… a work in progress

Finally ordered that Mac I’ve been drooling over since it came out, the 24″ iMac 2.8. Yay! Now I just need to figure out how to use Mac OS since the last Apple I owned was in 1988. It was a Mac Plus with a grayscale 9″ screen and 3.5″ floppy. I think I had a SCSI CMS 40 Meg hard drive and a SCSI laser printer. I loved HyperCard back then and I think I used Z Terminal for dialing out. Prior to the Mac Plus I had an Apple II+ with 64Kb, sound card and dual 5.25″ drives. After the II+ I had an Apple IIC. I can still run the Bard’s Tale series , Ultima IV & V, and Wizardry series on the IIC. Man those were some really good games. My favorite had no graphics, but it was the most fun, Telengard. It looks like there is a Telengard version ported for a PC, gonna have to check it out. Good times

UPDATE: Damn! I can’t figure out how to get in full screen DOS mode in Windows Vista to run Telengard. All the better I suppose, I’d probably have wasted several hours killing orcs and finding treasure if it did run.

Looks like it’s over for Toshiba and HD-DVV. I feel bad for anyone who invested in HD-DVD, as it looks like the medium is officially dead. Netflix, Blockbuster, Best Buy, Wal-Mart all went with Blu Ray and Toshiba is stopping production. Reminds me of Beta Video and Laser Discs of which I had both. To this day I still have all my Laser Discs (original Star Wars series and all) and the Pioneer LD player I purchased in college. My sister and brother-in-law got a Toshiba HD DVD player for Christmas, I guess it would now make a good standard DVD player with up-conversion This time I’m happy with my choice of Blu Ray Disc, now hurry up and release the Bourne series on BD DVD.

Engadget Article

PS. I want my iMac so bad, I’m waiting for an employee discount to go thru. If it doesn’t happen soon I’m going to get the iMac thru Motivano.com where I can get a small discount on the system, about $140 bucks and save bigger percentages on software and upgrades.

My recipe for a roasted tomato pasta, a light “sauceless” version. I make this all the time and it’s usually pretty consistent so I thought I’d write it up. It’s really really hard to mess this up, the most important is cooking the pasta perfectly and seasoning to taste. Taste throughout the process. Cooking the other items and bit longer or shorter doesn’t mess things up too much.The roasted tomatoes give it an intense flavor. I typically do not measure things when I cook, below are my estimates. This serves 2-4 people.

What you’ll need:

• 1/4 Pound Roasted Tomatoes In Olive Oil (I buy mine in the deli at Marczyk Fine Foods in Denver)
• 1 Ripe Tomato - Diced
• 4-5 Slices Of Good Bacon - Diced
• 1/2 Pound (about 1/2 a package) of good spaghetti. I personally like Sclafani or Barilla.
• 1/4 Cup Chicken Stock
• 2-3 Cloves of Garlic - Fine Chopped
• Italian Parsley - Fine Chopped
• Red Pepper Flakes - Pinch
• Sea Salt - To Taste
• Black Pepper - To Taste
• Olive Oil
• Optional: 1 Zucchini Julienne or some Asparagus. 1/2 Freshly Squeezed Lemon, Freshly Grated Parmigiano Reggiano
• **All of the above are estimates, more tomato, roasted tomato or bacon won’t hurt it, it’ll just be more hearty**

1. Prep all of the veggies beforehand, makes it easier.
2. Start cooking the pasta, remove and drain approx 1 minute before al dente
3. While the pasta is cooking on a med-hi heat cook up that bacon. Remove from heat right when it starts to get crispy. Paper towel dry.
4. About 3 minutes before the pasta is ready heat up a saute pan on medium to medium-hi heat. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and some red pepper flakes. A good pinch will do, add more if you like things spicy. Cook that red pepper flakes for about 30 seconds to release the flavor.
5. Add the garlic and cook for 15-30 seconds making sure not to burn it.
6. Add the diced ripe tomato. You can now also add the optional julienne zucchini or asparagus. Cook for about 1 minute on medium hi heat.
7. Add the roasted tomatoes. At time I also add the salt and pepper.
8. When the pasta is almost al dente, add the drained pasta to the saute pan and stir.
9. Mix well and add the chicken stock and season again with salt to taste.
10. Add the Italian parsley and diced bacon at the end. Optional lemon juice can be added.
11. Toss everything on a high heat for about 1 minute and serve.
12. Grated Parmigiano Reggiano can be added at the end.

NOTES: For a vegetarian version the bacon can be omitted and the chicken stock can be substituted with pasta water. Multigrain spaghetti never seems to work, I don’t recommend. It always seems to have a weird “grainyness” to dishes. Penne pasta works with this as well. An anchovy or two can be added at step 5 to give the dish an even more intense flavor.

Today Apple announced the release of the 32GB iPod Touch for $499. Better… but still not enough for me. I’ll wait till the next release.

Apple also announced the 16GB iPhone for $499. Great, but I’ll wait for the 3G/HSDPA model that is rumored to be released later this year.

I’ve been recently pricing out a new iMac 24″ with either the 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo or the 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme. I was checking out the Benchmark tests here and it seems the 2.8GHz version is worth the few hundred bucks for 16% overall performance increase.

I’ve been without broadband at home for a while now, about a year and a half. For a little bit of time I was allowed to jump onto the buildings T-1 line, but that was shared between two buildings and was really slow actually. It was as bad as dial-up at times, sometimes I couldn’t renew my IP address. Then the building owners cut me off, so I went shopping around for internet service. Cable modem is not available here because there is no cable service on this block, it’s the warehouse district outside of downtown. Across the street at my work we had been using a point-to-point wireless high power network that sent a signal about a mile or more to a wireless tower. At work when it was foggy, rain or snow we would not have any internet access. Then our next door neighbors had cable put in, the first customer on the block to have cable installed. 2 years ago the cable company wanted thousands to run cable to our block and the phone company only offered a T1 line. So we dumped our wireless service and got cable, so far so good. Fast and reliable service for our business. Now moving on to my loft… across the street. This side of the street has no cable and up until recently had no DSL service. For the past few months I’ve been using 3G or HSDPA service from AT&T wireless. AT&T recently launched 3G service and Denver and it has been fairly fast considering. So this now brings us to today, I have broadband internet service via QWEST DSL and it’s very fast for DSL service. I’m just happy to have something faster than GPRS/EDGE/3G.

Just did a network speed test, getting about 5.4mbps down and 640k up.

Recently I’ve been watching a lot of movies. Some recent one’s I’ve seen both at home and in the theater.

Paprika - Trying to get through this one, hard to work and watch at the same time since it’s in Japanese and in English subtitles. From what I’ve seen, it looks interesting but the sound seems amazing. It’s a movie from Sony, so of course it’s on Blu-Ray. I’m going to have to save it another day.

2 Days In Paris - I watched this last night and thought it was very funny. Written, Directed by Julie Delpy who also stared in the movie and even composed the musical score, this is a twisted romantic comedy of a couples trip to Paris.

Training Day - Saw this on Blu-Ray, seen it before a few times. Fun to watch once in a while, it’s so intense

The Lives Of Others - Absolutely loved this movie, go out and rent it or add it to your Netflix. It’s even on Blu-Ray! It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, so go see it.

There Will Be Blood - Crazy movie, left the theater unsure of what I had just seen. I’d have to say I liked it?! A few things I do have to say is that the music was great, the first few minutes were strangely intense and Daniel Day Lewis is a phenomenal actor. The pastor dude in the movie you may remember from Little Miss Sunshine.

I was just watching Late Night With Conan O’Brien and one of his guests was motocross/baja/rally car dude Travis Pastrana. They showed a clip of him jumping out of a plane without a parachute. Here is the clip:

I never thought that one of my most popular photos on flickr would be my Travelocity Gnome on a British Airways flight to Milan via London Heathrow. In 2005 I took this little guy with me all over Milan and Venice. I received weird looks from people, some laughs from people who have seen Amelie or Travelocity commercials. I heard that kidnapping gnomes and taking pictures of them in foreign places was going on way before I saw it in Amelie.

I just found out that Canon has released the Rebel XSi aka EOS 450D. It seems like a big improvement over the Rebel XTi and a really big improvement over my Rebel XT. Drool… I want one. Here are some of the new highlights:

• 12.2 megapixel APS-C CMOS (1.6x focal conversion)
  • I don’t think I really need12.2MP but from the previews from DPReview.com it sounds like many improvements were made to the sensor.
• 3-inch live view LCD (up from the XTi’s non-live-view 2.5-inch)
  • Sounds interesting, kinda like a point a shoot. Perfect for when I have to ask someone else take a picture. And a 3″ LCD is so luxurious compared to the 1.8″ screen on my XT.
• DIGIC III image processor
• 9-point AF, 3.5fps shot rate (up to 45 images in JPEG, 6 in RAW)
• SD / SDHC media
  • hmmm this is got to be a new change. I guess I’ll have to get rid of my CF cards.
• ISO setting displays in viewfinder and ISO button
  • Perfect improvement for the on-the-fly ISO changes.

DPReview.com has a brief “hands on” with the new Rebel XSi/EOS 450D Here

Canon Rebel XSi Press Release

Canon Rebel XSi Product Page

Jamie Oliver has a new TV show in the US called Jamie At Home on the Food Network. I’ve already purchased this show from Amazon UK and am waiting for its arrival. The show coincides with his new book “Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life“

Link To Jamie At Home Video Clip on Telegraph.co.uk

Link To The Whole Article on Telegraph.co.uk

Upcoming Episodes On The Food Network:

Peppers & Chilies AIR TIMES:

Mushrooms AIR TIMES: