Wow, I had no idea National Bohemian wasn’t available on tap until recently. ‘Natty Boh’ Drinkers Tap Into Nostalgia at Frisco Tap House in Columbia.
Here’s an awesome interview with W. Earl Brown, AKA Dan Dority from Deadwood, and Warren from There’s Something About Mary.
This is supremely creepy stuff, but fascinating. I will let that description stand on its own.
(hint: go forward to The Shining examples.)
The new AppleTV looks very tempting. We are currently paying for the FIOS triple-play as part of their 1-year promotion, so once our contract on that expires I’ll be looking for ways to ditch cable altogether and move to a more internet-oriented TV delivery system. AppleTV is now based on streaming vs. buying, which means there’s only 24 hours to watch a show or movie multiple times. I’m thinking this isn’t a huge deal for Jen or I (especially since we already have a Netflix account, which is supported in the new AppleTV) but for Finn, who will most likely want to see shows or movies multiple times, this could be a challenge. It would also mean giving up a few channels I’d like to have for her, including the kids’ music channel and Disney-free cartoon channels (in the rare event we let her watch TV).
I think the other thing I’d do with it is drop another terrabyte drive into our media server and load our DVD collection on there, along with as much kids’ programming as I could get my hands on in order to stream it to the TV. It would be so nice to retire the DVD player completely and subtract a big box from the TV stand; apparently there is a way to use the XBOX as a DVD player but I need an “XBOX DVD Movie Playback Kit” to do it.
Speaking of Apple, Jen’s new iPhone should be arriving on Friday, which is excellent news. Her old Motorola will be relegated to duty as Finn’s new toy, which is, sadly, about all it’s good for.
Wow, what a busy weekend. I feel, this morning, like somebody beat me up with a baseball bat. That’s not to say it wasn’t a great weekend—in fact, it was fantastic. Saturday was our sixth wedding anniversary, and in a rare display of forward thinking, I had a day of fun planned for my bride. Finn and I woke at our usual time, went out on a hike for food, and then returned home to Mama to share breakfast. We then spent some family time in the backyard working in the garden and assembling our new adirondack chairs before Aunt Christi arrived to take over babycare duties.
Jen and I then drove out to Lisbon to have some tasty lunch at the Towne Grill (fantastic smoked barbecue and sweet potato fries, YUM) before exploring Sun Nurseries for landscaping and gardening ideas. You may laugh at our romantic idea of alone time, but it was some of the best time I’ve spent alone with her in ages. It’s also nice to carry on a conversation without interruption for more than five minutes.
In the late afternoon, we had dinner reservations downtown at Cinghale, Cindy Wolf’s newest restaurant, which is billed as authentic country-style Italian and feels open and friendly inside. Taking the opportunity to dress up like adults, we ordered cocktails, selected from the Presto Fizzo menu and had a sommelier pair a light chianti for the meal. Everything was superb, from the service to the food, and if you go, we recommend the duck.
After dinner, we had tickets to an evening with Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert at the Hippodrome theater, where we sat in an audience filled with adoring foodies and listened to the two chefs talk about food, the restaurant business, fame, and famous people. I liked Bourdain before—I’ve caught his show a couple of times over the years—but having heard him talk I think we may seek his programs a bit more in the future. (I have a general dislike for cooking shows, mainly because I can’t taste the food myself, but I like the format of No Reservations, which is a mixture of essay, travelogue, and restaurant review).
After the show we walked through the lobby, where tables were arranged with all manner of different food for tasting; as it was only 10PM, we got a drink at the bar and sampled some chocolate before meeting up with some new acquaintances of Jen’s from her yoga class. It was about this time that a woman stopped over to check our wrists for armbands… apparently there was a more expensive ticket offered which included the tasting and a meet-and-greet with the chefs that we were not invited to, so she bounced us! I guess there’s nothing like a little lawbreaking to spice up an anniversary.
Sunday morning I cruised over the Bay Bridge to wrench on trucks with Mr. Scout, who is so tantalizingly close to being finished with his project he can taste it. During the course of the afternoon, we got the passenger’s door hardware completely installed (the driver’s side regulator was broken), chased down a bad wire in the temperature gauge, mounted the license plate holder and light, mounted the Tuffy console, and a myriad of other small things I can’t remember. We even fired it up and took it for a brief spin down the block, which was fantastic! He plied us with delicious tuna steaks and homebrew, but I somehow dragged myself away to boogie home in time for the LOST finale.
Overall, I was happy with the way they wrapped things up. I don’t share the hate some people have expressed for the final church theme, and I liked how they explained the flash-sideways construct in relation to the whole mythos of the show. Each of the sideways awakenings were handled pretty well (Juliet/Sawyer was really good, as well as Claire/Charlie), and I was happy to see characters from the first seasons come back one last time. The final sequence was good too; I liked how Vincent came back to be with Jack at the very end to close the circle. It’s not often I invest heavily in a TV program, and I’ve had my moments of doubt with LOST over the years, but I’m sad to see this one end.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Steam for the Mac went live a couple of weeks ago, so I downloaded the app and set up an account to poke around. They’re offering Portal for free for a few weeks, so I downloaded that and played with it for about a half an hour last night. What an awesome, addictive game.
Last night, while watching the second-to-last episode of LOST, I decided to tear into my MacBook Pro to replace the LVDS cable: the wire that sends pretty much all of the signal to the LCD display, and what I suspect is the root cause of the issues with the lower half of the screen disappearing for the last five months or so. I found one available online for $12 last week, and figured that $12 was cheaper than $1,200 for a new MacBook, which is what I’ve been mulling over for a few months now.
Because I wasn’t able to find the exact service manual or take apart directions for the model A1151 17″ MBP, I got stumped by removal of the clutch cover, and no amount of searching at 11PM revealed anything that would help. So I reassembled the case and rebooted, which went fine, but upon logging in I found the trackpad button had become extremely sensitive, to the point of being unusable. So I’m back to considering a replacement, which is not a happy thought.
At this point, I think I’d keep the MBP on my desk at home and get something more portable, like a standard MacBook, for carting back and forth to the office. As much as I love a 17″ display, I don’t use it enough at work as a hardcore workstation to justify the extra $1,000.
I’m currently listening to a 9-year-old album by Ivy called Long Distance, which is slightly uptempo chilled francophile pop (does that make sense?) I also have the new album by Delorean on heavy rotation, which is good; I’ve been sick of all the music I have for months now, so I like having some options.
And, quickly: last night’s LOST was…good, I guess. Rushed, to be sure. I think they’re trying to wrap up two seasons’ worth of explanations and story arcs and mythos in one abbreviated season, and a lot of the action feels forced and tossed-off to me. I wasn’t expecting a “very special episode” dedicated to Jin and Sun, but their departure (while in keeping with the “rules” of the show, as explained last night) was pretty quick. I’d developed an attachment to certain characters over the last six years, and so having more than one of them disappear quickly has been a bit jarring. While I’m glad the writers didn’t resort to maudlin half-hour goodbyes, it would have been nice to get just a little more time with folks, especially since they’ve all hiked across the island seventeen zillion times just to meet up with each other.
File this under “horrendous timesuck”: Steam for Mac goes live. I will eventually sign up for this, when they release the Half-Life Yellow Box.
Over the course of successive nights I’ve added old weblog posts up to the middle of September 2004, which doesn’t sound like much on the surface, but represents hours of repetitive labor. What I’ve had to do for each post is copy the raw HTML from my old handwritten files, strip out any broken links, change the creation date, upload and relink any image files (which I kept locally in that month’s subfolder), and add the relevant Category tag(s). See why I haven’t done this in the past? WordPress, at least, is quicker than Movable Type, which would have taken eons.
I’m thinking there has to be a better way of doing this, so I’m going to look into some kind of search-and-replace to build an XML file in a format that WordPress likes, and use that to import three years’ worth of entries in one swoop. The images will be a complicating factor, of course. Another thing I’d like to do is find a way to have WordPress list all of the entries for a particular month on one page, as opposed to the five-excerpt list it picks up from the homepage template. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to devote to the new weblog structure other than fooling with the base CSS, but I’m sure there’s an easy way to get it working.
In other news, I’ve got a tentative plan with Mr. Scout to go lookin’ through the local junkyard on Friday for a Saturn taillight, as well as yanking the radiator out of Peer Pressure to flush it out. I’m going to be up in the morning extra-early to get a jumpstart on things, because the weather is getting warmer and I’d really like to be driving the Scout again.
LOST was pretty good last night, if not a little sparse on the backend character development. I agree with the Onion review: we didn’t learn much, and there wasn’t a whole lot of resolution in the flash-sideways like there has been for other characters. I guess that’s a flaw in the writers’ attempt to jam two (criminally underutilized and potentially interesting) characters into one episode. And Jen guessed the identity of “the Package” right away.
Speaking of Lost and packages, here’s an exhaustive list of Dharma initiative food labels for everything in your pantry. enjoy!
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
So the tribute to John Hughes on the Academy Awards show last night was really thoughtful and well done. But did anyone else look at Judd Nelson and think METH WITHDRAWAL like I did? Wow. And Ally Sheedy, who I had a crush on in 1983 (after War Games) looks like someone stretched the skin on her face over a halloween mask. That kid from Home Alone is still annoying. And I miss the Farmer Ted version of Anthony Michael Hall, especially after having seen the last 45 minutes of Sixteen Candles on TV the other night.