http://brahm.windeler.net/ Light. Fluffy. In your head. en-us 2009-12-26T01:53:20-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000323.html I promised myself I'd get to bed before 1 AM this evening. This week has been a string of late nights preparing presents and dishes for family functions. I guess it didn't happen. My wife went to bed early feeling under the weather. I started to get a little moody as I am apt to do from time to time. I decided to work through it at the keyboard. I also decided to record it. And now here I am posting it online. I've been improvising on the piano since high school. I was fortunate enough to attend one... Stories Brahm 2009-12-26T01:53:20-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000322.html Yes, second post in two days. I'm making a conscious effort to resume blogging. Twitter has made it much too easy to neglect this site. Inspired by daily photo postings by an old friend which often involve food, I decided to post a few photos of the holiday cookies Jennifer and I made this past week. The recipes come from the December issue of Sunset magazine. We chose these recipies because we figured they'd be unique and tasty. We made a double batch of the Honey Caramel Nut Bars to share in various cookie exchanges.... Photos Brahm 2009-12-23T00:53:05-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000321.html Recently Google started inserting Twitter posts into the search results for current "trending topics". Apparently they, along with Microsoft, paid a handsome sum to bring this "feature" to the masses. While I'm glad this has made Twitter profitable as I am a Twitter user myself, I find the animated display of tweets in the results very annoying. The last thing I want when trying to read through the results is an eye-catching distraction. So to take the matter into my own hands, I figured out a relatively easy way to remove the animated elements from the page. In Firefox, you... Internet Brahm 2009-12-21T16:55:47-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000320.html I was just looking on Amazon for a book about landscaping in Michigan and came across this passage in the first few pages of the "Look Inside" feature of Landscaping with Native Plants of Michigan Not only does a native plant depend on the organisms with which it has evolved, but the other organisms also depend on it, creating a true web of life. This natural system of checks and balances ensures that native plants seldom grow out of control in their natural habitats. I got to thinking, why is this important? Objectively speaking, nature finds a way of "adapting"... Thoughts Brahm 2009-04-18T21:11:28-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000319.html It's been 4 years now since my friend Justin passed away. Though time has tempered the magnitude of the loss, his absence still enters my consciousness on a regular basis. So much has changed since then... uprooting from CA to MI, home ownership, birth of a child, my oldest child entering the educational system, the deaths of two (in-law) grandparents... the list goes on. Each milestone and major event is a reminder of the passage of time. In idle moments when my mind wanders I often begin to dwell on my own mortality and whether I'm making the most of... Thoughts Brahm 2008-10-14T23:05:59-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000318.html In an effort to get myself interested in blogging again, I've made some tweaks to the design of this site. I stuck with the lonely cloud image in the header, as there's something about it that resonates with me, even nearly 5 years after I took it. I've also become a fan of blog designs that have a wallpaper-like background, so I modified one that I came across a few months ago on a tiling image creation site to fit what I had envisioned for this redesign. I've also fixed a few things that have bugging me: Styling of my... Brahm 2008-09-10T22:19:00-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000317.html Wow. Eight months have flown by since my last update. I think that's a record for me. Just wanted to stop in to say I'm still around. This summer has flown by. I was just getting into the swing of things, now our first child has started Kindergarten. Yikes! Back in May I participated in the Bayshore Half Marathon up in Traverse City, MI. The weather was beautiful and cool, which contributed to me setting a PR of 1:48:36. Hopefully I'll be able to beat that at my next half marathon. In June I had my hike up Half Dome... Brahm 2008-09-10T21:05:24-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000316.html Last week I was checking out Amazon's Mechanical Turk web site. For those of you not familiar with the site, it allows people to set up simple tasks called Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for others to do that are easy for people to do but too difficult to automate by computer. The people who perform the tasks are then paid a modest amount for their effort. I came across one HIT that I thought would interest some friends so I right-clicked the link to a preview of the HIT, chose Copy URL, then shared the link with the friends. After... Stories Brahm 2008-01-28T10:00:59-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000315.html Two years ago I participated in the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Team in Training program to complete my first marathon. I had a terrific experience, made many new friends and raised over $5000 for the organization from the overwhelming generosity of my friends and family. I received a brochure for their Hike for Discovery program in the mail and knew it was time to do some fund raising again. So this year I'd like to repeat the experience doing something I have a passion for in a place that I love: hiking in Yosemite National Park. I will be training,... Brahm 2008-01-25T12:32:25-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000314.html It's been a few years since I've posted anything related to the current presidency. A friend past along a link to this Harper's Magazine article regarding a painting by W.H.D. Koerner titled “A Charge to Keep” (1916) that George W Bush admires. A blurb from the article: Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the “Tolstoy syndrome.” That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him. This is the hallmark of a tragically bad executive. But in this case,... Brahm 2008-01-25T08:51:40-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000313.html After nearly 4 years I finally upgraded this blog from Movable Type 2.64 to 4.01a. I had been holding out on the upgrade because: The contents of the blog were stored in the original Berkeley DB format Version 4.x no longer supports the Berkeley DB format and instead uses MySQL by default Many changes to the preferences, templates, and plug-ins were made in that time I finally upgraded because I was getting a lot of comment spam on any entries that I left open for commenting (especially Justin's entry... spam scripts have no shame!) and I was getting sick of... Administravia Brahm 2008-01-21T00:15:30-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000312.html I realize I haven't been very good about blogging recently. As a stop gap measure, I've been using Twitter to capture fleeting notions over the past week or so. I had been holding off, as I felt the last thing I needed right now was another Internet distraction. But I have to admit, it's kinda fun. And I find I post to it fairly frequently because 1) the entries have to be short because they are limited to 160 characters and 2) there is little to prevent me from posting since I leave the site open in a browser tab... Thoughts Brahm 2008-01-19T00:38:39-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000311.html A few friends asked me what I've been listening to recently, so I thought I'd share my response in case you're looking for some new tunes. Wilco. Chicago band that makes music that's kinda like Southern rock meets Radiohead. I haven't heard their latest album but Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of my all time favorites. Calexico. Like their name sounds, the music is a mix of southern Cal/Mexican style folk rock. I like pretty much everything they've made. Beck - "Guero". This came out a few years ago but it's still high on my list. I haven't heard much... Stories Brahm 2008-01-18T23:27:06-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000310.html I ran the Big House Big Heart 5K this morning in Ann Arbor. Jennifer and the girls were gracious enough to join me by waking up before dawn and driving over an hour so I could run in an event that lasted less than 23 minutes (22:56 to be exact... a 7:21 minute/mile pace). The event itself was pretty fun. I met up with a friend and a few of her relatives before the race. As it turns out, the brother who was running with her was in a work group with me in one of my advanced math classes... Stories Brahm 2007-09-30T22:26:06-05:00 http://brahm.windeler.net/archives/000309.html I freaked out yesterday afternoon when Symantec Client Firewall started blasting me with messages indicating it was blocking outbound traffic coming from vmnat.exe and matching the destination ports associated with various Trojan horses. I run a number of VMware virtual machines and vmnat.exe is the program that manages a virtual network with NAT translation on the host environment. The situation is nice because I can have isolated environments for various activities, take snapshots of system state and roll back if necessary, clone a system, etc. At the time I was doing some stuff on the web in the virtual machine... Stories Brahm 2007-09-27T12:45:17-05:00