Mmm. . . Bacon!

Being the bacon lover I am, I have always wondered about how much bacon goes into an ounce of bacon bits but wasn’t willing to buy an accurate scale to find out. The geeks at cockeyed.com did the experiment themselves.

  Price Package Size Cooked yield Price per cooked oz. Price per slice
Bacon Bits $1.89 3 oz. 3 oz. $0.63 31?
Raw Bacon $5.99 16 oz. 4.75 oz $1.30 63?

As you can see from this chart, the Oscar Mayer package of bacon bits are a good price for their weight. Bacon is priced like diamonds: The smaller the pieces, the cheaper they are per ounce.

It’s good to finally know the conversion factor of 16 oz. of raw bacon cooks down to 4.75 oz. My pricing is very different because I tend to buy in bulk and when things are on sale, but the bit price per ounce still wins, just not by as much: $0.39 vs. $0.53.

Mmm… Bacon!

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Posted in categories food, with tags

Pac-Txt

From a geek entertainment standpoint, this has to be the stupidest thing ever.

“Mixing the classic VIC-20 text-adventure games’ style with the enthralling plot of Pac-Man for the ultimate in retro gaming action, we present Pac-txt.”

Play Pac-Txt. You’ll be bored in about 1 minute.

Pac-Txt

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Colored Tile Illusion

Tiled Block

No wonder it’s so hard to make paintings. The brown tile in the center of the top face and the yellow tile in the center of the side facing left are the same color.

This is one of many illusions from Beau Lotto’s LottoLab Illusion pages. They say that their “AIM is to explain and explore HOW and WHY we see what we do.”

Colored Tile Illusion

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Incendio

The “Latin Guitar World Fusion” band Incendio played last weekend in a great free outdoor concert at Gardens of the World. There wasn’t much information available, and the local ads listed the band’s style as “latin fusion”, which didn’t really motivate me to go. But the day of the show I was listening to Al Di Miola, and realized that the his music could be described that way, so let’s give it a try.

The music was a nice blend of a bunch of styles, with no one of them overpowering the others. The sound was great (and even mixed well) and they’re playing was excellent. Give them a try if you get the chance. I’ll be picking up a CD soon.

For more, check out Incendio’s website and MySpace page. Both have music streams.

Incendio

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China Bans Reincarnation in Tibet

The entire story is quoted below because it’s short and news links tend to go away after a couple of weeks. Google the headline to get source links — lots of them will show up (over 1000 as of this writing).

Published: Aug. 3, 2007 at 7:26 PM

BEIJING, Aug. 3 (UPI) — China’s communist leaders have forbidden reincarnation without government permission in largely Buddhist Tibet.

The reincarnation ban is part of a 14-part regulation issued by the Chinese government in an attempt to limit the influence of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan religious leader, the Times of London reported Friday.

The People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet in 1950 and has attempted to consolidate its control of it since, designating it an autonomous region.

Since the 12th century, Tibetan Buddhists have believed that reincarnated important religious leaders, known as tulkus, can be identified in young boys.

Because tulkus have a large influence in the Himalayan region, the Chinese government has frequently sought to control the process of identifying the boys.

The new regulations, which go into effect September 1, 2007, will make it illegal to identify the child reincarnation of the Dalai Lama without the approval of Chinese authorities.

China bans reincarnation

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Alchohol Sites

Yeah, I know it’s not spelled right. I was searching for a nice quote to open this up, but spelled it like that. There are quite a few “drug treatment and alchohol abuse” websites. You would think they would bother to spell it right if it’s their business. I’m easily sidetracked; sometimes it’s best to just get it out of the way first. We’ll have to settle for this old quote from Homer Simpson: “I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer.”

I received a slightly used Wacky Web Sites calendar for my birthday, and that’s what got me started on the quote search. Here are a couple of quote-related sites from it.

First Drink of the Day is an animated manic-monkey-musical about the hair of the dog. Their main page is rather good.

Once again we learn that websites keep moving. The calendar offers up a page that no longer exists, but at least they left a forwarding address. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has a typically useless government page called Drug Calculator that will actually do multiplication and addition for you! Once you confess your sins to it, it lets you know how much you spent and what you could have bought instead. It let you know that for the $7,200 that you could spend on beer every month (100 drinks per “setting”, 9 times per week) you could instead have had both a wildlife safari in Africa and a trip from NYC to London on the Concord.

Oops, there are no more Concord flights. And there was no place on the form to include champagne brunch.

alchohol

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Bits of Skits

There are no instructions. Anywhere. Just click on one of the pictures to get a short Monty Python video at the Wall of Python.

The site has more stuff hidden away on their main page, also without instructions, including a few categorized walls of pictures and Photo Soup, where you can stir the soup by adding words.

Bits of Skits

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California Traffic Law Email

Lots of people have received the bogus email about new traffic laws going into effect in California. The biggest concern seems to be the requirement to use a hands-free phone while driving. The law did go into effect July 1, 2007, but won’t be enforced until July 1, 2008.

Urban Legends details some of what’s right and what’s wrong with the email. The fine for not using hands-free, when it goes into effect, is only $20. According to an article in a local paper, “The CHP said it plans to launch an educational campaign as the true deadline approaches.”

Meet the New Word…

…Same as the Old Word. Sudoku, DVR, smackdown and ginormous. These are some of the recent additions to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, according to a Fox News story. The story also says that ginormous can be traced back to 1948. DVR and smackdown have certainly been in common usage for quite a while.

Merriam-Webster’s website offers a sampling of the new words that are available in the 2007 Collegiate Dictionary, adding hardscape and perfect storm to article’s list.

New dictionary words

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Fourth Pictures

4th postcard

Time to send out those 4th invitations? Well, maybe a little too late, but there’s a great collection of old postcards that could liven up what you’re going to send. It’s really a history site but I prefer the postcard page.

Tom Kelley Studio

Tom Kelley Studios

I met Tom Kelley through my girlfriend. You probably don’t know, but she knows, that I’m not often impressed by photographers’ materials. Because of that, she was very surprised when I said “Wow” about Tom’s site.

Tom is a highly-acclaimed advertising photographer whose work has appeared in numerous books, magazines and exhibitions and, of course, advertising media. His images are available as Limited edition fine art photographs at a number of galleries.

My credentials, to help you decide if my opinion makes any difference: I’ve been taking pictures for 25 years and have a photo degree. I’ve been doing artwork since I was 10 (probably younger, but does it really count then?) and I was even displayed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for a couple of days (kid work, I’m not good enough to be on display there as a pro).

Check out Tom’s work. He’s probably pricey, but as you can see, you get what you pay for. I know where I’m going when I need to get my picture taken.

Tom Kelley Photography

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Win XP: Places Bar

I customized it once, then couldn’t remember the name of it to figure out how to do it again. It took an hour to figure the name out. What is the Places Bar, you ask?

When you save or open a file in an application that uses Windows XP’s common dialog box, chances are that you use the Places bar on the left side of the dialog box to speed up your navigation. It shows up to five places, such as “My Documents” or “My Computer”, that you can to quickly go by clicking on them.

As explained in this mvps.org article, you can customize the Places bar three ways: by editing the local group policy with the Group Policy Editor, by editing the registry entry “HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ comdlg32 \ Placesbar”, or by using TweakUI. The easiest and best way is to use the MS Powertoys program TweakUI. Go to its Common Dialogs, select custom places bar and change at will.

TweakUI is a must-have with so many features that I sometimes forget they exist, as in this case. If you don’t have it, go to Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP and get it. The “ClearType Tuner” available on the same page is also a nice addition, especially on LCD displays.

Internet Radio Day Of Silence

Internet Radio Stations around the country are protesting a proposed increases of over 300% to royalty rates on streaming audio broadcasts by partaking in the Internet Radio Day of Silence. Read about it more in either the LATimes article or Washington Post. (LA times articles are available at no cost for only one week.)

There is a lot more information at SaveNetRadio.org. The short story is that many of them say that the fees are higher than their revenue and they will have to shut down; they want the same fees as satellite radio.

Lake-ity Split

A five-acre glacial lake disappeared between March and May. It is now a 100 foot deep crater in Chile’s southern Andes. There have been no earthquakes in the area that could have caused cracks in lake bottom.

Missing Lake

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Update 7/28/07

The CNN link went away, so try these. (Reminder: AP news stories are no longer available 15 days after posting.)

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19353905/
www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3300709

and a slightly different one:
www.patagoniatimes.cl/content/view/117/24/

Art and Music Tidbits

I’ve got nothing, so here’s some stuff that’s isn’t deserving of its own post.

Trivia: Named after the British “Unemployment Benefits, Form 40”, pop-reggae band UB40 was formed in a welfare line in 1978.

Brian Eno has an new “DVD/Art Software Package” named “77 Million Paintings“. It consists of an interview DVD, a 52 page illustrated book, and a software disk, which is really what the package is about. The software creates a constantly evolving painting on your screen, and creates music to go along with it.

Gizmodo loves Frankie Flood’s pizza cutters. Me too. Their article doesn’t have, but here is, the link to his exhibit at the University of Illinois School of Art and Design’s MFA Thesis Exhbition 2004

Brian Eno and David Byrne are offering for download all the multitracks from two of the songs on their album “Bush of Ghosts”. The 24-track session of the songs, “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody”, are available in MP3 and wav formats, with all tracks available individually or with all tracks from the song in a single zip file. You are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like.

Art and Music Tidbits

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xFolk Tagging App

SEO | XFN | SOIC | xFolk | RSS | RDF | XML | PHP | XSL | xPath | XMLT | OWL | WDSL | UDDI.
Social Engines | Joomla | semantic mark up | Web 2.0 | keyword density | Atom feed | folksonomy | Tag Cloud | Feedburner | Technorati | Pingerati | digg | de.licio.us.

And many more.

So many TLAs and ETLAs*. So many people and websites creating and propagating terminology. Far too many acronyms and concepts for me to bother worrying about knowing them all, especially since this is just one little corner of the knowledge.

I’m getting to know more of it than I planned on by helping out on a project. If you know what half of the above jargon is about, you might be interested in my xFolk Cloud and Tag Generator. The page it’s on might move later, so get there by the Tech Projects page.

* TLA — Three Letter Acronym
ETLA — Extended Three Letter Acronym

Top Disposable Email Sites

I mentioned disposable email a long time ago. I don’t use the service I wrote about then very often any more; it wasn’t working for a while, so I found a different one: SpamGourmet.

Sizlopedia‘s list of the Top 20 Temporary and Disposable Email Services doesn’t include SpamGourmet. Disposable addresses really are useful to keep the spam away, and you should have one for when you need to provide an email to sign up for something, but want to avoid another mailing list.

Disposable Email

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Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

Here’s the way the story starts:

WANTS PAWN TERM DARE WORSTED LADLE GULL HOE LIFT wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry Putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.

Wan moaning Ladle Rat Rotten Hut’s murder colder inset.

“Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainersi”

There are a lot more stories written by Howard L. Chace at Kevin Rice’s ANGUISH LANGUISH PAGE. If you’re confused by what what’s quoted above, start with THE ANGUISH LANGUISH.

I discovered Chace because of an design book that used the text from Ladle Rat Rotten Hut in its examples. It took a while to find out who actually wrote it. Rice’s site is the only place I found any more writings than LRRH.

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

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Calling All Leopards

Forest guards in western India are using cell phones with ringtones of cows mooing, goats bleating and roosters crowing to lure curious leopards that are looking for an easy meal into a cage. I’m sure the live goats they used to use as bait heartily approve.

Calling All Leopards

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