Fun with technology

When Kelly finds a parking space in Harvard Square, it's usually a sign that we're meant to buy something expensive. Last time, it was the living room furniture. This time, we both got long-awaited new cellphones and made a blitz trip to Crate and Barrel (which is much cheaper if you go in with a list and talk to a salesperson right away instead of wandering around the store finding things you didn't realize you needed). I suppose I should be thankful that there's not a car dealership in that part of town.

Anyway, I am now a T-Mobile customer, except that the whole account is in Kelly's name and she's got all the power. The guy who helped us was very amused when I turned to her and said "now it's going to be a real hassle if we want to get divorced." He asked when we got married and then started talking about Dick Cheney finally standing up for his gay daughter. He also answered all my questions without assuming I was clueless, which was good. Sometimes, people who work in cell phone stores try to explain stuff to me like I was a total idiot and I just stand there thinking "and how many WAP Forum specifications have you had to read for your job?*"

Dean and FJ and Alek came over for dinner tonight. Dean took a picture of our new living room with his camera phone and sent it to me via Bluetooth. I have to post it because it's the "after" picture to match the one I took when we had the futon in here.

Today's big technical accomplishments were getting my new phone (a Nokia 3650, because FJ would never have spoken to me again if I had gone for the Sony/Ericsson camera phone) to sync up with iCal and the address book app on my Powerbook and figuring out how to get my pics from our trip to Maine off my camera's memory card. Unfortunately, I struck out with the smart card reader and OS X and then couldn't find the camera's special USB cable, so I wound up attaching the smart card reader to my old laptop and then using SCP to move all my digital photos from the old laptop to the new one. When I imported everything, iPhoto wasn't clever enough to turn the directory names into albums so I'm doing it again in phases. I want to write something that will zap photos to my web site really easily. Maybe it'll upload them and then post them to LJ as private entries or something so that I can share the good ones with my friends. But I'm very psyched that my phone and my Palm handheld and my laptop are going to be able to share data.

We've been acquiring a lot of new high-tech toys lately. Now that Kelly and I are living together (her last phone and both of our old laptops were acquired pre-cohabitation), I need to try and get us on an upgrade schedule that spaces things out a bit more. I was also pretty good about not buying toys while we were saving for a house. I need to remember to have fun over the next year or two, because then it'll be time to have kids and start college funds.

* To be fair, that was two jobs ago and they've probably changed things a little since then.

Fun in the kitchen

Desperate for some incentive to clean the houseEager to catch up with our friends after a busy couple of weeks, we invited Dean, FJ and Alek over for dinner tonight. When I was first learning to cook, I used to avoid trying recipes for the first time when we had guests. Now, we just tell everyone that if they hate dinner we'll order pizza. It hasn't happened yet.

Tonight, I tried roasting red peppers for the first time. I used a recipe that doesn't require a broiler, because our broiler isn't very big and I don't trust it not to set food on fire. Roasting peppers in the oven takes a little bit longer, but it's really easy. I used a recipe from Madhur Jaffrey's vegetarian cookbook (definitely my favorite for simple vegetarian recipes). After roasting the peppers, I cored them and stuffed them with feta that had been marinating in herbs. It came out fairly well, except that there was maybe a little too much cheese.

I also made a spinach recipe from the same cookbook that turned out very well. I need to remember to make a double batch next time. It's a cool recipe because you boil the spinach for a few minutes before you chop it. A pound of spinach that's been boiled is much easier to chop than a pound of raw spinach leaves. It gets its flavor from dill, much like the spinach and cheese casserole that I've been making at Chanukah for the last few years (mostly because it goes really well with sweet potato latkes).

Kelly made grilled chicken and a really fantastic dessert that she found in the latest Bon Appetit (it's not online at Epicurious yet). She made miniature chai and lemon-flavored bundt cakes and served them with a cinnamon syrup. Since Dean and FJ recently acquired an ice cream maker, we asked them to bring vanilla ice cream and it was awesome. The new rule is that we're going to make desserts that require ice cream whenever we invite them to dinner.

I'm psyched that the weather is cooling down a bit and the kitchen isn't too hot for real cooking anymore.

Why my wife has (mostly) stopped nagging me

Last night was the first time that we really entertained in our new living room. Since I was playing with my new camera phone, pinkfish took a photo of the living room on his camera phone:

( Small images follow )