[recipe] Kevin's Winning Corned Beef in a Crock Pot

1 2-3 lb corned beef brisket
5 Carrots chopped
1/2 White onion cut into wedges
5 Medium sized red potatoes cut into 1" cubes
1/2 Head of Cabbage cut into 6 wedges
12oz of your favorite beer (I used Guinness)

put carrots, onion & potatoes into Crock Pot
put brisket into crock-pot and cover with beer until brisket is covered
cook on low for 10-12 hours
take brisket out, put cabbage wedges into crock pot and cook on high for 35 minutes.

1/2 days work = 1 full stomach. :)

[find] Kill a Watt

Power Meter makes such a fun nerd toy, and how I can resist one with such a great nerd name as "Kill a Watt"? Brings me back to my solar car racing days. And now I can use it to race my home appliances against each other.

Buy it from Amazon for $27. Five-star reviews!

(Cred to Wired Magazine for a great article on the Neo-Greens)

[recipe] Todd's Excellent Potato Casserole

6 medium-sized potatoes (I usually use white rose potatoes, but you can use any I think)
1 pint (16 oz.) sour cream
2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 can Campbell’s condensed cream of chicken soup
¼ cup butter or margarine
1/3 cup chopped green onions

Either boil or bake the potatoes (I usually boil them). Peel and then coarsely grate the potatoes.

In a separate pot, over low heat, combine the sour cream, cheddar cheese, condensed soup, butter/margarine, and green onions. Stir until cheese and butter/margarine are melted.

Pour mixture over grated potatoes and mix until evenly combined. Don’t mix too much, or else you will create a smooth texture like mashed potatoes. It’s more desirable (at least to me) to have an airy texture.

Bake in a bowl or dish at 350 deg, for 35-45 min. (before it browns too much).

Eat with a smile.

[homage] Faith in Panama

[ Sung to the tune of Faith by George Michael ;-) ]

Wouldn't it be nice
If listings could be normalized
And ads were served in order by revenue?
But we gotta think twice
Before we give the farm away
Let's keep it up in Sunnyvale not in Mountain View!
Oh but we need some time to code it just right
Haste is waste, don't rush it out the door!
And we are workin' on it with devotion
Well it takes some dedication
But we'll show'em how it's done!
'Cause we gotta have faith...

[ To Advertisers ]

Baby... I know you've got some pain today
But please, please, please, don't go away
tomorrow is a brand new day
Maybe…you'll love everything you see
new EPS, SRDB
And even a replacement for DTC
It used to simply connect two oceans
But Panama is now our NBT*
They'll have to reconsider the foolish notion
that Google's gonna kick our butt
Just wait for Panama!
Yes we gotta have faith…

*Next Big Thing

[find] Cattle Management Software

I will think differently next time when I drive down Hwy 5 ... (though no software in the world will help with the smell)

[sql] Matching on underscore in SQLServer

Just learned that SQLServer uses underscore (_) as a single character wildcard (As oppose to %, which matches to mulitple characters). Thanks for techsoda for the trick.

For example, find rows that where [column] contains underscore:

SELECT * from [table] where [column] like '%^_%' ESCAPE '^'

The ESCAPE keyword specifies the carat as the escape character.

[find] Gorgeous coral pictures

www.seaphotos.com/corals.html

Just gorgeous.

[find] Free conference calls

Free conference call number at www.freeconferencecall.com. With just my Name and Email Address, I now have a (not toll free) number that I can have 100 people call into for 6 hours at a time.

Long live the free world.

[muse] What makes a dazzling search experience?

I remember AltaVista was the coolest thing since sliced bread when it came out. So how did I get converted to Google, like the rest of the world?

Hmmmm.

My current theory: Google offered dazzling search results on "tail terms", by indexing and showing "tail sites" in the results.