… a work in progress

I’m in San Diego right now for my dad’s birthday. I flew in last night to surprise him, and boy was he surprised. Today was spent troubleshooting computer problems for m parents. A PC that boots into the BSOD and sometimes doesn’t power up. CMOS was weird, a drive was making a noise and power supply sometimes didn’t run. Could be so many problems. Worked on another PC running Windows 98 with no CD burner. The Windows 98 PC which was running a Pentium II and a 4 GB drive was running pretty fast for that they needed it for. I stole the CD burner from the BSOD PC which is a newer P4 and installed it on the Win98 PC. Downloaded a free CD burner software and showed them how to backup some simple stuff. They had a brand new PC to replace the Win98 system and we set that up, with a nice new 20″ widescreen monitor. Tomorrow I need to transfer all the data from the two PCs to the brand new system, should go well.

Tonight we had Sushi Ota, so good! Here are some bad pics from my phone. Towards the end of the night I stopped taking photos. These are in the reverse order that I ate them.

Crab Head Soup

Tempura – Na No Hana, Shitake, Ebi

Crab Duh!

Sashimi – Shima Aji, Hobo, Japanese Tai, Japanese Blue Fin Toro

Crab wrapped in Cucumber, Tuna Meatballs. Both in Miso Sauce

I received my 24″ 2.8GHz iMac on Friday and I’m loving it The monitor housing is so huge I had to rearrange my furniture so I can see the TV while on the computer. Still getting used to using Mac OS, everything seems to make sense.  I have to figure out all the keyboard shortcuts for a Mac, I hate using the mouse. It’s really nice how things just work on a Mac, so far no problems. Rumor has it tomorrow Apple will release an updated Mac Book Pro.

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.