Army Brat

Yeah...my job can be very fun. And yes...I AM a dork.

A Very Nice Thanksgiving

As we gather together....

...we are thankful.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYONE!

No, its not Santa Claus yet...

Aunt Kee is coming to town for Addison's very first Thanksgiving. HO-HO-HO!

Is Luke destined to be a millionaire?

I think he's well on his way... :-)

We were eating lunch and I picked up the WSJ to do a little reading. I glance over and see this...SO cute!

OH! OH! BEWARE THE TAG POLICE!

Unknowingly, AJK tore off the tag from under Nana's chair that said,  "DO not remove under penalty of Law!"   

 We're DOOMED!

Out with the Old....In with the New

Well, I gave it a shot. I drove the mini-van for as long as I possibly could. I just never felt comfortable driving it (mentally, not physically). Although I liked the functionality, I just could not continue down this path. It is not who I am. So to that end, I bid adieu to my 2007 Honda. Hopefully it will find a nice home with people who will appreciate it more than me.

So you ask....."What did you get instead?" The answer is quite simple. I loved my 1998 Tahoe (except for the maintenance and repairs). So I executed appropriately. I feel whole again. And no Kirsten....I am not in midlife crisis. I would have gotten a Camaro instead. Of course you can see that Sadie is quite happy (nothing to do with the car, she is just always like that.)

That's all the time I have.

Thanks...You've been great!

On this Thursday, Nov 18, 2010

And I'm proud to be an American...

I am considering auditioning for the remake of "Private Benjamin"...if they ever make one.

My "soldiers" are actually all actors. Cuz the military doesn't allow active military to plug golf grips in commercials. Altho a portion of the proceeds from the new camo grips go to the "Troops First" foundation.

p.s. That helmet I am wearing WEIGHED A TON! If I tipped my head to one side, I would topple over to that side.

Happy Sweet Sixteen to our Kel-Belle!!!!

Can't believe she is Sixteen, though we always knew how sweet she is!!!

We hope you have a GREAT birthday, Belle!!! Love you!!

Have all your blog updates go to a single reader

Problem: You like to read from a bunch of different blogs, but think it’s a pain to keep checking them to see when someone posts something. And you don’t necessarily want to ‘follow’ the blog (which involves you giving up some personal information and / or having to create a profile) / or you just don’t want blog postings cluttering up your eMail.

What you’d really like: Is to have all the postings from all blogs, delivered to a single ‘reader’ – consolidated so you can catch up on the ‘news’ from each blog you want to keep in touch with. One spot to check.

Solution(s): The essence of what you are looking for is called an ‘RSS Feed’ (for Really Simple Syndication – no, I’m not kidding). And it’s just what it sounds like. It’s a standard for sending content from one place to another. There are other variations / standards like Atom – but you don’t have to worry about the nitty gritty to use them. All you have to remember is the following picture:

How to do it: There are two basic steps:

1. Decide on a ‘Reader’ tool. This is the tool that aggregates all of your feeds together.

2. Add all your feeds to the tool.

Step 1 - there are a lot of ‘Reader’ tools out there. Some are free, some you pay for. They come in a variety of types:

• Stand-alone applications that you run on your computer
• Apps that can run on your iPad / iPhone / Black Berry (visit the app store for each)
• Plug-ins for your browser (www.feedly.com for Firefox is a good one)
• Web based readers like Google Reader (www.google.com/reader)
• RSS Reader Applets for portal pages like iGoogle and myYahoo
• Readers that are built-in to apps you already use – like LiveMail and AppleMail)

The best thing is to play around with a few different readers. You can use many different ones on many different computers all at the same time. I routinely use LiveMail’s built in reader, a Google Reader applet on my iGoogle page, AppleMail on my iPad and RSS Feeder on my iPad. It just depends on where I’m at and what I’m doing – they are not mutually exclusive. You can also play around with different ones out there until you find one that works best for you.

Step 2 – Subscribe your Feed tool to the blogs and news you want to follow. Note that ‘subscribing’ to a feed is different than ‘following’ a feed. Unlike following, subscribing is a fairly anonymous process. You don’t have to follow the blog, or even have a login on the blog hosting site. To subscribe, all you need is the ‘feed’ URL. To find this, look for the ‘Internet-ional’ icon for feeds:

If a blog or news site offers a ‘feed’ then it will be on or near the above icon. What you are looking for is a URL that you can then enter into your ‘feed’ tool that you’ve chosen to subscribe to the feed. For example, on my blog (http://mo-kenyan.blogspot.com) – you would see the following on the left hand side:

Generally you can subscribe to just the blog – or to the blog, plus all comments made to postings. It’s up to you. Let’s say you just want to subscribe to the ‘Posts’ – clicking on the ‘Posts’ feed icon, you would get:

Many sites offer the ability to automatically tell the ‘tool’ to subscribe to this feed. For example, if you are using ‘Google Reader’, then you’d click the “Add to Google” and it would automatically subscribe that reader to the postings made to my blog.

If you don’t see your tool listed (for example: LiveMail) – then you’ll need to get the URL and enter it manually into the tool. An easy way to get the URL is to hover the cursor over ‘Atom’. In your browsers status bar at the bottom, you’ll see the URL. Or, even easier – you can click on the ‘Atom’ and it will take you to the ‘feed’ URL. In this case: http://mo-kenyan.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

You then just copy and paste this URL into your ‘feed’ tool that you are using. For example, if you’re using Windows LiveMail, then you would go to the Feeds window in Windows Live Mail and click the Feed button in the upper left corner. You’d get a pop-up that would look like this:

Once you do that, you’ll start getting your ‘feeds’ at regular intervals from all the blogs you’ve subscribed to. Each reader generally has a way to configure how often it ‘checks’ all your feeds for updates. Usually the default is daily, but you can change that.

Finally – one final note. Many tools are integrated into each other depending on the relationship of the tool providers. For example, subscribing to feeds in Google Reader will make them available automatically in other readers like the iGoogle applet. Similarly, subscribing in LiveMail will automatically add them to your feed list in Internet Explorer. I just mention this because it can be a little maddening sometimes to see feeds showing up in different readers and you think, “How did it know?”

So that’s it. I didn’t try to make this an exhaustive discussion on feeds, or even a comprehensive tutorial. There are a lot of those out there. I just thought everyone might find this useful as a way to get started.

For further reading, search for “RSS Tutorial” and you’ll get a big list of additional reading to whatever depth your heart desires.

Enjoy!

IN MEMORY OF....

THE EDMUND FITZGERALD

November 10, 1975

...and the 29 sailors who lost their lives on Whitefish Point 35 years ago.

Food & Wine and...Oh my!

So we finally got around to attending the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival today. The key to finally going was gettting a friend to sign us in so we didn't have to pay the $80 or so EPCOT admission...becuz you then ALSO pay for whatever foods and wines and beers, etc. you want to eat. So getting signed in finally made it reasonable.

And we had a blast. The weather was nice and chilly, the crowds were relatively light, and man, we had some gooooood food. A cheese fondue we got from a booth called "Charcuterie & Cheese" was sooooo unbelievably delicious that we could NOT bring ourselves to throw away what was left over after we'd dipped all the breads, etc. they gave us to dip. So...Brendan chugged the rest. And I did not judge him. Cuz it was THAT good.

Some of the yummiest stuff was at the booth of our homeland...yes, Poland. Had the potato pierogi and kielbasa there. VERY good. I was proud.

And believe it or not, the BEST thing we had there came from our friends across the river, Canada. A cheddar cheese soup that was, quite honestly, one of the best things either of us have EVER eaten. AND my friend who signed us in actually has the recipe so we will be getting that from her toot-sweet.

Other delicacies we had were Escargots and Braised Short Ribs in Cabernet and mashed taters from France. I actually had Escargot once before and really liked it, and the ones we got tonight were delicious. So I guess I can now officially say I enjoy Escargot. They actually taste like mushrooms, in my opinion. We had the bison chili from the U.S. as we both like bison and buffalo meat. However, altho it was very good chili, it wasn't anything "special" or particularly "bison-y."

Stopped in Germany for some VERY yummy Spaetzle Gratin with Ham & Cheez. Brendan was enjoying several beers in the Biergarten as well. I had some Riesling. As you see from my expression below, I do not enjoy the beer. Also had Lettuce Wraps with Roast Port & Kimchi Slaw, and BBQ Short Ribs, both from South Korea. The lettuce wraps were one of my favorite things. Very yummy.

Wanted to stop in and take a quick ride on "Soarin'", as I really enjoyed it when I rode it with the girls last year (multiple times) and wanted Brendan to experience it...but the wait was 45 mins and by then we were tired, full, and ready to head home.

Good food. Good drink. Definitely going to try to make this an annual thing.

Tis the Season...

Talk about Winter arriving all at once. While we were out today, we saw the first snowflakes. (Not as good tasting as December snowflakes.) Then when we got to Walmarts, we were greeted by a Christmas Tree and the accompaning Christmas Carols. I looked for the  fat man in the red suit, but  did not see him. Can Spring be far behind?

My running blog

Just FYI, I started a personal running blog.

It's at http://mo-Kenyan.blogspot.com

To the Sea...

So Natalie and Nicole took a trip to the ocean for the first time. They seemed to really love it, especially once they started body surfing and then boogie boarding. And Cole thought it was pretty cool that the water tasted like salt. It was fun to watch them discover this new joy.