Archive for August, 2005

Product Photography

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 | 09:03

To reduce clutter, we’ve been selling a few old items on eBay recently. To perk up the auction listings, I’ve engaged in some minor product photography. Here are some of Grace’s old shoes:

Links from that page go to all the other auctions.
I think my pictures are a lot better than those found on [...]

Bernstein’s America at Blossom

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 | 08:33

This past Saturday, we went to Blossom again, using our last two upgrades where we traded in lawn tickets for pavillion seats. Blossom was relatively empty that evening: it had been raining all day, though the sun had come out a couple of hours before nightfall. At the beginning of the concert, the [...]

Fig and Lemon Chicken

Monday, August 29th, 2005 | 20:35

This is derived from AllRecipes.com’s Fig and Lemon Chicken, which used dried figs and chicken thighs, so we have to do things with the greater amount of liquid from fresh figs.
Ingredients:

1 lemon, juiced
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup water
6 figs, trimmed and quartered
1 lemon, sliced
2 chicken breasts, about 1.5 lbs
1 handful cillantro, chopped

Preheat [...]

Into the Wild

Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 | 18:50

We picked up Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild after seeing it in one of the Alaska bookstores, in the large “local interest” section. I had actually heard of the story before, around the time it happened. As Krakauer noted, it made national news for a little while, and he wrote an Outside magazine [...]

Nikon Lens Serial Numbers

Thursday, August 11th, 2005 | 10:15

Here’s a table of (apparently all) Nikon lens serial numbers. I found it when trying to identify old lenses to sell on EBay. I don’t know ho w complete it is, but it certainly includes a lot of the old AI and AIS types and accompanying pictures for many of the lenses. [...]

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 | 15:02

I read it a couple of weeks ago, shortly after finishing The Dark Tower. It was an interesting contrast, if only because both Potter and The Dark Tower are seven-book series that are long in the making. As noted, King didn’t really have a plan on how his books were going to turn [...]

Indians - Yankees Game 1

Thursday, August 4th, 2005 | 14:15

In New York, it’s relatively hard to pick up tickets for Yankee games. In Cleveland, I stopped by the team store at Jacobs Field the week before Tuesday’s game and got two behind home plate, albeit towards the back of the upper deck. Much easier, and the ballpark is only a leisurely 20-minute [...]

Stephen King’s Dark Tower

Thursday, August 4th, 2005 | 13:03

Unlike most Stephen King fans, my road to the Dark Tower only began a couple of months ago, when I packed The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three into our bags to go to Alaska: airplane reading. I had had all the books at home for months, but hadn’t gotten around to starting [...]

Google Maps Pedometer

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005 | 11:33

Here’s a neat Google Maps hack that lets you figure out the length of route, given a set of waypoints.
Finally, I know (about a year after when it may have mattered) that the route we always took walking back from Fairway along Broadway to turn at W. 77th Street is the optimal route, beating the [...]

Finally, bread that isn’t the density of drywall

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 | 06:52

I finally made bread that wasn’t dense. Previous attempts have tended to result in dense (though sufficiently tasty) bread because I screwed up something in either the kneading or by not allowing enough time for the dough to rise after forming. They weren’t hockey pucks, but had relatively small bubbles in the, um, [...]