Frozen in Cambridge

Winter has come to Cambridge with a vengeance. Too bad as I was really enjoying the mild winter in December. We've gotten some snow and wind, oh the wind. And recently we've had some arctic air come down over Cambridge and drop temperatures in the single digits with wind chills in the negatives. On a recent trip to Indiana I missed the cold weather in Cambridge only to get some freezing rain in Indiana. The pictures are from the next day and yes the entire tree is coated in ice, it might look like water dripping of the tree, but trust me its ice. All of the trees in Columbus IN were coated, making it look like Christmas again.

RSS & Reading Blogs

If you've found that you like to read blogs, except you can't always find the time to go visit all your favorite blogs. Well one answer is to get a feed reader or other blog aggregator that will get the most recent posts from all your favorite blogs and either put them on a single webpage or will email you the latest entries.There are many aggregators out there, I think the most popular is Google Reader and there are some that plugin to your favorite browser such as Sage for FireFox.

However, if you are inside a company firewall and there are internal company blogs you like to read, some of the external readers such as Google Reader or Yahoo may not work. Also if, like me, you spend the majority of your day in Outlook, then finding a reader that plugs-in to Outlook can be useful. I have found, and use, RSS Popper. Which is free and adds another folder in your Inbox to collect the various blog feeds. It also works great with internal blogs and external blogs.

You can get feeds from a blog by subscribing to the blog's RSS / Atom feed. Using RSS Popper to subscribe to a blog's feed is a simple matter of copying the RSS link and pasting it into the correct RSS Popper field and clicking OK. You may have seen Atom on a blog page, it is just another method that a blog author/ blog site can use to syndicate their blogs. Both RSS and Atom are transparent to you the reader and as a reader, you only care about the RSS/Atom link. The feed for this site is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RandomThoughtsFromATrini

So go out and start gathering your favorite feeds into your favorite feed reader.

Poor Grapefruit, Good Callaloo

I'm not sure on the optimum way of removing the peel from a grapefruit, but I'm pretty sure Trini-wife's way is not it. At the end of the process there was more juice in the container than left in the grapefruit! She did make some great callaloo (green stuff) for a dinner party though. The dhalpuri roti (yellow stuff) was purchased from Ali's Roti Shop in Dorchester. Actual Callaloo leaves are hard to come by in Boston, although a local farmer's market has it from time to time. So she substituted spinach instead which does the job just fine. Here's a recipe, you can skip the crab part and add some cubed squash instead.

Err

Err and Ignignokt caused much stress and confusion for some and fun for others in the city of Boston this week. On Wednesday there were bomb reports all over the city that devices which contained components of IEDs were placed on bridges and buildings in the city. I-93, the major interstate thru Boston was shut down for a period along with several bridges, major roads around the city and the subway as bomb squads removed the offending devices.
However, the devices turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of LEDs on a circuit board with some Duracell D batteries. Any why were they placed there? All part of a viral marketing stunt gone wrong, for the Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Turner Broadcasting owned up to the scheme and offered to pay the city's costs. Funny or Serious?

Here's what I found interesting about the whole thing:

• The 'devices' were in place for 2-3 weeks before being found on Wednesday, if they were actual bombs then that doesn't say much for our post 9-11 security.
• They shoot a water cannon at the 'device' to disable it. Umm very high tech.
• Now some folks in other cities where the ad campaign didn't create a huge public scare are selling the devices on ebay for about $600.
• The blogs and other internet sources had it figured out by about noon. Yet the authorities continued their efforts through 5pm. Timeline.
  

While you can't fault the Boston authorities for doing what they did, since they have to take every threat seriously, a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Prosecuting the two guys who were responsible for putting up the signs seems a little overzealous since their intent was not malicious.

Its not like incidents like this have not happened before. The Orson Wells War of the Worlds radio cast in 1938 certainly caused quite a stir. Let's hope future events are as benign as this one.