Josh – Page 82 – Janicek.com

8/26/20058/26/2005

iTMS Bamboozle and tha Rasta Willie

I had heard a lot about Willie Nelson’s new “reggae” album recently. I passed it off as some overly-hyped thing that usually turns me off…

I don’t know how it came up but Elise and I started talking about Willie Nelson tonight as I was looking into a new flatbed scanner on eBay while sitting at the bar and while Elise was making a milkshake in the kitchen. I hit the iTunes Music Store and sampled Willie’s song: “I’m a Worried Man“. Elise and I, without prompting nor a head nod, immediately found ourselves in a groove. Elise was twisting and bobbing while blending her milkshake. I, at the iBook, stationed at the bar, was deeply and rastafarianly bouncing and turning my head in two directions to the rhythm. We could have easily been the b-roll for the opening credits of The Cosby Show. It was hot.

So, I bought the song, “I’m a Worried Man” for $.99 from the iTunes Music Store. I played the song 4 more times on the stereo in the living room via AirTunes. The bass was awesome… the hardwood floors were rumbling.

I revistited the iTMS and sampled more of the Countryman album. All of the songs are fun. It really is a great album. I haven’t listened to the lyrics yet – but it’s one of those albums that you just crank up while driving to New Braunfels in route to a killer toobin’ adventure. It doesn’t matter so much the lyrics, it’s just a fun album from a head bobbin’, neck jigglin’, Cosby Show intro perspective.

So I decided to buy the entire album (or “record“). Since I had already purchased the “I’m a Worried Man” song, I was asked if I was sure that I wanted to buy the entire album. What was I to do? 12 songs on the album. I had already purchased one song for $.99. There were 11 songs left to purchase. $9.99 for the entire album or pick the other 11 songs that I hadn’t yet purchased for a total of, yes, you guessed correctly, $9.99.

Could I return the one song? Instead of omitting one song, I purchased the entire album. So the music industry got $.99 out of Joe Consumer. It was for a Willie Nelson album… and a pretty cool album for that matter. I have some awesome en-route to a toobin’ music for next year!

On a personal note: my family moved to Cat Spring (population 17 and a coon dog) when I was 11-years-old. My parents had donkeys (Domesticated Ass would be great name for a band) for agricultural write-off purposes as they had a house on 35 acres of property in the country. Our donkeys received awesome names like: Dolly Parton, Earl Campbell, Kathy Whitmeyer, Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson. I have a deep-rooted and personal relationship with very important people. And donkeys.

So now I’m groovin’ to reggae music by Willie Nelson. All I see in my head is a donkey hanging out with Ricky Williams and they’re both buying music from the iTunes Music Store.

8/26/2005

Last Ride

I got home from work at 8 o’clock tonight and quickly mowed the lawn, edged and blew the grass clippings off of the driveway and sidewalks. I walked into the garage and stopped to look at the trusty Shadow. There it was… shiny black paint and chrome. I put the key in the ignition and the garage was illuminated by the headlight. I pulled the choke, turned the key and my faithful steed came to life.

I wanted to crank it up just to make sure everything sounded okay before Charles and his family come to pick it up tomorrow morning. Everything sounded great. I listened and stared. My old friend turned, looked at me and said, “Come on, let’s go. One last time.”

I obliged.

I saddled up and reved the throttle so the straight pipes could echo in the garage.

The trusty Shadow and I went on a peaceful ride. I wanted it to be one to remember. We took Slaughter up to MoPac and headed south. We curved onto Hwy 45 and took in the baby blue glow of the hill country sky as dusk began to pass. I held back a tear or two as it set in that this was our last ride. Then a bug hit me in the forehead.

We turned right on 1826 and I gunned it just for old time’s sake. I thought about all the miles I put on that bike. All the places we had been. It was my only source of transportation for years. I’d been through a lot with that motorcycle. It’s a great bike and has a lot of years left in it.

It was a great last ride. The temperature outside was comforting, the air was thin and all I could smell was grass and trees. There were very few cars out and of those, none were trailing us. We could go as we pleased.

I pulled into the garage and left the engine running for a bit so I could listen for one last time. I turned off the engine, dismounted and stopped to look at the trusty Shadow again. Riley walked into the garage, looked up at me and meowed. He and I are in-tune. He knew that this was a deep moment for me. I picked him up and we shared a final look at the ride I’ve always known as trusty.

I’m going to miss my old friend…

8/24/20058/24/2005

Dreamhost hosted website backup

Janicek.com was hacked sometime in the very early morning yesterday. Janicek.com has been hacked a few times in its years. In the past, I would contact Dreamhost‘s technical support and say, “My site was hacked. Can you fix it for me?” And they would.

This time I wrote and said, “Hey, my site was hacked. How do I fix it?”

Dreamhost takes full backup “snapshots” of your data twice hourly, twice daily and twice weekly. How’s that for getting your money’s worth?

So if you’re website is hosted by Dreamhost and you get hacked:

Telnet into your account
Windows: Start>Run> “telnet www.yourdomain.com” (without quotes)
Login will be the same as your FTP username and password
Or you can use PuTTy

OS X: Terminal

Here are Dreamhost’s instructions…

Steps for restoring data on your own :

I had to reacquaint myself with the Unix command line…

cd yourdomain.com
cd .snapshot (note “.”)
cd nightly.1 (or however far back you need to go)
ls (to see your data files)
cp index.html /home/.server/user/domain.com/folder

Let me know if you need help. Or you can contact the Happy Help You Recover Your Data Team at Dreamhost.

8/23/20051/9/2006

Important to do list

I have to keep lists for myself. I’m pretty good about keeping a mental list but I usually write things down for safe keeping and so I can actually scratch something off of my list. I really like my Ta-da List but I find myself using that for personal “honey-do” projects that are usually reserved for weekends. Most always I have a peice of paper in my left front pocket. I might need to run over to HoPot and I can’t call up my Ta-da List there.

This was on my tangible list today:

Plesk

Choline

Well I’m here to tell you that I found time to clean cat puke but not time to set up a client test domain. I’m a family man – family comes first. ;-)

8/23/2005

Fun with showroom salespeople

Mom, Elise and I went to Star Furniture in Houston on Saturday afternoon. Elise found a bedroom set that she liked. I liked it. Mom liked it. Elise and I decided to buy at least the bed. A saleswoman approached us. After introductions I asked if there were having any same as cash specials. She said, “No, but if you pay cash you will receive a 12% discount.”

12% is a nice discount and we would prefer to pay with cash but at that juncture, we didn’t have that much cash in our checking account.

I next asked if she could discount the bed as the footboard and a deep scratch on the top. She walked over to her point of sale kiosk and called her manager. We continued to inspect the bed. A few moments later she came back and told us that we would receive an additional 5% for the scratch in the furniture (the floor model was the last in their inventory).

Elise asked the saleswoman if we could have a few minutes to talk about it. She obliged. We talked about it and decided we didn’t need to spend the cash right then. We thanked the saleswoman and said we weren’t going to make a purchase today.

We continued to walk through the store. I was quick to notice a big poster that read, “Pay cash and receive a 12% discount OR take advantage of our two years no interest and no payments.”

We walked around the store some more (a 110,000 square-foot showroom) to see if we could find another bedroom set we liked. We decided we like the one we all had originally agreed upon. We walked back to that wing of the store and decided to go ahead and get the dresser as well.

We walked downstairs and had the business center page our salesperson. She came downstairs and I told her we’d like to buy the bed and dresser with the two years same as cash. We filled out the credit paperwork. Before she took our application, Elise asked to make sure that the 5% discount was applied to the purchase. We all heard her – she said, “Are you going to make sure to apply the 5% discount?” To which she replied, “Oh yes, of course. It will be on your receipt.” She then left and processed our approval. She came back with the the bill of sale which required our signatures. Elise noticed no 5% discount. She asked the saleswoman where the discount was.

“Oh, I thought you said you didn’t want the discount!”

Elise responded, “Why would we not want the discount?!”

Saleswoman’s response: “I don’t know. I was wondering that myself.”

8/21/20058/22/2005

Weekend with the parents

We spent this past weekend visiting my parents. We got to mom & dad’s around 7:30, said our quick hellos and hopped in the car again to drive up the road for catfish at Crossroads. Crossroads’ catfish always makes for a treat and is comfort food for me.

After dinner we went back to the house and we gave dad his belated birthday present. After belated birthday present opening, mom, dad and Elise endulged in homemade ice cream and cobbler. Everyone eventually fizzled out and went to bed. I stayed up, went outside and looked at Mars in the eastern sky. I thought about life, Mars, life, life, where my life is going, where Elise’s and my lives are going, if I left the toilet seat up for the cats so they could get water, I checked my armor, thought about life a little more and went for bed. Before settling in I softly asked Elise if she wanted to see Mars. She said, “Josh… See Mars?… You’re obviously stoned from the peyote so you and Jimi Hendrix need to put your guitars away for the night, you need to take Jimi home so he can take his kid to T-ball practice in the morning and you should brush your teeth and get some sleep.”

She got up and I showed her the bright orange glow in the eastern sky. She said, “Wow! That’s Mars?” To which I said, “Yes!” Elise then checked her armor and went straight back to bed.

Dad woke me up on Saturday morning so we could run the coax cable from the attic, down through the wall to the TV so mom could watch one show and record another….

My parents have been really up on television technology as of late. Last year they bought a large, flat panel DLP television for the living room. They subscribed to a digital satellite TV service and last week they acquired a new DLP TV for the den. Mom has been working on setting up the TV in the living room so they could watch one show while recording another on their DVR.

Enter Josh: I was up in the attic with an electric drill, flashlight, string, coax coupling kits, pliers and yards of coax wire. An attic in Texas turns into an oven at 10 a.m. in August. With the help of everyone I eventually ran the coax from the attic and through the wall to the TV in the living room.

The remainder of Saturday was cooking. Mom and I made homemade Salsa Verde. Mom went on to make garden grown spinach with balsamic vinegar, peas and a salad with purple onions, walnuts, Mandarin oranges, goat cheese with a sweet balsamic dressing. Dad marinated and grilled 1.76″ inch (yes, I measured) ribeyes. Dinner was awesome.

On Sunday Elise and I slept in. Around 1 p.m. the girls and I drove to Katy where I picked up a new e-Machines AMD64 Windows box for the office. We then drove around Houston in search for furniture. We had lunch at Panera in Memorial City and eventually we found a great bed and dresser for our bedroom at Star Furniture. We weren’t really in the market for new furniture but by chance we found a pretty good deal, aside from the terrible sales experience we had to endure.

We didn’t get home until almost 7 p.m. and had to immediately hit the road.

Another weekend that quickly blew by!

8/19/20057/6/2012

T3

Josh cooks for the girls

Tejashri, Jenny, Christine, Tonja, Cyndi, Michelle and Elise had a girls’ night in at our house last night. Last month Christine, Kim and Elise decided that the girls needed to maintain regular get-togethers once a month. Christine and Cyndi decided on the name: Third Thursday Thenoritas. One of them has a speech impediment.

For the first girls’ night out I was volunteered to do a cooking demonstration. This was the menu I prepared:

Grilled Asparagus Fence with a Butter & Balsamic Reduction

Smashed Mashers

CafÃ© AmorÃ© CrÃ¨me BrÃ»lÃ©e

Thankfully the girls were chumming it up most of the evening so I wasn’t on the spot all night. Unfortunately the meal didn’t go as well as I wanted. The pork was too done, I didn’t like the asparagus, my first corn chardonnay sauce congealed and I put too much beer in the potatoes which didn’t leave room for cream.

MexiCoffee pork loin

I think the girls liked the food. I wasn’t happy with the meal but all of the estrogen floating about the house kept my spirits up and eventually made my boobs tender.

It’s hard to cook a good meal for more than a handful of people. Next time I’ll definitely need a sous chef. Elise helped me as best she could but I hadn’t organized myself enough to account for help. I was expecting to do everything on my own and realized that I needed help only after it was too late.

The crÃ¨me brÃ»lÃ©e was well received. It was actually refered to as “orgasmic” – it’s hard not to blush when you’re the only guy in a dining room full of women and that word is used.

So… I’m glad the girls had fun. I tried to join their group for next month’s outing but was quickly denied. So I’m going to start organizing another Godfather Club meeting. First on the agenda is to see if Alexandra will come over and show us how to make crÃ¨me brÃ»lÃ©e.

8/17/200511/7/2005

Search gammut

This illustration is an actual pie chart generated in my web server statistics software. It clearly indicates that Janicek.com serves a wealth of information on topics that vary significantly. Janicek.com is a cornicopia of useful information.

Big

Janicek

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Jokes

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Training

8/16/20058/28/2005

Austin Radio and the Little Beat

Ever since returning from Cabo I’ve tried to maintain the “no worries” mantra. It really sucks to come home to anti-Bush bumper stickers, road rage, death in the news, a war, money, radio and everything else that we subconciously hyper-consume on a daily basis.

I spend a lot of time on the road. I used to think I liked listening to talk radio in the mornings. Not NPR. NPR is depressing. I used to channel flip between Austin’s KLBJ-FM Dudley & Bob show and the syndicated Howard Stern show. The Dudley & Bob show is sophomoric and to the best of my knowledge is the only “funny” local morning talk show. I listen more to Stern now because when you get past the boob and ass bits, I think he can be funny at times. But most of the time I have talk radio on for noise. Half the time I’m not really even listening.

Enter Podcasts. I read about Podcasts when they started gaining popularity and you could subscribe to them with your RSS Podcast applications. I downloaded a couple of them and gained no interest. Podcasts are modern day’s pirate radio. Most are not much unlike watching cable access – geared towards a very limited audience and generally very badly produced (I’m not complaining – I know if I tried to produce a Podcast, it would be terrible). We can all now subscribe to Podcasts from the iTunes Music Store. Last month I subscribed to a few new Podcasts to see if I could actually find a few that I would actually enjoy. After returning from Cabo I wanted to stay in that paradise state of mind so I subscribed to shows like HawaiiUp and Beach Talk for my commutes to and from work. They just couldn’t hold my interest.

So I don’t feel much like subscribing to Podcasts anymore. If anyone knows my sense of humor and personality and know of a Podcast that I might like, let me know.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from David Sadof. David had a weekly talk show on KLOL in Houston that I used to listen to religiously. He e-mailed me to let me know that he was back on the airwaves in Houston. Well, I live in Austin so I can’t really listen to him. I wrote him back and asked if he thought about producing a Podcast. He said he hadn’t fully researched it but apparently it’s being considered. That would be very cool – I would definitely subscribe to his Podcast.

An interesting thing about David Sadof: He was the first to interview Eddie Vedder about the meaning of Pearl Jam’s song “Jeremy“.

So I would subscribe to Sadof’s Podcast (hint hint). If they were still around, I would subscribe to the Stevens & Pruett Podcast. Funny, both are out of Houston. Austin needs something. Maybe I’ll start my own Podcast.

8/15/20051/9/2006

A date and a tough brisket

On Friday night I took Elise out on a date. I woke up on Friday morning, got ready for work, kissed Elise goodbye and told her we were going out to dinner that night.

My wife loves Italian food so I planned on taking her to Vespaio. We got to the restaurant at a quarter to nine and there was a two and a half hour wait. We turned around with no back up plan. We ended up at the Tree House Italian Grill on S. Congress. Elise had the roasted pork loin and I had the veal saltimbocca. The food wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. We should have waited until midnight to eat at Vespaio.

On Saturday we shopped for deck furniture.

I woke up early on Sunday set on smoking my first brisket. For many years I have sought true culinary enlightenment. I am a die hard Texan. I have never smoked a brisket.

I bought a small brisket the last time we went grocery shopping because the cut of meat looked so nice. It also provided me the opportunity to learn to smoke a brisket.

I did a little research last week and found what seemed like a great way to smoke meat. We don’t own an electric burner or have any spare terracotta pots so some supplies were needed.

While shopping on Saturday I looked for pots, grates and burners. I couldn’t seem to put together the smoker. We held off on shopping makeshift smoker supplies as we were deck furniture shopping. I decided to hold off on Sunday morning to get my supplies.

I woke myself early on Sunday with a vision. It wasn’t necessary to buy anything. I could make my own electric smoker. I wrapped my electric crockpot in foil and put it on the bottom of our gas grill. I ran an extension cord and plugged the crockpot in, put wood chips in crockpot, cranked it up and waited. I put the brisket in the grill and monitored the temperature with the remote thermometer that Steve and Joanne gave me for Christmas.

A few hours later, no smoke. An hour later, no smoke. My temperature was perfect but no smoke. I didn’t want to bake my brisket. If I did I would have done it in the oven and not out in the 100-degree outside heat.

My brisket needed smoke pronto. I hopped in the truck and headed to the ol’ HoPot. My plan was to buy a chiminea or a vase-like terracotta pot that would pipe smoke from its top. I would then use some sort of tubing to channel the smoke into the gas grill. I figured this would require some complex engineering, beer and duct tape.

I walked into HoPot and realized that this project would 1) be too involved 2) relatively expensive and 3) look pretty white trash. So I took the money I would have spent and put it toward a pre-assembled Char-Broil smoker. Man, that thing smokes.

Earlier that morning I rubbed the brisket with salt, pepper, coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne, garlic, fennel, brown sugar and coffee. I was envisioning the perfect brisket.

My first smoked brisket looked great but it was tough. Now it is my goal to smoke a tender, melt-in-your mouth brisket. I’m completely open to suggestions…

8/14/2005

Trusty Shadow

This really, really, really, really, really, really hurts.

8/14/2005

Breakfast

I hate breakfast. Back in 1996 I had an oral surgeon crack the front of my upper jaw back into place before the Novocaine set in. That was more fun than any breakfast I’ve ever had.

I’ve never been a big fan of breakfast, but now I just don’t like it. It’s not so much breakfast itself, it’s the foods that are generally involved.

I woke up this morning and started smoking a brisket. That’s why I’m wasting a post on breakfast foods – because I woke up early, cranked up some Jimi Hendrix and started toking on the Angus dooby. No, really, I have a slab of beef on the grill with a makeshift electric smoker (more on that in a later post). I decided to cook a standard American breakfast for the wife and myself: scrambled eggs, toast and bacon.

What’s with scrambled eggs? Chicken embryos that are quickly stirred into a yellow snot and heated to the point where they become a solid that have no signficant protein strands to make worthy of even chewing. And the taste – how would you describe the taste of scrambled eggs? Eggy? So we add salt and pepper so we can eat salty and peppery eggy nothingness that requires little more than a tongue and gums to pass through the food tube and into the stomach. I know there are dietary values of eggs but that’s not the point. I’m going on 30-years-old and I’m questioning the really important issues these days.

Toast? It’s really just a big crouton. Not much flavor there either if you’re using plain ol’ bread. Most people put butter on their toast. That takes so much time. And what if you just pulled a stick of butter from the freezer? How are you going to butter your toast? Now you have to chisel shards of butter into some sort of vessel so you can microwave it. You microwave your butter and now you have soup because it’s early in the morning and you don’t want to take the time to reprogram the microwave so it cooks at 24.67% power. Now you have to pour your salted milk fat soup onto your crouton so you have a soggy peice of charred bread that has the same consistency of your salty, peppery eggs.

What about jams and jellies? Some call it “preserves” – those are “preservatives” – so you have a soggy crouton with a sweet, gelatinous embalming fluid spread atop.

I cooked bacon. Now I like me some bacon. Bacon’s probably the best invention since the pig. But what is bacon? It’s pork belly. A fried-up swine’s digestive sack that’s 86.42% fat and pumped full of water, sodium nitrite and phosphates.

When I think of food, I don’t think of waffles, French toast, toast, bagels, pancakes, scones, fritters, scrambled eggs, Girl Scout cookies or Pine Sol.

For breakfast yesterday I had barbecued pulled pork butt, a beef rib and blackened chicken with a jerk barbecue sauce. Then I went outside and worked on my motorcycle. That’s breakfast in my book.

Brunch? Don’t get me started.

8/13/20051/9/2006

Deck Furniture Shopping

Elise and I spent all day shopping for deck furniture. We searched south Austin for manufacturer-direct locations with no luck. We did however witness a middle-aged woman on a pocket scooter tooling around the sidewalks. It was hilarious… I can’t put it into words, you had to have been there. Not but ten minutes later we saw a guy riding an old mountain bike while carrying a chainsaw. I kid you not. Man, this town is so awesome.

So we drove down 71 and stopped in at L&L Furniture to find patio furniture that was way out of our price range. Swivel rocker chairs were ~$500. We looked around the store and found our way out relatively quickly.

We drove down 620 and stopped in at Chair King. The prices were similar to L&L’s. Next we stopped at Sandy’s Burger Hut for two lousy, overcooked burgers. Then it was futher north up 620 and we drove by two other places that were similar in price range for furniture. We drove down 183 to 360 and stopped at the Container Store so I could get a desk drawer. No desk drawer. Nothing good from this outing thus far aside from crappy burgers.

We drove down 360 to Barton Creek Square to look for furniture at Sears. Nothing good there. Onto Garden Ridge. Nothing at the GR other than Christmas decorations. Remember, it’s August… time to start thinking about Christmas at Garden Ridge. Then to the ol’ HoPot on Brodie Ln. Nothing there. Then to Wal-Mart. We were exhausted and about ready to settle on anything at this point. Elise saw some wicker furniture that she thought she could settle on. I personally don’t like wicker. I decided that we would go back to the Chair King and pay a huge amount of money for deck furniture.

Back to the Chair King we go. Keep in mind we’ve circled the entire city of Austin in search of furniture – six hours have gone by and all we have are crappy hamburgers sitting in our stomachs. We’re at the point where we just want to buy something to make it a fruitful day out and be done with deck furniture shopping.

We get to Chair King and check everything out again. We look and look and look. I finally sit down at a display with a 72″x 42″ boat table with two high-back swivel rockers and four dining chairs. All have back and bottom cushions and they’re awesome. Price? $2,459. For patio furniture. There were some other set ups that were similar but these were, what we thought, the most comfortable. I spent a month building a deck so we could have fun with friends out in the backyard. I figured I’d make an investment in furniture as well.

We were both tired and done looking at patio furniture. I wanted to be done with this shopping outing. I have no problems spending money (luckily I married who I married) and was ready to spend $2,500 on stupid furniture that sits outside to get moldy and rot just so I could get home in time to watch Cops.

My wife said, “I’m not going to do what we did in Cabo. So, NO!”

I concurred. We walked away. I’m glad I listened to my wife.

We headed back down 620 and as a last ditch effort we stopped at the HoPot in Lakeway. We walked out to the garden section and found a display set of chairs and a rectangular table. This End of Summer sale was marked down 50%. The only problem was the set was missing one chair. So I had the HoPot kid go ask his manager if they could take $50 off the set since it was missing the one chair (yeah, me, Mr. Bargain Hunter who was about to drop $2,500 on patio furniture). The discount was approved contingent upon us taking the set tonight.

We loaded up the truck with a big, rectangular table and five fine rocker chairs for $200.