Stan’s Obligatory Blog

We took Lucinda to the Natural History Museum today. We went to see the Chocolate exhibit. She didn’t find that all that interesting, but as always, she asked to go the Insect Zoo. She got to meet and pet a number of animals in the Discovery Center, including a Desert Tortise, a Malaysian stick insect, a hissing cockroach, and a giant millipede. She’s not afraid of bugs. Besides this, we took her to see the gem and mineral exhibits and bought her a big iron pyrite crystal in the museum shop. Photos at: http://1134.org/lucinda/photos/index.php?ayear=2003&amonth=4&aday=6&byear=2003&bmonth=4&bday=6&submit=Search

We went to the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park today to see the Chocolate exhibit. The story of chocolate, from the Mayans in the rainforest up to the present. It was quite interesting and amusing.

Tonight we tried another brownie recipe. This was the Deep Dish Brownies from the Hershey cookbook. Lucinda liked this one, too. The flavor and texture are similar to the Ghirardelli brownies we made on Monday. The Hershey recipe can be found at http://www.recipesource.com/desserts/brownies/00/rec0060.html

Did a build-from-source upgrade to 4.8-stable today. Had some minor problems with sendmail, and had to chmod the binary to 6555, instead of the 2555 it had after the install. Also, had to chmod /var/mail to 01777 so that the Netscape movemail would work.

Looking at the web server statistics, March was the first month where we went over 100,000 hits, over 1.3GB, and averaged about 250 visits per day.

Lucinda and Daddy made a batch of brownies tonight. It was her first time to taste the Ghirardelli brownie recipe. She liked it a lot. The recipe calls for nuts or chocolate chips as an option. Lucinda opted for the chocolate chips. The recipe can be found at http://www.recipezaar.com/51404?path

Patched sendmail in response to Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:07.sendmail

Today we dropped Lucinda off at Grandma and Grandpa Tarantino’s house and we went down to Laguna Beach. We met our friends Paul and Patty there, and the first stop was the Laguna Art Museum. The exhibit was “Whiteness, A Wayward Construction”, which consisted of artworks about whiteness as a social and cultural identity. After that, we walked down to the Coast Gallery to see “Classic Rock”, which was an exhibit of photos of rock bands from the ’60s and ’70s. Finally, we stopped in at the Chuck Jones Showroom to see cels and paintings from his cartoons. We rounded out the day with dinner at Ichibiri in Laguna Niguel.

Lucinda visited with Grandma and Grandpa Tarantino today. They went to the park and played around the house.

We saw “Yank Tanks” today. This was a documentary about the old cars in Cuba. The economic embargo after the Cuban revolution left a lot of pre-1960 American cars on the roads in Cuba. The filmmakers interviewed owners about their cars, and also visited the shops where the cars are maintained. Because of the embargo, parts are unavailable, so they have to make everything by hand. There is a whole cottage industry in making everything from windshields and chrome, right down to hand-made brake shoes. The audience was aghast when we got to watch Ito sifting the asbestos by hand for his home-made brake shoes, but we were all glad to see that the filmmakers gave him a mask to wear in the future. Overall, this was a tremendously entertaining film. About the only bad thing we could say is that it was shot in motion-sickness-inducing hand-held video.

Afterward, we had lunch at Zeke’s Smokehouse in Montrose. It was pretty good barbecue, although the service was a bit slow.