As Useful As A Screen Door On A Submarine

Sigh.

Update: Time Warner Cable just called to tell me about the benefits of home phone service. I interrupted the woman from her script to let her know that my internet service through them was quite bad at the moment and that the only reason we were able to talk on the phone is because I don’t have phone service through them. She was quite flustered at that. I also tested my internet connection while she was on the phone, and it’s even worse.

Close-Up Photo - Mouse Ball

Changes Are Afoot

So joshmadison.com (jmdc) has been redesigned.  This is about the seventh major redesign of this site, and it’s the biggest one yet. Besides the obvious visual design changes, the back end was completely redone using Expression Engine as the content management system.

I’ll be updating this post with issues and concerns that might be occurring.

Issues and Concerns:

• There seems to be a problem with the RSS feeds.  The ‘asides’ links aren’t linking properly, going to the jmdc entry rather than what was linked to. Forgot to include isPermaLink="false" in the guid def.  Oops.
• Some images aren’t showing up. I think I got them all.  I’ll be keeping an eye on the error log to see if any 404’s come up related to images.
• The ‘Humor’ section has not been migrated at this time. There’s a small technical issue with it, but I didn’t want to hold up the benefits of the new design while those details were being dealt with. If the issue can’t be resolved quickly, the previous version of the ‘Humor’ section will be used until it is fixed.
• Some of the most recent comments from the old system need to be migrated and cleaned up.
• There’s an intermittent issue that’s causing IE6 and IE7 to periodically lose the navigation bar. Have I mentioned how much I hate IE?

Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins in Silicone Muffin Cups

I don’t have a muffin pan because I don’t make muffins that often, and with a Manhattan apartment kitchen, storage is at a premium so every device in there needs to be used often or have multiple purposes (or just be easy to store).  In the past few weeks I came across several muffin recipes that I would love to try out and during this time I was made aware of silicone muffin/cupcake baking cups that you just place on a baking sheet (which I have).  They were $8, so I decided to pick them up and give a few muffin recipes a try.

There are few things I like more than bacon.  Chocolate is one, and banana flavored things is another. For some reason, I’m not a huge fan of bananas, but I love banana flavored things. If you combine those two flavors in a muffin, you can bet I’ll be all over it. Last night, I gave them a try.

As you can see from the pics above they didn’t come out looking all that great, but boy did they taste incredible.  The woman I marry will need to make these, and in fact, should bring samples to the interview.

Continue reading . . .

Mint Crisp M&M’s

In the run-up to any big summer blockbuster, there are usually any number of tie-in products hoping to take advantage of the cross-promotion possibilities.  With ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ right around the corner, M&M’s has introduced a new variety, Mint Crisp.

I picked up a pack to give them a try, not really knowing what to expect.  Upon opening, I was greeted by M&M’s that were colored with the three generic mint related colors of white, light green, and mint green.  I was also treated to a slight minty aroma.  The candies themselves were about the same size as the standard crispy M&M’s, but their shells were less uniform in shape. In keeping with the tie-in to Indiana Jones theme, some of the M&M’s have an additional symbol printed on the side with the ‘m’. Upon biting one in half, I could see there was the standard candy shell, a layer of mint, chocolate, and the crispy rice center.

As for the most important characteristic of the new variety, taste...they tasted exactly like a crispy Andes mint would.  Since Andes are the gold standard of drug-store chocolate-mint candies, this is not a bad thing at all. Would I have them again?  Yes, absolutely.

Rating: 8/10

Traffic At LGA Is Really Bad

Google Maps, with it’s satellite view and street view, is one of the better time wasters on the web.  I love zooming in and getting a different perspective on areas around the world.

One day I was curious if the resolution was good enough to be able to tell which airline an airplane was part of, so I took a look at LaGuardia (LGA) to see if I could make them out.  I found the following picture interesting:

As you can see, there seems to be a plane halfway down the runway, taking off; one at the end of the runway, about to take off; and one a few hundred feet out, about to land.  About to land?

Wow, they really stack ‘em up at LGA.

It’s 99% likely that the shot of the plane landing was taken at a different time and the sets were “stitched” together.

Continue reading . . .

Installing Solaris 10 on VMWare Fusion

When I got a new MacBook Pro I also ordered VMWare Fusion at the same time so I could run Windows and play around with a linux installation or two.  It works great, but I ran into a problem trying to install Solaris 10.

Windows XP, Vista, and Ubuntu all installed without issue, but the installation of Solaris, both graphical and text-based would hang at various points.  When I finally got it installed, it would hang on running, never even making it to the login screen. The problem was that even though I was specifying a 32-bit VM in VMWare, the Solaris installation was still identifying the Penryn chip as supporting 64-bit, so Solaris would install the 64-bit version. I wasn’t sure that was the whole problem, but I knew that was the first troubleshooting step.  After a doing a little exploration around the interwebs, I found a very simple solution to that problem.

Continue reading . . .