Hear that?
That’s the sound of my head imploding. I’m not going to have much time to update this between now and the middle of February. Grad school preperation, The Serpent Woman, and work stress have my plate about as full as it can be.
Now, if I keep focused I think I can make sure it doesn’t stop spinning…
Over the MLK weekend I had a friend in town. Most of my friends seem to be allergic to visiting *cough Donnie * *cough Madelynne* so I took this rare occasion to really paint the town. We ate out every meal, we went shopping, we saw a show, we did it all… but the highlight of the weekend (other than the good company of course) was dinner at Heat.
The first three courses were unimaginably delicious sushi (two courses Nigiri and one hand-rolled Maki). I’m serious, you can’t imagine how good it was so don’t bother trying– you might strain something. Course four was the traditional miso soup followed by a melon and ginger salad with truffle oil infused raspberries as course five. Course six was a pan seared salmon steak with a mango and miso sauce topped with a super-fine shredded basil. and a delectable gelato for dessert. Of course everything goes better with booze so we split a bottle of Hoyo Kura No Hana Junmai Daiginyo (translated) Sake which was excellent. The waiters were all wearing black suits with white shirts and black ties (not bow-ties) and they gave us the lowdown on each item as it was served.
It was altogether a really excellent dining experience. Heat is able to maintain an extremely high level of food quality without making the gourmet sushi novice (like me) feel like a schmuck. Kudos to them.
Of course all good things must come to and end. Now there’s nothing left of the meal, or the weekend, but a fond memory and a dent in the checkbook. It’s the nature of such things– They’re always fun while they last.
In the mad dash to get everything in order for Grad schools I realized I have no head shots that look anything like me, so I bought a 20 dollar tripod and walked over to the lake to take some pictures.
This was the result:
It’s not professional or anything but I like it quite a bit. I’m now off to the photo lab to see how well it prints.
(If you’re curious you can click on the one above and download the whopping 2mb version I’m going to try to get printed.)
Update: I just go back from CVS and I have to say I’m really impressed. The prints turned out simply fantastic. The only way you can tell the picture was digital is a little spot where I cut the mask wrong to fake the depth of field right around my ear. Anyone who says 1.2 Megapixels isn’t enough for an 8×10 is a dirty liar!
Thanks to pOps for the hints on how to set things up in photoshop.
Things only my geeky friends will care about:
1. I’ve updated this blog to WordPress 2.0. I’ve always been a HUGE fan of tiny MCE and the good folks at WP have now built it into the latest version. I’ve been meaning to do it myself for a while but I never got around to it. Yeah for them for having more time and initiative than I do.
2. Unfortunately there were two causalities of the upgrade. Live+Press, which synced my blog to Livejournal and Kitten’s Spaminator, which kept me free of comment spam. These have been replaced by Livejournal Cross poster and Akismet respectively. My impressions are good, although Livejournal Cross poster is clearly pretty beta at this point, but it gets the job done.
3. BSG (Battlestar Galactica for those not in-the-know) season 2 resumes tonight! Woooohoooo!
4. I had to do a complete format and re-install on my work machine. I didn’t heed my own advice and turn it off over X-mas break. A domain administrator’s password was compromised (not mine I might add) and when I got back to the office on Jan 3rd my machine was happily serving up warez and midget porn to the l33t community at large.
The silver lining is I’ve really gone to town with the latest and greatest release candidates of all of my favorite software. It took some fudging about to find the proper plugins and extensions that would work with Firefox 1.5 but now that it’s all happy I’m quite pleased.
Long live the free software movement and to hell with Microsoft (they don’t even get a link)!