Category Archives: Helpful Hints

My Time Times Ten

Homeschooled children in the kitchen

It’s Friday and I will start with a food thought this week.  I’m a fan of every cooking magazine on the planet, as you should know by now. One of the things many of them have is some sort of time estimate on recipes – this long to prep, this long to cook. Those estimates are usually pretty far off. The reality is that I can do mise en place for almost any recipe faster than most folks in my home and even the slowest of us around my house can do it faster than a real beginner. Our skills make those estimates inappropriate and incorrect.

We also have a cook top that puts out more BTU‘s than does our furnace, so we can cook at restaurant temps (I won’t bore you with the tale of the 6 weeks it took me to relearn how to cook this way after cooking on an electric cooktop for years). This means that often the cooking times are often off as well.  Fascinating stuff, I know, but what does this have to do with you? Continue reading

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The Cloud

Bowl of clouds

I use a number of services that live in the cloud – you probably do as well. Dropbox for file storage and sharing is one and it was down yesterday. Maybe you use Google’s suite of services – Gmail‘s outages have been well-documented and I know there have been issues with Google Docs as well. There are many others.
Beyond the cloud, many businesses have come to rely on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Each has suffered a significant outage recently and in the process the businesses built around them have suffered as well. So? Continue reading

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Filed under digital media, Helpful Hints

Respect

Yet another over 40 friend got the sack yesterday. It had nothing to do with his age nor with his competence. Mostly, like many of my pals who’ve been shown the door over the last few years, it was about a change of direction. As I speak to them, most of my friends had an inkling that something was amiss. Interesting projects were given to others. They weren’t invited to meetings that concerned areas in which they were involved. Certain people seemed to be avoiding them. There are always signs – we just choose to ignore them or we notice and get angry but don’t do much. So here’s a request for both the soon to be terminated and those doing the firing. Continue reading

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Filed under Helpful Hints, Reality checks