What a busy day

Today was a fairly busy day. First was trying to combine a chocolate torte recipe with a chocolate mousse recipe. That definitely was a deadly combination. I'm not sure what you're supposed to expect when you combine super-rich with super-rich, but I think people have definitely learned that I make super-rich desserts.

Then there was the (un)natural disaster of dropping the bowl with the not-quite-finished mousse. If you can imagine a large sploosh that starts at the base of the refrigerator (where I dropped the bowl) and continues to spatter throughout the kitchen, in the direction of the sink, I think you get the idea of the extent of the disaster. The fortunate thing was that only half the mousse escaped the bowl, so there was still more than enough to combine with the cake.

Other highlights of the day included an hour at the beach and spending most of the rest of the day at Erica's so that the Kung-Fu gang could shower us with baby stuff. Overall this shower part was pretty fun as there was a lot of good banter about different books (the theme of the party), when the baby will start Kung-Fu, and croshitting. For the last, we got that captured on videotape as others gladly made witty remarks while the speaker of the last word backtracked very quickly about his slip of the tongue. As usual, there was much talk, much food, movies, beach, and at the end of the day, exhaustion. This state did not escape Erica's dog as he definitely likes his resting spot.

BBQ Season

It's definitely starting to be BBQ season. Too bad I won't have a whole lot of time to enjoy it since a lot of other things will be grabbing my attention. Too many things to do in the short term. Too little time.

Go Ho

Sometimes, it's easier to catch a disc (frisbee for all you non-ultimate types) when you're laying out. That's the technical term for doing a forward dive onto the (hopefully) grass such that your body becomes parallel with the ground. This is an example of why. Let this be a lesson to you recreational ultimate players. The feeling you get when you do lay out and catch a disc for the first time is amazing. It only takes a hellalot of energy to throw your body around and land hitting the ground with the whole of your body.

Swat 'em and Squash 'em

Looks like flickr has fixed a bit of its troubles after tonight's one hour maintenance window. The picture metadata definitely looks like its propagating well to all parts of the flickr web app now.

Bugs are a-flyin'

I just started using flickr this month. Now that someone was nice enough to give me a pro account (thanks mj), I'm starting to upload my pictures to flickr. I will say that flickr seems great when it works, which is more than 90% of the time. But I'm probably using it harder than it was designed to be used right now. The flickr uploadr breaks every once in a while. Their organizr applet doesn't play nicely with groups all of the time. There are data transactional issues happening in the back end. Sometimes I see my updates, sometimes I don't, but eventually everything gets updated to what flickr thinks I want.

All that said, flickr is still a very nice interface for sharing photos on the web. And that's saying something because interface design isn't as easy as it looks.

The Gym Shoe

Here's my nephew. My brother just happened to name him James, which is okay for pretty much 99% of the last names in the world. Unfortunately for him, his last name rhymes with nephew. No wonder he's wearing that facial expression.

Sunrise

Getting up early is a pain most of the time. You're groggy when you get to work, there's no one else to talk to, and if you do try to talk to someone else, they probably just got up even though you've been up for hours already. Getting up early does have some advantages, however, and I think this is one of them.

What is a Blog?

I'm not quite sure what a blog is. I just figure a blog can serve the purpose of a public diary. I'm just using this as random thoughts for random people. I hope these random musings are entertaining to someone.

Death to Retail

What does it take to find a MiniDV tape at a retail store? You'd think Good Guys and Ritz Camera should have plenty of stock. All I wanted was one tape at a reasonable price. But no, Good Guys had zero stock of anything MiniDV, and Ritz Camera had exactly two packages, one single and a two-pack for about twice the going rate at any other regular store. I wonder how Ritz Camera stays in business, since from what I saw, the camcorder that Heather just bought me is 50% more expensive there. Ouch.

A New Toy

I have a decent idea how to work a digital camera. I usually don't do any post-processing because I'm usually too lazy to do that stuff. But now I have a new toy to eat up disk space even faster. I have now joined the ranks of digicam owners. I can't say that I can do anything with it yet since I don't even have a tape. A tape? What are those ancient things still existing in this age of optical disks and flash memory? Apparently a whole lot. I guess I'll have to find a space to host video logs pretty soon.