Bento Kawaii

Or not... depending on how you look at it. I like how my bentos have turned out. Yes they aren't as cute as what a real Japanese mom could make but I like them none-the-less I think they fit the bill of being nice looking and good tasting.

This is my bento box that I bought in an oriental grocery store that sells a number of knick-knacks. I think it's beautiful!! ^w^

It's a simple cherry blossom design on dark lacquered wood with a red painted interior. I made a carrier/holder for it out of wide ribbons left over from my bedroom project. I'm thinking that this weekend I'm going to have to beef it up because I know the stitches holding the ribbons are likely to fail during some critical moment when the bento is full... That would be soooooo wrong!!! ToT








This is the first one in sections; bottom, middle and top.

















I didn't get a concise picture of the first one... quite unfortunate. Here is the second box in all it's glory. I do the meat selection as the top, the "vegetation" as the middle, and the fruit/dessert as my bottom.


























The third one is slightly less pretty but definitely my flavor favorite. Mmmmm!! Crab rangoon with duck sauce!





















More on my new hobby later! ;D

bathroom

So, I'm tired of how the bathroom looks. I want to do a complete overhaul and I want to do it now!

But... even though I have the tile picked out, almost have an exact count of needed tile, know what vanity top I want, have a good idea of what color flooring needs to go in, have accouterments tabbed and bookmarked for purchase, and a surfeit of energy (for once) I am on hold for two weeks.

This will allow for Mike to (hopefully) get over his bout of the plague, have spoken at his event, and the girls to be firmly ensconced back in their mother's care. However, this helps me none with my frustration at being able to go forth on an interior project.

I would play in my pond except I worry that if I finished the cleaning at night the water would be too cold to allow for enough oxygen with the pump off for my koi. I hate doing real gardening after sundown. It's hard to see where I'm putting my feet and I worry almost overly much about close encounters of the reptile kind. *shiver* So that restricts most of my outdoor necessary items to the weekend... except that this weekend is almost completely a bust as I will be looking after the girls more than usual. Mom used to just tell us to grab a coat and a ball, put on our shoes and a hat, and toddle our boisterous bottoms outside but I have as little trust for them keeping out of the street as I do for Lily baby doing so.

I'd also like it if Mike would occasionally not take so long to not hint around things. I don't always get them (interestingly enough) especially if I'm already focused on something. Like when I'm taking the tile off the wall with some partial thought to see if Knox Rail Salvage has some sort of plan to offset cost of items if you can give them enough reasonably whole tile or some such. This hideous tile is also in the master bathroom so I think if I was careful I could salvage enough whole tile for some stylistically impaired person to covet it as their own.

...perhaps I should start on the master bathroom. Mike can't exactly say that it going through upheaval would impair him very much in the slightest right now...

That sounds like a plan. And I'm drunk enough now to just do it. (Thank you Yeungling and Mike's Hard Lemonade.)

HD DVD Dead: I'm Screwed

Whelp, it's over.  HD DVD is dead.

Of course, no sense in buying a Blu-ray player, since none of them support the latest discs.  None that is, but the PS3.

Which is why I'm saddened to see HD DVD die (not just because I picked up a player last year for $99 at Wal-Mart).  Sony makes the movies, controls the spec, and makes sure it's player is inline with the spec changes.  Sony likes to charge through the noise on electronics, and don't mind spying on customers.

The winner wasn't decided on merit or price, but rather backroom deals.  Sony kept most studios only putting new movies on Blu-ray, keeping titles slim for HD DVD, until retailers had no real reason to carry both formats.

Microsoft (who backed HD DVD) should take note here - don't bother with catering to the MPAA/RIAA mafia.  To appease the media mafia, Microsoft put huge crippling "features" into Vista for DRM.  This was done of course, so the media mafia would all their content to be played on Vista in all it's HiDef glory.  Instead, Microsoft should just patch out the DRM out of Vista, and tell the mafia if they want to reach the 3 Million copies of Vista sold to deal with it.

Of course, this would let Steve Jobs kiss ass to the mafia with Apple TV as he has done so well in the past.

*tee hee*

I know most people who own gaming systems have seen this, but it just got passed back around to me:



















I find it amusing. (=^v^=)

anger!

So, Mike is the super-programmer. Not me. Disclaimer aside, I've been trying to build my own site... and it's going rather slowly. Particularly because I keep trying to make the code do double backflips with a half twist and all it can do is a one-handed cartwheel. Disappointing to say the least. ToT

I'll take my victories where I can take them. Since there have been many (remember: rookie) I am not in the least discouraged. I'm trying to win the war with the code.

I see myself loosing my current battle with the code (as it breaks in a most peculiar manner in IE) but I shall have a website that is: t3h r0xx0rz!!!

TurdPress.com

Here is how this blog came to be:

A coworker took time off last minute to go and get married in Vegas this weekend.  He setup a blog they both are posting to.  I hope I'm the first to coin the term "e-loping."

I've been planning on splitting my main blog, ViNull.com, into two sites now for the last few months.  I want to keep ViNull.com focused on .Net and programming, but I miss the days when I didn't care about SEO or "focus".  I have really important shit to say, and quite frankly the internet would be remiss without my content.

Add to this Cicelie's new site, FinsAndStems.com, will have the same issue.  To build a great site on water gardening you are going to have to keep low the off topic posts.

So stealing the joint blog idea was a no-brainer.  I fully intend to move this blog to my other hosted sites, and run it with ViNull Siding, but I'm booked and can't take on a new project now.  No problem, I'll use wordpress.com and get a hosted blog, then move it later.  Or so I thought...

I have long recommended wordpress.com to people looking to start a blog, though I've never actually used it myself.  I had used blogger in the past and I still ache when I remember what it took to extract my content from the site and move it to my own host.  I'm going to apologize to anyone I've ever recommended wordpress.com to now, and encourage starting a first blog with blogger.

Issue one - templates.  On wordpress.com, you have to pay for the privilege of what your blog looks like if you don't want one of the crappy "skinny centered" defaults.  Yes, the stock templates on blogger suck, but I can - without the need of a credit card - edit the raw HTML.

Issue two - domains.  Want to have a name that doesn't end in .wordpress.com?  $10 per year, please.  I was willing to pay that, but then I learned wordpress wants you change the nameserver records to them instead of just pointing a CNAME or A record at the server.  F-that, you don't get my entire domain because I have a blog with you.  Blogger not only allows you a custom domain for free, but takes a CNAME.

Issue three - feeds.  I know I'm going to move this site, so rather than worry over trying to make the new site RSS feed location match I want to use FeedBurner.com to manage the feed location.  I regret not doing this with ViNull.com because I want to make changes to the feed there and it's not going to be pretty no matter what I do.

Issue Four - interface.  I am a computer programmer - very good at what I do - yet I have trouble figuring out the massive wordpress control panel.  Cicelie's one post into the blog was a bitch that it took 15 minutes to find out how to post.  I speak all the time about how important user experience is, maybe I need to invite some wordpress developers.

At this point, I went and checked out blogger, and found it had improved since I last used it and did everything I needed.  I may have to work at moving posts like I did last time, but I'm fine with that.  The great irony here is wordpress is an open source blogging platform - you can download and run yourself all the code that runs the hosted blog service,  yet the hosted service is very closed.  Maybe wordpress could do a little less ranting on other's lack of openness, and look at themselves instead.

home again

So, I've finally submitted to the fact that I'm an anime nerd. Mike refuses to join me in this obsession (probably because I choose cutesy high school dramas like Shuffle!, Rosario + Vampire, and Suzuka) and pokes fun at me because he can.