Trout!

My wife and I lately have really been trying to cook at home more often. As part of this plan we now make a menu for the week every Sunday, and then only buy what is needed at the grocery store. We have been doing this for a few weeks now, and so far it has been working out very well! We are doing this to eat healthier, waste less food, and to save money.

We had a physical trainer many years ago before we got married. She emphasized eating 5 times a day instead of 3 to somehow boost the metabolism. We are trying to follow that plan again, and we are also attempting to eat roughly the same number of calories as we did. I whipped up a quick menu template to help keep track. We attach the current menu to the fridge.

We have been taking turns making the menu. My wife put together some great wraps for lunches a few weeks ago! However, this week it was my turn.

Von's had a sale today on Rainbow Trout, two fish were only 3.50$! I secretly made dinner for my wife because I knew that cooking a whole fish for her would get a great reaction! She loves all kinds of animals and is pretty sensitive to meat that resembles the creature that it comes from. For instance she won't eat the calamari that looks like the little squid, only the flat kind. Actually, I am lucky she eats any meat at all, because she used to be a vegetarian.

Anyway, I pan fried the fish whole and did my best at making a good looking plate. When I presented dinner to her at first she looked really happy, but once she looked a little closer she realized what it was she really freaked out! At first she refused to eat at all, but finally she calmed down was fine with me just removing the head and tail.

In the end she really liked it, and I was able to freak her out one last time by eating one of the fish eyes!

Blogging from a plane!

Today we are flying to New York so that my wife can attend a bridal shower. We are flying Virgin America for the first time. So far we are very impressed with the airline. The Wifi is only 9.95$, I thought it was going to be more. Also, there is a power outlet for each passenger, even in coach! The TV screens in the seat backs are larger than that of other airlines. The seats are nice. We had some fun chatting with friends back home and using the webcam. This blog post is being posted from a Dell Mini 9 running Mac OS X from a Plane! Pretty sweet!

Celebrity Sighting!

I had a celebrity sighting today at lunch! I sat at a table next to Jane Kaczmarek (the mom in Malcolm in the Middle) at Mediterranean Cafe, my favorite restaurant!

Registering Visual C# Express

My trial of Visual C# 2008 Express Edition had run out so it wouldn't let me continue without registering. This shouldn't be too hard, I thought to myself... Well, first of all, I could have sworn I had a Microsoft Live ID with my personal e-mail address, but I guess I was wrong. I then attempted to create a new account so I entered all of my information and typed in the CAPTCHA, but it wouldn't take. It kept saying that the CAPTCHA was wrong. I tried at least 20 of them over and over, and finally it took me to a page that there was a problem registering in the account. In a fit of rage I hit F5 a bagillion times really quickly, and guess what! It took! Once hurdle number one was overcome I then actually tried to register. It was stuck with a spinning green progress indicator for about 5 minutes before I gave up. Then I realized my problem all along... I wasn't using Internet Explorer. I reluctantly fired up Internet Explorer, but I still couldn't get it to work. What I finally had to do was set Internet Explorer as my Default Browser so that I could click the button inside of the Visual C# software to launch the registration wizard and only then was I finally able to get through the process.

I do appreciate that Microsoft releases these Express Editions so that I can tinker around at home on personal projects. I just wish they would acknowledge that more than one browser exists in this world, especially in their QA department. Friggin Mircrosoft.

Prime Rib!

Lately they have been having incredible deals on Prime Rib at Von's. I picked up a 4lb two rib roast for 15$, where it is usually closer to 40$. Overall it came out well, just slightly overdone for my liking. I also made Yorkshire pudding from its juices! My wife gets upset if I don't make something "green" to go along with dinner, so I fried up some zucchini as well.

Today was overall just a great day! We woke up this morning without having an alarm clock set, which hasn't happened in a long time. Every few months we like to take the train down to go visit Amoeba records to buy some new music. We hadn't gone in a long time and we had nothing planned for today, so we spur of the moment decided to go! On the ride to Union Station we noticed that the train seemed much more crowded than usual, and when we arrived we found out why. Today is National Train Day. I love trains! They had all sorts of stuff going on at Union Station; a model train exhibit, wine tasting information, giveaways and more. My wife picked up all sorts of goodies for her students, and I picked up a bunch of information on trains.

My sister is moving to Minnesota, and it seems like the perfect excuse to take the Amtrak Train from Seattle over to St. Paul. I learned today that the train ride is only 40 hours (I thought it would be longer!). It departs from Seattle at 4:45 PM. You spend the entire next day traveling through Montana and North Dakota which are both supposed to be beautiful. The following morning the train arrives in St. Paul at 7:50 AM. The timing seems ideal. We would definitely get a sleeper car, and as long as it is booked far enough in advance it doesn't look to be very expensive!

The Getty

It has been a long time since my last post. In the last month we had a major software release at work, I went to my nieces dedication, and I have been on a ridiculous number of 'man dates'. At work we have a new coworker James who will be working from the opposite coast, however he spent his first three weeks over here for training. It just so happens that my wife and I live a block from the corporate condo where he stayed, so he has been joining me on the daily walk to work. Some might say I have a 'walking buddy'.

In addition to our daily walk my coworkers, wife and I have been showing him around town. We have been to the local pub a number of times, we went to the club Largo to see a Jon Brion show, and finally we went to the Getty!

My wife took her students on a field trip to the Getty not too long ago, and she received a free parking pass. We have been itching to go back, and having James around was finally a good excuse to go. It was a beautiful day, and the furniture exhibit was awesome. The 'Vexed Man' is pretty sweet too, although to me he looks like he is just dropping a deuce, not so much vexed.

Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 was released three days ago on March 19, 2009. I installed it on my work machine as soon as it came out. Because I am a windows developer I feel a certain obligation to use Internet Explorer, although at home I have been using Google Chrome.

Overall the browser is way ahead of its predecessor. The search functionality is vastly improved. The search is now integrated, it can highlight results on the page, and it is much easier to step through the results. I also like the tab color coding feature. When opening a new tab from an existing tab, it will color code the two tabs to help with organization. Another nice usability improvement is that you can now paste a multi-line URL into the address bar, and it won't truncate the URL. Multi-line URLs happen all the time when trying to e-mail or IM long links.

However, there are several features that are still lacking and one that is seriously broken. I cannot believe that there is still not an integrated spell checker in IE8. This has been in FireFox for a long time, and made it into version 1 of Chrome. Also, I wish you could drag a tab out of the browser to make a new window. This is an incredibly important feature for users with multiple monitors, and something that Chrome supports. Finally, one of the main reasons that I use Internet Explorer is that in previous versions, it displayed web pages much better on a high resolution monitor.

At work I have a 24" Monitor with a resolution of 1920x1200. I run Windows at 120 DPI so that the text is readable. FireFox at that resolution will render the text much too small, and increasing the text size will make certain web pages ugly. Internet Explorer on the other hand takes the system DPI into account and renders the text at an appropriate size, without breaking the look of webpages. However, there is one major consequence, at 120 DPI by default Internet Explorer will scale images, which introduces blur and fugliness to web pages. Fortunately in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, there was a registry key 'UseHR' that would turn off the image scaling when set to 0, yet left the text rendering intact. Unfortunately, the 'UseHR' registry key no longer works in Internet Explorer 8. For this reason alone, unless I soon discover a workaround, I will probably have to go back to IE7.

The 'UseHR' Registry Key has been well documented by Microsoft. I can't believe that Microsoft would cripple this functionality because the world is moving to high resolution displays. Check out this Sony laptop. At an astounding 220 pixels per inch, Windows would be unusable at the default 96 DPI, one would need a microscope to read the text.

I have posted in the Microsoft discussion group about this, unfortunately there has yet to be a response.