Chocolate eclair cake

Posted on 2005-11-30 by Jim Vanderveen

We celebrated our extended family’s November birthdays last weekend, and my mom made this brutally delicious “cake” for dessert. It’s pretty easy and doesn’t take much time to prepare, (although it does have to sit in the refrigerator for several hours in the middle, plus a whole day at the end).

Chocolate Eclair Cake

  • 1 lb graham crackers (appx)
  • 3½ c milk
  • 2 small pkg vanilla instant pudding
  • 9 oz ctn Cool Whip

Frosting:

  • 6 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa
  • 5 Tbsp butter, melted
  • 2 tsp honey
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1½ c confectioners sugar
  • 3 Tbsp milk

Butter a 9″ x 13″ pan and layer the bottom with graham crackers (whole, not crushed!)
Combine instant pudding and milk and beat for 2 minutes. Fold in Cool Whip.
Cover graham crackers with half of the pudding mixture. Add another layer of graham crackers and the rest of the pudding mixture. Top with another layer of graham crackers.
Refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
Mix all frosting ingredients and spread on the cake.
Refrigerate for 24 hours.

Enjoy!

Posted in Recipes, Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

“Wizards of Winter” clip

Posted on 2005-11-29 by Jim Vanderveen

“Humor” isn’t really the correct tag for this post: it’s more along the lines of a “diversion” than outright funny…

If you’ve got Windows Media Player and a fat pipe, I received an amazing WMV media clip (about 4.8 MiB) from Becky, a.k.a. “The Punk.” These people had way too much time on their hands!

Sorry for not providing an open format — If somebody has a “translation” of this clip, please leave a comment with a link!

Update: According to snopes.com, this is an actual video (vs computer-generated or stop-motion animation) from Christmas 2004 done by a guy named Carson Williams of Mason, Ohio using Light-o-Rama controllers. Some of the links in the snopes.com article are broken. In particular, the instructions link times out when attempting to contact the server. 🙁

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Cooking

Posted on 2005-11-29 by Jim Vanderveen

Another hobby for which I already have several posts is cooking. Well, sort of… I can’t really think how I would post about cooking per se, but I have posted some recipes here, and they sometimes carry cooking tips, notes, etc. I guess that’s close enough to be included as my second hobby.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Boardgaming

Posted on 2005-11-28 by Jim Vanderveen

One of my numerous hobbies is boardgaming: getting together with family, friends, or total strangers to push bits of plastic around on a cardboard playing surface, and incidentally socializing with the aforementioned people.

Sacramento is blessed with a large number of boardgamers, but many of these folks don’t realize how many new people they could be meeting and playing against. One way to find potential players is to hang around in local game stores, such as Viking Hobby. An even better idea is to join the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup — These dedicated gamers get together at least once a week to socialize and play various games. (Disclosure: I’m the so-called Organizer of this group.) We’re currently meeting every Tuesday night at the Fox & Goose Public House, and we also arrange several other public and private events every month. Check our upcoming events for details.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

BoardGameGeek wishlist

Posted on 2005-11-28 by Jim Vanderveen

BoardGameGeek logo
One of the many cool things about the BoardGameGeek website is the ability to research games prior to purchase. Whenever I find a game I’m thinking about buying, I add it to my BGG wishlist and set the priority field to “I’m thinking about it.” You can then view and compare these by going to your BGG “Collection” and selecting “Owned: No” for your criteria. I usually sort the games under consideration by BGG rating and work my way down the list. Since I’ve normally got more games on the list than I have money to purchase them (or space to store them!), I’m initially looking for reasons to eliminate a game from my wishlist — if I find a reason to drop the game, I just uncheck the “Add to Wishlist” setting.

Once I winnow the list down, I start making entries in the Comments box. The first thing I put in is the price, then any reasons I might be particularly interested (or not) in this game. I also make judicious use of the “GeekBuddy Analysis” feature. (In fact, some day soon I’ll write an entry devoted entirely to GeekBuddy features.) After commenting on my wishlist games, I set/adjust the priority (from “Gotta have it!” down to “Thinking about it.”) These settings don’t appear in the unowned games list, but they are a sortable column on your BGG wishlist — This is the link I give to family and friends when they ask what I want for Christmas.

The only shortcoming of the wishlist screen is that the Comments field isn’t shown. I’d like to see both Wishlist Priority and Comments presented on a combined screen. Maybe a note to Aldie is in order…

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

MyNetflix20 (beta) how-to

Posted on 2005-11-26 by Jim Vanderveen

A few days ago my family signed up for Netflix. I had some spare time to play over the Thanksgiving weekend, so I installed and set up MyNetflix2 on my blog. Here’s how I did it. These instructions cover installation of MyNetflix2.0 beta on my web server (running FreeBSD 4.8). YMMV

  1. Download and uncompress the plug-in:
    cd my_wordpress_dir/wp-content/plugins
    fetch http://amphichon.com/wp-content/media/mynetflix20b.tar.gz
    tar -xzf mynetflix20b.tar.gz
  2. The source file needs to be customized before it can be used. (I guess this isn’t technically a “plug-in” because of this.) First change needed is adding your personal Netflix RSS feed URL’s. To find these, login to your Netflix account and follow the link labeld “RSS” at the bottom of the Netflix page. Below the “Personalized Feeds” heading, you’ll find the RSS URL’s. Copy and paste them into MyNetflix source code.
  3. You may also need to modify other settings, particularly if you don’t have the “3-at-a-time” plan.
  4. Activate the plugin from the admin / Plugins page.
  5. Add some code to your WordPress theme (typically on a sidebar) to display however much of your queue, current DVD’s, and/or recent rentals that your wish. I’m using the code below to display the DVD’s we’re currently watching:

        <?php if (function_exists('mynetflix')) { ?>
        <h4><?php _e('Recent NetFlix Activity'); ?></h4>
        <?php mynetflix('out'); ?>
    <?php } ?>

  6. I’ll probably add some code to display recently returned DVD’s in the future. (We haven’t returned any discs yet, so this breaks the MyNetflix code right now.)

That’s all there is to it. I’m going to see if I can hack up an Options page for this code to make it a true plugin. This would handle the RSS ID string(s) and the $plan settings, and possibly the image layout options. If/when I finish that, I’ll send the changes to herichon for inclusion in the next release.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Arden Park website

Posted on 2005-11-25 by Jim Vanderveen

About six months ago, we moved into the Arden Park neighborhood of Sacramento. I had heard that there was a web site for the neighborhood, but when I googled “Arden Park” most of the results were outside of California. It turns out that it was hiding in plain sight!

ArdenPark.org is a community bulletin board running phpBB software. There hasn’t been much traffic recently, probably because people weren’t aware of it. Hopefully this post will help boost the page rank of the site and/or direct interested viewers to it.

While I was searching for Arden Park’s community web site, I came across several related sites:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted on 2005-11-24 by Jim Vanderveen

Today (fourth Thursday of November) is Thanksgiving in the US. This marks the beginning of the holiday season, which lasts until New Year’s Day.

Thanksgiving is the holiday that I look forward to all year, because there’s no gift exchange so it seems less commercial than other holidays. And then there’s the food… I love to cook, and this is a great excuse to pull out all the stops in the kitchen! I don’t have time to post any recipes right now, but I may type one or two in later. Our family’s Thanksgiving feast customarily includes:

  • Pre-feast appetizers (deviled eggs, olives, sweet pickles, celery with peanut butter, celery with pimento cheese, veggie dippers, spinach dip, candied walnuts)
  • Turkey
  • Stuffing
  • Mashed potatoes
  • Gravy
  • Poppy seed rolls
  • Cranberries (homemade, of course!)
  • “Awesome strawberry stuff”
  • Candied yams
  • Pumpkin pie
  • Butternut squash pie
  • Mincemeat pie
  • Apple pie
  • Libations — wine, sparkling apple and/or pear cider

My household normally hosts Thanksgiving for our extended family, but this year we don’t have enough room in our “new” house so we’re gathering at my sister’s in-law’s house. We should be finished with our remodeling project before next Thanksgiving, so hopefully next year we’ll resume our tradition of kicking off the holiday season at our home!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Discriminatory CC&R’s

Posted on 2005-11-24 by Jim Vanderveen

It’s been a while since I had something good to say about a Republican official, but California State Assemblyman Roger Niello earned a few points by introducing Assembly Bill 394 during the 2005-2006 session. According to a recent article in the Sacramento Bee, this law will make it easier for homeowners to strike discriminatory language from their CC&R‘s.

Assemblyman Niello’s interest was caught by a January 2005 article in the Sacramento Bee. (I can’t find the original article on the Bee’s website, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reprinted the Bee article and still has it available online.)

(From the Bee article:)
Gregg Fishman and his wife moved into Sacramento’s upscale Arden Park neighborhood in 2001, enchanted by the shady Modesto ash, lush parks, large lots and friendly atmosphere.
They didn’t realize that, along with their 1950s-era California ranch-style home, they were buying a piece of America’s racist past.
Tucked into their property records, in tiny type, is the “Racial Occupancy” clause:
“No persons of any race other than White Caucasian race shall use or occupy any building or any lot except . . . by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant . . .”

AB 394 was passed unanimously by both the California Senate and Assembly. It was signed into law by the Governor on 22 September 2005. (The full text of the Bill is available on the Official California Legislative Information website.)

When we moved into Arden Park earlier this year, I had noticed that we have a similar clause in our CC&R’s. There is another clause which allows for the CC&R’s to be revised or amended every decade, so I was planning on getting the discriminatory clause stricken when the CC&R’s were up for renewal in 2010. But the current situation is preferable because, a) it applies to the whole state, not just my neighborhood, and b) it frees up my time and energy for other causes!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

ArdenParkTrees.org “browser-aware” scripting

Posted on 2005-11-23 by Jim Vanderveen

I stumbled across the ArdenParkTrees website while searching for something else, and since it was using PHP I decided to dig into the code to see if they were using WordPress or something similar. Unfortunately, the first thing I discovered was some browser-detection jiggery written by Milonic. Now, I don’t have anything against Milonic, but browser-detection in general is anathema to web publishing — The web should be viewable by any browser!

I may have to whip up a WP demonstration site with their content and see if I can talk the webmasters into switching platforms.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment