I discovered last night that the racks in my oven had been inserted backwards.
ovenracks/IMGP1628

This makes it very difficult to remove the oven racks to place them in different positions, which make me question how they got that way in the first place! It was certainly not easy getting them out, not to mention when the oven is at 350, but a little twisting and contorting and I was able to extract one of them.

But I’m still curious…who the heck put them in that way and how did they do it?!

I took a few more pics of my new place tonight. They can be found in the west loop moving gallery. Here’s a couple previews:

wl-moving/Living_Room_Dark
wl-moving/Kitchen_Dark

Would you let your dog drive your Lexus?

errata/IMGP1615

A scary time in any young man’s life - when he realizes he is becoming like his father.

In my experience these are isolated incidents when you realize that you are doing something your father would have, and you simply stop and put your head in your hands. Perhaps it’s not that extreme, but I just had one of those moments this morning.

I was opening a box of cereal and pulled a little too hard and ripped the bag down both sides. Instead of merely shrugging it off and assuming it would be fine, I whipped out the tape and patched the bag together in no time. As I was admiring my handy-work, my brain kicked in and said “eyep, just like your dad would do”.

Awesome. *grin*

Well I’m sure there are a lot of places, but when I went to this place about a year ago (maybe more) it was pretty darn good. And imagine that…they have a web site!

Luling City Market - Central Texas Barbecue & Bar
4726 Richmond Avenue - Houston, Texas 77027 (713.871.1903)

I’ll have to hit that up again if I’m ever in the neighborhood…

I just put up some nice photos of Chicago at night that I took this evening. The sun was reflecting off the buildings in quite a nice way.

Enjoy!

via Forever Geek, a couple pretty useful google map mods: Cheap Gas and Pseudo-Traceroute.

What’s next…a Google map of your hard drive?

So I finally pulled the trigger and picked up the Dell 2005FPW. That’s right, the UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor and man is this sucker pretty. I’ve had the 1702FP for several years and have loved it and I’m sure the 2005FPW will treat me just as well. I almost want to get a second one…

In any case, it’s functionality on my primary system was going to be something of a question mark as I run Windows Server 2003 for my desktop (I don’t do much gaming…) and I have an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. Well ATI doesn’t officially release or support their cards on Server operating systems, but their XP versions generally install OK.

I snagged the latest ATI Catalyst drivers and installed them, but when I rebooted I got an error message about the ATI Control Panel:

The ATI Control Panel failed to initialize because no ATI driver is installed, or ATI driver is not working properly.

Great…that’s not too cool.

A quick Google led me to this forum post with very detailed instructions on how to install Catalyst drivers on Server 2003. However, there were only two things that I needed to do from those instructions to make the control panel work:

1. Add the two *_XP.REG files in C:\ATI\SUPPORT\5-5_xp-2k_dd_cp_wdm\CPanel to the registry.
2. Enable full hardware acceleration in the Advanced Troubleshooting properties.

Once I did that and rebooted, the ATI Control Panel came up with no problem at all and I could rotate my brand new 2005FPW at my leisure!

I wonder how a 2005FPW looks on a mac…

I used to have Google Desktop installed on my laptop and I loved being able to find things that my brain forgot where I had left them. I also installed Yahoo! Desktop search on my home machine, but I wasn’t that impressed with it and ended up uninstalling it.

Well after about 2 hours of searching for an old document last night, I decided to give Copernic Desktop Search a shot. After it was done indexing, it found the document I was looking for within seconds in an old sent email.

So amazingly useful.

*Mom, don’t look at this!*

The Chicago crime database just went live today and guess what…it integrates with Google Maps! This was something I actually wanted to do after I saw the craigslist hack - put together a google map of crime in the city. I am very impressed with the person that put the site together - they did an excellent job!