Sara Miller

My Grandmother, Washington Square Park, Sunday, October 21, 1945

Junk Store Cameras

I case I never showed you, Junk Store Cameras is a website by Marcy Merill and her collection of "junk store" cameras. These include old box cameras, promotional giveaway cameras, toy cameras and even pintoid cameras (pin-hole cameras fasioned from metal altoid tins). The best part of the site is that Marcy actually takes photos with all of these cameras (click a camera to see the photos). I sure wish they had junk stores with this kind of stuff where I live.

The blogging of a blog; a new Food Box

Brother Dave has a new food review blog:

Excerpt: "The baked clams were awful. Six weak, atrophied representitives of the species, mostly bread crumbs and bathed in some fluid I now believe to be water, and tasting of soap. To be avoided."

Click here to visit Dave's new blog.

Cool mac tip of the minute:

option-click is a shortcut for 'Download Linked File'. thanks clunkyrobot

Take my card

"Sunburst Seven"

He's smug and lucky - I give you; the number seven.

Wardrobe by Bodoni Poster

If there are no loud objections, I shall archive and then sink The Salty Maiden

{because this is so much better}

I remember the name,

it was the claudelee roll. I think.

{see previous post if you haven't got a clue}

Wasabi caviar cleaned my clock

Ellen gave me a gift certificate to Nisen in Commack for my birthday. We went there on Friday night for sushi. It was very late when we got there because I teach a class at Katharine Gibbs from 6 to 11 (see below). It is not the first time we have gone for Japanese when the restaurant is nearing closing hours, but the folks in this place seemed less annoyed than in one of the places closer to where I live.

We got a sea-food salad appetizer, which was a miscellaneous assortment of mostly unidentifiable sea life. There was crab meat and shrimp, something that we believe was octopus, and one completely unidentified formerly ocean-going creature. After that, we both ordered sushi.

We each got the aptly named Yummy Roll (Yellow Tail, roe, etc.) and Ellen got a roll with eel in it. The Yummy Roll at Nisen is probably my most favorite sushi. As I was hungry and feeling adventurous (and had a gift certificate), I ordered a roll I never had before. I'm not even sure what kind of fish was in it (tuna or salmon possibly), because the main attraction of this roll (I can't remember the name) is the copious amount of roe (aka caviar) on top. There were eight pieces in the roll. Some had black caviar, some had red. The most interesting were the pieces with green wasabi caviar.

I've had wasabi before (every time I have sushi, for example), but i was not expecting the wasabi caviar to be as strong. There was at least a good table spoon and a half on each piece. I ate a wasabi caviar piece first, and I was pretty sure I was going to die. After dropping my chopsticks and seeing a few new colors, I came to with my sinuses completely cleared.

The other pieces with roe were pretty bland. I ordered the roll because I like the crunchyness of the little roe, but this was sort of a messy, slippery caviar overload. Clearly, when it comes to sushi and roe, more is not necessarily better. It was still good, but not as good as the Yummy Roll (which has a little bit of red roe spread throughout).

As for my class at Gibbs, I teach an HTML class on Friday nights. We rarely go the full five hours, because honestly, they don't want to learn for five hours and I can't teach that long. I do tell them that I will stay until our official end time if they want to try stuff out or ask questions. Last friday was the first time anyone actually stayed. I mostly wanted to get out of there and get my Yummy Roll, but I waited until the last student left. Also of note in the Friday night class, the projector was not working and my dry-erase marker ran out of ink. Imagine, if you will, teaching HTML and CSS without visual aides.

"Less than H-T-M-L greater than, less than head greater than, less than title greater than..."

Kind of frustrating for me and them. There are some things I like about teaching, but I'm not sure if I want to stay at K Gibbs after this quarter. Besides, I still want a full time production job. Any takers?

My father's parents, October, 1945

A new video blog post!

Click here for quicktime file

{They call it 'showing the action without showing the action'}

Long live

Ken Garson!

From Chone Murovchick to Hyman Miller

My great grandfather with his two names written on his photo from his naturalization certificate.

My great great grandparents, Chiam and Raisel Murovcheck

Great grandfather

This is my great grandfather (my father's mother's father). He came to the United States from Turov, Russia (Belarussia). He became a citizen of the United States on June 6th, 1938 while residing at 520 Tinton Ave. in Bronx, NY. He never went to school and was unable to write his name in English, which is more or less how his last name was changed from Murofchick (I have seen numerous different English spellings) to Miller. He was a presser of clothes. He was married (1909) to Devorah (Dora) Bashkin before he came to the U.S.; they did not come here together, she came later. He was the son of Chiam Murofchick and Ida Rose (maiden name), both of whom died in the second world war. He also went by his hebrew name, Chone or Chunan. He passed away on November 11th, 1977 at 2:55 PM at Manhassat Medical Center in Manhasset, NY at age 91. The immediate cause of death is listed as acute myocardial infarction.

From what I can gather, his siblings were Sonia (Susha), Abe, Joseph, Nachman, Benny, Morris and Golda (who may have been married to Hyman's uncle Harry). His grandfather was Yudel Muravchick, and his great grandfather (my great great great great grandfather) was Avrum Muravchick. He had three daughters (one died in childhood) and one son. He had six grandchildren and twelve great grandchildren (at last count).

We all wonder what he is leaning on in this photo.

Another (sort of working) template

I made another template. This one looks decent in safari and firefox, but looks like a victim of a tractor accident in exloperer. Unfortunately, I can't force people to stop using exlporer. Or could eye (one eyebrow raised in expression of evil).

The design was inspired by Brazilian music, the colors of the flag of Brazil, a couple of Disney movies, and the layouts and web design of Sarah S.

Currently working on

An HTML Template. I'm having troubles getting the bottom of the table to go all the way down in most browsers.

Also working on:

New Demo Reel DVD (With menus!)

Lesson plan for tonights class at K. Gibbs

You know what I haven't had in a while?

Jalepeño poppers.

{There’s a starman waiting in the sky, He’d like to come and meet us, But he thinks he’d blow our minds}

"Belnap"

Built in a day (more or less)

I finished Ellen's Website, unless she wants me to change anything. Currently, it works perfectly in Safari (tested on 2 machines) but it seems to bug out in Explorer and Firefox. They're not usual bugs either, they are graphics that just do not want to load. The lesson here is that everyone needs to get a Mac and use Safari :-)

Birthday et-cetera

On saturday we went to Croxley's for my birthday. It was a little sedate compared to last year but we still had fun (and I remember everything that happened). There were a few of us still there after we ate and another large party came in. They asked us to move to a smaller table, so we did and they gave us a round on the house :-) They even punched my croxley's card for the free round.

Then yesturday, we had grandma over for birthday cake.

Today is my actual birthday. I went to one bank to make a deposit, then to Commerce bank with a zip-loc bag full of change. The Penny Arcade thing at Commerce is much better than Coin Star at the supermarket. It works the same way, but there is no fee (you don't even need a Commerce account) and there is a neat animated character that explains how to use the machine. They will even give you a prize if you can guess how much you have within $1.99 - I was off by about $20. Then I went to Staples to get ink cartriges so I can print out my request forms for transcripts. I needed a black cartrige and a yellow one, which I got but they charged me for 2 yellow ones, which was cheaper. Tonight I'm going to Ellen's house for birthday pizza!

But my birthday doesn't end there!! We're going to the Heidelberg in Manhattan next Saturday :-)

You're one year older,
One year wiser.
Rock'n'roll star,
King, Czar and a Kaiser.
A room full of friends,
A mouth full of cake,
Every present is for you
And it feels pretty great.
You're the man of the hour,
The V-I-P.
You get the first slice,
Of the P-I-E.
Blow out the candles
and make a wish.
Put a smile on,
'cause its your BIRTHDAY, BITCH!

-MC Chris

I have only 2 years and 2 days left of being eligible for selective service.

You had your chance

You can no longer purchase a Cock of the Rock t-shirt on my cafe press store (closed forever due to underwhelming response) for $18.95. If you still want one, head on over to tshirts.sakraft.com, where you can pick up a hand printed version for $400 (when someone orders one, I'll figure out how they are going to get made).

Champagne, anyone?