Droppin’ it to Dropbox

I’m sure many of you already know about this, but I ran across this really cool program a few weeks ago and just have to tell you about it because I am loving it. Here’s the thing: I’m a knitter. I’m a knitter who knits all over – on the bus, on the train, in line, at restaurants, at work, etc. Sometimes, I’m a knitter who forgot to bring the pattern with her, or who printed the pattern but somehow left the most important page of it at home, or who is improvising and needs a guideline to work from RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE. I have an iPhone so I do have access to the internet, but this only works while I have decent cell coverage and sometimes web browsing speeds are painfully slow. And sometimes, I just don’t want the hassle of searching and browsing for a pattern on the itty bitty screen. (I do not have an iPad, nor do I have plans to buy one.)

Enter Dropbox. This handy-dandy program acts like a “My Documents” folder that I can take with me, and the best part is that it auto-syncs between as many devices as you want! I downloaded the program on my laptop at home and signed up for an account (it’s free), dragged a bunch of knitting patterns in PDF and MS Word format into the Dropbox folder on my computer, and VOILA! All those patterns are now hosted magically somewhere out in etherspace and by launching the app on my iPhone, I have instant access to all those PDFs and Word docs. Or I can log on to the internet from anywhere (at the library, for example) and add or retrieve files from my Dropbox.

This works for photos, too – so I can take pictures on my iPhone, pull them into Dropbox, and they magically sync so that I can access the photos on my laptop at home without having to plug in my phone or deal with email transfers. This is extra handy if you are traveling, as it acts like a backup of your stuff in case something happens to your phone or iPad. You can also do all kinds of cool backflips like linking to Twitter or Facebook, or using a Public Folder to share your stuff with other people. Or you can just take your knitting patterns with you to the local yarn store to make sure you buy enough yarn for your next project.

Dropbox gives you 2GB of space to start with, and you and I will both get a bonus 500MB if you sign up through my referral link. Do it. It’s free!

Here’s a screen shot of the app on my phone so you can see how clean and simple the layout is:

Pay it off quicker

With my mortgage refinance in the works, I figured today would be a good day to share a simple tool for calculating how you can, by paying just a little extra on your monthly mortgage bill, pay it off sooner and save tons of money in the process.  I’ve always rounded up our payment to the nearest hundred dollars – for the past few years, that means just $35 a month extra – but while that seems a rather insignificant amount, over the course of a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage that would knock SIX YEARS off the end of my mortgage period. Six years, and some seventy-thousand dollars in interest payments.

Working on my new mortgage terms, I wanted to see how I can pay it off sooner, like in 20 years instead of 30, and so I pulled up a handy-dandy calculator in Excel that lets you play with the numbers. For me to shave ten years (and save over $80k in interest payments) I would have to send in an extra $300 a month – but on my new terms that is still less than what I was paying so it’s very doable, and would save me so much money…

If you want to give it a try, here’s a link to an Excel worksheet that you can customize with your mortgage balance and interest rate, and lets you play around with other info (like the extra payments): Home Mortgage Calculator in Excel

If you are not an Excel fan, you can do this kind of thing online as well; here’s a link to a very simple one:  Mortgage Payoff Calculator

False advertising

It’s one of my favorite soap boxes to climb onto: be an educated consumer.

Certainly don’t fall for slick advertising, fads, and smokescreen claims that the megacorporations use to persuade you to buy their products. Don’t go in blind. Know what you are buying.

Advertisers are quick to sink their hooks into trendy terms such as “All-Natural” without backing it up with anything real. Right now, greek yogurt is hot — so it’s no surprise that the big guys are all over that.

The definition of greek yogurt is “yogurt which has been strained in a cloth or bag to remove whey, resulting in a thicker yogurt with a consistency between regular yogurt and soft cheese”. Strained yogurt is also higher in protein, which is the big selling point.

Chobani greek yogurt is a brand that is popular in our grocery stores, and the ingredients in the vanilla flavor are: cultured pasteurized nonfat milk, sugar, natural vanilla flavor, five live active cultures including S. thermaphilus, bulgaricus, L. acidophilus, bifudus, and L. casein.

Fage greek yogurt, another popular brand, contains milk, cream, and the live cultures above that make yogurt into yogurt.

Oiokos, another greek yogurt, is made from cultured pasteurized organic nonfat milk.

I’m sensing a trend.

Yogurt is a simple food – milk and enzymes (plus fruit / sugar / honey if you desire).

So why, then, (and I’m totally throwing them under the bus here) does Lucerne’s greek yogurt contain locust bean gum, pectin, protein concentrate and corn starch? Oh, but it’s ORGANIC corn starch, as if we aren’t force-fed enough corn products… Why do they pass this off as greek yogurt? Because they are counting on you not knowing the difference and buying their crapola-yogurt-made-thicker-with-more-crapola because they put the word GREEK on the front. Adding a bunch of thickeners doesn’t make it greek, it’s greek because of the process of straining.

If they are this misleading about their yogurt, how can I be sure their cage-free eggs really are? Somehow, my bullshit meter doesn’t buy it.

Summer reading

Whatcha reading?

Me, I’ve a voracious reader — and buying a nook two years ago just fueled my consumption. Yes, I have the older version, but it does exactly what I wanted: allow me to always have abundant reading material with me at all times. I don’t need color, I don’t need fancy graphics, I don’t want to browse the web or play games with it — I read. In bed, in line, at lunch, on the train, at baseball games, while waiting (anywhere), during lunch, over coffee, even while knitting if the book and knitting are getting along (meaning, if I don’t need to watch my stitches too closely).

Last night I finished reading The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, and promptly opened Doc, by Mary Doria Russell (both checked out from the library, but I’m inserting Amazon links). Waiting for me is a partially-read purchased ebook, A Clash of Kings, which is the second in a series that was recommended by both my son and a coworker. Rightfully recommended, because I’m loving it, but I need to finish the library books before they ‘expire’.

The Help was touching and I really enjoyed it, and Doc is shaping up to be just as enjoyable but in a different way. I didn’t intend for both books to be ‘historical fiction’ but they are – The Help is about the black/white divide in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s and Doc is about good ol’ Doc Holliday in the late 1800s. A Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin, on the other hand, is pure fantasy with dragons, knights, princesses, sword fights, giants, and other mystical creatures.

 

I yam not a yam

Myth-busting today: we don’t have yams here in North America, we have sweet potatoes. Ignore the signs at your supermarket that separate the potatoes into two sections, you probably won’t see a true yam in a regular American supermarket – though you may find some in an ethnic grocery alongside taro corms and other tropical tubers.

Sweet potatoes are the large, edible storage roots of  the morning glory family (Convolvulaceae), which grows primarily in South America. Each plant produces 4-10 potatoes that have smooth, thin skins and flesh that varies from orange to pale yellow (though there is a purple variety as well). Sweet potatoes are high in beta caratene, and the flesh is moist and sweet (go figure) rather than starchy. The potatoes are typically short and blunt, tapered at the ends. There are hundreds of varieties of sweet potatoes, but they all have eyes.

A few of the many sweet potato varieties

Yams, on the other hand, are tubers of a tropical perennial Dioscoreaceae vine and are common in places like Nigeria, Brazil, and Ghana. The tubers are high in vitamin B6 and potassium, starchy, dry, and covered with thick, rough, hairy skin that is difficult to peel. They can grow up to 8 feet long (!) and weigh over 150 pounds. The flesh of true yams varies from white or yellow to pink or purple (but not orange), and they don’t have eyes.

Look at the size of those yams!

Old is new again

We received a KitchenAid mixer as a wedding present from Chris’ parents almost twenty years ago. As an avid baker, I use the mixer frequently – several times a week, usually. Countless batches of cookies, cakes, breads, candy, whipped cream, and butter have been beaten into submission in the KitchenAid. We’ve used it, with attachments, to grate cheese, grind meat, and de-seed berries for jam. Through all, it has been a real trooper and only lately has it developed a bit of a wobble in the hinge, which is probably easily remedied. Gotta remember to check that.

Anyway: during our kitchen remodel we moved all appliances to the dining room and I was sorely missing my KitchenAid. When the happy day came to put the appliances back, I noticed that the mixer was sticking to the new counter. The little rubber feet were leaving marks behind, too. I flipped the mixer over and saw the saddest sight: five old feet that had given up and collapsed under the weight of batters and time. Cracked, flared, and sticky from age, the feet needed to be replaced. The ones at the front were particularly worn out, as they bore the brunt of the weight.

I promptly went online and started looking for replacements and was just as quickly disappointed in the price tag: $3-$4 per foot. Twenty bucks was not an outrageous sum of money to bring my trusty friend back into proper working order, but still I hesitated. A quick trip over to Amazon to compare prices, and I found a listing with two comments. I love comments on Amazon. One of the comments was positive, something along the lines of “these feet were perfect”. The second comment had a low rating and said, “never pay for feet – KitchenAid will replace them for free!”

Wait, free?

Quicker than a cat out of water, I emailed a KitchenAid customer service rep and inquired about replacement feet. I got an email back the next day asking for the serial number on my mixer. I looked in vain; the sticker is long gone and my hopes sank. Until, that is, she replied that she would “just send feet for mixers made prior to 2004.”

I waited with some trepidation. Few things in life are free. Would I really get all five? Would they arrive with a bill to pay for shipping? Would they even be the right ones?

A couple weeks later I arrived home from work to find five plastic envelopes, each containing one new foot.

I gladly overlooked the gross inefficiency, waste in packaging, excess postage cost, warehouse failure, and general poor business practices of sending one foot in one envelope in light of the five new, perky, bouncy, non-sticky, FREE feet that my KitchenAid so desperately needed.

It now stands proudly on the counter, ready to serve. Yesterday we made cookies, my KitchenAid and I. They are delicious.

Tiptronic

Yesterday I had the pleasure of checking out a Zipcar and running some errands for work. While ordinarily not an event in and of itself, I chose to check out a Mazda 3, which happened to have a tiptronic transmission. One of my favorite things about Zipcar is that I get to drive different kinds of cars. Someday, this may help me pick out a new car for myself…

Anyway, tiptronic transmission. Odd, if you’ve never used one before.  Really odd, if you’ve driven a manual and expect this to act the same. In the Mazda 3 it isn’t required, as the car is fully automatic and you can just drop it into Drive and go; but for those that like to feel in control you can use the pseudo-manual mode and shift without a clutch.

Yes, without a clutch.

Shifting is done via the gear shift, but with a simple flick up or down with the shifter (as opposed to moving along a gear track template). The odd thing is, you only HAVE to shift up – the car will downshift for you if you don’t do it… So no stalling at a stoplight. And you can’t accidentally put it into 5th from said stoplight, nor can you jackrabbit out into an intersection to the amusement of any bystanders. You can, of course, shift down as well, but without the benefit of a clutch to ease the transition it can be a bit abrupt.

(starting from a stoplight in 2nd gear, because I could.)

I tried to explain it to my son last night: when driving a manual, the body develops a rhythm, a synchronized dance of hands and feet to (hopefully) ease the car from gear to gear and make for a smooth ride. Lacking that and having instead a simple joystick-like shifter takes away that coordination and control. You are literally dropping the car into gear rather than engaging it gradually.

While I can see the appeal of shifting manually during heavy acceleration, overall I didn’t see much advantage in this car. It had enough get-up-and-go that I didn’t feel I needed extra oomph, but then again, I wasn’t trying to cut in front of a line of cars, either.

Overall, I give this a big ol’ lukewarm medium opinion. Perhaps with more practice one would develop the knack of shifting the tiptronic so that it isn’t as abrupt, but I think it’s more of a gimmick than a real benefit.

Namaste

My new bag arrived on Saturday and I promptly set about filling it up. I tranferred my purse contents AND my tote bag contents (with some much-needed weeding out first). I like it: it’s a bit like a purse that is more like a briefcase. My coworker says it’s classy and professional (I’ll pretend to ignore the implied slam against my previous purse).
I have a book, pair of gloves, some knitting, and my usual purse stuff in it, and there is plenty of room for more. And check out the gorgeous teal color! (photos are with my iphone, which sucks… Pretend the color is brighter.)

Movie Reviews

It was a movie-watching weekend, and I thought I’d take a minute to share a quick review on the three that I rented:

Failure to Launch: 3.5 stars, definitely charming and fun to watch but the animal bits were ridiculous and didn’t add to the movie. Loved the parents, loved the weird friend, thought the main characters were believable though SJP screams too much.

The Wickerman: 2 stars. Glad I didn’t see this one in the theatre. The storyline itself was fine, and Nicholas Cage did alright – but the plot was predictable and the characters shallow. The movie had long sections of “get it over with already” followed by “gee, I sure saw that coming!”

Stranger Than Fiction: 4.5 stars. Surprisingly good; I’m not a Wil Farrel fan but this was a more serious role and I enjoyed it. Emma Thompson is amazing, and ya can’t go wrong with Queen Latifah as a supporting actor. Throw in Dustin Hoffman and it’s a real winner!  This is one that I’d like to see again.

Mr. Clean Magic Eraser

I don’t endorse many products, mainly because I feel we have become embroiled in a disposable mindframe and this is just plain dangerous. HOWEVER, there are, on occasion, products that I have found to be truly helpful and an improvement over old standbys.

The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser is one of these products. At first, I ignored the television advertisements, writing it off as a fad. Then I got a free one, as a sample. I’m not one to simply toss free samples, so I gave it a try on some pen marks on the wall (kids, you know). To my surprise, the marks came off, though it did require a bit of elbow grease. The nicest thing about this Eraser is that you simply wet it with plain water – no need for cleansers. The Eraser is just abrasive enough to scrub off marks, but not so scratchy that it removes paint.

Yesterday I used it again, to remove some old pen / ink on our bathroom tile (kids, you know). This took more scrubbing but the marks DID come off, whereas previous attempts with a variety of cleaning products failed miserably.  My daughter used it on her bedroom wall, to remove markers (ugh, kids!). I really like that she was able to do it herself, without me worrying about toxic stuff on her hands or in her lungs.

So there you have it: a rave for the humble Magic Eraser. Don’t let it’s simple appearance fool you; this little guy can really scrub!