MPD

I’ve been trying to decide what to do with my online presence after graduation for a while now. I had a few choices about what I could do once my MIT hosting disappeared:

1. I could give it up and suddenly not be online.
2. I could use generic services like GMail and Blogger to maintain a basic web profile.
3. I could host my own server either with a dynamic DNS entry or with a static IP address and dedicated hostname.

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As some of your may have noticed, I have a new theme for my blog. This one is basically Vertigo Blue by Brian Gardner. Thankfully for me, he released the theme for free for people to use. All I had to do was make new versions of the header graphics and slightly modify the sidebar (I didn’t like how the links displayed), and I was off.

Unfortunately, soon after changing the theme, I noticed a sharp drop in visitors on my Google Analytics reports. Since my readership is so low anyway, I first attributed this just to people being busy and/or not noticing anything.  However, after three days of zero visitors showing up (even when I tried to make visitors show up by visiting myself), i realized something was wrong.  Turns out, I forgot that the display of WordPress blogs is entirely decided by the theme, and the way I had gotten Analytics working before was to put the javascript code into the theme footer.  So, when I changed the theme, I also eliminated all the tracking code from my website.  It’s back in there again (you can check), so everything should be back to normal.
So, in conclusion, let me know if you like the new theme.  I’m a little worried that I won’t be able to keep it over the summer when I will probably host my blog on wordpress.com for free, but I guess I’ll figure that out when it’s absolutely necessary.

I’ve been looking for apartments lately, so I’m constantly looking at Craigslist postings, finding the addresses, putting them in Google Maps, and trying to estimate how far they are from the T-Stop, whether it’s a good location or not, etc.. However, this morning I realized that Google Earth is a great tool for this. You can add more than one address, check distances, etc.

So, I decided to play around with KML a little bit and make a map of where I want my apartment to be. Now, I can just put the address in Google Earth and see if it makes it into my desired area quickly. Check it out:

Apartment Search (KML)

Apartment Search (KMZ)

One of the great things about Burton Conner is the kitchen in every suite.  Not only can we save money from not having to eat out every day, but I think it provides an opportunity for students to become more independent.  Learning to cook and stock a kitchen will certainly provide rewards later in life.

Some people, however, aren’t really sure where to start or what to make.  Other times, we all run out of ideas and can get a little sick of eating the same pasta night after night…  To combat these problems, though, there are a number of resources that home cooks can look to for inspiration.

The Reluctant Gourmet is a site specifically devoted to home chefs.  They have some great articles on general cooking techniques that you can use with whatever ingredients you happen to have (I’ve made some delicious sauces after reading their feature on pan reduction sauces).

Epicurious.com has a huge selection of professionally edited recipes that you can search through based on ingredient, and a number of other criteria.  They also have a cooking dictionary that’s useful when trying to figure out what a term like “al Forno” means.

Finally, AllRecipes.com has an enormous number of user-submitted recipes.  The quality of these recipes can sometimes be a little spotty (since they’re user submitted), but people also rate them, so you can at least see what others have to say.

As many of you probably know, I am a rather tall guy.  Unfortunately, this leads to the problem that I can very rarely find jeans that fit.

However, it now looks like there may be hope: www.makeyourownjeans.com.  I recently found this site while browsing the internet one day, and I may give it a shot.  They have a number of different styles of jeans from which to choose, but the great part is that when you order, they step you through the process of measuring yourself to find the perfect size for you.  This site also has price going for it.  $45 for a custom pair of jeans (plus ~$15/pair shipping, less if you order more) is not too bad, especially compared to the other options (the second-cheapest I could find was www.landsend.com at $70).

Another service that they offer is “clone-a-jean.”  For this, you send them an old pair of jeans that fit perfectly, then they will make as close a match as possible.  This would be great if I had ever found a pair that fit really well…

As soon as I find some tailor’s measuring tape, I’ll let everyone know how the jeans turned out.

I decided to try making an Amazon.com wishlist to keep track of things that I would like, as I think of them. I can never seem to decide on anything to ask for as a gift, so I figure maybe this will help.