“Play is the work of children. It’s very serious stuff.” — Captain Kangaroo
“Play is the work of children. It’s very serious stuff.” — Captain Kangaroo
A Marvelous Bed Head (Taken with instagram)
Taken with instagram
I’m trying out 3M Command Strips, the kind for picture frames that contain a “Velcro” style middle-layer to join each half of the strips. The hook-style ones worked out well for hanging Christmas stockings over the holidays, so I’m giving these a try on the kids’ fifteen-pound (6.8 kg) magnet board with the goal of avoiding drills and screws. Secured at six points around the board’s frame to a semi-gloss coated half-wall that we have in our family room, they appear to be strong enough to withstand one of the greatest forces of nature: Toddlers.
Uh, so in order to set the adhesive, I laid down and used my feet. I got bored, and took this photo. I may fall into a meditative trance (code word for “falling asleep.”), which may commence a whole new practice of yoga: Functional Yoga?
Zenzai on Flickr.
A sweet red bean (azuki) and rice cake (mochi) “soup,” eaten as a… dessert. The red beans are simmered in a simple syrup for hours. We rice cakes are toasted over a hot charcoal grill until they “puff” and turn golden brown.
Of course I cheated by using canned azuki beans thinned-out with a bit of hot water, and the oven’s broiler to toast the mochi on a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
My Cajun-Welsh-Scottish-American wife still finds sweetened red beans (very) weird, whereas I find it to be a comfort food and have it at least once every new year. Fundamentally, it seems there are many cultures that have variants on a “red beans and rice” recipe as a dish symbolizing good fortune.
In Terminal:
chflags nohidden ~/Library
That’s it. I wonder when that option will simply be added to Finder preferences or somesuch.

After installing OSX Lion on my MacBook Pro, I was annoyed by a dialog upon startup that stated:
To open “CS4ServiceManager,” you need a Java runtime. Would you like to install one now?
(My answer: “No.”)
This is a Photoshop CS4 nag utility that I didn’t want to have running on my machine all the time. I also did not want to install a Java Runtime just to run this stupid thing. How did I get rid of it?
Photoshop’s support site was barely supportive: A knowledge-base article informs us that we can create a custom plist file to disable CS4ServiceManager.
Ugh. Instead of doing that, l used launchctl:
launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.CS4ServiceManager.plist
Haven’t seen it since.
Now, I won’t receive auto-update notices, but there are some apps that I prefer to manage on my own time. (If forced to choose, I would prefer that my app check for updates during launch.)
(P.S.: With launchctl, I can also disable a bunch of other auto-updater agents, like Google’s App Engine updater by applying unload -w to com.google.keystone.agent.plist)