Objects in the Mirror...Wait.. What Mirror?

Ok, I have a lot of news to report!

First and foremost, I received actual e-mail from N. Todd. Wow. That may surpass my meeting Itzhak Perlman when I was 6.

A couple of days ago, I got e-mail from PW, at Vosges, who read my post about their new line of bacon chocolate, and is sending me a free sample! That's is very exciting, indeed. I will report as soon as I taste it, or perhaps even while I'm tasting it.


Last night I went to a new restaurant, Piazza Italia, in Brightleaf Square. I believe it's where the old CD store, Millenium Music, used to be. One of fine characteristics of the restaurant is that it's connected to their gelato store. The restaurant is also huge and nicely decorated. I ordered Mezzaluna Al Zafferano, which was effectively ravioli filled with shrimp and salmon mousse in a creamy saffron sauce. It was delicious. For dessert, we shared a serving of gelato with three flavors: green apple, pineapple and kiwi. The pineapple and the kiwi were the best and had the strongest flavors. The prices seemed reasonable and I look forward to going there again. Somehow I had completely missed that they have a spinach salad with "large chunks of lobster sautteed in a warm buttery garlic sauce" for only $11.


Today, when I left work, I was startled to see that my parking tag had fallen off. It took me several seconds to notice that my entire rear view mirror was also no longer there! My van has really good side mirrors and I didn't really miss it until I passed a bicyclist on 751 and looked up to see if I could see him him behind me. Oops.. Well, I didn't hear anything unusual.

Red Bellied Food Snob and the Queen

I've finally started working on copying over photos from floppies, which I took with my old Sony Mavica. It's a 1.1 megapixel camera and is comparatively gigantic, but it has a great lens, with 8X optical zoom. So, I'm finding some great, albeit comparatively low resolution images. The last time I tried copying any of these, I was getting lots of bad sector errors, but I haven't run into too many problems so far using an IBM floppy reader. Most of the ones I've been copying are from January of 2000, when we had the big snow, which was approximately 30 inches in Hillsborough. I took so many pictures of birds, that it's almost ridiculous. Here's a beautiful example of what was probably one of the relatives of my adoring fan, the obnoxious head-banging red bellied woodpecker:

Last night, after guitar practice, we went to Tripps. Regular readers will know that I am a food snob. I fail to understand why people go to chain restaurants, although, as JJ did point out, they have good parking. To be fair, my meal, salmon with lobster cream sauce with broccoli, cauliflower and mashed potatoes, was good. They weren't generous with the sauce, which is both good and bad, depending on whether one is feeling health conscious. The entree, with a glass of fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, cost $21 and change. For that price, I hope to have something that's better than "good". As always, the company was the important thing, so I definitely had a great time.

The night before last, I saw The Queen. I hadn't realized how much it focused on Diana's death. It was interesting watching a movie that was about a time and subject that I recall so well. It brought back memories of second semester calculus, since that's what I was taking at the time and our instructor was from Britain. Helen Mirren, who I'd watched previously in Prime Suspect episodes, did an excellent job portraying Queen Elizabeth, but I have to wonder whether the whole royal family is really as unpleasant as they seemed in the movie. It's been about twenty years since I read a biography of Elizabeth and her sister, so I don't remember much, but it seemed almost as if both the book and the movie were about two completely different people.

Now I'm craving grapefruit juice.

Pirates III and Bacon Chocolate

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean III last night. It still wasn't as good as the first one, but it was much better than the second one. It still needs major editing. After two hours, I was wishing it would end. One interesting aspect is that I think Keith Richards looks less creepy as a pirate than he does normally.

Some of you will remember when I blogged about the bacon ice cream at Tayst, in Nashville. It was one of those "I am not making this up" blog posts. Thanks to the Amazon Daily blog, I discovered that Vosges is now making a bacon chocolate bar. Intriguing!

3 Column Layout

I finally added a third column to the blog's layout template. It seems to look okay in both Firefox and IE, but it must not be quite right, because the Blogger tool for adding Page Elements doesn't seem to like it at all. You can still add elements and, but elements in the new right column produce these weird gray bars across the window, making it hard to see the elements in the left column. As long as it continues to work ok, I won't worry about it too much. It's fun working on this stuff, because I still haven't taken the time to figure out what I'm doing. I used a little bit of code from a Blogcrowds template, but quickly realized that it had all kinds of things that I didn't want. Fortunately, what little I selected and tinkered with seemed to mostly do the trick.

Easy Rider

I saw the movie, Easy Rider, last night. It's one that I've been meaning to see for a really long time. I'd always heard of it described as a movie about motorcycle riding with an awesome soundtrack and a sad ending. Surprisingly, I hadn't ever heard of it as a movie that reflects poorly on the South. It certainly does. My question is, have things really changed that much since 1969? Has intolerance for long-haired hippies just been replaced by fears of Middle Eastern looking men and illegal immigrants? Or has this xenophobia just spread to the rest of the country as well?


I also saw this beautiful bike in downtown Hillsborough last night. My Treo didn't really do it justice, but I accidently left my Canon at home.

DurHamFest 2007

I would say that that the Durham FM Association hamfest was a success! We had two to three hundred attendees and I had a great time visiting with friends, one of whom I hadn't seen in a long time. I sold thirty brownies and coconut macaroons, at $1 each, all donated to the club. Best of all, I have 16 left. It was held at the Little River Community Complex, in Bahama. It seemed like a great site and the surrounding area was quite pretty. This is the club's infamous Mobile Communications Unit (also known as a bread truck with ham radios inside). Notice the nice trees and green stuff behind it. After working hard to get ready last night and all the festivities today, most of us are pretty tired now that it's over.

Hamfest and Free Cake

Well, if only one fifth of a person attends due to reading this in my blog, it will be worth it:
This Saturday is the Nth Annual Durham FM Association Hamfest, which will be held in the vicinity of Bahama this year. It's a great opportunity to wander around, talk to friends , look at all the random electronic parts, feel nostalgic while looking at old computers and stock up on reasonably priced LED flashlights. You will also be able to buy coconut macaroons and brownies. Yes, I'll be spending my Friday evening baking again this year. If you are interested in going and you can't figure out how to get there based on the information in the link, let me know and I will be happy to confuse you further.

I have been incredibly busy the last couple of days. GM went to a Math-Biology conference at Duke and stayed in the Purple Guest Room. We went out to dinner with friends numerous times, which required lots of spamming as the plans evolved. Tuesday night we played a crazy game that GM invented. Just to give you an idea, RN said that people who overheard us in the Barnes'N'Noble where we were playing probably thought we were from an insane asylum.

In other earthshaking news, Nantucket Cafe & Grill no longer has chicken pot pie on the menu. This is a horrific tragedy and I need to write to them. I wasn't angered as greatly as I could have been because they had a soft shell crab special and they have decided to offer free giant pieces of cake (any non-cheesecake cake on their cake menu) with each entree, Monday through Thursday. Their sauteed soft shell crabs are excellent, too.

Tonight I went to a small party at SY's new house and it was unbelievably pleasant having dinner on her porch while listening to all the birds sing and talking with my friends. The weather and the conversation couldn't have been better.

The other night Venus and the moon were positioned such that they were right night to each other. It was worth going all the way to the end my driveway to get a clear view. I thought that all my photos were blurry, but they are actually quite nice, so I'm very pleased. It still doesn't compare to actually seeing it, though.

Rant and Skeedaddle

A couple of days ago, I saw the movie Pan's Lambrynth. It's basically a Spanish film about how a girl who loves fairy tales experiences one for herself. I thought it was fascinating that this tale, which on the surface would be appropriate for children, was depicted with a great deal of fairly gruesome violence. It's done in such a way that makes one feel strongly against one of the characters, but I'm guessing that it wouldn't have taken much to make it suitable for a wider audience and retain much of that character development. On the other hand, I'm strongly against sanitizing everything for children. I think it's important for kids to be aware that, yes, there are people who torture others. They need to know that this is something that's condoned by many, including our government. Despicable people are unfortunately not rare. Parents who are expecting their children to learn such things on their own, when they are adults, are endangering the lives of their children.

Last night we went to Caffe Driade, in Chapel Hill, to see Hugh and Anastasia (also known as HC and AM) play in their band, Skeedaddle. I'm using their actual names because they are now famous, having appeared on a small stage. They were probably famous in Charlottesville, too, but I didn't know them then. It was a lot of fun. They and their band members are so very talented and can play an impressive array of instruments. Caffe Driade has great coffee, too. We were worried that the concert would get rained out, but we managed to only hit rain on the way home.

Oops. Never Again.

I am currently annoyed with myself for making a stupid mistake. Last Wednesday, I decided to try taking a picture of my soft shell crabs at ACME Food & Beverage Co. using the lowest resolution, to see if by any chance it took better pictures in low light. It didn't. I knew there wasn't much of a chance that it would make a difference, but I thought I would give it a try anyway. Unfortunately, I forgot to switch it back and I've taken many pictures since then. My only consolation is that these don't take long to upload, but it's still sad.


This frog was peeking next to my front door the night I changed the setting.



This cute little bird kept me company while I was eating lunch (the leftover soft shell crabs) last Thursday.


I took some nice spring campus shots on the way back to the office after lunch that day.


On Saturday, this squirrel was acting bizarrely by hanging off the side of the deck for minutes at a time while kind of vibrating.


Sunday was graduation. I only attended the Computer Science Department's ceremony, as usual. This is actually a shot from my Treo, because it was more interesting than what I took with my camera.


Finally, is a photo of verbena bonariensis, which I took when I got home from work today. This is when I noticed that I could take over 1500 more pictures before running out of memory. Oops.

Some of My Favorite Music

I was practicing the guitar this evening and I often like to look for YouTube videos of songs that I'm learning. I started out looking for more Creedence Clearwater Revival and ended up finding a 1963 recording of Joan Baez playing Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind, which I am also learning.



Here are links to several other links to videos of Joan Baez performing favorite songs of mine that I hope to learn in the future:

• Sweet Sir Galahad
  
• God On Our Side
  
• Farewell Angelina (partial)
  

No Ice, Thanks

Yesterday I asked for another blogger to make his blog's banner image be a link back to his blog, to make it easy to get back if viewing a single post. I just noticed that my blog doesn't work like that. Well, it does now, but it didn't a few minutes ago. It's very simple. I don't read my blog, so it doesn't have to meet my usability expectations. Ok, so that's not a very good excuse.

Would I read my blog if I weren't the author? I'm sure I would if I knew me, but probably not if I didn't. I rarely read the blogs of complete strangers on a regular basis, unless they have some connection to someone I know (particularly a family member) or have a local theme. If none of the above are true, they have to have lots of pictures of cats, dogs, have a large progressive following or write about gadgets. If I've heard them speak in person, then I don't consider them to be complete strangers, I usually sit on the front row, after all. So, if I spoke, heard myself, and were a good speaker, then I'm sure I would read my blog.

Last night I saw Alice's Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie. It had been highly recommended by LA and the song had been referenced many times by JJ, so I thought it was time to see it. I guess I would describe it as tangential, which coming from me, of course, is a compliment. It's definitely worth seeing.

Normally on this day and at this time, I would be on Duke's East Campus for the graduation reception on the East Duke Lawn. We, however, are having a hail storm right now and I like only so much ice in my punch.

Fun with Yeast

I spent most of the weekend cleaning and preparing to have a bunch of friends over on Sunday night. I made two pizzas: one bacon, onion and tomato sauce and one shrimp, bacon and pesto. The dough rose beautifully, unlike my recent batches of roll dough. We also had a salad with spinach, lettuce, strawberries, walnuts, grapes and the Honey Asian Citrus dressing. I made brownies, too.

It was great to do some cooking again, because it's something I really enjoy. As usual, my enjoyment of a particular activity is inversely proportional to the time I spend on it, perhaps with the exception of blogging.

The important thing is that I had a really good time with my friends. We played Pictionary, which I probably hadn't played in 15 years or so. I think it was even more fun than I'd remembered. It was also great to have HS over, who turned out to be an excellent cooking companion.

Monday night, my parents and I watched Paradise Now. That was a very interesting, but sad, film about two Palestinian suicide bombers. It seemed to fit well with what I could remember having learned in Dr. Miller's historical terrorism course at Duke. I had trouble with the subtitles, because the bottom half of the last line always got chopped off. There is probably some way to move them around or move the image on the screen, but I wasn't able to figure it out in the length of time that one can fool with such things before the rest of the audience starts to become restless.

Tonight we celebrated Mother's Day. In the Triangle, Mother's Day always coincides with graduation at at least two of the local universities. At ACME Food & Beverage Co., they decided to make up for this by offering free dessert for mothers tonight instead. So, I took my parents out to eat, which was a nice mid-week treat. I don't have any pictures of the food, since it's too dark for my new phone, but take a look at this enormous portion of food that I got for lunch today at the Refectory.

It Pays to Give Something Another Chance Or Maybe Five

Friday night, after guitar practice, we went to Vin Rouge again, because 2/3 of us were craving steaks. In the past, that's been a bit of a pain, because most of their handicapped parking sign had disappeared and you had to use your imagination when looking for paint indicating where parking was prohibited next to the actual space. They've always had to look for someone in the restaurant or the one next door to ask the people parked there to move.

Well, look at the glorious work that they've done! That blindingly white area is the new sign, which appears to also be quite reflective. JJ and EB were hiding on the other side of my van.

My duck confit salad was exquisite.

Metaverse Misgivings

Yesterday, I went to the TRI-IT conference, hosted by UNC-Greensboro. For some reason, driving to Greensboro always seems like I'm traveling half-way across the world, despite the fact that it's approximately the same distance to Raleigh, which seems comparatively close. I think this is partially because you have to go through the splitting of I-40 and I-85 and I have this fear that I'm going to end up on the wrong one. It could also just be that I don't go there very often and it's not as familiar to me.

TRI-IT is an organization of instructional technology staff members at universities in central North Carolina. We meet approximately once a semester and it was started at Duke several years ago. It's a nice community of people who are facing many of the same challenges.

One of the highlights was a keynote on Second Life. In many ways, Second Life is cool. The graphics are nifty and you get to fly around. I, however, am still not very excited about the whole thing. I think the 3 dimensional models of buildings and trees are neat, but the whole avatar thing turns me off. I had a similar reaction to MUDs 15 years ago. It seems as if some of these virtual worlds add additional barriers to tasks that are more easily addressed by "standalone" applications. On the other hand, while I have seen an hour long demo now, I don't want to criticize it too much without having actually tried it myself.

New Treo, Showcase and an Anniversary

I was planning to spend the majority of this post whining about the quality of the lens on my new Treo 700p cell phone. Unfortunately, I am going to have to find something else to write about. I just transferred the photos to my laptop and even the ones that I thought were just horribly dark don't look nearly as bad after running them through Picasa's "I'm Feeling Lucky" filter. I had even been wondering if I needed to carry around my old Treo 650, just to use the camera, which I absolutely did not want to do. I don't think that will be necessary.

Over all, I am very pleased with the new phone. Since it's on Verizon's network, I get a better signal at home and can actually use it at the office. That is marvelous. I have missed so many calls because people assumed that I had some way of finding out that I had a message. It's also just nice to be able to make calls wherever I am, particularly in an emergency. I usually couldn't even get a signal outside in the parking lot most of the time.

Thanks to Verizon's EV-DO broadbandesque network, I can use my the browser on the phone much more easily. It is extremely fast and makes everything much more practical. It's particularly impressive when using the Google Maps client on the phone. Recently, the mobile version of Google Reader has been my favorite app. I've been using TreoTwit in order to avoid per message SMS charges.

Thursday was CIT's 7th Annual Instructional Technology Showcase and it was definitely a success. I worked at the registration desk early in the morning. I got to attend Malcolm Brown's keynote, the lunch and the poster-session. Lunch was catered by the Refectory and I must say that their hummus wraps are great. All of the door prizes that I gathered from our sponsors now have happy homes. I also got to see RN and KD, which was cool.

We had worried about Dr. Brown's arrival, because his original plane had engine trouble, as was depicted in a dramatic collaborative 2D reenactment by HC and SM, drawn on the glass in between their cubes.

After the Showcase, we had out traditional drinking party. This year we went to Satisfaction's and I tried their selection of virgin daiquiris. First, I had a lime one, which was very sour and good and was served in a wine glass. Various other people recommended their strawberry daiquiris, so I tried a virgin strawberry one. That was served an overflowing 16 oz. cup! By that time I'd also eaten several onion rings, cheese sticks, chips, wings and one jalapeno popper, so that was a little much.

Yesterday, at lunch time, a bunch of us went to the Duke Farmer's Market. We ate leftover Showcase wraps while listening to HC play Old Time music with his buddies. The weather was perfect for it. LA and I bought things for our mothers' birthdays.

Today, my mom and I went to the Flying Fish for lunch and we stopped by Callaway Jewelry afterwards. I visited FIFO in the afternoon and followed him around, taking pictures with the Treo 700p. We celebrated her birthday at ACME Food & Beverage Co., of course. What we should have also been celebrating is the fact that today is the first anniversary of the appearance of my doofus woodpecker who has been slamming his head into my windows for the past year. He was at it bright and early this morning. It's so nice to be loved.

Remember the Milk

Thanks to a couple of articles on Lifehacker about why it's better to keep a to-do list using pen and paper, I read about a new (to me) productivity / to-do list web application called Remember the Milk. Aside from having a cute name, it meets a lot of the requirements that I've been looking for in such an application. You can access it from the web application, your Google Personalized Homepage or Netvibes page, or from a mobile phone. It has tons of features, but one of my favorites is fairly mundane but rare from what I've seen: you can have repeating entries. I, for example, water my orchid plants once a week and I would like to be reminded rather than relying on a memory that only seems to kick in right as I'm getting into bed. Remember the Milk can do that for me, even to the point of sending my phone a text message.

Now if only it could actually water them.

La Forchetta

I keep getting Zogby polls about flatware. It's very frustrating, because there aren't any write-in comments where I can complain about the Bush administration. No, I don't know what company makes those forks you're showing me and until I have the opportunity to stick the tines in a neo-con's hand, I won't need to know where to send my letter of appreciation.

Tonight I went to Cinelli's for dinner and had linguine with clam sauce, substituting rigatoni for the linguine. Unfortunately, the pasta way more al dente than I like, which is better than the alternative, but a little too chewy. Otherwise it was good. We also shared garlic bread, which was great.

Afterwards, we went to see the Ciompi Quartet in the Nelson Music Room. While I'd seen the quartet perform a couple of times in the Levine Science Research Center, I'd never been to a concert there. When I was a student, the second floor of the East Duke building was completely inaccessible and that actually became quite controversial, leading them to cancel all concerts there for a time. Not too long after I graduated, they completed the Richard White Building, next door, which provides access via a catwalk. In any case, it's a very nice venue for music. There was a reception downstairs after the performance, which is apparently traditional for the last Ciompi Quartet concert of the season.

Down on the Corner, Out in the Cathedral

For today's Visualization Forum, we had an excellent talk by Caroline Bruzelius on her course on cathedral building. Basically, each of her students designs a cathedral and writes fake historical documents to go with it. She introduced us to two of her students, one of whom drew the architectural drawings in AutoCAD and the other who rendered his drawings in 3D, using Maya. Both projects were stunning and the ultimate goal of the second project was to convert it into a format suitable for use in the DiVE, so it will be possible to actually walk through his cathedral. I am unusually envious of students who are able to take the course, because it sounds like a lot of fun. I also got to see one of my former professors, Dr. Hans van Miegroet.

Guitar practice was particularly fun tonight, because we spent a lot of time on Down on the Corner. In between verses, there's a base line, which is really fun to play. This is the first time I've played one, so it's tricky for me.


JJ, JA and I went out for sushi afterwards. Cafe Zen had particularly good yellowtail and mackerel tonight. The photo shows most of our order, except for two rolls.

Splitting Twitter and Veggies

Regular readers of this blog may have observed that I write about the (hopefully) not so distant past and never write about what I'm planning to do in the future. At work, we've been using Twitter to let each other know where we are. I started wondering whether I want random strangers to know when I'm not at home or I'm driving home. Most likely, it wouldn't matter if they did, but I've decided to change the username of that account and only send updates to "friends". If I actually know you, you are welcome to add me on http://twitter.com/lenoreramm If you don't, you can still get my public updates from http://twitter.com/eronel I don't know what I'll be using it for, though, other than plugs for blog updates and random bursts of enthusiasm, but we'll see.

In other news, we got our first share of vegetables from Elysian Farm yesterday. Now we've had two delicious dinners with asparagus, radish, spinach and green garlic. I've had two pretty heavy lunches (Searle Center yesterday and the Refectory today), so that's been particularly nice.

Fangirl Favors Fancy Flashlight

Last night, at Ted's talk, I bought four $1 raffle tickets for various toys donated by his company, Lucasarts. I put my personal e-mail address on the tickets, so I was mildly disappointed when I didn't hear anything last night. Well, this morning, I had e-mail from SR, at work! I won the grand prize, the Obi-wan Kenobi Lightsaber! Wow! I thought I'd be lucky if I won an Artoo-Potatoo. If you grew up watching the movies, playing with the action figures, and listening to the soundtracks over and over, then you will understand me when I say how awesome it will be to wave this overgrown flashlight around for hours on end. The sound effects are great and turning it on and off is too cool.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we've had quite a bit of wind. The power was off at my house for approximately 24 hours. Unfortunately, this branch is still precariously balanced in one of my neighbor's trees, along my property.

Could Be In the Dark

The power has been out at my house and for much of this area all day long and there's no sign that it will come back on any time soon. It's been extremely windy here and there are trees down all over the place. I'm really appreciating my generator right now. After having endured literal weeks without power after hurricane Fran and the ice storm a few years back, I don't think I'll be taking it for granted for a while.

At lunchtime CIT had a fun brown bag celebration where we played games the whole time. HC, SE, SM and I played SET, which was challenging and fun. You can play on-line, but it's probably more fun playing in person. The same company also makes Quiddler, which I'd played before and didn't like as much. I was, however, in the mood to play hearts at the time. Before I joined CIT, they used to have game lunches about once a month, so I was happy to finally participate in one.

After work, I went to an ACM talk given by Ted Hung. He was a computer science major, who graduated just two years after I did. It was great to see him again and learn about what life is like as a game programmer. Going to an ACM meeting again was fun. It was definitely a mixture of nostalgia combined with the pleasure of not having to preside over the meetings anymore.

No Child Left Behind

Today was fun and hectic. Not long after I got to work, I had to go to an interview. Then I drove a bunch of co-workers to the American Tobacco Campus for a software presentation and a brown bag meeting. The excitement began when we left and SM was missing! We waited quite a while and I called various labs trying to get cell phone numbers. We finally gave up and decided that he must have gotten a ride with someone else. When we got back to the office, he still wasn't there. I was really beginning to worry, but it turned out that he and LA had gone to Cafe Zen for lunch. Next time I drive a van full of children somewhere, I'm going to make them all hold hands for the whole trip, so no one gets left behind.

Oh, and Mike Nifong walked by me while I was making those frantic phone calls from the parking garage.

Guitar practice was fun. Playing in the spring is so pleasant, because we get to sit out on the front porch. A lot of people walk along West Club Blvd, so sometimes that attracts attention, but not tonight. It was chilly and I was very hungry, so I was eager to go to dinner. We went to Red Robin, which I'd never been to before. It was very crowded, the service was pretty bad and it was very hard to hear. The food, however, was pretty good. I had fish and chips, which isn't the sort of thing one usually orders at a burger joint, but they did a nice job. Unfortunately, they must have forgotten my order and didn't give it to me until everyone else had almost finished, but JA spoke up and they took the entire price off my bill. I'm afraid I was too hungry to photograph the plate when it finally arrived.

My shipment of guitar picks arrived today and I'm very pleased. All of them have non-slip grips, so I shouldn't have any more problems with their rotating in my fingers in the middle of a song. I also now finally a thumb pick that won't twist off my thumb while I'm playing. It's a "bumblebee" pick, so it's even yellow.

The Price of Free Speech

I do have good news. I figured out why my Treo 650 was bombarding me with messages whenever I turned off bluetooth. Apparently the keyboard application (or any third party connecting application) will keep trying to access bluetooth unless that is also disconnected. So, once I made sure the keyboard application was turned off, it stopped asking me if I wanted to turn bluetooth back on. As it may now be obvious, I hadn't tried out bluetooth at all until I got the keyboard.

On Tuesday I went to a Durham FM Association meeting and we had an excellent speaker, Carlo Tomasi, who talked about his work with Canesta on the laser virtual projection keyboards and 3D sensors. I'd been admiring the keyboards on ThinkGeek for some time, so it was neat to see one in person and learn more about the technology.

Last night, I went to the Duke Symphony Orchestra concert, which was great. I didn't think my dad was going to be able to go with me, but he decided he would rather do that than grade midterms. We went to Taverna Nikos beforehand and I seem to be in another trout rut. My last one lasted over a year, but we were eating there a lot more often at that point.

Today, AE had the day off, so she came over to campus and we ate at the Refectory for lunch. It was such a beautiful day and it was delightful to eat outside. We had "Sopa du Soya", which is the faux chicken version of my favorite Mexican casserole dish. I like the chicken better, but whatever soy product they were using was quite good.

I'm going to do something unusual for this blog and weigh in on the Don Imus debate. I had actually didn't even know who he was until this controversy arose, so obviously this was a good publicity move. I've read various articles that say that it was his first amendment right to say what he did and therefore he shouldn't have been fired. That just doesn't follow at all. The constitutional right only applies to the legality of what he said, which I don't believe is being disputed. Don Imus, as an employee of a business, represented that business. If a business believes that it is not profitable to have him represent them, then it is that business's right to fire him. I am almost positive that if it had been financially advantageous to keep him, then they would have. Then that would suggest that advertisers thought that the majority of their consumers felt that this was acceptable behavior. If that were the case, then we would have a much larger problem on our hands than just one announcer.

Misbehaving Mobile Device

My beloved Treo 650 has been frustrating me. Yesterday afternoon, while I was watching a movie, Immortal Beloved, it beeped, indicating that its battery was low and needed charging. I dashed off to my bedroom and plugged it in. This morning, before I got up, it beeped again, so I charged it while I was in the shower. Note that it never did this before yesterday.

I decided to try turning off bluetooth, since I enabled it a few weeks ago for my bluetooth keyboard. Well, apparently if bluetooth has been on, then it doesn't like being turned off. There could be a way to turn it off for longer periods of time, but it kept popping up messages saying, "Do you know bluetooth is turned off? Do you? Do you? Feed me."

I eventually just ignored it. Well, eventually it got to the point that I could neither cancel the message nor re-enable bluetooth. It just kept flashing the message over and over. This afternoon I just decided to take out the battery. Then it started rebooting itself, over and over. It just wasn't my day.

I ended up having to do a hard reset and now I think it's fine. Fortunately, I sync it with my laptop fairly often, to get all those food pics off of there, so I have the meeting minutes that I took last Wednesday. I don't think I lost much, really. I guess I just lost yet another picture of an ACME lemon pudding cake from last night and some really nice Shade Tree Coffee latte art from Saturday. I think I'll live.

I think my phone has been listening to my talking about ditching Sprint and upgrading to a newer model on Verizon.

Spring Beauty and an Ant Experiment

I'm conducting an experiment. Can and will teeny ants get out of my new Black & Decker hand vacuum? It's shaped quite differently, so it's possible that they can't. They easily got out of my previous one, but spiders were too lazy. I had a bag of birdseed in the garage that was full of ants and they seem to have decided to visit my less than immaculate kitchen floor. I guess I haven't been swiffering often enough. Given the fact that I can't remember the last time I swiffered might also be some indication as well.

It feels as if I've been neglecting my blog, but I guess it really hasn't been that long since I posted. I spent much of the end of last week and the weekend working with SE and SM on an internal CIT April Fool's newsletter. That was just a tremendous amount of fun and I have even more of an appreciation for GoogleDocs, because it handled three people's working on the same document beautifully. I also had to work on DFMA minutes and other secretarial duties, which were not nearly as enjoyable.

Speaking of beautiful things. The spring flowers around here have been stunning. Even more daffodils have bloomed in my yard, thanks again to a regular reader and our neighbor/landscaper. Other flowers bloomed about a week early, so there was much more of an overlap of the redbuds, dogwoods and wisteria. My commute, primarily on Highway 70, has just been bursting with light purple and white. Since we've had a decent amount of rain, just about every dogwood is gorgeous and full of blooms. Unfortunately, a cold front is coming through tonight and, if the weather people are correct, I'm going to have to appreciate brown blossoms instead. I hope they're wrong. Many of the trees have their leaves out, too, and I'm afraid they're going to get zapped.

Recently, I've had lots of good dinners and lunches with parents and friends: DS, AE, NP and JH (serendipitous). In the evenings, I've been busy working on collecting gift certificates to use as CIT Showcase door prizes. so I've been going out to eat even more than usual. Since I want to finish this post and still get some sleep tonight, I'm not going to go into detail this time.

What else? I met two lovely cats last night. I really miss being around cats. I was photographed by the paparazzi yesterday. I went to the Duke Computer Science picnic on Saturday and had a good time.

We have a lot of pollen here and it's everywhere. We breathe it, live it and photograph it. Fortunately, I'm not terribly allergic to most of it, so I think it can be pretty.


Well, it looks as if I may have solved my ant problem.

Familial Feasts and French Foyers

Thursday night, my dad and I went to see Murray Parahia in Page Auditorium, at Duke. The pianist's concert consisted exclusively of works by Beethoven, Bach, Schumann and Chopin. I enjoyed it a great deal. I need to get more recordings of Beethoven piano sonatas, because I believe I only have three of them.

Friday, I went to the Visualization Forum and saw OLA give a talk on visualizing code. That was awesome. It was like being in college again, except I got to eat while I was listening. He is just hilarious and I think the audience really had a good time.

My brother, KR, and DC arrived late that night, but not long after they got there, KR started telling me about the Fujitsu P1610 and the OQO model 02. They are adorable. I need one of each. Not really. I started thinking of various fanciful scenarios of ditching my treo and my current laptop and dreaming of having a real itty-bitty computer with me at all times and a real phone that you can actually hear people talk on. The warranty on the laptop that I use is about to expire and I need to switch cell phone carriers, so it's not completely crazy.

On Saturday, my dad and I made crepe pancakes and DC became thoroughly engrossed in my Geomag collection. Early that evening, we went to A&M Grill for dinner. I still think the food there is just ok at best, but KR wanted to show off a representation of North Carolina barbecue. The sauce and the cole slaw are just too sour for my taste. I tried a spoonful of their brunswick stew and I'll probably have that next time, if I remember.

Sunday, we went to Eastern Lights and it was almost as if having KR along was like bringing a celebrity. When a family has been going to an incarnation of the same restaurant for 25 years, the owners and staff are very happy when a kid comes home to visit. KR wanted to show off Duke's campus to DC. I figured that it made sense to check out the new French Family Science Center while we were there. It's pretty impressive and it makes the Levine Science Research Center look old and boring in comparison. I guess that's the result I would expect from a donation from the Gates Foundation.


That night, we went to ACME Food & Beverage Co., which lived up to its superbness. I had another duck confit empanada and shared another serving of warm lemon pudding cake with raspberry sauce. I could eat warm lemon pudding cake every single day for years.

Monday, we went to the Original Q-Shack and it was hard seeing the Thai Cafe from across the street, just wishing I could have some Thai Cafe baskets and some Thai Iced Tea. I had a baked potato with "all the fixins". With butter, sour cream, chives and bacon, it's really good but way too greasy compared to what I'm used to eating these days. I like their hushpuppies. I tried their jalapeño deviled eggs and they weren't as exciting as I'd hoped, but they weren't overly hot either, which was good. It was nice going to a place like that at lunch time, so I could have a nice quantity of sweet tea without its keeping me awake. The weather was perfect, so we got to eat outside, too.

Volunteering and Twittering

I'll try to make this quick, because I want to finish loading the dishwasher.

Last night, I volunteered for UNC-TV by answering phones, taking pledges and eating food. I coordinated the library's volunteer effort with a few good spams. I had a good time and got to see JE! That was exciting, indeed. She showed me several pictures of her cats. It was also nice to meet the people from other areas of Duke, with whom I coordinated the logistics. The programming wasn't too exciting, so we didn't get a tremendous number of calls. They've continued to improve the technology, so I was actually able to hear every single one of the people I did talk to. Last time when I volunteered it was pouring rain, so I was also very thankful that I didn't get soaked this year.

Today the weather was beautiful, so I had a very nice time during my lunch hour getting more Pauly Dogs veggie dogs. I did that yesterday, too, actually, but the weather was nicer today so my inhalation was more leisurely.

Tonight my parents and I went to Taverna Nikos for dinner. I had the fruit and cheese platter, which was very good.

I've been joining the masses and checking out Twitter this week. It's basically broadcast IM, which has enormous potential. It reminds me of zephyr classes, but on a massive scale. I'm sure it would be more fun if I actually knew some people on there, so let me know if any of you use it.
It's been very slow with all of its publicity this week, so if you do check it out, you may need to be patient. I believe they are working on beefing it up so it can keep up with the traffic. You can also take a look at a neat Twitter / Google Maps mashup called Twittervision.

Scrap the dishwasher idea. It's time to sleep.

Why Buy One When 900 Will Do

Yesterday, I was talking to my mom in the great room, shortly before I was going to a get a haircut. I spotted a pileated woodpecker through the windows. We both managed to get some good shots of him.



Last night, I had an early dinner at Madhatter's Cafe & Bake Shop with AE, JB, and LB. EG's flight was delayed, so she couldn't join us. We had a great time chatting and then we went to Whole Foods briefly. That didn't take long, so AE and I decided to check out the new theater at Northgate Mall. Neither of us had been to that mall in years.

We spent a long time figuring out the optimal parking spot, since we weren't shooting for a particular movie time. Even though it's been extensively renovated, it's still an old mall, so it wasn't easy finding a space that would work that well with my van that had a curb cut anywhere nearby. We did find a good space, though.

By the time we actually got to the theater, it was about 7:45pm and we would have either had to have gone into a movie late or wait almost an hour. There wasn't anything that we were that eager to see, so we decided to wander around the mall some. Eventually, we went in Hungates.
Hungates used to be the only store in Durham where you could buy art supplies.

AE noticed that there was a whole display of colored pencils wrapped up and marked down to $200. There were over 900 Berol Prismacolor pencils, which normally sell for just under a $1 a pencil. I thought that was just incredible. They are my favorite brand of colored pencils and are almost the consistency of very smooth, but hard, crayons in wood pencils. Even though I haven't produced a major piece of artwork in 8 years, I knew I had to get them. It's not as if they will go bad or anything.

Apparently Hungates has been hit very hard by large chain art supply stores, such as Michael's and A.C. Moore, so they are getting out of the art supply business all together. Vic, the very nice salesperson that explained this, said we could drive behind the store and pick them up.

Very little is marked back behind the mall, but we knew we were supposed to see the Durham police substation and two dumpsters. I parked and AE called Vic on the phone, to let him know that we had found the dumpsters. We waited. We waited a good 15 minutes. We were very entertained at the idea of waiting behind a mall, in a large white van, waiting for a guy named Vic to deliver our large package of...colored pencils. There was one problem.

They were the wrong dumpsters.

AE called again and we found out that we needed to keep going around the mall. We found Vic and they loaded the pencils into the backseat. We were on our way. I actually found a place in my art studio for them, which is perfect.

Tonight my parents and I went to ACME (to celebrate the pencil acquisition, of course). I had another serving of pan seared scallops with cashew-ginger pesto, baby arugula and grapefruit. We shared a lemon pudding cake for dessert. That's one of my favorites.

Serendipitous Selections

As of this morning, I was #1 out of 16 in the library basketball pool! I must point out that no money is involved in this contest. I think it's just bragging rights and I need to be bragging while I can, because this won't last.

Despite my intention of not predicting any upsets in the first round, I did accurately pick the Winthrop upset. It was an accident, actually, because I was filling out my picks so quickly. Go Winthrop!

Downtown Dining

We went to the Flying Fish tonight and sat next to the window. My parents and I were thoroughly entertained by Donald, a corgie, who was vacuuming French fries from underneath all the outdoor seating. I got to meet him as I leaving and he was very sweet.

I then immediately ran into my builder for the first time in almost three years and got to tell him that I still love my house.

They had fried soft shell crabs as the special tonight and they were very good. The tartar sauce was not necessary.

The NCCA tournament is underway. I'm going to make an attempt not to even look at the bracket that I entered into the library pool, because I always enjoy it a lot more when I base my cheering on how I like each team rather than my predictions. I did, however, break my tradition and not pick any upsets for the first round. So far so good.

Gadget Joy

Today I went to my weekly meeting at the American Tobacco Campus, but I came back to West Campus for lunch. AE wanted to show her friend, DS (many name collisions on these intials lately- I leave distinguishing them as a hopeless exercise for the reader) around Duke. As I mentioned previously, there isn't a lot on campus that is open this week, so we met at Twinnie's. We then carried our stuff back up the hill and ate on the library patio. The weather was perfect.

My parents and I ate at Thai Cafe tonight. It's the time of year when I need to convince restaurants that donating gift certificates to be used as door prizes for the CIT Showcase is good advertising. It is!

When I got home, my Think Outside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard was waiting for me. That was very exciting. So far, I am extremely pleased with it. It's lightweight and compact. I downloaded the Treo 650 driver and then I was ready to go. Configuring the secure connection was a little tricky, because I was finally watching the second half of West Side Story and not paying attention to the instructions closely enough. It's a little tricky anyway, because you have to keep putting the keyboard in discovery mode while configuring the passkeys. It is very cool, though. I like the idea of having something that should also work with whatever tablet or phone I get in the future, too, since it uses bluetooth.

A Ghost of Dancing Daffodils

Those of you who are regular readers may recognize one or more of the photos above. I just wanted to show you all what a particular area on Duke's campus looked almost exactly a year ago and what it looks like today.


This has caused me to rant ad nauseam and now I will rant again here. Daffodils bloom EVERY YEAR. The perennials that used to be planted there continue to be happy and bloom EVERY YEAR. I shudder to think what has happen to all the poor forsaken plants and bulbs that were there. It looks as if they are putting in some sort of irrigation system, but that is no excuse.
It just annoys me to no end to see money wasted and that's exactly what happened if they were thrown out. You can see more photos of what this area looked like with perennials planted here as well as some other plantings on campus here.

A Discreet Awakening

Bzzzzzz....Bzzzzz..
Bzzzzzz.

I opened my eyes and realized it was my pager that was buzzing. That meant it was after 8am. NOOooooooo! Normally I get up at least an hour before that. Normally my alarm is set to go off at 6:23am. I had forgotten to set it the night before. I've forgotten before, but I generally wake up around the right time anyway.

It turned out ok, because I didn't have any early meetings. I called NC and I ended up not being more than about 20-25 minutes minutes later than usual. I was embarrassed, though. I did, however, feel rested.

Guitar practice had been moved from Friday to last night, because of the ACC basketball tournament. Most people had other things they needed to do afterwards, so MP and I went out to dinner. We decided on Blue Corn and then determined that they were closed, based on the fact that the restaurant was empty and there were upside-down chairs on the tables. Fortunately, we only had to deduce this by staring for a few minutes from the parking lot. After much discussion, we decided on either Parizade or Verde. Our decision was then made for us, because Verde was also closed.

We had a lovely dinner. I had baked goat cheese with very good bread and a Parizade salad.
Parizade salads have lettuce, feta, strawberries, toasted pine nuts and a raspberry vinaigrette. It's a wonderful combination. I had a cup of decaf coffee for dessert and MP tried their butterscotch creme brulee. Then I drove MP to EB's, so she could get her car. Heading back, I missed a turn and got lost. I've gotten to the point that I almost enjoy getting lost if there are no time constraints, because it's almost like a puzzle to figure out. I, however, prefer not to do it at 11pm when I have to get up the next morning. I wasn't lost long, though, and found a different I-40 West On-ramp from the one I'd originally planned to use.

It was a beautiful day today. I had lunch on the the library patio and ate the crab dip and crackers that CL gave me on Saturday. Then I wandered over to the Bryan Center Walkyway with the hope that the on-line schedule was wrong and that the Keva Juice stand was really open. It wasn't. It's spring break at Duke this week, so almost everything is closed. I ended up getting some fresh squeezed orange juice from Alpine. I then headed back to the library. I stopped to drink more right in front of the old Perkins Library entrance, giving the juice the opportunity to spontaneously squirt down my shirt. NP came out of the building just at that moment and pointed out that people were going to accuse me of having a drinking problem.

Again, it's been gorgeous here. March and April are my two favorite months of the year, because the weather is usually lovely, the flowers bloom and then the leaves start to come out.
Here are some photos of all the wonderful daffodils blooming in my yard. (Thanks to a loyal reader for taking these pics.)