I got a clean throw off against a resisting brown belt during randori last night! The instructor was actually standing right there with his stopwatch and pointed it out. He further noted that the brown belt can throw me around for the rest of the randori and I’d probably still feel good about [...]
A few months ago, we picked up one of those Imperia Pasta Machine at Williams-Sonoma, as part of a gift certificate we had left over from the wedding. (As a sidenote, I find W-S as possibly the most overpriced kitchen supply store in the universe. I tend to like using Amazon for these [...]
Usefilm.com has a search engine to show user-submitted sample pictures from different camera/lens/film combinations. Here’s the link for the D70 and the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D combination.
Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have Sigma or Tamron lens in their Equipment Search dropdown list. I’m leaning towards the Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 APO as the light, cheap [...]
Jane Brody in the NYTimes last month had an article about the expiration date labelling on packaged food. The article has gone to the NYT Pay Archive Heaven, but is apparently syndicated to other publications.
Anyway, the gist of the various food dates is:
Packed on: when food is put into the packaging, and is [...]
Bizarrely, in the space of a week, I’ve lost a little bit of skin at each of the places I get my exercise, all in consectutive sessions. In the first instance, I was at the gym playing around with this heavy bag I found near the racquetball courts. I haven’t hit a bag [...]
I picked up a Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8D AF lens on EBay last week in preparation for our Alaska trip in the late spring (It’s an older one, #3 on Ken Rockwell’s review). This is my first “pro”-type lens: heavy with fine optics, expensive but not insanely so. With the 18-70mm D70 kit lens, [...]
I read Victor David Hanson’s Carnage and Culture last year, coincidentally soon after reading Creasy’s Victorian-era survey book Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World
The earlier book consisted of relatively brief descriptions of the various battles that Creasy believed shaped history, the pinnacle of history being (of course) the British Empire of the 19th Century. [...]
Cleveland.com has a gas price survey that looks like it’s frequently updated. Of course, it’s probably not worth driving out (much less finding) some of these places, but one can get a feel for the prevailing prices.
Actually, this morning, I got gas at a BP near the aikido dojo for $1.87/gallon, which is apparently [...]
Well, I got bombed last night with some 300 trackbacks advertising an online poker site. WordPress handles trackbacks processing differently from comments processing (even though they all wind up in the same database table), so this spam robot escaped the captcha. As I get notification of each comment/trackback posting, I basically woke up [...]