Cookbook Controversy
Don’t know how many of you caught the Today Show this morning where they were talking about the cookbook “100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know”.
My friend Machelle says it is “just something different” and she is excited to run out and buy her copy. But as we were going through the titles of the recipes, I feel a bit patronized.
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/42429088/ns/today-food/
Do I need titles like, Engagement Chicken and Hook ’em Apple Pie?
Marry Me Lasagna?
Forget the Mistake You Made at Work Margarita?
Let’s Make a Baby Pasta? Uhhh, NO THANKS…been there done that.
No Guy Required Grilled Steak – did I need a guy for that anyway? Did I miss something?
Will I probably buy the cookbook? Yes, although they didn’t publish a Kindle edition…Fail.
Will I cook engagement chicken…not on your life. I am a bit superstitious that way. 😉
Enjoy!
Gadget Gal Round 2
Today I got another toy. Yes, I know it is completely pathetic but there are several things I just cannot do on my iPad.
You don’t have to remind me how bad my addiction is, that is what Dave is for, but in my defense I really NEEDED it. Honest!
I couldn’t post to my classes without flash. There were some apps I needed for grading like Visio & Project. And let’s call it like it is, some of the iPad apps just don’t have all the functionality you need.
I was looking at the HP Slate and came across this version.
Only time will tell if it will hold up. I will say I have some nice first impressions.
The screen is really nice which honestly is what I worried about the most. The handwriting recognition is FANTASTIC!!!! Just using my finger on the screen, it picked up an absolutely amazing amount of my chicken scratch even when I spelled the word wrong or ran short on space and scrunched the word. It is really analyzing not only the pattern, but the content to complete readable sentences.
I did have to do a bit of troubleshooting and driver magic to get the Bluetooth internal USB WLAN card working. It is always disappointing to me when those things don’t work right at of the box. There are just too many folks that don’t know how to fix things like that and let’s face it, the wireless networking is a key component.
All in all, I am very satisfied with the purchase.
If anyone has experience with some of the other tablets please post a comment on your experience, I am especially interested in thoughts on the Zoom from Motorola.
Happy Gadgeting!
April Fool’s Randomness
I saw this the other night and thought it was cute.
I mention Dave a lot. I guess because he is a pretty important part of life now. He was certainly a “busy making plans” find. This picture is the way most people know him.
In fact, I am in talks with blackberry for a way to permanently attach the device to his head, they said they are a little busy right now but will get back to me after their new tablet is released. (Which we all know is going to be a stinker following the announcement this week that it won’t roll out with the email client. Really? And I thought they had a lot of smart folks there. Go figure.)
Sorry, my ADD got the better of me for a sec.
This is Dave, this is Dave on the phone, this is how Dave is most of the time, the end.
Speaking of ADD, I choose to believe it is a blessing, not a curse. Not sure my family is with me on that, but they don’t get a vote here.
The trip to Texas is coming together, I made reservations today for the Wimberley Zip line http://www.wimberleyzipline.com/videos_photos/index.htm. I am pretty stoked having never been on a Zip line before. I also think I am going to try and look up a couple of the restaurants in Houston, Austin and maybe San Antonio that Robb Walsh grabbed recipes from for his cookbooks. Soooo excited!
Lego Update: I am pleased to announce, Cailin has built an original creation. It is a dance, if I remember what she told me, the boys are all on one side and the girls on the other. I have to wonder, is segregation of the sexes an inborn compulsion or has she seen one too many “TV” dances on the Disney channel.
I consider this progress, though, and yes, that is some crazy carpet. I haven’t replaced it yet. Give me some time, I just got the place in November. Furniture was first.
Being April Fool’s day, I wanted to part with some crazy joke or idea, joining a nunnery, giving up booze, but I got nothin’. Nothin’ you would believe anyway. So, I will have to live with links to other, more creative items posted just for today. (i.e. believe at your own risk, oh and they may lean toward geeky, sorry. lol)
http://www.thinkgeek.com/ (BTW, my favorite here is the Angry Birds Pork Rinds)
http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/mountain-view/autocompleter/index.html
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/motion.html
As you can see, Google really gets into April Fool’s Day.
http://www.zippycart.com/infographics/april-fools-2011-pranks-online.html (they track a lot of the other pranks)
Have a great weekend.
World Backup Day
This has geek humor all over it. It is apparently World Backup Day (April Fool’s Eve), we really are dorks…
Anyway, it is an important point. Backing up you computer is one of those things everyone knows they should do, and say they do, until it crashes and they sheepishly admit they may have missed one or two years. <sigh>
The look in someone’s eyes when they hand you a dead computer hoping you can recover their music, work or memories; it is just plain sad.
As a disclaimer, I will say I have never used this service, but one of the security podcasts I listen to is sponsored by them and from what I have read it seems to be a pretty inexpensive, easy to use solution – Carbonite www.carbonite.com .
Your data is encrypted, which is a good start. You may have seen their TV commercials and at $55 /year it is much cheaper than data recovery services – trust me. Apparently you can also access your files via a Smartphone from their service, which is kind of cool.
If you are a bit more on the paranoid side, there are also many home network aware storage (NAS) devices out there. I prefer the Linksys models just because, regardless of how irritating Cisco can be at times, I believe they have reliable gear. Of course all the hard drive vendors, Seagate, Barracuda etc have their own versions and they do know hard drives, so most likely good options as well.
I will throw in here, for really priceless items, I would also burn them off on a DVD or save to another USB drive, maybe even just saving to your Gmail as an attachment to an unsent email (Draft) – anything to have at least one other copy of it. Even backup devices can fail.
Last but not least, if even after World Backup Day, you make a conscious choice to avoid backing up your computer, there is a $90 program out there called Spin-Rite www.grc.com that you can run on your computer to keep your hard drive in shape. It has also been known to recover a hard drive which has stopped booting. I have saved stuff with Spin-Rite and love it.
BUT, backing up is really the answer.
Trust me; this is what you will look like to the Geek Squad when you need your data recovered.
Sad, isn’t it…
Friends
I am trying to convince my daughter to change schools. She is not doing particularly well at the one she is currently attending and I would really like to enroll her in one close to my home up north.
It isn’t going well…
The first thing she starts worrying about is her friends. Of course, every parent knows this trap.
I remember changing schools for 6th grade. It was the pits. I loved my old school and my friends. BUT, I also changed to a school where I was with the person who became one of my lifelong friends, Marsha. Since her birthday is coming up, I toyed with calling her my old dear friend, but she is only 2 months older than me, making that lose its appeal quickly.
In trying to explain to my daughter that she would make new friends and the value of making new friends, a line from a movie kept coming to me (in an incomplete can’t remember it exactly kind of way) about how something’s aren’t meant to last and some relationships take you from sunrise to sunset while others from sunrise to sunrise. (If you happen to know the quote and the movie it came from I would really appreciate a note on it.)
While maybe not the real way to look at it, I chose to let that quote give me permission to lose touch with people WITHOUT guilt. I am a firm believer that people are placed into our lives when we need them. Relationships come and go and many seem to be perfect for struggles we have or even good times when we help others. Whatever faith you have, I know mine involves a greater power that knows what I need and provides it.
Even when we have the best intentions, sometimes people slip away. We haven’t always had Facebook or Twitter to keep us electronically tethered to others. But superficial updates on people’s lives are not the same.
And it is okay.
As friends, we wouldn’t want someone to feel guilty if they drifted away, so why should we punish ourselves. Sometimes it seems we don’t give ourselves enough permission to be normal and busy and stressed.
Lucky for me, I am headed to Texas in a couple of weeks to reconnect with a couple of my friends. Haven’t seen Marsha in about 3 years and it has been about 5 since I have seen Tish (REALLY 5 years) WOW time flies when you are busy making plans.
Anyway, it will be great to see them and hear what new things are going on and just spend quality time feeding my soul with their presence.
The point I was trying to make to my daughter: No matter where you go, your friends go with you, they are in your heart forever and nothing can take that away.
Geek Post Alert: Wi-Fi Squatting!
I really want to make sure content here is original and mildly entertaining (or interesting) but when I read this article I decided to include it here in its entirety (it isn’t very long – that affected the decision). 😉
This has likely applied to all of us at one time or another. I know folks who have received letters suing them for downloading movies they didn’t; presumably from Wi-Fi squatters using their bandwidth.
If you are a consumer of squatted bandwidth, this is a nice article on the current state of the law, if you have an open access point – SECURE IT IMMEDIATELY! There isn’t anything else I can say on that, it is just bad on so very many levels…
As printed in Wired Magazine issue 19.04 – On Newsstands Now
Burning Question:
Is Wi-Fi squatting illegal?
It’s so easy: You see an open wireless connection called Linksys or dlink and you jump on to check your email or see if anyone has retweeted you. In fact, we did all the reporting for this story, including VoIP calls, over an unsecured Wi-Fi network. Were we breaking the law?
“It’s not clear,” says Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School and an expert in cyberlaw. “It’s probably OK, but you can’t rule out a prosecution.”
Though using an open Wi-Fi network doesn’t feel like hacking, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act sees things differently. That 1986 law makes it a felony to access computer systems, including routers, without authorization.
But the few cases of someone in the US being prosecuted solely for Wi-Fi theft generally read like that of the Michigan man who drew a sheriff’s attention four years ago by regularly parking outside a cafe with an open laptop but never buying anything. He was charged with using a computer system without authorization, pleaded guilty, and paid a $400 fine.
Over time, however, the law has apparently become more tolerant of Wi-Fi squatting. For example, you’re not committing multiple felonies if your iPhone jumps from network to network while you walk down the street.
“You have to know it was unauthorized,” says attorney Jennifer Granick, former civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”Otherwise, you are an accidental criminal, and generally we don’t allow that.”
Granick thinks you’re probably safe even if you purposely direct your laptop to an open signal. That’s because, as Internet users have grown more sophisticated, most networks have become password-protected. So one could argue that it’s reasonable to assume open networks are intentionally so.”Now, more than in the past, using open wireless can be considered authorized,” Granick says.
Still, no one can say for sure. The reason we lack a definitive answer, according to Kerr, is that authorities tend to prosecute open Wi-Fi usage only when they are piling charges onto real hacking crimes in order to snag a plea deal. As a result, authorized use, as it applies to the vaguely worded CFAA, has never been laid out definitively in court.
“But if anyone is charged with a crime solely for using an open wireless connection, have them give me a call,” Kerr says. “I will defend them.”
Hopefully we won’t have to take him up on that. – Ryan Singel
Wired.com © 2011 Condé Nast. All rights reserved.
Secret Love
Yes, I have a secret love. It isn’t really a secret, I just haven’t told a lot of people. The truth is, Dave loves her too. Well maybe love is a bit stong in his case.
I first spied her across a Barnes & Nobles I was in to pick up some Judy Moody book for Cailin. With her dark red-hair and confident smile she looked like someone at home in her kitchen. She somehow sensed the craving in me for my roots, the down home southern cooking I loved growing up. (I have to throw a disclaimer in here, when I say down home southern cooking I grew up with, I really mean more about the restaurants in my town. My mom wasn’t really that kind of cook.)
She is who I found to guide me throught the journey of learning to cook and she is fantastic.
Her name is Pioneer Woman or PW for short. http://www.thepioneerwoman.com/
I read her cookbook cover to cover picking out recipes and trying them as they seemed “doable” to a novice. The I progressed to her blog where she consistently posts new recipes (like the ones I just finished today – Spicy Dr. Pepper Pork Shoulder and Malted Milk Chocolate Chip Cookies).
She inspired me, gave me confidence and from her belief in me, I was able to reach out to others, namely Robb Walsh. He is a food editor for the Houston Chronicle.
Tex-Mex doesn’t really exist in AZ. It is much more traditional Mexican cuisine and if that is confusing, you are a perfect candidate for his Tex-Mex Cookbook which is so much more. It details the history of Tex-Mex cooking. He includes photos and stories of Texas, Tejano and Mexican cuisine history. Explaining the different types of chili peppers, what they are used for and other important cooking 101 items, he gave me back Tex-Mex.
Of course, Dave is the direct beneficiary of my new passions, so he is careful not to criticize usually only throwing out comments like, this is definitely a keeper when a meal strikes his fancy. (He is, after all, a smart guy.)
I never understood the allure of cooking before, it really seemed more of a chore with hundred of dirty dishes to clean later. Maybe it is a getting older thing (notice I stay away from associating myself with mature), or maybe it is because now I am doing it for myself and Dave because I want to not because I have to. That is truly one of those things that I have come to believe makes all the difference.
I do have to tell one story on myself though, Robb Walsh’s book has a recipe for a Pecan Pie made with Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup, which I ordered in from Louisiana. I spent a fair amount of time, melting the sugars in the syrup, letting them completely cool so the eggs don’t inadvertently cook in the sugars, etc. I made the pie (obviously my first pecan pie ever) and excitedly told Dave the pie would be ready shortly to which he replied. “I don’t like Pecan Pie.” “What?!?!” I said
“I don’t like Pecan Pie, but I will certainly taste it.” Sullenly I admitted, “I don’t like Pecan Pie either, I was making it for you.” sigh….
We both had a sliver and yep, we still don’t like Pecan Pie.
Oh well, I will just chalk it up to more cooking experience.
If you are interested, here are links to the cookbooks mentioned. PW’s is available on the Kindle as is the Walsh Cowboy cookbook (which had the Pecan Pie Recipe, but not his Tex-Mex cookbook – sadly).
Happy Cooking!
Geek Post Alert! RSA
I have held it in as long as I can.
REALLY? RSA? REALLY?
Of course, I don’t know the details, just an infosec geek reading along with everyone else, but this is huge.
I am not an alarmist and do happen to agree with Stephen Northcutt that the breach is not a game-changer, in the broad sense of the word, but could it be a game-changer for RSA. Many say no, I wish I was as sure.
RSA is one of the preeminent security companies in the world, they have a lot of positive karma out there and I hope it is enough.
I have been doing this long enough to know that yes, if someone wants to hack you, with enough patience and horsepower, they will. RSA has now fallen victim to that.
The disturbing part to me is the speculation of what they got. Best case scenario they got the list of take-out menus someone centrally stored on the servers but worst case is information detrimental to their two-factor authentication business. Again, there are degrees of bad here, just the private seeds with no client information is recoverable. Client information without seeds is also recoverable. Even seeds and client information is fixable (keep in mind all two factor requires a password you know and the numbers provided by the token). The bad guys don’t know your password – yet.
The scary part there is how easy it has been for malware and phishing emails to trick folks into giving up their two-factor authentication passwords.
I want to reiterate I don’t have any insight into what was taken other than the standard press everyone else has read. In true security world form, there will be limited groups who know the extent of the breach but they will be wrapped in so many NDA’s the rest of the world will never know, and unfortunately it has to be that way. I used to work for radio stations as a journalist, reporting the news. Now I am in information security and realize that sometimes disclosure can be more detrimental than helpful.
While it would be easy to condemn and point fingers, this really can happen to anyone. It is just disappointing for it to happen to such a respected security provider.
Most may never register a direct impact between this breach and their normal everyday life, but for many of us in the security field, we will hold our breath anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop; hoping we aren’t under it.
http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3872
http://www.insecureaboutsecurity.com/2011/03/18/the-emcrsa-breach-what-it-means/
Free Pie Wednesday
Although Village Inn calls it Pie Rush Wednesday. From 10 am to 10 pm at any Village Inn across the country they have free pie with any purchase.
There is, of course, some yada yada stuff with that, they feature certain “supreme pies” that are free but not all and while the young lady at the Village Inn close to work said “literally any purchase, a piece of toast, etc”. I imagine that really depends on the location and the staff (and how cantankerous you seem) on what they will allow to qualify as any purchase.
As you can see from my pumpkin pie with whip cream, it is a good size piece of pie – for FREE! Well, okay, I did have to eat at Village Inn but can I just say the one here in Chandler AZ at Queen Creek and Alma School is really pretty tasty.
The couple of times Machelle and I have eaten there it has been good. I will also throw out that if you are pinching pennies or a starving college student, they have this V.I.B menu item, advertised online for $6.79 but my location charges $6.99, where you choose 4 different items all day everyday.
It is just CRAZY!
At this point, I do have to take a small detour to discuss demographics. I just can’t help it.
As we sat in Village Inn or vi as they have branded themselves, we were a good 25 years south of their lunch customer demographic. Granted, I imagine that is much different at 2 am.
But it is interesting to see how “hip” they are really trying to make themselves.
As an example, the restaurants I have seen renovated are doing so with more retro colors, such as blue greens and light oranges.
Their new logo, as seen on this coffee cup, screams “we are trying”!
A coffee cup action shot with the Master Chief. 😉
It seems a little strange for a restaurant categorized with the Denny’s and IHOPs of the world to have an emoticon in its logo. Maybe it really isn’t, maybe this is their attempt to reach the “next” group of patrons. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a business has gone shopping for younger customers.
Their trademark statement Good Food…Good Feelings. I have to say, works.
I find vi strangely comforting; between the emoticon that speaks to my geekiness and the chicken fried steak with biscuits and gravy (ala VIB) which speaks to my southern gal appetite PLUS FREE PIE.
What else could you ever want in a place to grab a decent lunch?
Sometimes its hard, to be a woman…
Don’t get me wrong I am not saying it is hard in a, woe is me, kind of way. It is just really hard to figure out what to be when you grow up…
I used to tell people that as a mom your world is full of guilt, when you are at work you are guilty you aren’t with your kids and when you are home with sick kids you are guilty you aren’t getting your work done. It is just the degrees of guilt dictating your actions. Also, besides the guilt, no one ever told me you either have money or kids but not both. Those two specific pieces of information might have affected my decision to procreate. Oh, who am I kidding, probably not.
So to the question at hand, assuming the choice was solely my own, what do I want to be when I grow up?
Do I wanna be a homemaker? Cooking, cleaning, homeschooling? (some folks just fell out of their chairs at that so I am going to pause to let them recover).
<pause>
Do I wanna Rule the World? Run away to the circus? Own a farm? Start a cottage industry, aka http://www.etsy.com/?
Do I wanna work a normal job, not too stressful, collect a paycheck and have lots of weird hobbies (doh, like blogging)?
And before making that kind of decision, are there hidden gotcha’s in choosing a passion no one is mentioning – like the kid thing?
Cooking is kinda fun, but not really enough to be a chef and kitchen’s are hot and have to be cleaned a lot.
Quilting is okay, one project at a time, every 2 months, if it doesn’t have to be perfect and if each one sold for a gazillion dollars.
Maybe joining the Poker Circuit. I just need a sponsor, better card skills, some luck, oh and a brain full of hand probability statistics.
And just like the kid thing, I look over all these options and all the negatives and say, yes; I want to do them all.
Who did this to us?
Do we want to do it all because:
a) someone told us we can
b) someone told us we should want to or
c) if we don’t we feel guilty, like we are dissing Susan Anthony and the bra-burners?
I could theorize, but I don’t have a degree in women’s studies. I could postulate, if I really knew what that meant. In the end, I guess I just end up throwing rhetorical questions at the wall to see what sticks…