As I’ve mentioned before, my family makes Christmas gifts for one another. Last year we made hollow book safes, beaded earrings and teacup candles. The year before that, we made some wine bottle stands and beef jerky. This year, we made chalkboards, barbecue rub, monogrammed aprons, and pottery Christmas tree ornaments.
Announcement
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Sep 11
Sep 11
Why I’m Quitting Netflix
Pretty much everyone should have heard about Netflix’s customer service train wreck. Universities will cover this case study in business classes for the next generation. Shares of the company have slid around 40% since the CEO announced plans to split the DVD mail order and online streaming into separate services with separate billing. This comic strip pretty much sums up customer sentiment.
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Jul 11
Jul 11
The Wife’s Etsy Shop
As you probably already know, I have an incredibly creative and talented wife. She’s into arts and crafts of all kinds, but mostly sewing and pottery. She even has her own website at ElizabethChandlerDesigns.com and a Project Blog where she posts pictures of her latest designs. Recently, she’s shifted gears from custom orders to pre-made items and has built up an inventory. She’s selling everything through an Etsy Shop.
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Apr 11
Apr 11
Tornado Over Tuscaloosa
I traveled to Tuscaloosa, AL yesterday to take part in a funeral and reception for my Uncle Gabe, whose official and honorary pallbearers included some of the more distinguished names in Crimson Tide lore. A smallish tornado had ripped through Birmingham earlier in the morning leaving most of the towns between Moody and Bessemer without power. I caught some intermittent rain from the darkened skies, but otherwise it was a fairly typical drive. By the time the funeral started at 3:00 pm, the winds had really picked up. My uncle requested that we have a party afterwards in order to honor the way he lived, so a reception followed at his home on the waterfront just across the Black Warrior River from the hospital.
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Feb 11
Feb 11
Website Redesign
Most people who read my blog posts subscribe via email or RSS. That means they won’t notice the website redesign unless they make an effort to drop by. I loved the look of the old site, but I’ve been considering moving to a more professional layout as I take on more marketing consulting and web design work. WordPress recently put out another update that conflicted with my old layout. Rather than pore over the update code and tinker with the CSS to fix the error, I decided it was time to embrace 3.0 and make the change. Now if I decide to push the site in a more professional direction in the future, I can hide the blog in the back and build new index and portfolio pages.
I’m going to keep the site as a hobby blog for now, but I wanted to streamline the look, feel and utility of the blog. As I’ve said before, I originally built this website as a personal tool with which to catalogue and sort my various woodworking projects, recipes, travels, etc. You know, automation and all that. I think this new design manages to give me the cleaner feel I’ve been looking for while improving functionality.
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May 10
May 10
The Downside Of Food Blogging
I love to eat. I love cooking. I spend as much time perusing the aisles of the grocery store as I do the hardware store. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I like experimenting with new fruits and vegetables and exotic meats. I enjoy updating old recipes with new cooking methods. I subscribe to several cooking magazines and DVR a few cooking shows (mostly on PBS). I bring my lunch to work almost every day, not only because it’s cheaper than eating out, but because my food is better than most of the meals I can get in downtown Greenville in the middle of the day. To people that don’t really know me well, and even to some people that do, all of these attributes make me look like a food snob.
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May 10
May 10
Why I Started Food Blogging
Lately, lots of people have been asking me why I spend time taking pictures of food and posting them on the internet. Anyone who’s ever had a cast on their arm knows that there’s nothing more irritating than answering the same question over and over again (except maybe when you get an itch on your arm and you can’t scratch it because of the cast; that’s probably more irritating). I thought I’d put the explanation in one place so I can email it to people instead of constantly repeating myself.
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Nov 09
Nov 09
New Phone
I’ve finally moved into the 21st century and bought a smart phone. It’s the new Motorola Droid:
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Sep 09
Sep 09
New Camera
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the quality of the pictures on this site has degraded over the past year. Specifically, the sharpness of the pictures is has been falling off (examples here). Our camera is about 5 years old, and it just doesn’t have the right stuff anymore. Every time I take pictures of a project I’m working on, I have to take them from several different anglers on several different camera settings, hoping that a few of them turn out sharp and in focus. There were many recipes and projects I didn’t blog about because the pictures came out too blurry. What good is a photoblog without good quality photos? This was the old camera:
It was a good little Kodak, and it’s features were innovative when it was made. Unfortunately, those days are long gone.
Apr 11
My Experience With The ’4-Hour Body’ Diet
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