My Dad gave me a copy of the News Photographer magazine yesterday, which is the journal for the National Press Photographers Assocation. It was a good read, and got me to thinking about a bunch of stuff. I was poking-around on the NPPA website today, and saw this quote:

Jenny and I just got home after a most delightful picnic. I am working as Sound Designer for a show over in the Riverview school district (that's in Oakmont, PA, in case you're not from these parts). There was a tech work session today, so I was busy over there for that. I was done with my part right around 15:00.

Hmm. Technology and cooking as keywords for this entry. I'm probably going to make some automatic content categorization system explode.

Jenny and I both worked from home today. This is a great way to save on gas, and it lets us both get some stuff done around the house during small breaks in the day. I had this crazy idea the other day that I wanted to make homemade pasta one day this week. Today was the day. Woohoo!

I cleaned-up the kitchen before I started with work today. Jenny and I walked up to Eazer's in downtown New Kensington for lunch. We had a great lunch for not a lot of money, which is always a big plus. From there, Jenny went home and I walked over to Foodland to get some eggs and pasta sauce. They also had a loaf of Italian bread from a local bakery, so all that stuff jumped into my basket, and I headed home. After completing my work for today, I went upstairs to find our laundry drying rack, which happens to also work quite well as a noodle drying rack. I got all of the stuff ready and started to make dough. I decided that I'd use half white and half whole-wheat flour, which turned out to be a great idea. I always liked whole-wheat pasta, but it was always on the expensive side.

By the time all was said and done, I had made six batches of pasta, using an entire dozen eggs, twelve cups of flour, and a lot of hand cranking on the pasta machine. For dinner, I cooked the small pile of partial noodles that was left from the six batches, plus one whole batch of pasta. Yum. I love fresh pasta. I cut and bagged the rest of the pasta after dinner and tossed it into the freezer for future pasta goodness. That ended up making a ton of pasta, which is cool.

The other, completely-unrelated thing that I wanted to mention is that I'm now running the Gentoo Linux distribution on my laptop. I was running the Ubuntu Linux distribution, but it was overall pretty unsatisfying, and it had a tendency to frustrate me. Gentoo is much more down-to-earth, and puts me back in control of the system in a way that I like. Hey, I'm still a sysadmin deep down--what can I say?

That's about all from me for updates. It's getting colder here now. I finally had to turn the furnace on this morning so that we could work without our fingers freezing. All of the windows in the house are closed now. It is really feeling like Fall.

jonathan

Some readers know that I like to play with technology a bit.

Today, I finally successfully made hard disk encryption work on my linux laptop. This makes me pretty happy. I've been playing with various incarnations of this technology for a while--it is nice to have one that actually works the way it is supposed to work.

If you are also geeky and interested, here's a good how-to for the current wave of "new technology" that integrates block-device encryption with the kernel:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedFilesystemHowto3

jonathan

For the techie types out there, I've been working on Blog Version 3.  I'm playing with a software package called Drupal to host it.  If you're interested in clicking-around on it and taking a look at how it works, here's the URL to the test site:  Blog Sandbox.

Lots of stars, lots of funny (at least for geeks :) ):

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080107/bill-gates-last-day-microsoft-video/

jonathan