A Spam email without the message body? How am I supposed to buy stuff from them - or claim the price I won?
18th Jul, 2008
Are Spammers Getting Lazy?
10th Jul, 2008
Rocks
Somebody stacked rocks at the Chimney Bluffs beach. I’ve used my new Canon 70-200 f/2.8
8th Jul, 2008
He’s Dead, Jim!
8th Jul, 2008
Centercode is Looking for Beta Testers in NYC
Do you live (or work) in the NYC area, and are interesting in beta testing a “portable internet device”? Centercode is looking for beta testers at https://www.onlinebeta.com/callout/default.html?callid={28E7069E-D185-43EE-BC5A-536E11BBA143}
I would love to sign up, but unfortunately Rochester is not really considered to be a NYC suburb.
6th Jul, 2008
Capture Rochester
Rochester’s paper, the Democrat and Chronicle, is going to publish a coffee table book with the best photos of Rochester. Anybody can submit pictures on the web site of the project. I never miss an opportunity to shamelessly promote myself 
so there are a bunch of my Rochester pictures on the site as well.
The photos that get the most votes will get published in the book, so please go and vote for me
4th Jul, 2008
SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM
I am using Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) for - among other things - my email. Google’s SPAM filter is pretty good, but I used to go through the messages in my SPAM folder occasionally, and every now and then I would pull out a message that was incorrectly identified as SPAM… I don’t do that anymore. So, if you sent me something and have not received a reply, chances are that your message got lost in SPAM.
Why do I no longer look for ham in spam? Because it got too overwhelming. Google keeps a month worth of messages in the SPAM folder, anything older than a month gets deleted automatically. Up until yesterday I had 14000 SPAM messages. Today the count dropped to a bit over 8000. This means that about a month ago I received 6000 SPAM emails in about a day - oh man was I looking back to the good old days of only 300 SPAMs a day. The reason for that was that somebody used my my email address and my domain as the “From” address for a ton of SPAM, and a lot of mail servers out there still send out messages that are trying to tell the sender “your message got classified as spam” or “the user you tried to spam does unfortunately no longer exit”… And all these messages ended up in my mailbox.
This was not the first time that happened, and I’m just too tired of going through these messages and trying to find the needle in the spam stack.
3rd Jul, 2008
French Bread
Here is my first attempt to bake on of the breads in Daniel Leader’s
Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers. As usual, I had a problem with following instructions, and I had to modify the recipe a bit: Instead of 500g of all purpose flour, I used 400g of AP and 100g of whole wheat graham flour. I did not want to replace too much flour with whole wheat to not change the character of the bread and the consistency of the dough too much.
And, because of time constraints, I had to “rush” the whole process a bit by shaving off a few minutes of every step. The temperature on that day (it was very hot) may have worked to my advantage because the dough did rise a lot faster.
French bread is best fresh, and I did not want to eat three loafs within an hour of baking them, so I also cut short the baking time a bit - hence the somehow pale look of the finished bread.
That allows me to freeze the loafs and then just pop them into my convection toaster oven for 8 to 10 minutes and have delicious fresh french bread.
2nd Jul, 2008
PDF Content Streams
How Did You Get Here?
I did some research on why and how visitors come to my site. One interesting finding is that a number of people are searching for information about PDF content streams. Here is the list of the 50 most common Google searches that contain the string “content”:
30th Jun, 2008
Frog’s Back
29th Jun, 2008
Bread
I like bread. There is nothing better than bread fresh out of the oven - yes, I know you are not supposed to cut right into a freshly baked loaf, but still, there is nothing better…
Good bread recipes are hard to find, but I think I just hit the jackpot: Daniel Leader’s
Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers
How to I judge a baking book? Of course, I look for the pretzel recipe. Most recipes I find online result in a dough that is too dry - Leader’s recipe gets it right (it took me quite a bit of experimenting to come up with my recipe). I’m not yet convinced that his baking soda/water ratio is correct, and I don’t want to know what boiling the dough for 1 minute will do to the pretzels… Actually, I think I do know: It will turn them into bagels, and that is not quite the texture that I’m looking for in a pretzel.
I looked at a bunch of recipes, and they all look good. In addition to the actual recipes there are enough illustrations in the general section of the book that show the finer points of processing and shaping the different breads.
This is a great book, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be busy over the next few months baking all sorts of artesian breads.