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Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
Ellen's article about our bathroom renovation(s) is out, in today's Star-Ledger. With nice pictures of the rooms, and a lovely picture of Ellen and Sylvia.
posted evening of September 10th, 2008: Respond
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So some people at my company are using Lucene as part of a document retrieval system they're building -- I have interacted with them some and had formed the impression that it was sort of a database product, vaguely like MySql but with more fully featured searching. But now I'm learning a little more about it and am very impressed -- it makes searching totally independent of data storage. This seems like a fantastic idea, I'm really looking forward to learning more about it.
posted evening of September 10th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, August 15th, 2008
 Sorry about the lack of updates recently... someday soon I will start thinking about posting blog entries! I am loving Ricardo Reis, I think I will finish it this weekend, not sure what I will read next.
I am nearly done fixing READIN to be compatible with HostMonster, still just a couple of things to do -- like I can't post "What's of Interest" items on the sidebar, or update the blogroll, at least not consistently.* Timeline for finishing this is Tuesday, when I will have some free time and Internet access.
We are going away for a long weekend, to a place without Internet or even much of a cellular network -- and yet it is nearby! in northern Bucks County, PA -- and spend a few days relaxing. See you Tuesday!
 * If I could do these things, I would have: Added A History of New York to the blogroll, under "Literati"; updated Matthew Yglesias' link to point to his new site; posted an "of Interest" item that today is the anniversary of the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert. Without arena rock, we would not have Kansas, Styx, REO Speedwagon! Also, I would add a link under "Comix" to Bad Gods, which I see is publishing again.
↻...done
posted morning of August 15th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
OK, the new machinery is now active. READIN is now hosted by HostMonster. Comments don't seem to work yet nor does the RSS feed; these too will come.
 OK, comments are working...
posted evening of August 13th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
 Outage this weekend can be laid at the door of my ISP. Now I'm thinking strongly about moving the site out of my house, onto Dreamhost or some such. Recommendations welcomed -- the things I need are MySql, PHP, and ssh access.
 (Service is still kind of slow and/or occasionally nonexistent. A new ISP is in the offing, a new hosting service also: changing ISP's means no more fixed IP address for my house. But it ultimately makes way more sense to use a remote hosting service anyway.)
posted morning of August 12th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, August second, 2008
Ellen and I are clearing out dead stuff and overly grown stuff from the fern and forsythia garden on the side of the house, about the state of which the bitchy neighbor has been complaining and which, if the truth be told, is getting a little long in the tooth. Me: Did you see that vine with the pretty blue flowers? I hadn't noticed that before. Ellen: No... Me: It was right over here -- (looks around) Huh, now I don't see it. (A little later, looking under a fern and seeing a bit of plant with a flower attached) See, like this! I could have sworn there were a lot of them over here! Ellen: Oh yeah, those are weeds. I usually pull them, they're pretty invasive.
 (And this afternoon, the neighbor thanked us and apologized for complaining about it. Nice! Back on good terms.)
posted morning of August second, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, July 13th, 2008
That's what Robyn Hitchcock's grandma used to say, or so he told us this evening -- he said nobody ever turned into his grandma, so he dedicated "I'm Only You" to her. This was the second song, after "The Museum of Sex" -- I was happy to hear him open with this song after I had opened my mix tape with it. "I'm Only You" was followed by a long digression on digestion, and whether and under what circumstances we would feel comfortable discussing our digestions, leading into "a digestion song", viz. "The Cheese Alarm", which made Ellen (and me) laugh out loud with its urgency. "Please! Somebody ring the cheese alarm!" Robyn conducted a dialogue with the audience after, asking if WALL-E is any good -- "Yeah!" -- "That's good to know... Can you all hear this?" -- "Yeah!" -- "That's good to know -- it's reassuring to think this is all not just going on in here..." and played, with much dancing during the solos, "I Got the Hots for You" and "Glass Hotel". "Thank you --" and as he started playing "Idonia", "This is about someone who left a hole the shape of themselves in somebody else's life." As he was retuning to play his next song, people in the audience were calling out requests, and he said with just enough of an edge to get them to stop, "You know there's a thin line between a devoted admirer and a creep... To be a slave to love -- what a thing!" and sang "The Idea of You". A long digression about the Victorians -- "It's possible that the Victorians were frightened by sex... Victorians wrote mostly in longhand, no e-mail. But biologically they were much the same as us..." reflecting on the possibilities of interbreeding between modern humans and Victorians, getting particularly interesting if the Victorians in question are your own ancestors; "Screw your great-grandparents! Whole empires have been founded on worse. But this song is not really about that:" and launched into the hilarious "Victorian Squid". "Thank you -- it's all true."
The next song, "Creeped Out", went out to "a friend of mine -- it's her birthday on Monday. Happy birthday, friend!" and while he tuned up for the next song, he said: "There's something insanely simple about watching somebody perform songs he's written -- it's like somebody sending you YouTube videos of cats..." and dedicated the song, which was "I Feel Beautiful", to "Michèle and our cat". Ellen thought this was a really smart lyric, and I agree. "How many people find the idea of eternity relaxing?" Not many -- mostly we want finitude. Robyn played "Oceanside", which was maybe the only song of the evening that really had me wishing for a band behind him. "This isn't exactly about Arthur Lee -- it's just around him..." and sings "The Wreck of the Arthur Lee", which I guess I had not realized was about a person. "It's a funny thing about eulogies -- essentially it's sad -- ... what really makes people cry at a funeral is the jokes," by way of explaining why he had written "Underground Sun" so upbeat -- it's about a friend who died, who was "definitely not a dismal person." "When people are dead they don't have an age." "I'll leave you with a blast of folk-rock sound," Robyn tells us as he dons his harmonica, and plays "Only the Stones Remain" with a downright amazing harmonica part. But we clapped and clapped, and he came back out to perform a long encore -- wearing his purple shirt with iguanas rather than his orange shirt with dingbats. "You've Got Heaven"* was the first song in the encore, and Ellen's favorite song of the evening. Then a song I don't know (and can't find at The Asking Tree), with the chorus "I'm gonna see you in the afterlife." And finally, after a long digression about cones (during which he wished us all "an incredibly long rest of your lives"), Olé Tarantula. Nice -- a totally satisfying evening. The level of energy he projects from the stage just takes my breath away.
*Wow! "Heaven" is from the early eighties -- somehow I had got fixed in my head that it was from a recent record. I think it sounds much more like late-nineties Hitchcock than do any of the other songs on "Gotta Let This Hen Out".
posted morning of July 13th, 2008: 7 responses
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Monday, June 9th, 2008
So I left work early today, to watch Sylvia auditioning for next year's Overture Strings, and to file away the folders of music I've had in the back of my car since YOEC's spring concert a few weeks ago. Arrived at South Orange Middle School, only to find the school and the rest of town dark -- a fire at a transformer station in West Orange shut down several towns around here. Well Ellen, Sylvia and I escaped the heat by driving over to Springfield, which still had power and by lucky coincidence, has the only public library around here that's open well into the evening. We chilled out, I read the first chapter of Nixonland and confirmed that I want to read the rest of it. Got back home just as the power came on. So the site was down for a while this afternoon but it looks like no data was lost. And here we are.
posted evening of June 9th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, June 6th, 2008
Wilted spinach salad is one of my old favorites. Tonight, I figured out how to make it without bacon, since Ellen and I are trying to limit slightly, how much fat we are eating. The figs have a similar flavor profile -- sweet and smoky. The mushrooms give a meaty texture. Vegetarian Spinach Salad
Serves 2
- about ½ lb. baby spinach leaves, picked, washed, and dried
- a bunch of scallions, washed and chopped
- 5 dried figs, chopped small
(fresh figs would probably be good too)
- 6 mushroom caps, cut into quarters
- olive oil
- sherry vinegar*
- balsamic vinegar
- grated pecorino romano
Combine spinach, scallions and figs in a salad bowl.
Heat oil in a heavy skillet; when hot, add mushroom caps. Season with salt and pepper and saute a minute or two.
Pour vinegar into pan -- about one part sherry vinegar to two parts balsamic to six parts oil. Quickly remove from heat and pour over salad. Toss salad up into skillet so that it gets warm and wilted.
Top with grated cheese.
This makes a very nice, light dinner served with bread and cheese and red wine.
*(I had some sherry vinegar on hand from when I was making Redfox's Onion Jam recipe -- so I thought I'd use it. It seemed to give a very nice flavor in this dressing, though I can't think of any other salad where it would really be appropriate. It's not an ingredient I'm really familiar with.)
posted evening of June 6th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
Ellen made this salad for dinner last night, and it was very tasty. She remembered it from a Greek restaurant she ate at when she and Sylvia were in D.C.
Watermelon and mint salad
- Watermelon, cut into bite-size chunks
- Bucheron, cut into small pieces (the restaurant used feta cheese; Ellen used bucheron because it was on hand. I think the goat cheese was great.)
- Scallions, chopped thin
- Kalamata olives, pitted and cut in half
- Fresh mint leaves
Mix everything together in a bowl and serve. The juice from the melon will combine with the cheese to make a fabulous dressing.
posted morning of May 20th, 2008: Respond
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