Congratulations and be prosperous! We went to the Chinese New Year celebration and parade in Chinatown this weekend. The weather was blustery and we missed the Verizon float (damn!), but everyone was in good spirits and the confetti was flying. More pics here.
Author: dbeeby
How Can Brown Screw You?
I had to ship some boots back to New Hampshire this evening. I visited the local UPS Store in Park Slope and the gentlemen there helped me out. However, they charge a whopping $1.25 to tape closed a 6″ box. For the average 100m roll of 3M packing tape, that’s about $750. C’mon, Brown, give the tape away!
Two Technology Birds: Dead
I got a 2GB pqi memory stick to replace that awful cruzer. Not only is it clean and reliable, it works when plugged into my aluminum Apple keyboard. You can see from the adjacent photo that the USB drive is very small. I had to fashion an appropriate storage case from the plastic packaging (the supplied case is four times the size of the drive). Regardless, this pqi drive solves two recent technology problems nicely!
Sandisk Cruder
Do not buy a Sandisk Cruzer. First of all, I use a Mac, so the U3 “technology” was useless to me and even gummed up my system a bit. I was able to remove that firmware and get the USB drive working properly. That said, it was never terribly stable (it would disconnect intermittently when the computer woke up) and the power consumption of the bright blue internal LED made it unusable in some keyboard low-power hubs (like the mac alum keyboard, see rant below). The final straw came recently when it failed to be recognized on most of my computers. This drive has been so unreliable that I’m going back to my trusty old Kingston 256MB key. I’ll carry less around, but I know it’ll be there when I need it.
DIY Lunchmeat
This may be a dumb post for anyone who’s ever cooked before, but it’s amazing how simple, cheap, healthy, and tasty homemade lunchmeat is! M got a turkey breast at the co-op on Tuesday, which I roasted today with a bouquet of thyme and a slab of butter. After two hours baking and an hour resting, I sliced half of it for sandwiches (pictured here). It’s an easy week’s-worth of sandwich fixings for about 1/3 of the cost of those watery, nitrate-packed deli counter meats.
Applewood at Home
I invited David Shea, owner and chef of Applewood, to come in to our home and conduct a cooking lesson with M for her birthday. It was a great two-hour lesson. David was very laid back and taught M a lot of good tricks. We had striped bass on creamy polenta with orange/grapefruit supremes salad and jalepeno/onion relish. The ribeye was served with cruchy kale and onions with a beurre fondue. More photos.
A “New” Brompton
My pal Eddie went with me to check out a “too good to be true” deal on a used Brompton the other night. Everything checked out, so I’m the proud owner of a 1998 (?) folder. As far as I can tell it’s the “R3” model (a three-speed with a rack). The seat is awful, but I’ll probably upgrade to a Brooks soon. I’ve taken it on the subway a couple of times and ridden it across the Brooklyn Bridge. So far so good.
484 Networking Cleanup
I finally got around to clearing all the networking gear out from under my desk and moving it into the basement. Audrey even got back in the act as the network admin station! This is the setup: Verizon Westell modem, to a Draytek router/VOIP-controller, and a Linksys router (set up as a simple wireless access point). This article was really helpful getting the two-router setup working properly. Now if I can get all the kinks worked out with the VOIP service, I’ll be all set.
Q, The Fish
John F and I went out and got a pet fish today during lunch. We’d wanted to get one for a while, but with the holidays approaching, the end of 2007 was not the time. Our knowledge about domesticated fish was increased exponentially after just two minutes with the pet store’s kindly fish-man (an actual man, not some creepy half-man, half-fish hybrid). Did you know that a fish can live in a bag for two hours? Did you know that beta fish and goldfish are the only fishes that can live in a simple (unfiltered, unheated) fishbowl? Did you know that a fish costs $1.99?
Mac’s Aluminum Keyboard: not so great
File under: rant. I’m using Apple’s new slimline aluminum “chicklet” keyboard to post this message. I’ve had it for a while and I like it a lot. It has a USB hub that’s built into the underside at the edges, but the ports will only power devices that draw 100mA or less (a typical mouse). An iPod or a USB flash drive won’t work unless the keyboard is plugged into a new iMac (which I don’t own). The old keyboards’ USB hubs have all worked (for every iPod or thumb drive I’ve ever owned). This is pretty shoddy… Apple shouldn’t have let the new wired keyboard out the door with this limitation.