So our old giant 40 gallon water heater started leaking. I was told it was the end of the thing and that it needed replacement. I went to Home Depot and looked at replacements. It would set me back $700 including installation. Then my partner who is really into energy saving and being green asked me why I wasn't looking at a tankless on-demand waterheater. I told her it is probably very expensive and won't work very well. But as the good boy I am I went on the Internet and did some research. I found the site for the Titan tankless on-demand waterheaters. My initial reaction was "This can't be working". Then I looked at the pricing. The one I would need cost $249! That's $100 less than what I would have to pay at Home Depot for a direct replacement. I read some more and decided to take a chance on this technology. I ordered the model recommended for a household like mine. A couple of days later a little package arrived. It was the waterheater. I was shocked and thought I had been fooled. When I got the unit out it turned out to be 10"x7"x3" in size. Less than a shoe box! I had this sinking feeling when I called an electrician. He arrived and I showed him the unit. He laughed and told me that thing could simply not work, but would install it as directed. So he did. I ended up with this little box on the wall in the large cabinet where the old monster had been. It had cold water coming in, and hot coming out. The electrician asked me to turn on the hot water but said: "Don't expect much to happen". I stuck my finger in the running water. It got hotter, and hotter. I had to withdraw my finger. I measured the temperature and it was 120F. Just the right temperature! I went out and told the electrician who simply said: "I'd be darned". I had to take him into the kitchen so he could check for himself. He repeated: "I'd be darned". When he left he told me he wanted one of those himself. I was very happy and tried to turn on two showers at the same time. More than enough hot water!

This is simply an incredible technology. I do not understand why anyone would want the old tank-monsters installed. Also, i can expect a 50-60% reduction in hot water heating costs. I do not believe it until I see it. I will post back when I have the numbers ready.

Since this water heater is electric we decided to switch to a green electric energy company. So now we are having hydro/wind feed this little wonder which is producing all the hot water we need and then some. Thank you Titan for a great web site and incredibly good products. And did I mention that they offer a limited 10 year warranty? No, I am not paid by these guys. But sometimes products are simply so surprisingly good I feel the need to talk about them.

Here it is:

I am able to post from my phone agin. Expect to hear more from me!

Hurricane Ike is turning south and could very well be heading for the Gulf. I really hope that if another major evacuation is needed people won't look to Gustav and think: "It's probably not going to be life threatning either". But it's very possible that this will happen. We are humans with very short memory and narow perspective!

Posted on SpotJots near: 17132-17169 COPPERHEAD DR, TX 78664 US

What women (and some men) will do to look beautiful! Just saw on the news that a new facial mask/treatment has become popular. It's made from bird droppings and is supposed to be very effective.

Talk about getting shit faced!

Posted on SpotJots near: E PALM VALLEY BLVD/US-79 , ROUND ROCK TX 78664 US

I came across the attached Compuserve ad. I remember them: Together with AOL and Prodigy they were pioneering getting people on-line. They failed totally when they assumed they could keep people within their wall gardened content pool and not let them out on the emerging Internet. That was a huge mistake. They could at least have ended up as an ISP like AOL did.

However, when you look at the ad you have to give them credit for being right in one area. Too bad the "electronic mall" went far beyond their concepts and control.


Posted on SpotJots near: E PALM VALLEY BLVD/US-79 , ROUND ROCK TX 78664 US

Hi,

And here we are waiting for Eduardo to come by. We are hoping it won't break anything except for one thing: The dry spell!  It's been one of the driest six months ever around here. I hope Eduardo stays long enough to help a bit on that situation without flooding. Do you hear that Eduardo? :)

Follow Eduardo here.


Posted on SpotJots near: 300-399 W 6TH ST, AUSTIN TX 78701 US

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Posted on SpotJots near:

I have noticed that my 6 year old daughter has been mean to our cats and dog lately. She is messing around with them a lot, and not in a nice way. I have been asking her why she is doing it and told her it has to stop, but not gotten a good explanation from her I understand.

Then I saw her on YouTube watching animal videos. I looked a little closer and what seems to be nice and funny videos with cats and other pets in them actually are funny in a cruel way. It's videos about taping items to cats and other degrading behavior towards animals. There was the explanation! I have never been a fan of TV shows with funny animal behavior because it more often than not are humans inflicting the funniness on the animals. In some of these viral videos this aspect of it is very clear.

This is a side of viral video sites like YouTube I haven't thought of before, so i have put restrictions on my daughters use of it. I have nothing against videos with pets in them, but when I see a cat flying off a ceiling fan I am not sure it got up there itself although it could. I actually think it's people staging these situations.

We are so concerned about our kids seeing sexual content that we forget the more subtle ways harm can be done having them roam viral video sites, and the Internet as a whole for that matter.

I have to accept that cruelty for many people is entertaining, but I hope I will be able to steer my kids in a different direction.

Posted on SpotJots near:

'tis the weekend! Paying Duffy's "Mercy" 'nuff said......

Posted on SpotJots near:

Hi.

I purchased some house cleaning products the other day. One of them is a "cleanser" another is a "cleaner". They both do the same thing as far as I can see. What's the difference in meaning (if any) between the two terms?


Posted on SpotJots near: 17132-17169 COPPERHEAD DR, TX 78664 US

There's certain dishes you can't even get at restaurants these days. You have to cook them yourself. One of them I have going today: Split pea and barley soup. It's a cheap, nutritious and simple dish to prepare. And boy does it smell good the two hours it's simmering on the stove! This weekend it's going to be corned beef and cabbage. The smell of that going is just phenomenal!

I'm so tired of pizza, quiche and tacos. We should bring more of the good old traditional dishes back. They should not be forgotten.

Do you have a favorite to add to my list?

Posted on SpotJots near: Round Rock, TX

It happens, I have to get a new laptop because the old one dies or gets too old too soon. The new one comes fresh with Windows and tons of "crap-ware". The first thing I do is getting rid of that. Then I move my data over from a back-up (yes, I have those!). What's next? What's next is what this series of posts are going to be about: The software I install first since I can't live without it. It's software I do not question; no one can convince me there's anything better out there in it's either unique area or among it's competition. I am a software junkie, nothing escapes me, and since I work for a software company I know where to look and what to look for.

This post is about the Revo Uninstaller. Uninstaller? But Windows comes with an uninstall utility? Well, yes it does, but to cut a long story short, the built in unnstall process in Windows leaves a lot behind on your computer in places you do not want to mess around without some guidance from capable software. Revo Uninstaller is that software. Who's to blame for the mess? Mostly it's the software vendors themselves. They do not want to spend their resources on making sure they are perfectly removing themselves from your computer. Why would they? They say they do, but they don't. In fact, sometimes they want to leave stuff behind not to be "forgotten" on your machine, but that's another story for another time.

So what's so great about the Revo Uninstaller? It puts a simple (user inter) face on something that is quite complex: Traces of software in the Windows registry (the nerve center of your computer) and files left behind in places you would not know to look for them. It does this geeky stuff in a simple safe way and has never let me down. I will not get into details here since I recommend that when you start using software which digs deep into sensitive areas of your computer you should know it well in advance. So read and learn before you use it on a daily basis. Also, the program offers a fast, seachable user interface for the software uninstall processl which is much faster and better than the built in one. So this is a double whammy: It does it's job better than the built in solution in addition to offering a better user interface that the built in one.

Finally, the Revo Uninstaller is freeware. They do not even ask for a donation, something I would have given them instantly. This piece of software is like soap in the shower, you need it to keep clean!

In 1999 I sent out an e-mail to some friends about a new search engine. The Internet was still kinda new and everyone was talking of the complexity of it, how big it was going to be. It got big. But what got bigger than anything was Google. We were all using Hotbot, AltaVista and the Yahoo! index. Along came Google, goofy simple home page with very good results. Reluctantly people started using it and never quit.

Now finally Google has a worthy rival. The only thing that can stop this from getting just as big is money. Google has so much cash they can crush almost anything that comes in their not evil way. But I have hope and I am telling you, this is better, bigger and simpler than Google:

http://www.cuil.com/

The next step in search is going to look like this, unless this actually IS it.

Everywhere music is played like Internet radio, satellite radio and even FM eclectic is used in a way do you'd think they will play "anything" put together intelligently. Not true. If the term "eclectic" is used you will always hear Sting, Peter Gabriel, electronic world music, Enya and other Celtic stuff with some "classic light" thrown in. I'm not saying they only play that, but the before mentioned ingredients are always present in an eclectic play list. You'll never hear The Sex Pistols or Paul Hindemith though. I wish there were a real eclectic radio station somewhere. The closest I've come is the excellent Radio Paradise. However, I do not think I like that station because they are eclectic. I think their playlists are geared towards the more advanced listener to popular music. So not truly eclectic. You can play any piece of music and I will immediately be able to tell you if it would fit in an eclectic play list. Honestly, I can!

I often have to paste the same information into e-mail and documents I create. It's mostly a couple of sentences, or something I copied off another document. I've used a simple text file where I save the stuff I need for later use. A little bit cumbersome. So I was thinking: If the Windows clipboard had been a little more advanced with an easily accessible history and the ability to save templates I always have available to paste into my work the problem would be solved. And off I go looking for software. I found this little program called CLCL. It sits in your system tray and stores everything you copy to the clipboard. You can also store text as clipboard templates you always can access with a key combo.

I have had CLCL installed for a few months now, and I have ended up using it all the time! Funny how it's usually the little programs solving a minor, but constant problem which ends up being something you can't live without. CLCL has ended up on my list over a very few programs I always install on a new computer. I will talk about a few others in upcoming posts. But for now, get CLCL and get a clipboard on steroids. You won't realize you need it until you've tried it.

We've heard that watching moving pictures like movies, television and music videos will be done on your PC. For years we have been able to do this. There's been services out there offering some form of content intended to be consumed on your computer. I have used some of them, but ended up in my living room for most moving picture content viewing. It has either been too complicated, or the content has simply been too limited.

But now there's Hulu and Miro. Funny names for streaming video services, but they both work great even if they are very different. I use them both a lot these days leaving my television off for days on end.

Miro is the open source, free player with +4,000 channels. It's based on the Firefox browser thus having a web standardsr based user interface. It's rudimentary, but works great. It also use a lot from the open source self contained media player VLC for media playback. For transport it used normal ftp and even BitTorrent. However, you do not need to know anything about anything to use this. You simply subscribe to "channels" (yes, using RSS to keep you up to date). The "channels" gets download to your drive and you can organize your content the way you want with regards to how often to update, what to keep and how long it should be stored before it gets automatically deleted. Be prepared to spend disk space in the 10s of GBs for Miro. You can also add your own channels if you come over video blogs/podcasts which has an RSS feed associated to them. There's a lot of so-so content available, so the casual network TV viewer will not find the 10 o clock news and stuff like that here. I have found around 20 channels which I keep and enjoy watching. Miro is also a good movie player which you can use to organize and play back almost all video content on your drive. So here you have a good alternative to Window Media Player, Real Player and QuickTime in an open source free and politically corrects wrapping.

And then there's Hulu. Hulu can be used with any browser since this is not a stand alone program like Miro. Hulu offers commercial content like sitcoms, dram series and movies for free. There's limited commercial interruption of the programming, but it's much less intrusive than watching normal television. The interface is basd on Adobe Flash (like YouTube and other video services also are), but look much more professional than anything else I've seen so far. When using Hulu you're amazed of how good it looks on the screen and how easy it is to access content. There's new content added every day so you should be able to find something to watch. You can create play lists and watch your shows in a pop-up window if you like. I've been using Hulu a lot, but you can only use it when you are on line since there's no way to store content here. On the go I have used Miro.

All in all, here you have to relatively new offering which I think points to how we are going to consume video content in the future. None of these are perfect, but together they represent an alternative to cable and satellite TV for the casual viewer. For the TV-addict and sports nut neither of these will do. But I am none of that, so for me it's all I need right now, and I can watch it wherever I happen to be with my laptop, in bed, in the kitchen and while in the bath. Convenient!

Since I work in the browser business (for the browser company Opera Software) I need to keep up with all the browsers out there. Opera is a "lean mean browsing machine" out of the box doing almost everything you can think of, and some you didn't know a browser can do. But this is not going to be about Opera. It's going to be about Firefox, the other "alternative browser" out there fighting the Internet Explorer dominance. In another post I will discuss how you can turn the boring Microsoft browser into something exciting as well, but now back to Firefox. I was never really impressed with the speed of Firefox in it's 1.x and 2.x incarnations. So I was not expecting much when I downloaded the Firefox 3 Beta 5.

I installed it, opened it and browsed. Whoa! Fast! Pages came to life before I had lifted my finger off the "Enter" key. So finally the Firefox development community had found time to optimize rendering speed and and other tweaks turning the sluggish, memory leaking browser into something exciting.

Being a software junkie I like the extension and theme concept of Firefox. You can create your custom browser solution by taking the stock Firefox and beef it up both functionality wise and cosmetically. So I took my stock Firefox 3 Beta 5 and decided to turn it into the ultimate browser. This is something I can't do with Opera since it comes "as is", and all you can do is appreciate what it does, or not. Opera has their own widget support built in, so you can add little independent program snippets living outside the browser, but relying on it. Yahoo! has something similar, and Windows Vista has the sidebar you can populate with something very similar to widgets as well. However, Firefox has an endless list of extensions for functionality and themes for looks available called "Add-ons". The problem is that these are created for certain versions of Firefox and won't necessarily work in the version you happen to be using. You can't do much wrong though because either they will install, or they won't.

So now to what I have been working on lately: Building the "Perfect Internet Browser" on the new fast Firefox 3 Beta 5. After having downloaded the browser and installed it I started on the add-ons. This is the list I ended up adding for my perfect Firefox browser:

- Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4
Ads were yesterday!
- Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper 1.0.4
Helps you create element hiding rules for Adblock Plus to fight the text ads.
- Autofill Forms 0.9.2.2
Fill out web forms automatically
- DownThemAll! 1.0.1
The mass downloader for Firefox.
- Extension List Dumper 1.13.1
Dumps a list of the installed extensions.
- Flagfox 3.2.3
Displays a flag depicting the location of the current server
- Grab and Drag 2.5.0.3
Enables Adobe Acrobat-style grab and drag scrolling in Mozilla applications.
- Java Console 6.0.05
Java support for Firefox
- LiveJournal Addons 7.7.1
Add some facilities to LiveJournal
- Personal Menu 3.0.9
Replace the conservative menus, beautify your Firefox!
- Speed Dial 0.7.0.8
Direct access to your most visited websites
- Toolbar Buttons 0.5.0.4
Adds toolbar buttons.
- Yahoo! Toolbar 1.5.1.20080205
Get more out of Yahoo! and the web!
- YouPlayer 0.9.7
Advanced video-site player and download tool

I won't get into detail on all of these, but let you know what I ended up with. The browser I now have eliminates almost all ads on web pages. It fills in forms for me, and has advanced download management which opens several connections while downloading increasing speed of the process. I have Speed Dial like Opera has, and can download, play and store YouTube videos in the browser itself. Some of the extension are there to be able to tweak the user interface of the browser: Eliminating menus and bars I do not need and putting buttons for direct access to functionality with one click. It even has an add-on for working with the LiveJournal blog service which I am using for this post. And then there's some pure fun add-ons like "Flagfox" which will show you on a map where any of the web pages you visit physically are located. Finally I have the Yahoo! Toolbar added which I find to be very useful since I happen to be using a lot of Yahoo!'s services. I use this toolbar also on Internet Explorer, but there's no such thing available for Opera since this browser doesn't have an extension/add-on option built in.

I have also chosen a very compact theme for the browser since I want as little user interface taking up screen real estate but still have a lot of functionality available to me. I can't get into detail on the whole user interface, but if you are interested contact me and I will assist you creating something similar. The theme I have ended up using is called Nautipolis for Firefox.

Out of the box Firefox is too limited for me compared to Opera, but what I have created here is a real alternative and more. And of course it's an alternative to IE also.

This is what I ended up with:

Everyone in my family, including my lovely wife, have been hooked on MMORPG games for a long time. If you do not know what they are, don't try and find out! They are potentially as addictive as coffee, love, sports etc. Around here it has been World of Warcraft. It's an on line game where you create a character, fight monsters, complete quests and level your character up as far as you can get with an element of "when time permits". The problem is that the "when time permits" easily means you spend hours a day ending up thinking it's permissible to spend that amount of time on a world that's 100% fictitious. I've had numerous discussion with family members on how spending all this time on a game isn't a good thing. Never worked. My wife has been communicating with our kids about having their room cleaned through the game instead of walking in there and yell at them directly. Now, that's kinda cool I think: This hot chick female wizard telling a heavily armored knight to clean their room.

Since I am a declared software junkie who has to try everything that can run on a computer (and some that won't) I'm trying all these games as they come out. What strikes me is that they all seem to have something in common: Your character is a hot lookin' babe with big boobs and perfect behinds for the women, lot of muscles and other attractive male attributes for the dudes. It's almost always a mythological aspect to it which puts you in a world of lore, violence and the quest for power. Easily beats going to church

And here I find myself installing and trying yet another of these games. One that's even free to play. I yawn myself through the bottom levels, kill little creatures like spider larvae etc. And after an hour or so I can create quite a bit of visually interesting effects while killing stuff. It looks cool. I decide to be "scientific" about it and read up on how my character should "power up". You see, there are different classes of characters like wizards, summoners, warriors and healers. They all need to be developed with the skills and powers they need to have to be successful moving forward. I am a "Vicious Summoner", so I make a list of what I need to do to become a successful one moving up in the power chain. And then another few hours pass. It's working. I get invited to join a guild of other players. They see my potential and determination and want me on their team. So I am in a guild where these hot chicks and hunky guys are helping me develop my character. Neat! Then the guild leader wants to be able to reach me on IM (like Yahoo! Messenger and Skype). Okay, , so I give her my contact information. However, in my Skype contact information she finds my phone number. She calls me and tells me I need to in the game at 8 PM to work on my skulls and powers and become useful to the guild. That's the time when I read fairy tales to my kids before they go to bed, so I say "no I can't". Then she tells me I should really do it. So now the element of belonging and being needed is added to the mix. It's captivating and means my kids have to do Lego's instead of having me read to them. What's wrong about that for one night? Nothing is wrong with that for one night, but it gets very wrong when it goes on for years. I won't let that happen. But a Summoner has to do what a Summoner has to do!

Okay, , so I admit it. I find this game captivating. I've found out I can do it, so I want to see how far I can go. It's going to be a balance act, but not too hard for me since my kids and wife is already doing the same thing. So I decide that what's needed is to be able to limit the time spent and reducing the feeling of commitment. We'll see if I can do it. A lot of people can't and end up loosing everything important in their real life while developing a mythical identity in some game. I will keep you posted on how I manage to balance what's real and important with what's seductively attractive and fun.

Oh,the game? You want to know which game it is: It's called "2Moons". Try it, but remember what's important in your life. A game like this is designed to make you forget. Enjoy anyway!

I've been without e-mail on my Blackberry all day. I am still here, and still sane. Good (but unexpected) to know I can survive something like this. However, I did find the reason for it.

So what am I going on about now? Brine? What's brine anyway? Well, it's water with enough salt to preserver meat used to pre-treat meat. I always brine poultry before I grill or barbecue it. I brine the Christmas ham and the Thanksgiving turkey. The meat gets moist and delicious instead of dry and bland. I am not going in to details here but brining is simply leaving meat in a water/salt/spices solution for a while. A while could be 6 - 48 hours. And yes, you tailor your brine by adding spices and even fruit juices.

The main problem with brine if finding exactly how much salt to add. Yes, there are recipes, but they are not always perfect which brings me to the point of this post: A simple way to add just the right amount of salt for the perfect brine: Add salt until an egg floats! It's so simple, and results in the perfect brine every time.

If you do not brine your meat, start doing it! If you want a perfect result every time, use an egg and make it float. So simple. So perfect.