Ben Archives

The Used Cookbook Sale at The Hollywood Farmer’s Market

On Sunday, my friend Ben Mandelker of The B-Side Blog invited me to the used cookbook sale at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. As many of you know, I’m kind of a cookbook junkie (see here) so this was a no-brainer. When I got there, I found mostly generic cookbooks (many, many diet books) and old copies of Bon Appetit anthologies. But then Ben started to dig up some treasures, which I’ll share with you here….

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Server Switch

You know how sometimes you go to high school and you’re the world’s biggest nerd and you only have three people to sit with and you still drink juice out of a juice box? But then in 4th period English class you say something really funny and the cool kids ask you to sit with them the next day and more kids ask you to sit with them and before you know it the whole school is sitting around you at lunch?

Ok, I don’t know what that’s like at all, but my server certainly does! When my web guru Ben Lim put me on the server I’m currently on I was getting modest traffic, but now I’m getting so much traffic it keeps crashing the server which is why the site sometimes doesn’t load when you try to load it. So, in T-Minus 15 minutes, we’re going to begin the Big Server Switch to a swifter more spacious server that’ll ensure the site will always load and all kids–popular, unpopular, even the ones with headgear–can sit with us when we eat. There won’t be any more blogging here this week, but when you come back Monday, a bright shiny server awaits you.

All right, Ben: Let the Great Server Switch commence!

The A.G. Team

You can all breath a collective sigh of relief: this, I’m pleased to announce, is the very last post of my 5th Year Anniversary Week. Ok, maybe I went a little too far profiling anyone whose visage ever graced these pages, but, I must confess, it was quite a kick taking such a long stroll down this blog’s memory lane. Our final gesture is to give some credit where credit is due–that is to credit The A.G. Team, the people who keep this blog running.

Starting on the top left you’ll see Leah McCombe who gave this blog its beautiful, useful, whimsical and memorable design; next, on the upper right, is Ben Lim who is my savior and saint–he responds to all my pesky IMs when the blog goes down (which it’s been doing quite a lot lately)–and, more importantly, he’s the one who programmed all of Leah’s design and brought this blog to life; beneath Ben is the irreplaceable Lindy Groening who illustrates our awesome, hilariously kooky banners each month (she really is amazing: if I dream it, she can do it!), and–finally–next to her is Justin Dickinson who started here as an intern and graduated to our design team where he seamlessly uploads Lindy’s banners as soon as she’s done with them.

I’m really proud to call these guys my A.G. Team and I’m so, so, so grateful for their generous, thankless work. (Well, I hope it’s not entirely thankless.) I decided to ask them all a few questions which they’ve answered for you below. Let’s hear what The A.G. Team has to say.

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Twitter Updates, On The Side

You’ll notice on the left side of the page, above our Flickr pool (which is so awesome, by the way; thanks to all of you uploading pictures!) you can now follow my Twitter feed. So now there’s an extra reason to visit my page a thousand times a day: you can see what I’m doing EVERY SECOND of EVERY MOMENT of the day. What am I doing right now? I don’t even know, I better check my Twitter feed. I’m all atwitter with Twittering. Thanks to Ben my old/new programmer for setting this up!