Lone Locust Productions

Category: General

  • Happy Chinese New Year


    Chinese New Year has rolled around again and we made our obligatory visit to Chinese Week at the Chinese Cultural Center.

    Irene has been sick, but was feeling better today, so we decided to see if there was anything new. There wasn’t.

    Chinese New Year is an interesting holiday, in a Chinese country, apart from the sound of firecrackers, the day itself is practically dead. Everyone spends the day with family.

    That doesn’t make such great cultural festival, so they turn it into a dog and pony show. Here in Phoenix, which has no real Chinese community to speak of, it’s mostly an excuse to wander around booths for health insurance, acupuncture, a few “oriental” items for sale (many Japanese) and 5 or 6 Chinese (and one Japanese) restaurants.

    Despite being nothing new, Michelle had fun riding the train. I’m not sure if the train is just there for fun or is meant to remind us all of the important contribution the Chinese made building the rail network in the 19th century. I don’t think the Chinese had anything to do with the moon-walk, rock-scaling walls or the ferris wheel, though.

    Anyway, many of the local Chinese show up for lack of anything else to do. Many Taiwanese show up, too, although there’s the really stubborn contingent who refuse to show up or participate because, “Taiwan is not part of China”.

    Darn, with that phrase I just got my blog banned by Google China.


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  • Johnnie’s Chicago Red Hots


    What can you say about a restaurant that you’ve been going to for 18 years?

    In that time I’ve had 3 employers, 4 residences, gotten married, had 2 children and not one single thing has changed at Johnnie’s in that time except maybe some of the pictures on the wall and the business cards on the board. They’re still my favorite hot dogs in town.

    Featuring Vienna Beef products, Johnnie’s has been serving for around 20 years and has earned at least one of those “Best of…” awards given out by one of those newspapers.

    Sure, when you serve Vienna Beef, there’s not much difference in your product than every other Vienna Beef vendor. What sets Johnnie’s apart are their fresh, handmade french fries, served with every dog.

    A basic dog (w/mustard, relish, onion, kosher dil pickle, sport peppers, celery salt and tomato) starts at $3.39 and range up to the Garbage Dog (A jumbo w/chili, cheese, slaw and kraut, plus any or all of the aforementioned toppings) for $4.69. A limited number of Italian sandwiches are also available. Don’t go to Johnnie’s if you’re after a salad.

    If you like good hot dogs and handmade fries, give them a try.

    Johnnie’s Chicago Red Hots
    53 West Thomas Ave
    Phoenix, AZ
    (602) 241-0113
    Open weekdays, 10AM – 4PM


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  • iWeb – Bad Apple?

    IMG_3247.JPG

    I use iPhoto on a daily basis, but there’s been a continually annoying bug that has prevented me from doing some important things. Specifically, when you burn a photo album to CD or DVD, the keywords used for tagging get scrambled.

    For example, if I have a picture of Michelle at a zoo here in Arizona, it might have the keywords “Family”, “Arizona”, “Zoo”, “Animal”. I use these to post the photos to my flickr account, and as a way to sift through the photos in iPhoto quickly.

    Once the albums are burned to CD or DVD, the keywords get mixed with other keywords not associated with my pictures, for example thee above photo might become “Costco”, “Pizza”, “Taiwan”, “Urinal”. (Yes, I do have a tag for Urinals as I occasionally contribute photos to the website urinal.net.)

    The practical inconvenience of this bug is that I have not been able to merge the photos that I took in Taiwan (Sept ’05- Nov ’05) and afterwards from my iBook onto my Powermac where all my older photos are located. This is getting to be a problem because my iBook has limited space and my new Canon 350D takes really big pictures.

    With the release of iLife ’06 (and contained within a new version of iPhoto) I hoped that the problem was fixed, so I went against my instincts honed from years of programming experience and bought iLife ’06 before they released the first set of bug fixes.

    As it turns out, it appears that the iPhoto bug is fixed, but I need more testing before I’m positive that a merge will work correctly, but the first hurdle is out of the way. (In a way, I’ll miss the fact that I’ve got all those photos readily available to show off on my laptop, but I need that space back – perhaps I’ll shrink the photos on the iBook to a smaller resolution just so I can keep them handy.)

    Over the next few days, I’ll review the individual programs in iLife ’06 from my perspective, but I want to turn to iWeb first.

    Much of the “theme” of the iLife ’06 enhancements over iLife ’05 have to do with blogging, pod-casting, etc. To that end, they’ve added iWeb, a web-page management program, which integrates with the other programs and the .Mac service to make an easy-to-use tool for posting stuff to the ‘net.

    Like iDVD, their slick and easy DVD authoring tool, Apple supplies iWeb with professionally-designed templates, which you’re stuck with. Nowadays that’s not so bad as many, many people are keeping pages that have rigid formats and it is a tedious chore keeping a page with a unified look-and-feel.

    In a very short space of time, I put together a simple family web-page. My idea was for a “news” page where both Irene and I could post entries.

    Bzzzzzzt! Wrong answer!

    There’s apparently no (built-in) way for two people to maintain the same page from two different computers. A search of the net shows this isn’t just my imagination, although I did find this nifty tip on macosxhints.com.

    The tip shows how to take the file containing all the site information from one computer and moving it to a USB key and tricking the OS into redirecting the file to the key. Clever, but way too much hassle.

    So I thought, why not try to redirect the file to my iDisk (shared disk space provided by the .Mac service, more on that later) and trick the system that way? Here’s why not: The web site it created is 9.1mb, but the file that stores the info on my computer is 23mb. As I’ve only got a trial .Mac membership, I’ve only 11mb left available.

    Multiple computers updating an iWeb site is a critical enhancement that needs to be addressed immediately.

    The other “problem” with iWeb (and indeed many of the publishing enhancements to the other iLife ’06 products) is the tight integration (to the near exclusion of anything else) with the .Mac service.

    The .Mac service has been around for sometime. Once upon a time, before I ever bought a Mac, it was free. It provides you with some typical services, such as e-Mail accounts and online disk storage and some unique Mac-only services, such as the iDisk, which appears as a drive on your Mac, but actually resides at .Mac, giving you easy access to your files when away from your computer or on your laptop and the synchronization services, which are really nice if you have multiple computers. The synchronization services allow you to keep all your bookmarks, address book entries, calendar entries, passwords, e-mail accounts and settings the same on all your Macs.

    This is great if you’re out in the field and you add someone to your address book or you mark a new bookmark and when you get home it’s all updated onto your home computer. It’s a cool idea and it works well, but I’d never pay $99 a year just for that.

    Now, along comes iLife ’06. Want to do easy pod-casting? Garageband can do it – right to your .Mac account. Video-casting? iMovie and .Mac. Web-pages? iWeb and .Mac. Photo-casting? iPhoto and .Mac. See the pattern?

    I’ll get into photo-casting when I review the new iPhoto, but in a nutshell, Photo-casting allows the publishing of photos directly into the iPhoto of others. Something really cool if you’ve got grandparents living on the other side of the planet who happen to have a Mac. In any case, this new feature is compelling enough that I’m trying the 60 day trial membership to .Mac

    Despite earlier rumors, iWeb doesn’t require that you use .Mac. You can generate web pages, export them to your disk drive and then post that to another web server, but several features (such as nifty slideshows) are disabled. (If you want to see a slideshow, look here and select the “Start Slideshow” button near the top.

    iWeb certainly could bring a whole new wave of the unwashed masses to the World Wide Web but in my book, the jury is still out. (Who am I kidding, the unwashed masses can’t afford Macs, but now that Intel-based Macs are out, I do know some people at Intel who’ll need to buy Macs soon.)

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  • Wrong Photos


    Darn it! I posted all the scanned photos from our 2000 United Kingdom trip to my flickr.

    Then I realized I uploaded all the low-quality scans, instead of my better set. What a hassle.


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  • Zoinks! Scoob! It’s the ghost of the Creepy Pizza Clown!


    How’d you like this thing staring at you while you eat your pizza?

    They haven’t released all of Scooby-Doo on DVD yet, but if they ever do, I’m pretty sure this one is in there.

    It’s the episode where every time Shaggy and Scooby eat pizza, this ghost shows up and scares them into a hunger strike.


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  • Friday The 13th Isn’t Always Bad!


    Despite not feeling well today, James took his first (known) steps today.

    He clearly took 2 unassisted steps – towards me! I win again!

    This photo was taken a few minutes later. He’s been trying to stand and walk a lot this evening.


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  • This Should Have Been a Sign


    This picture, taken last night at dinner, should have been our first clue that James was staring to feel under the weather (again).

    Today he’s coughing (not surprising because we’re on the third day of high pollution warnings in a winter chock full of them), his cheeks are bright red and he’s begun to vomit.


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  • Verrado


    Yesterday, we went out to Verrado, which is one of those master-planned communities on the unbelievably far outskirts of the Phoenix-metropolitan area.

    Personally, I have strong misgivings about people who choose to live out in the boonies. I understand the rationale. Who wouldn’t want to get out of the damned, polluted and dirty city? As cities go, Phoenix may supposedly be one of the best-run in the world, but it is undeniably ugly, sitting as it does on the most unpleasantly ugly expanse of desert Arizona has to offer.

    You need to get a long way out of town before the land takes on any character.

    However, while I understand the desire to get away, I’m offended by the complete irresponsibility of people who work in town and drive 60 miles or more a day on their commute. You can’t tell me that isn’t a major contributor to Phoenix’s pollution problems.

    Nonetheless, it’s fun to look and dream about the day when you could retire and not have to drive in. or perhaps that not-so-distant day when we can really telecommute every day. I could make the trip once a month for staff meetings, that wouldn’t be so bad.

    Verrado was supposed to be one of the new attempts to bring community back to people’s lives. Some of the concepts include garages in the back of the house, front porches set close to the streets to foster community. “Centralized” retail space, which apartment living above the commercial space, etc.

    It all sounds good on paper, but in all practicality, the centralized retail space is far away from even the outskirts of Verrado itself. It’s beyond the walking range of the average person, and even beyond the walking range of the extraordinary person when the summer temperatures peak out well over 110º.

    So, while it is a little different from the average tract homes, it’s still just a planned community which relies on the automobile.

    We went out on a lark, in the afternoon, just to take a look. We had no idea there would be some 24 or so model homes from 8 different builders, and we weren’t able to complete the circuit before the sun was going down.

    By way of background, I used to do electrical work. I worked for some contractors who built mega-expensive, completely custom-built homes. These were homes ranging from $4-10 million and that was 22 years ago. I’ve worked on 16-bedroom mansions and homes with built-in elevators and 13 car garages. I’ve seen some very nice homes.

    That notwithstanding, the house pictured here is my favorite house I’ve ever seen. It’s about a 4 bedroom (with massive master bedroom and bathroom), plus den and office and with a completely attached (and yet separate) guest house (which is what you see in front).

    On the right of the picture in the main entry, which leads you into a walled courtyard. There’s even a tree in the courtyard, although I’d be concerned that might be a maintenance nightmare in the future.

    The only I would change about this house is that the model home directly to the left has a better master bathroom.

    However, as this model is over 4,000 square feet and priced at over $634,000, unless I hit the PowerBall, it’s never going to happen.

    Still let’s give them credit where credit is due, this particular home is “Residence Four” in the Acacia neighborhood by Monterey Homes. If you’re out that way, take a look at it, it’s amazing.


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  • My New iMac


    OK, it’s not my new iMac… it isn’t mine… it isn’t even a Mac… come to think of it, it isn’t even a computer.

    We were looking at model homes today and this was one of the props used to show how modern and computer-friendly the house was.

    Too bad there was no actual place to plug one in anywhere nearby.


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  • The Dangers of Billiards


    Every time we go to my father’s house, my daughter wants to toss the balls around on my dad’s pool table.

    So, my dad decided to get her a mini pool table for Christmas.

    There’s a far distance from tossing the balls around by hand and actually putting a cue in the hands of a three year-old, as witness by the picture of Michelle attempting to put my dad’s eye out.

    (Actually, she’d trying to hit the balls on the table behind her, but she just hasn’t got the hang of it.)

    I’m going to hide the cues for a few years. In the meantime, it’s pretty cute that she calls it a “ping pool” table after something she saw on my Buck Rogers DVDs 6 months or more ago.


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