It’s all about the Pocky

Our new super-amazing grocery store, Wegmans just opened and it is truly a marvel. We went in with a mental checklist of a few items we used to love back in Boston that we’ve bee completely unable to find down here. These include:

Ok, we weren’t actually looking for all of those. The Gelato and the Pocky were two things that I had long since stopped trying to find. Ironically, those are the two things I did manage to stumble upon. When I found the Ciao Bella, I was alone with Jack and I got all excited. Jack, quick to pick up on anything fun, ran with it and began announcing to anyone who would listen, “We found it! They have it! It’s here! Look! Look!” When I found the Pocky, I was alone (Ann was off with Jack elsewhere.) I, again, did a somewhat giddy dance and a family standing nearby came up to me and said, “Did you live in Japan too?” I replied that, no, I did not. But in Cambridge we lived right by a wonderful Japanese market which spoiled us on Soba noodles, incredible sushi, and Pocky. I asked them for advice on some of the other foods they had there and went home with some crunchy koala bears filled with some really good strawberry goo (a big hit with Jack) and a can of Wasabi Peas which I have been eating in alarming quantities (generally until my head explodes).

But, ultimately, it’s the Pocky that has me so happy. It was always a big treat for us as we rarely ever had it around the house. Jack’s never had it before since we moved out of Cambridge when he was 4 months old.

More Pocky links: linke 1, link 2, link 3 (I am Strawberry Picky according to the quiz).

devis and Open Source

A really great write-up on devis (where I work) and some of our recent work in Info World (InfoWorld: U.S. government seeks the open road: March 12, 2004: By Grant Gross and Ed Scannell: Application Development). The key tool is the application of which I am the project manager: EZ Reusable Objects (EZRO) which has been built over the last few years by a team of incredibly talented developers.

I run EZRO on my PowerBook G4 under MacOS X 10.3 (Panther) but it was developed to be run under Linux and, more recently, directly under Windows. I wish I could host it at Pair.com, my hosting provider, but I need to be able to run Zope and have access to Apache configs. I need to work out a solution for this. I want to be able to run my sister’s business site in it so she can manage her own content without having to know any HTML at all (it’s perfect for that kind of thing).

It’s a pretty neat tool. It lacks many of the bells and whistles of the higher-end content management tools but it’s core goal is to be a super-simple, very easy to use and manage tool for doing site content.

The most recent site to go live in this engine is our own site (devis.com) which I spent a very long week building out from the deisgners Photoshop master into a CSS-based skin (view the source, I did some sneaky things in there… it’s not, by any stretch, the best semantic markup, but at least there are no goddam tables in there! 🙂

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to lately. When I’m not railing against the Bush Administration.