Video conferencing: future is now!

Okay now, sometimes I really feel stuck in south of France when I need to be working with people in Paris! Phone + email was cool until my phone bills rocketed in the past few months... :-/

Recently, I decided, with a couple of business partners, to give internet video conferencing a shot! Guess what my biggest surprise was?

It actually works! And pretty well!

Not only could we see each other while talking but it was even better than the real thing: sound quality outstrips mobile phones! Especially when compared to SFR (the crappiest - but very common - network we have in France).

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Patent pending: My personal "Cookie Tenderizer"

Today we had a healthy lunch: a friend of mine brought us home baked cookies! Don't question about the dietetics, she's gotta be knowing what she's doing, she's an engineer in the food processing industry! :> Well, anyway, those were excellent and I even got one left to take home... :)

Then, I spent the whole afternoon with the smooth thought of treating myself to this cookie... Guess my disappointment when I opened the wrapping tonight and discovered the cookie had turned to rock? What a shame these cookies harden so fast! Not even 24 hours after baking!

Then comes the geeky bloggy rush of blood to the head where I remember Russell commenting about the ephemeral chewy state of the cookies... And while I'm in a webby state of mind I decide to go google for a solution to bring my cookie fossil back to life! (I know I could have eaten it like that and it'd still have tasted good, but I decided it just wouldn't be no fun that way!)

Now, believe it or not, it seems that no one ever documented a cookie tenderizing process on the web!

Next thing I know, I was standing in the kitchen with a grin on my face, starting some weird experiment... and, against all odds, it only took me about 15 minutes to revive my cookie!

"How did I achieve that?" you wonder...

Let me introduce you to my home brewed cookie tenderizer:

My home brew cookie tenderizer

It's a simple machine actually: stove / pan (with water) / steam / grid (originally for pizza) / dead cookie.

Just let the steam go through the cookie for a few minutes... and enjoy! Your cookie is now tender, chewy and hot, just as if it came right out of the oven. Warning: it can get *really* hot!

So? Who's the man??!! :D

Anyone thinking I'm delirious here? Check it out! Still not convinced? Okay look at it from another angle: the cookie gets back to the state it was in when it came out of the oven! This is what is commonly called a working time machine! :b (except it only works for cookies, please don't sit on the stove!)

Yeah I know, I need some rest! XX( And maybe next time I'll learn how to bake fresh cookies myself...

Sending mail with Outlook 2002

I have been using outlook 2002 since... errr... 2002 ? (Yeah I know there are better email clients avialable... this one just integrates with nearly everything! And you can't beat that! :P)

I have always had it configured in a way were any message I wrote stood in the outbox until I click on Send/Receive.

Now I reinstalled the same Outlook 2002 (with the same CD!) on my laptop, I cannot seem to find how to achieve the same config! I went through the options a thousand times and really feel stupid! :roll: Any mail I compose gets sent out right after I'm done with it.

That's such a pain in the ass, since my MTA needs me to check mail before I can send some (yet another crappy anti spam measure! :( )

Can anyone help me out here and tell me how I get Outlook to not automatically send emails before I ask it to?

Quote of the day - insanity

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

Syndication, RSS, RDF and Atom in a Nutshell

Once upon a time, there was a company called Netscape who was investigating a new market: portal sites and content syndication. The idea was simple: a variety of websites produce relevant content in a (nearly) continuous flow. Portals would be designed to aggregate news and content from those sites and present it to the user all in one page...

Thus, Netscape invented a format called RSS, which stood for "Remote Site Syndication". This spec allows content producers to publish their news/content in an "RSS feed" (an XML based document) and content consumers to periodically check those feeds for updates.

When Netscape lost interest in developing portals, they abandonned their original (and complex) RSS 0.9 spec as well as their efforts in creating a more appropriate and simpler version. At that time, UserLand picked up the simpler 0.91 spec and applied it to its blog tools. RSS had become "Really Simple Syndication".

Today, the blogging community still uses RSS extensively: every (serious) blogger publishes an RSS feed of his posts and readers aggregate all their favorites blogs' feeds in an aggregator. This, of course, makes it more convenient to check for new posts daily on all your favorite blogs...

b2evolution is an example of a blog tool used to publish RSS feeds. SharpReader is an example of a program used to aggregate RSS feeds.

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