The Omnigeek

1 Stick Butter/Margarine
1lb Brown Sugar
1/2 cup milk
1lb Confectioners Sugar
1tsp Vanilla Extract
3/4 cup Peanut Butter
a separate stick of butter

Prepare:

1. Grease a 9×9 baking dish with the extra stick of butter to keep the fudge from sticking.
2. Spoon the peanut butter into a measuring cup.
3. Have the confectioners sugar open and ready to pour.
4. Have your mixer with beaters ready.

Cook:

1. Melt the other stick in a sauce pan (quart size?)
2. Stir in 1/2 cup of Milk and the brown sugar, bring to a boil.
3. Boil for 2 minutes 0 seconds. Too long or not enough is a bad thing.
4. Remove from heat and add in the peanut butter and vanilla, stir until creamy. The vanilla will want to make the solution boil harder for a few seconds. Don’t be surprised!
5. Using the mixer on a middle setting, start beating in the confectioners sugar until you have a smooth creamy mixture.
6. Pour into the baking dish and with a spoon spread it out.
7. Put in the fridge for about an hour long enough for it to set.
   1. Share the beaters with someone, keep the pan for yourself, using a spoon to eat the fudge that was left behind.
   2. Cut into 1″ squares and put in a covered candy dish to serve.
   3. Nom nom nom.

Enjoy:

Disclaimer: I’m not responsible if your jeans don’t fit afterwards or any other conditions that occur.

My life as a BlackBerry owner has seen me through three handsets. I started with a Verizon 8703e, a reasonably functional handset. The browser was terrible and there were not a lot of apps for it. TwitterBerry was my app of choice early in its infancy. But as the developer’s added features (including fetching 200 tweets) it became unusable.

A short term acquaintance with a Pearl 8130 allowed me to browse the Internet better yet TwitterBerry didn’t seem to run well. I switched to TwiXtreme, which seemed to run better. I never got into hand held tweeting with that handset, partially because of the half-keyboard, the other part was the small screen and the apps still did not perform well.

In January of this year, I inherited a Curve 8900 on the AT&T network. I installed TwiXtreme, but again, just couldn’t get into twittering from my hand-held, though it was a nice “cute” app.

Today, I installed the office Research In Motion Twitter Application available from the BlackBerry App World. It installed quickly. I added my twitter login and password, said to remember me and it was off an running.

The app has all the usual features, see your mentions, direct messages and lets you reply to messages, set your status and so on. It does it fast and elegantly. Though it only shows two tweets at a time, it very easily scrolls to older tweets and if its fetching older tweets in the background you don’t see any delay.

It also supports lists, popular topics and search, something not seen in the other apps I’ve tried. And like any good Twitter app, it counts down your available number of characters as you compose your tweets.

Where the RIM Twitter client has impressed me is how it fits in with the Blackberry. You are notified when new tweets arrive (a feature I turned off), when new mentions and direct messages show up along with the rest of your messages. Now, e-mail, FaceBook messages, gTalk notifications, and important Twitter notifications all flow through a single messaging interface.

It also interfaces well with the camera and stored photos. I can initiate a photo from the Twitter app or I can grab an existing photo from my memory card and tweet it out using TwitPic in a very seamless manner.

It is supposed to shorten URL’s, but I’ve not had a chance to test it yet. We will also have to see what the impact on the battery will be with it running in the background all the time.

Pending the battery tests, this looks like one very well done application and its supposedly an open Beta. My version is 1.0.0.37.

At this point, I’d have to give it a thumbs up and recommend others give it a go. Twitter on the hand-held might become fun again.

Today as I was archiving old email I got an idea to figure out just how much information I created or processed for the year.

I’m an e-mail pack rat. I keep most every message sent to me. I do not keep spam, most mailing list messages, etc. So messages where Twitter tells me I have a new follower and similar are not included.

For Twitter, I have to way to count the number I read, nor do I have a way to count Plurk stats or text messages and IM’s sent or received.

I have two separate Flickr accounts, one is for bulk uploads and represents all but around 180 photos which I uploaded to the main Flickr account.

And while photos taken isn’t a social stat, its an interesting number.

Here are the numbers:

From the entire OmniGeek family we wish you and yours a Happy Holiday Season and Prosperous New Year!

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working on a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming training session for my day job. I’m using Microsoft Office 2005′s PowerPoint on a recently upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6.1) MacBook Pro and I’ve had a couple of odd crashes that I’ve not experienced before.

Both times the OS-X window manager blue screened, brought up the Mac “Plasma” login screen and I was able to log back in and continue work. Now while this may be some Snow Leopard vs. M$OFT quirk causing the window manager to die, I’d rather consider other options.

Higgs Bosons

So just what do these sub-atomic particles have to do with this? Well this article explains why some
reputable scientists believe that the Higgs Bosons (I’m not responsible for the headaches from reading that Wikipedia article) are themselves travelling back in time, sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider to prevent it from creating them.

Time-travelling Higgs sabotages the LHC. No, really

from Newscientist.com. The article quotes the New York Times where it humanized the physics writing:

“the hypothesized Higgs boson… might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”

In my case, I’m going to be teaching a subject that the customers want to learn, but I fear the
Pandora’s Box (slightly NSFW image on the page) that I may be opening by teaching it. The topic is about a templating language we use within our tools.

Both of these quasi-reboots (it only rebooted the Window Manager, not the whole OS!!!) happend as I
was putting together one particular slide on “Lists and Hashes”. Something is telling me to not include this slide. Perhaps I’m going to let people know they can wield more power. Is it karma? An omen? An act from the programmer gods? or Higgs Bosons?

Is what I’m about to teach so abhorrent to nature that its instruction is rippling backwards
through time and stopping my PowerPoint slide before I can create it?

Of course, being a science geek, I should point out Occam’s'Razor would suggest I look for a simpler, more logical explanation. In this case, “Microsoft Sucks”.

I’m at a paradox with this. Should I continue? Should I take it as a sign to back off?What are your thoughts? Leave your comments below.

One of the interesting challenges that a lot of people have is being punctual. We tend to run late and unless you live in Key West, where things run on Island Time where what time you show up, just doesn’t matter. People even have trouble guessing how much time has elapsed or how long things will take.

I however seem to have an internal clock that is insanely accurate. I have a quasi-game I play with my wife, where I insist on stupidly accurate numbers as any good science loving geek would do.  Relative to this post, I tend to give time estimates to an accuracy with in a minute, such as: I’ll be there in 17 minutes. What’s odd, is I tend to be correct within that minutes.

Today I pulled two time estimates out of my proverbial derriere. We were in Virginia Beach and my oldest son, Brandon wanted to be texted when we we left. I texted him: “We will be home at 8:52″. We were over 3.5-4 hours away depending on traffic, weather, stops and so on. The SUV was put into park at 8:53:15, a mere 16 seconds over my estimate. Maybe it was the extra nature stop that I didn’t plan for or it was the two cars that turned in front of us as we entered our neighborhood (delayed us by about 15 seconds). A 3.5+ hour drive nailed to a 30 second window.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. Its happens more often than not.

But I’m perhaps more surprised at my other time estimate that at around 2:59pm, earlier in the day my oldest son called wanting to know when we would show up. We still had not had lunch with my younger, hockey playing son. There is no telling how long lunch would take. Chris was not even out of the locker room yet. There is no idea how long the goodbye hugs would take. With no reference point on when we would leave, but I told Brandon “We will be there between 8:45 and 9:00pm”. So off to lunch, hugs good bye, and we were on the road.

8:52:30 was the mid-point of that original estimate. So not only did we pull in within one minute of my mid-point that I texted my son once we were on the road, but I pulled that 15 minute window seemingly totally out of the air.

Yea, bow to my inner-clock.

Now to figure out how to get people to use accurate times on mircowaves and let the the time expire instead of leaving 9 seconds on the clock for the next person.

(Evil Laugh!!!)

We have long envisioned Santa Claus as a jolly fat man in a red suit with elves and magical reindeer spending their lives making wooden trains and so on.

Well that was the old Santa who made toys for your parents. Today, kids want toys from Mattel and Hasbro. They are un-happy with generic dolls and jack-in-the-box’s. Elves don’t make Transformers or stitch Barbie’s latest fashions.

Santa realizing this to be the case several years ago, seeing his stock of trains, wagons, and nut cracker’s build up in his warehouse decided to reorganize. Santa now runs a large toy distribution system and it works like this.

You, the child take your parents to special viewing centers where you can see what toys Santa has available this year. These viewing centers are known as Toys ‘R Us, Walmart and so on. Santa allows your parents to have Christmas year round by selecting toys right away for you. But for Christmas, which is the special time, your parents can request what you want and send that information to Santa.

You used to have to write a letter to Santa letting him know what you want, but now, you can just tell your parents or show them. Santa, who now lives in a large office in Fargo, North Dakota. Its disguised, but I’ll let you in on a little secret. Look for a building with a big “Citicorp” sign. He uses a special card that he gives to each parent. They can use that card and let Santa know the right house, kid, and items that he is to deliver on Christmas night.

Your parents can use this special card while in the viewing centers to tell Santa what you need, or then can use their computer to tell Santa your holiday wishes.

Once your parents use the card to enter the information into Santa’s computers, the order goes to the Elves in North Dakota. They processes the orders and send them on to Elves located regionally. Because the world is so large and the toys no longer come from Santa’s workshop, the local elves handle bringing the toys to your house. They however can’t be seen while delivering the toys, so the sleighs have been disguised as are the elves. They use a brown truck and dress in brown clothes to help hide themselves better.

Santa also employees sub-Santa’s to work at the malls in case you want to get your wish list directly to Santa and not go through your parents. This local Santa will send your Christmas needs to Santa to be entered into the system.

Everything runs seamlessly with this system and you stand a good chance at getting your Darth Vadar talking mask this holiday season instead of a pretty red wooden nut cracker.

Horses Sunset from Stock Photo

Today I learned about a new WordPress Plugin called “Freebie Images” from http://www.freebieimages.com/.

The plugin is provided by Crestock.com, an online photo stock agency that normally sells its stock photos for use. But they make some good high quality images available for free to bloggers.The plugin shows up when you write a new post or page and gives you a search box to look for images for your blog.Once you find a photo you are interested in, just click the photo and its inserted into your blog. 

You have to be patient and it doesn’t look like it lets you use more than one a post, but this looks like it could be interesting.

A friend pointed me to this today and I just had to share it with my geek-kin:

Jones Limited Edition Spellcasting Soda

These look awesome! Go buys some for your geek friends including me!!!!

Needless to say, the water cooler talk at almost every office today wrapped around the latest episode from Kanye West during the MTV Video Music Awards where he interrupted Taylor Swift just as she started to give her acceptance speech for her first Moon Man trophy.

If you haven’t seen/heard about it:

• Huffington Post
• Kansas City Star
• MTV (Self Promotion?)
• Newsday
• Mashable

A co-worker today floated a conspiracy theory. We all love a good conspiracy right?

His opinion: It was staged.

And the logic behind it is pretty strong actually. Lets face it the VMA’s are not what they used to be. Are they even relevant any more? MTV doesn’t play videos. MTV2 which was supposed to play videos rarely plays them anymore. Even CMT only plays videos about half the day. doesn’t play videos and VH1 Classics play oldies. That leaves GAC for country videos (and now they have an hour or so mid-day with more interviews than music) and FUSE. So how can you have a Video Music Award when there are no TV stations playing videos?

So there needs to be some excitement to get MTV and their non-relevant awards show back into the spotlight. So use a tried and true formula:

West becomes the bad boy. Swift comes off as the innocent angel. Beyonce becomes the hero. All further each performers reputation. MTV is thrust back into the media. Since West needs street cred, even a bad event is good for him.

But we have to defer to Occam’s razor that states that when you have to competing hypotheses, the simpler one is usually the right one.

Conspiracy Theory or Jerk? You decide.

Several celebrities have made their thoughts known in the media and through Twitter. Pink, Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson have all spoken out. The links to their responses are below. Be aware that they are heavy with expletives.

Katy Perry summed it up the best “IT’S LIKE U STEPPED 0N A KITTEN”

• Katy Perry
• Pink, Pink and Pink
• Brad Paisley
• Kelly Clarkson

So what are your thoughts? Planned? Not planned? Right? Wrong? Leave your comments below!