Easily the 5th most famous Jupin in the world.

Changing up the site a bit… new css book has inspired me to hack the theme a little. Going for an orange and gray (I never know if it’s grey or gray). One day I’ll build my own css file from scratch. Until then it’s hacking away at themes.

Let me know if you hate it or if something renders odd. Again, it’s SUPPOSED to be orange.

Update: New RSS button and sidebar colors to match.

I’ll be honest- I’ve known about Rosie Thomas for almost two years. Even more honest- I normally don’t like music like this. However, she’s got an extremely wide vocal range for someone her size that lends itself to a very deep and powerful melodies. I’d call her a cross between Indie and Folk. A friend of mine and I even saw her live and it was a truly phenomenal show. Her music is great for when you’re feeling a little introspective, you need to relax, or possibly stuck on the bus/subway while it’s raining (yeah, that happens to everyone I’m sure).

Check out any of her albums on Amazon. My personal favorite is “These Friends of Mine.”

I’m going to start a new series whereby I post my favorite CNN T-Shirts.

Never heard of it? Well, it’s quite possibly the stupidest marketing idea ever produced in shiny-tabled conference room.

However, it’s hilarious. Check the site often to have headlines put on either a black, white, or gray shirt. This episode- “Nasty Pedicure.”

Does the wordpress app work? If so pretty slick.

Tired of the same old blackened grilled chicken that you tend to get at every BBQ? You know- it’s usually sitting next to the warmed-up can of bush’s baked beans and a sad looking pile of mashed potatoes? 

I know I am!

And that’s why I give you the recipe to the best grilled chicken I have ever tasted. It’s easy, flavorful, MOIST (yes, I know that’s hard to believe), and inspires you to be a better person (well, maybe that’s pushing it). 

Grilled Butterflied Chicken

(from page 60 of “I’m Just Here For The Food” by food genius Alton Brown)

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon kosher salt
• 2 teaspoons fresh ground black pepper
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon coriander
• 2 tablespoons garlic powder
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• One whole chicken that’s been halved by the butcher..easy to find at the grocery store
• Canola oil

Directions

Prepare a medium-hot grill using about 3 quarts of natural chunk charcoal (do not buy that match-light crap). Mix the salt and all the herb and spice ingredients together in a bowl. 

Wash the chicken and pat dry. Lay it flat like a butterfly. 

Liberally rub both sides of the chicken with canola oil and then sprinkle the spices liberally to cover the chicken.

Place chicken, skin side down, directly over the coals. Grill until brown and deeply marked, about 12 minutes. Turn the chicken over and allow to cook another 15 minutes or until chicken is just done (use a meat thermometer if you’re paranoid about food poisoning like me). Let the chicken rest for 10 minutes ant then bring to the table whole. (Serves 2-4 people). 

Eat. Then, swear off taking a bottle of some marinade to your chicken before throwing it on the grill FOREVER. 

One thing missing in our lives as renters was the freedom to cook outdoors (without being arrested). That’s all been fixed. Behold- our newest outdoor addition to the family- the Classic Weber Silver Edition Charcoal Grill(e?).

First pictured listed is from Alton Brown’s famous grilled split chicken recipe. Best damn chicken I’ve ever had off a grill. No nasty char marks. No pretending that the chicken wasn’t dry. Nothing. This was PERFECT (recipe to follow later). I know it’s not the little green egg but for $80 it fits the bill nicely at our house.

Ok, I’ve never really been a gamer. Well let me restate that- I was obsessed with Sim City 2000 and Gran Turismo 4. I think my problem is that I have a rather short attention span when it comes to games. I’ll obsess over them for about 2 weeks and then I have little to no desire to play them again. Others, like my college roommate or friend Brad, have the innate ability to play until the game is complete (and I mean, done). I don’t possess that sort of will-power. I will, however, spend hours playing with less exciting pieces of software like Aperture or checking out the latest Web 2.0 fads (Twitter, I’m looking at you). However, that has all changed.

Enter Spore.

I haven’t been looking forward to a computer/console game like this in a LONG time. So much so that I’m even thinking of upgrading the Mac’s graphics card. The scope of this game is unreal… At any rate, I purchased the Spore Creature Creator and I’ve had a blast creating random abominations. Check out my Spore page here. Looking forward to September 7! (well, not as much as I’m looking forward to July 11, but the anxiety is definitely there).

Some of my creations…

Visit Spore.com

Best album I’ve bought (er, downloaded) in a while. Metro Station is a cross between synthesizer, pop, indie, rock, and emo-styles of music. All I can say it’s one of only a handful of albums I can rate at 5 stars for 2008. Buy now from Amazon.

After some serious searching on Craigslist I managed to find a slightly used iMac G4 for the low, low price of $200. Now, that may seem a lot for a computer that is 5 years old but we all know how well Macs hold their value. Buying a 5 year old PC would be ludicrous, sure. However, this thing is more like a piece of home decor. And, it fits perfectly on the desk in our guest room.

Here are the specs (as purchased):

15″ Display
1GHZ PowerPC G4
512mb ram

Upgrades thus far:

Purchased 1GB ram (being delivered Monday). Although Apple only officially supports 1GB total- the unofficial word is that it will hold 1.5GB total (512mb DIMM and 1GB SODIMM- user replaceable).

Airport Extreme card. Let me say the belkin wireless usb adapter I purchased was a nightmare. After 5 different drivers it still was not working. The airport extreme was purchased at Fry’s, installed in 10 minutes, and working in 5. Sometimes it’s best to just stick to Apple products since they play nicely together.

Installed Apple Remote Desktop (client). This will be for maintenance and general spying when guests are in town (kidding! sorta).

Upgrades coming:

New Keyboard/Mouse!. My wife and I cleaned the hell out of the keyboard (each individual key) because it was 7 layers of disgusting. However, I still don’t like it- too bulky for the desk it sits on. Also, not having the Mighty Mouse really stinks due to the lack of a scoll ball.

All in all, it’s a great little computer. Obviously no where near the horsepower of the current intel-based macs but still a great work of design and engineering.

Pictures from Flickr:

Although there are many ways to get a favicon (ie, upload an image and have it spit out an .ico file) I have not come across many articles on actually creating a SIMPLE (that being the keyword) favicon. To be honest, anything can be a favicon. If you had a picture of a horse you could use that. However, I’ll stick to something a little more universal as my site does not traditionally dabble in equestrian topics.

First, a little history.

“A favicon (short for “favorites icon”), also known as a page icon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage.”
~ Wikipedia

Favicon icons are used for bookmarks, appear in tabs making it easier to pick a site out in a sea of tabs, appear in the address bar, and are often snatched for use on other sites in blogrolls.

Using Pages

Let me start by saying that you can use just about any image editing software to do this- such as iWeb, Photoshop, or event MS Paint (shudder). But, you clicked the link that said “How To Create a Favicon Using Pages” so that is what you are about to witness :-). I like Pages because it’s simple to create and add objects, edit text, and it’s fairly easy for a beginner to just create something without having to think of layers, vectoring, etc.

Without further ado…

Launch a blank page in Pages

Start with a nice sheet of white paper (blank document). This is where you will create your image.

Select a shape

As I said earlier- anything can work for a favicon. I want something simple- a circle with my initials “cj” in the center to represent cjupin.com. I could have used a square, rectangle, arrow, or liger but I chose a circle. Get over it.

Size up the shape

You will need to make the shape (again, I’m using a circle. Following?) a little larger. Click the circle and drag one of the corners to scale it vertically and horizontally.

Change the color

Now, unless you want a pea green favicon you are going to need to change the color. Click the inspector icon and then the pea green color and pick out something more suitable to your taste. Since there’s a decent amount of black on my site I am going to use that as the color of the circle.

Type something

If it was not added automatically- click the circle and then select “Text Box.” You will probably want to align it to the center. I’ll type “CJ” as promised. I am original.

Also, using the inspector you will probably want to change the color of the icon (Inspector->text tab). I thought about typing “colour” to make you think I was European- or just eccentric. However, I did not want to fool you. So, I went with my native “color.” At any rate, select the inspector again and change the color to something pleasing. I am using white for the text since the background is black.

What the font

Yes, I am witty (not). Notice now that your text is too tiny to fill the circle. You will want to resize your text either using the inspector, the text size drop-down presets, or the font panel. 96 is a tad small so I went with 100. Also, I’m a fan of Helvetica so I went with that. To be honest, it’s going to be hard to discern the font when it’s that small in the browser but it’s more of an anal-retentive thing.

Moving on.

I also changed the inset margin to 85 to help bring the text down into the circle.

Grab Time

Now, using your favorite (or built-in) screen-capturing tool you will need to make a copy of the image. Now, if you were using photoshop you could export ONLY the image and would be super-perfect. However, you want simple, right? So just copy it! Yes, there will be a little white around the edges of your image. However, this will not really be a problem since your address bar is white- remember? Get over it, really.

Now, you can either use Leopard’s built-in “Grab” functionality (which works great) but I’ll use Skitch (my personal favorite) since that is what I am using to make this tutorial.

Select the image and try to eliminate the white space around it. When you’re done save it to the desktop as a .png, .bmp, or .jpg file. Personally, I have only used .png but I know the other two will work.

Convert image to favicon

Almost done! The hard work is over and now it’s time for some automagical processes to kick in. I use a site that can automatically convert the image into an .ico file. Using the site I have listed (or a personal favorite of your own) upload your image and select “generate favicon ico.”

File selected:

After generating- select download. Notice you can preview your favicon now. Also, you can download the animated one if you’re a tool and still using dial-up via AOL. Sorry, that was mean. Maybe you just like stuff that moves and grabs your attention. What, are you creating a community website for your great-aunt’s assisted living home? Think that would get everyone’s attention? Sad. Very sad.

The above site downloads your image as a zip file. Uncompress it (using either the built-in tool for Leopard/Windows) or some other application like “stuff it.”

Pull this icon onto your desktop for easy access. Make sure your icon is labled “favicon.ico”

FTP your icon

I really, really, hope you have heard of FTP. I mean, if you are creating a site you should know about FTP. Otherwise, how have you been maintaining it? Well, I guess you could be on a blogger account..oh well. At any rate, I won’t go into the specifics on how to use FTP but some good ones for OSX include Transmit, Fetch, or Cyberduck (the latter being free). As a side note- did you notice how all three of those sites have custom favicons? I bet you didn’t. Back to FTP…I use Transmit, personally.

All you need to do is drop the new icon into your root directory and upload. For me, since my site is cjupin.com- I need to upload to this folder (not any subfolders). Make sense? If you already have a favicon (which makes me wonder why you are reading this tutorial) then you’ll want to replace it with your new one.

The root directory:

Replace your favicon.ico file if one exists (don’t be afraid if you see this warning). Again, you will ONLY see this warning if you currently have a favicon set on your site. Otherwise, it should transfer without this.

Now, head over to your site (I think I’ll plug cjupin.com one more time here). Your browser may already have the favicon loaded. If not, hit reload a few times (for safari, it’s command + R, for IE it’s ctrl + R).

Voila! Your favicon will now be seen by anyone who visits your site, bookmarks it, or follows you via RSS. Just another way to stand out in the crowd.

Now, go forth and make way better favicons then I did. Leave a comment if you have another tip, have a question, or wish to berate me on my lack of technique and style.

Enjoy!

Update: Josh suggests The Unarchiver for your uncompressing needs over StuffIt. Vodka tonic. Do it. Do it.