Memorial Day Tribute
My friend Dennys Bisogno is a great photographer and is now doing some video work as well. Here is a video he did for Memorial Day in River Falls, Wisconsin. Touching.
He shot this on his Canon 1D and edited in Final Cut. The clip of the elderly soldier walking down the path at 3:40 is just great.
Mazie's 2nd Soccer Season
Mazie is playing soccer again this year with the Cyclones in the Fuller Soccer Club. The whole team has improved a ton and there is some improvement to ball handling this year. Mazie is having a great time too.
Tyler figured out how to climb into this area of Mazie’s art table. He thought it was a lot of fun, until he couldn’t figure out how to get out.
Remodel Project Starts
This week we started the remodeling project on our house. I plan on taking photos of the process. It’s a decent sized project. We are lowering the floor in the basement, putting in two egress windows, installing a new furnace and air conditioning unit and adding a mud room to the back of the house. It’ll be just a little under four months. They start demolishing the floor in the basement this week.
Here is what it looks like now.
Hot Dashboards
It was really hot today. It seems that the thing to do today was to take a picture of your car dashboard to prove it! This is what I saw on Facebook just now.
It was really hot.
Congrats to Jim on First Marathon!
This weekend my friend Jim ran the Minneapolis Marathon. This was his first one and he looked great, even at the end!
Our remodel meant that a pretty sizable Azalea bush in our yard had to go. My Mom couldn’t stand to see it get discarded so she came over in 100 °F heat and we dug it up to go live at her house. She’s a true tree hugger!
Outdoor Burner
Here is a scenario. You are doing a brisket on your Big Green Egg. It’s a weekend, and the meat will be smoking on the grill pretty much all day (and possibly all night). You aren’t going to serve just any barbecue sauce with it, you make your own. This requires you to simmer the sauce for hours. The longer the better. The brisket, and you, are outside having a nice day probably with a good beer. Where is your sauce? Inside on the stove? Total buzzkill. This is where you need an outdoor burner.
When I got my Double Big Green Egg table I knew I wanted to do a full meal outside, from prep all the way to eating. While I love my grills, there are some things that you need a burner for. Last year I picked up one of these Max Burton Pro Chef 1800 units from Kitchen Window and it’s worked out great.
Why get this unit?
- This is a commercial unit and it is built well. I feel comfortable with moving it in and out of storage and not needing to be overly gentle with it. (Note, it is only outside when in use. Otherwise it’s stored inside.)
- The unit is very easy to clean. The cook surface is a flat glass plate that just wipes down. The touch sensitive control surface is easily wiped down as well. When grilling my hands get dirty and this unit gets dirty.
- I wanted a burner I could dial into a temperature, and this one can do that. If simmering a sauce I want to just punch in a temp and not think about it. Easy.
I’ve been really happy with it for everything from cooking pancakes for a brunch on the grill to simmering sauces or boiling some water for carrots. The only job I found it challenged by was boiling a huge kettle of water to cook corn in. It just didn’t have enough power to deal with 3 gallons of water. But really, the corn should be grilled anyway.
Inside Job
I finally got a chance to watch Inside Job tonight. Wow. Very good documentary on the financial collapse. For those that have read a bit about the issue the recap of CDO’s and Swaps will be redundant, but it’s not much. The skewering of the ratings agencies and the economic profession is pointed.
Wonder if Eddie Vedder’s next album will be “Recorder Songs”. Maybe “Kazoo Songs” instead.
My daughter is alternating between an absolute angel and a demon with sharpened horns and fangs. Trick is figuring out which, when.
Twins Fan Tyler
Tyler did his best to try and help our last place team. Doesn’t seem to have had much effect yet.
Memorial Day Grilling
Memorial Day is required grilling in my book. I did the entire meal outside. Simple burgers, asparagus, carrots and grilled romaine hearts. Delicious.
Mazie In Tree
Mazie’s kindergarten class had a picnic at the Rose Garden by Lake Harriet. She decided to do a little tree climbing while we were there.
We just hired Quartersawn as the general contractor to do a house project. Upon signing the agreement every friend of mine feels compelled to share every horror story they’ve ever heard about how horrible general contractors and home remodeling projects can be. Thanks! 😀
Foo Fighters in Council Bluffs
It has been a day since the Foo Fighters show and my ears are still ringing. This had to be one of the loudest shows I’ve been to, and it was great.
Let me start with the bad news. Kent and I had talked about going to this show specifically because Motörhead was opening for the Foo Fighters. Yeah, we wanted to see the Foo Fighters but we also really wanted to see Lemmy and the gang. Kent put it all together and added a couple of other guys to our gang to head down to the show. Sadly, when we got to the Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs there was a sign on the door saying that due to travel problems Motörhead would not be performing. Ugh!
The silver lining though was the 2nd line that said the Foo Fighters would play for 2.5 hours! When Grohl was on stage he said
We’ve got 16 years and a hundred ******* songs. How many of those do you think we can play tonight?
They played all the best of them! I grabbed a couple of video snapshots from the show to give a sense of what it was like. Did I mention it was loud?
I had seen the Foo Fighters play on the Skin & Bones tour. That was nothing like this one. This was a hard, I might even say metal, show. Grohl and the Foos put on an amazing show.
The stage set was pretty cool. They had these 6 “video orbs” on cables that moved around and showed a variety of effects. The stage itself had video projected from underneath on the floor which I still can’t figure out how they did.
There was also a small stage on a platform that lifted about 15 feet in the air toward the back of the main floor. Grohl made a few trips out there and did the solo acoustic songs in the encore on that stage.
I just love this picture that makes the stage look like it’s exploding in light.
If you dig the Foo Fighters, go check out this tour.
Asking For Too Much
Softball season has arrived again and the B-Squad is back out trying to win a game. My softball team calls Dusty’s in Northeast home, and after every game (and sometimes before) you will find us at Dusty’s enjoying a Grain Belt Premium.
Part of our ritual is the jukebox and Dusty’s has now upgraded their jukebox to a fancy new version that has a touch screen display as well as a connection to the Internet to do various things. I would assume it gets new music that way. It also can get messages about what to play from the Internet and there is a handy little iPhone app that you can install for free to control the jukebox. I was eager to give this a try.
I downloaded myTouchTunes to do some remote control of the Dusty’s jukebox. I expected to just be able to install it, connect to the jukebox through some lookup and somehow pick songs. However, it seemed I had to create an account with myTouchTunes to do that. Annoying, but okay I thought. I’ll make an account and I’m guessing you can save some preferences or something for me (although, that could just be done on my phone). So I tapped the Register button to make an account and got this screen.
It was one thing to have to create an account, but why exactly does anyone need to know my age and gender to pick a song on a jukebox? Why is my zip necessary to queue up Black Sabbath’s Ironman. It is not! I closed the application and deleted it. I’ll stick to putting plain old dollar bills in and picking songs.
Seriously, what in the world is myTouchTunes doing here? I think asking for all that information is despicable on its own, but what in the world good is it doing them? If they want popular songs by area, they don’t need my zip. They know where the jukebox is. Why do they care if I’m a guy or gal? Of what possible utility is that to them?
I’ll pass.
Why I run my own websites
Marco Arment had a blog post today on the recent changes to Twitters API. He highlights that “Twitter is not Ours”.
Twitter can do whatever they want.
It’s the simple, brutal truth. Twitter must do what’s best for Twitter. They owe us nothing.
It’s not a public good. It’s not a right. It’s a private, entirely centralized service with no meaningful competition and a massive network-effect barrier to competitive entry. Twitter has all of the power in its relationship with users and developers.
You can replace Twitter in that reference with nearly any other social network or hosted blogging platform on the Internet.
This is why I run my own websites, on servers I pay for and administer, using open source software.