Cleaning up is hard to do

One of the few things I routinely use my kitchen for is to make popcorn, which is very tasty, but always leaves a frustratingly hard-to-clean oily pot behind. This weekend, Googling in anger, I discovered that I should be using a Dobie pad. Skeptical of the ridiculous name but desperate, I bought one, and it worked miracles! Dobie pad, I love you! The Dobie pad has joined the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and Scrubbing Bubbles in my pantheon of life-altering cleaning products.

Tips for Manhattanites venturing into Brooklyn

After countless forays into our hipper, less convenient neighbor to the East (mostly to meet up with girls - why do all girls live in Brooklyn? discuss), including one just this Saturday, I feel like I should share the various valuable lessons I have learned:

1. Bring an umbrella. Especially if Dolapo is coming. Nine out of ten times, if Dolapo is present in Brooklyn, it will be raining. I do not know why this is. Maybe Dolapo secretly controls the weather and does this to give him ammo against future invitations to Brooklyn. Maybe Brooklyn hates Dolapo. The jury is still out, so your umbrella should be, too.
   
2. Bring numbers of car services. Dolapo-inspired rain can humble even the most golfish of umbrellas. For example, an awesome Philip Glass/Dracula/Kronos Quartet was cancelled halfway through because the lightning might possibly kill us. If this happened in Manhattan, we would hail a cab and head for safety. This is not an option in Brooklyn, where there is significant religious opposition to cabs. Instead, it's important to bring the numbers of some "car services" which you can call for a ride out.
   
3. On a related note, bring a map. Most of Brooklyn is not near a subway and these are often places you want to go, such as the Red Hook ball fields (remember NOT to bring Dolapo!). And the parts that are on the subway turn out not to be near one another. If, for example, you are going from Park Slope to Williamsburg, it's pretty much a toss up between walking, a horse and buggy, and the G train. If you are going from my apartment to Prospect Heights or Fort Greene, it will take at least two transfers, and probably the train will be skipping exactly the stop you intend to get off at.
   
4. Be sure to tell people serving you food and/or beverages that you are from Manhattan. For example, the man serving us mojitos on Saturday (in lieu of our ballfields visit, *cough* Dolapo *cough*), was very entertained to hear that we were from Manhattan, and promised to do his best to rival those on our island. Although the drinks were cheap, they also tasted heavily of sour mix.
   

Don't get me wrong. Brooklyn is awesome. There's tasty food. And a park. And large apartments. Just come prepared.

Oo, my 10-year high school reunion is coming

I was catching up on my blog reading, and it was a good thing, too, because Annie had a link to the web page for our reunion. And now I'm passing it on!

I sold my soul to Apple and all I got was a wasted evening

[ pretend there were some prefatory remarks about not blogging in a while because so many exciting things have happened, too many to enumerate at this late juncture here ]

This Saturday, I lost my phone in a cab (yes, the second time this year, but only the second time in my whole life (not counting some close calls)) just as I was lusting after everybody's iPhones, which was quite convenient, some might say suspiciously so. So Sunday, I finally went to the Apple Store and decided, hell, while I was there, why not get the Mini I've wanted forever as a media PC (if only it could play Netflix movies without buying Parallels!). Being a good OCD shopper, I had already looked up the various options for connecting the Mini to my TV, which suck, since Apple has decided the Mini, because it is useful, should be harder to connect to your TV that the Apple TV, which is neither useful nor more expensive. I believe this is what they call "market segmentation," in so far as I, the market, want to segment my eyeballs in frustration.

So, here I am, it's Monday night. I was up late last night with a tool called DisplayConfigX, which is about user-friendly as its name might suggest, eventually gave up, came home, and tried again for a few hours. There are all sorts of random settings for various TVs posted on the Interwebs, but not the ones for mine. Although my TV claims it can do 1024 x 720, when I feed it that resolution, the image is most definitely cropped on the top and the bottom, and that's even after fiddling with the "front porch" and "back porch" of the signal to get it to center correctly. Did you know video signals had porches? It's fascinating. I'm imagining my desktop drinking mint juleps between frames. Or not.

Right, so, it's Monday night and instead of doing anything remotely useful, I have labored extensively and am now the proud owner of a screen that has a 1 inch black stripe on the right side and is cropped on the top and bottom and another that is center horizontally and vertically but still cropped and ostensibly the wrong resolution. Two great choices.

But I am listening to my mp3s over an optical connection to my receiver, which is hott. And I do love love love my iPhone. Anyway, if anybody has any leads on getting this perfect on my TH-37PHD8UK, I'm all ears.

Update 11/23: I managed to at least make all the pixels show up and not look funny and fill most of the screen at the totally random resolution of 1048 x 700. The settings are Horizontal (16 front, 112 sync, 216 back) and Vertical (40 front, 3 sync, 21 back).

Liveblogging jury duty

The rumors are true, there is Wi-fi in the waiting room! But, for reasons that have not really been explained even during the handy video introduction from some of your favorite national news personalities (including graphic depictions of the trial-by-ordeal that we should be grateful for supplanting with this "jury" thing, a reminder that some day when we're on trial the awesome jury we get will justify all the waiting around, and the specious assertion that jurying is more important than voting), the demand for jurors is incredibly unpredictable. Anyway, we arrived at 8:45, the first people left at 10 something, and around 11:15 they dismissed us from a 3 hour lunch. Now, an hour later, 1 batch of folks has left and the rest of us are sitting around. A girl in front of me has read 150 pages of In Cold Blood so far. Highlight of the day: bubble tea. Yum.

Math makes intoxication classy

Saturday was the long-awaited exponential decay bar crawl. Thanks to a handy-dandy planning notebook, some fuzzy math, and Rohit's task-mastering, things went very well, whiny-trooper-friends-without-any-girls-to-enamor-them-between-64-and-8 notwithstanding. We went to Baker Street @63 (cute bartender), Blockheads @34 (cheap frozen margs), Petite Abeille @20 (very alcoholic Belgian -beer), Bua @8 (espresso martini!), Stillwater @4 (outdoor seating!), dba @2 (mollie bought me framboise!), one and one (dancing! late arrivals! more booze!), and double happiness (more dancing!). All in all, about as ridiculous as you might expect. Luckily, the hangover was not so bad.

My new running secret

A few weeks ago, I discovered that it's possible to cut across Manhattan pretty quickly on Houston, and this pretty much changed my life. Anywhere north or south of Houston is pretty crappy due to a combination of lights and pedestrians - best I've done is Tribeca, but there's a lot of annoying twists and turns involved in that. Today, Ak tagged along on my second 10 miler in the past few weeks, and he was annoyingly in shape considering he doesn't run that much, but fun was had.

I'm also getting a lot of, ahem, mileage out of my new Fuel Belt, which keeps me from buying lots of overpriced and heavy Gatorades en route. It took some getting used to and weighs me down a bit, but it was totally worth it. I'm going to try tracking my runs on Sanoodi, although it's a little annoying because I can't list a date without also listing a time, and I never precisely time anything.