Meal #1

Last week for our anniversary I made the first meal in our attempt at eating a more balanced meal. Tofu, pasta, vegies And to top it off, we had a Strawberry Banana Supreme Smoothie

For the Tofu, pasta, vegies (probably a few extra dollars for the smoothies)
Cost: $8
Meals: 6-8

My Twist:
I couldn't find the Braggs liquid amino, so I skipped it. I used whole wheat pasta 2$, frozen bag of stir fry 2$ (instead of the vegies they mentioned), and garden vegetable spaghetti sauce 1.3$.(tofu was 2$) I found you don't need to add the extra spices if you use a spaghetti sauce.

My thoughts:
Great meal to start eating healthier off. It was fairly simple as long as you get the timing down: when to start the vegies, pasta, sauce, and tofu so they are ready at the same time. Make sure you watch your oil level on the pan so it doesn't burn. Use extra virgin olive oil to help prevent this. (higher burning temp than regular canola or vegetable oil)

getting into cooking

My wife and I, for the most part, eat healthy, or at least healthier than most people. We rarely eat out, and even more rare eat fast food. However, we still are not where we should be with home cooked meals. We do quite a few things right, whole wheat, very little red meat (little meat in general), high protein-non meat ingredients, mostly natural foods (i.e. very few items with unknown ingredients). What we lack is a balanced meal: meals that have a good proportion of fruit, nuts/legumes, protein, oil, grains, vegetables, and dairy. We tend to eat one thing. So a typical meal might be all vegetables, or all protein.

I am hoping to make at least one meal a week and post my results here.

Lafes - Deodorant Stick

The past four days I have been trying out a new deodorant. In the past I started with what most people use, speed stick, then Old Spice, then Axe anti-perspirant. The first two were just deodorants, which eventually had to be laid on super thick to cover BO. Then I switched to Axe's AP, which was tremendously better as it stopped one of the causes of BO, perspiration. But still, it required applying quite a bit.

So, with all the store brand types failing I looked online for an answer, anti-bacterial, the other component of BO. I was always skeptical of this as most are quite expensive for what you get. (half size regular stick for 5$ minimum) But, I decided to give it a shot and bought two types, a regular stick and a baton (mineral salts)

The past four days I have been using the baton and it has been amazing. You simply wet it and apply it. I don't know how long one application will last, but it has lasted about 36 hours with no sign of BO. (although clothing is still able to create BO as you are not applying it to your shirt.) Over all, well worth the 5$ plus shipping.

My Grandfather

Posted for JP.
Here is a real life story from that region.

S.B. 1070

S.B. 1070 news article

the truth is being twisted to reverse these roles by Liberal Socialist provocateurs attempting to incite chaos. There is no injustice involved, it is an illusion created by a logocracy using language to confuse the populace. Asking for aliens to obey already existing law is not anti-social nor repressive, it is the definition of a just establishment of the Rule of Law.

The consequences of misunderstanding who is right, and who is wrong in this debate, could very well spell the end of liberty and freedom in America.

Very interesting for me since I grew up in Phoenix. I don't think this will really help or hinder illegal immigration. I do think it is great that another state is attempting to fix their own issues themselves rather than wait on the federal government.

Personally, I think the only way to solve the illegal immigration issue is to figure out why they are crossing. If you never figure that out, they will always keep attempting to cross. And I think it is extremely obvious why they come over, jobs. And the only way to fix this issue is to start businesses in Mexico. I remember reading an article a few years ago about a city in Mexico that was actually retaining current population and growing due to people emigrating to it. And the reason for the retention and growth was a local business that was doing well.

mod_rewrite

The past couple weeks I have been teaching myself about mod_rewrite and what it is capable of. What got me onto this was when I was trying to teach myself symfony. In symfony you write URLs something like this: url.com/cd/show/12/. That would probably mean you would be looking at CD with an ID of 12. Internally, mod_rewrite rewrites that url to what the Apache server understands, url.com/index.php?cat=cd&action=show&id=12. Or, whatever you set it up as. So there are at least two benefits doing it this way, 1) the end user is able to visually see by the URL what he is looking at, 2) it hides the inner workings of your website (i.e. variables and files...you don't even have to have an index.php file. It can be names joesbarandgrill.php)

Those are two benefits. Another benefit is you can restrict users from randomly trying to access files. You do this because once enabled, there has to be a rule setup in order for you to access everything. (I am sure my limited knowledge is somewhat skewed)

Another thing I have been looking into, also as a result of attempting to teach myself symfony, is the MVC architectural pattern of programming. (Model, View, and Controller) Essentially, you split all three of those into separate things. It has definitely helped my coding become more legible and understandable.

One thing I found extremely helpful was to use a routing file. Essentially a large if tree that tells what to get. So, you have a template file that has all the things that don't change from page to page. Then, where you would have the stuff that changes from page to page, you place, in my case, an include statement to the routing file. That routing file uses one of the variables in url for the first if, then the second variable for the nested if. And in the second if statement you place another include to the 'view' file. That second if statement takes one to CRUD files. (Create, Read, Update, Delete) So, for the programmer, it makes life much simpler. You can figure out exactly what file needs to modified, without going through countless lines of code.

Another benefit to this kind of programming, especially using mod_rewrite is search engines will actually index your site. I have read often times a SE will not index a site when it starts variables. But since a SE does not see variables, the chances are much higher it will index the site, since all it sees are what appear to be folders. From what I have heard, it also makes creating breadcrumbs extremely easy, which SE then use to create the navigation on the SE site.

web stuff

I have been developing a financial/budgeting website now for almost two years. Unfortunately, I have not been trained by an instructor on how to program, let alone properly. So, I have probably restarted about half dozen times. I just recently restarted it as I realized I was doing quite a bit wrong. This time through, I think I got the database setup and have learned quite a bit of new code.

In addition, I realized my need to actually document things, not just in the program but my thoughts and other things related to the program. I knew I wanted something similar to MS OneNote, but for free. I searched a bit last night and really liked tomboy. The problem is it goes against the one thing I believe in most, apps should be web-based not client based. It does give the ability to store your notes on the web, but that is much different than web based, it is still client based.

This morning I did another search and found Google Notebook. It doesn't have (or at least I have not found it) the ability to do linking like tomboy, but it looks pretty good so far. Above that, it is web based.

Hopefully, using Google Notebook will provide a means for me to manage this project.