-up newspaper also fills me up; that doesn’t mean it tastes good.
It is, however, a welcome change in the fast-foot burger landscape. So, it’s expensive, kind of bland for a sandwich that’s made its name on having some kick, and a slippery little devil. But it’s filling and not bad-tasting. Ultimately, though, a disappointment.
So, if balled-up newspaper is a zero, and the best burger in the world is a five, then this one gets:
 
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The Death of Internet Radio
Posted 6:31 PM, Apr 18, 2007 |
I don’t listen to a lot of radio - my exposure to broadcast radio is limited to sports radio. On very rare occasions I listen to Internet radio. I was a subscriber to Pandora back in the day, making them the only online music service to which I paid money. It was a great way to find new bands, and I honestly don’t remember why I quit, except maybe that I would find a new band I liked, then go buy their CD, then repeat until the coffers were running low. Pandora wasn’t expensive for me, but the follow-up purchases were.
In any event, that’s all going to end for everyone. The Copyright Royalty Board recently almost tripled licensing fees for Internet Radio, and made the increased fees retroactive to 2006. According to InformationWeek, they “invited requests for a rehearing, and then speedily ignored them” and decided, on April 16, that they “had been right all along.”
Awesome. I hope you like your music really expensive or not at all.
Related to this was recent news that label EMI struck a deal to sell their music through Apple’s iStore without digital rights management. Previously, all their tracks (and all other tracks sold through the iStore, I believe, or at least a large percentage of them) were shackled by digital rights management (DRM), limiting the number of times they could be transferred to new computers, copied, and so on. I don’t know specifics because I don’t use the iStore because of DRM. So now EMI is selling DRM-less tracks via the iStore. The catch? They cost more.
They bumped up the bitrate on the songs, but apparently there isn’t much difference unless you’re using a really high-end stereo system.
I see consumers breaking down like this;
1) The consumers who don’t know anything about DRM, which is just the way the music industry and Apple would like things.
2) Consumers who understand that their iStore purchases aren’t truly theirs, but don’t care and will be unaffected by the EMI deal.
3) Customers who think a higher bit rate will be noticeable, and so the EMI deal is awesome and they’ll gladly pay the extra money and chalk it up to having better music quality.
And… well, I ran out of steam. But basically, people shouldn’t be excited about paying an extra $0.30 per track to get rid of DRM - they should be mad about paying $0.99 for a track that they don’t even really control.
And it’s just going to get worse.
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How Come You Taste So Good…?!
Posted 12:53 AM, Apr 17, 2007 |
I’m still working up to such famous sandwiches as Dagwood Bumstead’s “Dagwood” and The Cosby Show’s “Double Bacon Burger Dog”, but I ate this:
 and enjoyed it. A list:
1) Sourdough bread.
2) Mayonnaise.
3) Muenster cheese.
4) Turkey.
5) Ham.
6) Onions.
7) Green peppers.
8) Red peppers.
9) Pickles.
10) Banana peppers.
11) Mustard.
12) Thousand Island salad dressing.
This was one delicious sandwich. I ate it with a giant 22 ounce Lagunitas Brown Shugga’ beer, fermented with fresh brown sugar, which was 9.9% alcohol, I realized about 4 hours later. This was one of the more delicious meals in recent memory.
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Gallery: San Diego
Posted 2:38 PM, Apr 14, 2007 |
These are some pictures I took.
San Diego
Most of these photos probably could have been taken in any major U.S. city. But they weren’t. They were taken in San Diego.
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R.I.P.
Posted 10:10 AM, Apr 12, 2007 |
I don’t really understand how, when Kurt Vonnegut dies, sadly, I still can’t find the link to the article above from The New York Times’ main page, nor on CNN.com. Of course, CNN.com is filled up with articles about American Idol, something about penguins, and a fleeing suspect who was caught after his fake leg fell off. It’s not like I’m surprised.
Maybe Vonnegut doesn’t have the reputation I thought he did - sure, his last couple books were stinkers, but what about Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, and one of the best shrot story collections I ever read, owned, loaned to someone, and never got returned to me, Tales from the Monkey House? (I’m still waiting for it, Annie R., and it’s been 11 years.) Don’t all those count for something?
In any event, I’m sad, but the silver lining, I guess, is that is a good reason to go back and read the ton of Vonnegut books I haven’t read. Yet.
Update: CNN.com and the Times have gotten with it.
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Sparks
Posted 9:41 AM, Apr 12, 2007 |
On our way back from San Diego over the Easter weekend (where we took in a Padres/Rockies game at the relatively-new Petco Park), we stopped at Ikea to get some tables for Ye Olde Math Shoppe, and also got a new hanging lamp for the dining room here at HQ. We sold the old, ugly one when we got here, so a hanging lamp has been about 10 months coming.
It was a plug-in lamp with your standard two-pronged plug, but the one we took out was just hard-wired, with two wires sticking out. So we snipped off the end of the cord, peeled back the insulation, exposing the two wires within, and hooked it up. Voila, much to everyone’s surprise, two things happened:
1) It worked.
2) I didn’t electrocute myself.
So then I went to the hardware store to buy a canopy kit, which we’re going to use to cover up the hole in the ceiling and make it look all pretty. To install it, I had to unhook the lamp, put the cord through the canopy, and then hook the lamp up again. I did that, turned the fuse back on, and witnessed a fluttering of sparks and a loud electrical pop. No fire, though, and it didn’t repeat its performance when I messed with the fuse of the lightswitch again.
The canopy still isn’t up - one of the screws that we had to remove has a head that is completely worn away, and it wouldn’t budge, whether with manual or electric screwdriver, or pliers. Until we can get that screw out, the process is on hold.
But I’m more concerned about the sparks. It seems like there should be laws preventing people with a rudimentary understanding of electricity from installing fixtures, especially when it involves cutting the plug off from a lamp. I felt like I was doing something illegal, like I was a salesman tearing off mattress tags.
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Sometime in the Future
Posted 9:33 AM, Apr 9, 2007 |
I caught myself for just a moment
in the department store mirror,
behind me a fleet of shoe boxes,
like barges ready to set sail.
I looked tired in that fleeting glance,
my hat low over my eyes,
a small growth of beard on my chin
like moss from an ancient tree.
I turned quickly away from myself
in the mirror; I was not the person
I imagined myself to be.
My clothes were uncoordinated,
my jaw was hanging slack like a hammock,
and I was walking in a tired daze.
Would I come back to the mirror,
in the long summer days, maybe,
when I had to buy shoes? When I did,
I decided, I would look better.
I would wear a smart suit with pinstripes
the color of white lightning. My shoes
would be sharp mirrors, shiny, and my
face would glow, would be radiant,
like a star passing through the aisle,
something people stop to watch, their
fingers pointing, children tugging
on parents’ arms.
That day would come soon
enough, and I would catch it
in the department store mirror
and save it for cloudy days when
the stars were invisible.
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It’s No Giant Squid
Posted 9:54 AM, Apr 6, 2007 |
The giant shortraker rockfish is one ugly fish, especially when it’s about 100 years old. An Alaskan fishing boat pulled in the approximately-century-old fish, which is aged by growth rings in its ear bone. It’s a nasty-looking thing.
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The cows look over the fence
Posted 11:45 AM, Apr 5, 2007 |
The cows look over the fence,
eyeing the tall glasses of milk
like they know something is up;
their puzzled looks say they
aren’t quite sure what it is.
The picnickers eat their sandwiches
and cannot tell the difference
between the sound of the cows
chewing cud and their own
bodies, flexing, and swallowing.
When they stand, they find
grass stains on their knees
and small pieces of dirt
between their toes
and under their toenails,
like paint scrapings
from a brown barn door.
They walk home, the wicker picnic
basket made of long grasses
like the ones they step, barefoot,
through. The cows moo quietly,
as if asking the picnickers
to stay a while longer,
just until the sun sets
and the cows fall asleep,
the heat from their bodies
steaming into the quickly cooling air.
The picnickers are like the cows in that they
are not sure what is part of them
and what is part of something else.
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Making a Go Of It at Grover Cleveland (2)
Posted 11:54 PM, Apr 3, 2007 |
So I spent my day off today, by choice, at Ye Olde Math Shoppe with a couple other guys that work for the company. We painted, did some repairs, some maintenance, some reorganization, and I learned how to properly use Quickbooks for accounting, invoices, and receiving payments. I worked 8 hours today and got paid $0.
It turns out I view this job as a challenge - it’s a situation that I haven’t been in for a while, and it turns out that a challenge actually makes me not lazy. I want YOMS to succeed. At old jobs, I didn’t really care. I mean, I wanted them to succeed enough so accounting would still issue me a paycheck, but beyond that, I had no personal interest.
And tomorrow, another day off (Passover), I’m going in to apply a second coat of paint to today’s efforts. And vacuum.
I said something about this before, but I’ll reiterate - it’s so weird for me to have a job that I actually care about. Is this my life’s calling? No, probably not, so put those thoughts to bed, but it’s doing an excellent job at this point in time.
My life’s calling, of course: a princess.
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Summer is Here
Posted 2:14 PM, Apr 1, 2007 |
Ah, finally, summer has arrived. Maybe you think it’s because I’m in California that I’ve lost all sense of when each season occurs - after all, hasn’t it been summery here for years?
But tomorrow is the full-fledged Major League Baseball Opening Day, which is really the beginning of summer. Sure, there’s a game tonight, which is just a little teaser, like the play-in game in the NCAA tournament, but everyone knows the season really starts tomorrow.
I finished reading Shoeless Joe (the book upon which Field of Dreams is based) last night, and now I’m ready, reminded of the magic that baseball has. Sure, 162 games is a long season and at times might seem interminable to those of you that don’t love baseball, but 162 games is far too short. It will be October soon.
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