Foodaroo.com gets a facelift!

Over the past week, I have been redoing a few things on foodaroo. Mainly I cleaned up the look and feel a bit, and got rid of most of the tables(yes, I started it back in 2005-2006 and did not know the extent of there evilness.) and hope to get rid of them all. The over all look came out quite nice, and many bigs have been fixed, and a few more will be over the next few days. Let me know what you like or don’t like or if you find any new bugs in the site. Keep adding restaurants! A mobile app is on the way, look out yelp, we have menus!

www.foodaroo.com

For those that don’t know, Foodaroo is YOUR place to upload your favorite restaurant menus and information. You can share your favorite independent places with the world, comment, review, rate, and network. You can also search by a dizzying array of features like if it is open at certain time, to if they have vegetarian friendly food.  The site will quickly replace that folder of local favorites you look at every time your about to eat out. Have no idea where to eat? Try the random button, or the guided search of the main page. It is all free, fun, and delicious!

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Moray Labs LLC is official and has a website!

Ride the eel!

As of 3.14.2011 Moray labs LLC was official!  Drew D. Lenhart and I decided to make Pi Day special this year and form a company to better allow us to develop and market our apps, games, and websites. We already had a small catalog of apps we collaborated on for webOS, and you can look forward to many more to come. We are currently working on a tank game, and a few other projects we will share more about later. In the mean time check out the companies website, it’s about 90% done, and I think represents us well. It looks best in a modern web browser that supports HTML5 well, as we believe in looking forward.

www.Moraylabs.com

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Yoga Pal for WebOS published and available now!

Although it was over a week, I have not had a chance to post until now. Check it out, its probably one of the best yoga apps for a mobile device currently out there!

More info here

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Dinosaurs in the wild! Plateosaurus roams in the range??

This is a picture, un-doctored I took at an undisclosed area. I do not want to publish publicly where it was, the dinosaur hunters will get closer….

Look closely in the center, see the dinosaur!

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Swatch and Cell Phone X-rays! Sometimes I love my job!

Yesterday I got to work with one of the venders to set up the new software for the Dental Clinic on our campus. Part of that process required us to calibrate  the digital x-ray machine. Rather then give ourselves a dose of radiation we snapped pictures of a cell phone and my swatch watch. Have a look(click for full size)!

The inside of a cell phone. Taken with a dental cam.

The inside of my watch. Notice the driver motor with a screw gear.

I am hoping I get a chance to go back and set it up next time they get a software upgrade.

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eMusic Sells out, but I discover mtraks.com

This month eMusic signed yet another deal with another major label. There obsession with expanding their catalog and competing with iTunes has further diluted the chances of finding a good song. They also rose the costs again, and got rid of the one song per credit method. Now you get a monthly allowance to buy songs for around 49 cents each. When I saw Britney Spears newest album on the front page, it was the last straw, I canceled my auto renew, and will be done with them in December. It is really sad, because they still have lots of great independent music.

The good news or really great news though is that I discovered www.mtraks.com They are everything eMusic was. For plans starting at $10 a month you can start downloading. Their best value plan works out to 27 cents a song. They focus on independent music, so if you are looking for anything else you will probably not find it. Their tag line is even “Independent music for independent minds.” That said they claim to have over 1 million songs! The files are  good quality, DRM free MP3′s. Another neat feature they include is the ability to search for music in your area. I was able to find and buy a number of albums form artists from Chicago. Like eMusic they also let you search for a mainstream artist and get suggested similar artists that are independent that you might like. They include the standard charts and basic searches of course too, although I would love to see more options or ways to search top songs. The community does not seem as well developed as I expected, but it has lots of room to grow and improve. Check out their site and about page for more information www.mtraks.com/page/about I am really liking it and at this point highly recommend it! They have a free 30 downloads now too, so I suggest you give it a try.

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Lake Huron Sun Rise

Yes that’s right sun rise, not sun set, you seldom will see me posting this. From our hotel window.

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www.uvumi.com Another Great Source of Great Independent Music Discovery

I have been using another great website a lot lately to find new music. Although I still use thesixtyone.com probably more, I really like some other features Uvumi.com offers. It has better event and concert tracking, and also makes it easier to look at other media for each artist. I also like the “add to queue” option. So basically I can look around, add some music that looks interesting to my playlist and then go back to working, or whatever else I am doing, and hear what I found. If I like something, I can go back and rate it, comment on it, or queue up other songs by the artist. That was always something I wanted on youtube, or other places that I have searched for music before. It also has some nice options for genre surfing and a really great search engine that will let you play all your results. The site also has very nice user and artist networking, it seems a lot easier to connect then other sites. It is as if Facebook was done right, just for music artists. It is much easier to be become a fan of an artist or friend them then it is on thsixtyone. After your a fan, you will get updates when they add songs, or post concerts. They also have a number of tools for musicians to market themselves or promote their music. The charts playlist is another very handy feature I really like. You can find some of the hottest music and play though it. I like that it has a calendar mode, and other options, so I can look back further and see what was hot a few months back.

I highly recommend you check uvumi.com out, and discover some great music.

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Fried Zucchini! One of my favorite comfort foods!

My dad just gave me a TON of great veggies form his garden today. That included lots of zucchini. Which would happen to be my favorite squash. One of my fondest summer memories growing up, would be waking up to the smell of fried zucchini on a Saturday morning. My dad would wake up earlier, work on the garden and pick fresh zucchini. Then he would fry a lot of them up. The smell would wake me up, my room was right above the kitchen, and I would go down for that green breakfast. It would never be quite done when I came down, so I am sure I was rather annoying as I would watch and ask if it was done yet. The longer you could wait for it cook, the better it always seemed to get. Then when it got done, there was always that wait for it to cool, it seemed like an eternity over the wonderful aroma of cooked zucchini.

I decided to cook up a batch for a midnight snack tonight.

It is a really simple recipe, that it seems few people have had in their lives. Just simply slice up a few zucchini with the slicing side of a box shredder and cook in some butter. Add salt and pepper. Thats it! Really it is not “fried”, more in the sense cooked down, like fried cabbage or sautéed I suppose would be the word? Anyway Yum!

My Fried Zucchini!

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Before you hate BP, look in the Mirror….then hate BP

Everyone seems to be jumping on the hate BP band wagon. Maybe thats not a bad thing. Well no maybe about it, it is a good thing. What is most concerning about the situation is BP is not the only bad oil company. As far as evil oil companies they are kind of the standard. Exon never even paid the fines for the Valdieze spill. In 2003, Greenpeace listed Exxon as #1 Climate Criminal.  They spend huge sums every year funding global warming skeptics. They still use the same single hull ships that have caused a number of spills. Oh then there are a number of human rights violations. Citgo, owned by the Venezuelan government has a horrible track record.  Chevron has done major damage to Ecuador and Angola and Niger Delta to name a few. Not to mention they own the rights to a number of battery patents and will not let anyone make them.  Shell has the record for the largest fresh water spill.

All the big oil companies are pure evil, and few would argue with that. But it is time we look in the mirror. This is our own fault. We depend on oil and gas way to much. It is our oil consuming selves we need to put blame on too. We enable and have created this situation. We drive to big of cars, to fast, and wastefully. We need to really support EV efforts and stop blocking alternative energy development. We need to support wind and solar, not nuclear, and stop giving subsidies, tax breaks and incentives to big oil. Gas prices need to go up, period. That’s the only way to make people care. That might be thinking to big though. We really are talking about personal choices here. If you own an SUV, unless you have 10 kids, sell it. Does your car get less then 30 mpg? Stop driving it. Next time you speed away from the light, remember your enabling BP and all its friends. Next time your buying a car, think of fuel economy, not cup holders. If you can a ford one of the EV’s buy one, not a sports car. Have a commute to work? Carpool. Take the bus, train or ride your bike when ever you can. It’s time we look in the mirror and put some of the blame where its due.

From Wikipedia-Chart of the major energy companies dubbed "Big Oil", sorted by latest published revenue

Check out www.betterworldhandbook.com/gasoline.html to see how the different oil companies compare!

Or check this site out www.greenopia.com

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Solar now cheaper then Nuclear!

This is HUGE news and a historic moment. Solar is now more affordable, and more practical then nuclear from a business prospective! Read this article for more details.

http://theenergycollective.com/oshadavidson/40559/study-solar-power-cheaper-nuclear

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Google notes… Yoga poses to flatten the stomach?

Occasionally, I will search for something, find a bunch of information and want to distill it down to a “best of” or summery if you will. Well that’s what this is. If you have any interest in yoga, strengthening your core muscles, or flattening your stomach, check out the videos and sites I found. If not pass on this low interest post….

Continue reading

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