Lone Locust Productions

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  • iWeb – Bad Apple?

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    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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  • Western Pizza Express


    Western Pizza (or perhaps Western Pizza Express is a Canadian chain with one location in Phoenix.

    Looking at their website, they operate two types of locations: take out and delivery only (Western Pizza Express) and facilities that include dine-in also (Western Pizza). If that’s the case, the Phoenix location is a Western Pizza, although their menu says, “Express”. Your guess is as good as mine.

    This pizza has more of a bready crust, but it wasn’t bad, and was properly cooked throughout – a welcome change after the last few pizzas I’ve had at other places.

    The pizza was loaded with good-tasting pepperoni, a full layer under the cheese and then small slices on top of the cheese.

    The cheese was good too.

    All-in-all it was a good, serviceable pizza, my only complaint was their “…’family secret’ recipe for our incredible tomato sauce…” as they put it.

    There was another person eating pizza with me, and without consulting each other we came to exact same conclusion: It’s barbecue sauce, not pizza sauce.

    If you like a really sweet pizza, this might be for you, but it was a bit too much for me. Although, to my surprise, it wasn’t as awful as it sounds.

    It was a nice place and I might eat there again, although I’d be inclined to try something else on their menu. They have a variety of subs, salads, wings, appetizers and desserts.

    Conclusion: Not for everyone, but worth a try, maybe, I suppose, or not.

    Price: 8″ Pepperoni, $7.50
    Price per square inch: $0.15 (0.149)

    Western Pizza
    Western Pizza Express
    4801 E. Indian School Road
    Phoenix, AZ


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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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  • Pino’s Pizza Al Centro


    Pizza is subjective. I’ll be the first to admit that.

    One person’s ultimate pizza is another man’s greasy cardboard. Some days when I’m eating a review pizza, I think, “no one could like this”.

    Other days I think, “this isn’t my cup of tea, but I could see how someone else could love it.” And so it was while I was eating at Pino’s Pizza Al Centro.

    Right off the bat, I’m not inclined to return, but I’ll try to be as detailed as I can in this review to let you decide as you see fit.

    I generally see pizza lovers falling into two major camps: Foundationers and Topping Heads. I’m a Foundationer.

    A Foundationer is not a crackpot religion, but a pizza philosophical position. In short, a crust failure is a total pizza failure.

    (While it isn’t a crackpot religion, if anyone would like it to be one, just send me money and I think something can be arranged. Similarly, we are looking for someone to write a wikipedia article on this philosophical movement.)

    Meanwhile, Topping Heads think everything above the sauce is the key to a masterful pizza. They’re just plain wrong, but I have to say that to keep my membership up in the Foundationers.

    Keep all that in mind as we move along in this review.

    Pino’s has been just off Central on Thomas for I don’t know how long. I’ve been passing it on my way home for as long as I can remember although I won’t go so far as to say It’s been there for the full 12 years I’ve been driving home that way.

    It’s never open when I pass it. For the longest time, I thought it was out of business. In fact, it’s only open weekdays between 10 AM and 2 PM and again from 5 PM to 8 PM and I’m almost never driving that way during those times.

    Today I made the effort to get there during lunch hour. I was expecting them to only have a couple small tables (looking through the front window gives the impression of a cramped space and no dining area), but actually they have a good-sized dining room with 20 or more tables.

    Even though I ate an early lunch, it was quite busy.

    They have several pizzas in a serving area for pizza by-the-slice, although I did notice that the crowds seemed more inclined towards have pastas and sandwiches rather than pizza.

    My pizza was a 10″ (their smallest) pepperoni. It looked really good when served up but it did not, for me, live up to the promise of its appearance.

    Starting from the top:

    • I disliked the pepperoni. Pepperoni generally falls in one of three categories,

      • flavorless – self explanatory
      • smoky – some pepperonis have an almost summer-sausage, smoky, country, bitter flavor. More like something I’d expect from Knickerson Farms than an Italian Deli
      • pepperoni-flavored. I can’t describe this one, but this is the flavorful, not smoky flavor that makes a pepperoni that I can just eat cut right off the stick.

      Unfortunately, this was the bitterest, most smoky flavored pepperoni I’d tasted in a long time. That, in itself, is not a show-stopper, there’s always Italian sausage as a fallback.

    • Cheese. The cheese was good, but there was loads too much on the pizza. It was awash in melted cheese. They certainly did not skimp on cheese (or pepperoni, for that matter). Too much cheese creates a different problem, which we’ll get to in a bit.
    • Sauce. Good. Tasty. No complaints.
    • Crust. Oh, this is really where the problem lies. The outer edge was cooked but had little flavor (unless you like the flavor of flour). There was one crunchy spot which tasted very similar to those dried Italian breadsticks they used to serve in a restaurants before they discovered people liked fresh ones.

      The inside portion of the crust was raw. “Raw” in this case meaning “wet dough”. This is exactly what happens when you put too much cheese (or other toppings) on pizza. The bottom browns up nice, but the top of the crust remains uncooked.

      I took a picture of it for demonstration purposes, but my cell phone camera has no macro and the picture was not clear enough to post. I was able to measure it though. There was a thin layer of cooked crust on the bottom and 3 times as much uncooked dough sitting on top of that. If you figure that the cooked crust will have risen, that’s really a lot more 75% uncooked.

    As a Foundationist, the uncooked crust is inexcusable, and yet I know many people who wouldn’t think twice about eating a pizza with double or triple cheese on it.

    If that’s you, then this pizza might be for you, but if a well-prepared crust reigns supreme in your book, give this one a miss.

    10″ Pepperoni Pizza, $6.95 = $0.09 (0.088) per square inch

    Conclusion: Topping Heads Only (But you might really like this one.)

    Pino’s Pizza Al Centro
    139 W Thomas
    Phoenix, AZ


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  • Olympic Gyros


    There’s a little hole-in-the-wall gyros place on 24th street that I often pass at lunchtime on my way to the Apple Store.

    Every-time I pass it I think, “I should have gone there for lunch” but the parking is almost non-existent and by then I’m committed to another course of action.

    Yesterday, though, I was in the right place at the right time and finally stopped in.

    Just as the sign says, their menu is mostly just gyros and sides, which is fine by me, The lunch special was souvlaki, fries and a drink for $6.50.

    I’ll need more visits to determine the overall quality of the food, but the souvlaki (grilled pork) was very good, and I really liked the sauce on the gyro. It had a strong, fresh flavor (heavy on cucumber) which added a lot to the dish.

    The restaurant only has about 6 tables and apparently even less parking.

    If you’re in the area, give them a try.

    Olympic Gyros
    3405 N 24th Street
    Phoenix, AZ 85016


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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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  • Oregano’s Pizza


    Ah late Christmas presents! A coworker took the crew out for pizza as a belated Christmas present. We decided to go to Oregano’s

    Oregano’s is a local Arizona chain, although somewhat of a late-comer to the Phoenix market. I ate in one in Flagstaff many years ago and bemoaned the fact they didn’t have one closer to home.

    Generally I’ve had stuffed pizzas, but today I decided to try the Chicago Thin crust.

    The smallest they have is 14″ which they claim feeds 1-2. Unlike most pizza places where the estimate is overstated (“Our 8″ pizza serves 2” Ha!) Oregano’s is understated. Few single people of normal capacity could polish this pie off in one sitting.

    The crust was very thin, but cooked and crisp throughout, with very little droopage (is that a word?) even on the center pieces.

    It is cut into squares rather than slices and that just plain sucks no matter what pizza it is. The pieces in the middle just don’t have that crusty last bite to complete the experience – although they do make good pieces to give to others and pretend you’re sharing magnanimously.

    Otherwise, good all around. Good crust, good pepperoni, good cheese, good sauce. A little salty.

    I still prefer the stuffed pizza, but for that you’ve gotta wait the better part of an hour, so don’t order one if you’re dying for food right now.

    Oregano’s always seems to be crowded, no matter which one you go to, so go at an off time or prepare to wait.

    They have other items and, although I tend to go with pizza, their sandwiches are large and good.

    14″ Pepperoni Pizza $10.74, cost per square inch: $0.07 (0.070).

    Conclusion: Recommended.

    Oregano’s Pizza
    1008 E Camelback
    (for other locations, see their website)

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  • Hit By A Red Brick


    I felt my review of Red Brick Pizza was somewhat unfair. Considering how much they bragged up their oven technology, it seemed I must have gotten an off-day pizza. They could hardly have called what I got “crispy”.

    Today, I took the family in during the middle of the day and tried again. This time we had a more rounded meal.

    My daughter had breadsticks: Like the crust, the breadsticks were nearly flavorless.

    My wife had some form of combo pizza. Before she’d ever read my review of Red Brick, she told me the ham and pepperoni must be made of tofu, as they had no flavor, although the sausage and bacon were flavorful.

    My pizza was nearly identical to my previous one. Pictured here you can see just how “crispy” the crust was.

    We timed the pizza, it was 12 minutes from order to pizza on the table. We did watch the process and from the moment the pizzas went in the oven it was only 6 minutes to the table.

    Final recommendation: Not recommended.

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