Hydro Flask? Don't fall for the hype and the touchy-feely charitocapitalismo. Stainless steel, vacuum insulated hydration bottles have been around for years and they're great. I use both of these models on a daily basis. The lid design is leak-proof and quick and easy to drink out of. The throat of these models are large enough to accommodate all standard size ice cubes and they'll keep your water cool all day long.

24 oz. Vacuum Insulated Stainless Steel Hydration Bottle

18 oz. Vacuum Insulated Stainless Steel Hydration Bottle

Make mine a Ballantine's

 

I will never claim to be anything but highly suggestible. Recently, I went on a Mad Men binge, imbibing the entire existing corpus via Netflix. At one point, Roger Sterling refers to a bottle of Canadian Club as "the good stuff" which  got me to thinking about the relative merits of whiskeys.

For some time, I've been heartily tired of the whiskeys that must be reverently anointed with no more than a drop or two of water and then savored with furrowed brow and serious mien.

I wanted a whiskey that didn't cost the earth that just tasted nice. Something that I could splash over a couple of rocks into my father's old thick bottomed Rosenthal crystal tumblers. 

I started out by tasting the Canadian Club, but there was a pervasive bitterness to it that just didn't please me. I tried a great number of other blended whiskeys on the rocks, but for some time I couldn't find one that was just right.

Finally I hit upon Ballantine's Finest (ironically the lowest priced whiskey in their lineup). Ballantine's is a venerable brand of blended Scotch whiskey that tastes to me exactly like a whiskey should taste. Faintly sweet, smooth, a hint of bitterness and very little in the way of smoke, peat or iodine (why is it that some people crave those flavors in whiskeys? I think it's just a masomachismo thing). $28.50 for 1.75 liters at my local hoocheria.

Pizza Giotto

Here at the Sanctum, the Tiny Leader and the Darling Leader both frequently demand to be fed that ambrosia universally beloved by tiny cult leaders, pizza. Whenever the Chief Acolyte informs me that the supplies are low, I spring (ok, actually I need about 30 minutes to warm up both myself and the oven so maybe it's more like lurch) into action, and produce crisp, thin, slabs of pizza in about 25 minutes. All of this is accomplished through the good offices of my trusty sous-chef, Trader Giotto. The attached video shows the entire process compressed into about 4 minutes. A note on the oven time. I usually just use my nose. When it starts smelling like pizza, I look at it. If it basically looks done except the edges are a little pale, I know it's time to spin it. About a minute or two after that, the edges should be lightly golden and the pizza is done. Exact times in my oven @475 are 2.5 minutes, then turn the pizza and then bake for 2 minutes more.

Run Away to the Circus

Trust the Gray Lady to cast her haughty gimlet eye down upon the gaudy big top and to find it wanting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/theater/reviews/26coney.html

This is what I have to say about Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey's Coney Island Illuscination. Just go. And bring your kids. Sure, it's nothing that most adults haven't already seen. I suppose if your kids are especially jaded and have already seen Cirque du Soleil and Big Apple Circus and Momix and attended Robert Wilson's L'Orfeo at La Scala fer chrissakes, then it might all be a little passé for them. If your kids are like mine and consider Yo Gabba Gabba and the Backyardigans to be excellent entertainment, this'll blow their minds. The Tiny Leader (<4) and the Darling Leader (<2) were both rapt.

This is like a circus that might have rolled into your mythical little American town but better. It's a one-ring big-top with the worst seat in the house being no more than 50 feet away from the ring. You get jugglers standing on horses, spinning hair-hanging maidens, a posing trio of elephants with ladies in spangly costumes, blind-folded martial artists jumping through flaming spinning blades, a man in a cage with a whole pride of lions, clowns, acrobats, aerialists, dancers, tight rope acts, and ladies disappearing, reappearing, changing costumes in a flash, turning into a lioness, etc.

If you go an hour before showtime, your kids can hang out in the ring itself. The ringmaster clown leads them in activities like dancing, jumping rope, hula-hooping, and there's an up-close and personal cameo from (presumably) the most even-tempered of the three elephants.

The cheapest tickets are $10 and they're fine. $20 tickets are excellent. Under 2s are free and any number of businesses offer $5 off coupons for kid tickets (a 20 ride ticket from Deno's Wonder Wheel is the example that I know of). You can also check the coneyisland.com website to see if they have a promotional offer going.

Two things to be aware of, as follows. The air-conditioning can be a little aggressive in spots, so bring sweaters and make sure that the whole gang takes a bathroom stop before going to the show, it's port-a-potties and not nearly enough of them. Bonus: You are in Coney Island: Luna Park, Deno's Wonder Wheel, The Cyclone, The boardwalk, the beach and Nathan's. Enjoy!

http://www.ticketmaster.com/Ringling-Bros-and-Barnum-Bailey-The-Coney-Island-Illuscination-tickets/artist/1439161

Joining a machine to an Active Directory Domain across a Hamachi 2 VPN

OK. This is extremely geeky. I put this here just so others who might want to try this can find it. It is possible to join a machine to an Active Directory Domain across a Hamachi 2 VPN. A little bit of trickery is required, but it's actually pretty low-impact. The first step is to make sure that the machine you'd like to join to the domain is a member of the same Hamachi network as the domain controller and that it can see the DC. Ping std.hamachi.logmein.com to get the IP address of the Hamachi intermediation server (I get 64.94.18.75) . On the machine that is joining the domain, set the Local Connection DNS setting to the Hamachi IP address of your domain controller. Now go into the Hamachi 2 client on the machine being joined to the domain. Go to Preferences, Settings, Advanced settings, Server connections, Server address and hardcode the IP address of the Hamachi intermediation server there. Hamachi should then be able to resolve and reconnect to the network. At this point, you can go ahead and join the machine to the domain. The thing to keep in mind is if you ever lose the Hamachi network connection between these machines, check to see if the IP address of std.hamachi.logmein.com has changed and change that setting in Hamachi appropriately.

Lenovo ThinkServer TS200v how doth thou suck *ss?

Ceaselessly and with great fervor. Let me count the ways:

1) Server 2003 installation crashes.
2) No 2003 Server drivers are available for download.
3) ThinkServer "EasyStartup" program hangs.
4) Driver installations need .Net framework 3.5 installed to run cleanly, meaning you have to add the Application Server role BEFORE installing drivers.
5) Hypervisor setting turned off in BIOS
6) When the Hypervisor setting is turned on, graphics go squirrely and machine freezes
7) If you boot into Safe Mode with Hypervisor setting turned on graphics are OK but machine blue screens upon password entry
8) BIOS flasher fails mid-flash.

I finally got the Hypervisor to successfully start up the virtual machine by turning off the Hypervisor in BIOS, booting, removing the display drivers (built-in, on-board adapter), booting, turning on the Hypervisor in BIOS, full power off, and then rebooting.

WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP.

Help getting dressed

Sure, I can whip up a different vinaigrette every day of the week. Blue Cheese, Caesar and Ranch all know the touch of my whisk. I've even been known to dress green salads with Nuoc Cham or various Asian sesame oil & rice vinegar concoctions. Some days though, I just need a little help. I'm doing a bunch of other things and I just want my dressing to come out of a bottle. This is when I reach for the FreshDirect Blue Cheese Dressing. This stuff is easily as good as anything you'd make yourself without the hassle of keeping supplies of sour cream, buttermilk and blue cheese on hand. Honorable Mention goes to FreshDirect Roasted Garlic Caesar Dressing which is good but needs a little extra oomph, some mashed up anchovies or a little drizzle of nuoc mam a.k.a. fish sauce (known to the Caesars themselves as garum). I would avoid the FreshDirect Raspberry Nectar Vinaigrette w/ Omega-3. I find it to be sweet, sour and insipid.

The Gleat Galric Clisis

Is it just me, or has it become harder and harder to get decent garlic? Everywhere you go these days, its those white net tubes of garlic sent over from China, in slow-moving uninsulated cargo containers. Even if you don't see the tubes, chances are very good that the anonymous loose garlic you find in your local supermarket comes from our favorite 1.3 billion producers of low-cost products. The stuff has a nasty off aroma and if you actually eat it in little chunks as I am wont to do, you get this weird acidic aftertaste. It's just bad.

When my timing is just right, I get great local garlic at the various Farmers Markets. Very occasionally, a single head of garlic turns up in my CSA box, but that just doesn't even begin to cover my everyday garlic needs. Fortunately I have found two reliable sources of non-Chinese garlic. The regular (non-organic) garlic from FreshDirect comes from Mexico. (The "organic" stuff comes from Argentina, but I just don't know what that word means outside of the US. Even in the US it's starting to mean "Factory produced, ultra-pasteurized and shipped to you from far away.) The other place that has garlic with identifiable provenance is Trader Joe's, their organic garlic is clearly marked as a product of California.

Uploading your contacts into Gmail or GApps and synchronizing with the iPhone

I recently spent a great deal of time uploading all my contacts into Gmail Contacts and then trying to get those contacts to sync cleanly with my iPhone's contacts using Google Sync . To my chagrin I learned that although both these mechanisms work very well, there are some significant stumbling blocks when using them together. The first important thing to note is that not all of the fields that are in Dave's terrific .csv file will sync to the iPhone. Here is a shot of all the fields loaded with test data uploaded to Gmail. Pretty, right? Not shown because it didn't fit in the screenshot is the "Notes" field at the bottom but that worked fine. The fields "Section 1 - Other" and "Section 2 - Other" Show up as "Other" and "Home" respectively, toward the bottom of the contact; a little odd but dealable.

When you go ahead and set up the Sync with the iPhone, that's when you run into problems. None of the Section 1 Phone number fields will sync with the iPhone. Section 2 fields: "Home," "Home Fax," "Mobile," and "Pager" sync up just fine. The fields "Section 2 - Company," "Section 2 - Title" and "Section 2 - Other" will also fail to sync.

After a GREAT DEAL of trial and error, I have come up with one significant improvement. If you replace the Section 1 - Description with "Work" (don't use the quotes) you will get two more fields on your iPhone; "Section 1 - Phone" and "Section 1 - Fax" will sync to the iPhone as "Work" and"Work Fax" respectively. Those Section Descriptions are REALLY important. They must be on every line of the .csv, spelled correctly and the first letter must be capitalized or they just don't work.

So to recap: Use this .csv file. Change the Section 1 - Description from "Other" to "Work" (again don't use the quotes). Do not use the following fields: "Section 1 - Mobile," "Section 1 - Pager," "Section 1 - Other," "Section 2 - Company," Section 2 - Title," "Section 2 - Other." (Possibly these columns could be removed from the template, but I haven't tested this).

Just as a side note, if you have contact records that contain a "Company Name" but no "Name" field, Gmail will not import those. Copy the contents of the "Company Name" field into the "Name" field and you're good.

Once you've done this though, it really rocks. BUT: don't forget to occasionally use the Gmail export function to backup your contacts to a csv file. Although it feels like you're backed up because it's on your iPhone and on Gmail, the truth is if something is accidentally deleted from Gmail or if something should go terribly, terribly wrong over at the big G, your sync'ed iPhone contacts can disappear in a twinkling of an eye.

If anyone wants to take this info and make it into a super user-friendly tutorial, they should feel entirely free, I just don't have the time just now :)

A real NY slice of pizza

What is the New York slice? For me, it's the pizza of my childhood during the 70's and 80's. I'm talking about the pizza that was in almost every little pizzeria in town. In those years when you went for a slice, you got a wedge cut off a freshly made, usually still-hot pie produced by a master of the craft. As one pie disappeared, a new one would be made and baked in a regular gas-fired pizza oven.

The pies themselves were generally large and very round, thin but chewy (not crisp) with smallish crusts. Abbondanza was the guiding principle behind the application of the sauce and cheese. A thick layer of hot, gooey, cheese covered a tangy, generous ladling of tomato sauce.

Unfortunately, you don't see really good examples of this kind of pizza much anymore in New York. There are terrific artisanal pies of the "no slices" school of thought but in most regular pizzerias, bready pizzas are made en masse, by seemingly semi-skilled labor, smothered with an assortment of bulky toppings and set out in glass cases to await the mealtime rush.

But like my own version of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, I've discovered that on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, Margherita Pizza is still making pizzas the old-school New York way. I'd walked past this little pizzeria on my way to clients at least a half a dozen times with nary a second glance. I'd never seen the name mentioned in any discussion of New York pizza and from the outside, it appeared completely unremarkable. Yesterday however, when I walked by I happened to look inside and was immediately struck by the complete lack of glass display cases on the counters.

After finishing up at my client, I decided to investigate further. When I arrived, only one slice of a pizza pie and about three slices of sicilian were sitting on the back counter awaiting customers. A whole pie, which looked mostly complete was being checked in the oven and the dough for a third pie was just that moment being tossed into the air by obviously expert hands.

I waited about 3 minutes for the fresh pie to emerge and ordered two slices. The Ivory-bill opened its beak and produced a pair of madeleines for me. The slices were just as I remember them, rocket-hot, and delicious. Margherita has been in business for 41 years. The counter guys told me that the owners who are in their 70s come in each morning at 4:00 AM to make the dough and sauce from scratch. This is pizza that is being made with pride and love.

Margherita Pizza

16304 Jamaica Ave
Jamaica, NY
11432-4912

Phone: (718) 657-5780

About 5 blocks from the Jamaica Center - Parsons/Archer E,J,Z station