Ploafmaster General

So my few loyal readers will have noticed an absence in both posting activity and actual site activity over the past 24 hours. This is because my hosting provider, Dreamhost, had a ridiculous hardware issue that took them a lot of time to properly diagnose and resolve. Even their main support page, Dreamhoststatus.com, was unavailable for quite a while today leaving many folks in the dark as to what was wrong and when it would be corrected.

Serious hardware outages have occurred a few times in the past two years that I've hosted my website with these people, and this time is bringing me even closer to a serious switch in hosting providers. Media Temple's Grid Service is looking pretty good except it's $20 a month vs. the $8 a month I pay now. Anybody have any other good recommendations?

Anyway, I'm going to be writing several posts in the immediate future, so those of you on Twitter or subscribing via RSS, pardon the barrage :-)

My friend Steph's site Gentle Graffiti has a post up about artist Josh Keyes, and I have to say his paintings are wonderful.

At once both preposterous and pointed, his scenes render a compelling juxtaposition of the natural and the manufactured. Below is one of my favorites:

It seems that U.S. Customs officials don't have access to knowledgeable computer technicians, since a single network card brought down the whole screening process for TEN HOURS at LAX this past weekend. This was a problem on one computer apparently, the caused issues everywhere else, and led to the stranding of about 17,000 passengers!

How is it that such a critical system could have any single point of failure? And why did it take so long to diagnose the problem and repair it? It's crap like this that feeds the stereotype of "government quality" work.

I want this so bad it hurts.

For whatever reason, I sort of missed the whole big deal about podcasts in general. I do listen every week, however, to Ira Glass' This American Life. I, like many others, was made aware of Radio Lab on an episode of This American Life. Now I subscribe to two podcasts :-)

Radio Lab is excellently produced and hosted well by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, and has recently covered such topics as Morality, Emergence, and Sleep.

I highly recommend this show - it's both entertaining and informative...but don't dare call it edutainment :-)

Holy Smokes! I finally bit the bullet and purchased the 2007 EP from Beirut, Lon Gisland, and goodness gracious is it amazing!

The first track is "Elephant Gun" who's video I posted recently, and it stays sweet through the last track, "Carousels," which is simply phenomenal.

I prefer when a band's sound stands on its own, but I do know that a) there is nothing new under the sun, and b) comparisons can be useful, so I'm just gonna say it. Imagine Jeff Buckley or Rufus Wainwright singing a composition by Sufjan Stevens after a trip to Eastern Europe. I know that's a jam-packed comparison, and perhaps you don't like any of those individual components, but seriously. Give it a listen.

If you use SimplifyMedia's amazing utility for iTunes, check out my user name, ploafmaster, and you can listen to the album yourself.

Just a quick hey-hey:

Yesterday I created an event on Upcoming.org about the Programmers' House Party. If you're attending, please indicate thusly so I know what to expect.

It's refreshing to see people look for simpler approaches to problems and, dissatisfied with available options, craft their own.

Fellow web nerd Trey is working on his own nifty flavor of a content management system (CMS) to give him that coveted combination of simplicity and flexibility, and he calls his work-in-progress "Yark" - a portmanteau of YAML and Markdown.

I'll be following this development, and I'm looking forward to a peek at the final product.

It's been a while since I perused McSweeney's Internet Tendency, but I was glad to return today, especially after reading this hilarious entry from "The Lonely Sommelier."

You know, I explored the band Beirut a little more after posting that video for the song "Elephant Gun" a few days ago.

I've gotta say, I'm getting pretty hooked. The twenty-one-year-old Zach Condon assembles some delightful Eastern-European-sounding pop music that really makes me smile. Go to the music page on his site to download 160 kbps MP3s of two tracks from his first album, totally free.

I think I'm gonna try to pick up his EP Lon Gisland when I get a chance.

I just got off the phone with my lovely wife, and I hung up the phone laughing about what she shared with me.

On her way down the interstate to a client's site she spotted an all-yellow billboard proclaiming a genuine Broadway musical called Urinetown!

I'm sorry, I guess it's the part of me that's still a 6-year-old boy refusing to grow up that finds this amusing - but apparently I'm not the only one: who knew that a pee-titled performance could be nominated for 10 Tony Awards?

So if you're viewing my site directly instead of through an RSS reader (do I have any regulars like that, anyway?) then you'll notice that as of today the Google ads have been replaced my a little Amazon ad.

I've done this for a number of reasons. First, I'm able to choose exactly what I want in that box. This makes it more relevant to me, and likely to my readers as well. Second, I think I actually have a better chance of generating even tiny amounts of revenue with Amazon's links than Google's, and this is related to my first point.

For example, why would you click on a link to the House Party Planning website that Google coughed up when I created my post about the Programmers' House Party? On the other hand, if you like music, movies, games, books, random crap, etc., it's more likely that you'd at least look at the album or film I'm recommending, and hey, maybe even buy it.

Whatever. I'm not expecting any real revenue for this (what with my handful of regular readers), but I figure it's better to experiment with it now. Who knows what would happen if my crazy little site were to be linked on Digg or something and my bandwidth spiked for a few days...at least I'll have a slightly better chance at recouping some of the cost that would incur. Maybe :-)

So about the first recommendation - it's for the upcoming album by Kenna called Make Sure They See My Face. I absolutely loved the first album, and the samples I've heard for this new disc make me want to purchase it as soon as I can.

Now I promise I won't be hawking crap at all of you on a regular basis, but I figure since the ad is supposed to reflect something I like, I might as well explain it. In the future, I'll likely just change the ad when I talk about some music or movie I like, and I won't discuss the link, so don't worry about it.

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: