Category: News

What’s new or interesting in the world according to Finious.

Always Backing the Losing Horse

It seems that I find myself always backing the losing horse in this race called life. At least the race dealing with technology products and services. 🙁

I don’t go out to pick the horses that will fail. Far from it. I make my choices based on features, usability, customer service, price, product and the company’s reliability, user ratings and more. But when it comes to a technology company succeeding, it really seems to have nothing to do with any of these factors. The deciding factor is always money. Logic seems to say that the money would follow those who succeed in those other factors I mentioned. Sadly there is absolutely no correlation between the two, though sometime it seems there is an INVERSE correlation. Continue reading Always Backing the Losing Horse

Today Skunked Sister, Tomorrow N00b Nephew Pwned

I am a childish old man who enjoys the simple things in life… Gaming.

This evening I played a game of cribbage with my patient sister who is in town visiting for a couple of days. Luck of the draw, but I “skunked” her big time. Continue reading Today Skunked Sister, Tomorrow N00b Nephew Pwned

Burned My Blog

(NOTE: This post updated 5/27/14 w/ additional info.)

So I burned my blog today. No, I didn’t delete or otherwise destroy my blog. Rather I did something I thought I had done a long time ago, and apparently never completed. Namely I signed my blog’s post feed up for a FeedBurner account so I can use some of the features that service provides: such as stats, friendlier subscription options, SmartFeed, and more.

What prompted this is that one of my friends asked if he could subscribe to my blog via email instead of via a post feed. I know there are a number of WordPress plugins that can enable this feature, but I thought I already set up FeedBurner monitoring of my site and knew that the service could be set up to manage email subscribers. Continue reading Burned My Blog

Music: R.I.P. Bob 2 of DEVO

Sad news. Bob Casale (Bob2) of DEVO passed away yesterday, February 17, from heart failure. See the press release from his brother and DEVO founder Gerald Casale.

The news had me crawling the web watching DEVO videos…

Devo’s “Beautiful World” seems an appropriate song for today, exposing that ironic mixture of beauty and ugliness of life. Continue Reading and Watch Some Devo Videos →

A Sherlock Holmes Day & Review: Sherlock (Season 3)

By sheer luck, today has been Sherlock Holmes day for me…

First: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was born on this day in 1854.

Second: I watched the first two episodes of season three of the BBC series Sherlock.

While the new Sherlock episodes were fun and quite good, considering that there are only a total of three episodes in the entire season and I just watched two-thirds of them, where are the MYSTERIES? The mysteries should be the CENTER of any Sherlock Holmes tale. The ones that have appeared so far seem to be like appetizers to a meal that is never provided. I have an idea where they may go with the last episode, but really… So much wasted potential.

Day 0 Of 365 2014 Project

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to take at least ONE photo every day (even if I have to take a quick pic with my phone). I will then post it (hopefully the same day) and mark it Day 1 to Day 365. I’ll be posting these “photo of the day” pics to this blog and tagging them “2014 365 Project”. I’ll also be posting them to a “2014 365 Project set” on my FLICKR account.

As it is New Year’s Eve day, I figured I would post the photo below today as kind of a prologue and public commitment towards my new resolution.

000:365:2014 "Flying South"

The photo above was actually serendipitous as I was originally trying to take the photo below; which, while interesting, was a fairly standard picture of a starling sitting on the power line outside my apartment window singing to the rising sun. To my surprise as I looked through the viewfinder, the geese happened to fly into the background, so I quickly recomposed and shot. Since I was at 200mm and not set up for any kind of depth of field the geese were of course out of focus, but I think the blurred silhouettes add to the look; particularly when I dumped all the saturation for a more “artsy” black and white photo. If only the starling had looked to his right (towards the geese) just at that moment, it would have been perfect.

Greeting the Morning

Header Images

  • Update 12/31/13: Added 2 new header images for a total of 10
  • Update 11/27/13: Added 4 new header images for a total of 8.
  • Original Post 11/25/13: Posted 4 new header images.

After running the Twenty Eleven WordPress theme for this blog for two years now, (which I still LOVE,) I JUST discovered something I didn’t realize it could do. Namely that it would let you randomly display from a selection of custom header images.

I remember at one point when I first started using this particular theme that the only thing I didn’t think it did which I wanted to do was random custom image headers. I was new to wordpress and programmed my own very crude routine to do just that. But I made my changes to the actual theme files (which is a wordpress no-no), meaning that when I updated the theme to a newer version I lost those changes. And now I’ve discovered that the theme easily supports just what I wanted it to do much more elegantly than what I had jury-rigged together. If I had only uploaded more than ONE header I would have discovered the option to not only select from one of those images, but to instead display a random image.

Below are the images I currently have randomly appearing on every page of this website (except for on those few posts or pages where I have chosen to have a specific header). I will definitely be adding more soon.

Click the thumbnails to zoom.

While zoomed you can click on the left or right side of the image to move to the previous or next image in the gallery. You can also click the “start” link on the upper right of the zoom screen to watch the gallery as a slide show.

 

 

Ancho-Beef Stew, I Love You

I have been trying to be a little more ambitious on my “weekends” off and do some more serious baking & cooking (usually my “cooking” amounts to refrigerated or frozen meals I can pop in the microwave or oven and chow down on with little to no preparation or assembly). Last week I baked cookies from scratch, (making Oatmeal Scotchies with mixed results).

This week I used my Crock Pot to cook up a pretty awesome Ancho-Beef Stew recipe I found in a magazine and baked some pretty good corn bread from a mix (Marie Callender’s Low Fat Original Corn Bread). Probably a copyright violation, but I’m posting a link to my copy of the stew recipe here with some notes and variations on things I did differently a/o might do differently in the future.