Are you detecting a pattern yet? In my Wordless Wednesday post, I showed some photos of my harvest. In my Tell Me Thursday, I posted the story of my harvest. Well, today we devored our harvest. Ok, not the entire harvest. As I mentioned yesterday, I made Peanut Butter Jalepenos and Peppermint Tea. For the cucumber, we decided to go a simpler route. I sliced it up and had a taste test with a store bought cucumber we had on hand. We were pleasently surprised to find out that the home grown cucumber was sweeter than the store bought one. Alas, split amoung the four of us, the cucumber was gone all too fast. We’ll just have to keep an eye on our cucumber plant to see if any more cukes mature. Have you ever grown anything to eat in your garden? If so, what did you make with it?

Oh, and while you ponder your answer, here are some photos of the cucumber being prepared for devouring.

Thank you Kailani at An Island Life for starting this. Please head over to her blog to say hi. Also, remember to sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Yesterday, I posted about “Harvest Time.” Back in the Spring, we did some plant shopping and decided to get a few potted vegetables to grow. We bought two tomato plants, one zucchini plant, and one cucumber plant. I bought one Jalepeno plant to be “mine.” While doing so, I joked that the spicy peppers would keep the local rabbit away from our plants. NHL, meanwhile, chose a peppermint plant because he liked the way it smelled. We decided not to plant all of these in the ground, but rather to pot them. Plants potted, we waited for the warm summer weather to help them grow.

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With the economy the way it is, everyone is looking for ways to save money. For awhile now, I’ve thought about how much our cable TV costs us per month and whether/how we would do without it. We currently have Time Warner Cable’s All-In-One package (Internet, Phone and Cable) with two boxes. One is a DVR and one is a plain cable box. The phone line and Internet we would need to keep. (Ok, technically we could cut our land line and go cell phone only, but that’s a thought experiment for another day.) Switching to Time Warner’s “Surf & Talk” plan would save us about $65 per month.

Of course, our cable TV doesn’t go unwatched every day. NHL and JSL watch it. B watches it. I watch it. So we can’t just rip out the cable line and pocket the monthly savings. Some kind of entertainment is going to need to replace the cable TV loss at or below the cost of cable TV. In doing research on this, here are some of the options I’ve come up with:

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I’ll admit that, as much as I love blogging, part of me hated writing blog posts. It was filled with annoyances. First I had to go into WordPress’ admin panel. For some reason, I’d always wind up logged out, so I’d have to load up PasswordSafe to retrieve my password and log in. Once in, I’d have to navigate to the New Post page. When I was there, I’d need to type in my post, remembering to hit Save every so often lest my browser crash and I lose it all. (Somehow, auto-save never works when you need it to.) When I wanted to put images in my post, I had to upload them then add them to my blog using a variety of tactics.

All of these little annoyances meant that it was hard to write a blog post. At least harder than it should have been. All I wanted was a local version of WordPress’ admin panel (so I wouldn’t need to log in) with more of an application’s feel to it. After some Google searching, I found Zoundry Raven. Zoundry Raven gives you a local copy of your blog to work on. It uploads changes (posts, photos, etc) via XML-RPC. What this means is that you load up Raven, select a blog post (or create a new one), add images via dragging and dropping and then hit Publish to send it all to your blog. No messing around with a separate FTP tool. No stopping writing to upload some files.

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In three weeks, I’ll celebrate one whole year of blogging at TechyDad.com. So much has happened since I first launched this blog. I attended my best friend’s wedding, JSL had two trips to the hospital, my grandmother passed away, JSL turned 2 (wow, I thought I blogged about that – guess I owe JSL a blog post), we went to Disney World, NHL turned 6, to name a few. I know that some people do special things for their blog-o-versaries, but I couldn’t decide what to do for mine. Anyone have any ideas?

Yes, I know that technically I pushed this post live on Thursday, but I’m still going to make this an Aloha Friday post. So my Aloha Friday question will be: What should I do for my 1 year Blog-o-versary?

Thank you Kailani at An Island Life for starting this. Please head over to her blog to say hi. Also, remember to sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

B likes putting photos together into collages for her blog. They help save space when she wants to display a series of related photos. However, her usual tools for making collages weren’t working out well so I went hunting for a new one. Something that can arrange a series of photos in a layout and allow her to decide how (or if) the photos are cropped. Unfortunately, I didn’t find such a tool. (If you know of one like this, tell me about it in the comments section below.)

What I did find was Shape Collage 2.5. Shape Collage will take a set of photos that you specify and toss them together into a shaped photo collage. It comes with 3 preset shapes: Rectangle, Heart, and Circle. You can also enter some text to use as the shape. The real strength of the program, however, is the “More” category. Here, you get to draw your own shape or load one from a file. The photos will take on the shape of whatever you draw.

The first use I thought of for it was making a poster of our nearly 3,000 Disney World photos. I loaded the directory with the photos and decided on a shape. After a quick experiment drawing a “Mickey Ears” shape (turned out well enough, but my drawing skills are lacking), I decided to take it to the next level. First, I found a PNG image of Mickey online. (Shape collage uses PNG and I figured this would be the best format to modify into a shape.)

I tossed this into a photo editor (Paint.NET), gave it a white background (instead of transparent) and turned Mickey completely black so that the image turned into this shape:

I loaded this shape into Shape Collage, changed a few settings around (e.g. I told it to only use 1,000 photos) and clicked Preview. After a short processing screen, I was treated to a sequence of photos appearing and rearranging. They quickly formed the Mickey Mouse shape. Once this was done, I clicked Create and got my image:

Trust me, the original photo is huge. Almost 100 megapixels huge! That would be big enough to make into a poster (which isn’t a bad idea for displaying your vacation photos). Here’s a crop from the original:

The only caveat is that it puts a “ShapeCollage.com” watermark on the resulting image. You can pay $25 for the Pro version which doesn’t add watermarks and adds a few other features like exporting the image into Photoshop/GIMP formats (complete with each photo on its own layer).

Even if you stick with the freeware version, I’d highly recommend this piece of software. I know I’ll be having fun putting together some shaped photo collages in the near future!

A few weeks ago, we looked through a local community college’s summer camp brochure trying to figure out which sessions to sign NHL up for. We definitely wanted a dinosaur one since NHL loves dinosaurs. (Even moreso after we saw Walking With Dinosaurs.) For the other session, this listing caught my eye (click to enlarge):

Did you notice something wrong with that listing? That’s right, they’re calling the study of the planets, space and stars “Astrology.” I wanted to make sure that they wouldn’t be teaching my son about birth signs and how the alignment of the planets determines our destiny so we called to confirm. Yes, they meant “Astronomy”, not “Astrology.” While I found this mess-up a little funny, it was also a little scary to imagine that someone in the community college didn’t know the difference between the two. I’d recommend whoever messed this up head on over to the Bad Astronomy blog, run by the wonderful Phil Plait, and find out just why Astrology is wrong.

Last night as NHL was getting ready to go to sleep, I was setting some programs to DVR and making sure we had enough room. While checking to see if an episode of “The Spectacular Spiderman” was one I hadn’t seen, I accidentally hit play. NHL only saw the first couple of seconds, but that was enough for his “bedtime procratination sense” to tingle. He asked to see it and I told him that I’d show it to him another day. He asked what happened in the episode, so I explained the story briefly.

Me: “Spiderman found a black costume that made him stronger, but it also made him mean to people. He didn’t like being mean, so he took off the costume. This episode tells how he took it off.”

NHL: “Who’s Howie?”

As this point, I couldn’t contain myself. I burst out laughing and had to leave the room. I told B who also burst out laughing. As I caught my breath, I told a confused NHL that he just said something very funny even though he didn’t know it. (I didn’t want him thinking I was laughing at him.) It was all-too-much like something from the Naked Gun movies. Yes, I am serious and don’t call my Shirley.

All this is just a roundabout way of saying Happy Birthday to my now-six-year old NHL. Last year, at this point, he couldn’t read at all. Now he’s reading whole books to himself (and us). Last year, he couldn’t ride on a bike two feet without help. This year, he can ride almost all the way around the block without needing help. (Only some uneven sidewalks stand in his way.) Last year, he didn’t know any math at all. Now he’s adding and subtracting like a pro. He keeps learning so much that it is sometimes hard to keep track of it all. He’ll display some piece of knowledge and I’ll have to stop and ask “NHL, when did you learn *THAT*?” This can be good, like with reading various complicated words, or bad, like playing Mario Kart Wii with me and telling me that he’s going to “kick my ass.” (Yes, I told him never to say that again.)

While tucking him into bed last night, NHL told me that he’s going to miss being five. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to do things that he liked doing because he’ll be six. I told him that he’s had a lot of fun being five, but that every year he’ll be able to do more, not less. He’ll still be able to do the things he loved doing when he was five, but he’ll be able to find new things that he loves doing that he wasn’t able to do before.

I watch NHL grow with mixed emotions. Part of me finds it amazing to watch him grow into such an intelligent young man, but part of me wants to keep him a baby forever. As he gets older, I’ll miss the hugs and father-son cuddle moments that were so much a part of his younger years. But then again, I guess I’ll take my own advice and look forward to finding all of the new things that we can do together that we weren’t able to do before.

Happy birthday, NHL, from your very proud dad!

(For B’s Happy birthday message to NHL, hop on over to TheAngelForever.com.)

On our trip to Disney World, we sampled many great foods. Everything from Morrocan to Canadian to, well, good-ol’ US of A food. The food that stuck in our minds the most, though, came from the hotel we stayed in. The Pop Century Resorts’ restaurant had Tie-Dye Cheesecake. A delicious, rich cheesecake, swirled with many different colors, was served atop a “crust” made from red velvet cake. *YUM!*

Being the cooking enthusiest that I am, I decided that I couldn’t let Tie-Dyed Red Velvet Cheesecake be just a fond Disney World memory. I *had* to make it myself. A quick Google search turned up this recipe over at Slashfood. If you follow my wife’s blog, you know that we made it and what the result was. Long story short, the cake, while good, was not what I was hoping for. Instead of a multi-colored cheesecake with red velvet crust, we got a red velvet cake with a multi-colored cheesecake icing. The basic recipe was sound. We just had to fiddle with the proportions. So we decided to halve the cake portion and double the cheesecake portion. We also decided to substitute red velvet cake for Strawberry cake.

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