Sunday, December 23, 2018

Protect Your Cookies

The Internet is always stealing your cookies.  That is, it is reading all the cookies automatically collected so that it can post ads which might be relevant.   This annoyance can be minimised by changing your Web Browser settings.  The images here are from Google Chrome.

So turn on "Block third-party cookies"



Monday, December 17, 2018

Minimalist Living

Google reports 956 million candidates for minimalist living so it is an important topic for many people as the new year approaches.  There are Utube videos, books, blogs, and so on.

The site Money Under 30 gives a good outline of the pros and cons.  It suggests to focus more on value or quality and less on quantity.  If you have more stuff you have to spend more time managing it.  Mess causes stress.  Marie Kondo suggests to discard things that do not Spark Joy.

Ironically, minimalism is not a good principle for the financially challenged.  For example, buying food and supplies in bulk to fit a budget is not minimalism.   But it has a sympathetic perspective.

I recently discarded a stuffed chair because it was a useless obstacle in my 630 square foot condo apartment.  I replaced it with a tilt-back office chair on wheels which is more comfortable and practical.  I was eyeing the matching sofa but Brownie The Cat has claimed it for 20 hours per day of sleeping.  She does not like the room being changed.

Then there are various online accounts, forums and such.  Today I closed my LinkedIn account because it was a bother to scroll through the feed looking for something interesting.  Twitter will be next to go.

If I bring something home I must throw something out to make room.



Monday, October 15, 2018

Leonard Cohen Roasts Kanye West

So Kanye West went for a bizarre meeting with DJTrump, the POTUS and
self-proclaimed 'very stable genius' of the White House. Leonard Cohen
would have called this 'bullshit culture'. He wrote a poem roasting
Kanye West in 2015 'Kanye West Is Not Picasso'. Cohen died in 2016 and
the poem is found in the 2018 book aptly named The Flame.  In the
poem, Cohen pretends to be more Kanye than Kanye. It is a bragging
contest and Cohen is the winner. "I am the Kanye West Kanye West
thinks he is". You can see the poem on Twitter Leonard Cohen, various
news articles, and in the book.

Review

Tuesday, July 03, 2018

Ketchup Wars

Vintage Heinz ketchup was so thick is was difficult to pour from the tall glass bottle. After tipping and shaking, I used a butter knife to get some. It seems the current recipe is much thinner so it can be squeezed from the upside down plastic bottle. There is a wide plastic cap with a small opening such that it resists squeezing until a big blob spurts out at once. Some shaking is necessary so that the sauce settles into the cap before squeezing. I tried some recently and threw it in the garbage because it was sour. Perhaps it needed more shaking to disperse the vinegar.

Heinz had a plant in Leamington until a few years ago. They moved production to Ohio. Now there is a 10 percent tariff to import back into Canada.

French's ketchup was a poor seller until Heinz moved. Now French's has a plant in Toronto so their product is marked as made in Canda with Canadian tomatoes. By Canadians, I assume.

I like the French's ketchup. Their web site has some funky recipes. For example, Meatloaf Bombs

By the way, French's is U.S. owned by McCormick, a spice company.

Monday, June 18, 2018

McIsaac Family Crest

I purchased the high resolution McIsaac Family Crest from House Of Names. Click the image to enlarge it.


The McIsaac family comes from the ancient Scottish Dalriadan clans of the mountainous west coast of Scotland. The name McIsaac is derived from the personal name Isaac. The Gaelic forms of the name are Mac Isaac or Mac Iosaig, both of which mean son of Isaac.

Spelling variations were extremely common in medieval names, since scribes from that era recorded names according to sound rather than a standard set of rules. McIsaac has appeared in various documents spelled MacIsaac, MacIsaack and others.

Saturday, June 09, 2018

Vintage Photos of Stephenville, NL

Some family picture albums have been lost so I was looking for old photos of Stephenville on the WWW. Google pointed to photos at this site www.c-and-e-museum.org/Pinetreeline/Photos/. The top-level domain redirects to the Military Communications And Electronics Museum which does not yet have the Stephenville 1959 photos. I got permission from the museum facebook page to use them.

Most of the photos are about the military site on "table-top" mountain usually called Pinetree. There were many Pinetree sites with big dish antennas for communications and RADAR. Powerful snowstorms sometimes ripped the roofs off buildings since there was nothing to break the wind.

There are photos of the British Queen Elizabeth visiting Stephenville in 1959.

See photos here: NORAD Pinetree Site

Monday, June 04, 2018

Cod Jigging

I thought of my maternal grandparents when reading an article about the decline of Newfoundland outports and scattered villages. Little is known of my grandparents before World War II, I believe they were Acadians who made a living from fishing and farming. Many outport residents having these occupations were paid subsidies to move to urban centers for less costly, more efficient, goverement services.  But my grandparents did not need to move because modernity came to them with the construction of Harmon Air Force Base by the Americans.  See Memoriam.

Saturday, June 02, 2018

Second Brain In The Gut

Scientists have discovered that animals have neuron (brain) cells in their gut. This is probably to manage the complex energy factory down there. It seems like a second brain so they call it a butt-brain.
What will those smartass scientists think of next?

Humans are living creatures that move so we are animals. Except, maybe couch-potatoes.

Reference

Friday, June 01, 2018

In The Cloud Of Google Domains

Bobmc Dot Net was hosted at the HostDime data center in Orlando for more than 10 years. It was on a server of HasWeb, a HostDime company where the bobmc site had a legacy designation. It was cheap and reliable. Now All the HasWeb services are on hold because it is merging with HostDime. My old password did not work and trouble tickets would bounce between HasWeb and HostDime such that nothing was done. In addition, Dotster was the site registrar so I had to deal with Dotster, HostDime, and HasWeb. It was too much bother for something no longer needed.


So I decided to move to Google Domains for bobmc dot net registration, G Suite for email, and Blogger for random musings. It seems more complicated than the web site admistration in my experience. I am comfortable with scripting and updating server control files. However, Google hides or abstracts all these details. There are a ton of documentation pages, some already deprecated, and there are various forms to fill out.

The idea is for all web pages in my domain to include "bobmc.net" as part of the URL. It is almost working. Eventually, when you search for "bobmc.net", you should see "whatever.bobmc.net" which links to this blog. I have had this blog for many years with postings here and there. It is really "bobmcisaac.blogspot.com"

Perhaps everyone should register their own domain to have a unique presence on the web if only for future use. With Google Domains plus Gsuite you can have aliases for your email address and for web sites, blogs and documents.