Philip Fibiger

In LA I had built a wiki, ordered by dining category, of all the notable places I’d eaten and of information gleaned from chowhound about places I wanted to try. It was rewarding, a lot of people found it through google, but it was a pain to maintain. Wikis are even more fertile ground for link spammers than blog comments. In one instance a page was overwritten so many times that I lost the edit history and a ton of data.

I started the wiki for Orlando, but it’s suffering from the same problems. For now I’m going to try to replicate that functionality through Backpack. It won’t have the anyone-can-edit benefit of a wiki, but the truth is that I think the LA restaurant wiki was edited once by someone who wasn’t me and who wasn’t a spammer.Here’s the backpack-driven list of Orlando Restaurants. I’d love to hear suggestions if you’ve got any.

We’ve been doing a lot of minor renovation around the house, trying to make the place ours. Painting, replacing hardware, new appliances in the kitchen, that sort of thing. Our half bath downstairs was painted a nice color but in all other aspects it wasn’t at all our style. It had this ugly gold hardware on the sink, and the toilet paper holder and towel ring were gold and antiqued iron. The walls had “decorative” fleur-de-lys painted all over it. Emily painted over the decorative paint and I hit ebay for some new bathroom hardware.

The Kohler Fairfax faucet that I bought was really astounding. The old faucet I removed (which likely wasn’t that old, maybe 7-8 years?) hooked up the traditional way. Each handle and the faucet were attached separately with nuts, puttied in place, plumbed to the water supply with lengths of pex. The multi-part drain was epoxied together. Contrast that with the new faucet set:

A single piece drain that has a gasket built in and just screws tight (plumbers putty around the drain is the only place it’s required). Braided stainless supply lines that can fit a variable length run. The real beauty of the installation design is the way the faucet mounts to the sink itself. Instead of having to putty it down and then try to tighten it down from below, it has a rubber gasket and uses a toggle bolt to hold it tight. The toggle is guided up the bolt by a pair of plastic guides, literally all you do is fit the faucet in place (the toggle pops through the centerset hole) and then turn the hidden screw (in the drain plug control) until the toggle moves up flush with the bottom of the sink.

In the end removing the old faucet and cleaning up the old putty mess was the longest part of the process, actually installing the new set was a 10 minute job. A lot of home improvement technologies feel like they really haven’t changed in 50 years, It was a pleasant surprise to find out how easy Kohler had made this task.

Recorded originally for radio broadcast, these excellent quality mp3s of an entire Jonathan Richman show from 1984 in Lyon, France. Accompanied by his then-wife clapping and singing backup vocals, it’s a perfect representation of a Jonathan Richman performance.

How did it take me this long to find MacFusion? Built on top of Google’s MacFuse, a layer that allows developers to build a filesystem over a variety of protocols, MacFusion lets you cleanly and easily mount ftp and more importantly ssh servers as drives in OS X. I’ve been waiting for SFTPDrive to release their in-development mac client for a long time, and here someone’s released something that does exactly what I want, and it’s free. Installation was a breeze and it works exactly as i’d expect.