Carl Hutzler's Blog

Shovel Sled

Forecast looks good for no school the rest of this week.

Outside seating next to the Moby Dick kabob house in Sterling VA. Spring seems a long way away. Oh, and another 12-16″ forecast for tonight!

I am actually up on NYC this weekend with Rylan seeing Suspended Cirque. My good friend Phil sent me this image from Oakton, VA

For some reason I put on a little Tom Waits this morning. Eventually it got into some live tracks and a funny story he told about how a woman got pregnant without intercourse (Big Time: Train Song).

Anyway, I decided to visit Tom Waits’ website and his “wit” page. This one made me laugh out loud…

Another charming one from page 2…

1. McDonalds (cheap/fast)

2. Five Guys (cheap/good)

3. Counter Burger (fast/good)

One of our closest friends, Michelle Dortignac, performed “suspended yoga” last weekend at the Galapagos Art Space in NYC. The show was entitled “Across the Water” (fitting as the venue was filled with water just below the island like seating area).

What is suspended yoga? Well, it is pretty much what you might think. Slow strength manuevers….lifts, stretches, balance….performed to music while suspended in air. Take something your might see at some other french sounding circus and put it up in the air, hung from nylon fabric, and you will get a sense of what it is like (or check out the pix)

The Suspended Cirque

It was not my first time seeing Michelle perform, but this was the first time I have seen her in an actual show. In the past she had music and the choreography and her sense of performance was amazing, but she was usually alone or more in a demonstration type of performance. But this was a show! A show with four other professionals  performers, beautiful lighting, excellent use of the space, well thought out music and perfect orchestration. This was the real deal. And the (standing room only) audience knew it, as they were totally infatuated with the show which they kind of had to be as it was literally performed right above their heads!

The owners of the venue loved the show (and the completely packed house) and invited the troop back for several more shows this summer. I will try and post something when I hear about the dates.

While in NYC for the rest of our (kid free!) weekend we visited with Michelle and Kenny and dined at a great Ethiopian resturaunt in Brooklyn’s park slope, enjoyed a day at the Met and an experience at Katz’s deli. All in all we had a very fun time as always.

In my first ever wife guest celebrity blog post, I am pleased to talk about a unique opportunity to have fun while raising money for a good cause.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Carl’s wife, and organizer of the recent Disney trip. I am also good friends with another  local blogger who has started www.bloggersforgood.org to benefit local charities. The first event will be on February 19 from 6-8 pm at O’Faolain’s in Sterling VA (right by Regal Cinemas). A portion of the restaurant tab, raffle sales, and direct donations will go to Loudon Interfaith relief. Several local bloggers will be there, as well as Carl who will take some pictures of the event.

Hope to see some of you there!

How you ask?

Answer: Get rid of your cable TV.

But how will you survive without TV and Movies?

Read more

I bought a pair of Audio Engine A5 speakers and they arrived today. I like music a lot and I enjoy good quality sound. I have tried a number of things to find something reasonably small with a self contained (self-powered) amplifier that sounded great. While there may be some competitors out there with good sounding boxes which I have not heard, I can attest that these are fantastic speakers. $280 shipped from Provantage.com.

They build quality is excellent and I also like a few thoughtful features included on these. They have a 120VAC outlet on the back which could be used to power an Airport Express. They also have a USB port on the top (power only) which could be used to charge an iPod. Very nice design.

Only thing I would have wished for is a cloth cover over the drivers for a little “kid finger” protection. But my kids are old enough and these aren’t that expensive that the risk is that high.

So I looked into why my blog was slow to load the last few weeks or so. It turned out the header background graphic (fall leaves) was a 340KB PNG file and it was adding 300+ KB of extra data that was not needed. So I changed it to a JPG with a lot of compression and its now just 16KB. Granted I still have some big graphics in a few of my recent posts which still yields 1MB initial load. But other than going through a lot of extra steps in my image posting process, this is just life. At least it is down from 1.4 MB which is a 30% savings.

But I started to wonder why the WordPress theme I am using (or perhaps its WordPress’s default?) uses a PNG instead of a JPG? The only time I think to use PNG is when I need an image with transparency so that the background shows through. Sometimes I use GIF but more and more I use PNG as it has transparency and I believe PNG can show more colors.

But as far as I can see, this banner/background image has no need for transparency. And since PNG is a lossless compression, it yields fairly large file sizes compared to JPG. Am I missing something? Are there other considerations?