Ingredients

* 4 T butter
* 1 small onion chopped
* 1/2 C half and half (or whole milk)
* 2 pressed garlic cloves
* 1 stalk celery finely chopped
* 1 carrot chopped
* 2 potatoes cubed
* 1 butternut squash (peeled, seeded, and cubed)
* 4 cups chicken broth
* 1/2 tsp cinnamon
* 1 pinch of nutmeg
* 1/2 tsp curry powder
* salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Melt the butter in a large pan, and brown the garlic and onion
2. Add celery, carrot, potatoes, and squash – simmer for 5 to 10 minutes
3. In a pot heat chicken broth and mix with half and half (or milk), cinnamon, nutmeg and curry powder.
4. Add the vegetables to the pot and simmer for 45 – 60 mins.
5. Blend the vegetables in a blender and return to heat and season with salt and pepper.

Writing To Reach You – Travis

The Dissociative Fugue – XOXO

Rio – Hey Marseilles

I Won’t Go Hollywood – Bleu

If I Didn’t Know – Jenny Owen Youngs

Photo credit: Macworld

I was lucky enough to recently get a shiny new 15″ MacBook Pro Unibody for work. The specs are killer: 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 500GB HDD , 8GB RAM, etc. As always with a new machine there’s plenty to configure and install. Here’s what I did to my Snow Leopard machine:

First things first: After I set up my new account I ran all System Updates.

64-bit Snow Leopard – I wanted to get the most out of the machine so I enabled 64-bit mode. I did this at the very beginning to see what apps I may have issues with as I install them. I always boot into 64-bit mode by editing the config file as shown here. The great thing is: after all was said and done I only had one issue.

Multi-Boot Prep – I resized the root partition and installed ReFIT for later on when I want to double or triple-boot

Terminal Modifications – The default terminal settings are crappy. Here’s what I did:

• Fix Terminal Colors
• ~/.profile additions:
  • export CLICOLOR=1
  • export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad
• Fix Terminal key bindings
  • Open up Terminal.app and go to Preferences (Cmd+,)
  • Find the Keyboard tab for your settings
  • All these changes should be “send string to shell”
  • Home: type in ctrl+a
  • End: type in ctrl+e
  • PageUp: Set the string to \033[5~
  • PageDown: Set the string to \033[6~

MacFUSE - Gotta have sshfs - I use this all the time to get into my Linux boxes.

• MacFUSE (http://adavidchan.com/macfuse-on-snow-leopard-64-bit-mode)
• MacFusion (http://rackerhacker.com/2009/08/28/fix-macfusion-on-snow-leopard/)

General Software -

• Install MacPorts (I like everything clean and separate from the Apple stuff)
• sudo port install wget (cURL is fine for some things, but I'm a wget kinda guy)
• Parallels Desktop 5 (btw: All my VMs are like butter with 8GB RAM)
• iStat Menus (if only for a better looking date & time display in the menubar)
• Textmate
• Firefox and Addons:
  • Speed Tweaks
  • AdBlock Plus
  • Greasemonkey
  • Delicious
  • BugMeNot
  • Google Gears
• Remote Desktop
• Growl
• Adobe AIR
• Seesmic Desktop (My FB and Twitter Client)
• Google Notifier for Calendar and EMail
• Google Earth
• Picasa
• Evernote
• Skype
• OpenOffice
• Chicken of the VNC
• VLC
• Handbrake

Development Software - Here's what I've set up to get hacking on code:

• Versions
• NetBeans 6.8
• PgAdmin
• Git / SVN: sudo port install git-core +svn
• Postgres Server 8.3 from MacPorts
  • sudo port install postgresql83 postgresql83-server
  • sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb
  • sudo chown postgres:postgres /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb
  • sudo su postgres -c '/opt/local/lib/postgresql83/bin/initdb -D /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb'
  • sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.postgresql83-server.plist
  • Add to ~/.profile: export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/lib/postgresql83/bin
• Install Ruby, Ruby Gems, Rails and Passenger
  • sudo port install ruby rb-rubygems
  • sudo gem update --system
  • sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install pg
  • sudo gem install rails passenger passenger-install-apache2-module
  • add the following lines to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:
    • LoadModule passenger_module /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
    • PassengerRoot /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5
    • PassengerRuby /opt/local/bin/ruby
  • Install Passenger Pref Pane
  • sudo port install rb-rmagick
  • Create ~/.irbrc with the following in it:
    • require 'pp'
    • require 'rubygems'
    • require 'irb/completion'
    • require 'irb/ext/save-history'
    • IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 100
    • IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = “#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb-save-history”
    • IRB.conf[:PROMPT_MODE]  = :SIMPLE
  • Textmate Bundles and Fixes
    • mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
    • cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
    • git clone git://github.com/drnic/ruby-on-rails-tmbundle.git “Ruby on Rails.tmbundle”
    • mkdir -p /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
    • cd /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
    • git clone git://gitorious.org/git-tmbundle/mainline.git Git.tmbundle
    • git clone git://github.com/alkemist/groovy.tmbundle.git Groovy.tmbundle
    • git clone git://github.com/alkemist/Groovy-Grails.tmbundle.git Groovy-Grails.tmbundle
    • Commented out line 169 in /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/tm/process.rb
    • Added PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin to Preferences -> Advanced -> Shell Variables
    • osascript -e ‘tell app “TextMate” to reload bundles’