Chèvre chaud “nuggets”

In my continuing series on French groceries, I would love to see something like these in the US. Are you listening Trader Joe’s?

How to choose a melon (in France)

Bien choisir son melon charentais jaune How to choose a Charentais melon Le poids Bien dense, le melon doit peser lourd au creux de votre main. Although dense, the melon should be heavy in the palm of your hand. La…

Ubuntu on a Lenovo ThinkPad X100e

Stephanie’s brand new ThinkPad X100e arrived today, so I got to have some fun tonight and set up Ubuntu on it for her. Installation via memory key This was the first time I’d installed Ubuntu via memory key. Means I…

Machine translation, semantic HTML, and embedded code, oh my!

It’s hard for me to believe that in the not so distant past I worked as a web producer for O’Reilly’s now defunct Online Publishing Group. Basically I was a sort of HTML jockey, shuttling articles through their content management…

End of an era: Blogger shutting down FTP service

When I started Justinsomnia back in the summer of 2002, I setup Blogger to publish to my university webspace via FTP. In the spring of 2005 I started playing with WordPress because that’s what Ruby was using for OrangePolitics. My…

Mushroom foraging at Salt Point

A certain type of person goes into the woods to hunt for mushrooms, but to me that always seemed like a relatively esoteric, specialized pursuit. And then it started popping up in a number of things I was reading. Michael…

Hedgehog mushroom and ham quiche

It’s mushroom week here on Justinsomnia, as Stephanie and I try to consume the 4.5 pounds of mushrooms I foraged with Danny at Salt Point State Park. First up, hedgehog mushroom and ham quiche. We followed this basic quiche recipe,…

Buon giorno, Mercedes Benz

BNJORNO Mercedes Benz 560 SL, San Francisco, California

Channel Islands on a whim

Never ventured further south along the California coast than Morro Bay before (which is just north of San Luis Obispo). Given the three-day weekend, we decided to see how far we’d get. Los Angeles wasn’t out of the question, but…

Deer running from bears: next 2 miles

Yet another one for the collection (also see: elk, bighorn sheep)

Shrimp in a beer

On the way back from the Channel Islands, we stopped for lunch at Mariscos Puerto Nuevo in Soledad, which I’d previously written up in the aptly titled, An alternative garnish for Mexican beer. Somehow I remembered exactly where the place…

Preparing to juice some oranges

Sometimes, in rare moments, my kitchen looks so accidentally picturesque, I just have to stop and take a photo of it.

What happened to the black trumpets?

Half of the black trumpet mushrooms I foraged went into a very tasty, but not very photogenic coq-au-vin (chicken with wine stew) that I made in the slow cooker—just in time to feed two surprise guests a week ago. I…

Pacific coast cows

While going through my mushroom foraging photos, I discovered that I’d captured a decent picture of a cow crossing sign as Danny and I drove south on California 1. It joins bears & deer, bighorn, and elk in my menagerie.…

The phantom cable car

First attempt… Finally, caught on “film”!

Looking up 555 California

This needs to be said again and again and again:

And again, it’s not the salt on the kitchen counter that’s the problem in the American diet. It’s the hidden sodium in all the canned, boxed, and fast food we can’t keep our hands off of.

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I often view photography as form of collecting: Vans and the places where they were. #

The importance of following: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy #

My Dad completed the Austin Marathon today! 26.2 miles is a long way to run #

This is just too funny: Google is now allowing users to opt-out of its service by moving them to a remote mountain village #

I’m not much of an early-adopter when it comes to such things, but I do respect Sam Ruby and Joe Gregorio’s opinions #

Nice rap: Fear the Boom and Bust #

Man, this pisses me off so much:

Among the sites it took down was I Rock Cleveland, whose author, Bill Lipold, painstakingly sought and received explicit permission to post every single track and excerpt he put up. By using the law to annihilate sites that obeyed all the rules and sought permission from the copyright holders at every turn, IFPI’s message is simple: “Don’t bother getting permission. Just take stuff. You’re wasting your time trying to obey the law. It all comes out the same in the end—we don’t care whether you obey our rules or not.”

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Love this: Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire #

I enjoyed scrolling through this: The Quest For Every Beard Type #

Check out the latest in Stephanie’s Crottin Experiments #

Name-drop dinner: “A New Age of Wonder” #

Great name: Goodluck Jonathan #

ROUS! Giant Hamster: pictures of Caplin Rous the pet capybara #

Term I did not know: Button copy #

As a fan of the NPS, I found this eye-opening: In the West, ‘Monument’ Is a Fighting Word #

Great title: The Breast Whisperer

“Once you go home from the hospital, you’re on your own with this little alien creature, and you have to figure out how to keep it alive, So you put it on your nipple and wait for it to eat, and hope all is right. But you really have no idea. Are they doing it right? Are they not doing it right? Are they eating enough? Are they starving?”

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Got a new computer at work, which gave me reason to update my Setting up Ubuntu from scratch and Setting up a nice LAMP development environment posts. Very very glad I had them, so I’m very happy to keep them updated. #

Been thinkin’ about HTML5 lately: XTH – the XHTML to HTML converter for WordPress #

Yikes, bad news for fair use today:

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided that the US Post Office’s use of an image, based on a copyrighted sculpture [, the Korean War Veteran’s Memorial], was not fair use.

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Wow, it was annoying that I had to do that:
Can’t Click in Flash using Ubuntu x64 9.10 (Karmic)? #

Too good: tautology club #

Self-hosting might not mean what you think it means #