Ploafmaster General

I don't like to brag, but tonight I think I've made myself quite proud.

I just consumed my own home-made cannelloni pasta filled with my own home-made Bolognese sauce and smothered in my own home-made beciamela sauce.

Now I have to say, before I continue, that most folks outside of Italy don't quite get what Bolognese sauce is supposed to be. Here in America, particularly, "Bolognese" typically refers to tomato sauce with meat, like ground beef. True Bolognese sauce, as I discovered in Italy, is still a meat sauce. Except it's a sauce made almost entirely of meat. I took veal, pork, pancetta (that's Italian style bacon), and a soffritto of onion, carrots, celery, and garlic, and I cooked it all for about four hours. This resulted in a tasty, fine-grained ground meat sauce that formed the filling to my cannelloni.

The cannelloni itself, for the unfamiliar, are pasta tubes. The dish with the same name is essentially a meat-filled version of manicotti. Now I actually made the pasta from scratch as well. It's super easy, super cheap, and ever since my first home-made pasta experience, it's difficult to buy the dried stuff at the grocery store.

Finally, I made a home-made besciamella sauce which is the Italian version of the French "mother sauce" called a bechamel. This sauce follows a nice 5-4-3-2-1 ingredients list: 5 tablespoons of butter, 4 tablespoons of flour, 3 cups of milk, 2 teaspoons of salt, and 1 healthy pinch of freshly ground nutmeg. While I heated the milk in one pot, I created a roux with the butter and flour. After cooking out the raw flour flavor, I added the simmering milk a little at a time to the roux and kept heating until the sauce was a nice thick consistency. I finished it up with the salt and nutmeg.

I piped the Bolognese onto blanched squares of my fresh pasta and rolled them up, placing each one onto a thin bed of tomato sauce in a baking dish. I covered everything with the besciamella and baked it in the oven for the better part of an hour.

Okay, after all that build up...it is SOOOOOOO good :-) So good that Jake would be cracking up at the sight of me shaking my hand in the air.

Oh yeah...and I have lots of leftovers...

At the behest of Trey, I decided to go for Mint to track my site's statistics. Mint was gorgeously crafted by Shaun Inman and resides on my server.

All I had to do was upload one folder to my domain and place one line of javascript in my header file, and voila! Stats for my whole site. And I've gotta say, I get more hits per day than I thought - like, tens more hits than I thought! Woohoo!

Another fine link from Ze Frank to a song to which I feel compelled to listen over and over by the very young Beirut:
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjeh6P4sRfw&w=425&h=350])

You'll just have to trust me when I say that the new name for the Developer's Working Sessions just worked out to abbreviate as PHP. I'm honestly not that clever on my own.

So anyway, here's the scoop:

Programmers' House Party, week one.
Time: 7-10 pm, Wednesday, August 15th.
Place: My place, the dining room.

Patrick and Trey have directions to my place, and guests are welcome - but a reminder of what this is all about:

The purpose of these meetings is for web designers/developers and programmers (web or otherwise) to have a space and time blocked off where they can work on pet projects or freelance work. I believe a change in setting will help us all focus better on our own work. I hope these are fun and informal, and some networking will naturally occur - but I don't want this simply to be a chill-fest :-)

So bring your laptop, and lets see if we can overwhelm my wireless router!

Ze Frank linked up to this hilarious and very well done parody of a speech from our president:
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0JcSTOwHNA&w=425&h=350])

Oh, whoops...I meant to say, Dreamgirls.

Now really...the vocals from so many folks in this film were incredible. And Ms. Hudson, the girl who was (oh thank heavens) dropped by American Idol, proves that even though she couldn't win a dopey TV talent show, she deserved every ounce of that Oscar.

Unfortunately, I couldn't rate this movie higher than a 3 out of 5 stars because the majority of the music sounded as if Andrew Lloyd Webber sneaked into the production offices and swapped out the score for one of his. I understand this film is a screen version of a 1981 Broadway show, but wow, it doesn't seem to be one of the good ones...

To be fair, I'm really picky with musicals anyway, so the odds of my liking it were slim from the start (darned preconceived notions). But I seriously believe that outstanding vocal performances aside the music of Dreamgirls doesn't hold a candle to greats such as Rent or West Side Story.

Holy cow...this Johnson and Johnson vs. The American Red Cross issue must be hot, because news sources seem eager to gather public opinion on the topic...including mine, apparently :-)

You see, today I discovered that my post on the affair was linked and quoted on The Chronicle of Philanthropy. When I contacted the piece's author, he told me I was linked up on the New York Times' lede blog! That probably explains the extra comments from people I don't know :-)

Perhaps it's time to start keeping track of how many visitors I have? Will my daily readership balloon from half a dozen to three quarters of a dozen? I'll have to wait and see...

Holy crap on toast...finally, a trailer for Michel Gondry's next film. At least it appears to have more than a vague story, unlike The Science of Sleep (great concepts, kinda meandering). Let's hope that's true.
http://www.movieweb.com/v/V07H7amDHILQRV

CNN Money is reporting on a lawsuit that truly infuriates me: Johnson and Johnson is suing the American Red Cross because the charity is using the red cross symbol on certain emergency/first-aid products that it sells for fund-raising.

Now, apparently, Clara Barton herself signed some agreement with Johnson and Johnson in 1895 about the use of the symbol on medical supplies. But let me ask you this: what do you think of when you see that iconic red emblem? I tell you what I don't think of. I don't think of band-aids, or gauze, or other home medical supplies. I think of a humanitarian organization. You see a red cross with four even-length sides? What do you call it? A red cross? Yeah, I thought so.

Way to go, Johnson and Johnson. Sue the charity. You look great doing it. You look great fussing your way right into the Corporate Embarrassment Hall of Fame. You almost make the RIAA look noble. Well, not really, but this is downright shameful.

I know this thing is already making the rounds in Interweb land, but I figured it was ingenious enough to embed here, too:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=266383&server=vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF

iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich and Vimeo.

I'm no baseball fan, but I still have to laugh at the so-called broken home run record by Barry Bonds. That's why I love this t-shirt design from Busted Tees:

Whole Foods is finally coming to Richmond!

Well, Short Pump, really. No word yet on when it's opening, but I can bet securely that it'll be in all that new development across the street from Best Buy. I'm pretty jazzed about this - even though it's even farther from my house than Fresh Market, it's going to be WAY larger and should carry quite a wide range of traditional and hard-to-find ingredients.

My hope is that it will also drive prices down a tad at these upmarket food stores since it will be competing somewhat with Tom Leonard's, and directly with Fresh Market and Joe's Market.

Maybe we'll get a Wegmans in the future? I've heard good things about those joints...but that's probably just wishful thinking for this foodie :-)

Today Apple, Inc. unveiled a due update to it's consumer desktop computer, the iMac.

Now they've switched two key materials - we have an aluminum enclosure and a glass screen, though the form factor remains largely unchanged but for some subtle differences. I've gotta say, it looks pretty classy, and I think I'll be pushing even harder to convince my mother-in-law to pick one of these up later this month. I like particularly how the back of the enclosure is a matte black finish. Not sure yet how I feel about the new keyboard, but it is pretty slim...

As soon as Apple's store page is back up in an hour or so, I'll update with a picture.

UPDATE:
As promised, here's what the pretty new compy looks like:

I've been to France on five separate occasions.

Well, technically.

The first four times were actually only to the Charles de Gaulle airport on the way in and on the way out for two different trips to other European destinations (Italy and the Czech Republic). The fifth time is an extreme technicality in my mind since I was actually in the Caribbean - yeah, that's right. French Saint Martin is, politically, French soil.

I don't feel, however, as if I've ever been to France proper. Or at least Paris proper. This coming March I aim to change that.

Yesterday Valerie and I took what is for us a big next step: we purchased the Lonely Planet guide book for Paris. It's always exciting for me in these early stages, reading up on metro ticket prices, cheap places to eat, and exciting places to take a stroll where we might take in some of the essence of our destination. We already have a rough idea of when we'll go and where we'll stay. All that's left now is the giddy planning of what to see and do while we're there. God willing, this should be a very exciting trip, and I know I'll get increasingly jittery as I count down the next 7.5 months.

Those loyal half-dozen readers of mine may notice today that I have a new link in the side bar (unless you're pimpin' the RSS goodness).


Gentle Graffiti is the online presence for a little arts magazine published by my friend Stephanie DeSocio and her cohorts. The web site is updated with reasonable frequency and typically contains entries about photography, music, art exhibits, and the like. Quite fascinating, and a lot of it quite up my alley. I hope you feel the same way. Go check it out.

One of the funniest editorial cartoons I've seen in quite some time:

Just my luck. Scientists at Oxford may have discovered the gene that causes left-handedness, but it may also be responsible for an increased likelihood of going bonkers!

Okay, so the risk isn't actually that high, and more than this one gene is responsible for mental illness, but still - do we lefties really need more stigma? :-)

Giddy with excitement, Melvin grasped both handles and exclaimed, "Last one there is a..."

Looks like the viral campaign is kicking off for next summer's The Dark Knight; the quirky website now displays a flash box for the first teaser. Was that really Heath Ledger's voice as the joker?

Great googly moogly!

If you haven't heard of Simplify Media's software (named after the company), you should hit up their download page and grab the joint.

Got it now? Good. Well here's what it does...

Well a lot of folks may not be aware the iTunes allows you to share your music over a local area network. If you're at work, and several folks have iTunes, you can listen to each others' tunes. Pretty slick, eh? Well with Simplify Media's software running in the background, it allows you to share music across the entire internet. All you have to do is add your friends to your list, and then you can see each others' music as if you were on the same local area network.

Let that sink in for a moment...

Do you realize what this means? That means that if I'm in Paris and my buddy Patrick grabs the latest album from his fave underground indie hip-hopper, I can still listen to it as if it was on my own computer. Yeah, for real. The sound quality is excellent, but you can't actually save the tracks on your computer so it's not piracy. It's simply extending existing iTunes functionality.

Currently, the software only works with iTunes, but on both Windows and OS X. They're working on adding support for Winamp and Windows Media Player in the future, but considering the broad reach of iTunes, I'm sure plenty of you out there can use this.

Most folks who know me actually don't know that I was a hair's breadth from going to college for a creative major rather than something technical such as engineering (originally) or information systems (eventually). Well my illusion that engineering would be an easy route to working as an inventor led me along the tech route, leaves me occasionally pining for a crack at something more creative such as photography, film, and graphic design.

Today, my artistic inclinations got the best of me and I purchased a book on typography. Specifically, I purchased Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris' text, The Fundamentals of Typography:


I don't know whether this is a fantastic entry-level book or not, but it seems to cover a broad range of concepts. Explanations are often printed in such a way that illustrates the concept which I hope will prove as helpful as it appears.

So hear goes nothing...if I actually read through this book and still feel hungry for more, I'll probably dig into a book on color theory next.

Holy crap...crazy big props to my buddy Chris for pointing the way to this video:
http://www.factoryfilms.net/films/quicktimes/FuyijaMiyagi_AnkleInjury.mov

Thanks to Dan Cederholm, I just laughed my butt off (and was thoroughly amazed) because of this YouTube clip he linked to in a Twitter posting:
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwYxuV2dVzw&w=425&h=350])

Today I discovered on Apple's movie trailer site that a Beowulf film is debuting on November 16th. I don't know why this was the first thing that came to my mind, but instantly, I couldn't help but think, "Scott Baiowulf."

Oi. Last night I finally finished reading the last Harry Potter book to my wife. I was reading out loud from about 6:15 in the evening until 1:40 this morning - nearly 7.5 hours.

And this morning I pay the price for it :-)

However, now I can finally watch the news and surf the net more fully, my gentle paranoia about prematurely learning the ending no longer necessary. I can also contemplate the full magnitude of the ending, and glance approvingly or annoyed at countless reviews of the novel. Ultimately, though? I'm simply happy to be finished with what I believe was an excellent series in literature.