Steel White Table

Jenny picked up a cedar plank from the grocery store today. (Yup, it’s just a piece of wood.) We were supposed to soak it for 4 hours, but we didn’t have time. We soaked it in boiling water for about 2 hours instead. We heated up our $89 Canadian Tire gas BBQ to — well, we put it up on bust. It cooled down to about 500 F once we opened the lid (and turned it down to a medium flame). I put the plank on the grill and closed the lid. Once we could hear the wood crackling and popping, we placed 3 salmon steaks right on the plank and let them cook for about 15 minutes with the lid closed. (Fillets would have been better but the store was sold out.) Smoke leaked out all over the place, especially near the end. It was alright and well worth the minimal effort I put in it. Here’s a slide show of the whole affair. It was the best salmon I’ve ever tasted. I recommend it to all my friends. And my enemies.

I recently got a new PC pre-installed with Vista. It seems like a half decent operating system so far. My main complaint is: things that used to work don’t work anymore because they’re incompatible with Vista. My older version of WordPerfect isn’t compatible with Vista (so I’m switching to OpenOffice). Neither is my older version of Nero, my old video editor and a few other applications I use on a regular basis.

The latest to show signs of incompatibility is my CD-ripper: AudioGrabber. So I’ve switched to CDex instead. The help feature doesn’t work. Besides that, no major problems — yet. (I’m testing my first CD as I write this.)

Anyone have any problems using CDex on their Vista PC? Any recommendations? Anyone on vacation? How’s your vacation going?

I saw a silly 3-D movie tonight and afterwards took a bunch of pictures of myself wearing the glasses in various poses. These are the banjo poses. Most of them are blurry. Not much to see really.

I did some other poses that are funny. I might post them later. No much time for blogging when I’m on vacation.

Anyone notice the new blurb in this site’s header image? Quit reading this through Google Reader or Bloglines and visit the site for a change to see it.

The Periodic Table of Videos:

Very cool. Here’s the one for Phosphorus:

They have a YouTube Channel that features all their videos.

Google Reader recommended the site LOL god for me, which “puts the fun back into religion” (according to its tagline). It features cartoons about all religions, atheism, and science. There’s something there that WILL offend someone.

This post is directed at tommyboy more than anyone, although I’m open to any useful responses:

- How long fresh pasta can last in the fridge (unworked)?
- Does anyone have recipes for ravioli fillings using rapini, swiss chard, or tatsoi?

Ain’t the internet great?

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

This is why the internet exists.

Matt’s websites has lots of clips and a journal about the making of it.

This CNN article made me laugh: Vatican ‘regrets’ female bishops decision:

If they’re going back to the tired argument of “because it’s written in The Bible,” here are some good ones:

We’re still living in the Dark Ages.

My three year old son started playing soccer last week. My daughter’s in gymnastics and piano lessons. My wife goes to the YMCA for exercise regularly, and I play World Of Warcraft.

I watch less than a couple of hours of television a week, but the kids watch it a lot; it’s their baby-sitter. We want to reduce our dependency on it, keeping them busy with creative and engaging activities instead.

I know a couple people who are tv-less, which I respect a lot. I’m doing some googling about breaking the tv-habit, but I could use any advice and ideas:

How do you keep a 7 year old and 3 year old busy without a television and without destroying the house?

Escaped bees abuzz in N.B.

They’re being imported because pesticides have been killing the natural population of bees.

Update: From another CBC article, they were being exported after fulfilling a pollination gig.

3:51pm. I’m moving today. I’ve got myself a Uhaul cargo van out front. I just began filling it up with the large items, mostly bookcases. There’s still a lot of junk left.

Jenny and I made the final inspection of the new house this morning and now we’re waiting for our lawyer to call and tell us the sellers have our cheque. Then we move in. Until then, we’re not allowed on the property. So I’m here filling up the cargo van. I may drop in throughout the day to update this post. Or maybe not.

First question: Do all Uhaul vans originate from Arizona? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Uhaul van that didn’t have an Arozona licence plate.

4:40pm. The van is full, but we still can’t go to the house. We called our lawyer and she said everything looks good. Now she’s waiting for some other document, whatever it is. And once that document arrives, we can start moving into the house.

I’m going to write a post in a week or two about how insane it is trying to buy a house in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Anyone living off a moderate income — you know, average folk like me — have almost no chance of finding a house in this market. Finding this house was like winning the lotto. If an expert told me we got the best possible deal anyone could hope for under the current market conditions, I wouldn’t doubt them. Just before we came across this house, we’d resigned ourselves to living in a tiny condo or a real run down place — the “handy man’s special.” Thank jebus we managed to dodge that bullet. For the longest time, it felt like it was coming right for us.

Lots of dust behind our bookshelves.

5:15pm. We’re still waiting for our lawyer to call us and say we can take possession of the house.

First she gave us the impression that the sellers simply had to accept our cheque and we could go in. She said, “That’ll be in about 30 minutes.” That was 4 hours ago.

We’ve called her since and she tells us documents have arrived, but now more are on the way. So we still have to wait. We just called her again and now all we’re getting is her voice mail.

We’ve been looking for a house for the past 6 months. The longest 6 months of my life.

7:00pm. We’re moving. Gotta go.

9:02pm. Done for the day. Our lawyer not calling us was a misunderstanding. She called our real estate agent who assumed she was going to call us next. She should have called us anyway, but whatever. Who cares. Time to order a pizza and collapse.

Looking forward to seeing how crazy the cats go when we bring them up, which will be in about 5 minutes. Over and out.

This is the most useful — definitely the most used — teenie-weenie application on my PC: Volumouse.

I use it to change the volume on my PC without having to click anything. I use it to change the Master Volume and the Wave volume, but it can be easily configured to change the volume of anything that has a volume control on your PC. And if you really want to get fancy, you can use it to adjust all kinds of other things — which I won’t get into, because I’ve never done it. But it’s a useful, unobtrusive little application.

It’s free and it doesn’t prompt you for updates or ask you to register for anything. It takes 5 seconds to install it and about 30 seconds to configure it do whatever you want it to do. I adjust the Master Volume by using the mouse wheel and holding down the ALT key. A vertical track bar shows up during the adjustment and then disappears when I let go of the ALT key. I adjust the Wave volume by using the mouse wheel while holding down the SHIFT key. To distinguish it from the Master Volume, I have it configured to display a horizontal track bar.

I originally had it set up to adjust the Master Volume when the mouse cursor was hovering over my system tray, and the Wave Volume when it was over the desktop while holding down the ALT key. There are numerous way to configure it — and it’s easy.

An excellent little program for adjusting various volumes on-the-fly. I use it every day.

Download link for the Volumouse setup file.

NoSquint is one of my favourite Firefox add-ons because it makes at least half the sites I visit on a regular basis easier to read by making everything on the site bigger — the text and the images, and it does so without messing up the design of the site because proportions are maintained. Here’s an example:

Roger Ebert’s site usually looks like this (click to view full-sized image):

When I crank NoSquint up to 150%, it looks like this, filing my screen and making it much easier to read (click to view full-sized image):

There you go. A nice little add-on for anyone with poor vision or anyone like me who can’t stand reading micro fonts.

UPDATE #1: Shows you how much I know. Just ignore me, folks. From the first comment:

In Firefox 3, it’s built in. Just use Ctrl+Mousewheel to change the size of the text and images. It even works with videos.

That’s how NoSquint works. I thought it was the add-on doing that. Time to uninstall NoSquint.

UPDATE #2: Cancel update #1. The Control-mouse wheel operation does nothing in my Firefox 3. When it does work, I wonder if the built-in Firefox function remembers the magnification for each site like NoSquint does, or do you have to increase the magnification every time you visit a site? And I’m running Firefox 3 on Windows XP. Maybe some things don’t work the way they should on other operating systems such as Vista. At any rate, time to reinstall NoSquint.

A 20 pound bag of basmati rice that was on a low cupboard in the kitchen. He’s been shitting rice cakes for two days.

Unfortunately, no photos.

(Related posts about Wally.)