A week ago I bought a third-party iPhone charger from my new favorite online cables/parts/accessories supplier, Monoprice, that cost less than $4.00. I wanted one to keep at the office that would charge my phone and that the other folks at the office could use, too. So I ordered three of them so I would have one just about anytime I needed one.
Well, I got the chargers over the weekend, but when I tried to charge my phone, it wouldn’t charge for more than five minutes. I tried the other charge, figuring that if this thing retailed for $4.00, it likely cost $0.40 to make and quality control might be lacking. The second one had the same problem. Damn! The phone charges fine with the OEM charger and through my MacBook Pro’s USB so we can deduce that the iPhone is capable of taking a charge.
So as a “hail mary,” I brought the third charger with me to work, and guess what? It works. It has fully charged my iPhone and I’ve been listening to it most of the day. Well, go figure.
Nighttime Snow
So, as you may have heard, it’s been snowing around here, and last night, it really came down in earnest. No foolin’.
Well, I had felt a little guilty about canceling last night’s Media Criticism class, but once I went outside and saw how much snow had fallen, I felt vindicated. It also helped that Fordham University, Queens College, and NYU—not too mention all NYC public schools—had all canceled classes today, too.
Here are some of the pictures that I took late last night to get a glimpse of the peaceful scene on Vernon Blvd.
Christmastime Trip to LA
After having a few days to catch up with the website and getting Gallery2 playing nice with WordPress, via the heaven-sent plugin WPG2, I have uploaded a ton of photos from the Christmastime trip Sarah and I took to LA.
Although I didn’t take pictures of everywhere we went, I did manage to snap up photos of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, which was part of Sarah and I’s tour of presidential libraries. in Yorba Linda, California. Unfortunately, at some point during the trip, the memory card got corrupted, and we lost about sixty photos.
We did however salvage the remaining photos from the trip, including those from the walking tour of downtown LA’s historic core, and of the Rose Parade floats in Pasadena.
The day after New Year’s, we took LA Conservancy‘s walking tour of the Historic Core, which I recommend that anyone in LA with a free Saturday morning to take. I posted the full set of photos that I took. One of the highlights of the tour, which we didn’t get to see on the tour due to acess restrictions, was the LA Central Library. Thankfully, they offer their own building tour and we took that later that afternoon.
The next day, taking advantage of a daytime temperature of nearly 80°, we went to Pasadena to look at the floats from the 2010 Rose Parade. Sarah took a bunch of her own photos and videos, and I’ll post a link to that once I learn where she’s posted them.
Sorry for the delay. You can check out the full set of each photos.
A Satisfied Customer?
After last month’s huge project in printing nearly 200 tote bags and as many t-shirts, I finally saw one of our products on the street.
I should say that the bag does look sharp!
Now, if we’d ever get paid for this job.
Bourbon Trailblazing
Sarah and I took another extended trip to Bourbon country as part of the annual “fake Thanksgiving” trip. On this trip, we hit up three different distilleries: Tom Moore, Heaven Hill, and Jim Bean. Each of these distilleries seem to make more than half of the bourbon in Kentucky, but they also represent a significant consolidation among all the distilleries in the area.
Tom Moore
The Tom Moore distillery was enormous, and it just recently started letting tour groups come visit the area. This tour was my least favorite of the three distilleries we saw. First, the tour was extraordinarily long: it was three hours in length. Second, the facilities were pretty ugly. Yes, I understand that this is a booze factory, but there really was no attempt to make it look nice. Maybe I should be giving them credit for keeping it authentic, but as you can tell by the photos I took, there wasn’t a whole lot worth snapping a photo. Perhaps the best representation of the state of the distillery is the hybrid school bus and military truck that had been made on the premises. Finally, there was no tastings at the conclusion of the tour. It’s one thing to see an ugly place for three hours where bourbon (and a lot of other spirits, including brandy) is made, but please let me taste some of the stuff. Anyway, the spirits giant Sazerac took over the plant over the summer so any attempt at the folksy tradition of bourbon making seems to be gone.
Heaven Hill
This was a much different tour to visit despite the proximity. Heaven Hill produces a lot of brands of bourbon, including Evan Williams, and the tour was very different. We made it there just before closing time, and our tour consisted of wandering around the gift shop and being summoned to enter this barrell-shaped room. Unlike the Tom Moore tour, there was no long-winded tour… just two half-ounce tastings of bourbon. The Evan Williams Single Barrel but the Elijah Craig Single Barrel had aged 18 years, which took too much flavor from the barrel. Anyway, it was still a treat after touring distilleries for nearly four full hours.
Jim Beam
In the category of short and sweet, this tour consisted of a seven-minute video, detailing the long tradition of bourbon making under the Beam name, and a short tour through a restored guest house. Then we went on to the bourbon tasting. At this tasting, we had some Booker’s Single Barrel (can you detect a pattern here?) and a curiously strange berry flavored bourbon, Red Stagg. I definitely preferred the former to the latter, especially since it has that oaky flavor you really drink bourbon for. But the flavored stuff wasn’t too offensive. In fact, I kind of liked it, but I fear what will happen to bourbon if they go the way of the vodkas.
Burning Screens as easy as ABC No Rio
Social Text turns 30 years old this year, and they have commissioned Sarah and myself to print their commemorative tshirts and tote bags. So far we’ve split the duties tonight. She and Lily and printing the tote bags and I have come to the Lower East Side to burn the screens for the tshirts.
My job is usually really easy except that we have to adjust the size of the print for each shirt size. After toting around a bunch of screens on the subway, we are burning each screen. Pictured is one we did and it looks like it’s coming out fine.
Anyway this is going to be a long night, and I have an early morning class to teach tomorrow. Come to think about it I might take a taxi back to avoiding carrying around all those screens.
Radar Eyes at LIC:Space
The LIC:Space held an optical illusion show at their gallery and at a neighboring taxi garage.
Follow the duct tape arrows to the other space….
The fine folks at Dogfish Head Brewery will be staging its fifth-annual Novemberfest on Thursday, November 5, starting at 6:00 pm at Standing’s (43 E. 7th St). Five brews will be on tap plus free pizza. Also, there’s a fairly decent chance that the bar’s sporty side will shine with a possible Game Seven of the mid-autumn classic on the many flat panels.
Say goodbye to the old Juanomatic.net website. A new site is coming!
In the last few days, I’ve decided to completely redo this site, migrating from a site where I documented many of my misdeeds to something a little more grown up. Also, this has enabled me to finally abandon Movable Type as a the site’s CMS to Word Press, which is something I should have done years ago. (Word Press is so much better!)
In the coming weeks, I’ll be making many changes to this site and maybe even trying to resurrect some of the more popular parts of the old site, such as the photo gallery and the softball blog.
Thanks for your support over the years. And now that I am getting something more to my liking (and appropriate for my 30s), I’ll be bringing a spiffy new site.
