Author: isaac

I like cats and compost.

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Mmmm…Crawfish!

Jazz Fest Crawfish

I ate a bunch of these at Jazz Fest. I’m not a huge fan of the crowds and dirt at Jazz Fest, so the crawfish make the thing tolerable. We ate some awesome food outside of Jazz Fest too, including some crawfish at Restaurant August that were loaded with cream and cognac – even better than the usual Old Bay-ish stuff.

Back in DC, Acadiana’s news page says they do crawfish boils every Friday 3:30 to 6:30p on their patio “weather permitting.” So, I guess not today – maybe next week if the weather cooperates. On the phone they said they also do the boils Sundays 2-5p.

Update: Even though the weather looked bad to me they were still boiling crawfish outside and serving them in the bar. We’ve been a few times now – they’re pretty expensive but worth it if you’ve gotta have some crawfish.

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Fuzzy US Capitol

US Capitol

I’ve been using a Super Takumar 50/1.4 adapted to my Rebel XT a lot lately. I think it’s got a bit of the radioactive yellow thing, which I guess means it sat around a while out of the sun. It’s supposed to go away after exposure to sunlight, but after several months of use and some time in the windowsill it’s still a bit yellowish. It doesn’t really matter with digital because it’s easy enough to adjust the color later.

I forget to stop down the lens a sometimes after using the open aperture for easier focusing. All the stray light, flare, internal reflections and whatnot conspire to make some subjects look pleasantly soft. Seems to be distant subjects, where you’d have the focus at infinity, that look best. So, I tried a few shots of the capitol with the aperture open to 1.4. Bumping up the contrast removes the haziness, and I prefer shots like this in black and white. In color they look like 70s snapshots, which can be nice too.

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Cherry blossoms down at the tidal basin

Cherry blossoms

This has been a pretty nice cherry blossom season in DC – a little windy but warm enough that they haven’t fallen to the ground early like last year. These were down around the tidal basin, across from the Jefferson Memorial. There are some less crowded spots out around Hains Point, but there’s something about the trees around the tidal basin – the light off the water illuminates the blossoms from below I think. There’s a bus from the parking at Hains Point to the tidal basin this year, so it’s easy enough to see all the trees.

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Worms cure Crohn’s disease…

Seems like I’ve heard of a similar treatment before someplace. Sweet quote from a gastroenterologist:

“It seems remarkable that some people are prepared to be infected with worms, but the fact that they are says a lot about how poor current treatments are.”

Link to the BBC News article

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Eee PC impressions

I got an ASUS Eee PC when my iBook finally died. I like the little thing a lot – the tiny form factor easily makes up for the limitations.

Where the 12-inch iBook had an adequate-sized 1024×768 screen, the Eee PC’s screen is 720×400, too narrow for a lot of web pages. Zooming out can help, but I find that just makes my eyes hurt after a while. I expect ASUS will add a version with a larger screen sometime this year.

The keyboard is probably my biggest gripe. The keys are all there, but they’re a little small. With my small hands and fingers it works okay, but the iBook certainly was more comfortable for extensive typing.

The installed OS is good and bad. Good because it’s a Linux distribution, so I didn’t pay for a Windows license that I wouldn’t be using anyway. Bad because it’s Xandros and defaults to a simplified user interface. I did live with the advanced desktop mode for a while. That does offer more flexibility, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep things properly updated – counting on ASUS to update Firefox seems foolish.

Luckily, I’m not the only one underwhelmed by Xandros on the Eee PC – the EeeUser Wiki has a long list of alternative operating systems people have installed on the Eee PC. Fedora usually works for me, so I decided to try Eeedora, a live cd version of Fedora with some customizations for the Eee PC. It seems to work well enough, but there are a few things I’ve done that I’ll post about later.