Best wishes for the new year!
Posted in General on December 31st, 2006
Best wishes to everyone as we head into 2007, and here’s hoping for many more!
Just over two more years until we get a new President here in the U.S…
No tag for this post.Archive for December, 2006
The first piece
Posted in Events, Family, Photography on December 31st, 2006
My dad’s favorite pie is this egg nog pie. He grew up with it, and my mother has been gamely making this for him since the mid-sixties (when his mother died). For decades it would “fail” with the yellow “egg nog” layer separating into a thin, dark yellow rubbery layer on the bottom, and a very pale yellow layer above. (The failed pie is still quite yummy, however, and always managed to get eaten.) All of this is covered with a layer of whipped cream (as illustrated) before it’s put in the fridge to set. As a result, one doesn’t know if it’s gone wrong until you cut the first piece, with everyone watching.
So Mom has put up with all sorts of good-natured ribbing about this, made all the worse that her friends can do it, and I have in fact successfully made this pie for nearly 20 years now.
Somehow she seems to have largely “fixed” the problem, however, as her batting average must be around 80% for the last few years. None of us (including her) know for sure what she’s doing differently, but we don’t look gift pies in the mouth.
This is this christmas’s pie, which was one of her best yet. Fluffy and delicious. I had the last piece last night, and it was still wonderful. Unfortunately Dad and solid food aren’t on good terms at the moment, so he only got to see the wonderful pie, but having him at the table with us for part of christmas dinner was a wonderful treat in its own right!
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Floral pick up lines
Posted in Events, Family, Photography on December 29th, 2006
For Xmas, I got the spiffy Canon 100mm macro lens (the same one Dan let me play with a month ago), and I’ve been having way too much fun with it. It’s a great macro, but it’s also a really nice general purpose lens. At f2.8 it’s quite useful in lower light situations, and the 100mm length makes a nice portrait lens.
Hee, hee, hee. Thanks to WeatherGirl for the very generous gift!
I also got a very cool Gorrilapod SLR-zoom (by Joby) from Linda and John. That little puppy’s hardly come off the camera. It’s light enough you don’t mind having it there, and you can bend the legs to make a pretty reasonable shoulder stock. I got some quite usable shots at 1/8th of a second up at Pea Ridge National Military Park that way which I’ll have to share later.
I’ve had a very merry christmas :-). Hope you have as well…
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Best wishes to all for the season!
Posted in Art, Family, General, Photography on December 24th, 2006
In warming up, designing, and practicing the calligraphy on our new cabinetry (one example here), I went through embarrasingly huge piles of practice paper. We saved it all, as WeatherGirl has plans to make art with some of it. I beat her to the punch, though, and snagged some of it for gift wrapping, as seen here.
Doing this has got me thinking that it might be fun to design wrapping paper like this to be printed and sold at the local art gallery. I have no idea where one could get something like that printed at a reasonable rate, though. Anyone out there have any thoughts?
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Evil marketing ray guns are eating my brain!
Posted in Family, Mildly amusing, Photography on December 18th, 2006
Not my shot, but a wonderful (in the deeply scary sort of way) shot by the talented ahyc at a Harrods window display.
Luckily we avoid a lot of this sort of thing out here in the hinterland. We have our little Parade of Lights when they turn on the Xmas lights on main street, and the shop windows have their cardboard santas taped in the window, but it’s all pretty easy to ignore. I may rupture something, though, if I see another TV advert telling me that I will have no love (or love life) if I don’t buy WeatherGirl some diamonds!
Personally, I recommend foil hats to keep the evil marketing ray guns from eating your brains. Below we have Sub-Evil Boy demonstrating their proper use while surfing the web in these difficult times.
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Taco Man takes 3rd!
Posted in Family, Music on December 18th, 2006
OK, this is ancient news, but I only just learned that there is both a video documentation and audio documentation of this crazy moment, and posting this is more fun than finalizing grades :-).
Back at the end of October, Sub-Evil Boy and I took part in the annual ASA (Asian Student Association) Talent Show, performing an original (and highly strange) gem of Sub-Evil’s entitled “Taco man”. He has been a contestant in several of these in the past, including placing twice. His first go was back when he was 5 or 6 and he took 3rd (if memory serves) , all thanks to KK for dreaming up the crazy idea and signing him up! He later took first with a wonderful sing-along performance of Gershwin’s “It ain’t necessarily so” acapella and wearing a kilt!
In this, he was the veteran, for I had never actually performed in one of these things. He’d come up with this wacky “Taco man” song, though, and it was crying out for a horn section. So, lacking a horn section, we worked up an accordion accompaniment and I became part of the act. We came in third (all credit to Sub-Evil’s excellent song writing and delivery) - woot!
The video is unfortunately only of the last 1/2 of the piece, and was probably shot with a cell phone, but it’s still cool to have even this much. If you’d like to hear the whole thing, check out this recording. The quality’s quite good (it was taken straight off the sound board), although the volume’s really low for reasons I don’t fully understand and haven’t had time to try to fix. Props to Ellery Fisher for sharing the cool photo on Facebook, and to Huck Brock for telling me about both the photo and the video!
I should point out that I’m wearing the morning jacket that both my grandfather and I got married in (although it fits me a wee bit tighter than it did in 1989!), and the gaucho hat I bought when I was an exchange student in Montevideo, Uruguay, back in high school. I might also note that the guy standing next to me looks suspiciously like he might turn into an adult on us if we’re not careful…
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Midwestern evening
Posted in Photography on December 16th, 2006
Beauty is where you find it…
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A happy Unhindered By Talent holidays from my dancing elf self
Posted in Family, Mildly amusing on December 15th, 2006
Yeah, so this is really silly. I blame Voodoo Zebra for pointing me to ElfYourself.com, and then encouraging me to post to his new Elf Yourself group. Good thing I don’t have anything important I should be doing, like grading papers or writing letters of recommendation or sleeping… :-)
Go here if you want to see my elf self dance, but I wouldn’t recommend it :-).
Best wishes from all of us here at UnhinderedByTalent.com!
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It’s…Super Nic!
Posted in Education, Mildly amusing on December 14th, 2006
Over the years I’ve been blessed (?) with students feeling a bizarre urge to draw pictures of me and (perhaps more importantly) share them. This is one of the earliest of these gems, produced by Joe Sandin in my intro computing course about 10 8 years ago. Dan Flies (who had also been in that class) recently poked Joe for an electronic copy, and shared, so you all get to bask in this multi-reflected glory. Or something like that.
This reflects those heady days when I still wore suspenders (also documented here). I much prefer them to belts, but unfortunately had to abandon them when I blew a disk in my back in 1999. I suspect that I could start wearing them again if I stopped carrying 6 to 8 pounds of loose change, pens, and other crap in my pockets, but that’s not likely to happen…
And while I do own (and wear) two Code Warrior shirts (a fine and mighty compiler back in the day), I’m fairly certain that I never lectured in a cape in that class, and I usually wore socks…
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Hitting yourself in the face with a hammer
Posted in Family, General, Politics, Science on December 12th, 2006
Those wild and crazy people at WalkingTimeBomb.com have a whole host of ads aimed at college students who blithely assume (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that they’ll quit smoking after they graduate. Some of them are pretty strange and don’t make a lot of sense, but some are real winners:
Hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is not harmful as long as you only do it socially.
When I’m at the bar I like to smack myself in the face a few times with a good claw hammer. So what? Who am I hurting? Or the other day I was walking along with Joe and he pulled out a shiny ball-peen model. Man, we just went to town with that baby. But what of it? I don’t plan on being one of those life-long hammerers. I’ll just quit after I graduate by tapering off with some of those small rubber mallets.
Generally I’m a pretty libertarian kind of guy, and I rarely give students grief about their smoking even though they bloody well ought to know better. Going through this cancer fight with Dad, though, makes it tough not to run around shouting at students that I see smoking.
The problem is that the claim that smoking (or not wearing a seatbelt or a bicycle helmet or whatever) only hurts the fool is based on a sad and ultimately unacceptable assumption that there is and will be no love in that person’s world when the odds come for their due. To watch my mother hold Dad while he’s vomiting again in the middle of the night, to hear her voice break on the phone after spending another all-nighter with him at the hospital, all this shatters any arguments that the impact of these choices is limited.
We are people, and that has implications.
When my father started smoking in the early 40’s, there was no broad understanding of the horrible risks involved, and as that data became clearer the tobacco industry spent millions to confuse and obfuscate the issues. At some point when I was a kid (late 60’s, early 70’s) Dad became convinced and stopped cold, an action I have always admired.
Today’s students can’t claim ignorance, and I sure as hell hope they don’t plan on lonely, loveless lives. I know that I have higher aspirations for them…
