Rooftop Plunge Pool
Holy cow, Playa del Carmen is unbelievably beautiful. I spent this morning lounging in the sun (after greasing myself up with SPF 40, of course). I’m about to put on my walking flip-flops and go look for a burrito on a bike.
Speaking of photos, I carried the new point ‘n shoot to the top of the hill behind our house and did some experimenting with high-dynamic range shots. From the aptly-named Grand View Park, you can see a big chunk of downtown, as well as the Golden Gate, Marin Headlands, and Ocean Beach. It’s a pretty spectacular place to take photos, but unfortunately, the shots I took aren’t anywhere near as spectacular as some of the others I’ve seen.
I’m a little peeved at Flickr. They’re forcing old members, people who pre-date the Yahoo aquisition, to switch to a Yahoo ID-based signin. I’m just concerned, because there’s absolutely no support at Yahoo for people who have problems with their Yahoo IDs, at least in my experience. Anyway, my subscription is up next week, so I’m wondering if I should just move my photos to another service. Of course, that would involve downloading about 1300 images, then transferring them to the new provider. Or, I could just suck it down, resubscribe, and link my Flickr to my Yahoo ID…
Right now, I’m testing about 30 different utilities to see which is easiest and best for copying DVDs. I’m currently leaning toward AutoGK, which has vastly improved since the last time I tested it. It’s even ripping discs–like the Incredibles–which I previously had serious problems getting the audio and video sync’d.
Next up is ripping HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, using the extremely immature apps from doom9
While I’m sitting here not writing the intro for this month’s cover story, I wanted to throw some props to America’s Test Kitchen. Gina and I made three of their cookie recipes this weekend with great results.
The Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies are brilliant. I generally prefer milk chocolate to semi-sweet, so I cut the brown sugar down a bit. It’s a premium-only recipe right now, but I’m sure it shows up on Google. These are consistently described as the best chocolate chip cookies people have ever had.
I love peanut butter cookies, and their peanut butter cookie recipe is fantastic. They’re delicate, chewy, with a nice crisp shell. The secret was to pull them out of the oven before they were actually done. They recommend Jif peanut butter, but I actually used the fancy gourmet stuff, which separates into oil and peanuts, with great effect.
The Soft and Chewy Sugar Cookies were looking great, til I over-cooked them and turned them into little crisps. I’ll try them later and see what I can do next time.
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