today i gave my personal blog some tender loving care. it now sports a random image from my phonepic folder, a drop-down for archives (since i have now 28 months’ worth of archives), cleaner formatting/stylesheet, and i fixed a layout bug in the banner.

the phone pics are great. forever consistent in size, and small bits of moments from my own life.

this morning my awesome ipod has been playing-and-replaying one of my favourite freezepop songs, tracey gold.

i want to touch your permed hair
tell “boner” life just ain’t fair.
stare at you without a care
now u are mine, now I am yours

love receiver – where did u go?
my dream weaver – nobody knows
lust deceiver – one that i chose
carol seaver – take off your clothes

tracey gold – where have you gone girl?
tracey gold – where in the world?
tracey gold – what have u done girl?
tracey gold – my heart’s in a whirl over u -
my brain’s in a swirl over u
- my hair’s in a twirl over u…

lately i’ve gotten a new deluge of blogspam. the spam machine has found old entries on my blog that had trackback enabled. they exploit this feature of MT and post spams to blogs. luckily, my blog is database-backed and i was able to change 106 blog entries with a single command.

mysql> update mt_entry set entry_allow_pings=0 where entry_allow_pings=1;
Query OK, 106 rows affected (0.04 sec)
Rows matched: 106 Changed: 106 Warnings: 0

yay!

today i finally got around to setting up my etrade account and managing my stock options. turns out the stock was worth more than twice my strike price, half my options are vested, and now is a good time to execute and sell. so i did it. this is my first time ever doing things like this. with some guidance from the money-wise don, it was easy. etrade executed the sale in three seconds.

tonight don came over for dinner, with his mom and aunt. i made a good bread dip (EVOO, balsamic, kosher salt, ground black pepper, LOTS of fresh minced garlic, plenty of oregano) and wine (the good chianti the woman and k+l had me try). i worked on twice-fried french fries (salt, fresh rosemary), while ryan worked on the steaks (red cayenne, paprika, sea salt, pepper). it was a good food, and way too many embarassing stories of don’s childhood. mom, if you’re reading this — you’re never meeting this woman! you two would get stuck in competitive mother-son stories for days, and don and i would have to leave from embarassment!

last night i had the excellent experience of attending a beer tasting dinner. the brews were all belgian, picked by a brewer. the brews were matched with food by the talented jacob, of bistro la moone fame. all the beers were incredible and exceeded my expectations. the highlights (if i could pick any) of the dinner were the beer-battered prawn with edamame-crab risotto (the prawn was so fresh, it was very tender.. honestly the best i’ve ever tasted) and the kriek boon belgian lambic ale (a cherry infused lambic.. a dessert beer!).. it was served with a tangerine glazed cream puff with hand made cherry ale truffles.

a fabulous five course meal, paired with five distinctive belgian ales (including commentary on each from a well spoken brewer). you can’t have it any better on a monday night!