Food, Cooks and Kids
Stopped by Jill & John's for a visit and some amazing grub by Jill's brother Drew, who is a chef, currently working on a roving restaurant ship. While in their kitchen I noticed their well stocked recipe book shelf was reminiscing about an NPR story I recently heard extolling the virtues of the Nowruz feast (Persian New Year) but didn't find any Najmieh Batmanglij books in their collection. I was hoping to borrow one, because I want to see if I can actually cook any of it before buying one. Oh, how I want my very own housewife!
In the meantime, I have one more righteous meal to look forward to, the public debut of chef Bridget Meyer at the Hideout on Sunday April 27th. It's a limited-entry 4 course dinner included pea vines, halibut cheek sautée and more...if you're interested drop Bridgie a line at eat AT lovinfromtheoven.net.
Finally, speaking of debuts and chefs, Greg Johnson, the husband of Angela's childhood best friend Dawnelle and fancy cook and budding film-maker has a trailer for his newest work online at ChefAndFather.com, "how a chef cooks for his daughter and keeps his family together". The movie appears to be a hybrid of how to cook for your baby or toddler and the importance of eating together as a family. The following is a linked vid from Youtube but the quality of the trailer on Greg's site is much better, a must see! By the way, that cute kid is not only a movie star but a model for Twig Children's Boutique in Greenwood (she's on the far left in the purple dress on the home page at the moment).
Dance Moves
Yes please, yes. I want MORE!!Uncle Jim on ABC World News
On the news article Polaroid Closing Instant Film Factories you should be able to find the video 'Polaroid Goes Out of Style' which aired last night and features a photo of my uncle, Jimmer, for a split second. An ABC news producer found the photo on my Flickr feed, which I titled Friends with Lapels.
Photo posted to Flickr by Mahalie, taken sometime in the seventies.
In retrospect, I probably should have called it Friends with Butterfly Collars, although they do sport lapels as well.
UPDATE: Jimmer just chimed in:
Yep, that's Lance. That is Sonja - she was homecoming queen (and my date - go figure) and the first girl ever kissed (go figure again). Lance and Sonja and I were always "buds". This was taken sometime in the mid-late 70's in Monti - at a wedding.
Last names removed cause some ppl don't like their name floating around the internets!
Get Your Suit On Ladies
This is what we're wearing for my bachelorette party...so start getting ready. Dress code strictly enforced!
Comcast Pays People to Take Up Room
Bribery….it’s COMCASTIC! The only thing redeeming about this recent episode is that Comcast’s sophistry is so blatant and silly that perhaps more non-hardcore-geek citizens will get involved.Comcast paid people to show up early to a public hearing to fill seats so that other people (er, actual interested, concerned citizens) couldn’t get in. Tell me this is illegal! Will they be sued? Why couldn’t they get their own employees to do this…their tactic is so blatant. SavetheInternet.com broke the story and Conde Nast publication Portfolio.com actually got Comcast to admit to paying people to obstruct the public process!
Their goal is to:
- Charge website owners for premium bandwidth so their site is fast. In other words, big business sites will be fast and all the sudden your baby blog will give a whole new meaning to crawl.
- Charge you, the average consumer, varying rates for internet service sort of like a cable plan. You get some sites for $, more sites for $$, and access to all of the internet for $$$$$. In other words, you’ll get to surf AOL sites and Amazon, maybe even eBay all day, but you’ll have to pay a premium for equal access to “non partner” sites.
- They’ve decided bittorrent is bad, so they will block it and any other type of traffic they see fit.
Please take a moment to learn more about this. As you know, money talks. The best thing you can do is drop Comcast if you have them and if there’s an alternate internet service provider. Make sure to let them know why. Speaking of which, are there any other internet service providers in Denver/Northglenn?
Related news and links:
- 2 minute video succinctly explaining what the hubbub is all about.
- Google’s Net Neutrality Site
- Baltimore Sun, 2/28/2008: ‘Net Neutrality’: Ignore at your own risk
- A grass roots site advocating Net Neutrality: savetheinternet.com.
- There is actually a site that opposes Net Neutrality regulation - handsoff.org. However, a Wired article did a trace on owners and interests of the site which led them to TSE Enterprises, a PR firm and eventually it was admitted that primary funding came from AT&T and BellSouth.
- Video of the FCC’s hearing at Harvard, visit www.fcc.gov and look for the En Banc Hearing on Broadband Network Management Practices (direct link to RAM/video file).
MSNBC-Like Header Experiments
A couple of weeks ago I posted a little Photoshop experiment that came out of a quest to figure out how to achieve the rainbow light-ray effect used at MSNBC and elsewhere. Many folks chimed in here and on Flickr. I saw that PSDTuts posted Reader Request: MSNBC Style Effect, so today I squeezed in a bit of experimentation time…and this is what I got.
Note: Click any image to see bigger version / slide show. If your monitor is too small to see the whole thing and you can’t see the controls you can use Alt+B (back), Alt+N (next) and Alt+C (close). Or click in the left/right half to navigate and outside the image to close the slide show.
Gi & Katie’s Coop
There’s lots of breedin’, layin’ and general expanding happening in Giora’s neck of the woods. Check out their new chicken coop!
Photo by Giora on Flickr
From this angle it looks like a modern cabin…sort of reminiscent of the just-completed project by Matt & Jo - hoping to see their new getaway on Guemes Island soon!
Papercut Campaign Mockup
Papercut campaign mockup [see it bigger] posted on my Flickr site.
This is a banner ad for my firm’s internal website - we’re doing a paper waste reduction campaign. We’re asking folks to send in paper-saving tips and giving them an as-yet-undetermined prize if their tip is featured. (No, not a Macbook Air, that’s a joke). When their tip is featured, that will go in the quote bubble.
Many thanks to thePixelPusher.com for the awesome air freshener vector and to Snap2Objects.com for the guy vector. I could never get fun things like this done if it wasn’t for all the great templates, brushes and vector freebies out there!
Fast forward a few days (to now) and I have a whole page mocked up. I would love any feedback on the design. I feel like it needs some ironing, I didn’t approach it as methodically as I usually do, I had to slap this together really quickly.
See this comp bigger [right here] or on Flickr.
Product Promo: Earth
copyleft 2008 by mahalie.com, click to enlarge or see it on flickr
Promo piece for our new product, the Earth. This one will be a big seller I think!
Inspired by Apple (who else?), their MacBook Air promo in particular. I created this while following the PSDTuts Cool Lighting Effect tutorial for practice.
I’m trying to figure out how to do the lighting effects on the header of MSNBC and the my.9Rules Store (as shown below). If anyone knows how or of a tutorial please let me know!!
Following a tip from Alex I read the Light Threads in Photoshop tutorial, but I’m still missing that glowy radiance…need to play more.
New Female Mauy Thai Movie
Next, from Prachya Pinkaew, the director of the amazing martial arts films Ong Bak [IMDB] [Netflix] and Tom Yum Goong [IMDB] [Netflix], comes Chocolate stars newcomer Nicharee “Jeeja” Vismistananda set top open February 7th in Thailand. Probably straight to DVD. I recommend decoding your VCR and finding an original release with subtitles, as the American re-releases of both Ong Bak and Tom Yum Goong lost a lot of their flavor. Not to say there’s a lot of depth in any of these movies to muddle with, they’re basically just loose plots to showcase the amazing skills of the main actors, Tony Jaa and now Miss Vismistananda.
