Potluck Photos

Jennifer and I hosted a potluck for our weekly dinner club. Every Thursday we try a new restaurant in the South Bay, though occasionally we’ll get together at someone’s house and pick a theme for the meal. This week it was “India and the East”. Most everyone brought a curry of some sort, though we did have a few Chinese dishes as well. Everything was delicious. I’ve posted a few post-meal photos. Not pictured are Eric and Loi (not sure how that happened! It wasn’t intentional, I swear!).

Upcoming Concert Page

I’ve written a script to check for upcoming concerts in the Bay Area for artists that I like. The script runs nightly and compiles the data from the concert tracking site Pollstar. They have a similar auto-notification service, but I found the 99 artist and venue limit was too, well, limitting for my interests. There was also no way to see an overview of all the concerts for a given area. I originally wanted the output to be included in the concert sidebar, but decided that there was just too much information to fit per line (I guess I could reduce it to just artist and date). I’ve updated the concert sidebar menu to include a link to this stand-alone page instead.

I really kneed it

Last weekend a bunch of friends and I had a ski weekend at Kirkwood Ski Resort just south of Lake Tahoe. I’ve been there many times over the past few years and have decided it’s my favorite in the area so far, though I haven’t been to many on the north side of the lake yet. We stayed at the Caples Lake Resort, just over a mile from the entrance to the resort. This proved to be very convenient, especially in getting to the slopes just as they were opening and avoiding the late morning crowds coming from South Lake Tahoe.My friend Mike took pictures of this trip, as well as during our group trip in December. He’s made them available on the World Is Round travel site that he heads. Matt also took some pictures and has made them available on Snapfish. Continue reading →

Isn’t that sweet?

I’m not sure why, but over the past few years I’ve become more interested in food and nutrition (you might recall an earlier post I made questioning the need for genetically modified food). I don’t think it’s something that can be contributed to one factor… it’s something that has developed gradually due to external influences. Hanging out with vegetarian friends; discovering the True Food booth at a local concert; being introduced to Alton Brown’s Food Network show Good Eats; having books like Fast Food Nation, How To Read A French Fry, and What Einstein Told His Cook fall into my hands; and having a good friend be diagnosed with type II diabetes have all had an effect on me. This last item is the focus of today’s post. Continue reading →

The Other Donner Party

Jennifer and I just got back from a weekend in Truckee visiting our friends Rick and Kelly. Rick was a co-worker of mine back at Xetex. We have been trying to get together for several months now, especially since they bought a new house there in Truckee. As it turned out they were also celebrating their daughter Alexandra’s first birthday this weekend.We also did a little cross-country skiing while we were there, hitting the trails at the Tahoe Donner resort on Saturday afternoon and the Donner Memorial State Park on Sunday morning. The weather was gorgeous on Saturday, with sunny skies and temperatures in the high 50’s. Unfortunately, this led to icy conditions and fog Sunday morning around the lake.

Look At This Cutie

Well, she did it. She had been threatening to get a hair cut for many many months now and finally scheduled an appointment last weekend. Today, at 3:15pm, the long locks were left behind. Inspired in part by Paige Davis from TLC’s Trading Spaces show, Jennifer found a hairstyle she liked by uploading a picture of herself to the The Hairstyler website and produced a mock-up for the hairstylist to work from. I’ve posted before and after pictures for all to enjoy.

Site Updates

Well, the holidays have pretty much come and gone. I’ve posted a few more photo albums from the trip to Michigan, as well as a few photos I had forgotten I had taken at Rachel and Brian’s wedding rehearsal dinner back in October. I’m testing a new template that I put together using some of the new extensions in the BetterHTMLExport plug-in for iPhoto. Let me know what you think. I’ve also updated the Reading and Music sections based on the gifts I received over the holidays (thanks everyone!).

Electric Desktop

I’ve found a number of web sites over the past few years that have excellent pictures suitable for computer desktops (well, I like them). Here are some of my favorites so far:End EffectMandoluxTazl DesktopsThe desktop images at the following web sites can be hit or miss, but I’ve found a few good ones among the cruft:MacDesktopsMacMonkiesAnd this site has a number of desktops plus links to many other desktop sites:Rampant Mac