Ploafmaster General

Here's a treat for the day, and make sure you read it right before you grab a bite to eat.

I guess that technically counts as a sarcastic warning :-)

This morning I received my download code for Radiohead's latest, In Rainbows.

I've been rockin' out to the new joint since about 7:59 here in the office, and I really enjoy it. I agree with the band when they indicated it was pretty spare, but I can't say I agree with the BBC's Ian Youngs who feels like Radiohead is stuck in a musical rut. While I wouldn't call this album particularly groundbreaking, I don't believe this is too much like any of Radiohead's prior efforts.

So far, some of my favorite tracks include "Bodysnatchers," "Weird Fish/Arpeggi," and "All I Need." I bought the download for 1 GBP, but I do want the discbox (Christmas present, Valerie?) so I can have that second disc, the artwork, and the ability to rip at a higher quality than 160 kbps (yeah, I'm irrationally picky).

Good job, blokes. I think this is a good day for Radiohead fans around the globe.

I watch too much television. I admit it.

Now that I've got THAT out of the way...

I think I finally saw the first "reality competition" show that I enjoy - Food Network's The Next Iron Chef. I believe it airs on Sunday evenings, but I recorded it while I was out of town and finally got to watch it this evening. I know, I know...I'm biased. I love cooking, and I love the Food Network, and I watch pretty much any show with Alton Brown. But there are structural reasons why I feel this competition program fares better than the rest.

The first standout is the collection of contestants. It's rare to see so close a correlation between the entrants and their goal. Every competitor on this show is a real chef - most of whom own and operate at least one high-end restaurant. These are not simply athletic people trying to survive on a deserted island. These are not people who are simply pretty enough to be on camera. These are trained artisans trying to prove which is the best...trained artisan.

What I enjoy the most, however, is the relevance so far of the challenges. No attempts by business students to sell crap out of an Airstream trailer. The first episode consisted of two main events. The first was a test of speedy food prep skills. Chefs had to race between an ingredient station and food prep tables earning points for the quick filleting of fish, frenching of a rack of lamb, and extracting coconut water. Such an activity is straight out of Iron Chef (or a real kitchen for that matter) and practical preparation for competitive cooking. The second challenge was a test of creativity; entrants developed their own recipes for two desserts - one traditional and one with a savory ingredient (squid, tripe, or beef anyone?). Once again, this test was 100% relevant to the goal of the contest. Competitors on Iron Chef are forced to develop recipes on the fly all the time, and quite often from unconventional components like ground beef or sea urchin.

You may not like Iron Chef or cooking, but it's quite refreshing for me to see a show in this genre which actually seems to prepare it's contestants for their prize. Give it a shot if you like cooking shows - it's quite entertaining.

Oh yeah, and pardon my excessive use of alliteration in this post - it's hard to think of synonyms for "chef" and "competition" while I'm watching TV :-)

Okay, so here's the big news, and I'm sure to some of you it's no big deal...but I'm excited.

You may recall my mention of a certain lost picture taking device last month...

Well today I received as good a replacement as I could hope for. I purchased a 1969 Nikon F with Photomic T finder on eBay last week, and after thorough testing to ensure it's in fine working order, I surprised Valerie with it when she arrived home today. She was pretty psyched, and I have to admit that I'm just as excited. Taking the test shots this afternoon got me jazzed up again about manual photography and fine optics.

I never expected this camera to take the place of the original, but I'm glad Valerie is happy with it, and now we have two SLRs again (her N65, remember?) so we can both go walking around taking pictures together. Of course, the old school camera has a much better lens :-)

Big News, coming soon.

And no, it has nothing to do with work or babies or the Lottery.

I'm just too excited not to post anything about it now, but I can't spill the beans yet. I'm giddy!

The Sneeze made my day with the long-overdue return of "Steve Don't Eat It."

It's 10:54 PM as I start this entry - Sunday night, before Val and I head back up the highway to Virginia.

It's been a fine weekend, but I'm not looking forward to a day spent in the car and a return to the office on Tuesday. Here's how the weekend went, however:

In general (Ploafmaster General?), we hung out with Val's sister and one or more of her room mates who were all pretty cool. Actually they were all pretty goofy which suited me just fine as it allowed me to be my eccentric self. Yesterday, of course, we attended the Florida State University football game...or at least until the lightening delay late in the third quarter. I must say, attending such a spirited sporting event made me wish even more that VCU had a football team. The sight of tens of thousands of fans pouring into the castle-like stadium made me excited enough to be a vicarious Seminoles fan, standing up and cheering heartily at every first down, tackle, and score.

It's all temporary, of course. At least I have VCU's men's basketball season to anticipate.

Oh well, bed time, and I have a long drive ahead of me. I'll be back to my usual internet shenanigans soon enough.

My posting will be a little slim for the next several days. Val and I are making our second trip to Florida this year (and we have two more after that! Really!) to visit her sister at FSU in Tallahassee.

Tomorrow we shove off at the butt crack of dawn - 5 AM - and make the 12 hour drive down the Atlantic Coastal Plain. We'll hang out, we'll eat out, and we'll see the Florida State Seminoles take on the NC State Wolfpack. Then we'll make the long drive back to Richmond on Monday, hopefully in time to catch Heroes :-)

I'll have the laptop with me since I plan at least to write up the football game. This'll be only my second major college game (I caught VT at UVA when I was in high school), and I'll try to get into it despite my alma mater's lack of team.

Anyway, enjoy the weekend everybody. I'll enjoy not working tomorrow and Monday.

A Brief Message has an interesting take on Olympic Games identity.

As a side note, I really like the use of different color links rotating throughout the piece in the order of the rings of the IOC logo.

For the past several days I've been testing out the Tag functionality that came standard with Wordpress 2.3. You probably notice the obnoxious (noxious?) tag cloud in the sidebar...it really looks crappy in a Times-style serif typeface.

Anyway, I wanted to see if categorizing my posts using Tags would be easier than checking off categories I'd defined, adding new categories when relevant.

My conclusion is that I'm switching back to categories as of this post. I can't search my site based on tags, and the default URL structure (which I'm too lazy to mess with) doesn't take my tags into account. Granted, that last one would be difficult to implement, but I like that categories are included in the URLs - I believe it aids navigation a tad.

Now I have the extremely exciting task of categorizing my posts since the upgrade (and killing that infernal tag cloud). Hopefully that won't take too long.

You know, sometimes the message is so right and so good, that potentially ulterior profit motives can't spoil it.

Courtesy of swissmiss, this is probably one of the best ads I've seen all year. Anybody know what that song is? I know I've heard it before, and it's AWESOME.
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaH4y6ZjSfE&w=425&h=350])

Call it derivative (hamster dance, anyone?), call it stupid.

I can't stop laughing at this "remix" of a portion of an Arby's commercial:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2AN7kBQOsw&rel=1&w=425&h=353]

While Valerie slumbers upstairs a bit earlier than usual, I feel like it's safe to write about our anniversary dinner.

I've eaten at Cabo's Corner Bistro before; once when I was a college freshman with my Dad and brothers, and again for Valerie and my wedding rehearsal dinner three years ago. I remember clearly enjoying the food both times, and tonight was no exception.

We were treated to a complimentary appetizer for our anniversary (they asked if it was a special occasion when I made the reservation), and I don't mean simply nice bread or grilled portobello mushrooms, either. Our dish was seared ostrich loin, sliced thin and served chilled over a small bed of sprouts with three sauces artfully spread on the plate. Let me tell you, ostrich is one of my favorite new meats. The chef expertly seasoned the cut, and there was a distinct pastrami-like characteristic that set off my taste buds.

Valerie's entrée was Chilean sea bass with Parmesan gnocchi (nyo-kee), wilted spinach, and diced tomatoes all in a fresh lemon sauce. The gnocchi were the perfect texture - pillowy soft on the pallet without falling apart, but not gummy at all. The bass was tender and delicious as well.

My dinner was the beef tenderloin special - cooked almost rare with demi-glace, roasted young carrots and cauliflower, and garlic mashed potatoes. My steak was juicy, perfectly seared, and intense beefy flavor. The mashed potatoes were my preferred consistency - creamy with some discernable pieces of the tuber. Also worth noting were the portions for both of our meals. There was just the right amount - enough to satisfy, but nowhere near the heaping modern American meal sizes.

For dessert Valerie chose the frozen chocolate mousse topped with toasted pistachios. The plate was decorated with a thick strawberry sauce, and garnished with fresh strawberries and tiny Champagne grapes (probably pinot noir). My confection was vanilla bean crème brulée with a veritable fruit basket on top: fresh raspberries, golden delicious apple slices, blackberries, strawberries, and some Champagne grapes of my own. Both treats were amazing.

Certainly a dinner like this doesn't happen often, but for those special occasions such as Valentine's Day and our anniversaries, a meal such as tonight's is well worth it. Having dined at Cabo's now thrice, I'm still impressed. This is one of the finest restaurants in the city of Richmond boasting an incredibly creative chef.

Thanks to Trey for making me aware of Rolling Stone's preview of the forthcoming Radiohead album. You have to go page by page, song by song (for the most part), but it's still worth checkin' out. I'm counting down the days until I get my download code!

The Morning News has a fantastic slide show featuring the work of painter Stephen Earl Rogers. The accompanying interview, while brief, is informative. The following line, particularly, stands out:

I can’t remember the last time I ran dry. I work with medieval technology, so things take a long time—I am always playing catch-up with myself: so many ideas, so few of them realized yet.

I quite enjoy the sense of aloofness on much of the subjects' faces (when people are involved). It's the closest thing I can imagine to a "candid painting." Please forgive the distortion that comes with a reduced image size for the below painting - one my favorites:

Alright...gushy alert.

Today I celebrate my third wedding anniversary with my awesome wife, Valerie. Tonight we're heading to dinner at Cabo's Bistro on the corner of Addison and Broad - the same place we had our rehearsal dinner before we were married.

Three years of marriage of left me just as surprised that Valerie would want to spend the rest of her life with me, so I believe it's purely by the Grace of God that we're still together.

She only reads my website about once every few months, so this isn't to fulfill some spousal sense of obligation...I just want to share with everybody how much I dig being married :-)

Sometimes Married To the Sea makes me smile.

Here's a happy update on my radiator moving extravaganza...

I almost broke my ankle!! Hooray!

I mean, ouch. Thank heavens it's just a sprain that's healing quickly. Let me just say that the dude at the scrap metal place was WAY off...some of these things weighed a LOT more than 400 pounds. And moving them downstairs is murder.

We did manage to get 6 of the 9 radiators out of the house including The Beast of the Foyer which I estimate weighed close to 800 pounds. Seriously. I still have three more upstairs - one in my bedroom, one in the office, and one in the back bedroom which is on the smaller side. My friends the helped Saturday said they'd be willing to help get the others out some time, but I imagine we'll all be taking some time off before we scare the crap out of ourselves again by carrying more cast iron down the stairs.

I may just cut them to pieces with the Sawzall instead :-)

I caught this clever ad for a Midwestern sub shop chain:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HClNcAvD1AY&w=425&h=350]

Head on over to the campaign's website to see the making-of video as well.

So this morning I changed my theme. Yup.

I noticed, though, that I had hardly any hits to my site at all today. Somehow, I failed to connect the dots...(see, it's a joke, because the ellipses uses dots)

Each theme has its own set of PHP files for the pages; specifically, there's a different header file for each theme, and that's where I'm supposed to paste the reference to Mint.

I finally fixed it, so I should be happily (obsessively) checking my stats again.

I think Layer Tennis is a lot more like Iron Chef then a sport for the visually creative.

So as you may notice, I've changed my blog theme...again...and back to one I've used before.

I did this for two reasons:
1. While the previous Mac-centric design was clever, it was really only clever for like a week. VERYPLAINTXT is much cleaner.
2. My previous theme wasn't wide enough in the main column. I was tired of referencing images that were too big...basically anything more than ~475 pixels. Sure, I could have spent some time resizing images myself, but I'd have to wait until I got home to use Photoshop, and I prefer to post on the fly rather than waiting until everything is ready. Well, most of the time, anyway.

So yeah, that's the deal. I'm wimping out again by changing to another theme instead of just buckling down and building my own. I hope, at least, this is easier on the eyes for a while.

The Non-Expert delivers a hilarious, musical entry today.

I've always thought of using Moo to create some business cards after getting a free sample some time ago. While I'm too lazy (and lack Photoshop skills) to have actually made my own, you can see some fine examples from Trey and Aaron.

I ordered some pizza, but instead McSweeney's delivered a heaping helping of humor.