After several years of listening to the shitty white noise generator (SWNG) we bought to keep babies asleep in their beds while we cavorted in the living room late at night, I’m sort of addicted to nature sounds. Well, the only nature sound that sounds remotely natural on the SWNG is the ocean tide. I tried the bubbling brook, but it sounded like frying bacon which just made me hungry (recall I am a carnivore in a vegetarian household, although I’m making pretty good progress on converting my eldest son to the dark side). I’ve been trying to find something that would produce great nature sounds as I’m working on my computer so I can tune out all the craziness that happens in 4-d all around my home office. I got tired of listening to the same recordings over and over. I looked around and found Atmosphere Lite, a freeware nature sounds generator and it is AWESOME. It has tons of sounds that can be selected, combined, and randomized–everything from a crackling campfire to flowing water to various charming insects and birds. It even has binaural beats to put you into that new age state of mind so popular in the 1980s. Here’s the link:
http://www.vectormediasoftware.com/atmdeluxedown.htm
You can also get it at:
http://download.cnet.com/Atmosphere-Lite/3000-2257_4-10425240.html
Now I just have to figure out a way to put a speaker in the bedroom that can play sound from my computer so I can jettison the SWNG to Value Village.
Did you know that the state of Texas has a significant influence over the content of textbooks? California, too. Setting aside the question of why anyone thinks textbooks are better than real books, don’t you find this disturbing?
(For the record, I don’t hate Gingrich, and I don’t hate conservatives. I just hate the idea of history being taught along political lines. I would be just as disturbed if Howard Zinn was in charge of the textbook board.)
I finally realized the business value of “green,” when so few consumers seem to genuinely care about it. It’s a way of overcoming objections. With so many choices out there, anything that even slightly tilts the consumer against you is a problem. So, you add “green” to your list of good qualities. Because Wal-Mart has engaged in such massive green-related marketing, a whole market of people who care even marginally about green-ness will be slightly more likely to consider shopping there. The consumer doesn’t say, “I’ll shop there becaue it’s green.” They don’t say, “I’ll buy the fish because it’s sustainably harvested.” Faced with millions of choices and data points, they pick up a package and say, “Hmmm…these are the same in terms of price and perceived quality, but this one says it’s sustainable, so I guess it wins.” Into the bin it goes. I’ve just been trying to figure out the disconnect between how much consumers really appear to care about the “green” thing and the major marketing efforts around it by so many companies. If you’re not “green,” the consumer might choose something else, all other things being equal or at least undistinguishable or so noisy that rational though is impossible.
There’s a little burger stand with a big neon ice cream cone on top of it just on the north side of Astoria, Oregon. I’ve passed it about a million times going back and forth to Cannon Beach, but had never gone there. During a kid pre-nap emergency lunch, it was a convenient spot to stop. It was really good. They have medieval-themed hamburgers (no blackbirds or hot cross buns) and a big selection of ice cream. The food was great (I had the Barbarian burger, which could just as well be called the barnyard burger because it required contributions from pigs, cows, and chickens). The best part was that, because it was windy, we had a picnic in the back of our van. MJF climbed into the front and started working every dial and knob and button trying to get the car started so he could drive to, I don’t know, where would a one-year-old drive you? Into a ditch, probably. LJF said, “Get the camera and take a picture of our picnic in the van,” so we did. Memories get created in the most unlikely places.
I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to MediaMonkey, which is a great program for managing your music collection. It can manage iPods (better than iTunes itself, I think) and helps you organize your tracks. But, best of all, it’s FAST–in my experience, way faster than Windows Media Player or iTunes.
It gets down to something that I always wonder about–why is it that there are such huge performance differences between two programs that do basically the same things? Why is iTunes such a resource-hogging beast? Is it that they’ve added all kinds of gewgaws to it to make it more, I don’t know, Apple-y? I know it runs a lot of unnecessary background processes without asking, which I find offensive. It’s like someone siphoning gas from your tank so they can go to the store and buy you something you don’t want.
There’s also something inherently pleasurable about using a tool that’s well-built for a particular purpose, whether that tool is a piece of software or a can opener. Tangentially, I recently tossed a fancy “easy-to-use” newfangled can opener that stopped working after about ten cans and got a classic Swing-Away, made in the USA can opener, from McLendons, of course–not as “clever,” but my grandkids will still be using it 30 years from now. I also pitched my wife’s crappy plastic stapler without asking and got her one of the most reliable machines ever invented: a black Swingline stapler, which, in addition to costing approximately a dollar at the thrift store, and in addition to doing its job effortlessly and perfectly every time, can also be used to brain zombies.
We’re going camping this weekend. Camping makes food taste better. We’re pitching our tent at the AYH Ranch Hostel, so we’ll have kitchens and showers and such. With a couple of under-4’s, we’re not pushing the wilderness thing too hard at this point.
Although there are lots of restaurants on Vashon, I’m trying to avoid eating out, since after all, we’re supposed to be camping, right? I’m going to make crepes; biscuits and gravy; grilled salmon; falafel; and other good things. Not all at once, mind you.
And yes, I did get enough s’mores materiel to go around. Not to mention the ingredients for Nutella Fluffernutters, although I’m not sure I can slip those past the nutrition police. Maybe if I stick some banana in them.
I use a weird hybrid of calendars. My wife and I share a Google Calendar for household and business stuff. I use Thunderbird for my e-mail because Outlook is such a resource hog and I don’t need enterprise features (I even tried Pine for a while but it was a little too minimal). But I found Lightning, the calendar counterpart to Thunderbird, hard to use when syncing it with Google for reasons I can’t even remember. So, I use Outlook for my offline calendar and to respond to meeting requests.
Now to bring this Rube Goldberg contraption full circle, I use Google Calendar Sync to keep data current between the Outlook calendar and our shared Google calendar. Well, it started hosing Outlook every time it performed a syncrhonization. I searched the Web for a fix, and found one that worked (thanks, kpeavy):
Rename “C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Local Settings\Application
Data\Google\Google Calendar Sync\data_files” to “data files.old” or whatever. Restart
Google Calendar Sync. As far as I can tell, this procedure forces Google Calendar Sync to rebuild its data files, some corruption in which I assume was causing the crashes. I think you might be able to accomplish the same thing by uninstalling and reinstalling Google Calendar Sync, but I haven’t tried it.
I’m really happy to have found this solution because crashing Outlook can cause .pst files to become corrupted, which forces you to repair them, which is a pain in the butt and doesn’t always work, in which case you are hosed.
For my son’s third birthday I made two cakes. As usual, both were ice cream cakes because the weather is usually pretty warm by the time it rolls around.
One was a devil’s food cake with a layer of strawberry ice cream in the center and strawberry frosting using this recipe, although I used half a cup of butter rather than 1/4. The cake itself was the “Devil’s Food Cake Cockaigne” recipe from the old Joy of Cooking. I must say, a cake recipe that begins with “make a custard using the egg yolks and chocolate” is testing my patience. Come on, I’m already making a scratch cake–now I have to make a custard, too? But it was worth it–the cake was super moist and fudgy yet light.
The real hit of the party was the root beer float cake. I made a root beer flavored cake according to this recipe from Savuer, even going so far as to order the Zatarain’s root beer extract. (The recipe is right–the Zatarain’s has a fantastic, strong root beer flavor.) But instead of doing root beer frosting, I put a layer of vanilla ice cream in the middle and frosted it with whipped cream. It tasted just like a root beer float–even the grownups were into it. I’ll definitely make that one again.
One other recipe that I used for the party was Charcoal-Grilled Corn on the Cob with Mayonnaise, Cheese, and Chile. It’s definitely the most elaborate thing I’ve ever done with corn on the cob, and this one surprised me by being a hit with the kids–every single kid from ages 1 to 5 went crazy for this corn. The recipe calls for anejo cheese, which is weird because the article is about cotija. I used cotija–its salty, feta-like quality just seemed right. Also, I just used regular mild chile powder because I didn’t have arbol or even really know what it is. Anyway, kids will surprise you sometimes–who knew they would eat corn slathered with mayonnaise and unfamiliar salty cheese?
Resident Evil: Extinction
Mila Jovovich and her magnificent pan-Slavic nose star in a nonsensical video game with a broken controller that destroys any possibility of the viewer winning. A great way to use up extra beer.
