RSS feeds and a note on pizza

I have been learning about this new thing call RSS (Real Simple Sindication) and it is pretty darn cool. Basically, you can go and download a program which will automatically go and retrieve the updated content you specify from many of your favorite sites, including Weblogs, the NY Times, the BCC, and all types of news organizations. So now you don’t have to go and surf the Web to see what has been updated or check and see if it has been updated, this program will automatically receive the new content as it comes out. It’s a little like Tivo, scanning for your favorite stuff and recording it for your viwieng later. CNET has written a little thing on it and recommends Awasu. I guess you can find different types of RSS listings through search engines like Feedster and Technorati. You will also know if a Web site offers an RSS “live feed” generally when you browse to it and some orange box on the bottom border of your browser pops up that says "RSS" on it. My understanding is that you can just take this icon and drag it into your RSS reader and you will be subscribed, but I am not sure. I haven’t started trying any of it yet, but conceptually, it seems really awesome.

I also found some really cool new blogs, one of which led me to this crazy story about how these illegal Mexican immigrant high-school students raised $800.00 to build an underwater robot and entered it into a national competition against the likes of M.I.T. and won! The tale is like a Disney movie, except for the fact that none of them can afford to go to college and they’re all still poor as can be. However, it's a really interesting story, almost unbelievably interesting. Even if you don't like that story you should check out the story about the fish that ate a basketball ... or tried to at least. Truly a fish after my own heart. :-)

Finally, Jenny wanted more details about my pizza dough making experience. Unfortunately, the story is probably not as interesting as she had hoped. I took the recipe from Emeril, or more specifically, from his section of The Food Network's Website. The hardest part for me really was not getting too much flour everywhere and figuring out when enough flour had been added. I also did not read the recipe correctly the first time over. See the ingrediants list calls for 3 1/2 cups of flour but then the instructions direct you to add 1 1/2 cups. When I re-read this I realized that they meant add this amount initially and then continue adding a quarter cup more at a time until it was slightly sticky. Then you work it on the board, with more flour, until it's slightly tacky. See you have to decearn between sticky and tacky, and you also have to be able to read and comprehend English. Fortunately, I was able to do both in the end. I may have allowed too much time for the dough to rise overall, as we were waiting for a dinner guest to come over, but it still was an amazing dough. I highly recomend that recipe, and the pizza crisper pan available at Bed Bath and Beyond. Good times.

Culinary skillz

I made pizza this weekend ... which is mostly to say I made pizza dough this weekend because in my estimation - that's the hardest part about making pizza. After you have made the dough all you really have to do is add the sauce, seasonings, and other toppings and plop it in a very hot oven. The dough is a little interesting though. I hadn't made dough in years so it was definitely an experience. My girlfriend really liked it.

The hardest part about making the pizza - other than making the dough - was finding the items I needed, like a pizza cutter, ingrediants, and a great big cutting board on which to cut the pizza. Publix (the main grocery store chain in Florida) was closed because it was Easter, and when you are in a town geared towards Publix, and only Publix shopping, it's not easy to shop any other way.

Otherwise, my weekend was fairly routine. I got more kitchen items, which was very cool. But the fishing trip had to be cancelled because the husband of the couple we were going fishing with had to go out of town at the last minute for work, and so things had to be packed and cleaned and all of that stuff.

My fish is going to die I think. For those of you that are not up to date on my fish saga, it all started when my girlfriend and I went to a wedding where one of her close friends was getting married - on Fort Lauderdale Beach during spring break no less - which made for an exciting ceremony. (I think my favorite part was the plane flying the marquis sign over the cermony throughout for Hustler lingerie. It was a total photo op because you could get the bride, groom, priest, and Huster marquis sign all into the same shot.) In any event these beta fish were the center piece of every table at the reception. So being dutiful wedding guests, everyone at our table grabbed a bowl. We were quite a greedy table I suppose, but we were also one of the most fun tables so we had them comin. In any event, my fish is just not happy. For awhile he wouldn't eat. I'm still not sure he eats. He mostly just sits there in the bowl. My grilfriend's fish is happy and swims all over and enjoys his plant and .... I think my fish is going to die. :-(

My herbs are still alive. I've been growing rosemary, basil, and parsley. Well I have been really bad about watering them this last week ... somehow I forgot, and I thought for sure that they were done for, but a little water and bam, they're back. So my plants are happy just with a little water and my fish is miserable no matter what. Maybe I should stick to plants and cooking....

One more down

Another week draws to a close.

It was a fairly cool week. I finished an article and sent it off to my co-author. Perhaps soon we shall become published authors. And not just Reader's Digest published authors either. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I had been working on this article forever, and I never thought I would actually finish it. It kept getting pushed off for a myriad of reasosns, but finally at least a rough draft of it is complete. *sigh of satisfaction*

I got to argue with another attorney. That's always exciting. I swear the number of attorneys out there that don't have the slightest clue as to what they are doing often boggles my mind. People should really take the time to learn the law once in awhile. Oftentimes, they actually know just enough to be dangerous but not enough to be fully competant. Then there are exceptional ones out there that get to take the grief for all the bad ones.

I've been posting on other people's blogs. It's kind of cool. I never really know if they reply to my comments or not ... but it's cool to find other people out there just sort of writing about their lives. One person even wrote a comment on mine to thank me. That was totally cool. I love comments. I'm a comment whore really. I wonder what blogs will be to historians. Oftentimes, historians have had trouble reconstructing the past because not enough people kept journals - which while are subjective accounts of what was happening, when read together help give you at least some picture of the past. Now everyone seems to have a blog. The question is for how long will they be preserved - these little bytes of information floating about the Web, contained on some server somewhere in the world. Will they still be there in 50 or 100 years for review?

My girlfriend and I had fishing plans for the weekend, but they fell through it seems last night. So now we have a calm weekend. Mine is more calm then hers, however, because she has an Easter event to help put on for Saturday, but still it is cool. This is our second calm weekend in a row, which is cool because we haven't had any in 6 months, and I'm sure that if I don't just start enjoying them now I'll miss them even more when things start getting hectic again.

I think one of my friends stopped speaking to me. We had been friends for 9 years. I am not really sure what caused the communication breakdown exactly. As far as I know, I didn't do anything other than ask him about $100 he's owed me for over one year. (I had lent him money when he lost his job and no longer had enough money to eat. He had paid back part of it but never all of it.) *shrug* Not much you can do about that one.

It doesn't matter though. It's Friday. It's Easter weekend. We're almost into April. Spring is here. If I were still in school I'd be stressed out about finals or something probably at this point, and looking forward to summer break. I miss summer breaks. I don't miss finals though. :-)

Planning

This Terri Schiavo case really has been a wake-up call to a lot of people. Suddenly, estate planner's offices are busy with random people seeking to obtain a living will - and hopefully, after being fully informed, a designation of healthcare surrogate. It is terribly unfortunate that Mrs. Schiavo did not have one when all of this occurred. I suppose one never thinks that they will need one ... until they do.

I was really surprised at how motivated Congress suddenly became to save this woman's life - after she has been on life support for ... 15 years. Lots of people die every day and our country has a ton of issues that require their attenion - icluding a war, a budget, tax reform, universal health care, the environment, welfare, minimum wage, inflation, the deficit, health and safety. What gets them off of their vacation though? A woman in a persistent vegitative state. It was rather un-Republican like as well - to become so involved in a family's private affairs, and interfere with State court rulings. And the President returned from a vacation in Crawford, Texas to sign the legislation as well. I do not think he even cut his vacation short for the tsunami.

I know there are a lot of people out there that think that they know the right thing to do in this situation, but I really think that they cannot. It is a personal decision as to whether or not you want to be kept on some sort of life support. It is something only she could really answer, and as she is incapacitated, only those closest to her could decide what she would have wanted. A bunch of Monday morning quarterbacks watching a few minutes of tape cannot conclude what the woman in the picture would want or how she viewed this topic. I really do not see how Congress, where most of the members have only watched a couple of tapes of the woman, can interfere with courts that have actually heard all the testimony and evidence regarding what this woman wanted. Seems ridiculous.

Planning could have saved the family from all this pain and all this mess.

Changes

Alright ... so I had dreams and hopes and aspirations for my blog to be cool and to have my friends and other people randomly post on it and to have thought provoking discussions and ideas being shared and passed back and forth at all hours. It was to be cool. Then I realized a couple of things: 1) my friends do not seem to like to visit and write on blogs ... or at least not mine; 2) other people are already doing a pretty good job on a lot of this - http://www.foreignpolicy.com/index.php has good political discussion blogs and http://o-n-a.blogspot.com/ has random facts and info, http://h2g2.com is for all you DNA fans, and http://uselessjunk.com has you covered for all that is useless; and 3) my friends like receiving my weekly emails more than coming to some Webpage to read my senseless musings.

So now I am stuck. I have nothing left to offer except for my own writing. I still have to decide what I want to post here. Not sure how interesting it is to write about my life. Perhaps I could write quite a bit about my thoughts and ideas and such. Or I could bitch and moan about the injustices of the world. I'm not sure anyone will ever read any of it, but it may be cathartic.

You know what bugs me about Blogger? People that have taken the really cool domain names often have not updated their blogs in about 4 years! What the heck? They should expire or something dammit. Share the wealth ... err ... the domain names.

Well let's see what happens...

Intro

I hope to allow this to be a fairly loose forum where people can post their viewpoints and ideas and raise interesting thoughts that lead to progressive discussion. The posts can concern anything so long as they are thought out and at least a little respectful to everyone else on the blog.