Pelanne.Com

This morning’s surfing has netted three interesting sites:

1) Famous People’s Last Words
I especially like Pablo Picasso’s - “Drink to me!”, when he died in ‘73. I have been trying to hold true to his memory.

2) 176 Lines in Star Wars that are improved by replacing a word in the sentence with the word “pants”

Notable quotes:

“You are unwise to lower your pants.”
“Governer Tarkin. I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s pants.”

3) Louis Wain’s Paintings
This set of pictures, snapshots from later and later points in 20th century artist Louis Wain’s life, depict his changing perceptions as he sank deeper and deeper into schizophrenia.

As you can tell, he’s famous for painting cats. And for having schizophrenia while he painted cats (despite the aspect of tragedy, it’s actually pretty darn interesting - that last cat is something that might chase me in a bad dream).

Got some fish? Got a bunch of dishes that need cleaning? Do you happen to be hungry right now?

Excellent! You have achieved the trifecta of conditions that deserves: DISHWASHER SALMON.

Short story - you take a hunk of fish, a scintillating variety of spices and wine, and some foil. Bind them together into a packet of sorts. Place in the dishwasher. Tie down any small, sharp items (say, knives) that may fly around a dishwasher. Run through a normal cycle. Extract from foil, plate and enjoy.

I never thought I’d use these terms in a sentence together, but that sounds both terrifying and delicious.

Many times, especially at places like conferences or other such professional gatherings, you will meet with people who, you will notice, are making a mountain out of the molehill they’re trying to get across. This article calls it for what it is: BS.

If you hear the term “leverage” more than once in a conversation, especially one which has to do with something related to computers, chances are that someone’s trying to either sound like they know more than they do, or sell you something that isn’t that good.

This article is by the folks who brought you Basecamp and Ruby - they actually practice the simplicity they preach , which is nice!

Full Article Here

Backing up your workstation is one of the most necessary, and one of the most overlooked, actions you can take to safeguard your important information (documents, application settings, and that magical family vacation you just got back from) from otherwise inevitable destruction at the hands of entropy.

Tech Hints has written a good article about how to make smart decisions about backing up your home computer- specifically, what to back up, and where to find it, and how to go about doing it.

The good news is that if you’re using Windows XP, you already have all the software you need to make it happen. All you need is an external USB hard drive and a dream.

Article Details Here

The camoflage strategy was definitely one I had to resort to in order to safeguard my fermented beverage, circa ‘92.

Things haven’t changed all that much, but now that I’m older and slightly more wisened (looking at least), I call it “cellaring” and I swirl the beverage prior to quaffing it, while regarding it with a cool glance of enlightened disaffection. Afterwards, I speak of it in SAT-approved simile.

This is from a hilarious series of ads for Miller Lite - click here to do a seach on YouTube for “Man Law” - I’ve found eight different ones. The way he says “turkey” in this one cracks me up.

One of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker, has a great piece about how to get more out of the music service Pandora.

Pandora is a great piece of in-browser software which lets you listen to pretty much any music you want to (streaming-only), and does a very good job of picking out other music you would probably enjoy, based on what you tell it you like.

The really cool thing about Pandora is that unlike the way Amazon tell you what music you might like based on what other people have purchased, Pandora chooses other likely similar musicians based on what it calls the Music Genome.

It’s something like a fingerprint for music - 400 heuristics per song, which rate a piece of music on everything from production quality to saxophone sound to shrillness of vocals. Each song is rated by a trained musician - it takes 20 to 30 minutes per song.

Given a piece of music, it can find you a similar piece of music, regardless of who the artist is. This unique way of identifying music makes this a fantastic tool to find new artists (they break a surprising number of new artists), which was one of the goals of the founder of the service, Tim Westergren, a once-starving artist himself.

He recently came to Blacksburg and had a great back-and-forth with the audience (mostly students). His entry on the Pandora blog is here. I apologize for having my back to you in the picture.

So, fresh from Lifehacker - tweak your Pandora settings, give it better clues about how to suggest music, play it from your task bar…lots of good stuff here. The details are here.

I sit here in front of the glowing LCD, completely famished.

Starvin’ like it’s my job, and what do I happen upon? A webpage completely devoted to one man’s quest to create the best pizza ever.

His name is Jeff Varasano, and in his quest he has taken the time to try every cheese, every tomato, every flour, every yeast, and all kinds of oven varieties and temperatures.

His findings? The most important things, by far, are what he calls the big three: high heat, good natural yeast, and mixing technique. Get those right, and you overcome most of what can ruin a pizza.

If you’re hungry, check his page out - just scroll down to the pictures. Your eyes will grow stomachs just looking at them. If you like to cook, check it out too, but take the time to do some reading - he’s really put a lot of time into researching it.

I’m definitely going to try some of his recipes out. If they turn out as good as they look, I’m going to have to up the running regimen a bit.

The ole THX audio test that blows your ears off each movie you watch: