Thursday, November 29, 2012

Superstorm Sandy: Interactive Before and After Images

ABC News shows before and after the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in the NY area. 

Hover over each satellite photo to view the before and after comparison.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/hurricane-sandy-before-after-photos/


Friday, November 23, 2012

Turkey Cooking Time

http://www.jennieo.com/cooking-with-turkey/view/id/8/How-to-Roast-a-Turkey


Five easy steps to roasting a perfect turkey
  1. Thaw the turkey. Remove neck and giblets from the neck and body cavities.
  2. Heat oven to 325°F.
  3. Rinse the turkey inside and out with cold water.
  4. Place turkey breast side up on a rack in a shallow roasting pan.
  5. Roast the turkey, uncovered, until a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the thigh, not touching bone, registers 180°F.
Roasting Timetable
Approximate Oven Roasting Time at 325°F
WEIGHT          COOKING TIME      
10-12 lbs.3-3 1/2 hrs.
12 to 14 lbs.3 1/2 - 4 hrs.
14 to 16 lbs.4 - 4 1/2 hrs.
16 to 18 lbs.4-1/2 - 5 hrs.
18 - 20 lbs.5 - 5 1/2 hrs.
20 - 22 lbs.5 1/2 - 5 3/4 hrs.
22 - 24 lbs.5 3/4 - 6 hrs.
Turkey is done when the meat thermometer inserted in the breast reads 170° F. and 180°F. when inserted deep in the thigh, not touching the bone.
More Roasting Tips
  • For a picture-perfect turkey, tuck wing tips under the shoulders.
  • Place a foil tent over the breast during the first 1 to 1-1/2 hours of roasting, then remove the foil to allow for browning.
  • Allow the turkey to stand 20 minutes before carving.
Electric Roaster: Oven Turkey Preparation
  • Recommended weights for turkey in the roaster oven 12-18 lbs.
  • Birds larger than 18 lbs are difficult to actually fit into the roaster while keeping the lid shut tightly.
  • Roaster ovens DO NOT brown turkeys. The constant dripping of condensation from the cover of the roaster prevents the turkey from browning, but also produces a turkey that is moist and juicy. For a turkey with a brown skin after cooking, follow the simple turkey browning sauce recipe below.
  • Always use a meat thermometer to make sure your turkey is thoroughly cooked.
Electric Roaster: Step-by-Step Directions
  • Make sure insert pan is in the roaster. Place rack in the roaster (this will make for easier removal of the turkey after roasting).
  • Pour ½ cups of water into the insert pan and preheat the roaster at 325°F for 15 minutes.
  • Remove turkey from package and remove giblets and neck from the cavities of the turkey. Rinse bird inside and out with cold water. Pat turkey dry.
  • If desired, place 1 onion, peeled and quartered and 2 stalks of coarsely chopped celery inside of the turkey. Season the outside of the bird with salt and pepper OR brush the exterior with the turkey browning sauce recipe (see below).
  • Place turkey in roaster. Cover and cook at 325°F for 2½-3¼ hours or until the thighs reach a minimum internal temperature of 180°F and the turkey breast reaches a minimum internal temperature of 170°F.
  • Let turkey stand for 20 minutes before carving.
Electric Roaster: Turkey Browning Sauce
Recipe included in Hamilton Beach® Roaster Oven Cooking Booklet
To achieve a turkey with a brown skin, use the following recipe before cooking
  • ¼ cup melted butter or margarine
  • 1½ teaspoons browning sauce
  • 1 teaspoon paprika
Wash turkey with cold water. Pat turkey dry. Paint/brush turkey with the browning mixture and cook as directed.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

"Fill Your Heart With Thanksgiving"


Take nothing for granted, 
for whatever you do 
The 'joy of enjoying' 
is lessened for you

For we rob our own lives 
much more than we know 
When we fail to respond 
or in any way show 

Our thanks for the blessings 
that daily are ours...
The warmth of the sun, 
the fragrance of flowers, 

The beauty of twilight, 
the freshness of dawn, 
The coolness of dew 
on a green velvet lawn, 

The kind little deeds 
so thoughtfully done, 
The favours of friends 
and the love that someone 

Unselfishly gives us 
in a myriad of ways, 
Expecting no payment 
and no words of praise

Oh, great is our loss 
when we no longer find 
A thankful response 
to things of this kind,

For the JOY of ENJOYING 
and the FULLNESS of LIVING 
Are found in the heart 
that is filled with THANKSGIVING.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Stress Reliever List: 25 More Stress Relievers to Try

http://stress.about.com/od/tensiontamers/a/stress_reliever.htm

Need to relax and de-stress? This list is bound to have the perfect stress reliever for you:
  • Overcome Perfectionism: If you’re a perfectionist, you’re most likely causing unnecessary stress to yourself and those around you. This self test assesses your level of perfectionism, and provides resources for change.
  • Overcome Type A Traits: Type A personality traits also have stress inducing effects. Test your ‘Type A’-ness, and find resources for handling these traits in yourself and others.
  • Play Music During Your Commute: Music has great stress relief and health benefits. Try this, and find additional ways to use music as a daily stress reliever.
  • Get a Massage: Massage can be a great way to relieve tension in your body, and a self-massager gives you an inexpensive massage any time. Read more about this and other stress relief gifts and tools.
  • Take a Quiet Day: If you don’t have the money or time for a vacation, taking a quiet day is a great way to get a break. Here are some more ideas for stress reliever mini-vacations.
  • Goof Off A Little With how busy we all are these days, it can pay off to take a little time to do nothing. We all instinctively knew this as children, but somewhere along the way got too busy to let our inner children come out to play. Read more about this and other stress relievers from childhood.
  • Laugh With Your Friends: Laughter has significant stress management and even health benefits. Learn more about the stress relief benefits of laughter and find ways to work this great stress reliever into your day.
  • Throw a Small Party: Social support works wonders on a person’s stress level, and each type of friend is important. Throw a small party (as opposed to a large, unruly one, or no party at all) and celebrate your most important friends and the roles they play in your life. You’ll strengthen your social bonds and relieve the stress you may be feeling.
  • Have a Spa Night At Home: Taking time to pamper yourself is an important but often-forgotten stress reliever. An inexpensive way to do this is to have a spa night at home. Learn how now.
  • Go on a News Fast: News is important, but what we hear in the news these days can be highly stressful. Taking one day a week to shun the news from t.v., the internet, and other sources can do us good. If anything really important is happening, you’ll hear about it, but the peace and quiet can be good for your stress levels.
  • Read a Book: Getting lost in a good book can be a great way to relieve stress. Here’s a selection of good fiction and non-fiction that can be especially helpful for stress relief.
  • Daydream: Give your mind a break and let it wander for a while. On purpose. Imagine yourself swimming in a pool of chocolate, floating on the moon, or winning a Nobel prize and going to Disneyland to celebrate. You’ll feel less stressed in just a few minutes!
  • Get A Hug From a Loved One: Remember when you were little and a hug from Mommy or Daddy would fix it all? Hugs and other forms of social support can still make a big difference.
  • Have a Pajama Day: Take a full day (a day that you have off from work) and stay in your jammies. Relax, stay comfortable, and do what you want. It’ll feel like a mini-vacation and you won’t even have to leave the house!
  • Here are more effective stress reliever ideas for all lifestyles:
    • Get A Hug From a Loved One: Remember when you were little and a hug from Mommy or Daddy would fix it all? Hugs and other forms of social support can still make a big difference.
    • Have a Pajama Day: Take a full day (a day that you have off from work) and stay in your jammies. Relax, stay comfortable, and do what you want. It’ll feel like a mini-vacation and you won’t even have to leave the house!
    • Develop a Positive Self Talk Habit: We often don’t realize how much our thoughts color our world, but the impact of self talk is significant and pervasive. Developing a more positive style of self talk can be a minor change that has a major impact. It’s never too late to change.
    • Eat To The Tune of Classical Music: Music can slow down your system and aid digestion. Learn more about the benefits of music.
    • Cultivate Mindfulness Worrying about the future or rehashing the past can really drain you in ways that you may not readily realize. Practice the art of ‘being in the now’, or learn another easy meditation technique. With practice, you should find you have much more energy to devote to what’s going on right now.
    • Get Moving! Getting exercise is a great way to take care of yourself and your health. Here are 10 more great self care strategies for stress management.
    • Stop Self Sabotage: Are you your own worst enemy? If you’re sabotaging your own happiness and sense of peace (either consciously or unconsciously), now’s the time to stop. Here’s help with stopping self sabotage.
    • Play With Your Pets (or Someone Else’s): Pets carry great stress management and health benefits. Whether you’re stroking a cat, tossing a Frisbee to a dog, or staring at the inhabitants of a fish tank, you can lower your blood pressure and your stress level pretty quickly!
    • Create Artwork: Getting in touch with your creative side may have been easy for you during childhood, but if you’ve lost touch with your penchant for drawing, it’s not too late to pick it up again! Learn more about reducing stress with the therapeutic qualities of art.
    • Post In The Forum: There are plenty of members and visitors populating the Stress Management Forum every week. You can join them and post questions and answers to stress-related problems. Open 24 hours!
    • Take a Free E Course: Interested in learning to live a low-stress lifestyle with targeted weekly lessons sent straight to your in-box? Find out about this site’s free online learningopportunities.
    • Participate in Fun Stress Polls: What stresses you the most? Do you exercise regularly? These stress polls are a fun way to see how other people live and view the world, and examine your own life and the role stress plays in it.
    • Visualize Your Ideal Life—And Make It Happen! Guided imagery, self- hypnosis and visualizations can help you to visualize where you’d like to be in life, and then BE there. They’re also great ways to relieve stress—now, and in the future.

Thursday, November 15, 2012


It's Polaroid's World—We Just Live in It

The Steve Jobs of his day, Edwin Land invented not just instant photography but the culture that came with it

[image]Danny Kim/Princeton Architectural Press
Polaroid SX-70
In 1970, Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid and the inventor of the instant camera, stood before a movie crew in a brand-new, empty factory, laying out the idea he had been cultivating for the preceding 25 years. Though his name is largely forgotten today, Land had a surprisingly prescient view of the future.
"We are still a long way," he said, "from the...camera that would be, oh, like the telephone: something that you use all day long...a camera which you would use not on the occasion of parties only, or of trips only, or when your grandchildren came to see you, but a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses." It was going to be "something that was always with you," he said; and it would be effortless. Point, shoot, see. Nothing mechanical would come between you and the image you wanted. The gesture would be as simple as—and here he demonstrated it, reaching into his coat—taking a wallet out of your breast pocket, holding it up and pressing a button.
Land's future is our present, and what he described, pretty nearly, was a smartphone. The wallet he pulled out was black and oblong, and when you see him hold it vertically in front of his eye, it's an uncannily familiar gesture. Land envisioned our being able to document our whole lives, building up an immense library—a wall-size memory bank that was, effectively, an analog Facebook page. He even went so far as to cook up instant-developing 8mm home-movie film, called Polavision. (It was a flop, arriving on the market well after video cameras had become widespread, but a remarkable technological achievement.)
image
Danny Kim/Princeton Architectural Press
Polaroid or iPhone? The Polaroid SX-70 folded down to the size of a cigar case.
image
Danny Kim/Princeton Architectural Press
Polaroid SX-70 partly folded
In the digital age, photo-taking and sharing have become not just instant but constant. Last week, pictures of Hurricane Sandy dominated; this week, it was queued-up voters and the storm in the Northeast. For quite a few young people, an event undocumented is an event unlived. It's easy to forget that a lifetime ago, in the late 1940s, almost nobody did this.
Back then, your camera went with you only on special occasions: a picnic, a birthday, a wedding. You then mailed your film to an Eastman Kodak processing plant in Rochester, N.Y., and got your prints back in a week. When the Polaroid Land camera was introduced in 1948—made possible by a series of breakthroughs and refinements, particularly in a process known as diffusion-transfer reversal—"pictures in a minute" were an instant success: The first batch of cameras, expected to meet consumer demand for weeks, sold out in hours. By the 1970s, when Polaroid introduced the SX-70 camera and became an ubiquitous part of the American landscape, a new breed of amateur photographer was shooting a billion photos a year.
It's no wonder that Steve Jobs considered Land one of his first heroes and called him "a national treasure." A generation ago, people talked about Land in the same breath with Thomas Edison. In the digital age all pictures are instant pictures. But one of the most significant things Polaroid invented was not merely a camera-and-film system but a particular kind of casual documentary photography.
I recently visited an artist named Tom Slaughter, who had been a huge Polaroid shooter back in the '80s, and we went through some of his pictures, of which there are thousands. And what do they show? People laughing over glasses of wine on the porch. Their kids jumping into the swimming pool. Even plates of food on the table: It all looks uncannily like an Instagram feed (down to the square format, which Instagram consciously borrowed).
Land had grand ideas for his invention. Both he and Jobs believed that their creations would not only build a business but fundamentally change the basic nature of human interaction. And both companies struggled without their founders. Land retired in 1982, nudged out by Polaroid's board. His successors—despite promising moves into inkjet printing, holography and digital technologies—couldn't manage to turn those notions into irresistible products. Polaroid declared bankruptcy in 2001 and again in 2009. (The current trademark holders are putting the Polaroid name on a broad range of consumer electronics and a nifty line of pocket-size printers.)
At Polaroid's zenith, though, Land believed his technology to be a world-changer. "A new kind of relationship between people in groups is brought into being...when the members of a group are photographing and being photographed and sharing the photographs," he wrote in 1974. "It turns out that buried within us...there is latent interest in each other; there is tenderness, curiosity, excitement, affection, companionability and humor.... [W]e have a yen for and a primordial competence for a quiet good-humored delight in each other: We have a prehistoric tribal competence...in being partners in the lonely exploration of a once-empty planet."
In the words of the old jingle for the Polaroid Swinger: "It's more than a camera... It's almost alive."
—Adapted from "Instant: The Story of Polaroid" by Christopher Bonanos (Princeton Architectural Press).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578108840573155684.html?KEYWORDS=Bonanos#printMode

Friday, November 2, 2012

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff

A meteorology professor stood before his Meteorology 101 class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a very large and empty glass mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.


The professor then picked up a jar of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open spaces between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar and of course the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous yes.
The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and then proceeded to pour the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the grains of sand. The students laughed.
"Now," said the professor, as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things -- your family, your partner, your health, your children, your friends, your favorite passions -- things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.
"The pebbles are the other things that matter, like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else -- the small stuff.
"If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out dancing. Play another 18.
"There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first -- the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented. The professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of beers."