There is a great, great Irish bar out here in Astoria called The Quays.  You can scuttle off and find the mentions and what not.  Frankly, I don't want you to find it.  But if you doubt it's a fantastic bar I have two things for you: 1) for some reason the Smithwicks on tap there tastes better than anywhere else I've had it and 2) Here is the view at the top of the stairs down to the bathroom.

Yeah, that's money.

Working late with Vijay, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

I suppose I should tell him I stole his soul with my talking box.

FW: Me in a Fez, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

I am setting up post with picture and email in anticipation of my trip to Vegas next week for the Microsoft web development conference, Mix08. The Saitz stopped by today and talked me through it. This is exactly what I've been looking for to give me that post verite that I am after.

If only I could find the open tag key on my phone so I can do basic html.

I remain impressed with the functionality of flickr but man finding the info on their site
to fully utilize their features is a pain in the ass.

And, yes this is fun for me too.

Spokane, Washington



Stratosphere, Las Vegas

Okay, this is both intriguing me and weird-ing me out.  I am fascinated by the possibility of huge visual variety, but at the same time, what will I see in the crystal ball come screen saver that big brother has lovingly made for me?

You all judge for yourself.  I'm still deciding. I'll let you know if I go for it and please let me know if you give it a try.

SurveillanceSaver is a screensaver which shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide. Yep, when your computer is idle you’ll get to see a live feed of what’s going on in other parts of the world. It’s quite fascinating because of the voyeuristic element involved but also surreal because it compresses time-space.

Something is happening right at the moment elsewhere and you are a witness to it. It is real but since it’s only an image, you tend to question its verity a little more than what you see with your eyes. Sometimes I can’t bear to look away from the screen because I’m always expecting something to happen just that moment, maybe a car accident or a cute girl would enter into the frame.

It’s these thoughts that make this screensaver (and surveillance) quite an intriguing process.

FYI:You more or less have to have seen "There Will be Blood" for this to make sense

Some of you likely noticed that around late Thursday of last week, in conjunction with my lengthy post about my adventure into canning this blog went wonky and showed something that was an incomprehensible mix of two posts. The good news is no one wrote or commented telling me my writing had improved.

I think the problem had to do with using BlogJet. It seems to support dasBlog nicely but something went horribly wrong. This post is using ecto. I so, so so want to like ecto, and I do it's got that perfect mix of raw dork horse-power ( html-templating with keyboard short-cuts; solid html generation; and flickr/Amazon/YouTube buttons). But, and there always seems to be a "but", it was barfing on a post I was trying to make again my humble little dasBlog instance. I attempted to debug into the code on the dasBlog side, a big reason I chose dasBlog. In my initial look through I concluded that the problem was likely somewhere in ecto, not that dasBlog is a shining example of good code practices. 

I know, I know dasBlog is open source and I'm so critical, why don't I roll up my sleeves and dive in? The truth of the matter is, I'm not interested in writing a blogging engine, or even really fixing on this one. I've got other side-projects I want to work on and the list is already too long. While I don't believe blogging is fully mature, the issues I've been having with what seems to me a late teen set of technologies: blogging APIs and blog software) frustrates me a bit. And maybe this problem lies in the technology I've chosen. Blogging comes more or less from the PHP side of the tracks and .NET being my comfort zone I opted to use a .NET open source tool. Maybe it's time to learn PHP. (You hear that Bill?)

Back to the dangle-y loose thread holding this post together. I won't be using BlogJet on a live instance without further testing. Windows Live Writer (thanks for the suggestion Ben) hasn't really gotten a workout from me, will be making an audition on a laptop near me. And ecto, oh ecto... What am I to do? I went to your help page hoping you could tell me how to tune your software for dasBlog and this is what I saw:

Looks simple right? You'll notice I've included both the left and right edge of the browser window in the screen shot. In fact, I even went so far as to view source - there isn't an input tag on the page.

I'll give it another try, cause I like it so much, but it looks like Windows Live Writer might win. While it was fun to do raw HTML and I like the spell check and ability to have drafts of future posts.

This last Saturday, my friend Jenn (soon to be a linked to blogger) and I took our CSA bounty and canned it. This was the first time for both of us at canning. In my enthusiasm I had picked up several books on canning and pickling. We used Pickled: Vegetables, Fruits, Roots, More--Preserving a World of Tastes and Traditions as our guide this time. The CSA had delivered about 19 medium large beets and well over 30 beautiful carrots. So we selected two recipes one for Beet Pickles and one for Pickled Carrots.

Earlier in the day I had run out to get jars. I had remembered that a local 99 cents store had them. Indeed, they did. Not paying as much attention as I should, I purchased a partial case of jars small jars and one quart jar and one half gallon jar. The recipes both said they made 4 pints. When I got home I realized that the smaller jars were in fact a box of half pint jars put in an empty box for pint jars. As Jenn pointed out, I should be well acquainted with the pint - touché. We adjusted by making 8 half pints of carrots, and 3 quarts and 1 half pint. This involved a little scrounging around the apartment but luckily I had bought extra lids and had spare rings. Read More...

From the New York Times

Technology

Toshiba Concedes Defeat in the DVD Battle

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: February 20, 2008

The Japanese electronics giant threw in the towel on its HD DVD technology, announcing that it would no longer develop, produce or market disc players for the format.

In case you were wondering as I was, what is the difference this little FAQ helped me out. Here are the specs:

So I've been toying around with ecto as a tool to compose blog posts on my local box before I post them to my site. Here is what they have to say for themselves:

With ecto you can write and manage entries for your weblog(s). The advantage over using your weblog's control panel is that you can compose entries offline and use the extra features ecto offers, such as spellcheck, creating links, attachments, and much more. ecto is designed to make blogging much more easier and yet give the users as much power as possible to manage their weblogs.

There are a couple things I'm really stoked about. First the keyboard short-cuts for definable tags, so in the rich text editor when I press Ctrl-Shift-B it wraps the selected text with

<blockquote class="withquote"><p class="withunquote">[Selected Text]</p></blockquote>

Second, it has an in browser preview capability that I don't get now using dasBlog. I have to save the post as unpublished and then return to editing. Finally, I'm really stoked about the ability to have draft posts. dasBlog doesn't really support that concept at all. The only problem is it's not free. There is a 21 day trial and then it's going to run me $17.95 or so. It may be worth it.

I've more or less figured out that if I'm going to keep up any sort of reasonable pace I need to be able to start posts in one sitting and finish them later.

I found these images on my phone.

I woke up this morning at 6:00 AM and couldn't really go back to sleep. So I fiddled around on the computer, paying some bills, checking my stats - Hello Alaska - and then decided I'd go to the gym... Yeah, that's what's weird. I may have just become a morning person. Let's hope it doesn't stick. I suppose it has something to do with going to bed at 10 PM last night because I was so exhausted, but I suspect that had more to do with the few glasses of wine I had after work at the DE shin dig. At any rate, off to the gym. It will be a brisk walk there, it's 19 deg outside.

I have been looking at this game for some time. It's more or less from the same family, press your luck or choose, as Coloretto but a little lighter. I noticed that the English release was available, Circus Flohcati, but the game snob I am I wondered if I could get the original German. Well, good old eBay delivered at a very reasonable price. Here is the description from funagain

The object of the game is to collect many valuable Circus cards to achieve the highest points score. In the course of the game, cards with circus attractions are displayed in one row in the middle of the table. On his turn, a player chooses and takes a card from the row, either into his hand, or to form a Trio for bonus points. Before selecting his card the player may, if he wishes, draw cards and add them to the row in order to improve his choices. However, if he draws an attraction which is already in the row, he forfeits his right to take a card. The game ends when one player succeeds in staging a Gala Show, with one Circus card from each attraction!

This last Friday I went out for dinner with some friends at Mole, Mexican Bar & Grill and it was really great. You may remember my earlier post about Rubio's Fish Tacos, and how I lamented the fact that the closest fish taco worth consuming was 1,776 miles away. Well there is good news. Mole is great. I have to tip my hat to my friend Lyndi, a fellow southern Californian who pointed the place out, and to Vanessa for organizing an evening there.

Let's get down to gory details.

I squeezed two posts out of this ritual last month, but I'm going to make it just one this time. I read Wired magazine, have for several years. I consider it my candy reading. The ritual I mentioned is around recycling my copy of Wired. I used to store magazines that I subscribed to in boxes, cause, you know you may read them again - as if. Ever since moving to NYC I have become merciless about things that take up space. So, instead of keeping them, I slice out the pages with things I'm interested in so I can go back later and remind myself. I'm endeavoring to not keep sliced out pieces any more by blogging about the items I'm interested in.

Anthology Records

This is REALLY great. Here is the link to the Wired article: Vinyl Frontier. It's a tidbit about a record label that re-releases vintage stuff. Here let's let Wired tell it.

Sure, iTunes has millions of tracks, but don't go looking there for obscure or out-of-print treasures like, say, the seminal stoner-rock stylings of Sir Lord Baltimore. Fortunately for music geeks, help is on the way. Keith Abrahamsson, an A&R rep for New York-based indie label Kemado Records, recently launched the first all-digital reissues label. At prices similar to those of Apple's square mass-market store, Anthology Recordings offers high-fidelity (320 Kbps), DRM-free rips of supercool, ultrarare titles — from late-'60s Swedish psych-rock to British postpunk and early-'80s dub.

I was doing a little browsing and came across Panama! Latin, Calypso, Panama! that sounds pretty great. And, I have no idea what this is...Thai Beat A Go-Go Volume 2.

Thinking of making my PC my TV

The OnAir GT Mobile HDTV Receiver & DVR for PC (HDTV-GT) seems to do the trick. This is my first stab at just going full on Media PC for all my entertainment needs. Right now we don't have cable and so all our TV is broadcast. It's not as bad as you think. Although we do miss our favorite channels: TLC, Discovery Channel and History Channel. I realize this isn't going to solve that problem, but I'm hoping by getting some DVR action I can do a bit of time shifting on stuff that I want to watch.

Goldfrapp, anyone? anyone?

Does anyone know anything about these guys? Opinions? I am intrigued by the 7 of 10 review that Wired gave their album Seventh Tree. Not running out to purchase (or I guess pre-purchase), but the Amazon.com MP3 downloads is definitely an option. I used it to download Basement Bhangra for $8.99 (DRM Free MP3). It's a good album (also found in Wired) I'll be using the AmazonMP3 optiont again. I still object to iTunes.

Finally the light has come on with me and TDD. I totally get-it from a process perspective. I totally get-it from a qualitative perspective. And as a software engineer, I am innately averse to fear-based coding. To be perfectly honest I'm not entirely there either. I've fiddled with TDD - in so far as most of us have. Exploring the novelty of writing a test, running it to failure and then coding it to success. There were/are several issues, but the one that was second on the list is best expressed: "so what, I have a lot of tests"

Well, due to some prodding by my adopted boss and some ribbing from a fellow blogger (Jonk), I've started to find TDD actionable. I've "seen the light" all along, but how to make it real was always the problem. The other day I wrote a method called CityStateZip() on an Address class. You get the picture, you always want that pretty one line of the address for display but constantly doing the string.Format() gets really old. Yes I am aware that some of you out there just realized that in your mind I 'adulterated' a business object with display logic. All I have to say it bite me. It's a standard format, standard to the domain of Addresses in general. So dismount your separation of concerns high horse and lets move on. Proud of myself (um, yeah) I checked it all in and went about my business (What no code review? Bite Me). The next day my adopted boss, let's call him Tony, said, "Hey, you guys gotta watch those tests. You checked in a method CityStateZip and didn't add a test for it."

Ha haha ha... Seattle, San Diego - Typical!

Thanks for holding the line. Now that that's taken care of. Over the last little bit I've been watching the percentage of my modest traffic from search inch up to a higher and higher percentage. As of this writing, It looks as if I'm holding steady at the top of the Google search results for "Dave and Busters Phoenix". This is a fairly interesting little trip into SEO. I'm starting to wonder if I should be detecting when people arrive here by search (dasBlog has some hooks for that) and show ads to those people. I'm not really interested in disrupting you-all, my loyal readers, with that kind of thing, but I can't help but smell the potential of essentially passive revenue at some point in the future.

For those of you catching up it all got started by the following blog posts (in chronological order)

• December 12, 2007 - Dave & Busters - Did I miss something?
• January 12, 2008 - Search: Dave & Busters Phoenix
• January 24, 2008 - Well Dave and Busters Phoenix appears to have worked

Definitely worth the read. This is long something I've realized - no talent, no company

Another Difficulty for a Microsoft-Yahoo Marriage: Recruiting

One risk for Microsoft is that it could spend billions to buy Yahoo only to find that many of its most talented people have already left. That is one of the perils of high-priced acquisitions in the talent economy, where the real prize is often the collective abilities of a company’s employees.

I've been a bit behind because I'm working on a new site.  Sorry, it's still under wraps.  There are a few of you who know about it, but let's just keep it on the D/L until it's ready - it's morphed a bit.

Last Thursday Shawn hosted a board game night at work.  We had taught ourselves El Grande a few weeks before and got to play a full game (4 Players).  It's a really great zero-sum-ish majority game ripe with all kinds of tight trade off decisions.  It's been out for a long time and I'm glad to finally have gotten to it.  Finally one less game that I own and have never played - it's a bit embarrassing.

After games my wife and I went over to Bar 169 so hear Ronan play an acoustic set.  He was really great, some fine guitar playing, a little harmonica and really heart-felt challenging lyrics.  Definitely will catch his next one.  Bar 169 on a Thursday night was a bit of a strange crowd that added to the fun.  Prior to Ronan played some singer chick who used background music and vocal tracks through the PA.  And on top of that she sang really pop-y crap.  After Ronan one of the women (of a table of about 8 lesbians) who had been sitting close to the "stage" got up and played.  She was better than I expected and only played 4 songs or so.  We were busy congratulating Ronan and relaxing.  Then as we were getting ready to leave this guy comes on and plays "new age piano" to a rhythm track.  He proceeds to finish one song and state that the next one was either inspired by or dedicated to his brother.  A SLIGHTLY different rhythm track comes on and he proceeds to play a different riff on the same melody he played in the first song.  We left.

As we stood outside Chealsea's friend Matt (if I remember correctly) is opening a restaurant, whose name I don't know, on February 26th literally next door to Bar 169. We got a tour of the place top to bottom and it looks great.  It is going to be a local produce driven menu - according to Matt, the head chef, it will be about 60% (or was it 80% vegetarian) and of that a good portion will be vegan.  Sure, all the carnivores just rolled their eyes, but I'm a huge fan of the veg and I'm looking forward to giving it a try. 

The interior of the restaurant is great as well.  When you first enter at street level there is a large bar with 3-4 big banquettes, a great place to have a drink and/or wait for your table.  Then as you move to the main dining room there are several generous banquettes on either side of the open area.  The ceiling has great small bulbous fixtures hanging down through large wooden slats.  At the very back of the space there are a couple archways beyond which is a large sunken area.  On the back wall there is a "green wall" covered in plants.  At first glance I thought I was looking out on a subterranean patio, but as it turns out there is a bar on the level below that opens up to the top.   The "back bar" seemed like a swank hideaway.  It got even cooler when he told us there was a separate entrance at the street you had to be buzzed through, after which you walk down a very cool wood slatted long hallway.

I'm looking forward to being in the know on this one.  If his restaurant is anything like Chealsea's other friend Allan's BBQ place, Georgia's BBQ (Yes, Chealsea is quite the hook-up), then I'm sure his food and his reviews will be will be great.  I'm going to have to be sure and soak it all in before the New York Times effect sets in.  But that is a whole different post about how I have a love hate relationship with the New York Times reviews and recommendations. I'm perfectly willing to check out places they recommend but am pissed when they tell the rest of the city about my secret places.  That being said, here is the link to Alan's / Georgia's BBQ's link in the NYT

This is fun. I had heard tell of this event from some folks. I was overjoyed to find a photo of it. You all look so young.