Ploafmaster General

Gah. I guess I'm getting sucked in to podcasts.

I finally caved and subscribed to John Gruber and Dan Benjamin's The Talk Show.

After listening to this week's episode, I decided to hit the subscribe button in iTunes and start gathering the back episodes as well.

I've recently reacquainted myself with The Best of Simon and Garfunkel. I'm not generally a huge folk music fan, but there's no denying the craftsmanship that went into their music and lyrics, and so I've been hooked all over again.

I also noticed that some of the lines in their songs put the most shoe-gazing of Emo kids to shame. In fact, just check out the words to the famous, "I Am a Rock" and see what you think:

A winters day
In a deep and dark december;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
Its laughter and its loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

Don't talk of love,
But Ive heard the words before;
Its sleeping in my memory.
I wont disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries.

Huzzah! My buddy Chris Malak and I just threw together a mini-road-trip of sorts. See, he's a huge Atlanta Falcons fan (even without Michael Vick), and I'm a huge New York Giants fan.

Well he called me up yesterday to ask if I wanted to go with him to see the Giants play the Falcons in Atlanta for Monday Night Football on October 15th. I couldn't resist, so we'll be snaggin' a couple of nose-bleeds from StubHub, stying in a Super 8 at the edge of the beltway, and taking the subway directly to the stadium.

This is SO gonna rock.

I have a Cingular (The new AT&T!!!) 8125 smart phone. This thing runs Windows Mobile 5, however, so the intelligence of the handset is pretty debatable.

You see, I work in an office. I don't want my co-workers to hear my phone blasting That Song by Big Wreck every time somebody calls me, so I keep it on vibrate during the day. Nothing special about that, right? Well if I had the ringer turned on, the low battery indicator would issue a short beep. Push a few electrons through the speaker so you know the phone needs charging, but don't use too much of that precious battery power to tell me, mkay?

What happens when the batter is low and the phone is on vibrate? Well what happens if somebody calls you and the phone is on vibrate? The phone doesn't make a sound - it activates a small motor inside the phone and spins an intentionally off-balance weight at high speed to cause the vibration. This is exactly what happens when the battery is low, too. However, incomprehensibly, the phone vibrates for a full five seconds! What better way to conserve battery power than to spin a weight inside the device just to tell me that the power is running out!

Maybe other phones do this, too, but most other phones are running very simplified operating systems compared to Windows Mobile. There should be no reason to expend the dwindling stored energy in my phone on a buzzing, spinning weight other than an incoming phone call, and no matter which platform is on the phone, surely it's only a software problem to kill the motor when the battery is low.

I've been a little tired of my phone for a few months now, but this is one of those things that annoys the crap out of me ever time it happens.

So I'm curious - do any other phones behave this way? Does the iPhone? Does Windows Mobile 6?

Okay, so Mugs tipped me off that "sushi" doesn't really mean, "with rice." I still like the name I've chosen for my dish, and it's stuck now, since my creation is a reality!

Tonight I made four rolls, and I deviated a little from my master plan, but I wanted to make sure it would actually work first. I could make a few tweaks in the future, and I may have a serious dish on my hands with endless possibilities! Anyway, check the video below, and see the final product:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=287675&server=vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF

Con Riso from ploafmaster and Vimeo.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention what it really tasted like :-)

The asparagus really balanced out the sausage, and both blended well with the risotto. I'm thinking of making sauces to go with future versions, such as a balsamic reduction and a white sauce. I may even sprinkle some toasted fresh bread crumbs on top. There really are so many directions I can go with this - I'm pretty psyched about it.

Alright everybody, it's time for the second Programmers' House Party this Wednesday night, August 29th from 7-10 pm.

Check out the event listing and mark whether you're attending. No "watching" this time, Trey :-)

I just have to say that I'm pumped for the impending NFL football season. In less than two weeks, the Indianapolis Colts face the New Orleans Saints in what's sure to be a battle of the quarter backs pitting the amazing Peyton Manning against the excellent Drew Brees. That action will keep me up really late on Thursday, September 6th.

Then the season really gets going when my New York Giants take on division rivals, the DESPICABLE Dallas Cowboys, on NBC's Sunday Night Football game. Here's hoping that the Giants don't depend on Eli too much, and that the running game doesn't suffer too much with the loss of Tiki Barber.

Go Big Blue Wrecking Crew!

Q: why are there so many “B vitamins” (B6, B12, etc)?

A: Well Chris, this one turned out to be easier than I expected. It seems that when folks were naming vitamins, it was originally understood that Vitamin B was a single chemical compound. A gentleman by the name of Robert R. Williams (an arm-chair vitamin researcher, it turns out) first isolated the chemical compound and structure of what we now know as thiamine. This, as I understand it, was the original "Vitamin B" and is still known today as Vitamin B₁.

Later of course, scientists determined that what they called "Vitamin B" was actually a complex of several compounds, not all of which coexist in a food at the same time. Each of these sub compounds of the complex is responsible for aiding different metabolic functions in our bodies, and were named likely in order of discovery. Now we have such familiar (from cereal boxes, at least) compound names as Riboflavin (B₂) and Folic Acid, or Folate (B₉).

So there it is...the answer to Ask Dan's glorious (maybe?) return.

Go ahead and post new questions in the comments section, hit me on Twitter, or email your quandaries to danielcwarshaw [at] gmail [dot] com.

Alright. I can't stand Rachael Ray. It drives me nuts to hear her say, "sammies" and "EEE-VEE-OH-OH," and I want to wretch every time she laughs. I avoid her show as best I can, and would rather watch commercials on another channel than suffer through the last two minutes of her show while waiting for Good Eats to come on.

Last night, however, I came to respect the self-described, "cook, not a chef," a little bit.

Valerie and I had our friends Lindsay, Rob, and their little baby over for dinner last night, and in preparing, I told Valerie to find a recipe for a chicken dish. Where did she turn? A gift she received from a relative - Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals 2. The dish was supposed to be grilled, but worked just fine on the stove top, and involved chicken with an absolutely delicious honey mustard glaze (and I don't like mustard!) composed of apple cider vinegar, curry powder, freshly ground allspice, some red onions, and some brown sugar. Oh boy, was it juicy and delicious.

So while I still have no intention of ever subjecting myself to her television programming, I'm willing to ease up a little bit and try more of her recipes (for those few occasions when I cook from a recipe).

Have you ever noticed that some CDs are way quieter than others? Even when you rip them to your computer the levels can vary widely, much to the detriment of your ears. For a perfect example, check out my music (ploafmaster on SimplifyMedia) and first listen to the song "I Hate It Too" by Hum, and right in the middle of that song, switch to "The Sun Also Rises" by Brave Saint Saturn.

Did the difference in volume startle you?

You see, it turns out many recording/mastering engineers compress the audio in order to increase the average decibel level of the music. I just read a fascinating, insightful, and surprisingly down-to-earth article in the IEEE's Spectrum publication about the commercial reasons behind the use of audio compression and it's serious drawbacks.

I think I'll be using Sound Check in iTunes and on my iPod from now on.

I never thought I'd ever do this. Call it peer pressure, call it a moment of weakness. Call it whatever.

After a modest meal at Galaxy Diner in Carytown, I shared some Deep Fried Oreos with some compatriots.

And they were totally worth it.

Where two or three come together for the inane, there am I to give crazy answers.

Thanks to Alexis and Chris, the rest of you are likely to be subjected (resubjected?) to Ask Dan once again!

So go ahead, submit those questions in the comments section of this or any other post, via Twitter, or by emailing me at danielcwarshaw [at] gmail [dot] com.

Do it!

I mean...please :-)

What better way to celebrate 500 posts and over two years of reasonably consistent blogging than a post that sums up the very ethos of my website?

I just finished reading about the recall of an arm-wrestling video game in Japan on the BBC News' website. Apparently some unlucky folks are breaking their arms on the device, and while "Even women should be able to beat it," according to a company spokesman, the game is being removed as a precaution.

I think I'd rather watch Over the Top anyway :-)

Now I ask you, seriously. Who would want to use the first floor?




Booger Hollow - Double Decker Outhouse


Originally uploaded by dsimmons2006.

Totally brilliant idea:



This boat is totally portable, collapses small enough to fit in a car trunk, and only takes about a half hour to put back together. The price is a bit out of my league, but $5000 is a lot cheaper than most sail boats I've ever seen, and this seems a lot more portable, too.

I'm continually amazed with Man's desire to have his cake and eat it, too.

I hate urban sprawl - absolutely. I hate seeing perfectly good land get swallowed up by shopping malls, townhouse developments, car dealerships, and tepidly unoriginal chain restaurants. It saddens me to see Midlothian and Richmond's West End turn into miniature versions of Northern Virginia, locked in horrible traffic and a suburban staleness which characterizes such rapid commercial development.

Recent figures put Virginia's population growth rate around 5.4% - that's about 380,000 people a year! Even if we cut that in half we're talking about a huge net increase in population in my home state. Where do most of these new people go? Urban centers like the DC metropolitan area, the 757 area code, and of course, Richmond, VA.

Unfortunately, this burgeoning collection of new residents doesn't want to live in the urban centers where they seek jobs. The native Virginians don't want to either. "Too much crime!" they cry. "Too much noise! Too filthy! To expensive!"

So those who can afford it move outside of the city. This actually hurts in two ways. First (and so huge a topic on it's own that I'll not address it here in depth), the city itself starts to decay. Land values drop because more people sell than buy. The two-fold decrease in property taxes (fewer residents and lower values collected) causes city budget issues which harm city schools and infrastructure. Thankfully, my fair city of Richmond is in a state of gradual renewal with increasing numbers of young people preferring the character of the city to the vanilla suburbs.

Of course, the more sinister effect of this urban exodus is the so-called urban sprawl. These city workers who want nice yards and picket fences now have to drive a further distance to their place of employ. That's more pollution, folks, especially since the "rugged individualism" fostered so strongly by our culture keeps us from being comfortable in a good-old-fashioned car pool. And don't forget that these suburbanites don't want to drive more than five minutes to do their shopping! So smart retail executives build shops of all sorts in the suburbs. Pretty soon the service industry moves out to the suburbs as well, and you know what? Business in general starts to add to the sprawl. What was once a nice green space is now a densely-populated traffic hell with more petty crime and even a few run-down strip malls closer to the city where the growth started. Suddenly, people in these "suburbs" start looking for more open space and move further out...

And so on.

New construction and development in the city is an easy prospect in my mind (though not necessarily cheap). People expect commercial development, and when you're in the city, you don't typically worry about bulldozing farmland to make way for an apartment building or a sky scraper. I don't mind this sort of development so long as you're not pushing people out (which is yet another topic). In fact, I love seeing dilapidated structures and districts replaced with vibrant new areas to explore.

But then we have the suburbs. Even in such a crowded, bland, sub-divided wasteland as Western Henrico County, people would sooner build characterless town house developments a little further out instead of building a single condo or apartment building that's over four stories tall in an existing developed area. A lot of the people who decry the building of tall structures in these "suburban" areas mischaracterize the concept of urban sprawl when they try to keep the city from coming to them.

Well I say stop building further from the city. I say shut up about tall buildings and denser building plans in these areas. I say build up, not out.

A good example of what I'm talking about is the forthcoming West Broad Village development in Short Pump. Sure this is an upscale, exclusive, corporately planned (by the warm and friendly sounding Unicorp, no less) venture, but they get lots of things right about this such as mixed use space, more densely contained living arrangements (more like the Fan than Brandermill), and a design based on a walkable community. They also plan to have a few towers over 10 stories to house a hotel and office space. Yes, the old farm land that use to sit between West Broad Street and Three Chopt Road is now a collection of berms and dirt, but a series of taller office and apartment buildings clustered in the middle of an already heavily developed section of town will help stem the tide of further suburban spread - not add to it. Imagine how much smaller Innsbrook would be if the buildings were all 10 stories or more!

But no. The citizens of Henrico County don't want tall buildings in their collective back yard. So what if the immediately surrounding area consists of office buildings, car dealerships, highway ramps, and retail space as far as the eye can see. It's too "urban." Well thankfully, plans are moving forward anyway.

Will developments like this solve the problem of urban sprawl? Of course not. But it's my hope that people will stop crying for the loss of their view or the loss of a few acres of grass in the middle of suburbia, and start building up. Otherwise, we'll be weeping for the loss of a few million acres as the population continues its spread out into the surround farmland of the Old Dominion state.

It was about five o'clock late yesterday afternoon when one of my best friends, Jake, arrived at my house with his girlfriend to watch a movie with Valerie and I. We watched Blood Diamond, a heart-wrenching story which revolves around illicit diamond trade during Sierra Leone's civil war, which was quite a good movie (and four out of five stars in my book).

By the time the movie was finished, however, it was near eight o'clock in the evening, and none of us had eaten dinner. I didn't really feel like cooking that late, so I suggested the four of us all go out to eat. Valerie, ever practical, didn't want to go out and spend more money at a restaurant when we'd already eaten out quite a bit during the weekend, but my suggestion won out (this time). We decided to try our luck with the ever-crowded Kitchen 64, even as the darkling sky threatened a storm outside.

As soon as we stepped out of the car I knew I'd made a fantastic decision because there, on the patio waiting for a table, were our friends Nikki and Joel, and Kevin and Tiffany. We hadn't seen these two fine couples in several months so we happily sat down with them after putting in my name for a table of our own.

The sky gave us a drizzle as we started to chat, and as that drizzle turned into rain-in-earnest, our four friends were called in to their table. Content with our serendipitous encounter, our original party continued to chat it up.

Not five minutes later, however, Joel popped his head back out of the door back on to the patio and told us to come in and squeeze into the huge booth they had acquired, and to our joy, our party of four became an octet. What followed was a fine couple of hours of reminiscence, food, wine, the news of Nikki and Joel's impending parenthood, and plenty of crowd noise in this young Northside hot spot.

We said our extended good-byes afterwards, as friends often do, varying our farewells a little after just one more topic of conversation, lingering in the parking lot during a break in the rain storm. Finally we parted ways, returning to our separate places of residence, all attempting to mentally forestall the work week that lay ahead.

I wonder if the flavor of this gum lasts an extra, extra, EXTRA long time.

You know, ever since I became aware that I have this new-found readership of possibly 8 people instead of the 4-6 I'd previously guessed, I've been considering reviving an old friend. Tonight, after some goading from Patrick, I decided I'd test the waters, presidential campaign style. So here goes...

Should I bring back Ask Dan? For the unfamiliar, this was a roughly weekly feature where I'd answer a question from the comments of any post (or emailed? Maybe?). This question could be about anything - Where does "Ploaf" come from? Why is red wine red? How many ducks will you trade for my magic kidney stone? Seriously (or not), submit any question, and I'll pick one and answer it by the end of the day on Friday. The answer may be literal, thorough and exact, or it may be completely absurd. The seriousness of the question doesn't necessarily dictate the seriousness of the response.

I'm hesitant, not just because The Morning News handles this WAY better than I do, but because it sort of swelled like a novelty and faded rather quickly, hanging on barely because of my sister-in-law and her silly questions.

How about it? Should I? If so, bury me with questions in the comments section, or send me one at danielcwarshaw [at] gmail [dot] com.

Tonight Patrick hosted a rap show/house party at his digs for Sintax the Terrific. Now Sintax is a member of the Deepspace5 family, and I have to say that his performance tonight was totally killer. In addition to bringing a DJ (who was great), he mixed some short readings from assorted books and Scripture in with his hip-hop excellence.

I seriously wish I had brought my digital camera so I could've recorded some short video clips. For now, this will have to suffice:
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe3dsZnuLF8&w=425&h=350])

You know, sometimes I feel like I know my buddy Patrick's co-workers better than I know my own. Maybe it's the common interest in general Interwebs Geekery that fosters such a notion.

Anyway, one such co-worker is Phil Barbato, and he writes a comic strip. Check out Patrick and Trey immortalized in the latest edition (and click the image to see the whole thing):

I just returned from a fine evening at Penny Lane Pub with my wife. Terry O'Neill's fine establishment is a Richmond landmark in my book, and represents the closest thing to a genuine English pub in our fair city (and indeed, one of a few real pubs in the area in general).

I've loved this place since I was old enough to drink and it was located on 8th street between Grace and Broad. Now, on East Franklin, Penny Lane is an easy stand-by when I want a tall pint or a well mixed drink in an environment that allows me to sit and hear myself think. While I wouldn't quite recommend the place for dinner (other than the tasty Cornish pasties), the drinks are more than reasonable, even from the top shelf. Best of all, the atmosphere is benign enough that even when Val and I have little ones running around we can still frequent the place; the traditional pub environment is open to families as well as tipplers.

Rarely have I felt so purely as if my brain had been cooked in a lightly-greased, Teflon-coated omelet pan.

I think it's time for cocktails this evening. For serious.

I noticed today when reading a fascinating story about natural-born identical quadruplets on the BBC News website, that they changed the way their news stories display:



Now they join the countless hoard of blogs that feel compelled to provide ugly and distracting link option icons at the end of each story/post. I hope they're just trying this out, because it doesn't quite complement an already busy-looking site layout.

So after making my own cannelloni from scratch, I was struck with a fascinating idea for a new dish based on several separate Italian components, but fashioned in a wholly unorthodox manner.

First, I'll create spinach pasta (the nice green sort) in sheets and roll it out to it's absolute thinnest, but I won't cook it (yet). Next, I'll cook risotto, probably with nothing more than some cream, white pepper, and some grated Parmesan cheese added to the typical preparation. Finally, I'll cook some spicy Italian sausage and cut it into thin strips. Perhaps I'll roast some asparagus for good measure.

Then I'll spread the rice over sheets of pasta, and place strips of sausage and asparagus across the rice, and I'll roll it up and steam it, slicing the end result into six neat pieces, much like makizushi. This is where my name for the dish comes in: Con Riso, the Italian phrase meaning, "with rice" much like the Japanese word "sushi."

I still have to finalize some of the details, and determine which flavors will really work well together. I'm also hoping that steaming the roll for a short time will be enough to make the pasta tender but not enough to turn the filling in to goop.

So here we go - uncharted culinary territory here! Unless somebody else has already done this...?