Rand Wacker

Wow! I’m soooooo happy that I upgraded to WordPress…or more specifically, that I was able to re-enable comments on my blog (no matter how many times I tried, I just couldn’t get the MT plugins to work). I’ve had more nice comments from a wide range of friends that I haven’t heard from in a while as well as excellent feedback from a number of people who I didn’t even know was reading.

This just really reinforces in my mind that the power of blogs is not just in the simplicity of posting, but in the simplicity of community, and makes me wonder if there aren’t possibly some really innovative things that can be done to bring together many different types of communications mediums such as blogs, email, SMS, etc, on both a community but possibly also individual topic level. The long tail theory I’m sure would have a lot to say about thinking of the market not just in the context of individual small websites, but of individual snippits of content on those sites.

CodeRage - Zooom

Zooom provides users the ability to work with any application window using shortcuts for moving, resizing and zooming - which increases your productivity because it’s then much easier to focus on what you really want to be doing!

Well since all the cool kids are doing it I decided to switch from Movable Type to WordPress, and I have to say that I’m impressed. I particularly like this Light theme by Stephen Reinhardt.

Anyways, a huge benefit of switching to WP is that I can now open comments again (yay!). I’m sure I’ve driven off my five or so readers from ever wanting to dialogue with me, but if they come back then now they can!

If you find anything broken please drop me an email…or better, leave a comment!

So here we are in another new year. It seems a little anti-climactic as 2006 ended very surreally for us. I haven’t really said much about it here, and most of my regular readers will know, but on Thanksgiving 2006 (more specifically, 4:16am the morning after) my beautiful wife Alexis gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Alana Corrin.

So things have been, shall we say, insane, and absolutely wonderful. I was able to take about three weeks off of work, then go back for a week and then head down to Lex’s parent’s in LA for a week, so December was a surreal blur of diapers, no sleep, an unbelievable cuteness.
Now I’m back to work full time, and Alexis and Alana are enjoying full-time baby fun at home. New schedules are going to require new routines, but whatever I can do to maximize time with the girls is important because I can’t believe how fast they change.
Babies are fun!

No, not gardening, the show.

I’ve been so caught up in the plethora of excellent series on HBO such as Deadwood, Rome, Entourage, The Wire, and the ever-controversial Big Love, that I’ve completely missed some of the programming coming from Showtime. One show that caught my eye due to the actors that I like in it and the rash of Emmys that it won recently is Weeds. This is a simple half-hour show about a suburban mom who has taken to selling pot to her escape-needing suburban neighbors after her husband died. Now that sounds like it could be a dark and depressing subject, but its not the illicit activities that make the show, its the backdrop of her neighborhood in the picture-perfect “Agrestic” planned community.

Great cast, snappy writing, and good story lines got me hooked after just a couple of shows. I saved half the first season for Alexis and we plowed through six episodes in one night (she got hooked as well).

Season one is out on DVD now, season two should be soon, and season three should start broadcasting in the next few months. Check it out, I highly recommend it!

I hate buying pre-packaged frozen food at the store because I think its bland and bad for you, but I love to put together various one-dish dinners and freeze them myself because they are tasty and convenient.

Long a staple in our freezer has been various forms of lasagna we like; with turkey sausage, without, zucchini, sometimes with goat cheese, yum. Well I tried a new “format” this weekend that I say wins hands down over the traditional long wide noodles and stacked presentation.

Basically instead of going through the palavra of boiling the noodles and laying everything together, I instead simply used some penne tossed in tomato sauce as the main component and then mixed in layers of mozzarella, parmesan, and basil leaves. The result was a fantastically tasty baked pasta dinner that could provide an excellent canvas for the addition of any of our other favorite ingredients, and doesn’t suffer from the sometimes dried-out ricotta layer that is so necessary for structurally sound lasagna. Yum!

(Shoot, I should’ve taken a picture)