#51: Holiday and Cooking and Recipes, Oh My!

Be it the holidays or just a casual evening that you'd like to dine in there are different places you can find recipes easily.

Not only that but let's say you were thinking about making food for you and your significant other when your family shows up unannounced. No need to panic let's just multiply the serving size to how many people you are going to feed. It uses a little math if you're up to it yourself but if you're in a hurry and just need figures to be spit out you can hop on the website:

http://www.thatsmyhome.com/recipes/converter.htm

You can also hop on www.foodnetwork.com or http://www.bonappetit.com/

It's a conversion chart that simplifies subtracting or adding serving size to your recipe.

The recipe I'm going to use today is the Easy Lemon Pasta with Chicken. The usual serving size is 3-5 but let's say those services are just for one person (like me who eats alot). I want to make this meal for 12 (equals to 96 servings) people that have just crashed our apartment.

So to make the conversion I just multiply everything by 12 basically.

So here is the original recipe measurements:

• 1 pound dried penne
• 2 chicken cutlets, cut into fingers
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 3 cloves garlic, sliced
• 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 tablespoons roughly chopped fresh parsley, for garnish
• 2 lemons, juiced
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan

Using the conversion chart it'll be:

• 12 pound dried penne
• 24 chicken cutlets, cut into fingers
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 36 cloves garlic, sliced
• 1 Tablespoon red pepper flakes
• 2 1/4 cups olive oil
• 2 1/4 cups roughly chopped fresh parsley, for garnish
• 24 lemons, juiced
• 6 cup grated Parmesan

Give the recipe a try at:
Click Me for Pasta Recipe

#50: Global Nation

We all plan vacations but sometimes the logistics of it can be overwhelming. Others can just say "Hey lets go to New York City" and when they get there it's a free for all in terms of sight seeing.

But what about the road trip? This used to be an American past time when gas was cheap and the freeways/highways connected all of us together. You would pack some clothes, ready snacks, pile into the station wagon and be on your way.

You would visit different monuments or landmarks along the way to your final destination. It wasn't how fast you got to where you were going it's how you got there. Did you take the scenic route through the mountains? Take the highway through the desert or drive through a country road where you could see all the farms.

There is a great website called Simpatigo that's a great help in planning different places to visit on your way to final destination.

You basically type in your address and type in end address. This will draw out a map for you of the fastest way to get there. Of course you don't need to take this route but when you zoom in on any routes to the end address it will show you interesting landmarks, dineries, locations for you to visit on your way over there.

So you don't need to know the locals to find a great place you can just use Simpatigo to plan the different stops easily.

Our beginning destination is going to be Houston, TX of course. Our ending destination will be the Grand Canyon in Arizona. In between we are going to stop at Denver, Colorado to visit friends and family.

Before we get to Denver we are going to stop at Dallas and checkout the Japanese Tranquility Garden with a beautiful assortment of Japanese plants. Then after hit up the Brooklyn Jazz Cafe for some live Jazz music. We'll be staying there for the night but after refueling we'll head out to Oklahoma City and stay there and stay the night. We're going to try out the "Go for the Steak" restaurant as we drive up north for lunch which I think should hold us over until the next state. Then it's a long drive to Denver Colorado which we'll be staying there for 2-3 days. Our family friends are going to take us out to some great spots in Denver and in Boulder. After that it's straight for the Grand Canyon which of course is what we've been wanting to see.

It's a great program that allows you to make a different route depending on what you want to see in each state and city. Try it out for your next vacation.

#49: Love of Languages

Learning languages is something here in America leave behind usually after high school. Americans usually settle in to their lives and jobs and people are fairly comfortable with just English here in the states.

I personally regretted the fact that I did not join one of these classes to learn a different language. I was very interested in French and also in Japanese and sometimes I think "Where will I find the chance again to learn these languages for free?". Well in the age of information there is always a chance to learn through library systems or even online. At first online courses would charge you a fee to go through their modules. Now it's a different age where you can receive classes for free by learning through audio, visual and typing.

The website www.livemocha.com is a great website that definitely fits my needs. I find it easy to use and easy to pick up. Usually in classes you have a time frame and a finish date. Here you yourself are your own teacher. I've learned Italian to the intermediate level and have been adding friends to speak to them in Italian while they send me English messages to practice it.

Right now I'm going to keep learning Italian and hope to visit Italy to visit some of their beautiful architecture and monuments. I'm sure I can use Italian at work as we have a couple of Italian customers that come in. They do know English but it would be great to communicate with them and maybe even learn a couple things in Italian.

#45: Making a Video

Making a video shouldn't be anything new. But what about making a video out of all those digital pictures that you have? Yes that's nothing new either...Myspace has a feature that lets you view pictures as a slideshow. But what it doesn't have is a pretty cool set of features as Animoto has. You can upload several pictures at once 12-15 to make a short 30 second slideshow video with music.

Animoto.com makes it easy for you to do this with it's beginner's video and also step by step instructions. You pick the song you want and then let the Animoto do the rest with it's mash up engine.

Checkout my video that I made that only took me 10-15 minutes top. The only reason it took so long was that it took me forever to find the pictures I wanted to use. Animoto took only 5 minutes to create the video.

#26: Making Music Together

The web is filled with music. From people making their own music to people splicing together music with their favorite anime or tv show.

There are different ways for you to make your own music. One of my favorite programs is called Fruity Loops. It's a program alot of music producers use to make beats and sound. One perfect example of people who use this program to its full advantage is Timberland or Pharrell. They exclusive use this program to create loops and beats and somehow come up with very catchy tunes.

The basic program can cost from $49 all the way up to $400 for the most expensive and full featured version.

But there are free options on the internet you can use to make your own music. One of these websites is called Jam Studio:

http://www.jamstudio.com/Studio/index.htm

You can use this website to use a simplistic but very intuitive display for making your own music. It has different instruments and beats and a music page to make your music. I found it rather easy to make a very simple catchy beat that loops. After I started adding more instruments that's where I found myself spending too much time trying to tweak the song to get everything right. As you can see it will suck you in once you start and it's fun to boot.

#25: Am I a music pirate? It's hard to know...

Ah! I remember the early days of Napster. It was around 2000 and I remember going to visit a friend on campus at Rice University. Now I've played also with the early edition of Winamp but what I saw was that he was listening streaming MP3's. It literally blew my mind.

Here we had the MP3 player that now played streamed MP3's through the internet. Anyone with a computer and a nice music list could become a DJ and there where several genres you could listen too.

But now what if you didn't have alot of CD's you could rip to your computer? What if you didn't have money to pay for all these new CD's when you only wanted one popular song on it.

Well que in Napster. You'd download this program and install it, configure it to your bandwidth speed, locate the music folder you wanted to share and voila free music. You can download pretty much any song you could think off....for free! Basically people would rip their CD collections and the more music you'd share the more people would share with you. If you didn't share a music folder or enough music you'd be limited to really slow download speeds and limited search functions.

But those days are over after Lars Ulrich and Metallica took Napster to court. After that trial free music and any software that allowed you to trade any music online where chased down by the RIAA and laywers.

Burning a song is pretty simple using the instructions provided by iHCPL. I opened up Windows Media Player, inserted a blank CD, followed the simple instructions and was able to burn the free music I downloaded from music.download.com.

This should be pretty straight unless you have DRM that will not allow you to do this.

Sharing music on a grand scale could leave artists out in the cold but with DRM it seems we're force fed this software that is unwanted. Usually artist like Radiohead that are at the frontier of fighting DRM and also offering free downloads really show that giving an option people will usually pay for a song. Downloading I do think is illegal but the punishment is too harsh. I think of these people that download music as customers that are not being served correctly.

Think of China and their illegal digital distribution. It is illegal to buy copied movies from a street vendor but this is a customer that has not been served correctly. What they are doing now is offering free movies or movies online for very cheap and cutting the middle man out. This brings in money and helps cut piracy alot.

This should be done with music and DRM should really go away. It's as if I buy music, I pay for it but I cannot listen to it on a different device of copy it for backup.

#24: The Sound of Music!

Seeing some of the different websites that offer music interested me on their pricing for individual songs.

I've used iTunes before and usually per song it's 99 cents. Which is just a buck and doesn't seem bad at all. But then you run into things like DRM, transferring your bought song to another device, enconding quality and so on.

Also depending on where you went it seems that some places where you can buy music (like iTunes) have way more songs than some other websites (Raphsody).

Also their song download services varies in price.
Raphody = $12.99 a month for unlimited downloads or 129.99 for an annual fee.
Napster = $12.99 a month for unlimited downloads
iTunes = 99 cents per song cheaper when you buy the whole album.

Downloading music was easy with simple with music.downloads.com. You register and then search any of their free music. Click on the song you want, aim it at the folder you want it downloaded to and just wait a minute while the song downloads.

KRBE has an online radio station. You click on their website and click on their streaming link which opens up your default music player. Then you can listen to live music through the internet.

I usually don't use KRBE or any of the other radio stations in Houston. It seems that alot of these radio stations only have Top 40 music and nothing new. So you I usually listen to www.di.fm which has plenty of live radio and genres in case you one day you want to listen to alternative and switch up to classic rap.