Syncing google contacts on iOS
| January 20, 2011 | Posted by matt under gadgets, howto, techie |
I use my google account to keep my addresses synced up between all my devices. I realized that I was creating contacts on my iPhone or iPad and they weren’t showing up in my address book on my mac or in my google account. A simple google search didn’t seem to turn up what the issue was, and then after poking around a bit I realized what was going on. By default, when you connect your google account to your iOS device, it appears that it creates new contacts on the device, and not on your google account.
It was pretty easy to fix. Just go to the Settings app…
Tap on Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then scroll down to the Contacts section.
Tap on Default Account, and make sure it’s set to your gmail contacts account, not ‘On My iPhone’. Contacts should now sync to your gmail account immediately when you update or add them.
Green eggs and ham
| January 9, 2011 | Posted by matt under family |
Do you like green eggs and ham? These eggs and ham tasted great, but I couldn’t get anyone else in the family to
try them.
First harvest of 2010
| May 15, 2010 | Posted by matt under garden |
First harvest of 2010. Some French Breakfast radishes and an Early Scarlet Globe. I think I picked them a bit early, but I couldn’t wait!
Book Review: The Big Short
| April 21, 2010 | Posted by matt under reviews |
I remember sitting in my office at Lehman Brothers sometime around September 15, 2007 and telling one of my coworkers that I couldn’t wait to read the book that someone wrote about the entire financial mess. Lehman had just declared bankruptcy and the entire financial system looked like it was about to collapse. I was working in the Investment Management Division of Lehman in their IT department at the time, but had a perspective of an outsider. I had started looking for a new job a few months before and as the firm melted down, I was able to slip out of the office for interviews without anyone noticing. I resigned later that week. I didn’t feel too much guilt since I felt like my company’s management had really let us all down. A storied Wall Street bank had collapsed due to greed and a lot of poor decisions.
I finished reading (or rather listening to) Michael Lewis’ book, The Big Short, about a week ago, and I think it is the book I was waiting for. My timing couldn’t have been better. Since finishing the book, Dick Fuld testified before congress, Goldman Sachs was charged with fraud by the SEC, Greg Lippmann (featured in the book) is out at Deutsche Bank, and the media is all over the subprime mess with some great reporting. I have heard several senators mention the book as they grill the witnesses from these failed institutions.
Michael Lewis does a great job in selecting a group of interesting characters to tell the story of the financial collapse. He develops the characters and then describes in detail how they came to recognize the pending collapse. In hindsight, it’s hard to believe that more people didn’t see it coming, but that’s how it usually works. The two main characters in the book would probably be Steve Eisman and Michael Burry, two hedge fund managers with unique personalities who saw the subprime troubles a long way off. Lewis uses their history to tell the story of how mortgages were packaged into bonds, then those bonds packaged into CDOs, and then the real killer, the synthetic CDO was developed by our dear friends at Goldman Sachs. The subject matter is approachable by someone with no experience in the industry, but those inside the industry really like the book as well.
The two annoying things about the audiobook edition were the mispronunciation of Lehman (Lee-man not Lay-man) and tranche (like raunch, not ranch). There is a nice intro and wrap-up interview featuring Michael Lewis as well.
I think this book should be required reading for anyone who wants to have a real conversation about the financial industry and its problems. I am glad to see that congressmen are reading it and taking it seriously. Maybe this book will be the impetus for congress and the general public to find a way to clean up the mess for good (or at least for a while).
Review: ATC Best Recipes and Reviews 2010
| March 28, 2010 | Posted by matt under Uncategorized |
I got the magazine version of The Best of America’s Test Kitchen Kitchen: Best Recipes and Reviews 2010 (that’s a mouthful) a few months ago. I have been working my way through the recipes and have tried about ten of the 64 recipes so far. If you aren’t familiar with America’s Test Kitchen, I would describe them as a Consumer Reports for cooks, but with a few extra side businesses. First, they have an excellent cooking show on PBS that performs food product taste tests, product reviews, as well as recipes and cooking techniques. They are also known for Cook’s Illustrated magazine.
The greatest thing about America’s Test Kitchen is that they take every recipe and experiment with different techniques and ingredients, testing each one until they find the best recipe possible. They say they will try a recipe 30, 40, or even 70 times before they publish it. As a result, a number of the recipes have some very unique ingredients or techniques that can provide surprisingly good results. For example, their Creamless Creamy Tomato Soup uses white bread blended into the soup instead of cream to provide a creamy and thick consistency. I never would have thought to try bread in the soup, but it was quite good.
The Ultimate Cinnamon Buns are outstanding, although they were almost too rich. They are made with a cream cheese glaze that is very good, and the filling uses brown sugar instead of regular sugar with lots of butter. Since they freeze very well, we would eat them two at a time with a week or so in between.
The Baked Ziti uses cottage cheese instead of ricotta, fresh basil instead of dried, and fresh mozzarella cut into cubes instead of shredded. All of these ingredient choices make a big difference over the usual recipe. It is definitely the best Baked Ziti I have ever had, and they also solve the usual problem of soggy pasta by having you undercook the pasta before the baking portion of the recipe.
There are a few things I would like to see changed in the recipes. First, they don’t give you a very good idea what the total prep and cook time is for the recipe. I usually like to know how much time I’m going to have to set aside without having to read through the recipe and add up all the time periods. This is especially annoying for bread recipes that have multiple rise times. The second thing that is missing is nutritional information. This can be added up pretty easily, but for the more complicated recipes with many ingredients, this is a hassle.
This magazine has been a great source of recipes. I will have to think about whether the entire book is worth getting. It appears that the full book is 352 pages with about 133 recipes and a number of pages of tips, techniques, and reviews, but the magazine is 64 pages with 64 recipes. I think maybe an online membership might be the way to go, since it provides access to all their content, including historical recipes.
Book Review: Respectable Sins
| March 21, 2010 | Posted by matt under reviews |
I received a copy of the venerable Jerry Bridges’ latest book Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate as a gift from my parents recently and slowly but steadily made my way through it. This is a very practical book that attempts to point out to Christians the sins that we have allowed to take root in our lives and accept. He starts the book with a discussion of sin and how it has disappeared not only from the vernacular of the country, but from most churches as well. When sin does come up in many Evangelical churches today, it is used to describe the actions of others instead of the actions of Christians. The first five chapters deal with a discussion of sin, how it separates us from God, and how the gospel is the only remedy for sin.
Chapter six is where the book begins to be very practical, providing some directions for dealing with sin. For example, Bridges recommends that once we identify that we struggle with a certain sin we should internalize scripture that deals with this sin, recognize the place of the Holy Spirit and pray regularly and specifically about the area of sin, and finally bring along others to help us in accountability and prayer.
The rest of the book deals with individual areas of sin: ungodliness, anxiety and frustration, discontentment, unthankfulness, pride, selfishness, lack of self-control, impatience and irritability, anger, judgmentalism, envy, jealousy, sins of the tongue, and finally worldliness. Seeing a long list like that would make just about anyone want to put the book down, but Bridges does a good job making the discussion encouraging and practical, often including examples from his own life.
I found that as I worked through the chapters I was really convicted in areas that I have ignored or not spent time thinking about. For example, the chapter on unthankfulness helped me to realize how little time I spend being thankful for the things that I have received in life. The chapter also dealt with the topic of being thankful in difficult circumstances, not just being thankful when everything is going well. The chapter on self-control helped me realize how a lack of it can wreak havoc in so many areas of life, and that overindulgence in any area can bring unhappiness.
In the chapter on impatience and irritability, Bridges describes impatience as a strong sense of annoyance at the (usually) unintentional faults and failures of others. I found this to be a very good definition that helped me to put some perspective on my irritability. I take the train to work, and I have turned into a typical experienced commuter who gets irritated with people who talk on the train. In almost all situations, the person doing this is not doing it intentionally, so if it is bothering me it is my problem.
The chapter on anger was also interesting. Bridges addresses the issue of righteous anger, something that many Christians use as an excuse for their anger over the actions of others. It seems to me like many Christians are very angry about political issues in the United States, and many may feel it is justified as righteous anger. He says:
“The fact that we may be reacting to another person’s real sin does not necessarily make our anger righteous. We are more likely more concerned with the negative impact of the sinful actions on us than we are that it is a violation of God’s law. Or we may even use the fact that it is a violation of God’s law to justify our own sinful angry response.
I would recommend this book for individuals, but it might work even better if read in small groups where there can be some discussion and accountability.
Bridges finishes off with some recommendations of putting some of the lessons of the book into practice, and ends with a very appropriate verse, 1 Peter 5:5: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble”.
Easy way to combine pdf files into one
| March 13, 2010 | Posted by matt under howto, techie |
This is a bit of a techie post, but I wanted to document how I do this since it seems to come up once or twice a year and I always forget the steps.
I had to submit a form via email to get reimbursed for my flex spending account and had to include scanned copies of my receipts. I wanted to send this as one file, but couldn’t remember how to combine the tiff files that my scanner software generated into one file. If you do a google search, you end up finding little utilities for windows or a tutorial of how to use Adobe Acrobat to accomplish this. Using a mac or linux machine, this is pretty straightforward with some free software.
You need ImageMagick and ghostscript installed. For the mac, the easiest thing is to use the wonderful Darwin ports to do this. To do this with ports is easy:
$ sudo port install ImageMagick ghostscript
Then, if you have tiff files (or other formats) from your scanner you want to convert them to pdf. This is easy using the ImageMagick convert tool. For example:
$ convert filename.tiff filename.pdf
The convert command determines the format based on the file suffix, so this will convert the tiff file to a pdf. It really is a swiss army knife of tools and this is just one of the most basic things you can do with it.
Then, take the multiple pdfs and combine them into one using ghostscript:
$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=combined.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf
Tada!
Community Supported Agriculture with Cedar Valley Sustainable Farms
| March 6, 2010 | Posted by matt under Uncategorized |
After watching Food, Inc. recently we started to investigate alternatives to the local grocery store for obtaining our meat products. We recently signed up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) meat share with Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm. The farm is a family run farm in Ottawa, IL. Their meat share program allows you to purchase a wide selection of beef, chicken, and pork products from their farm which are available for local pickup once a month. The program currently costs $255/3 months, $500/6 months, $975/year.
The usual meat share has several cuts of beef or pork, hamburger, 1 1/2 to 2 chickens, some pork products, and a dozen eggs. All the meat is delivered frozen, and is in a freezer bag that is returned in the next month. The local pickup is in downtown Evanston and is a quick and easy errand for us on a Saturday around noon.
We have received two shares so far, and the quality has been excellent. In February, we received 1/2 dozen eggs (the chickens were cold!), 1 1/2 chickens, two filet mignons, one large sirloin steak, 4 bratwursts, and a pound of ground beef. This seemed to be a light share, but the two cuts of grass fed beef were excellent and were a good size. We especially enjoyed the sirloin steak.
The January Meat Share
In February, we received a 1 1/2 dozen eggs this time, 2 1/2 chickens that were smaller than the previous month, 1 pound of italian sausage, 1 pound of ground beef, a package of beef patties, and a pork loin.
The February Meat Share
The eggs from Cedar Valley are quite different from what I’m used to. Their yolks are a bright orange, and the yolks are very round and firm. You can’t see this in the picture below, but the yolk in the Cedar Valley egg is probably twice as high as the Phil’s Fresh egg. I’ve had them scrambled and fried and they are very good.
A Cedar Valley egg (top) vs. a Phil's Fresh egg (bottom)
I especially enjoy getting a variety of cuts of meat and trying new recipes. We have been stuck in a ‘boneless skinless chicken breast’ rut for some time, and making meals with chicken parts or whole chickens is kind of fun. So far we have only had to supplement a pound or two of ground beef, eggs, and chicken breasts for a few larger meals we have made for larger groups.
I highly recommend Cedar Valley, and hope that Community Supported Agriculture continues to catch on and become available for more people. It feels good to support a local family farm and be more connected to our food and where it comes from.
Pretending to be a Christian
| February 28, 2010 | Posted by matt under church |
I saw several links to this story on the New York Times Freakonomics blog this past week about a family in Texas that pretends to be Christians so that their children can socialize with other members of the community.
We are agnostics living deep in the heart of Texas and our family fakes Christianity for social reasons. It’s not so much for the sake of my husband or myself but for our young children. We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended.
This type of behavior coming from people claiming to be followers of Jesus is just so contrary to how he lived his own life. Reading comments on various blogs seems to show that this is probably more common than most Christians would like to think. People are pressured into ‘acting religious’ in order to fit into their community or families or to keep a job or other position where someone in power is forcing religion on them. What is so sad about this is that the people who are pressuring this family to behave this way are missing out on some great conversations and friendships.
If we really cared about them and wanted them to see true Christianity in action, then we’d seek them out for play dates and social interactions before those who were regular church attenders. Compare the behavior this family encountered with the way Jesus interacted with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, or his interaction with Zacchaeus, an outcast of Jewish society in Luke 19:1-10.
iPhone App Review: YouVersion
| February 20, 2010 | Posted by matt under bible, reviews |
Update: Since I wrote this review, the YouVersion iPhone app has been updated significantly, and they have also released an iPad app. Both versions have addressed almost every bug that I found last year. Two major improvements are adding ESV and NIV (for a limited time) as downloadable versions and streamlining the reading plan functionality. One of my favorite new features is the ‘Catch me up’ button on a reading plan. It allows you to just catch up to the last completed day of a plan, no guilt attached! Also, there is an ESV bible app available from Crossway that is great for use as a primary reading Bible. I like the fonts and feel of the app much more than the YouVersion one, but it doesn’t have reading plans or other versions available.
I have been using the YouVersion iPhone app for about a year and I have been pretty happy with it. It provides a large number of translations and has good navigation. You can download a number of translations for offline reading, such as The Message and the New Living Translation, so it’s not just the King James Version or American Standard Version that most of the other free Bible apps provide. The mainstream versions like the English Standard Version and New International Version are only available while on the network.
The app has had two main problems problems for me: (a) performance and (b) losing my offline translations after every upgrade. The performance can really suffer on Sunday morning when I’m sure there are thousands of people using the app during church services. It does appear that YouVersion is building out their infrastructure to handle the load. It’s great to see so many people taking advantage of a tremendous resource. The app also has had trouble after upgrades of losing my offline translations or even failing to start without deleting the app and reinstalling. The quality has been better recently, and with the release of 2.2 near the end of 2009 I was happy to see them come out with a version that included a number of reading plans. Every year I try to complete a different Bible reading plan, and I have done a number of different plans over the years. By mixing it up, I find that getting through those long stretches of Deuteronomy is not so difficult. With any reading plan it’s important to be able to track your progress against the plan and to be able to eliminate any excuses for not keeping up. Once you are behind by more than a few days it can be tough to catch up.
I have found the iPhone to be an excellent tool for regular Bible reading. It is always with me and thus allows me to get some reading done when I normally might not. For the last three years, I have used the ESV web site to complete the Through the Bible and Book of Common Prayer Daily Office reading plans, both year A and B. Their mobile site works well on the iPhone, but the only drawback is that it doesn’t provide you with tracking against your goal.
With the YouVersion app, you create an account and they will track your progress on a reading plan. You can then catch up if you get a few days behind. The interaction with the daily reading plan is pretty straightforward when you use it for the first time. I quickly found and started the Project 345+ plan and started reading it on January 1. Now that I have been using it for a solid 6 weeks my only real problem with the application is the complicated flow it takes every single day to get to my daily reading. I think they got the flow right for the first time user, but once a user has setup a reading plan there should be at most two taps to the daily reading. Also, the application does not restore your reading plan if you exit and return, so you have to traverse the six steps every time you open the app. I really hope they have plans to fix this soon.
Here’s what the process looks like. First, you are told about the new feature.
Then, you are presented with the list of reading plans that you are currently reading, plus a sepate list of available plans.
Once you select your plan, you see the plan overview.
Tapping on “VIEW TODAY’S READING” finally takes you to the list of passages for the day.
Then you tap on a specific passage to read it and mark it completed. You can tap the arrows at the bottom of the page to go to the next passage in your daily reading.
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