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Vegan Chili

Prep Time: 30 mins | Cook Time: 1 hr 45 mins | Servings: 8 to 10 servings | Difficulty: Medium

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. cooked pinto beans
• 12 ounce bag Boca Meatless Ground
• 2 tbsp Earth Balance Buttery Spread
• 1 large onions, chopped
• 1 tbsp chopped garlic
• 2 3/4 tbsp oregano
• 1 1/2 tbsp ground cumin
• 6 ounce can tomato paste
• 1 cans tomatoes, in blender
• 1/2 tbsp salt
• 1/2 tbsp black pepper
• 4 tbsp chili powder
• 1 tbsp sugar

Directions:

Cook onions and garlic in buttery spread until onions are clear. Then put in pinto beans and veggie crumbles. Put in other seasonings and tomatoes and cook slowly after bringing to a boil. Cook about 1 1/2 or 2 hours. Add enough water so it won’t stick. Slow simmer with lid on.

Surprise

NWCC Game

A Match Made in Photo Heaven

Now this is what we have been waiting for…big organizations partnering with Flickr. This is a great idea IMHO.

it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.

Library of Congress Blog

Buckeye Balls

• 1 1/2 cups creamy peanut butter
• 1/2 cup butter softened
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 to 4 cups confectioners’ sugar

Coating

• 1 pound chocolate flavored candy coating
• 2 tablespoons shortening

Combine peanut butter , butter, vanilla and salt in large bowl. Beat at low speed of electric mixer until blended. Add 2 cups sugar. Beat until blended. Continue adding sugar 1/2 cup at a time until mixture shaped into ball will hold together on toothpick. Shape into 3/4 inch balls. Place on waxed paper-lined tray. Refrigerate.

For coating, combine candy coating and shortening in microwave safe bowl. Microwave at 50% (medium) for 30 seconds. Stir, repeat until mixture is smooth.

Insert toothpick into candy ball. Dip 3/4 ball into melted coating. Scrape off excess. Place on waxed paper lined tray. Remove toothpick and smooth over holes. Refrigerate until coating is firm; Remove from paper. Store at room temperature in covered container.

Mock Peanut Brittle Christmas Wreath Cookies

These are easy no bake cookies that are quick and fun to make.

• 1 Cup Sugar
• 1 Cup Light Corn Syrup
• 1 (12 oz) jar of Peanut Butter
• 6 Cups of Corn Flakes
• Green Food coloring

Combine sugar and syrup in pan. Heat and bring to a hard boil. Remove from heat and stir in peanut butter. Add green food coloring. Mix in corn flakes and stir until all are coated with syrup mixture. Drop by spoonfuls onto wax paper and shape into wreaths. Add red hot candies while wreaths are still warm.

Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

• 2 Cups of Sugar
• 1 Stick of Butter
• 1/2 Cup of Milk
• 2 Tablespoons of Cocoa

Combine and boil the above ingredients for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and mix in the following ingredients. You must move fast because the mixture begins to harden quickly.

• 1 Cup of Peanut Butter
• 2 1/2 to 3 Cups of Quick Cooking Oatmeal
  (the oats must be quick cooking and don’t put too much or the cookies will be dry)
• 1/2 Teaspoon of Vanilla

Drop by spoonfuls on wax paper to cool.

Some Ways to Reduce Stress

Maybe you will find one or two of these helpful.

1. Pray
2. Go to bed on time.
3. Get up on time so you can start the day unrushed.
4. Say No to projects that won’t fit into your time schedule, or that will compromise your mental health.
5. Delegate tasks to capable others.
6. Simplify and unclutter your life.
7. Less is more. (Although one is often not enough, two are often too many.)
8. Allow extra time to do things and to get to places.
9. Pace yourself. Spread out big changes and difficult projects over time; don’t lump the hard things all together.
10. Take one day at a time.
11. Separate worries from concerns. If a situation is a concern, find out what God would have you do and let go of the anxiety. If you can’t do anything about a situation, forget it.
12. Live within your budget; don’t use credit cards for ordinary purchases.
13. Have backups; an extra car key in your wallet, an extra house key buried in the garden, extra stamps, etc.
14. K. M. B. M. S. (Keep My Big Mouth Shut). This single piece of advice can prevent an enormous amount of trouble.
15. Do something for the Kid in You everyday.
16. Carry a Bible with you to read while waiting in line.
17. Get enough rest.
18. Eat right.
19. Get organized so everything has its place.
20. Listen to a tape while driving that can help improve your quality of life.
21. Write down thoughts and inspirations.
22. Every day, find time to be alone.
23. Having problems? Talk to God on the spot. Try to nip small problems in the bud. Don’t wait until it’s time to go to bed to try and pray.
24. Make friends with Godly people.
25. Keep a folder of favorite scriptures on hand.
26. Remember that the shortest bridge between despair and hope is often a good “Thank you Jesus.”
27. Laugh.
28. Laugh some more!
29. Take your work seriously, but not yourself at all.
30. Develop a forgiving attitude (most people are doing the best they can).
31. Be kind to unkind people (they probably need it the most).
32. Sit on your ego.
33. Talk less; listen more.
34. Slow down.
35. Remind yourself that you are not the general manager of the universe
36. Every night before bed, think of one thing you’re grateful for that you’ve never been grateful for before. GOD HAS A WAY OF TURNING THINGS AROUND FOR YOU. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Romans 8:31

Paint Buddy to the Rescue!

This was a school project of Holden’s. He had to invent something and then make a commercial about it. His invention was a paint brush with a paint key built into the handle. Patent Pending

Those Who Can, Code; Those Who Can’t, Architect

A friend of mine sent me this email and it sent chills up my spine.

“At the moment there seems to be an extremely unhealthy obsession in software with the concept of architecture. A colleague of mine, a recent graduate, told me he wished to become a software architect. He was drawn to the glamour of being able to come up with grandiose ideas – sweeping generalized designs, creating presentations to audiences of acronym addicts, writing esoteric academic papers, speaking at conferences attended by headless engineers on company expense accounts hungrily seeking out this year’s grail, and creating e-mails with huge cc lists from people whose signature footer is more interesting than the content. I tried to re-orient him into actually doing some coding, to join a team that has a good product and keen users both of whom are pushing requirements forward, to no avail. Somehow the lure of being an architecture astronaut was too strong and I lost him to the dark side.

He’ll be in good company though. I was recently called to a customer who expressed interest in a software tool I’m working on. I came armed with the latest build of the product, looking forward to the opportunity to test some ideas and concepts in front of potential users. Instead I found myself in front of the customer who had also invited a competitor in order to create a conference room product shoot out. While I had my PC with running code to show, my opponent had brought along a briefcase full of PowerPoint presentations. Their slides were impressive: good use of color, animation, and a generous splattering of buzzwords and acronyms. Despite the fact I had working code to showcase, the discussion quickly degenerated into a discussion about the fact that mine was a so-called “fat” client, in fact a pretty lean Eclipse RCP-based product, while the opposition had a “thin” client.

The truth was the opposition didn’t have a thin Web-based offering; their current product was built six years ago as a desktop application that could be downloaded as an 87M applet. However, they were in the process of rewriting it all to run in a lightweight Java EE container as portlets. In other words, they had nothing. They were peddling vaporwear. Worse than that, despite the fact their company had a perfectly good product offering that I was prepared to go head-to-head with, they seemed to have given up on making it more usable and instead opted for the deep thought option: a total rewrite just to suit the whims of today’s architectural fashion.

I kept wanting to take the customer’s IT manager and shake him back to reality; however, he somehow got drawn into their trap and was asking me architectural questions rather than focusing on whether the product I had brought to show and tell was going to make his users more productive.

Remember the kid in the playground who knew the name of a band you didn’t, or who had a new album? They were cool; they had knowledge we didn’t; and whether or not it was any better didn’t matter, it was new and shiny and we had to have it too. If we did, then we would also be in possession of knowledge that others didn’t own, and we in turn could be the cool kid to someone else. This kind of atavistic worshipping of the obscure and unknown piece of knowledge is the personality disorder that plagues the software industry and is somehow encouraged and admired by architects who are never satisfied with what they have available to them to build software. They’re not innovators or research pioneers pushing knowledge forward though – such people are hugely important as they invent the future and redefine technology boundaries.
Instead these silver-bullet junkies just latch onto ideas and fads for the sake of it, because if nothing else it makes them appear ahead of the curve and in possession of secret facts and information. As soon as a project gets into trouble, they can launch these facts at programmers and proclaim, “Aha, it’s because you’re not using BOJOX and NADA 2.0 combined with YML that you have a bug” in front of the nervous manager who wants nothing more than to buy more time by telling his reporting chain that he needs a year to do a total rewrite. During this time, because nothing ships, nothing can go wrong and, hopefully, the stock price will have grown to the point the manager can cash in his options in time to go be a coward somewhere else.

Meanwhile, the architects seem invincible to failure and rise within the ranks of their organizations, ordering fresh business cards each year with the words “architect,” “senior” or, for the power blowhards, “distinguished” in the title. They are drawn to the tar pit of attending and creating presentations, or joining conference calls with fellow architects who showboat their knowledge of obscure standards specifications or bleeding-edge research projects. They’ll have copies of Christopher Alexander books in their office and spend hours googling for obtuse and arcane quotations to lace their presentations with and gain kudos from fellow fools. When confronted by such people, recant the following mantra:

Code ships, code runs, code helps users, get their job done.

Remind any architects in your path that presentation charts, e-mails, project plans, line-items spreadsheets and so forth, are all there to help the code ship on time and to spec. The goal of everyone on a project should be to spend as little time as possible on tasks that distract from the job of creating quality, tested, and shippable code. Please architects, please understand this, respect this, and quietly stay out of the way of those good folk who prefer to spend their day working with an IDE writing code rather than composing e-mails.”

Wow I wanted to cry, I love this guy! Who wrote this? It is so true. Come forward mysterious coder guy!