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Poor Ryan Seacrest. He looked a little lost up there without Didi. Last week during Didi’s interview he never let go of her hand. This week he barely touched the contestants. Apparently he’s not looking for a rebound contestant to take her place.

Now on to the singing for Lennon-McCartney week…

Aaron Kelly: “The Long and Winding Road”

Sings nicely, but predictable. Do ballads sell well these days?

Katie Stevens: “Let It Be”

The song was fine, that’s all. Good job.

Andrew Garcia: “Can’t Buy Me Love”

I was glad to see he did not wear a tan jacket this week. That just makes him look like Kim Jong Il, if you squint a bit while watching. I have no idea what Kim Jong Il sounds like, especially while singing.

Michael Lynch: “Eleanor Rigby”

Not bad, but he has to do better than this if he wants to make it to the final.

Crystal Bowersox: “Come Together”

If this were Survivor or Biggest Loser, Crystal would be the one who won immunity every week. Not that she needs it, since she’s good every week.

Crystal, learn a lesson from Tara Costa – you can win every week’s contest but still not win the grand prize. I don’t know what that means or how that is supposed to help you, but I felt like writing it.

Tim Urban: “All My Loving”

This isn’t a smiling competition – it’s a singing competition. Tim can certainly sing, but not as well or as memorably as the other contestants.

Casey James: “Jealous Guy”

Katie Stevens did a pretty good imitation of Casey’s laugh during the pre-game interview.

Siobhan did not.

I’m sure he’ll go through to next week, even though most of the 30 million people watching had never heard that song before. I know I wouldn’t recognize that song if I heard it again, unless I heard the words “jealous guy” in it.

Siobhan Magnus: “Across the Universe”

It’s like having a new contestant every week! Who is that new girl on AI? The one who looks nothing Siobhan did last week? Oh wait, it’s Siobhan again. But she still sounds good.

If I had to create a Transformers name, I would use “Siobhan Magnus”.

Lee Dewyze: “Hey Jude”

This song gets old quickly, but Lee did his best to move it along and not let it get too boring. But having the audience sing? Singing the song is your job, Lee.

What did the bagpipes have to do with that performance? I’ll tell you what: it was distracting, but it will make people remember Lee’s song.

Who’s going home? Probably either Aaron or Andrew.

Who, besides those two, will make it into the bottom three? Probably either Katie or Tim.

Want a better review of American Idol? Go read Boomama.

As I was getting Alpha’s breakfast on Easter Sunday, I asked him what he wanted. He glanced at the piles of chocolate that had been left on the table after the Easter egg hunt the day before, and then he told me he wanted to eat a Hershey bar for breakfast.

“What?!” I responded, “You can’t have chocolate for breakfast. How about some cereal? Here, have some, umm, Cocoa Krispies.”

Inspired by that transaction, I grabbed the camera and the glass bowl that held most of the chocolate, and I setup a photo shoot.

Here, without further introduction, is my Easter breakfast:

And here is a close-up shot of the contents:

Ideally, the chocolates would be unwrapped. And if I had time I was going to add some milk in the bowl (virtually, using Photo-Paint) as that would make the visual even better (yes, I said Photo-Paint and not Photoshop).

But I didn’t. So you’ll just have to imagine it.

Easter is like the Superbowl® of chocolate.  Christmas is good and all, but there are too many other things (cheese and sausage, eggnog, candy canes, etc.) that dilute the role that chocolate plays.

Easter, on the other hand, is just chocolate. Sure, some chocolate makers might fill the chocolate eggs with things such as peanut butter, Butterfingers, or cream (creme? crème?), but it’s all centered around chocolate.

Or worse than that – they fill the chocolate with air. “Hollow” is just a marketing term. Because really, who would buy air-filled chocolate? It makes it sound like a tire.

All that chocolate at Easter would be overwhelming if you’re not prepared for it. My wife has been buying chocolate so that we’ll be well-stocked when the big day arrives. I have been using the Stash O’ Chocolate to train.

Oh yes, you need to train for that day. Just diving into all that chocolate cold turkey could cause problems. Your body isn’t ready for it. Hmm…maybe “cold turkey” wasn’t the best phrase to pair with “chocolate”.

I have been gearing up. The training starts back in October and peaks on January 1st. Then it’s mostly maintenance through February and March. Now we’re on the home stretch so I’ve been increasing my chocolate intake each day. Saturday will be just a few bits of chocolate – a stretch and warm-up if you will.

I think I’m ready.

On an unrelated note: spring break is next week and I think I’ll start my spring/summer running program then. Run for half the year, eat chocolate for half the year. I think it’s a good balance.

On a related note: yes, I took the headline from Stuff Christians Like.

There are various ways for a stay-at-home mom or stay-at-home dad to earn extra income, or at least try to. One of the more popular ways is the Independent Consultant.

The independent consultant sells a company’s goods via home shows – get someone to host a party and the IC demonstrates the products and takes orders.

It started with Tupperware, at least in my recollection.

Then along came Pampered Chef.

Then Creative Memories.

Then the snowball started getting out of control – Usborne Books, Lia Sophia, Close to My Heart, Southern Living at Home, Uppercase Living, and various other candle, lotion, perfume, and home goods companies.

The array of choices is so overwhelming that I think it needs some organizing. What if someone is interested in becoming an independent consultant but doesn’t know where to begin or what companies or products there are?

I propose a new home-show-based business: Meta Consultants.

The Meta Consultant (or Consultant Consultant) would be an independent consultant whose job would be to advise people about being an independent consultant. She would go into someone’s house for a home show and describe to the attendees the various companies and products there are to sell.

I’m sure there would be food and games involved too.

The Meta Consultant would not sell any products herself – she would get a commission based on how many people sign up to be consultants (or book new home shows).

I don’t have the details of where the company would get money to pay commissions, since no one is selling any products. But we’re in a service-based economy now, right? And we’re selling services instead of products now, right? So the money will come from somewhere, somehow.

And that’s why I’m typing this as a blog post and not as a business plan.

This post is split into two parts. Read one or both or none, depending on which blogging platform(s) you use.

Blogger.com Users

Hey all you Blogger/Blogspot users: are you tired of people on WordPress who don’t show your profile picture next to the comment you left? Do you want that profile picture instead of the default or randomly-generated icon?

The reason your picture doesn’t appear is that you are using only Blogger.com and not Gravatar.com. Now Gravatar is supposed to be a Globally-Recognized Avatar (where “Avatar” is an icon or small picture, not the movie with extra special effects to distract you from the lack of a good plot). But it requires people to sign up for the service and a bunch of people, mainly blogger.com users, have not done so.

You have two options:

1. Sign up for Gravatar.com

2. Tell the person who uses WordPress instead of Blogger.com to install Grab Avatar. Send them to the Grab Avatar page for details.

I recommend step #2 because if everyone does step #1 then I’m out of business.

WordPress Users

Hey all you WordPress users: are you tired of people on Blogger.com who leave comments but don’t have a Gravatar so you can’t display their profile picture? Now you can please everyone. Grab Avatar finds a person’s avatar whether it is on Gravatar.com or Blogger.com.

It is a simple process and doesn’t require any code editing. Just install the plug-in and it magically starts working. Visit the Grab Avatar page for details.

The old, cheap roll-up shades that we had in the living room were showing their age. Some edges were torn, some had broken or missing reinforcement rods at the bottom, and one couldn’t even roll up anymore so it was left halfway up all the time (or halfway down for you pessimists).

The dining room has two windows, and those did not have the roll-up shades. They, instead, had the old-school blinds, with a pull-cord to raise and lower them and a long handle to twist if you wanted to change the angle of all the slats. Since those types of blinds are being recalled and shunned due to the strangulation hazard of the cord, we decided to replace all the shades and blinds in both rooms. No sense in having nice new shades in one room and ratty old blinds in the next.

The replacements are the cordless cellular shades.

Unfortunately, we found out too late that “cellular” refers to the construction of the shade and has nothing to do with mobile phones.

I installed all the new shades, being careful to make things nice and level. Then I stood back and surveyed a job well done.

Thinking to myself:
How could that happen?

That’s the problem with an old house. Things are either level or even. I make new things level, with a level, but then they don’t match the existing things that match but aren’t level.

Then I stepped closer to the window.

Hey, look! The shades aren’t crooked – the curtain rod is.

Step back, look at the rest of the window.

I think it’s just the curtain rod. That shouldn’t be too bad to fix. What could go wrong with that?

I like using GIMP for creating and editing images. I was playing around with the auto-generation of images and just thought I’d share what I did, in case anyone else out there is wondering what the Swirl-Tile option does.

My goal was to generate some background for a website. I wanted the background to be interesting but not too distracting, and the seams between tiles shouldn’t be noticeable.

Setup: Find the option to generate swirl-tiles.

Step 1

It will have some defaults. These are the default settings:

And this is what the default settings will generate:

And here are a few of them put together. The seams aren’t too bad.

I’ll cut off the post here for the general blog readers who don’t care about web page background images. But those who are interested can click on the link below to continue reading.

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