do you usually visit this blog, and trying to figure out why there hasn’t been posts?
well, in the previous post, I was contemplating moving over to blogspot, and that, I did, though it’s still under construction, though I’m posting my new articles there now, you can get there by going to http://newblog.foreignkid.net. Eventually, the blog address will be the same as this one, but during the transition period, I will have this temporary address.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been contemplating my online workstyle while dealing with a my webhost which has been less than ideal lately, in addition to dealing with Wordpress problems that I can’t seem to find a good solution for (not the formatting of the articles being all screwed up). Some say, it’s the theme, some say it’s the browser, I spent countless hours trying to fix it, then last night, it dawned on me…
I have been an avid fan of gmail since its inception, I use everything google as it is, so I re-checked blogspot, after abandoning it about a year ago, and i was pleasantly surprised with the improvements that have been made to it, the new Widget enable templates are really cool, allowing me to pretty much add anything I want on the blog.
As I contemplated the idea of the blog, I starting thinking back about web services that are in existence today that are more than adequate for a lot of tasks, namely photo galleries, with flickr, google gallery, .mac gallery, webshots, who needs to host their own gallery anymore. I used to enjoy having full control over that, but that eventually just becomes a nightmare really.
So… my new initiative.. is to start working on moving most of my services to the wonderful world of hosted web 2.0.
No worries on your end, if there are any faithful readers of this blog. I will only migrate fully once I have moved the archives to the new location, which, will probably take a little bit of time, as I haven’t quite figured out an easy way to move articles from WordPress to BlogSpot yet, mind you, there are a whole lot of articles that do the process reversed (BlogSpot to WordPress) … does this say something about the two services? I’d like to believe that it doesn’t but I will give it a shot anyway. I hope to be able to have a nicer looking page after all, while still providing interesting, education, and fun content.
Stay tuned as i go through this transition, and things will be dandy again soon.
I don’t know if you take a lot of time looking on the sidebar section of my site. There is one section in particular I’d like to draw your attention to though: The Utility Of The Day section.
Though I haven’t been posting a whole lot on the blog, I have been updating that Utility Of The Day link. This is nothing but an RSS feed to my UtilityOfTheDay tag on my del.icio.us profile.
You can always check that on here, there is a whole lot of really cool utilities, a lot of which is now becoming web 2.0 tools, all the better… that means less downloading and installing stuff on your machine!
Of course you can always have my feed straight into your RSS reader that will deliver the UtilityOfTheDay straight to you:
Anyone that knows me know that I’m a sushi fanatic! fortunately, for me, I also have a partner in crime My friend Patty can also eat sushi just about every day! well, her birthday is coming up, and she’s the creative type, so she decided to make a cake and decorate it with dessert sushi. I thought it was a great idea, so we got together on Saturday, and made an event out of it. Turns out that we are pretty good at making dessert sushi, for a first attempt at least. since we took some pictures of the process, I told my friends that this is going to definitely make it to the blog, as I know that there are some people out there that would be interested in knowing more about how we did some things. Of course, it’s not like there’s lack of information on ther internet about any topic, but a personal experience is always good to share
So, here’s the scoop on what we used to make the whole thing.
- A whole lot of dried fruits: Mango, Banana, Apricots, Berries.
- Colorings: Colored sugar, and food coloring
- Rice and seaweed ingredients: white chocolate, dark chocolate, black frosting, and coconut shaving. Rice crispy treats
(You can click on each of the pictures to get a bigger version) In this first picture, you can see us making the sea weed, and the rice. We tried a couple of things, and ended up resorting dipping the rice crispy treats into the white chocolate and the dark chocolate. The white chocolate didn’t quite give the effect, so in addition to that, we decided to add the coconut shavings, and that made it look perfect!
Uni, was a bit hard to get the color. We put some food coloring in white frosting, but since we only had the 4 basic colors, we mixed some red and yellow until we got thecolor we’re looking for. In my opinion, I think it’s still lacks some texture, but unless we try a different ingredient altogether for the Uni, this is about the best we’ll be able to do. any better ideas on that?
In this picture, you can see the 2 sea eel sushi, which we used the dried banana for. I didn’t think they looked very realistic, and looked a bit more like the tamago then the sea eel. though if you look in a later picture, they looked a big better when there was the sea weed wrap around them.
In this picture, you can see the two pieces of california rolls, or philly roll, or I’m not really sure what it is, but it looks darn good! Obviously the green avocado is done with kiwi. I thought this one looked great though!
My handiwork here.This is the Uni, and the massago, which I filled with the colored sugar. I thought it turned out fairly good.
The salmon was a bit challenging to make. Annette had started it with the right idea, by putting lines of frosting in it, but I thought that we could do better than that, and make it look like the white stripes are actually inside the mango. That took me about 10 minutes per piece to make, but it was well worth it. I cut V-shaped stripes in the mango, and then filled it with the frosting, and just spread whatever is left around on the salmon to make it look more natural.
This is the plate with the Salmon, Tuna and Sea Eel. The Sea Eel, still didn’t have the sea weed on it. but it still looked pretty good.
The scallops were a little bit challenging, due to their “slimy” nature. it was hard to emulate that look. but we resorted to dipping some of the dry apricot in the white chocolate, and placing them on the sushi. turned out fairly good, though it was a lot of work. The sprinkles are the orange sugar, for the massago.
This is where things start coming together. this is one of the plates that has the salmon, Yellow Tail, Sea Eel, and Tuna
This is the California rolls, Uni, Massage, Tamago, and some wassabi on the side, which was made with white chocolate with food coloring.
I loved this picture of the Salmon and Sea Eel, so I thought I’d just put it on here..
And last but not least, we decided to put the pieces in a plate like on a normal sushi dinner plate…. check this out!
Now if this doesn’t get you hungry, then I don’t know what will Oh wait, I know what will, you can check out the rest of the gallery of picture right here, just in case you’re curious.
I got my hands on a copy of Mac Office 2008, and was so excited to check out the new entourage, since I’ve always had gripes about the lack of functionality of Entourage. Well, turns out that all Microsoft did with Entourage is add a few eye candy features, and shipped it back out. I figured, in 4 years, they would’ve had enough time to invest in sprucing up the functionality to become at least comparable to the PC version. I was wrong!
I am just recently a Mac person, and never really had any bias towards Mac users, but now that I have my own Mac, I will refer to “US MAC USERS”! :-P, we, feel left out.
Here’s my opinion about it though, ever since Leopard came out with the spiffed up version of OS X mail, I’ve been using that with no complaints. ok, maybe a couple, like the lack of a nice archiving system like the PC version of outlook has, and which Entourage STILL doesn’t have! I have not tested full functionality of Office 2008, because I’m still dealing with the initial shock of disappointment!!
At this point, I’m thinking of reverting back to OS X Mail, and using the PC version running Office 2007, on my Parallels VM. cloodgy? maybe, though with the Parallels tools installs, the locations of my files don’t even matter.
Before I finish my rant on Office, I have one more gripe! Pricing!
Hello!? $400??? for the standard version of Office 2008 that actually supports connection to Microsoft Exchange. Hmm… I work for a school district, and when they create a version of office that says on it “Teacher and Student edition” … I would expect all teachers and students jumping on that version, when, in reality, in my case, 100% of the teachers will actually need Exchange functionality! So now, $150 for the retail price of the Teacher and Student edition won’t be enough anymore, and the $399 edition will be required. Granted, educational pricing will probably still be lower than that, I think that the featureset that got offered in this version does not deserve this big hype, and certainly not this high price!
Oh, and I don’t believe I’m the only one that had this issue with Office 2008 for Mac… reading reviews about it, I see these complains all over… Microsoft! get on the ball with Mac users!
I am a relatively new Mac user, and I am still learning the ropes. One of the things that I used to be bale to do very easily on the PC was to create an ISO (CD Image file) from a CD. On the Mac, I attempted to do it using DiskUtility, which is a native tool that comes with OS X, but it does not really do the job. So, after a little bit of research, I found a cool way to do it, which is fairly easy. For this to work, you probably have to be a little comfortable using your “Terminal” application. I will try to put the steps in as much detail as possible, so that you can follow along:
Disclaimer: Please note that the tool used in this article (dd) can be dangerous, and, if used incorrectly, can end up wiping your whole hard drive, so, consider yourself warned!!
- Open “Terminal” : Applications / Utilities / Terminal
- With your CD mounted. (You should be able to see the CD on your desktop, type: df -h
The important line is /dev/disk1s1s3 . This is the device reference to your CDROM drive.
This number may vary, and in order to be sure that your CD device reference is the correct one, you can run the following command, and that should give you at lease the first part of the device without the reference to the volume:
drutil status
This /dev/disk1 is the CD Drive.
- Unmount your CD:
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1 Disk /dev/disk1 unmounted.
- Now create the ISO
dd if=/dev/disk1s1s3 of=mynewcd.iso bs=2048
- When the process finishes, you should be able to mount that image using this command:
hdid mynewcd.iso
Or you can mount it by double clicking on the iso file, and it should show up on your desktop.
Gotchas:
- The main problem that I had with doing this process was to refer to the CD device, instead of the volume that I need to rip. (i.e: /dev/disk1, as opposed to /dev/disk1s1s3). If you use dd and get the final file, it’ll look fine, but when you try to mount it, you will get an error. So make sure you refer to the correct volume.
- Make sure that you are writing the ISO file somewhere within the filesystem that you have WRITE access. The safest place would probably be your home directory, so your dd line would be best that way:
I has been a few days since I got a chance to blog, a lot has been happening, but I’m around. I hope that you guys still stick around even if a couple days pass by without any posts! keep the comments coming, and if you haven’t checked out the EntreCard,  (especially if you have your own blog), I encourage you to do so.   I received an email from my friend a couple of days ago, which had some pretty sweet images. Some of them may be old, in fact, maybe all of them, but I’ve always been intrigued, and impressed by this kind of work! How cool! Check it out: (Click on the pictures for a larger version)
So, I don’t know if you are aware of the RSS feed that is available on this site, and other sites for that matter. it’s a great little tool to be able to keep track of any updates on the site without having to keep checking back.
To add my site to your RSS feeds, all you have to do is click on the “Entries RSS”, or “Comments RSS” and, if you have Firefox, or Safari, you would have a built in RSS reader, otherwise, you would need to download one before you add the feed.
A little confused? check out the YouTube video below, which will tell you a bit more, in simple terms about RSS Feeds:
Why should the wedding ring be worn on the fourth finger?
There is a beautiful and convincing explanation given by the Chinese…..
Thumb represents your Parents
Second (Index) finger represents your Siblings
Middle finger represents your-Self
Fourth (Ring) finger represents your Life Partner
& the Last (Little) finger represents your children
Firstly, open your palms (face to face), bend the middle fingers and hold them together - back to back
Secondly, open and hold the remaining three fingers and the thumb - tip to tip
(As shown in the figure below):
Now, try to separate your thumbs (representing the parents)…, they will open, because your parents are not destined to live with you lifelong, and have to leave you sooner or later.
Please join your thumbs as before and separate your Index fingers (representing siblings)…., they will also open, because your brothers and sisters will have their own families and will have to lead their own separate lives.
Now join the Index fingers and separate your Little fingers (representing your children)…., they will open too, because the children also will get married and settle down on their own some day.
Finally, join your Little fingers, and try to separate your Ring fingers (representing your spouse).
You will be surprised to see that you just CANNOT….., because Husband & Wife have to remain together all their lives - through thick and thin!!
I thought this was pretty cool, so I thought I’d share it…
Have you ever heard of the phenomenon that happens with some community sites that come around? If you are even the slightest internet user , you would be aware of eBay, MySpace, Facebook, etc …
With all my experience on these sites, and these communities, I had not known about the site I’m going to introduce you to until just recently. It is, indeed, a cultural phenomenon in itself… when you go to it, and start participating in the forums, you will know why.
Let’s start with the basics, the site is called WOOT! , and you can find it at http://www.woot.com
The concept of the site is actually very simple: They place one item up everyday for a ridiculously cheap price, and you can buy it for that price. it’s that simple. When I say cheap, I’m talking 60, 70, or 80% off the retail price. granted, sometimes, for electronics, the items are refurbished, but they are great nonetheless. Also, a lot of items, are actually brand new, and a lot of times, their items come in a 2 for 1 package, which ends up being a truly amazing price for that item.
I have personally purchased a refurb vaccuum cleaner from there, and it is working like a charm.
If that isn’t enough, there is actually an event that happens every so often, and it is called a “Woot Out” … where they basically have a marathon of items on display, as soon as the item is out of stock, they put up the next one, and the next one. The trick to that, is that there is no way for us to know how many (quantity) of a particular item they have, so basically you have to keep looking. The deals that come up during a Woot Out! are unbelievable, sometimes very stupid, but sometimes really good.
The cultural piece to that is that the fact that people who are hooked on this site, actually spend an all nighter waiting for the next item, as to not miss out on something that may be cool, the forums, during these events (and even regular days, for that matter) , are hilarious .. check them out …
Are you convinced? No ?? seriously? Ok … here’s one more thing… during a Woot Out! , there is one special item, which is, hilariously called, the Woot “Bag of Crap”, yup , you heard it right, the site has a weird sense of humor, but nothing dirty ever, so you can safely let your kids go to it. ok, back to the “Bag of Crap” .. it’s basically, well, just that, colloquially speaking, of course
The best deal about this bag is that you only pay $1 for it, that’s it! It doesn’t matter what is in it, sometimes valuable stuff, and sometimes, not so valuable, but what can you lose for $1…
I personally have never gotten the “Bag of Crap”, because, I’m not known to have that lucky streak, but I know other people have, and maybe if you end up getting it sometime, you can tell me what’s in it
I hope that you liked this little review about Woot! , and perhaps you will start taking a look at it like I do.
And by the way, if you end up getting hooked, and you happen to use Firefox, you can download a Woot Watcher Add-On, which will show you the current woot in your firefox taskbar, kind of a cool little utility, though to be honest, it doesn’t update as often, or as I’d expect it to, but it works, sorta
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