tim merritt [dot] net

Recipe: Spicy Roasted Chicken Thighs
Adapted from Suvir Saran

Pro Blogger Jason Kottke compiled a list of his best links of 2005. Jason finds and links to things that constantly open my eyes and continue to show why the web is such a great place. I’ve been saving many of these as PDFs to read on the train to work.

Blog Torrent is free, open-source software from Downhill Battle that provides an easy way to share large files on your website without large storage or bandwidth costs.

I don’t know if TextDrive, my host, supports this. I wonder what the server hit would be. It’s not that I have a bunch of large files I want to torrent, but I want to keep my options open.

This came as part of Small Dog Electronics’ Kibbles and Bytes enewsletter. I’m keeping it here – below the fold – as a reference for me and for anyone who might find it useful. Thanks to Small Dog!

For iPod Newbies
Ed@Smalldog.com

A very good, very clever friend of mine was delighted to receive his first iPod this Christmas. He ripped open the package, turned the iPod on, and immediately set the language to Chinese. He does not read or speak Chinese. Rather than read the fine print in the manual, he called me to learn how to reset the iPod. He also had lots of other questions about how the iPod works – the same questions we hear everyday at Small Dog Electronics. Because many people will be receiving the iPod this holiday season, I decided to dedicate this article to answering six of these very common questions. If you are the person that all your friends call when they have ANY computer problem, hang on to this article for them!

Jack says he doesn’t like olives, but I know he’d like the first part of these Deep-Fried Garlic Cloves and Green Olives I’d like to make. From the NYTimes.

We had a nice Christmas and first day of Hanukah. We all exchanged gifts, but less expensive than in past years, and made a collective donation to Habitat for Humanity’s Katrina-specific recovery efforts. We also ate almost all of two six-pound legs of lamb, a good bit of red wine, assorted delicious fresh vegetables (in the middle of winter – modern life is better than we realize, most of the time), and several cookies and some spectacularly stinky Shropshire blue cheese. We – or some some of us, at various times – played games with the infant and the five-year old and the college students and high schoolers and grandparents and a little solitaire on a laptop, ate cookies and watched some TV and read some books, and talked and told stories, and ate more cookies. A great family holiday.

[Update: I changed the graphic at the top from New York’s skyline at dusk as seen from the Empire State Building last December to my brother making gravy Christmas day for the roasted lamb. Thanks, Michael.]

It’s not a book, really, it’s a short story first published in the New Yorker. I haven’t read it yet, though I’ve saved it as a PDF. I had come across some buzz about the movie here and there, and Jason Kottke linked to the story at the New Yorker.

It’s directed by Ang Lee, whose films (at least the ones I’ve seen: Sense & Sensibility, Ride With the Devil, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) seem to be about troubled or forbidden relationships, forbidden by custom, class, race, vocation. I have not seen The Ice Storm, which as I understand it covers similar ground in a Connecticut family, nor have I seen The Hulk, in which Jennifer Connelly and a large green man with anger issues have troubles. But that’s a digression.

Brokeback Mountain explores the forbidden relationship between two men with care and respect. I found it moving and genuine, and I greatly admire Heath Ledger’s performance. Recommended whole-heartedly.

DV for Teachers is back! With the help of Jason Levine of www.queso.com and his Manila-to-Movable Type script, I now have all my archives and images from the old site (gone in a week or so) at the new one. There’s still housekeeping to do – several of the post titles have too much HTML sticking up here and there, and I have to fix the images I embedded in some of the posts, but the info is there, the links that haven’t rotted on their own work, and hotcha I’m excited. I hope to have those things fixed and a nice design implemented in time for the 22nd of January, the official 5th anniversary of DV for Teachers. I found out yesterday that the blogging software I use, WordPress, is about to be upgraded from 1.5.2 to 2.0 – apparently a very big deal. I’ll wait a bit, let some other brave souls debug a little, and have a really solid site that’s easy to post to, easy to look at, and fill it with good information and links. This is great.

((((( Hearing Voices )))))
MUST ADD “STORIES” CATEGORY, FOR THIS AND FOR POSTS ABOUT… STORIES.

Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot –
“My English teacher’s assignment was an oral report on a book of our choice. I had no trouble selecting a book, because I had just read the definitive work on one of my favorite topics: Led Zeppelin. Stephen Davis’s cheesy Led Zep biography, Hammer of the Gods, had just been published, and I probably read it front to back the day it came out.”

I loved Led Zeppelin myself. Loved them. I know they didn’t define Rock Star Excess, but they practiced it and burnished it to an excessive gleam that virtually no other band has been able to touch. Despite this and innumerable other flaws, I revere some of their early power blues, and some of the great stuff on Physical Grafitti still makes me drive fast. From Panopticist: Cultural Surveillance.

Vitamin Q – a temple of trivia and lists – posts Twenty Films whose ‘fans’ are more annoying than the film itself. (Can’t recall who pointed to this, or I’d give them credit.)

I’ve moved the site to TextDrive, which doesn’t change what you see, but changes a little how I put it up here. Just a little plug for them.

The 64 Second Film Contest – the link came via the DMN newsletters I subscribe to.