Haightlife - Aldoblog

Fire & Knives

I was just referred to the “Fire & Knives”:http://www.fireandknives.com/ cooking and food site with the “recommendation” that “Here’s a nice little food site that is snobbier than youse guys…” I decided it was a keeper when I laughed out loud at this description of wonder bread in a new shape:

bq. Cunning bakers have responded, not with an authentic baguette but with a preservative-laden, turd-shaped travesty called — with callous humour — a French Stick. It’s exactly the same rubbish they extrude into white loaves but delivered in a staggeringly inconvenient shape. Trying to eat a sandwich made with one is like trying to fellate a torpedo.

I was just referred to the Fire & Knives cooking and food site with the “recommendation” that “Here’s a nice little food site that is snobbier than youse guys…” I decided it was a keeper when I laughed out loud at this description of wonder bread in a new shape:

Cunning bakers have responded, not with an authentic baguette but with a preservative-laden, turd-shaped travesty called — with callous humour — a French Stick. It’s exactly the same rubbish they extrude into white loaves but delivered in a staggeringly inconvenient shape. Trying to eat a sandwich made with one is like trying to fellate a torpedo.

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Open, Open, Open!

With luck, and a signature from the city, Cafe du Soleil will open tomorrow. I could not be more excited!

Rochelle noticed activity (pastry boxes and such) at Cafe du Soleil yesterday, when walking past on her way to Muni. So today I went by around 11am, to see if they might be opening. I saw fresh baguettes in bags, but no people, and the doors were not open.

But after lunch, our contractor went by to have a look, and voila!, the doors are open, and there is bustling activity. I went in, and had a nice chat with one of the owners, and got a beautiful pecan bun.

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WordPress 1.5.1

I updated to WordPress 1.5.1 on Friday, after drinking a cocktail with Rochelle. Maybe not the best strategy for preparing for a software upgrade, but everything seems to be working fine. Let me know if you see something funky…

Rigos the Neighborhood

GraceAnn Walden is probably our favorite of the SF Chronicle‘s current food writers, and her weekly column keeps up on the comings and goings of San Francisco restaurants, restaurateurs, and chefs. This week’s column had news that literally brought tears to my eyes: “Pascal Rigo is opening a place right around the corner from our house”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2005/05/11/FDGC2CKG841.DTL.

GraceAnn Walden is probably our favorite of the SF Chronicle‘s current food writers, and her weekly column keeps up on the comings and goings of San Francisco restaurants, restaurateurs, and chefs. This week’s column had news that literally brought tears to my eyes: Pascal Rigo is opening a place right around the corner from our house (2nd snippet):

If a month goes by and Pascal Rigo doesn’t buy something or open a new cafe, I feel like I’m missing something. Well, he’s back at it. Eight months after opening Rigolo, he has bought Movida Lounge at 200 Fillmore St. (at Waller Street) in San Francisco, and will turn it into Le Cafe di Soleil.

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Importing Audiobook CDs into iTunes

Rochelle and I have fallen in love with listening to books on our iPods. We’ve signed up for two books a month through Audible.com, and for me, that pace is actually pretty good. Rochelle goes through them faster, though, and recently started going to the SF Public Library to get more books to listen to. Importing them onto an iPod is not terribly intuitive. This post describes what I think is a fairly optimal process, using only iTunes to do the importing.

Note: These instructions have been superseded by a new version available in the Aldo on Audiobooks section of this site. Please use that version instead of this page.

Rochelle and I have fallen in love with listening to books on our iPods. We’ve signed up for two books a month through Audible.com, and for me, that pace is actually pretty good. But Rochelle has more time to listen while commuting and at work; she blows through our two books a month.

She recently started going to the library to get audio books there, on CD. The San Francisco Public Library has quite a lot of them, and you can reserve them online. The only downside with the CDs is they cannot be played (directly) on an iPod. Enter the second half of Apple’s one-two combination, iTunes, which makes importing CDs relatively easy, and keeping them organized, syncing them with an iPod, and making custom playlists extremely easy.

The only problem is, it’s optimized for music CDs. It’s taken quite a bit of trial and error — mostly error — to come up with a recipe that works well, and produces audiobook files that are reasonable in size and quality, and as easy to use on our iPods as the books from Audible.com. I’m going to save you some time, and share the recipe.

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Before and After

After posting the photo of scope creep, we kind of had a pause in progress, while we back-tracked on a few things. So we’re finally making progress again today. Here’s the before and after of the pantry doorway.

After posting the photo of scope creep, we kind of had a pause in progress, while we back-tracked on a few things. So we’re finally making progress again today, getting to the point where we can finish all the taping and mudding, and the subfloor can be laid in. That’s when we’ll get to move some furniture back into (semi-)permanent positions, and get to start having a life in our kitchen again.

Here’s the before and after of the pantry doorway:

The difference is pretty subtle in the small photos, a little more apparent in the larger ones (click photos to view). Basically, the door now starts 16″ from the wall, instead of 4″, and it’s much wider.

The difference isn’t subtle when you’re standing in the kitchen. We are incredibly pleased with how much it changes the room, by having the pantry be more a part of the room, rather than a hole hidden in the back of it. And if it looks this good before trim and paint (and all the rest of moving back into the kitchen), it’s going to be fabulous when we’re all done.

Scope Creep Caught on Film!

It’s not often you can snap a picture of scope creep, but I caught it this evening…

It’s not often you can snap a picture of scope creep, but I caught it this evening, after Rochelle came back from meeting with a kitchen cabinet consultant.

Like all decisions we’ve made, this one seems reasonable. And in the end, it’ll be the right thing. All we’ll really lose by moving the pantry door is some time (which is expensive) and some sheetrock (which is cheap).

What I’m struggling most with — aside from how to pay for it, of course — is where to move the Cat5 and speaker jacks, now that the cabinet in which the Sonos ZonePlayer audio unit was to be housed is no longer on that wall. Fortunately, with the extra expense of moving the door, it’ll be a while before I can buy it, so I’ve got some time to figure things out…

Desk chairs

“Alex asks”:http://www.alexking.org/blog/2005/04/25/desk-chair/ for recommendations for desk chairs. I was going to answer in his comments, but it got to be long, so I thought I’d post here instead. I have three data points about desk chairs.

Alex asks for recommendations for desk chairs. I was going to answer in his comments, but it got to be long, so I thought I’d post here instead. I have three data points about desk chairs:

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Modern Art, or Vintage Mess?

When we took out the kitchen sink cabinets, and the walls behind them, we found what our plumber called a “masterpiece of modern art.” But really, it was a baroque mess.

When we took out the kitchen sink cabinets, and the walls behind them, we found what our plumber called a “masterpiece of modern art.” But really, it was a baroque mess:

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Now It Looks Like Progress!

So, at the end of the week, we’ve finished the electrical, including some in-wall speaker wire and coax, and one Cat-5 Ethernet line. Most of the walls and all of the ceiling are insulated. The ceiling is up. And something special is hidden inside it.

So, at the end of the week, we’ve finished the electrical, including some in-wall speaker wire and coax, and one Cat-5 Ethernet line. Most of the walls and all of the ceiling are insulated:

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This is progress?

A quick update on the kitchen remodel. (Look, I wrote it without a qualifier! I must be coming to acceptance…)

A quick update on the kitchen remodel. (Look, I wrote it without a qualifier! I must be coming to acceptance…) The photos in the previous post about the remodel were from the end of March. Two weeks after the second one, our kitchen looked more like this:

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Neat Stuff: Sigalert

I’ve been a subscriber to the “Sigalert service”:http://www.sigalert.com/ for a while. It’s a real-time traffic monitoring service that aggregates information from the sensors embedded in highways and major thoroughfares and CHP and CalTrans information about incidents like accidents, and combines it with mapping and routing functions, to give you a very complete picture of just how ugly traffic in your region is.

I’ve been a subscriber to the Sigalert service for a while. It’s a real-time traffic monitoring service that aggregates information from the sensors embedded in highways and major thoroughfares and CHP and CalTrans information about incidents like accidents, and combines it with mapping and routing functions, to give you a very complete picture of just how ugly traffic in your region is.

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