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Blog - July 2006 |
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This page stores my blog entries from July 2006. The entries are from July 4 and July 31.
10th Anniversary Page / Summary of Last Five Months / Review of "Da Vinci Code" July 4, 2006 Hello, faithful readers and various other critters of the Internet world! After spending nearly a year of re-design and reconstruction, I have emerged with my Official Tenth Anniversary Edition of my site. Sometime back in 1996 I flopped my first site on the web, and I felt that being on the web for 10 years and still being in business was something to commemorate. Some of the changes I made include:
I still have a "What's New?" page, but I'm feeling that I may need to give that the axe in the near future as well. It doesn't make much sense to have such a thing when I can express those changes in an entry here. I seriously doubt much of anyone cares about what I did to the site three years ago. The photo of Scone Palace and Scott dress tartan remain. I nearly replaced the latter with a Donnachaidh hunting tartan, but I decided to keep it as-is for personal reasons. Besides my main lineage putting me firmly in the Donnachaidh family, I do have reasonably strong ties to the Scott clan as well. In moving my writings to this page, I have made it much easier on myself for writing more and moving my writings off to archive pages. I'll let entries pile up here until I take the bottom one and flop that on the appropriate month's archive page. It's a lot easier than conforming myself to keeping just a month's writings on the page at a time. ********** ********** Quite a bit has occurred over the past five months. As I sit here and think about it, I don't remember a whole lot. It's a good thing I can put together a bullet-point highlight reel:
A few other things happened that were kind of cool or somewhat interesting, but I'll leave that to sub-entries below. ********** ********** For probably the first time in many, many years, I went to see a movie on opening night. Normally, I cringe at the thought of seeing any popular movie on opening night, especially if it were to be a movie like "The Da Vinci Code". Shoulder-to-shoulder people, all squished together in a sticky, dirty room with people talking on cell phones and through dialogue and allowing their babies or children to cry or talk throughout the movie. Thankfully, none of that happened. Sadly, neither did any of the protests I had so strongly hoped would happen at our location. As I watched the opening credits, I kept in mind that I promised a co-worker that I'd write a review of the movie. I would have three days to write it, and most of those three days I"ll be busy elsewhere and away from my computer, or I'll be home but busy doing things I need to do for the following week. So, after sitting through the 2+ hour movie and spending some sleepless late hours writing, I came up with an acceptable review. It did get published in our company newsletter, so I was rather happy with that. The full review is below: -- -- -- -- -- Fun, Flaws Balance out in "The Da Vinci Code" -- -- -- -- -- |
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Moving-In Memories: The Oven / 4th of July / Urban Hydroponic Gardening Monday, July 31, 2006 I ran across a piece of paper that I've had around since I first moved in. It contains a list of the people who live in my complex and the following chart:
When I had my first chance to use my oven, my bread came out ok, but much more burnt than they should have been (especially since I took them out after only spending 1/2 to 2/3 of the minimum baking time in there). Eventually, with the help of a Farberware oven thermometer, I discovered that my oven had been heating up to an obscenely high temperature. When the knob was set to 350°, the thermometer was beyond the listed range (which showed up to 550°). Eventually, I worked up the chart above to use in order to cook the food I needed for my meals. Eventually I got fed up with fiddling with that and called my landlord, who promptly got the diagnosis (bad thermostat or something) and had it replaced. ********** ********** In short, my 4th of July was pretty cool. We shot off fireworks as usual, buying the ones that were cool from last year and substituted a couple of new ones: the Pink Diamond, and the Steel Rain. TNT apparently did not offer the very cool Sunburst fountain this year, and I left the booth rather disappointed on that note. Otherwise, the purchases met our high expectations. Steel rain provided a wonderful display. Pink Diamond, a new one this year, was cool, but it seemed a bit short for how much it cost. ********** ********** Living in an urban setting allows a person many opportunities that would not be the same anywhere else. This year, I participated in an urban garden and tried to grow lettuce. My attempts have two flaws: (1) I'm growing lettuce from stems of lettuce I bought from the store; and (2) my lettuce is growing in my kitchen sink. My first attempt happened entirely by accident: by me leaving the romaine lettuce stem sitting in the sink for too long. It grew rather nicely for a bit, so I decided to plant it in a pot and try to keep it growing into another head of lettuce. Since I had to keep it at my girlfriend's house, I couldn't keep a consistent eye on it. Hence, after a week, the heat finally got to it and it mummified. My second attempt, on purpose, resides in my sink where it'll stay. I've been watering it well and recently made sure it got some sun through my drapes. It still seems to do rather well. I don't expect to get a whole new head of lettuce through this, but I find it interesting as to how large this will get on its own. Maybe the decaying bits of other foods will provide it with the nutrients it needs in order to grow larger. I'll make periodic reports on my progress with this plant.
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