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The Secrets to Great Chex Party Mix

We've been making party mix for a number of years. Here's my tricks on how to get great Party Mix:

  • Use real butter, not margerine
  • Oven-bake, don't microwave
  • Go easy on the Wheat Chex, make up for it with extra Rice and Corn
  • Use less mixed nuts, make up the difference in pecans

Have fun!!

Secure Shell Little Black Box

Mike Warfield gave a great talk at the October AUUG meeting about system administration with ssh. He suggested a "Little Black Box" to run all your SysAdmin ssh connections through. In light of that, I put up a howto site for Secure Shell Little Black Box. I'll be adding some more info to it hopefully soon. I'll be speaking on the subject at the February meeting of the Atlanta Unix Users' Group. See you there.

Christmas Black Comedies

I love black comedies: works that derive their humor from death. One of the best of recent offerings is Pushing Dasies, which has unfortunately been cancelled. Christmas black comedies are fairly rare, but from childhood I've loved We're No Angels starring Bogart, Ustinov, Rathbone, etc. I recently found a marvelous Belgian short on YouTube called the Bloody Olive. Have fun, and Merry Christmas to all!!

Eating One's Own Dog Food

Well, the Yahoo! Microsoft deal is back in the news. I'm sure it makes some sense to the MBAs but in the technology arena, it makes none. Why?

In the technology arena there is an old saying that "You have to eat your own dog food." What does this mean? It means that you have to use your own technology products. If you're IBM, your business needs to run on IBM hardware and software. If you're Dell, there had better be al Dell on every desktop and every slot in the server room. If you're SAP, your business had better run off of SAP software. Why? It goes to the heart of credibility. If you don't use your own products, why should your customers want to? It's real tough to sell a product that you don't use, because it's clear that you don't really believe in it.

Back to Yahoo! and Microsoft. Microsoft makes the Windows operating system and .Net programming language. Yahoo is built on BSD operating system and PHP programming language. If Microsoft does buy Yahoo, they have two choices: continue to run mission-critical infrastructure on non-Microsoft software and lose credibility in the industry, or convert the Yahoo infrastructure to Windows. To 'eat their own dog food' they'll have to convert Yahoo to a Windows stack. This will take a monumental amount of effort/dollars/months. It will be a couple of years before the infrastructure settles down again. By that time the Yahoo/Microsoft online presence will be irrevelant.

Polarized Electorate or Polarized System?

Many talk of the red/blue polarization of America. I believe what's actually going on is that it's not so much that the population is polarized, but that the voting system we use forces polarization. There are much better voting systems out there. Currently the best system I've seen is called range voting. In range voting, each person ranks each candidate on a 1 to 10 point scale. The candidate with the most points wins. This seems to give the candidate with the least regret.

Another way to Unfreeze Credit

A nice historical reference on how to unfreeze credit. And a slightly crazier notion from Robert X. Cringely.

Article with Perspective about the Current Financial Crisis

William sent me this article. The current financial crisis really is closer to the panic of 1873 than the stock market crash of 1929.

Latest Cleanup

I've updated my resume a bit and started the process of getting google ads on the Rook pages.

Site Re-Work

Well, my site started as static HTML, then went to tableless HTML with CSS. I started suches.org with Joomla, now I'm experimenting with Wordpress. The theme is from edmerrit.com, called 'autumn concept'. He only has two Wordpress themes out there. It's a shame, he seems to be a talented designer. Anyway, I've copied over a fair amount of content from the old site and added a picture of Woody Lake from May 1st, 2006. We'll see where it goes from here.