My pick for this year's best productivity booster is probably Bloglines.com. Bloglines is a free RSS feed aggregator. Most blog and news sites provide RSS or Atom feeds. With a Bloglines account, you can "subscribe" to as many feeds as you wish to follow and Bloglines will track new articles and present them to you as "unread" articles. It is presented in a way very similar to how we see our unread email.
No longer do I have to manually visit each of my regular sites and determine what information is new and what I've already read. Although this sounds like it doesn't take much time, it does add up. Now, I can just go to bloglines.com and all of the new articles are there for me to scan at my own pace. Feeds are scanned regularly and new articles are displayed automatically.
You can select to view articles as titles only, summaries or in their entirety. Hyperlinks to the actual article are provided as well. Articles can be marked as unread, etc., similar to managing email.
Not only does this save time from not having to navigate to multiple web sites, new articles are pulled regularly and it makes it easier to avoid unproductive web surfing. For busy people that frequent multiple news or blog sites, a feed aggregator is a must.
What sets Bloglines apart from other aggregators is that it presents new articles like unread email, rather than as a list of articles without old articles screened out. It can be used to follow any site that offers a feed, including photo sharing accounts (i.e., Flickr.com), shopping sites (i.e., dealspl.us), career sites (i.e., dice.com) and many others.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Mmm... Homemade Ice Cream!
We finally tried our new Cuisinart automatic frozen yogurt / ice cream / sorbet maker. I had the mixer bowl in the freezer for a few days to get it nice and cold. It's recommended to have it in the freezer one or two days before using it for best results.
Thanksgiving seemed to be the perfect day to try it out. I mixed the ingredients, turned on the gadget and poured the mixture into the mixing bowl. In 30 minutes, it was nice and creamy. Since we like our ice cream on the firmer side, I transferred it into an air tight container and stuck it in the freezer for a couple hours.
After dinner, we had our ice cream. It was still a bit soft for our liking. But, the taste was good. There was still more than half that we could save for later.
The next night (tonight) it was firm and much better overall. Reminded us of Breyer's. I am very impressed by this homemade ice cream! Looking forward to eating more! There are other recipes we can try too.
Thanksgiving seemed to be the perfect day to try it out. I mixed the ingredients, turned on the gadget and poured the mixture into the mixing bowl. In 30 minutes, it was nice and creamy. Since we like our ice cream on the firmer side, I transferred it into an air tight container and stuck it in the freezer for a couple hours.
After dinner, we had our ice cream. It was still a bit soft for our liking. But, the taste was good. There was still more than half that we could save for later.
The next night (tonight) it was firm and much better overall. Reminded us of Breyer's. I am very impressed by this homemade ice cream! Looking forward to eating more! There are other recipes we can try too.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Halloweenie Weekend
Alice, her dad, Emma and I drove up to San Francisco for Halloween this year. Alice's dad has been staying with us again after my mom went back to Hawaii in late September. He's been watching Emma while Alice and I are at work. As always, he's been a great help and still cooks for us regularly.
Halloween this year was on a friday. Since I've been working my schedule to get every other friday off, we left for San Fran after work on Thursday. Well, not immediately after work. By the time we were ready and all packed, it was 8:45 p.m. On the bright side, we didn't hit much traffic. The drive went smoothly and we arrived at Alice's parent's home at 3:00 a.m. Since Sean and Luke had school that day, we were able to sleep in until around 11 a.m. or so.
On Halloween night, we walked a few blocks around Alice's parent's house on Girard Street before going to Alice's cousin Johnny's place for their costume party. Emma was dressed in a cute bumble bee costume that we purchased at Babystyle.
It rained all day on Saturday, so we ended up hanging out at the house. We didn't step outside, except to show Emma the rain. She loves water.
On Sunday, we ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant near Henry and Mary's apartment in the Sunset District. As it turns out, instead of heading back to L.A. after lunch as planned, Alice went back to her parent's to play some Mah Jong while Sean, Emma and I went over to Henry and Mary's to play Guitar Hero World Tour. Emma took a nice long nap too. At 8 something p.m., we were back at Girard Street packing. We started our drive back home at 9:50 p.m. and at 3:20 a.m. we made it back to our apartment in L.A.
Halloween this year was on a friday. Since I've been working my schedule to get every other friday off, we left for San Fran after work on Thursday. Well, not immediately after work. By the time we were ready and all packed, it was 8:45 p.m. On the bright side, we didn't hit much traffic. The drive went smoothly and we arrived at Alice's parent's home at 3:00 a.m. Since Sean and Luke had school that day, we were able to sleep in until around 11 a.m. or so.
On Halloween night, we walked a few blocks around Alice's parent's house on Girard Street before going to Alice's cousin Johnny's place for their costume party. Emma was dressed in a cute bumble bee costume that we purchased at Babystyle.
It rained all day on Saturday, so we ended up hanging out at the house. We didn't step outside, except to show Emma the rain. She loves water.
On Sunday, we ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant near Henry and Mary's apartment in the Sunset District. As it turns out, instead of heading back to L.A. after lunch as planned, Alice went back to her parent's to play some Mah Jong while Sean, Emma and I went over to Henry and Mary's to play Guitar Hero World Tour. Emma took a nice long nap too. At 8 something p.m., we were back at Girard Street packing. We started our drive back home at 9:50 p.m. and at 3:20 a.m. we made it back to our apartment in L.A.
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