When I read a recent entry on Chris Cosentino’s blog “Offal Good” about Jamie Oliver’s show that aired on BBC Channel 4, I was immediately intrigued. The show, titled “Jamie Oliver’s Fowl Dinners“, tackles the topic of raising chickens to be used for their eggs and meat. At first glance, this might not appear as a topic worthy of an entire show. However, it opens up a much larger question that the majority of American’s probably never consider: “Do you know where your food comes from?”
Mr. Cosentino has done the leg-work and has found a collection of YouTube clips of the show and posted them in his entry about the show. Before reading further, I recommend you check out the post and watch all of the videos; it’ll take you about 30 or 45 minutes. Then you can come back and read further.
Maybe you have come across the term “email bankruptcy“. It’s when you just have so much email in your Inbox that you are forced to delete all of it and start fresh. It’s very much a last resort type of maneuver and one that I have yet to come across in my personal or professional life. However, it is understandable.
My problem is not email, but rather the collection of RSS feeds that I monitor on a daily basis. RSS is a great way to get the latest content from your favorite websites. But when you start subscribing to multiple feeds that are pushing out more than a dozen new pieces of content each day, you can get overwhelmed. I’m thinking I’m approaching that point, as evidenced by the graphic to the right.
If you look, I am subscribed to 89 feeds, have over 1000 unread posts, and my trends for reading the existing content is slowing. I’m about ready to just mark everything read and undoubtedly miss out on something interesting, but I’m gun-shy. What if that something is REALLY interesting?! I will feel like a fool!
On Saturday night, I watching re-runs of SNL’s Weekend Update show, that they have been running on Thursday nights. One of their “newscasts” featured the “crazy lady” from one of the McCain rallies, where she told Senator McCain that she was afraid of Barack Obama because he was an Arab. I remember seeing the actual video from that event and shaking my head, thinking “I’m sure glad I don’t know anyone like that.”
Unfortunately, I can no longer make a statement like that.
I had spent the night at my in-laws house and my wife’s grandparents came to visit while we were getting ready for our last wedding of 2008. My wife’s grandfather is quite the liberal and takes great interest in politics, so of course the conversation turned to the election. Nearly everyone in the home was voicing their opinion (more accurately, their support) for Senator Obama. The lone dissenter was my wife’s grandmother who proclaimed that she did not like Obama because he was a Muslim.
This completely floored me as I had always known my grandparent-in-laws to be well educated and aware of the world around them. To hear one of them state something so false, was almost disgusting to my ears.
I tried to reason with her, as did my wife, saying that the claims of Obama being a Muslim were almost entirely untrue. (According to Fact Checker, Obama attended a Catholic school “enrolled as a Muslim”.) But her grandmother insisted that he was a Muslim and that he couldn’t be trusted.
After returning from my most recent travels and examining the pictures I captured, I was feeling let down by the quality of the images. I’ve known for a while that the Canon PowerShot 450 that I use isn’t the best camera, but it had kept me satisfied for the most part. I’ve constantly been annoyed by its performance in low-light situations and how the flash completely washes out the subjects in my photos. But the small size and easy portability of the camera kept me hanging onto it. (I really should have kept my Canon PowerShot A80; even though the camera is older, the pictures are far superior.)
But I think it is time for me to upgrade my photo capabilities. I took a few photo courses back in my high school days, so I’m familiar with some of the terms that surround the use of any SLR camera. I’m no expert, but I think I can hack my way through it. I’ve used my Nikon N60 with varying degrees of success, although I haven’t really touched it in over two years. And since I’m not looking to become a professional photographer, so my needs are below what a real pro would want.
I consulted with a variety of people on this topic and have generally been steered in one direction. Most people agree that the entry level DSLR cameras from Canon and Nikon are the way to go. Both companies have a solid reputation and similar price-points. An analogy was made that it was akin to buying a Honda or a Toyota. Interestingly enough, most folks who had entered the arena of DSLR have chosen a Nikon D60, which is where I am leaning right now.
I’m still deliquent with the remainder of my posts from San Francisco, but I had to mention the most recent travel plans I just completed.
My wife and I are finally closing on this year’s wedding season, with one final wedding in Newport, RI this weekend. But before that, we traveled to Atlanta and Philadelphia for back-to-back weekend weddings. Rather than travel to one location, fly home, work for a few days, and then travel again, we decided to insert a mini-vacation into our plans to simplify matters. I’m not sure if simplicity is what we ended up with, but the mini-vacation was worth it.
I don’t want to get into too many of the details of the mini-vacation right now, but our stops included Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA. We drove from Atlanta to Charleston (about five hours) and spent two nights and most of two days there. Such a fantastic city filled with great history and tourism. This was the big surprise of our ten day trip for me. I had no idea what to expect when traveling to this area of the country and I really fell in love with it. Charleston has the oldes historic preservation laws in the United States which results in a beautifully preserved historic district that looks about the same as it did hundreds of years ago. (Minus the expensive import cars, obviously.)
Savannah was a bit of a let down, considering I was expecting it to be the better of our two in-between destiinations. It had a more “commercialized” feel to it and was definitely more busy of the two. The upside is that you are allowed to walk around with an alcoholic beverage, so that makes strolling around the city a bit more enjoyable. We saw some great historic homes in Savannah too, but they could not compare to those that we saw in Charleston.
No promises, but I’ll try to get the next installment of the San Francisco run-down online this week.
Having been asleep for a good portion of the evening and night of our first day in San Francisco, we woke relatively early and decided to venture out for some breakfast. I decided to give Yelp a try and look for breakfast close by that had good ratings.
A diner named Dottie’s True Blue Cafe had a rating of 4.5 stars, which is a solid rating by the folks on Yelp. It was only about five blocks away, so we got ready and headed off towards our breakfast. We passed a number of delicious looking restaurants along our route and tried to make some mental notes about those we wanted to try later on.
I recently had the pleasure to travel to California to attend a wedding for my good friends from high school. The interesting part of the wedding is that the bride and groom, like myself, live on the East coast. As are most of their friends, family, and other guests of the wedding. Since it was essentially a destination wedding, the happy couple had outlined a fun-filled itinerary for all of the out-of-town guests (which was everyone).
I had originally thought that I could get everything I wanted into a single entry. But as I started to recount the experience of my very first day, it was clearly evident that this would require multiple entries.
Last night my wife and I treated ourselves to some dinner in the city of Worcester, after a long day tidying up our apartment. Having been away in the San Francisco area for the last week and just being terribly busy before that, our abode had been in dire need for a good cleaning. After a thorough scrubbing of floors and other surfaces, we were very hungry.
I decided to go against my original, single-column theme for the site and opted for a two-column theme instead. I found that the lack of a place to display my shared Digg items and Google Reader items was taking away from the overall experience. More importantly, the lack of a search feature made it difficult for anyone to find older posts (including myself).
I’ve been twiddling with the proper way of framing the inline images in my posts and I think I have it figured out. This was my last hurdle and I believe I can go towards producing more informative posts (like a recap or maybe just some pictures from my most recent trip to San Francisco).
When I read a recent entry on Chris Cosentino’s blog “Offal Good” about Jamie Oliver’s show that aired on BBC Channel 4, I was immediately intrigued. The show, titled “Jamie Oliver’s Fowl Dinners“, tackles the topic of raising chickens to be used for their eggs and meat. At first glance, this might not appear as a topic worthy of an entire show. However, it opens up a much larger question that the majority of American’s probably never consider: “Do you know where your food comes from?”
I consulted with a variety of people on this topic and have generally been steered in one direction. Most people agree that the entry level DSLR cameras from Canon and Nikon are the way to go. Both companies have a solid reputation and similar price-points. An analogy was made that it was akin to buying a Honda or a Toyota. Interestingly enough, most folks who had entered the arena of DSLR have chosen a 
A diner named 
