Dear winter,
Once again you cant make up your mind; 3″ of snow last night, and now they are calling for 45-50F by the weekend.
I can’t take the on-again-off-again-general-hospital relationship. It’s over. Deal with it.
Author: Matt (Page 31 of 41)
Holy crap thats a big wardrobe! Thank you Ikea for the new clean space in the basement.
It took me 4 hours last night to assemble this monster, and a couple hours tonight to rearrange stuff in the basement to get this beast to its new home.
What do you think??
After
Sunday I was feeling like I needed to accomplish something constructive around the house, so I convinced Christa we should goto Ikea. Really it was the mere mention of Ikea and she said yes, but in my mind I was the one who did the convincing… 😉
We had a few items picked out that we were looking at, and most involved storage in one way or another. After cruising the store in record time, we ended up with 2 major purchases: a storage hutch & a 3 door wardrobe.
Last night I assembled the hutch destined for the upstairs “reading room”. We needed something fairly low since the ceiling slopes down, and something within a certain measurement to fit in the existing space layout. This model fit our requirements perfectly. It’s got a couple of storage drawers as well as some big shelves inside the main doors. I think the idea is to store some of the nice drinkware we have like wine glasses, martini glasses, champagne flutes (no we aren’t alcoholics…), and our nicer china set & cutlery we anticipate getting soon to help alleviate some space issues we are having in the kitchen.
I think that’s a perfect addition to the room; makes the area seem more whole instead of just being empty space where we had Bailey’s litter boxes.
Up next: IKEA Trip Part 2: Holy crap thats a big wardrobe!
I know there are people out there that read our posts regularly. I’ve tried to tell people about something only to find so and so already knew about such and such by reading the this or that here and there, you follow?
So anyway, we know you’re reading us. Prove it and leave some comments.
There’s no pressure, it’s only the rest of the internet reading…
This morning the google maps site added real-time traffic data to their maps. Until now, this was something that was only available using the mobile client (ie. cell phones). I had used it a few times when we were stuck in traffic jams around town just to see what the skinny was up ahead and thought it was awesome. Unfortunately my cell phone makes the experience clunky and a general pain to use.
Google Maps will add a layer that colors the roads in green, yellow, red, or gray. The colors represent how fast the traffic is moving:
* Green: more than 50 miles per hour
* Yellow: 25 – 50 miles per hour
* Red: less than 25 miles per hour
* Gray: no data available
Perfect timing too, because now I can check my route home for lunch to maximize my hour away from work… 😉
Saturday was my birthday, and as the saying goes I’m another day older and deeper in debt. That didn’t stop me from taking 27 out and bringing 28 in with a bang Friday night…
The evening began with some pre-drinking over at the Brooklyn lofts by old Tiger Stadium. By 11:30 or so we finally made it to Esko (Detroit’s newest nightclub downtown) for a Paxahau show featuring Marc Houle. We had been there once before about 3 weeks ago, and I made the comment that if it could last a year in it’s location it would probably find itself in the new hipster center of the city due to it’s close proximity (across the street) from the old Book-Cadillac Hotel which is being gutted & renovated to make room for mullion dollar condos. On our way in we caught the building next door*** to the Book-Cadillac coming down (top-left in pictures below). Both buildings have been empty for years, and while the one with the most Detroit cultural significance will stay, it’s still sad to see another Detroit skyscraper come down.
We stayed at Esko until about 1:30 Saturday morning when Marc Houle finished, headed back to Jane’s loft to regroup, and then continued on to the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID) for funk night. The place was unbelievably packed. We tried snapping some crowd shots but the lighting wasn’t very good so it’s hard to really show how busy the place was. I did some adjusting to one picture (bottom-right in pictures below) and it turned out pretty cool. We endured the crowd and a few minutes of technical issues (ie. blown circuits no one could find) and stayed at the CAID for a few more hours dancing to the funk, before heading back to Ferndale around 6am.
It was a really nice evening full of friends, dancing, and drinks. And while I may be 28 now, I’m happy to feel 22 while I still can.
***Update: The building next door to the Book-Cadillac was the People’s Outfitting Company building built in 1916 and it is being demolished to make way for the new Book-Cadillac parking deck. More history & photos can be found at the detroitblog.
Good thing I run this on all of my machines as well. See Christa, marrying a geek has it’s benefits… 😉
SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the volunteers’ home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has comeout of this massive project… that is until today! One of the volunteers was able to track down his wife’s stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, ‘I always knew that a geek would make a great husband.’
Full story here.
I had to deal with an issue yesterday of how to get a very computer illiterate person in my workplace setup to be able to FTP files to another company who is doing work for us. While I would not normally recommend anyone to use the built-in FTP functionality of Internet Explorer, at the time this seemed like the simplest solution; create shortcut/bookmark, click on it & BAM! copy/paste your files.
At least, thats how it worked in IE6…
After about 20 minutes of toying around, I realized IE7 adds a step to this process – it no longer automagically changes from an IE window to a file explorer window (think “My Computer”) when using FTP. Crap!
So if you do need to use FTP with IE7, these steps will get you back on track:
- Open IE7
- Enter your FTP user name, password, and site in the address bar using the following pattern:
ftp://: @ - IE will display a directory listing of the FTP site.
- Click the Page menu (it’s on the right hand side under the search bar)
- Select Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer.
- Windows explorer opens.
Note: Windows may or may not remember the login information provided in step 2 – my testing was not consistent. Enter your user name and password if you are prompted with the login box again.
I’d really like to punch the Microsoft developer that came up with this “security feature”.
Over the past 2 weeks or so since the official long awaited (read: massively delayed) launch of Microsoft’s new flagship OS, Windows Vista, I’ve noticed an influx of questions at work regarding the “should I upgrade” question.
To save time & effort here is the short answer: don’t do it.
The only “wow” that “starts now” (their new slogan, the wow starts now is horrible by the way) is the amount of resources this beast takes do do the same thing XP does perfectly well; and if you don’t have a beefy video card you’re screwed. Vista delivers no really revolutionary new features as an incentive for upgrade. And to top it off, the software asks you CONSTANTLY “are you sure you want to do that”.
The bottom line is that I’ve had several friends try Vista, and they all went back to Windows XP after an hour or 2. Don’t waste your time or money yet.
Apple picked up on Vista’s “new & improved” security features in this ad. Love it!
I made C an awesome belated Vday dinner last night. If anyone is interested here’s how i did it.
2 top sirloin steaks (~1lb)
2 Tbsp olive oil
salt
pepper
celery salt
parsley
1/4c red wine***
1 large shallot
1 Tbsp butter
Heat a cast iron pan on medium high & add 2 turns of the pan of olive oil (~2 Tbsp). Oil should be smoking. Salt, pepper the steaks to taste both sides, sprinkle a dab of celery salt & top with parsley. Cook 7 minutes to side (5 would be medium rare). Remove from pan & tent the steaks w/ foil. Add shallots and brown for 2 minutes. Add 1 Tbsp butter & 1/4c wine, scrape all the steak goodness off the bottom of the pan, & cook the wine down about 1/2. Pour wine sauce of steak & serve w/ steamed broccoli.
***Note: A Cabernet would be a good choice of wine to use. I used a Shiraz and it turned out just a little fruitier than I would have liked.