its a cold, cold world out there…
I was in Providence last week for training and work. Providence is one of my favorite places to go which is fortunate since I spend so much time there. The food is simply amazing.
One benefit was that the first night I was there, I was fighting the flu and sinus infection. After a very long evening beginning at Capital Grille dining on martinis, Delmonico steak and a Wedge, I ended up at Ri-Ra trying out Tullamore Dew.
Woke up in the morning - no flu and clear sinuses!
I was sick for a week with the flu and sinus infection. This happens at least once a year for me. At a certain point, I start to eat salsa, red chili peppers, Korean ramen and anything to keep the sinuses clear. Recently I discovered that there is nothing better than a huge bowl of rice porridge full of chicken, ginger, garlic and black pepper! The variations on congee are infinite. Here is a sample and further explanation.
This is an absolutely amazing vegetarian chili recipe from the wife of a VeriSign sysadmin at a get-together we had. I didn’t even notice that there was no meat in it!
Chop 2 large onions and saute them in about 1/4 c. olive oil.
Add 2 chopped green peppers and some minced garlic (I used 3 cloves).
Saute for awhile.
Add 1 tsp. ground cumin, 1/2 tsp. chili powder (I use more) and salt and pepper.
Add 3 large (28 oz.) cans diced tomatoes (used 2 cans “fire roasted” and 1 regular).
Add 3 large (25 oz.) cans kidney beans, drained.
You can add more beans and/or tomatoes depending on how many you’re serving and how you like it. Can also use some garbanzo or black beans in place of, or in addition to, the kidney beans.
Add 1 can beer and 1 tbsp sugar.
Let it stew for a while. Taste to see what else it needs.
Serve with plain yogurt (or sour cream), grated cheese, fresh cilantro and cornbread.
1 package of Italian sausage
5 fresh cloves of garlic chopped
- Brown sausage with garlic.
- Add:
1 can of beef broth
1 can of black beans (rinsed and drained)
1 can of great white northern beans (rinsed and drained)
1 can of diced tomatoes (preferably flavored like garlic and olive oil)
- Mix everything together, cook for awhile and serve.
Garnish with fresh basil and parmesan cheese.
It’s often difficult to find out just exactly how much space is taken up in the home directory on your hard drive. IF you are comfortable with the command line, startup terminal and run:
du -h -d1
This will list the top level of directories from wherever you are (hopefully your home folder). The ‘-dx’ controls how many directories to descend. Do a ‘man du’ to learn more.
If you prefer a GUI interface, then WhatSize is what you are looking for. It’s free and a good tool to use. It’s easier and faster than ‘du’ in that it lets you rapidly compare different areas on the disk visually.
Now if you want something really cool, Disk Inventory X is an experimental application that creates a “treemap”, like this:
While not entirely useful, treemaps are cool in that they let you see disk usage in ways that are impossible to visualize otherwise.
Tonight I was at the Manassas Battlefield. It’s not easy taking a flat empty field and finding things to take good photos of. This is my third trip and I am finally starting to feel familiar with what might and might not work. I think this would be a great place to take photos in the wintertime.
This time as sunset came on I started to use the omnipod more as well as remembering to remove the polarizer (doh!).
I spent the evening at Great Falls, MD on the Virginia side trying to get some decent photos in the evening light. It’s very difficult to take pictures here. The light doesn’t seem to want to cooperate. I got lots better results a few years ago in the middle of winter. I think that at that time the sun was setting more in the direction along the river rather than directly across the river, like it is now. Last time, there was a period of about 10 minutes at sunset where the cliffs on the sides of the river bloomed from dull grey rocks into pink and orange. No such luck this time. The most I accomplished was to have the sunlight diffuse, bringing out the green of the vegetation and the orange in the rocks. Then it all went dark.
Another frustration is that the 18-200mm lens is adequate with VR but nowhere near the clarity I want. Next time I’ll bring a solid tripod, disable the VR and do things the old-fashioned way.
Also, I am hating the way Picasaweb is resizing images on the fly for the destination browser and distorting the photos. For these darker landscape photos, it makes them look pretty ugly.
Now if only my photos looked like these. Here is a view from the Maryland side, they have a better panoramic view over there!
I have been trying out the .Mac Web Galleries and am disappointed. While it does offer 10GB of storage, the features of the gallery itself are strictly for consumers showing snapshots.
1. The data transfer and website is very heavy. Its slow. Much slower than it needs to be. Someone clocked the initial download hit for scripts, etc. at 2MB.
2. All images are resized on the fly. There is very little thumbnailing and no possible way to see the image in its native resolution. When trying to view images full-size, the resizing messes up the image quality, at times quite severely. There is no fixed resolution view mode to show the image at high quality.
3. Reflections. I am showing photos, not eye-candy reflections at the bottom of the photos.
4. Upload options. There are none.
5. When clicking through full-size images and there are multiple pages of thumbnails, a user is told they are at the end of the gallery when they reach the end of the thumbnail “page”. In a test this caused every single user to miss the second half of the two-page gallery.
While this Gallery is as easy as possible to use for your average iPhoto user, I think that it could do a much better job with less of the bloat.
PicasaWeb, with all of its features and Google maps integration and an iPhoto plugin, is still lightweight and plagued by none of these problems. It just works. Of course, with the release of the new iLife 08, the Picasa iPhoto export plugin is broken, but the separate uploader app works and an update to the plugin will be released soon.
Here is an example for you to compare:
I have begun working my way through Yasujiro Ozu’s films with the goal of extrapolating some common themes and styles from his work. Thus is the peril of Netflix - browse at your own risk, you will find yourself going off on tangents and ending up with a full movie queue.
Late Autumn, filmed in 1963, is a quiet drama set in the then modern-day Japan. If this film were a food, it would be a cup of tea. It is quiet and understated with depths that need to be found through relaxation and reflection. There is humor, but it is dry and not found unless looked for.The movie provides an interesting view into the Western incursion into traditional Japanese style, attitudes and culture. The older generation is markedly different from the younger, both in dress and attitude. The Western American stereotypes of traditional Japanese culture are so strong that the “modern” dress and language of the younger generation in the film seems to be more affectation than reality.
Ozu seems to concentrate more on composition and rhythm rather than acting. Actors address the camera overmuch, walk on and off of the scene and things come off like you are watching the film adaptation of a play. While somewhat disconcerting, the formalized structure of the film allows you to pay attention to the smallest details.
One of the most interesting photographic composition elements from a Western viewpoint is that the camera is often at the viewpoint of someone sitting on the tatami rather than in a chair.
Here is a much better writeup than mine.
Here is a new photo gallery from San Diego. All pictures were taken with my Nikon D40x and an 18-200mm VR lens.
