In trying to get the house settled for the long haul, we're getting a new bed (comes Thursday), moving our existing bed to the lower level guest room. That left the main floor living room as the only "empty" room. Since we have been wanting a different long-term solution for the home theater, we decided to explore moving the set that's currently in the theater up into the living room and get new stuff for the theater. However, we've been discovering just how difficult it can be to actually increase the number of seats (the one deficiency that has been bugging us). At the moment, without bringing down another chair, there's really only 4 seats in the theater.

We went to the stores this weekend to figure out what our options really were. . . Read the rest of this entry »

After watching the "oatmeal" episode of Good Eats, I decided to give the steel cut oats a try in an attempt to rescue oatmeal as a breakfast for me. I've always loved the taste of oats, but the texture of instant oatmeal and even standard rolled oats has always made it hard for me to finish a bowl. However, knowing how filling they can be, how good the fiber and vitamins are for your heart and the rest of you, I really wanted to see if ther was a way for me to start eating them again.

With the Alton Brown recipe in hand as well as the one from America's Test Kitchen's The New Best Recipe, I gave "real" oatmeal a shot this weekend. My first batch, while I accidentally overtoasted the oats, was quite good. However, I'd gone the "safe" route of brown sugar and cinnamon and using the full recipe (including faking whole milk with 1% and heavy cream). While the results were good, the extra calories just weren't a good setup for my weight loss goals. To make this a regular part of my diet, I'd have to cut the calories in each bowl. Read the rest of this entry »

I had another discussion yesterday about car blind spots* and thought I'd make a quick post about them. For some reason, most people just accept the idea of blind spots and just look over their shoulder (or, unfortunately, just move over anyway). The thing is, in a normal car, pickup or SUV, if properly adjusted, there IS NO blind spot on either side. Really. Once set up, you no longer need to look over your shoulder and can keep facing forward (far safer for everyone) while still being entirely aware of what's going on around you.

The basic principle is that between your 2 side mirrors, center rear view mirror, normal peripheral vision and forward vision, when the mirrors are in the right position, a car is always visible in at least one of them for 360 degrees. As cars approach from behind, move lanes, etc. they just move from one zone to another. Here's a quick diagram of the overlap. It's obviously not drawn to scale or intended to be any sort of scientific measure of angles. It's just a quick sketch that reflects the setup on every car I've used it on.

Click to enlarge

To set up, either do this in your driveway or a parking lot, with the car parked. Do NOT try to set this up for the first time while on the road. Make sure the area you're working in is level and you do pretty much need another person to help you get this right. Find someone else who wants to eliminate their blind spot and take turns "being the car". Read the rest of this entry »

I visit a wide range of sites for professional and personal purposes. Unfortunately, there are a lot of sites that have decent content, but are impossible to read. There are tools like Greasemonkey for Firefox that let you fix sites you regularly visit. However, many of the sites that cause me problems are a 1 time visit. As a result, I didn't want to have to set something permanent for each. I also didn't want to set up an overall permenant solution like Firefox's user_content.css file (which lets you force CSS settings for all pages) because there are some sites where I actually do like their design.

So, I used a combination of the ideas as well as the bookmarklet concept and made a bookmarklet that applies a user_content.css file to the current page. It formats the page to black text on a white background, mutes the images and otherwise sets it up like I like. I call the bookmarklet "Light CSS".

Here's an example site. If you just visit this site, unmodified, it's pretty much unreadable. One click of "Light CSS" and it's immediately cleaned up and more printer-friendly to boot.
http://www.bigmonkeypress.com/warren_haynes.htm Read the rest of this entry »

I have a fairly sensitive nose and, despite HEPA filters in our house to sanitize the air, and regular cleaning, there's occasionally an off odor that I want to cover up. Sprays don't last long enough and the little plug-in things all use different oil inserts, making it a real pain to work with them. Candles generally work fairly well for affecting the general scent in a room. My biggest problem with the whole scented candle thing though is that the whole industry (and, at $9.99 for a container candle, it IS and industry) is aimed at women. The scents are mostly floral (lilac and gardenia) with overly sweet variations (sugar cookie, maple syrup). There aren't many "masculine" scents on the shelves, and where there are, they're overpowering versions of cheap cologne. I think there is a need for candles that are aimed at men. The kind that will work in a den, home theater, home office, workshop, etc. Places where the rest of the atmosphere is masculine and the scent would just make it a complete retreat for a guy. Read the rest of this entry »