Tag Archives: Google

Vichyssoise

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Another cold soup.

Mike and I got on the cold soup kick the other day when I made gazpacho. We decided to try a few different cold soups for dinner, leaving the big meal of the day to lunch time (when it really should be eaten).

So I got online and did a Google search for cold soup recipes. I wound up on a page at allrecipes.com with a list of cold soups. I printed off a few recipes that sounded good. But the one I decided to try first was for vichyssoise, a leek and potato soup. The recipe was submitted to the site by Derek Parker and had a rating of 5 out of 5 stars.

The soup was quick and easy to make. I followed the recipe quite closely and was rewarded with an extremely tasty soup. We had it for dinner last night and I just had a little post-lunch snack of some more.

If you try this recipe, serve it with a crusty bread, like a loaf of French bread. That’s the only thing it needed to make a perfect summer meal.

Dusting Off the Horses

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Mike and I take a ride in the desert.

Since I’ve begun flying, I’ve not only been neglecting my motorcycles, but I’ve been ignoring my horses.

Mike and I have two horses. While I know that might seem like a big deal to the folks living in cities who are reading this, it isn’t a big deal at all when you live in Wickenburg, AZ. Much of the property here is “horse property” — that means that property where you’re allowed to have horses. We have 2-1/2 acres of “horse property” and wonderful trails in the desert are only minutes away by horseback.

Our horses spend most of their time in a one-acre corral down in Cemetery Wash, where they have plenty of room to walk around or stretch out in the sun. But they spend most of their time standing by the water trough, napping. Except near dinner time when Cherokee, my Paint Quarter Horse, decides it’s important to pace in the same path over and over until we feed him and his buddy Jake.

Some of my neighbors have horses, too. It’s easy and not terribly expensive. Hay costs $8-$10/bale here and a bale can last a horse 4-5 days. The only other major expense when you board your horse at home is shoeing — figure $55 per horse every 6 to 8 weeks. Cherokee, because of all his pacing, needs new shoes every 6 weeks; Jake could go 8 weeks, but we get them shod together to save our farrier the bother of making two separate trips.

Our horses get fed twice a day. We feed them in the morning before we go to work and in the evening, usually right before dinner. They make horse poop (of course) and we use an ATV with a sort of drag trailer behind it to break up the poop. It dries up in this hot, dry air and doesn’t even really smell. When the wash flows, it takes all the broken up poop downstream where it probably makes a really good fertilizer.

They don’t need a barn. This is the Arizona desert. The coldest it ever gets is in the high 20s, and that’s only at night during the coldest months — December and sometimes January. They grow heavy winter coats that shed (like a dog’s) in the spring. They’re shedding now; every time we brush them a bunch of hair comes off. We let the hair fall to the ground where we brush them and birds come around and pick it up to use it for their nests.

The horses do need a shade to keep them out of the hot sun. And plenty of fresh water — about 15-25 gallons per day per horse, depending on how hot it is. We have a hose running down to their yard and attached to a water trough that automatically keeps the same water level all the time. Easy.

So it really isn’t much of an expense or a bother to have horses living at home with you.

We’re fortunate to have miles and miles of riding trails in the empty desert behind our house. Our house doesn’t border state land, but the house behind us does. To get to the trails, we either ride up the unpaved road from our house to our “next door” neighbor’s house and go through the gate there or just ride down Cemetery Wash. So we can saddle up at the tiny feed barn we have halfway up the driveway to our house and ride out from there. Easy.

Since I started flying, I have a lot less time to do things like go horseback riding. Still, every once in a while, Mike talks me into it or there’s a ride with the Wickenburg Horsemen’s Association that I can participate in. And I’m always glad to be back in the saddle again.

Today, we had a nice, leisurely, Easter Sunday ride from our house, down the wash, through the slot canyon, and out into the state land adjoining Rancho de los Caballeros. Los Cab (as the locals call it) is our best “dude ranch” and it has miles and miles of maintained trails out in the State and BLM land. We were out for about 2 hours and took a bunch of different trails we hadn’t been on in a long time. I had my old GPS turned on and tracking the trail we rode — I’m making a map of the trails out there using the GPS — you can see our path on a topo map (courtesy of Terrabrowser software) below.

Trail Ride Topo

Our house is just below the W in Wash.

Oh, and if you want to see how it looks from a satellite in orbit around the planet, look at this:

Trail Ride Photo

The ride was 4.3 miles long and we were moving for about an hour and a half of that time. We ran into two other trail ride groups (from Los Cab) while we were out there.

Today was an incredible day. High 70s, light breeze, not a single cloud in the sky. What more could you ask for on Easter Sunday? The ride was just long enough to be enjoyable without being tiring for either us or the horses. I think we all enjoyed it.

When we got back, we hosed the horses off good. Jake took it like the ranch horse he is (or was) while Cherokee wiggled around, pretending he didn’t like it. They both rolled down in the sand, getting all dirty all over again, when we brought them down to their corral at the end of the ride.

A nice way to spend the morning. Makes me wish I could find time to do it more often.

On Mailing Lists

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Talk about junk e-mail!

Whew! I just unsubscribed myself to the last e-mail list I was subscribed to.

An e-mail list, if you’re not familiar with the term, is like a topic based mailbox that list subscribers can send messages to. When you send a message to the list, it’s automatically sent in e-mail to everyone on the list. The idea is that you can use a list to get information about a topic from people who might have answers.

The operative word here is “might.” A lot of times, subscribers won’t have an answer but they won’t hestitate to say “I don’t know the answer but wish I did” or “this might be the answer” or “that question is off-topic” or “you should ask that question in this other list, too” or “I just read the answer to that in this other list” or “why the hell do you want to know that?” Then the topic starts expanding in every direction, sprouting more questions and answers, only some of which are vaguely related to the original. Arguments develop with differences of opinion sometimes getting nasty. So one question can generate dozens of e-mail messages that may or may not have any value to the questioner. And if you didn’t ask the question in the first place and don’t care about the answer, it’s even more junk to wade through.

Of course, you can always take a list in “digest” format. That’s when they put a whole day’s worth of messages into one big, fat e-mail. I think it’s worse because you can’t even use a message’s subject line to determine whether it’s something you want to read (or delete).

One of the mail lists I was subscribed to didn’t have a specific topic. It was a strangely quiet list, with no messages for days on end. Once, I thought I’d unsubscribed to it — it was that dead. Then, suddenly, someone would send a message and twenty people would respond to it. Like they were all lurking out there, waiting for someone to make the first move so they could join in the fray.

The really weird thing to me is the amount of time that passes between the original message and the responses. Sometimes it’s as litle as a few minutes! Even in the middle of the night! Like people are sitting at their computer, watching every e-mail delivery, ready to dive in with a response when a message appears. Egads! Get a life!

Another list I belonged to briefly prevented me from posting questions or answers. Even though I was a subscriber, my messages were considered spam. Wow. Hard not to take that personally. I think I lasted about a week. Very frustrating when every time you try to chip in with a little assistance your message gets bounced back at you with a spammer accusation.

Why did I join these lists in the first place? Well, for a while I was feeling a bit isolated. I live in my own little world here in Wickenburg, one that’s very light on high-tech people. Very light. Lighter than the hot air the local “computer experts” spout while they’re pretending to their customers that they know what they’re talking about. I started feeling as if I were missing out on new developments in computer technology. That I lacked a reliable forum for getting answers to computer-related questions. That I had no place to turn to when I needed help.

I heard about a list from a friend and got mildly interested. When one of my editors praised it, I thought I was missing out on something really valuable. I jumped in. With both feet. And the barrage of e-mail began.

I’ve made worse mistakes. But not many lately.

So now I’m off the lists. All of them. My mailboxes are feeling much lighter these days.

I’m back to doing what I’ve been doing for the past few years. When I have a question, I hop on the Web and Google to get the answer.

Get Me a Spelling Checker!

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I used to know how to spell.

Plagiarism is not spelled plagerism. How embarrassing to have spelled it incorrectly — in the title, no less — of my previous post. I just fixed it.

Spelling checkers in word processing software have made me lazy. Why know how to spell a word when my word processor will simply underline it for me to call it to my attention if I get it wrong? Or, worse yet, simply fix it for me, as Microsoft Word often does? In exchange for convenience, just a little more of my mind is being sapped away by disuse.

WordPress, which I use to maintain this site, does not have a built-in spelling checker. That’s why you’ll see so many typos and misspelled words here. There’s no red underline to flag possible problems, so I just don’t notice them. I have, however, made a special effort to look up the spelling of words I’m not sure about (such as disuse and misspelled earlier in this entry). I do that with the Dictionary widget that’s part of Mac OS X. I leave it open and press F12 whenever I need to use it. Enter what I think is the right spelling and let Dictionary tell me if it recognizes the word. If it doesn’t, I think it out, trying to come up with the right spelling. It’s a good exercise for my brain.

The Dictionary widget is also useful when I’m reading an article online and need a word defined. Rather than try to glean meaning from use, I can just fetch the darn meaning to have a firmer grasp of the word and build my vocabulary.

If I can’t figure out a word’s spelling, I use Google. I enter my best guess at a word in Google’s search box — for example, plagerism — and Google instantly responds, “Did you mean plagiarism?” Uh, yeah. That’s what I meant.

Now at this point, Miraz, if she’s reading, is asking herself why I don’t use MarsEdit, like she does, to work with my WordPress blog. I tried it, but I wasn’t very impressed. I really don’t like using a lot of different software to complete a task. It’s more to learn. It’s more to figure out when it doesn’t work right. In my case, I couldn’t get MarsEdit to handle pictures the way I needed it to and I didn’t want to invest the time to make it work. I’ll probably use MarsEdit to do my blogging during the summer months when I’m away from a handy Internet connection most of the time.

So if you find a misspelled word in these blog entries, have patience with me. It could be my flying fingers unable to hit the keys in the right order. Or it could just be that I thought I knew how to spell the word…but was wrong.

Snagged the Server!

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Another eBay success.

I managed to win an auction for a copy of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. Apple sells this for $995; I got it for $449 including shipping. According to the seller, it’s in an unopened box, so it sounds legal to me.

I’m excited about this. I’ve been sitting on the fence about switching to Mac OS X server for about two years now, but my recent dealings with the folks who sell WebSTAR made me decide to take the big step up. I run a bunch of Web sites on the G4 in my office. I also run a FileMaker Pro database Web publishing server, Webcam software, and audio streaming software.

I used to run e-mail there, too, but the IP address I had was somehow linked to a spam account and all my e-mail was getting bounced from the sender as spam. What a hassle that was. So I moved my theflyingm.com domain name to a GoDaddy.com server and use that for e-mail and hosting my podcasting files. Although I now have a different IP address, I think I’ll keep theflyingm.com on GoDaddy’s server. They offer a ton of bandwidth for a very affordable price.

Now, I need to come up with a plan of attack for the new server. I want to take my time about setting it up, so I’ll probably start by moving all the Web sites I host over to GoDaddy.com for a month. Then I’ll set up my new server’s features, step-by-step, and get the Web sites all in place. I’ll “flick the switch” back to my server and, with luck, there won’t be any service interruption at all.

Those of you reading this who don’t know about GoDaddy.com and have a need for domain name registration or Web site hosting should really check them out. They’re affordable and reliable and have excellent free technical support by phone. (E-mail tech support stinks.) They also have a lot of how-to documents on the site to answer the easy questions.

Speaking of how-to documents, I got an answer to my MIME Mapping question that pointed me to a file named .htaccess. A Google search got me the information I needed from the JavaScriptKit Web site’s Web Building Tutorials pages. I think this will be a gold mine of information for me as I work directly with a Unix-based Web server for the first time.

As I work my way through this project, I’ll probably report my progress here and provide detailed how-to information in the companion Web site for my Mac OS books — that’s where most readers interested in this kind of stuff are mostly likely to look for how-to information from me.

Oddly enough, I haven’t felt this excited about a computer project for a long time. I’m really looking forward to the challenge and to learning the new things that’ll make it all work.

Oh, and the good news is that I didn’t win the other hard disk auction.