Jacs, at 2611 Monroe St. on Madison’s near West side, “soft-opened” earlier this week in the wake of the recently shuttered Monroe St. Bistro. We (me, AmyJ, and our 2 and 5 year-old kids) spontaneously stopped in for lunch today. Jacs wasn’t perfect (what is after 5 days?), but we all agreed that it shows promise, and are happy to have it in the neighborhood.
While we’d intended to have lunch, Jacs serves only brunch between 10am and 3pm on weekends. The brunch menu had some very tasty looking breakfasts (omelets, eggs benedict, various lighter breakfasts, etc.) and a handful of sandwiches.
I was happy to see the moules frites still on the menu, as they were the only thing on the MSB’s menu that I ever found pleasing without caveat (and the only area in which MSB came anywhere close to its generally superior neighbor up the street, Brasserie V). I don’t know that they’re the same, but my understanding is that there’s some continuity in ownership and/or management between the two, so there’s reason for hope. Continue reading →
I set out this weekend to get an Arduino board to control my Roomba. (The Roomba has a great – and generally open – interface, and iRobot deserves significant credit for encouraging creative repurposing/extensions of their producs.) I’ve got a few project ideas in mind, but for an initial step just wanted to verify that the Arduino could a) send control commands (”move forward”, “turn right”, etc.) from the Arduino, and b) read sensor data (”something is touching my left bumper”, “I’m about to fall down the stairs”). This post contains my notes, which hopefully will help others doing this sort through some of the issues in a bit less than that I spent. Continue reading →
I remember when Ben used to say “Happy Day” instead of Happy Birthday. I don’t know when he stopped…you never know when they will stop doing those things…you always noticed the “firsts”, the “lasts” seem to slip by…. I wonder when the last time Nora will make her little snoring sound when she lays down to sleep or notices something sleeping or puts her babies or animals to sleep …
Indeed. For years I’ve intended to more systematically capture the countless precious moments, hilarious tidbits, etc. that our kids produce on a daily basis. It occurred to me that posterous.com, which I’d briefly toyed with over the holidays but not really found a real use for, would be perfect for this.
And so I now intend to start recording those moments — the things the kids say that make me smile or laugh, the fun things we do, et cetera. At the risk of overwhelming cheesiness, John Lennon put it well: “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”.
Here it is. Honestly, it will probably bore you with its detail. I’m the intended audience, I’m just keeping it public. So follow along if you’d like.
I haven’t posted here in forever – lately I’ve spent all of my non-working online time with things a bit lighter-weight than blogging. Places I have a presence include:
If we know each other and you’re on the above, send me a friend/link invite so we can connect there as well.
I’ll still occasionally post here (probably about as often as I have the past few years), though by far most of my day-to-day activity is in one of the above.
I’ve been playing with Arduino boards in my limited spare time over the past few months. It’s a fun way to spend quality hands-on geek time that is clearly distinct (at least to me) from my day job. Plus, I’m able to start actually instantiating some of the ubiquitious computing / distributed sensor ideas that have been floating around in my head.
I’ve been working on a simple wireless light, temp, and motion sensor. Light was a trivial CDS photocell connected to the analog port of the arduino. My first attempt at temp is using the Dallas Semiconductor DS-18B20 digital one-wire sensor, which is pretty slick for $4.25.
There was some good sample code on the main arduino site, but I spent a small bit of time to flesh it out more completely, adding the ability to configure sensor resolution and extracting the temp value from the returned data. Code is here, if this is interesting or useful to you.
I was going through an old pile of paper in my office recently and encountered a set of note cards I’d accumulated years ago, back in the very small, scrappy, it-definitely-might-not-make-it startup stage. Most of the cards contained miscellaneous reminders, todos, or ideas I thought worthy of further exploration.
A few of the cards, though, had the record of an idiom mixing game my colleagues and I played back in the day (I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with strongly multi-disciplinary and linguistically inclined geeks).
At its basic level, the game produced comprehensible phrases that amusingly combined two familiar idioms, such as “there are other fish to skin”, or “there are other cats in the sea”.
These are good for a chuckle, but not fundamentally anything more than language slapstick. Some combined idioms of similar intent in ways that made more vibrant images than did the originals, such as
“that opens up a whole new can of monkeys”
(A “can of worms” is one thing, but monkeys make everything funnier.) Rather than just “getting ducks in a row” or having things “fall in line”, we had
“all the ducks are falling in line”
Other are amusing but confusing, and almost seem as if they mean something, at least until you actually think about them. Example:
“Happier than a clam in pigsh*t”
The pinnacle of our mixed idiom game, though, were those hard to find combinations whose meanings were a novel blend of the original idioms. Most of these tended to mockingly riff on various elements of commonly accepted corporate-speak.
“I’m just putting them on the table as I see them”
for example, takes the casual (if sometimes cowardly) innocence of the defensive verbal communication standby “I’m just calling them as I see them” with the trite business-ese of “putting something on the table” to create an all-new description of an impetuous laziness thrust upon others.
Better still, in my opinion, is the lighthearted cynical foreshadowing of:
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”
But my favorite, by far, is a sadly apt commentary on organizational politics gone awry:
Apologies for the few weeks with no index page … I obviously typo’d something on the command line a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to G for pointing it out.
I’ve been listenening to Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar all week. It’s great: fresh (ok, if you follow new music with lower latency than do I, as it’s a year old), somewhat novel, and both lyrically and musically interesting for multiple listenings.One song in particular has sunk its aural fangs into my brain. Scenic World is haunting in its brevity, like there’s nothing more to say on the topic than is said in these two stanzas (which constitute all of the lyrics of the song – no need to repeat anything here):
the lights go on
the lights go off
when things don’t feel right
i lie down like a tired dog
licking his wounds in the shade
when i feel alive
i try to imagine a careless life
a scenic world where the sunsets are all
breathtaking
I think Amy is probably going crazy listening to it, though she’s doing a good job hiding that. Ben, on the other hand, loves it — while he and I were in the car together earlier in the week he offered (unprovoked): “this is a very beautiful song, daddy”.
My name is Josh Heling. I work in technology, and blog here with incredible inconsistency about miscellaneous items of interest to me.
This is not me, but these are.
