Chick-fil-A = Awesome
My sister-in-law and folks I know around the Internet have been extolling the virtues of Chick-fil-A for some time now, but I was never able to see for myself because the closest location was 50 miles away.
Until now.
A new location opened up yesterday about halfway between home and work, so off we went for dinner last night. I can see why people love it so much, as I am now counted among those people. I don’t know if it’s being pressure cooked in peanut oil or the slight dose of crack cocaine that makes “The Original Chicken Sandwich” so good, but I for one will have no problem complying with the instructions of the Chick-fil-A mascot, which is a cow wearing a sandwich board, its message imploring us to “Eat Mor Chikin” (apparently cows are not very good spellers).
Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays, due to founder Truett Cathy’s Christian beliefs. As a Christian myself I applaud this, and since I intend to eat Chick-fil-A three meals a day from now on it’s best if I have one day a week off to eat, you know, carrots or something.
Come on spammers, just try it
OK, maybe I shouldn’t be poking the bear like that but after what happened with my previous blog I really want to see my “spam blocked” widget in the side bar show something other than zero. This site is too new to have been discovered by spammers as of yet, but they’ll be here eventually, and I’m ready. I am running the awesome Akismet plugin to filter out comment and trackback spam. Even though I don’t update my old blog anymore I have left it online with Akismet running for testing purposes, and even though the site is still getting hammered it hasn’t let a single spam comment through.
Bring on the spam!
Testing Media Player plugin
I doubt there’s anyone left who hasn’t seen this, but it’s one of the funniest videos ever, so it will make a good placeholder for testing the media plugin I just installed.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/STXpdXaY6gM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
If you are just seeing this for the first time, I’m glad to introduce it to you. 
We’ve gotten into a mutual hobby of trying new recipes, and we get most of our ideas from watching the Food Network–thankfully, just about any recipe you see being made on one of their shows is also posted on their website, and you can even print them in a recipe card format. Our recipe box is full of them, and as of yesterday there’s a new one: Orechiette with Sausage, Beans, and Mascarpone. I hadn’t heard of orechiette before, but it’s pasta in small concave shapes (it’s been described as ear-shaped, and apparently orechiette comes from the Italian word for ear):
It was surprisingly easy to make, including getting the turkey sausage out of its casings (which I thought was going to be difficult and messy). I also wasn’t sure I was going to like the cannelini beans (white kidneys) but they turned out great. One thing that turned out to be very convenient was that very often a piece of sausage or a bean would get stuck in a piece of orechiette–made it very easy to get a proper pasta-sausage-beans ratio in nearly every bite. This one’s definitely going into our normal rotation; next time I may add a bit more oregano or use some spicier sausage.
Made the jump to Gmail
I’ve been using Gmail for about a month now, and I’m a convert.
I was slow to adopt it because I was stuck in the old way of thinking that says you’ve got to have all of your e-mail stored on your own computer–after all, what if you are offline but need to look through your old messages? But in this era of nearly ubiquitous broadband available in some form wherever you are, that argument doesn’t hold much water anymore. Besides which, the advantages of having not only my inbox but all of my archived mail online are too great to ignore–whether at home, at work, on my BlackBerry or at virtually any computer in the world, I can simply log in and see my e-mail–not just new messages, but everything exactly the way I left it. Sorted stuff stays sorted, filed stuff stays filed, and deleted stuff stays deleted.
The thing that pushed me over the edge, though, is Google Apps for Your Domain, which allows me to use Gmail to interact with my e-mail without having to be tied down to an “@gmail.com” address. That probably doesn’t matter to most people, and indeed it takes some behind-the-scenes trickery with MX records, etc. to get mail for your domain pointed at Google’s servers, but it’s absolutely worth it to me.
If I can convince my wife that it’s better than a paper calendar on the kitchen wall we’ll start using Google Calendar as well.
Start calling Pluto an asteroid…
I’m laughing so hard I’m having trouble concentrating long enough to post this.
I’m on Twitter now
I’ve known about Twitter for a while now, and to be honest I haven’t been all that attracted to it–I’m generally a very passive user of the Internet (much more of a content consumer than a content creator), but today I figured “what the hey†and I’m giving it a try.
New blog!
Time to start posting in earnest.
My old blog at stevehahn.net (still up, mostly anyway, and it’s got a wacky purple astronomy theme going on) went over a year without an update and I eventually took it offline when it was overrun with comment spam. Now that I’ve discovered the Akismet spam filter (see the counter to the right) and gotten a swanky new domain it’s time for blog “2.0″.
We’ll see how it evolves; still a bit of construction dust around (I have a Flickr plugin installed, but there are some bugs to work out with its integration into this theme… plus I need to, you know, upload my photos to Flickr), and most importantly, I need some readers!
