Thanksgiving Traditions

Tyler Florence used to have a show on Food Network where he would help people who were trying to recover a long, lost recipe. People would ask for help on recapturing Grandma's Beef Stew or some other childhood favorite. Taking information about the person's ethnic heritage, foods available in the location that they lived, and other family history, he'd come into a person's home with two recipes. One would be a proximity--or best guess--on how the person's grandmother might have made the dish and then he'd give his own take on how he likes to prepare the dish. I couldn't find the show listed on the Food Network,  so I don't think its still on the air. The closest I could find was something called "Rescue Chef." Since it's Thanksgiving week, I started thinking about "lost recipes" and other traditions that have gone by the wayside. My Aunt Jo always talked about her mother's, (my Great Grandmother Anna Ruth Buchanan Sullivan's) Ambrosia Salad. The recipe was so special that she even had a specific dish that it was put in. My Aunt Jo inherited the dish and when you entered her home, she'd point up to the top of her cabinets to the large ceramic bowl. I have never tasted my great grandmother's Ambrosia Salad.

It makes me sad because it is a tradition that has been lost. Even though my mother just passed away this year, it won't be the first Thanksgiving I've spent without her fantastic feast. For he last 15 or so years I have observed Thanksgiving with my in-laws who's Greek heritage comes with its own host of traditions. I've gone at least 15 years without my mother's Turkey stuffing. My husband's family doesn't serve stuffing. Instead they have a delicious rice alongside their beautiful roasted bird. Still, this year, because of the loss of my mother, I have been wondering if I've already lost the recipe of her stuffing. Stuffing was never a major dish at my mother's Thanksgiving dinner, but it was always my favorite. In fact, the very first Thanksgiving I spent with my in-laws, I made my husband "swing by" my parents house afterward. I told my mother I was in culture-shock without her stuffing and she packed up a care-package for me. Stuffing was not in my husband's traditions so he didn't really get it. All the more for me. 

I see magazine covers touting "traditional" oyster stuffing, or cranberry raison stuffing or some other obscure concoction, but they all seem so foreign to me.

Image via WikipediaMy mother's stuffing, was so simple it was almost a crime. Its not a recipe she would brag about--and she really could brag about being a great cook. Some of her recipes even won awards. This was just plain ol' warm your tummy, stuffing. It was simply bread chunks, celery, broth and seasonings, baked until there was a crust on top. Easy, squeezie, lemon peazy. Still, what I wouldn't give to have a bowl full of it now. 

My husband's family has a Thanksgiving tradition that's also slowly dying out. Right after the dinner most of the elderly would gather at one table and play nickle poker. They'd have their coffee and pumpkin pie while vying for the pot. In recent years, fewer and fewer people have gathered at the table. Most of the older folks have passed, and the younger ones want to see the latest and greatest video game being played. It will only be a few more years now when this tradition is no longer observed. 

There's still hope for the younger ones. Even though my son had never had Thanksgiving dinner at my parents', he has had my mother's stuffing. True, I cooked it, but it was her recipe. I didn't expect the reaction I got, so I only made a little of it. The tradition must be somewhere deep inside his DNA, cause he ate most of it and asked me to make it again the next night. Now, when ever I prepare turkey -- once or twice a year -- I make my mother's stuffing. All this is my long-winded way of asking what other traditions have been forgotten?

Teacher Oz is A Tribute To Educators

Image via WikipediaAnyone interested in history or is a student of history will appreciate this fantastic website called Teacher Oz's Kingdom of History. What drew me in was a link to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." In it, an educator from Texas named Tracey Oz, provides links to sites that explain each of the words in his lyrics. The result is a page that provides detailed information on the major historical events of the 20th Century.
 For instance, the suicide reference links to  Religious Tolerances' explanation of Jim Jones's People's Temple. The links are so in-depth that you can get lost in each one.


I just "wasted" a couple of hours just following the marvelous links on the one page, when I wandered down to the bottom to click on her index. My eyes popped out of my head! The Billy Joel song lyrics page was just the tip of the iceberg. The vast amount of history found in her pages is so comprehensive, so astounding, I'm drooling.
I read somewhere that colleges are having trouble with students using Wikipedia as a resource for their assignments. The problem with Wikipedia is its often incorrect, as the information is entered by volunteers. You don't have to worry about the validity of Ms. Oz's research. I also like that she tells students how to reference her website in their papers.
Its easy to see that this educator has such a passion for her calling that it would be so cool to be her student. But don't take this history lover's word for it. She has received kudos from The History Channel, librarians, historians, grad students, and most importantly other teachers.
This website not only covers the 20th Century History of the US, but Ancient History, Military History, World History, Religious History, Art History, Biographies, etc. etc.
Educators and parents will especially appreciate that she has dedicated one page just for them encompassing education, lesson plans, study skills, teaching links, and all links relating to education.
If that wasn't cool enough, she even has some "fun" topics, like the history of food.
Come on already! Go visit her site! Teacher Oz's Kingdom of History

There is Something Very Wrong With This

Seriously? What happened to respecting our Commander-in-Chief. OMG.

Self-Deprecating Advertising? Really?

Advertising sure has come a long way since I went to school. Recently, my husband and I were snickering ourselves silly when we saw a television ad in which the announcer actually said "Call 333-3333* and We'll Pick Up the Phone." In 2002, TrendSpotter reported an upswing in Self-Deprecating Advertising. A water bottle company issues an undesigned, plain bottle with only the words "Another Bloody Bottle of Water." A handbag designer gets a lot of buzz when they portray their product as barf bags.
But, I wonder if Microsoft Windows Phone 7 $500 million dollar advertising blitz really knows the message their sending. PC World interprets the point of the ad as the phone that will "save us from our phones" and will get users "in and out and back to life."









Sure, their marketers might have you believe that there's a "HUGE" problem with self-involved Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone users who have dropped out of life. But will these users actually consider buying a phone who's advertising message is "Hey, the Windows Phone 7 is so boring you won't be distracted?"
I mean, Really?


*not the actual phone number

Enhance your blog with Zemanta

Image via WikipediaI've been kind of busy lately, but an article by TechCrunch, a news feed I follow on Google Buzz, prompted me to write.
In Find Photos For Your Blog In Three Easy Steps, TechCrunch reported a new startup to help bloggers find art for their columns. The site is called Wylio. What it does is search for photos across the web to add photos to your blog.  Lets face it, the world of blogging would be so much more drab if there weren't some kind of graphic to break up the text. My interest was piqued so I checked it out and have to admit that it looks promising. And then I remembered I already had Zemanta installed. Zemanta does what Wylio does and more. The drawback with Wylio is you have to go to its site and enter a specific keyword, then copy the result and paste it into your blog. Zemanta, however, works right beside you as you are typing your blog. As you type it will suggest meta-data, media, related articles, etc.
Zemanta is an extension for browsers (it supports Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer). It also has plugins for Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. In other words, its got you covered.
I must confess that I had forgotten all about Zemanta's benefits--having turned off what I had deemed unnecessary add-ons a while back to speed up my surfing when things were getting too slow for comfort. But I went a little crazy and turned off practically everything.  After reading the article, I turned Zemanta back on to take another look. I fell in love with it all over again.
Being an artist, I like to create my own artwork, but sometimes I just don't feel like firing up Freehand (or Illustrator, or Photoshop). Sometime's I just want to write. So, I don't always use the photo feature. The photo on the right was pulled up by Zemanta. The art was among 400 pictures that Zemanta found that coordinated with some keyword in this blog entry. It also found around 24 related articles, from RSS links ranging in dates from 1 day ago to 1 year ago.  (Only one was 1 year ago. Most links were within the last 3 months.) Another benefit of Zemanta is that you can take it or leave it. You don't have to use any of their suggestions, but its always handy to have while you are writing.
If you're a blogger, check it out. It might be just what you're looking for.

Guido the Geek Performs Hit on Twitter?

Image via WikipediaWhen White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs admitted his Twitter account had been compromised, a host of feelings popped up for me. Having had one of my websites hacked a while back, I thought well if a site as huge as Twitter could have left its guard down what had happened to me wasn't that bad. It could happen to anyone. The thought of such "huge" people as Gibbs and Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown's wife Sarah getting hacked goes to show how wide spread technology crime has become. Still, don't you find the media's attempts to describe technology a bit funny? I do. In a New York Times article -- Twitter Is Hacked Tuesday Morning - NYTimes.com -- the writer states:

Other attacks, including the first worm to strike the iPhone, launched in November 2009, also paid tribute to Mr. Astley. In rebel-Web parlance, clicking to see Mr. Astley is known as being “rickrolled.” Twitter has since disabled @matsta’s account.

I love that description "rebel-Web parlance." ROTFLMAO.
The article also suggest a mafia-like cybercrime organization, which elicits in me visions of Guido the Geek completing a hit on Twitter account holders. Is there really a "cybercrime organization?" Well, sort of. There are a few groups who's sole purpose is to steal identities. That's what the Justice Department's division of  Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property define as cybercrime organizations. If there is a Cybercrime Mob, is there also a "Godfather?"
I know its not funny to those who were infected. The matter might appear less humorous to me if I'd visited twitter that day. Yes, I have a twitter account, but rarely post any tweets simply because I can't write sentences that short. And, by the time I think of something to say, the subject is too old to comment on. I also don't read tweets off of the website. Like many, I use an app (I prefer NAMBU) to keep up with those I found interesting enough to follow. However, I can go weeks without even firing it up. But, now that I know there's a cybercrime mob, you can bet I'm going to follow @guidothegeek so I can keep up with them.

The Physics of Farm Town

Old hats of the Facebook/MySpace game called Farm Town are familiar with this but its new to me. The geek in me finds it fascinating enough to write about it.
I think about all the years' physicists like Stephen Hawking have been working on this and its right there on a silly facebook page. A Farm Town glitch knocks a hole in the space-time continuum. BELIEVE IT . . . OR NOT.
The glitch allows you to have unlimited dimensions on your farm. In one dimension you can have a crop of pineapples and on the same farm you can have another dimension of crops of tomatoes. These dimensions are not aware of each other, they don't interact in any way. There are no dualities. And, almost, no rules.

OK, stop laughing at me. In order to write this, I have to come clean and admit to being a Facebook gamer. Yikes. There's so little time to do everything I do and yet I often find myself looking at my watch thinking, 'Oh no, I've got to go harvest my (some crop here). Betty White said on her SNL debut, (Facebook) "sounds like a huge waste of time." I actually have gotten a lot out of social networking sites, but that's another column. I was introduced to Farm Town's multi-dimensional universes recently, while assisting a neighbor who'd hired me to harvest her crops. Helping out in Farm Town is beneficial to both parties. Both receive cash and crops, while saving on the valuable fuel commodity. So back to my discovery over the physics of Farm Town, my overall-clad avatar was going along, minding her own business, harvesting this person's crops when suddenly the world started disappearing. It was as though my character was being swallowed up by a black hole! Frightened, I typed, "What's going on????!!" and my neighbor explained what Farm Towners know as "Layering Farms."

Layering farms

Here's the info she sent to me:

Farm #1, completely harvested and plowed.
Open farm in 2 to 4 tabs...depending on how much you wish to layer
tab 1, plant 4 day crop if you have opened 4 tabs
tab 2, plant 3 day crop if you have opened 4 tabs
tab 3, plant 2 day crop if you have opened 4 tabs
tab 4, plant 1 day crop if you have opened 4 tabs
At this time all tabs are still open
All farms are planted
At tab 1, click refresh
when the farm reopens the crop planted on the last tab..(tab 4 - 1 day crop) will be showing. Close other tabs.
When crop is ready to harvest:
harvest crop and delete fields. Refresh, crop showing should be crop planted on tab 2. Once this crop is ready to harvest, do so and then delete fields. So on, so on... After harvesting 4 day crop, plow and begin again. This can be done with all 6 farms...therefore each farm has 4 separate days worth of crop for a total of 16 harvest in 4 days.

I've done it with more than the 4 crops - added 8, 4, 2 hr ones sometimes if I needed them.

I tried it, and even though it's a bit confusing, it worked the first time out. Something happened I should note for those who want to try it. When I did it, it said I had gone offline and asked if I wanted to reconnect. I took a guess and said no. I finished following the directions and it still worked. Now all I have to do is make sure that I harvest the "layers" (I much prefer my definition of alternate dimensions) before they whither. I can't wait to see the black hole effect again.

Never to Old to Avoid the Trekkie Redshirt Effect.

I ran across the link for this at Huffington Post. It is hilarious. But, it reminded me of a lesson I'd learned from my teen-aged son. To confess, I never considered myself a Trekkie--sure I loved the series and had seen all of them along with the movies but I wasn't hard core. I did, or so I thought, know a lot more about Star Trek than my son. But at one of the ComicCon's or other comic convention we attended, I was about to purchase a Star Trek T-shirt, when my son took it out of my hand and told me absolutely not. Puzzled, I looked up at him and he said, "Mom, the red shirt always dies." Don't laugh, but I'd never heard that before, nor had it occurred to me. I'm embarrassed to find out that its common knowledge. Apparently, redshirt is a writer's slang term for a minor character who's sole purpose is to dramatize a dangerous situation with his brutal death. It was apparently first used in Star Trek, but has become such a common technique among writers that it has a Wiki named after it, a book about it, and so on. Just goes to show me how much I don't know.

Logmein.com

This is a site I'd heard about before, but really had no need for it nor did I want others to have the ability to access my computer. Now that my parents-in-law have bit the bullet and gotten a computer, I have found out the need to be able to see their computer when they call. Being able to move the mouse is a major accomplishment for them, so to say the least they are in need of a lot assistance. The only problem right now, is I'll have to go down there and install the logmein software before I can test it out. So stay tuned.
Note: I did install it on my laptop. I had one tiny glitch. I'd forgotten to turn off norton's firewall and the first install failed. Once I'd given the permission to open a port on the network (sorry I didn't write down which one), I tried again to install and it went well.
Check out logmein.com (its free unless you want more features).

Creating a Blogger Template with Artisteer

I decided to test out the blog template creator using the great program called Artisteer. It took some trial and error, but I got it to work. First, I tried to re-create the PastisEnterprises.com look, keeping the same color scheme and header features. That wasn't too difficult. Then I saw that Artisteer supported flash now. (Honestly, I don't care for lots of bells and whistles, but since I was playing around I used it.)
Next, I tried to publish straight to blogger, using Picassa to hold the art work. This is the default in the Artisteer program. It does give the option to export the files to ftp or ImageShack. Since I just wanted to test it out, I went with the default option. Unfortunately, it failed. It didn't like the flash header, so I dropped it and tried again.
The software said it had been published. So I clicked on the view page and the template was there. All the posts were gone, though. So, I bit the bullet and took a look at the code. All appeared to be alright. Sure, Artisteer puts a lot of extra stuff and left out some of the new blogger features, but I can live with that.
So, back to Artisteer. I took out the menus, and other extra's and this time saved the file to my computer instead of publishing directly to my blog.
Then, back on blogger, I went to my dashboard. Then to the Design tab, then selected Upload file. Found the blogger.xml file that Artisteer had exported to my computer, and followed those commands.
It worked.
That piqued my curiosity. Maybe it was just my layout and Artisteer could publish it directly? So, again, with the trimmed version of the layout, I attempted to publish directly to blogger. Once again, it said it was successful, and once again, there were no posts in the blog. So, I reverted to the old layout out.
To make a long story short, if you're going to use Artisteer to create Blog templates, export the file instead of trying to publish it automatically. It shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes and you'll have a functional and, completely personalized, template for your blog.
I think you'll be able to add additional widgets after you get your Artisteer-created template up and running. To do that, you go through your blogger account dashboard and click design, edit pages and then add widgets.
Note: I am using Artisteer version 2.4.0 and there has been an update since then that may have fixed the problem of publishing directly to blogger. I just am short of funds at the moment, but that's another story.

Note to self

Self,

You keep complaining that you can't find the notes you made about such and such. So, I started this blog to send yourself notes. I've installed the Safari Extension and the Firefox Addon for Scribefire. Now, when you're surfin' and run across a cool feature or anything else you take notes on, you just hit the little note bubble next to the url and start typing.

Hold on, hold on. I know you also surf with Google Chrome, but I haven't had a chance to look for the extension for that. First thing's first. Scribe fire's extension requires you to put in a url so there's somewhere to put the information in. So, I'm just setting it up right now.

Love,

me