Nevermind()

I’m writing some quick and dirty (oh very dirty, I’m almost ashamed at how bad this PHP code I’m writing is…) web pages for a project at work.

One of them has a form that the user can either fill out and submit, or cancel. If the user clicks the cancel button, I’m firing a JavaScript function that will return the user to the index of the site.

The function name: nevermind()

I don’t know why that amuses me as much as it does.

Modified Coq Au Vin

Coq Au Vin was one of the first recipes I tried out in the slow-cooker. The version you see below is far from traditional, but it captures the essence of what I love about the original.

While you don’t strictly need to brown ingredients before adding them to a slow-cooker, doing so brings a richer flavor to this dish.

One note about wine: Don’t cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink. Cooking will intensify the flavors in the wine. If you use a cheap wine that you don’t really like the flavor of, you won’t be happy with the final dish.

Continue reading Modified Coq Au Vin

Slow-Cookery

I bought a crock-pot a couple of weeks back, so I could submit an entry for the chili cook-off at work. I’ve been using it quite a bit since. I wish I had gotten one of these a long time ago.

I’ve done a braised chicken, a roast beef, (well braised beef, really) Coq Au Vin, chicken and dumplings, and 2 batches of chili (I did a test batch before my final entry for the contest as I was adapting a pressure-cooker recipe, and wanted to make a couple of other changes, too.) So far, I think my favorite was the Coq Au Vin. Tonight I’ve got corned beef (sans cabbage) lined up.

The thing I like best about cooking with a crock-pot: Throwing everything in to it in the morning, and basically forgetting about it until dinner time.

The thing I like least about cooking with a crock-pot: Having to wait 7 more hours to eat dinner when it smells SO GOOD right now. 🙂

East Bay Harmony

I recently joined a choir called East Bay Harmony. We are preparing for a concert at the end of this month. (See their website for more details.) I’ve got to have 14 songs for the large choir memorized (I’d say I’m 80%-90% there. I was off-book for the last rehearsal, but had trouble with few of the songs) as well as 2 “Small Group” songs, one of which I volunteered for at the last rehearsal.

As I’ve mentioned to a couple of people, the thing I’m most worried about is the material for Small Group. (Especially the Quartet piece.) One of the things I’ve always had trouble with is relying on the other singers around me to keep me on pitch. A big piece of it just has to do with my confidence as a singer, which is the main reason I wanted to join the Small Group Master Class. I wasn’t expecting to perform in any of the small groups at the upcoming concert, and was half ready to tell the director that I didn’t want to. Then I realized that I should just step up. (Thank you Paul.) If I backed off from this performance, it would be just that much easier to back off from others.

What’s the worst that can happen? It’s only a 2-3 minute song.

So, if anyone reading this is going to be in the Oakland area on the evening of March 26th, you are more than welcome to come see me (and a bunch of other talented musicians) sing. More details can be found here, and if you’d like me to send an evite your way, leave a message in the comments.

Justin and Blue



Justin and Blue, originally uploaded by Hooloovoo.

Jenny and Justin went to the Santa Rosa mall to meet Blue this afternoon. As you can see, he had a blast. I didn’t go with them because I had rehearsal. “Rehearsal for what?” you ask. I’ll write more about that soon.

Cleaning Up the Archives

There are some schools of thought that one should never (or almost never) delete old blog posts, or even create substantial revisions without providing notice of the change (and access to the original text.) I do not really feel that way. One of the things that can make publishing on the web (a blog, a video, a plain old web site) is the fact that it is a living thing. It’s easy to make changes and improvements.

Of course it’s not as easy to hide those changes as one might think. This is also a good thing. It helps keep people accountable.

Ease of updating is one of the most powerful things about the web.
That power should not be wielded indiscriminatly.
If nothing else one should be accountable to oneself.

I’m going through the archives and cleaning things up. Fixing spelling errors, adding titles to entries, (There are over 100 that just have a time-stamp as the title. An artifact of the port from g-blog to WordPress. I had a bad habit of not entering a title when posting.) fixing broken links, and removing some of the useless cruft.

For example: there are entries that are marked private that are never going to see the light of day. Nothing bad, but I had another habit of leaving notes for myself in the blog (One example was birthday gift ideas for my step-father) that the rest of the users (or the general public) didn’t need to see. I don’t need them anymore, so out they go.

I’m tired. I’m up too late to be writing about this coherently. I suppose I could save this as a draft and come back to it later, but whats the fun in that?

Look What Daddy Taught Me!



Look What Daddy Taught Me!, originally uploaded by Hooloovoo.

I was making faces at him the other day. He started making this one back.

I’m playing with ideas on incorporating photos into this blog. I tried posting an entry from within Flickr. It worked, but I’ve come back and edited it quite a bit from within WordPress. I think I can find a better way. (I guess it’s time to dig into the plugins again.

Does anyone think I should stop blogging about setting up my blog and start blogging?

State of Flux

I’m toying with the idea of moving this blog to a new home. Namely http://hooloovoo.net (instead of using the blog.hooloovoo.net sub-domain.) Over the last few days, I’ve come to realize that I have no interest in updating (or even maintaining) the design/content of my old site.

The only substantial change I’ve made recently was adding a rule to my .htaccess file to redirect http://hooloovoo.net/blog to this site. Prior to that, I updated the homepage (and did a design refresh) in 2002, added the blog page (syndicating g-blog.net) in 2003. I also added an eBay directory last year for self-hosting auction images. (But I never linked that to the rest of the site.)

My old website has languished for 4 or 5 years. It’s time that changed. There’s nothing on the site content-wise that I can’t easily port into WP as a Page. So I think that is what I’m eventually going to do. For now, I’ve added a couple more rules to my .htaccess file, which is most likely how you got here if you just tried to visit http://hooloovoo.net.

(Tangent – I should clean up my category list now that I have control over it. Do I really need a “Testing GLUE” category now that this site is no longer on GLUE?)