The Mom & Pop Meatball Factory

My step-father Victor makes some of the best meatballs and sauce on the planet. He does it just 4 or 5 times a year, and when he's making his meatballs, it's an occasion in the neighborhood. He always makes enough to share around and to freeze for future use. No holiday or special occasion would be complete with Victor's meatballs and sauce. Victor is 87 and when he's gone his meatball recipe will go with him.

I got my updated Sheetz MasterCard a couple of days ago. I find it ironic that the expiration date is 7/11.

Verizon DSL Tech Support - Kudos!

In the past I have not had good experiences with Verizon DSL Tech Support. So when I couldn't get my new MacBook to wirelessly connect to my router, I was not looking gleefully forward to calling that dreaded number again.

Things started in the usual, anticipated way. First call, bad connection, had to hang up and retry. Second call, worked my way through the annoying menu system and finally got directed to Mac DSL support. Held for several minutes before an automated voice announces they are over capacity, please hang up and retry later. Call number 3, the voice recognition suddenly seems to have become hearing-impaired necessitating at least three repetitions of every command. Finally, however, I reach a real live tech support human.

This guy was fantastic! He quickly diagnosed the problem (needed modem/router firmware upgraded) and walked me through the process. Once we got the MacBook online, the iPod Touch went offline. So, he worked to resolve that issue. He was extremely courteous, pleasant and competent. 

This is my first Verizon Tech Support issue that didn't end up with me frustrated, angry and demanding a supervisor. Big props to this individual!!

Bumpy

Sabotage and The Secret Agent

Recently I read the Joseph Conrad novel The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. The book tells the tale of an ordinary man who gets caught up in London's anarchist community in the late 19th century.

I had seen 1996's The Secret Agent starring Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette, Gerard Depardieu, Christian Bale, Robin Williams, and Eddy Izzard a couple of years ago. This film was well worth watching and true to the Conrad book. In fact, the movie spurred me to read the book.

Last night I watched Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage based on the Conrad novel. Starring were Sylvia Sidney and Oscar Homolka. I was delighted to stumble upon this old film and looked forward to watching it. I was disappointed that this movie did not stay very faithful to the book. This movie was rather superficial and the characters were not well developed. Had I not known something of the characters going in, I wouldn't have understood the motivations behind some of the events.

Plurkerrific!

For the last several days I've been checking out a new social micro-blogging site, Plurk.com. Actually, I'm way past "checking it out," I'm nearing "consumed by" status. I had tried Twitter twice in the past and it just didn't work for me. But Plurk has grabbed me by the *****!

The community is still small but vibrant and enthusiastic, and growing. I think that they, like myself, are excited about being in at the start of something with potentially a great future. Plurkers appear to be a more mature, more sophisticated group. As yet, not a lot of kids appear to be plurkers. I have met a lot of really interesting, wonderful plurkers so far and had a blast!

The quirk of Plurk is the horizontal timeline.Newest items appear at the left and by dragging or using the scroll wheel you can go back in time. It has a bit of a learning curve, but as I got more familiar with it, navigation became relatively simple.

I really like the conversational threads that develop from individual posts and appear in a drop-down window. Sometimes these convos go on for hours with various plurkers jumping in and out as they can.

You can also preface your plurk with a choice of verbs and choose from an assortment of emoticons.

There's a system of karma points with certain plateaus that open new features. For example, when you reach 25 karma points, you're emoticon set increases.

You can group friends into cliques and send private plurks among the members of that group.

Pictures on other image hosting services such as Photobucket, Flickr, and Picasa Web can be linked to as can YouTube videos.

Plurk is not feature-rich. There is no search capability as yet. There isn't a way to ignore a conversation or save one, but it's early days yet.

I'm hooked, as are most of my pleeps. They are the best thing about Plurk ☺.

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Keep Your Weiner Safe

Saw this video on Cali Lewis' GeekBrief.tv podcast.

Thanks to modern technology we can now end senseless weiner tragedies. Seriously, as my dad was a carpenter, looks as though it could be something good. But, how does it know?

SawStop

Thirst for Bottled Water

This is an issue I've been concerned about for some time. I have gotten reusable bottles that I fill at home. I've tried to convince friends to do the same (success limited). After all, most bottled water is just somebody else's tap water, nothing special.

Thirst for bottled water unleashes flood of environmental concerns - USATODAY.com

The Republic of South Africa Owes Me a Million Pounds

From Dr. David Njama Radebe
Director (Payment Approval)
Office of the Treasure - Department Of Finance
Pretoria Head Quarters,
Republic of South Africa

The Treasury office of the Department of Finance here in the Republic of South Africa, has investigated your fund, which has been on transfer process for some period of time.
During the second quarter of the general Financial Auditing in the South African Reserve Bank, the office of the auditing and fund recovery unit, has recovered your fund at the tune of GBP£1,000,000.00, which was to be paid to you through bank-to-bank transfer to your bank account.

After the auditing, the SARB decides that all recovered and returned fund should be paid to their various beneficiaries within 21 days starting from today. This decision was taking by the Board of the auditors and the External Affairs in the Department of Finance (Office of the Treasury), and at present your fund is in the escrow account of the South African Reserve Bank.

It has been understood by our investigation team, that this fund was acquired by you as a result of the initial inheritance of fund, which an agent in South Africa was supposed to remit the fund into your bank account in your country some time ago, although you have not received the fund due to the fact that the South African Revenue Service Department and some other finance entities requested for some payment, including the Inland Revenue Tax

The Department of Finance has signed the released of your fund, and it has also decided that your fund should be paid out to you without any further delay.

For your full identification and completion of your payment, you are hereby advised to send to our agent (Citizens Finance Corp of South Africa), your full information as stated below:

NAME:
AGE:
ADDRESS:
OCCUPATION:
PHONE NUMBER:
FAX NUMBER:
EMAIL:

Don't you already know my name and email? If not why did I get this?

Note that the Department of Finance has ordered and assigned our accredited agent (Citizens Finance Corp of South Africa) to carry out your payment, therefore you should urgently contact them on the following details;

CONTACT PERSON: Prof. SAMSON NGOBENI
COMPANY: CITIZENS FINANCE CORP OF SOUTH AFRICA
POSITION: PUBLIC AFFAIRS DIRECTOR
PHONE: +27 780 531 122

EMAIL: citizensfinaceorp02@gmail.com

PAYOUT AMOUNT: GBP£1,000,000.00
IN WORDS: ONE MILLION BRITISH POUNDS STERLING

Please contact the above person on phone urgently +27 780 531 122 and request them to give you more information on the means which you will receive your fund.
As soon as our agent (Citizens Finance Corp of South Africa) has confirmed to us that you have contacted them, the Department of Finance will proceed to hand over your fund to (Citizens Finance Corp of South Africa) and request them to commence your payment with immediate effect.

Is it Department of Finance or Ministry of Finance or Department of Treasury or Office of the Treasure or ...?

Waiting for your reply for further proceedings.
Regards,

Dr. David Njama Radebe
Department of Treasury
Ministry of Finance
Republic of South Africa.

Two Questions? (1) What kind of morons think this will fool anybody? (2) What kind of morons are fooled by something like this?

Man Buried in a Pringles Can

When I came across this headline, The Man Buried in a Pringles Can - TIME my curiosity was certainly piqued.

It seems the children of Fredric Baur, originator of the now classic Pringles can, respected the wishes of their father when the 89-year-old Baur passed away last month. Apparently the children stopped at a Walgreens on the way to the funeral home to pick up the can

Recycling Energy

Energy recycling is a relatively new process that recovers energy from heat that previously has just drifted away into the air such as the steam that escapes from the cooling towers at a generating station.

According to Tom Casten, who is chairman of Recycled Energy Development, a company that works to capture waste heat from industrial clients and uses it to produce electricity, two-thirds of the fuel burned to generate electricity is lost in the process, mostly as waste heat.

"Recent EPA and DOE studies suggest U.S. industries waste enough heat to generate an estimated 200,000 megawatts of power — nearly 20 percent of what this nation uses. That's enough electricity to replace up to 400 coal-fired power plants." (1)

At the big European-owned ArcelorMittal steel mill in East Chicago, IN, energy recycling creates about half of the electricity it uses each day.

In northern Europe energy recycling is much more common than it is here in the US with some countries generating 35% or more of their electricity this way. The US generates about 8% of it's power this way according to the DOE.

The EPA established the Combined Heat and Power (CHP) Partnership in 2001 to encourage cost-effective CHP projects in the United States. In the years since, the CHP Partnership has helped install more than 335 CHP projects, representing 4,450 megawatts (MW) of capacity resulting in emissions reductions equivalent to removing 2 million cars from the highways. (2)

Image details: Electrical Wires Stretching In Front Of Polluting Smoke Towers served by picapp.com
Sources:
(1) NPR: 'Recycling' Energy Seen Saving Companies Money
(2) EPA Combined Heat and Power Partnership
(3) US Department of Energy