Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

I made a recent post on Legos but I've recently had an experience that could be described as adult legos. Plumbing. Yes, that mystery piece of infrastructure in our houses and apartments that deliver us water. Last week, my friend James replaced a good bit of old iron pipes with new copper pipes in his house. Measuring and cutting lengths of pipes, procuring and using the right connectors is very much like playing with Legos. The only difference is that your basement doesn't get damp if you screw up how you put things together.

I had never done anything like this before but it was great education in home improvement for me. What seemed like an overwelming task at the beginning of the day turned out to be pretty manageable by the end of the day. Granted we had a lot of people working on the project but most of us were plumbing newbies. I got to do most everything except for soldering. Its certainly not a project to take lightly since you don't want to screw up (since their are wet consqequences) and you have to finish the project before you can take a shower, but it won't scare me so much in the future.

During this project we spent a lot of time in Home Depot and Lowes. The ailses full of plumbing connectors is maddening. There are hundreds of parts with lots of subtle differences. Rarely are the parts in the right place and it can be a nightmare to find the exact part that you need. I feel sorry for the poor folks that have to stock and face these shelves. I liken this back to my stock boy job many years ago. The worse two things to stock and face were the Jell-O and pickles sections. It was virtually impossible to keep the shelves organized because there were seemingly endless variations of every product and no customer put things back in the same place. At least with the grocery items, the packages are clearly labeled so you know what you are getting. Not so with the plumbing products. Things are poorly labeled and you really need to examine each part closely to make sure it is the right size and has the right types of fittings. You end up spending way too much time at the store and not enough time at the job site.

Update: I got to do some soldering to help James fix a connection that wasn't properly sealed. I think I am now well along the way to Journeyman status. ;-)

Here is a tip that won't work for all of you but it is fine and dandy for me and my situation. Because my wife and I travel to my parents and her parents during the holidays, we don't exchange gifts until well after Christmas when we return to Cincinnati. There is no sense in lugging all those things in the car just to turn around and lug them back. What this means is that I can do most if not all of my shopping for her after Christmas which means gigantic sales. This of course won't work well for hard to find items or things that might run out but for a lot of things like clothes, books and grooming products this works wonders. I can't imagine paying full price for any of these things.

No not that 42. In this case I am refering to waist size. Its a month early for me to do another recap of the year's progress in weight loss but I thought I would take this time to note that for yesterday's New Years celebrations I actually wore a pair of size 36 pants. This is another big milestone for me. The 42 in the title refers to the pants that I found in the back of my closet. They are now on their way to be donated to worthy cause. As I continue to make progress, the 40s won't be far behind them.

I had a thought this morning:

Love is great in the good times. It is absolutely necessary in the hard times.

A few days ago I noticed something tragically wrong with my iPod Shuffle. When plugged into the USB slot in my computer it would get charged but the computer or iTunes wouldn't recognize that it was connected to the computer. It behaved exactly the same when I plugged it into my friend Jeff's computer so that put the spotlight on the shuffle being the issue.

This of course is mega frustrating since the device is useless unless you can connect it to your computer and copy audio to it. So with that said, I took it to my local Apple store's Genius Bar which is stocked with tech support people. The tech support guy took one look at the shuffle, tried it out in his computer and replaced it free of charge. That was excellent support and I was very pleased. A word to the wise, try to go early as possible to the Apple store for this type of service. I got there about 20 minutes after the store opened and I had to wait for a few people ahead of me.

Nick Spencer, one of my favorite Cincinnati bloggers and Over The Rhine business owners and activists has relaunched his blogging at the aforementioned location.

To Drink NYC's Water or not to drink NYC's water, that is the question. Excellent AskMefi post on the quality of the water of our largest city. I'm a generally anti-bottled water person but I was surprised to see that the question answers were so uniformally pro-tap water.

Did you know they sell pre-sharpened pencils?

The greater Hyde Park - Oakley just got its 3rd Indian resturant. India Hyde Park has just opened for business in the Hyde Park Plaza. It is located near the Blockbuster on the far side of the plaza. From a cursory look at the menu and the descriptions of the food, I would take a guess and say that this place is owned by the same different people who own Baba India in Oakley. Angela and I tried our typical order of Lamb Rogan Josh, Chicken Tikka Masala and Garlic Nan and noticed that the food has a bit more spice to it. Also the Chicken Tikka was darker than the Baba version (probably means that has less cream in it). Lastly, the garlic nan had tons and tons of garlic in it. Since we are garlic lovers, that was a real treat. Only time will tell if this is a long term strategy for the resturant or just due to it being new.

Angela and I have only gotten take out so far so I don't have any review of the decor and service but I hope to rectify that soon. Since they are new, here are their contact details: 513.871.2777 and 513.533.2777 (Fax). So far, India Hyde Park looks like a great addition to Cincinnati's stable of Indian resturants.

Update 2-March-2006: Thanks to the anonymous tipster...I forgot to update this entry after actuallly dining in the resturant. Its very clearly owned by different people.

Tim Bray's plea to not invent your own xml language should be read by anyone considering creating an xml vocabulary. This is espacially true if this format will be used outside of the scope of one application. By that I mean, the format ceases to be an implementation detail that could be changed to one that is an external entity that can only change along with the pain and penalty of having a formal change management process (and likely project). For most endeveavors, once this format gets beyond two or three uses, any change that you will make will be almost unbearable to the people using your format or at the very least will take forever to use the new format and will kick scream to the bitter end. Tim's point is that you don't have to change what you haven't created.

He goes on to further suggest that you should first look to utilize (or prehaps extend) one of the big, existing xml vocabularies: XHTML, DocBook, ODF, UBL, Atom before going down the path of new vocab creation. I couldn't agree more. I hope in the near future that Tim extends this great article with examples where people heeded his advice and reused these existing formats.

One of the lesser known features of the command shell of modern MS Windows (i.e. Win 95 and beyond) operating systems is the start command. In short this is a way to start an application with various options like Run Maximized or have it be a high priority task. Even lesser known is that you can have it "start" data files and they will load up the default application for that file type. Example:

start tea.jpg

Will launch the application that is associated with JPEGs. It was with this in mind that I ran into weird behavior today. I have a jpeg with a space in the filename. You would expect that the following would work:

start "the tea.jpg"

Except that it doesn't. What happens is a new command shell window opens up.

Frustrating isn't it.

PVRBlog has a short article on the new High Def TiVo. The article links to a video demonstration of the device and it looks very impressive. It has a laundry list of features that I would like to see in a new device including twin HD tuners, front mounted LCD screen to show what is being recorded, CABLECard slots, ability to add external storage and an updated remote control.

One hokey thing is that you won't be able to just hook up any External SATA hard drive to the box to get more storage. According to the presentor, you will need a hard disk that has some special TiVo software on it. They will be glad to sell you such a device that will be color matched to the rest of the device at what is sure to be a pretty premium. That's a shame but I bet that will be one of the first things that gets hacked.

I'm pretty reluctant to change from my first generation ReplayTV since it doesn't have a monthly fee, but it were to break at somepoint, this TiVo sounds like the way to go. I just hope they get it to market sooner rather than later.

The Shield made its return to TV last night for the first episode of the fifth and presumably last season of this very dark cop show. I've written about this show before and this episode doesn't disappoint. The show effortlessly blends the chaos of the police work as well as exposing the intimate details of all the characters. You can already see the triangles of conflict being drawn up and if you are like me, you are itching to see how all this conflict and drama plays out.

New to the cast this season is Forest Whitaker who plays a Internal Affairs officer who is tasked with bringing down Vic Mackey and his Strike Team. Forest does a fabulous job with the role. Full of bravado and arrogance when he needs to be and shamelessly vulnerable and open to people he is trying to con. He also has this nervous twitch about him that makes you think he just might be off his rocker. I don't want to spoil things for people who haven't the seen the show, so I will leave it at that.

Lastly, my advice still stands to watch this show straight thru on DVD. Go rent the disks and treat yourself to a huge sweeping epic.

One last thing, I still have much hate in my heart for FX's insistance on using an almost all Flash website. Man that is irritating.

You know with all the effort and vigor that the lawyers must go thru to make sure that proper trademark and copyright symbols are properly placed when discussing Java(tm), its a wonder why the VM binaries aren't named:
java(tm).exe
java(tm)

Both are legal filenames. ;-)

Its very good to see that Clarence Carter, singer of Strokin' has his own Wikipedia page.

There are reports that the Dubliner is closing. This is really sad. We've had a lot of fun there on their trivia nights. It was such a nice neighborhood place that made you feel like a regular. I'll be sad to see them go.

Orbitz is offering RSS for hotels, flights and travel plans. I've signed up for a few. This might be a great thing but I am hesitant to say its a great thing until I see if this results in a deluge of meaningless posts. Its also sad to see that there are no deals for flights leaving Cincinnati. This is probably a good indication of Delta's stranglehold on Cincinnati market.

(via LifeHacker)

As it was mentioned before, the Dubliner as we know it closing. Last night a group of my friends hit the last trivia night. As I predicted there was a huge crowd there to give Mike Kull a rousing send off. It was uplifting to see all the support but very sad at the same time. The place had a very authentic feel to it and that will surely be missed. I hope the new owners are able to maintain that same level of connectedness with their clientel.

One more thing, the closing of the Dubliner means that there are 42 people out there that are looking for work so please keep them in mind if you are an employer.

I have been using Subversion off and on now for a few months now and find it vastly superior to what CVS has to offer. What I didn't know until recently is what a fine client TortioiseSVN is. TortoiseSVN is a svn client that integrates as a Windows Shell Extension. Thus you can right click on files and directories in Windows Explorer and see all sorts of source code management features. I have seen various shell extensions for SCM for other products in the past and they all have been very underwelming. That is why I have stuck with Eclipse's svn client and the svn command line client that is available in cygwin. I had also been using the AnkhSVN client that integrates with Visual Studio.Net but I have found it to be very incomplete and buggy. This is what got me in trouble today. I was working in a virtual image where I didn't have any of my normal tools AnkhSVN was choking on a VS.Net project and I couldn't get it to check in new files that were part of a Web Reference. I didn't want to download and install Eclipse or Cygwin in this virtual instance so I decided to give TortoiseSVN a go. Wow was I surprised. Not only did it work first time with the files that AnkhSVN was choking on but it did it in a very polished way. The product looks very professionally done and has lots of menu items that are shortcuts to what would be long and arduous to type text commands. I'm sold on this product and will use it anytime I don't have good SVN integration in an IDE or editor.

Update: One cool thing that TortoiseSVN does that I have seen in other products is that it does spell checking for commit comments and will do type ahead for values that appear in the files that you are commiting. Very neat and useful feature.

Today I ran the longest distance of my life in one workout session. The route was a shade under 15 miles long and took us about 2.5 - 2.75 hours to complete. Needless to say, my legs are killing me and I expect them to be worse in the morning. Despite the cold weather and my aching joints, running outside with James and Jeff was a very pleasant experience. The motivation that they give me far outweighs the cold weather. Also, getting around on foot in the city really helps you experience the city's neighborhoods in a way that isn't possible by car. I highly recommend that everyone walk or run thru a neighborhood that you aren't familiar with. Just seeing the different architectual styles of buildings is interesting to experience.

As anyone who has looked at buying a house knows, one of the most important things to consider is location. Despite the fact that everyone knows this, why do maps on real estate websites suck so hard?

I got so fed up that I created a GreaseMonkey script just to improve the UI of the Cincinnati area realator, Sibcy Cline. As you can tell from the photo, this GM script adds a link on the right hand side of the screen that shows the current property in Google Maps. It is far superior to the mapping interface that Sibcy Cline provides so this should make the people of Cincinnati very happy.

Here is it is: GMaps for SibcyCline.com. Enjoy.

Update 30-Jan-2006: I fixed the link to the script. No one complained about this so I figure no one out there in the world cares about this script except for me.

Cincinnati Tourist Blog aims to document tourist attracts here in the Queen City. So far only 4 posts but this is a worthwhile endevor so I wish them well.

I like tv. I really do. I've written a lot of entries on the subject. However, I am no where near obsessive enough to create a Google Map of the world of 24. Not only are the areas where events are supposed to take plus shown, but the actual filming locations for some of the scenes are also marked.

You must see this Google search performed in the US and from China. The results speak for themselves.

So, just like last weekend, James, Jeff and I ran 15 miles. This time we more closely followed the Flying Pig Marathon course. With less than 100 days before the race, getting familiar with the course is something I am going to need.

Up until this point in our training, we have been blessed by having good weather. The mild winter certainly helped and I don't think we have trained in the rain...until today. Yes, today was my first time out running in the rain. What a miserable experience. Thankfully, the pockets of rain were very short and the warm weather meant we weren't too bogged down in layers.

One last thing, while running in Eden Park today, I saw something I had never seen before and shame on me. The overlook at twin lake was very impressive. The panaramic vista of the river valley below was very pretty. I've been living on a few miles away from this for years now and I didn't even know it was there. Running has certainly opened my eyes to seeing the neighborhoods and buildings in a whole new light. You can't really apreciate them as you whiz by them in your car. I'd recommend to everyone to get out and walk or run in a place that you aren't too familiar with. It will be a good experience for you.

Here is a fabulous recipe for a very easy and very tasty dish of my own creation. I present to you, Coconut Apricot Chicken.

Cook your chicken breasts as you normally do.

Next, toast some coconut so that it picks up a bit of color. You will want about 3 teaspoons of coconut per breast. Watch this carefully as coconut goes from toasted to toast in a short period of time.

Next thinly slice some green onions. Once again, you will want about 3 teaspoons per breast.

Lastly, use a spoon or fork to mash up some apricot preserves. This will turn the preserves into something more like a sauce.

To serve the dish, cover the breasts with the green onions and coconut and serve the apricot sauce on the side.

You should definitely try to make each mouthful contain a bit of the chicken, the onion, the coconut and the sauce. It is amazing how well those flavors go together.