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110% Over-Thanked, But I Can’t Complain While my Mouth is Full

June 14th, 2010

As a "thank you" for building a kitchen set and shooting a movie in our garage, filmmaker friend Susie baked us a pan of fresh, homemade apple dumplings. With a bottle of cinnamon-sugar sauce. And a bottle of bourbon to top it with:

OH MY GOD, were they good. We are seriously, egregiously over-thanked here. We’d feel guilty, but it’s hard to feel too guilty when your mouth is stuffed full of delicious apple dumpling with cinnamon-sugar bourbon sauce. WOW.

The kitchen in the garage, built of insulation board and wallpaper. And cabinets scrounged from Habitat for Humanity. I took this picture before Kevin and Jim hung green screen across the window-wall and filled up the remaining space with lights and camera equipment (and craft-service tables.) It looked cool!

We’ve got a kitchen renovation underway in our house; when the neighbors walked by in the alley and saw Jim and Kevin working to set this kitchen up, they shook their heads "Goddamn, how many kitchens does that family NEED? Are they gonna rent the garage to college students?"

This is the interior of the kitchen set, with wallpaper up. The wallpaper was stained to look old, with lighter spots where pictures used to hang. I think it looks very stylish!

Here’s the trailer for another award-winning short film “Jacob and Death“, which Kevin and Jim (and other folks) made last year and which you can buy here:

By the way, the kitchen-set movie is the same one that we helped make fake, edible bars of soap out of chocolate a few weeks ago! I can’t wait to see how it turns out! I especially can’t wait to do any old little favor I can for Susie.
Videos From the Chester County Hospital May Fair

May 17th, 2010

In 2008, I blogged about a visit to the Chester County Hospital May Fair, on a wet and rainy morning. This year, the weather was amazingly magnificent. While Kate and her mom tried to whip the house into shape, I diverted LBY by taking her! Here are some iPhone videos I took:

The truck-portable ferris wheel, held together with tiny wires!

A fifty-foot-wide wading pool, in which floated hamster balls! (Will Ronco wanted to use one of these for a treadmill on his boat, but I think each one only holds about twenty minutes of oxygen):

The Tilt-A-Whirl, which causes thirty-nine-year-old men to hoot “wheeee!” like little girls, and little girls to say “I’m going on this again, man” like jaded thirty-nine-year-old men!

The terrifying scrambler thingy! Which the six-year-old was Not Interested In At All!

I. Love. The. Fair.
HURRAH FOR SPRING!

March 17th, 2010

In celebration of spring, I am posting my favorite UNCHAIN THE AWESOME videos, from one I just discovered today (“Grocery Groove”, below), to my favorite thing in the whole entire world, animal, vegetable, or mineral — the Bill Irwin video from Sesame Street at the bottom. See, his Charleston really was THAT amazing the whole time; it just took the friendly, supportive teamwork of the two other fellows to UNLOCK THE ROCK for all three of them! Okay, here goes:

(There’s more awesome Fred “Rerun” Berry dancing, from his earlier career as a Soul Train dancer, at 1:06 in this video that Dr. Zibbs linked to)

Honorable mention: the amazing Prisencolinensinainciusol, which was written to sound like what English sounds like to non-english speakers, and William Shatner’s unexpectedly affecting cover of Common People!
I Graduated from C25K This Weekend!

March 14th, 2010

I’ve been doing the Couch to 5K beginning (and returning) runners’ plan since January, and yesterday, I finished it and ran a 5K race for the first time in, uh… oh, wow: twenty years!

C25K is pretty straightforward, though there’s a lot of stuff to keep track of. You start by jogging one minute, then walking ninety seconds, then repeating — then, in the next week, you jog a little bit more and walk a little bit less. In the past, this meant lots of time spent scrutinizing your stopwatch. But I’ve been using Felt Tip’s C25K iPhone app, which tracks all the details and just gives you “run now!” “okay, walk” messages through your headphones. In fact, the “RUN NOW WOOP WOOP WOOP” message is kind of startling, like an “all hands” general alarm, which is great for getting you to leap off the blocks when it’s time to start jogging again. You can run it on top of the Nike+ application on the iPhone, which IN TURN runs on top of your iPod, so you can chug along, listening to your music, just obey the “walk now” and “run now” commands, and when you’re done you get all kinds of telemetry about your runs uploaded to the Nike+ website.

Here’s the graph of all the runs I did for C25K, on the Nike+ site. Since C25K gradually replaces brisk walking with jogging, the mileage doesn’t go up steeply, or anything. But it’s nice to have such a big collection of green bars!

Up until just a few days ago, all of those runs were on the second-floor gym track at the YMCA Youth Program Center on Chestnut street. Around, and around, and around the track!

Yesterday, I graduated with my first 5K run! I signed up for the St. Pat’s 5K race, held by the really excellent local Chester County Runners’ Store. Kevin Kelly, the co-owner of the store, was actually my cross-country coach in high school, and he puts together a whole bunch of clinics, group runs, workshops, and friendly, mellow runs like this one.

The run was held on the West Chester Downtown Loop, which is two mile-and-a-half-ish loops around town. It’s square, and flattish, and there are volunteers standing at each corner to stop traffic, even when the rain is slashing down sideways like it was yesterday. (“Seems like we’ll have a nice tailwind by the park”, wrote Coach Kevin in an email Saturday morning to let us know the race was still on.) I ran in a gore-tex jacket, and felt very hard-core running through a nor’-easter, but those folks stand in one place for the same duration, braving the weather just so we can have a nice, flat, untinterrupted jog.

Anyhow, I’m very happy to have completed ten weeks of C25K, and I’m looking forward to many runs in West Chester! Hurrah!
Cult of the Object: Wheatley Aluminum Fly Box

March 11th, 2010

My grandfather, John Randolph (“Slim”) Young, was a hell of a fellow. He was an avid fly fisherman, and belonged to a fishing club in the Poconos called the Pohoqualine Fishing Association, which I’ve blogged about before. Here he is in 1979 with my aunt Becky, relaxing in the white clapboard fishing cottage called “totem home”:

Here he is, be-suspendered, on the lawn outside Totem Home, teaching my cousin Beth and I to cast. Ten… and two! Ten… and two!

Here is my aunt Becky, looking incredibly fierce and dashing in her full fly-fishing fig, preparing to cast a dry fly upstream into McMichael’s creek. Or perhaps she’s waiting for a gaggle of Ralph Lauren photographers to arrive. Could they have been far away? I mean, come ON! Look at those hip waders! JUST LOOK AT THEM!

Anyhow, the reason I posted these pictures from Flickr (you can click on them to see the set, including this picture of eight-year-old me looking just like Lydia), is because I remembered the existence of the chief, the most amazing, the BEST piece of gear in a hobby that’s almost entirely built around wonderful little bits of gear. This is the item that I would stand in the stream and play with, mesmerized. I’d take it out of my child-sized fishing vest, provided by my grandfather, and just MARVEL at it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the richard Wheatley Spring-Loaded, Multi-Compartment Window Dry Fly Box Number 1609:

Each little window compartment has a spring behind it, and a little wire catch, so when you touch the catch, the window opens with a satisfying little “FWIP” noise. You can run a fingertp down a column of windows and “FW-W-WIP” open up three in a row. You can run TWO fingers down TWO columns and “FF-WW-IPP” open up two rows of windows. Since the box is stuffed with lots of colorful little flies, it’s the most AMAZINGLY SATISFYING THING EVER. I hadn’t thought about this box for years and years and years, and now that its existence popped into my head I REALLY REALLY want one again.

Given that JRY was an inveterate gearhead, I realized that this probably was not a cheap item. And it’s not – it’s two hundred damn dollars. And since I don’t fish anymore, I don’t even know what I’d put in there. BUT I STILL WANT IT!
Still Life With Dashing Uncle

March 10th, 2010

Matt got his 1971 BSA Thunderbolt up and running yesterday, and stopped by at dinnertime. There’s a line in a Lord Peter Wimsey book where Peter produces a revolver, and immediately is upgraded in the eyes of his nephew from “genial uncle” to “Exalted Uncle”, and that’s what this picture reminds me of:

Matt is wearing an old-stock waxed-cotton Belstaff jacket, which I think may have been Bob’s, and of course the correct pudding-basin helmet with goggles.

The whole family comes by it honestly. Here’s a picture of Kate, Bob, and Matt after Bob won the AHRMA grand national championship of the sportsman 750 class in 1987!
Ice Cream Sundae, Sundae, SUNDAE!!!

March 6th, 2010

Every Lose It or Lose It user (here’s my profile; I’ve lost 26 pounds while on a LIOLI plan so far!) gets a daily reminder: “STEP AWAY FROM THE CHEESEBURGER!” we exhort our users. “DON’T CONCENTRATE ON THAT TWENTY POUNDS, just concentrate on the two pounds you need to lose for your next weigh-in!”

Users can get their reminders either through email or SMS. At least, they could until we discovered that Clickatell, had been accepting our SMS messages for delivery BUT NOT SENDING THEM since February 25th!

Without the SMS reminders, our users were in imminent danger of re-lard-i-fication! What might they do if Randy was not constantly nagging them to make good choices?

Randy heard about Twilio, a cloud-telephony service that lets your website actually call your users on the telephone and play MP3 files to them (that’s to start with; there’s a whole bunch of XML stuff you can do, too.) What we needed was an option to replace SMS — and fast!

So during lunch we ran around the corner to the local AM radio station (WCHE 1520 in West Chester, PA), and asked them to let us record some voice reminders to send as outbound telephone calls through Twilio. John (on the left) and Randy (on the right) are recording one of the message that YOU will hear on your phone when you sign up for a 10-, 20-, or 30-pound Lose It or Lose It plan!

Here’s the message we were recording in the picture above. A LIOLI user has the option to get THIS, or one of a bunch of other random messages, as a call on their phone each day:

http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=http://lioli-general.s3.amazonaws.com/twilio-audio/lioli10.mp3

MAN, did we have a good time doing this. Especially with JT, the morning-host DJ and studio technician, to clean up our goofy recording and make us sound like we actually know what we are doing. Thanks, JT! We’ll be back to record more reminders! And thanks, Twilio, for making it so easy to solve our SMS emergency!

Voice reminders will appear as an option in LIOLI users’ preferences starting this weekend — as soon as Randy stops raging long enough to be able to see his monitor again!
West Chester in the Snow

February 16th, 2010

Last Wednesday, the snow was coming down thick and fast. It had been snowing for, what, three days in a row, and I think by that point it was drifting up to seven or eight feet, on top of the twelve or thirteen that we already had. West Chester was totally shut down — AGAIN — after the huge snowstorm over the weekend. I had cabin fever something fierce, and so needed to get out and work at the office.

I suited up and spent the day working at the Barcode Building, which was great. As the day progressed, things just got more and more snowy. Until finally it was like a comedy snowstorm out there. Good thing I was wearing comedy snowstorm clothes. I wrapped up in a scarf, jammed my pith helmet on my head (hey, a blizzard is sort of like a sandstorm, right?), and began the walk back.

New street (pictured above) was completely empty, except for fellows on quads and snowmobiles, careening up and down at fifty miles an hour, warlike hoots muffled by their Cabela’s balaclavas. Everything was closed downtown….

Everything, that is, except for Éclat Chocolate, the world’s finest truffle maker! The storefront was brightly lit, the case was full of freshly-made ginger caramels, whiskey truffles, and all sorts of great stuff that a fellow should bring home after Braving Nature’s Wrath. Dana even posed with a plate of valentine hearts, so I could tweet my luck:

Then, back out into the snow. Here’s Sharpless Street, heading west:

As I’m writing this, there is MORE snow coming down. Sheesh! But I’m delighted that West Chester’s local businesses are helping us through the season by providing the necessities of life.
MANDOM!

February 1st, 2010

It’s condom, man, random, domination and condiment rolled into one word! (Says my friend and colleague Claudia.)
I cannot possibly do justice to these commercials in words, so I will not even try. Simply BEHOLD.

MANDOM commercial number six, in which Charles Bronson demonstrates that “the world loves a lover” by going home alone, sticking his dress shirt to the ceiling, and rubbing scented oil all over his body:

MANDOM commercial number four, in which Charles Bronson tames a wild helicopter:

MANDOM commercial number eight, for men with guts, he-men, men of action:

OMG, Mandom is still sold! I’m going to get some. BANG! KAPOW! WHINNY!
Lose It or Lose It on CBS3 this morning

January 1st, 2010
Since the beginning of October, I’ve lost just over twenty pounds by carefully monitoring my calorie intake and working out 4-5 times a week. The lion’s share of my weight loss has been spurred by my friend and colleague Randy Schmidt‘s brilliant new website, Lose It or Lose It, which has a simple, effective premise:
1. Set a weight loss goal
2. Give Randy lots of money
3. Check in every week. If you’ve made your target, you keep all your money.
4. At the end of the ten-week plan, get your money back! And now you’re skinnier! Whoo!
I put up fifteen hundred dollars in November against the goal of losing twenty pounds in ten weeks. I was 251 when I started, and I’m right around 236 now, with all my trendlines going steadily downwards. You can see pictures of each week’s weigh-in here.

The great thing about Randy’s program is that it provides the missing ingredient of immediate, specific, and consistent motivation. I’m not trying to avoid eating that cheeseburger based on some nebulous beach goal seven months away; I’m avoiding that cheeseburger because if I eat it, I lose a hundred bucks on Monday! You don’t have to risk as much as me, but I really like cheeseburgers, so I put the figure pretty high. So far, it’s worked great, and I’m starting to get to the point where people are noticing and commenting that I’m looking skinnier.

On Wednesday, CBS3 technology reporter Nicole Brewer called Randy about doing a story on New Years’ resolutions and technology. Lose It or Lose It’s official Philly celebrity geek Blankbaby couldn’t make it, so I filled in. Kate, Lydia, and I drove in to the city, met Nicole and her camera operator in the lobby of the sporting club at the Bellevue, and even got a workout in for the camera! (I burned 14 calories during the shoot; Kate burned 12. So, you know, we got our morning exercise in!)

Here’s the piece that Nicole made!

(If you’re reading this as a Facebook note, the embedded video won’t show up. You can see it on YouTube here)

I had a great time talking to Nicole, and I’m glad that the piece worked out well for Randy, with the URL getting carefully spelled out on TV and everything. Hurrah!

PS. After we were finished shooting, we stepped outside the Bellevue on our way to the Academy of Music to take Lydia to the Nutcracker. I stopped and turned in an uncertain circle. “Uh… which way, honey?” I said, my iPhone grasping for satellites. Kate pointed: “Let’s follow all the girls in red velvet dresses”, gesturing at a sidewalk FILLED with six, seven, and eight-year-olds all headed one way, decked out in velvet trim. The Nutcracker was GREAT, and the trip to Max Brenner’s afterwards was FANTASTIC. What a day!