Bacon Turkey

In case you missed it, here is a nice pic to make your mouth water all over again. 

Also, warm up your leftover turkey in the oven with a few strips of bacon draped on top. It enhances the flavor. Partially cook the bacon first, so you do not overheat the leftover turkey.

Update - Bud sent this along to one-up me -  Bacon covered Turducken, chicken stuffed in duck stuffed in a 15 lb. turkey, all nicely packaged in pork bacon. The bacon isn't just on the outside. The chicken pieces were wrapped in it then the duck was bundled in bacon, and then the turkey was lovingly covered in more bacon, resulting in a total of five pounds of the porcine product. Mmmm!

Recruiting With Bacon

Another reason why I love Google. This week, it set up tables outside of Amazon headquarters to recruit new employees.  It hired the ad agency Wexley School for Girls to find a solution.

They set up a food cart outside of Amazon.com’s headquarters and invited workers there to have some free bacon. A bunch of bacon lovers braved the rain for free strips of pepper bacon. They also had toppings of spray cheese, peanut butter, maple syrup and chocolate sauce.  Serious candidates can even get a bacon air freshener. How can you not appreciate the unique way to steal employees.

Shameless Self Promotion

Shameless Self Promotion - Last year I promised that I would put all my Friday Thoughts for the year in a book. I have been very busy until lately, but have finally managed to finish a book with all of the  2010 Friday Thoughts and another from 2009. Bloginalia 2010 and bloginalia 2009 are available on Amazon now. These facts never grow old, so don't let the title throw you.

In addition, Bloginalia 2011 will be out no later than February, as I have been adding to it weekly. Anyway, if you want a whole collection of interesting tidbits and facts to read while you are having a bacon sandwich, these might be just for you. Fun stuff and great Christmas stocking stuffers for kids and adults of any age. They will also be available on Kindle for those who need a bit of light reading while on the go. Thanks

Buying Technology

As we approach the buying season, here are a few tips to remember when buying technology. Memory (RAM) is more important than speed. Most do not use the full capacity of their computer, so getting more memory actually translates to more speed than chip speed.

Texting is more expensive than voice time, so watch your contract for cost of messages.

Buy the best components, and the cheapest cables, because all those claims about gold cables, ultra cables are almost meaningless.

When looking at cable plans, buy speed, not channels, because hundreds of those channels have nothing worth watching. Plus if cable internet is fast enough, you can watch more TV and videos on your PC for free. You can do like my brother and hook up your laptop to TV for Netflix movies. Wouldn't you like a 50 inch monitor to surf the net?

When it comes to TVs, remember that size really does matter. A larger screen is more enjoyable to watch than paying for faster refresh rate. Technology has come a long way and refresh rate is way less important than it used to be. Also, LED LCD is much better than LCD alone.

3D TV is an immature technology waiting for an audience, which will not likely happen until at least the next one or two generations. Save your money and wait.

Camera lenses are more important than the camera and most lenses can be re-used on next year's wizbang camera model.

Mark Twain

Happy Birthday next week to Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was born on November 30, 1835.

Home Robots

Still time to buy a robot for Christmas. While Roomba vacuums your living room, Scooba is scrubbing the bathroom floor, Verro is power washing your pool, and Looj is clearing out your gutters. You can kick back, catch the game, and the house will be spic-and-span just in time for the party. Prices are coming down, too. A few hundred bucks for many and up to a few thousand for the really slick and sophisticated ones.

Millions of home robots have been sold and are busy every day. Ava, an autonomously-guided, mobile robotics platform that has a PC tablet, a smart phone, etc. for its brains. This mobile interface will allow us to become a night watchman, or see things that we currently can not, or anything we can think of, only limited by developers’ imaginations. This and others are all open platform, which means we can do our own programming and teach our bots to do our personal bidding. The home bots are coming and the next generation will be absolutely amazing. We will likely have to wait for a few years, but the trend is up.

Google and Facebook

Google will now begin adding Facebook comments that are public and your comments could end up in a Google search. One more reason to watch what you type on Facebook, especially when you type personal information or names. This stuff lasts forever on the web, so it pays to think ahead before you type.

Grating Butter

When you're buttering your bread, or other goodies, it is a pain when the butter is cold and hard. Instead of microwaving or waiting, you can solve the problem with a cheese grater. Grab your butter brick and grate it over whatever you're going to eat. This process generates a little bit of heat, but mainly the smaller pieces will melt faster and spread better when they hit your warm piece of toast or muffin. It works on bread for sandwiches and is also a good idea for baking.

Fenelon Funicular

The Fenelon Place Elevator in Dubuque, Iowa is an incline railway running 296 feet from bottom to top. It first went into business in 1882, and has been owned by the same family since 1912. It was originally built so workers could get up the hill quickly to go home for lunch. Now visitors take the one dollar ride up the hill for the scenic views.

This year, four inspectors from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) arrived in black vehicles to secure the 'railroad' and conduct inspections and investigations to prevent attacks.

To give you an idea of how far 296 feet is, the farthest baseball throw was 445 feet 10 inches by Glen Gorbous of Canada August 1, 1957 while playing with the St. Louis Cardinals Triple A team.

A funicular is a railway up the side of a mountain pulled by a moving cable and having counterbalancing ascending and descending cars. Yep, that's our government dollars at work. Oh, we are safe. They did not find any security threats or WMDs.