Sorry for the outages and posting delay here. I’m seriously considering finally paying for an external web host to put this blog on. It won’t help the occasional service outage at home, but it will remove the (albeit slight) embarrassment of having a blog that no-one can get to. It should also greatly increase the performance aspect….

More to come.

This is a quick test post of the Windows Live Writer blogging software.  It’s not too bad, really.  It let’s you post in a window that looks like your blog, instead of the usual Movable Type plain text window.  Let’s see if this makes it to the blog…. 

The problem would be (as it always is with an installed client) when I’m not at my own computer I would just end up going back to the Movable Type interface anyway to post something.  The insert picture business is alright I guess, but I make Flickr pay for my image bandwidth, so why bother?  Anyway, it is a clean application, and it should certainly stay free in  it’s current incarnation.  No way this is worth any money yet.

Another annoyance is the new post=new window behaviour, I can’t for the life of me get the current window to just reuse when I am done with a post.  I think that pretty much kills it for me, I don’t generally work on more than one post at a time.

I generally suck at cooking, but I love kitchen gadgets. So over the past few years I have been buying Henckel knives and tossing the other crappier knives we have. The Henckel knives are really nice, they feel great and are comfortably heavy. The thing is, the Henckels don’t really come with the kind of edge you would think they should have. So I have tried to sharpen them a little bit myself with a ceramic rod kit from Lee Valley. I’m not that impressed to be honest, it seemed to only help a tiny bit with the edge, I just thought I was doing it wrong. So, when I saw this knife sharpening tutorial today on Instructables I think it may be time to take it up a notch with an actual stone instead of the ceramic, which doesn’t seem to do anything. I will let you know how that turns out once I find one of these things.

Anyway, in the course of my knife-related ramble today, I came across and noticed the following:

– From Metafilter, a vintage Ginsu commercial I remember being on TV about 12 years ago. And from the same Mefi post, a mind blowing video of a samurai sword that is sharp enough to cut a bullet fired at it from a 9mm handgun. I would say that my knives aren’t quite up to the task just yet.

– What is up with that Henckels website, by the way? I mean the female models holding deadly knives? One of them is wearing a wedding dress, which I guess is a common gift idea for wedding registries. The rest of them are dressed rather provocatively, and one of them has a pizza cutter in a leg sheath, secret agent-style. What the heck kind of pizza cutting does she do?

– And finally, an unfortunate fisherman was actually run through by the marlin he was hauling in. He is lucky to be alive, since he was impaled by the 14 foot, 800 pound fish and tossed into the ocean. That’s not strictly knife-related, but it is long, sharp and pointy related, so I thought I would put it in this now very long winded post.

That’s it. I have never seen that before ever. Weird.

Our fridge at home is a busy place, as you can imagine. Five humans (and periodically, a dog) eat the food that comes out of there every day. Most of the time we eat that sucker empty in no time flat, descending like a swarm of locusts. From time to time something slips through the cracks and we don’t get to it until neither Nikki nor I can be sure when it was purchased, and so it’s either roll the dice and give it a go (which we don’t do very often), or toss it in the trash. Well, those days are soon to be numbered it seems.

Enter Timestrip Smart Labels to save us from ourselves. It’s too cool stuff, they are disposable strips that you activate and stick to stuff when you put it in the fridge. The strips have a little window that shows you how much time has elapsed since you did that, so you can better decide if you should eat that potato salad, etc. The only problem I can see is I’m not too crazy about the extra effort it will take to activate and adhere these things to all of the groceries we buy. That and the extra cost of having these things on hand might be a problem for the business model. Still, there are some indications on the website that some products may start to come with these things built right into the packaging, and that would make much more sense.

I saw this one on Gizmodo.com