I’ve been living without a landline for a couple of years now and just using my cell phone however I’m a bit of a cheap bastard and only have about 250 minutes a month. Most months thats more than enough since I don’t really talk on the phone that much however when some sort of parental tech support issue comes up I can burn through the minutes pretty quick.

Lately with my Mom I’ve been using iChat’s audio capabilities and its worked great. Both my Mom and I have the older titanium PowerBooks with the built in mic and the auto quality is excellent, not to mention that my hands are free to click around and look stuff up while I help her out.

Unfortunately my Mom is the only other macophile in the family so when my Dad called looking for some Linux help last night we ended up turing to Skype to save on the minutes. The sound quality wasn’t nearly as good as the iChat conversations I had had but that could have been due to the cheap headset my Dad had.

Wanna use iChat/Skype to get ahold of me? I’ll update my about page with my account info…

Pork Chop Headband + Hungry Lizard = PURE TV GENIUS

I’ve been playing with last.fm a bit over the weekend. Its a neat idea, you create an account and download a program that tracks both what you listen to in iTunes and what you play on your iPod, then uploads the track information to a central website so you can share your musical tastes with others. Once you have uploaded enough tracks they try and identify a number of people who are your musical “neighbors” and theoretically have similar musical tastes as you so you can browse what they are listening to and maybe find some new music.

I was somewhat inspired by this after seeing Adriaan Tijsseling’s script that you can use to update your blog, but for now I think I’m going to just leave it as a link…

Alex’s last.fm page

Sunday’s I usually cook up a batch of something I can portion up into a bunch of lunches for the week. This week I made another attempt at one of my favorite Indian foods - saag. A while back I found an excellent recipe that I’ve been using as a base to improvise over.

This time around I substituted mustard greens for the spring greens (I have no idea where to find the spring greens the recipe calls for, it appears that they are some sort of young cabbage), then added 2 carrots cut into big pieces right after I zapped the mixture with my nifty immersion blender. Before I cooked up the onions I pan fried up two cubed russet potatoes, then mixed the onions in and rejoined the recipe. I like things a bit on the hot side so I added 3 tsp cayenne to the spice mixture. Finally, when mixing the spiced onions and potatoes back into the main pot I also added a can of garbanzo beans.

Results? Pretty damn good with the jasmine rice I cooked up, although as usual way too much food and a bit hotter than I planned.

I had a bit of leftover rice sitting in my refrigerator that I thought I’d cook up into something I could quickly heat up for breakfasts as well. I usually do a stir-fried rice with whatever I have left around when I have old white rice but this time I though I do something different. Many years ago I went to Costa Rica for a week and while I was there I was exposed this addicting black bean & rice dish that they eat for breakfast over there. I found a recipe online and proceeded to cook up a batch that I zap up for breakfast. Results were ok but not quite like what I remembered, maybe because I had to use chicken stock instead of bean stock.

I’d put some pictures up online but I sans camera for the time being - I destroyed my trusty canon S400 this last summer when I took it on an ocean hike with my brothers and ended up getting sand in it . Now the lens is stuck halfway out and no amount of compressed air will remedy the situation… < big sigh >.

Tomorrow afternoon my friend Teman leaves for Japan to work abroad for the next couple of years . He’s promised to keep his blog updated with posts detailing his experiences - here’s wishing him luck on his big move.