Month: September 2002

Food porn blog: the Julie/Julia Project

Pointed to by Scott Rosenberg: the Julie/Julia project. Julie Powell is cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking: “365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.” A series of priceless quotations, including my favorite:

“How in God’s name do people do multicourse meals? This is French Cooking for the servantless American cook, remember?!” (menu: Potage Veloute aux Champignons, Coquelets sur Canapes, Pommes de Terre a L’Huile, Crème Plombieres Pralinee)

Somebody give that woman a job at Gourmet. This is more entertaining reading than that magazine has been for a long time.
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Senate blocks firefighting initiative, saves trees

Follow up to my previous article: Greg reports that the Senate is sitting on Bush’s proposal to fight forest fires by giving the logging companies authority to clear old growth forests and immunity from enforcement suits under the National Environmental Policy Act. Tom Daschle has forced a “supermajority” vote to pass the bill, meaning that it won’t go anywhere for a while, if ever.
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Home improvement continued

Working from home this morning. Our long awaited window replacement contractors are here. They’re starting with the windows with broken seals in the skywall; next week, they’ll move on to replacing the old windows in the original part of the house. I’m amazed at how much work I’m getting done…

Irony strikes again

As I was writing the previous item, Adam was complaining that Outlook’s support for turning email into calendar items isn’t intuitive. Why? Because it uses drag and drop.

As I wrote there, figuring out how drag and drop worked as a Windows programmer was one of the hardest things I had to do. Admittedly, that might have had more to do with the development environment I was using than the Win32 APIs…
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Brent: RSS on the Clipboard

Brent continues to chug along, gearing up for a new NetNewsWire Lite beta that will support a published clipboard format for RSS items. This means you can use cut and paste and drag and drop to connect stuff from NetNewsWire Lite to other apps. Maybe it’s time to get off my butt and figure out what’s wrong with Manila Envelope–and see if I can get the new Drag and Drop in AppleScript Studio working.
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Winning the sensitivity award…

…members of the Alabama GOP accused the Democratic governor there of wrangling an endorsement from Charlton Heston by taking advantage of his recent announcement that he had Alzheimer’s. I don’t know. According to the record, he was endorsed because of a strong pro-gun and pro-conservation record, Heston’s two hot buttons. The NRA is required by its charter, apparently, to give any candidate an endorsement who gets an A on their annual scorecard.

I don’t know if Heston was “grossly manipulated” by the Democrats, but I do think that State GOP Chairman Marty Connors (“a gross manipulation of Mr. Heston”) and Republican candidate Bob Riley’s campaign spokesman David Azbell (“you have got to wonder if people are acting in Mr. Heston’s best interests”) have together done more to destroy Heston’s political capital than his disease has.
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Random weekend sound bites

The wedding was a ton of fun. Apparently I missed the most fun of all, the bridal party night out, which happened the day before I got to Maine (I will pay good money to anyone involved for footage of my wife dancing with Kelley’s sister in law to an Eminem tune).

We had a good time at the rehearsal dinner. During the long wait for food (familiar to anyone who’s had a rehearsal dinner for 30 people at a restaurant not used to serving that many at once), we got a little creative with the nametags Kelley’s friend Dan had gotten. He apparently couldn’t find proper nametags at the grocery store (there being no close office supply store at the Maine/Canada border), so picked up a stack of the store’s special pricing stickers. We all tried to figure out what kind of “special pricing” the bride and groom were under, with the result that their nametags were emblazoned with the legends “Low mileage,” “Original woodwork intact,” “Available for a limited time only!”, and “Make best offer.”

The wedding itself was smooth, with two exceptions. The flower girls had been told to get rid of all their flower petals, resulting in a much lengthier than expected trip down the aisle and a lot of banging on the bottom of their flower baskets to dislodge the remaining petals. And the bride dropped the groom’s ring. While picking it back up, she said, “All you folks with video cameras can use your fancy digital rigs to edit that out!” Not a chance, Kelley. The highlight of the reception was probably the minister returning in full Elvis regalia, though the bride dancing with her father to a recording of his college group singing a song he had arranged many years before was a close second, as was the ten-year-old cousin who kept telling Lisa she had to come dance with him when the DJ played the Britney Spears song.

Back (barely)

Returned home late last night from Maine. This morning I was awakened (Lisa had already gone to the office) by a rapping on the wall more or less behind my head. I threw on khakis and a t-shirt and went out through the garage to see what was going on. As I opened the outside door, a squirrel ran away.

Sighing, I went back through the garage and tried to open the door, only to realize it was locked. No keys in my pocket. Thankfully we had left a window unlocked on our back porch, or I’d still be out there freezing. More trip details later.

Bangor has an Internet café

After a really long flight (Seattle to Atlanta to Boston to Bangor, Maine), I got in to find that Lisa was delayed in construction. I looked around for something to do and was surprised (well, astonished, really) to find Bangor International Airport’s first Internet café.

Well, to be fair, it’s really an Internet kiosk plus cell phone dealership. But it is absolutely the last thing I expected to see, and it’s $3 for 15 minutes. And as the likelihood of WiFi in this part of Maine is pretty remote, it’ll do just fine.

Almost as unexpected as flying into Atlanta at 5:30 this morning (Terminal A), bracing myself to find an awful bagel or something, and finding a place that did really excellent scrambled eggs, bacon and biscuit. I could have had grits and gravy if I wanted it. There was even wireless from Laptop Lane–unfortunately, they weren’t savvy enough to provide web-based self service sign ups, so it refused to serve me an IP address and was therefore pretty useless. On the whole I prefer the Internet access in Bangor.
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Argh.

A while back after installing Jaguar I found that Manila Envelope no longer worked, or worked only intermittently. I upgraded to 10.2.1 last night, and I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but it worked again–for about two minutes. I posted two test posts successfully to the editing region, but now it’s not working at all.

Did Apple break something in 10.2? I’d love to know. One possibility is the new Core Foundation web services framework, which has probably been shimmed under the existing AppleScript SOAP support introduced in 10.1 (at least, that’s how I’d do it). Another possibility is that something broke in the CFString search and replace functionality that I use to do fancy text processing. Debugging it is really really painful.

At least I have wireless. I had forgotten about my Wayport membership. My flight takes off in another hour or so, and I can’t wait. It’ll be the first time all week I’ve had any sleep.

Off

In case I don’t get a chance to update later: I’m off to join Lisa in Calais, Maine for Kelley’s wedding. Have a good weekend.