Adam's Blog

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS: Do not read any further if you do not want critical plot points revealed I saw The Dark Knight on Friday afternoon. Like many movies, I need a few days to truly digest the film. Sometimes, I like a film and later decide I didn't like it as much as I thought (see: Spiderman 3, Die Hard 4). Sometimes, I like a film and decide later it was better than I thought (see: The Matrix, The Bourne Ultimatum). In this case, I knew I liked the film. It was very true to Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins film in both storyline and dark overtones. But, like James Bond, I fear there are some real breaks with reality that I struggle to accept. Nothing in the Bourne movies I mentioned above requires major suspension of disbelief. But The Dark Knight pushes reality a little too much. Let's examine some aspects of the film: Cast and characters Again, masterfully done. I enjoyed the acting quite a bit. Christian Bale, Michael Cain, Morgan Freeman, Aaron Eckhardt, Gary Oldman, Nestor Carbonall, all were fantastic. Heath Ledger - while I won't call him Oscar-worthy, primary because I don't really understand what...

Marvelous day for good eats, eh? It was sunny and 95F here in Florida, the perfect day for a refreshing afternoon snack. After a quick trip to The Fresh Market , Jennifer and I munched on this: The perfect afternoon snack: perfectly ripe sideless yellow watermelon slices with huge fresh organic blueberries. Dinner was a very successful experiment. This is one of my favorites: Veal Osso Bucco on saffron risotto. This is one of my favorite dishes I've ever made. Not bad for a lazy Sunday.

I have several websites. The way my web host has them set up, like many hosts who use cPanel, is that one site is a "master" and the others essentially exist as directories within that site. My master site is smallaxesolutions.com, which is the "company" under which I sometimes do my web design and network support business. One of the things I (used to) do as Small Axe Solutions was publish the core code of the engine that powers sethadam1.com, Small Axe. Small Axe code was built up as 0.1, then 0.2, then 0.3. At that point, I had added several features to sethadam1.com that I had yet to merge upstream into Small Axe. So, I created a build system so I could slowly integrate the changes. In short, it worked like this: I had a directory called "build_source" which contained my current code. Of course, it had all kinds of problems out of the box, like the config files which pointed to nonsensical location like /path/to/your/blog/. It had no valid database connection info. The flatfiles were unwritable. So, in short, the code was (usually) solid, but PHP couldn't compile it. Meanwhile, another directory called "demo" was waiting silently. Lastly,...

It happens to us all. We network folks admins have a lot of responsibility put on us that no one else understands. Google is sometimes seen as the company who can do no wrong. Well, they're human, and it's time to hire someone to do your administrative work, boys.

It's been awhile since I've last written largely because I've been so busy. But I have to record this one passing thought. I woke up today, a Sunday, and walked the dog at just before 7AM. The sun was out, but not too hot yet. The birds were chirping, but no humans made any noise or could be seen. No one had yet begun mowing their yard or washing their cars. It was just the dog, the birds, the sun, and me. I've tried meditation. I've tried deep relaxation. But honestly, right now, nothing I know of can beat the natural, organic peace of 7AM in Florida in the Summer.

Since I've been learning a little more about cooking, I've been trying to focus a little less on just grilling meat. Aside from a 2.5 lb prime grade cowboy cut ribeye that I burned the other day (it was salvagable once I trimmed away a black layer), I've got the grilling thing mostly down. So I started really looking into different dishes than I normally would make and I focused on using non-traditional exotic spices like Garam Masala. This week we started playing with cooking with cocoa and chilis. It's farily common knowledge in the culinary world that cocoa powder and chilis complement each other. Even the Mayans used chilis in their hot chocolate. And now Lindt makes a chocolate bar with chilis. So we tried two dishes. First was cocoa chili steak. It was a choice ribeye crusted with cocoa powder and crushed smoked chipotle dust had a sweet and hot aftertaste. The butter dripped tri-color rotini was a nice complement. A much better example of the combination was the cocoa chili chicken mole pronounced (MOH-lay). The mole was entirely unique, the taste was both sweet and chocolatey, the cocoa was unmistakable. That said, every bite had a very...

I needed to have an image blink in one of our intranet applications today, so I wrote this quick javascript to accomodate. There aren't many good image blinker scripts online, so I'm adding mine to the mix: Start by adding this to your javascript file:

function blinkId(id) {
	var i = document.getElementById(id);
	if(i.style.visibility=='hidden') {
		i.style.visibility='visible';
	} else {
		i.style.visibility='hidden';
	}
    setTimeout("blinkId('"+id+"')",1000);
	return true;
}

And this right before you end your <html> tag:

This will work for images, divs, spans, pretty much any block level element with an id. Updated 8/19/2008: Fixed a copy/paste bug in this post.

Last night, three of my friends and I got together for an "exotic meat" dinner. Below is the proof and a short write-up of each meat. First Course: American Kobe Beef American Kobe beef is an off-shoot of Japanese Wagyu beef. It is super tender, exceedingly well marbled, and delicately flavorful. This steak was a top sirloin, not typically one of my favorite cuts. However, it came out beautifully, and tasted fantastic both raw and cooked. American Kobe top sirloin Second Course: Elk Tenderloin Elk is a delicate meat that can be gamey if not properly prepared, but I have found, in my limited elk experience, that it can be an amazing dish if done right. We made ours in a beef and cream sauce, heavy on the tarragon, with carrots. The tenderness, no doubt, can be attributed to the cut more than anything, but the fantastic texture can only be described as buttery soft, and the flavor, while suggesting a hint of game, was uniquely tasty. A lamb lover, I think, will appreciate elk's flavor. Elk Tenderloin Third Course: Buffalo Steak Buffalo and bison meats are not quite as exotic as some of the forthcoming meats, but they both...

Last night's season finale of Lost was truly everything I wanted it to be. After 4 seasons, we finally are getting to the meat of the story. I keep saying that we learn so much and still know nothing, and while that's true, I admit that last night left me very happy. Let's examine: (1) Desmond's storyline has come complete circle and pretty much ended. Although there's a lot of bits to be filled in, primarily revolving around Penny Widmore, Desmond got his happy ending. We don't yet understand his future flashes, but he reunited with Penny, and for that, we're all thankful. (2) We know that time travel is a factor here, and that the island, via its unique magnetic properties, can itself move in time. Does anyone else go "wow!" just having confirmed that? I loved that we're actually seeing some real unraveling of the mystery of the island. Guys... where are we? (3) We know how the Oceanic 6 became the Oceanic 6. So they didn't get off the island... the island simply went away and left them back in the real world ...or something. What we don't know is why Jack, rather than simply saying "no...

I went into last night expecting to be disappointed, not because I felt Archie had more fans than David Cook, but also because season 7 of American Idol has been so crappy that it would have been poetic to have it end in tragedy too. But alas, it did not. In fact, they really made me look foolish by giving us several gifts. Let's review: first, David Cook's fun "Sharp Dressed Man" with ZZ Top. The performance itself wasn't so great, but it was fun, which was nice. Also, good to see that ZZ Top is still alive and that Sharp Dressed Man is still a good song, and that American Idol didn't remove all of the instrumental bits. Then came a real gem, the second "gave me chills" moment of the season, when Brooke White delivered a gorgeous rendition of "Teach Your Children" with Graham Nash. Nash was humble and restrained, White was on-key, confident, and natural. The entire ballad was not only beautiful, but also well captured. The mix favored the harmony over the melody by just a little, just enough to highlight Brooke - after all, it was her performance - but not overdo it. All in...