My Recommendation for the Best Massachusetts Home Inspector

Our recent home buying experience was one filled with lots of research, paperwork, planning, and conversing. At times it seemed overwhelming, and my wife did a great job of managing things, especially during times that wore me down. However, among all my interactions with attorneys, real estate agents, insurance agents and such, my experience with the home inspector was the best. If you're in the market to purchase a house in Massachusetts, I highly recommend Paul Rogoshewski of Harmony Home Inspection.

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  Tales told by Simon Brooks

Simon Brooks, a former coworker of mine at Allaire and Macromedia, has become an innovative storyteller and launched the business DiamondScree. Simon's a very nice guy with a great imagination. Check out his website:

Simon began spinning yarns and telling tales in 1991 when he would perform for school groups and families at Youth Hostels in the United Kingdom before moving to the States. In 2003 Simon became a Children's Librarian and freelance storyteller. He has performed for libraries, schools, and private functions and festivals telling to young children and adults. Combining his passion for children's literature and folklore, Simon creates a fun program for all ages. His repertoire comes mainly from European folk and faery tales, but Simon also includes stories from South America, Africa, China and Japan amongst other countries and cultures. All these stories are given life and animation by unique voices, as they are acted out in front of a captivated audience.

Simon Brooks performs tales with energy and wit. Telling folktales, myths and legends from all over the world, he brings characters like Ananzi the Spider, the trickster Raven, Wayland Smith, Merlin and Dionysus vividly to life. From the world of stories Simon captivates his audience with unique voices to animate characters and with expressive body language, he truly brings the stories to life.

Simon made his first CD over the winter of 2005/6 which was released to great applause in June 2006. "Second-hand Tales" To find a copy of his CD, please visit cdbaby.com Here you will be able to hear his storytelling at his finest.

Visit DiamondScree today!

  The Butterfly Place in Westford, MA - A Photo Gallery

www.flickr.com

The Butterfly Place [map]
The Butterfly Place is an indoor living environment which has been carefully designed for the propagation and development of some of nature’s most colorful living creations. This wonderful man-made habitat is contained within a 3,100 sq. ft. glass atrium building towering to a height of over 27 ft. at its peak. Within this atrium’s living butterfly environment can be found a variety of colorful plants and shrubs, each of which has been selected as a source of nectar for the butterflies.

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  Traditional Maryland Crab Soup

While waiting at BWI airport this past Friday evening, I stumbled into an old favorite, Bill Bateman's Restaurant, to find this delicious bowl of soup on the menu. I could not resist. Just look at the chunks of backfin in there!

I grew up in Maryland and lived there until I moved to Boston twelve years ago. There's so much about that great state that I miss, and I think Maryland crabs in any form top the list. Crab soup, crab cakes, fried softcrabs, ... I can't get enough! I even worked on a real commercial crab boat in the lower Chesapeake Bay.

Bill Batemans was an old hangout on Cub Hill Rd in Carney, but I've heard he's had a lot of success and expanded with a chain of restaurants. His crab soup was so good, I topped it off with a crabcake sandwich, but it looked so good I forgot to take a picture :) Darn it, I'll just have to return for another .

The traditional spice for Maryland crabs is Old Bay, from McCormick, so of all the recipes I've found for crab soup, I'll recommend theirs: OLD BAY Maryland Crab Soup. Although, they suggest that other types of crabs might be healthier, I assure you they do not taste nearly as good as the Maryland Blue Crab.

  Your rights to take photographs in public places

Wired Magazine published a short article regarding privacy concerns and your rights as an amateur photographer, titled Stalker or Shutterbug. Its a helpful article that explains some tricky situations, but generally speaking within the United States you are pretty much free to take a picture of any place that is viewable from a public space, whether the subject be a person, a home, a building, an event, or any other public scene.

Earlier this year I was angrily confronted for having posted a picture of a beach house in North Carolina. Although the location was anonymous in the sense that there was no address, signs, or other identifier in the image, some clever people must have figured out the exact location based on the context of the other images in the photo gallery.

Moreover, those clever individuals must have gone one step further and researched the home's address and owner contact information since the complaint I received was from the home owner demanding (IN CAPS) that I immediately take down the photo within 48 hours or he'll sick his lawyers on me. You see, random people were apparently calling him to rent the beach house after seeing my anonymous photo. It was then that I decided to investigate what my rights were and all the articles I found tracked back to Bert Krages, an Attorney At Law specializing in photography cases.

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  Teye and Belén, Flamenco at Club Passim

Last weekend my wife and I spent a fantastic evening watching and listening to Teye, a dutch flamenco guitarist, and his Spanish wife Belén, a dancer from Sevilla. Club Passim sits unnoticed in a Harvard Square alley, half sunken but with many windows to let in the light on the lower level. The atmosphere was small and friendly as though one were in a living room, and Teye was eager to chat. Belén began by accompanying the guitar while seated on a percussion box - a cajón - where she slapped out the staccato rhythms of Flamenco. From there she leaped into brilliant dance, strutting, twirling, and tapping her way into what seemed like a frenzy. Teye's guitar playing was equally hypnotic while his hands were all a blur as he thrashed the strings. If you have an opportunity to see them perform, you must.

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  Concord Community Swim Center Opens

From the Concord Journal:

"The crowd in attendance for the opening of The Beede Center gave some sense of the people involved and interested over the decade-long process to bring a swim and fitness center to Concord.

About 400 residents turned out for the event, which was held on a sunny April 2 afternoon at the newly christened pool and fitness center at 498 Walden St. ...

Inside, the modern facility features cardiovascular workout stations, each equipped with its own monitor television, a weight area, and, as the name suggests, pools and pools and pools. There is one Olympic-sized lap pool, a heated therapeutic pool, a shallow children’s pool including sprays and fountains, and a diving well - all aquatic needs are now met locally, and without sharing pond life or unguarded areas at local swimming holes."

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  Sonic RecordNow! BSOD, drvnddm.sys, Direct Access Component problems

My Windows XP SP2 laptop has been crashing during shutdowns while referencing drvnddm.sys in the blue screen memory dump. It was also producing a pop-up system error shortly after logging in stating

Direct Access Component has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

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  Galleon Home Media Server for Tivo

A coworker recently recommended a free program to enhance Tivo. This weekend I installed it and now I'm hooked. I don't have to get up from the couch to follow what's going on in the blogosphere, weather, movie listings, and local events. For someone that spends 40+ hours a week sitting down already, is this really such a good thing? ;)

Get a lot more from Tivo with the free program Galleon for Tivo. You can now push recordings from your Tivo to your PC rather than having to log on to the PC and then pull them over. Galleon also has very useful features such as viewing your RSS feeds from your TV, plus local movie theater listings, local social events, local weather, as well as listening to your iPods music collection and watching your JPG photos on your TV. ...And you can watch movies on your TV over the network from the program library on your computer.

Here are some pictures of my TV menus when using Galleon...

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  Apples, Softies, and Trains

Three Apple engineers and three Microsoft employees are traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three Microsoft employees each buy tickets and watch as the three Apple engineers buy only a single ticket. "How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" asks a Microsoft employee.

"Watch and you'll see," answers the Apple engineer. They all board the train. The Microsoft employees take their respective seats but all three Apple engineers cram into a restroom and close the door behind them. Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the restroom door and says, "Ticket, please." The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on.

The Microsoft employees saw this and agreed it was quite a clever idea. So after the conference, the Microsoft employees decide to copy the Apple engineers on the return trip and save some money (being clever with money, and all that). When they get to the station, they buy a single ticket for the return trip.

To their astonishment, the Apple engineers don't buy a ticket at all. "How are you going to travel without a ticket" says one perplexed Microsoft employee. "Watch and you'll see," answers an Apple engineer. When they board the train the three Microsoft employees cram into a restroom and the three Apple engineers cram into another one nearby.

The train departs. Shortly afterward, one of the Apple engineers leaves his restroom and walks over to the restroom where the Microsoft employees are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, "Ticket, please..."

  Coulton on Creative Commons

Folksinger Jonathan Coulton extolls the altruistic virtues of Creative Commons licensing and propagates the art of giving one step further by composing a song inspired by and set to a series of random Flickr photos that are themselves licensed for non-commercial sharing. This creative music video is available in quicktime format, and begins with a recent photo of mine taken of Concord Center after a heavy snow.

Thing a Week 14 - Flickr
By Jonathan Coulton
See his blog link for the 17 MB .mov file

  Concord Community Swim and Health Center To Open Soon

The Concord Carlisle Community Swim and Health Center is nearing completion. The state of the art facility continues to accept charter memberships until the middle of February '06.

UPDATE: The opening date has been pushed out to April 18, 2006
Read about the Grand Opening of the Beede Center.

The facility will have the following features:

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  Developer's API Enhancement Request for Stop & Shop Grocery Store

To the Stop&Shop Website Architect or Website Project Manager:

I would like to access my shopping history. I know that Stop&Shop maintains my history via my Stop&Shop card number in order to tabulate accumulated savings, etc...; however, I would like to be able to review my purchase history to look for trends regarding the products I buy, such as dollars spent per unit time, dollars spent per product category, frequently purchased products, favorite products, and so on.

While it would be fantastic if Stop&Shop provided a web portal where I could analyze my shopping history, I realize that is a very tall order. A short term solution that would benefit many technologically adapted customers would be availablility of shopping history in an XML format, requiring authentication/login to maintain privacy. A nice idea would be to be able to login to the website and have a simple rss feed referencing each monetary transaction (total purchase) where the contents of a transaction item would contain transaction details including individual products and quantities as well as price, vendor/SKU, and total cost, method of payment, etc... Not only would this help costomers analyze shopping history, but they would be able to build wish lists or favorite product lists for future shopping excursions.

Stop&Shop could also publish a Developer's API describing how to access the data in different formats so that web application developers could build their own portals to help Stop&Shop customers better understand their shopping habits and plan for their next shopping requirements.

  Back in the saddle again

This week I've returned to the office from Macromedia's generous sabbatical program. For the last 45 days I've occupied myself with a wide range of activities, and surprisingly almost none of which had anything to do with ColdFusion. Now that's a vacation!

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  Geocities Guestbook - Recovered

Before this blog on TalkingTree.com, and before TalkingTree.com at all, I began a homepage with Geocities back in 1994, my first experience with homepage wizards or any kind of content management. Soon after getting hooked on HTML, I began building a laberynth of photo galleries and personal information, and after a couple of years I had managed to hack together some form of a Guestbook form on my own. Well, I know that Guestbooks are so 90's, but nevertheless I've rescued my Geocities Guestbook off Archive.org and am republishing it here...

Name: Jeremy Reines
Date: April 22, 2001

Hi Stephen: Loved your web. Great photos, I am sure you are going to love my site as well. I have just launched the MOST AMAZING virtual tour of Madrid at www.multimadrid.com and I would love for you to place my mini Java refresh live Plaza Mayor image on your website, if you place it on your links page I will include your URL in on my Madrid Webs dropdown menu, you can see more about htis program I have created at http://www.multimadrid.com/mm_info/madrid_webs.htm

Thanks for your time and I hope to hear from you soon,

Jeremy Reines...
www.multimadrid.com

Name: ylse sanchez
Date: April 19, 2001

Hi Steve,

Hace mucho que no se nada de ti, aunque no nos conocimos personalmente, se que eres un buen chico y espero estemos en contacto. Como sabes, estoy en Alemania con mi esposo y ahora espero un bb, estoy feliz. Recibe muchos carinos y escribeme pronto.

Tu amiga, Ylse

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