Quick warning to anyone who may want to try this with skinless chicken, don't. I'm not sure if the brick method linked mentions this, but at least with cast iron, I have made the mistake of having a large portion of skin folded back (careless oversight on my part) so the top skillet was in contact with breast flesh.…

Oh, I see. Facts have become strange, elusive things in the yeas since I was in college. Lord I feel old.

I did take journalism classes and got a degree in Technical Communications, and I guarantee you if we had used "true fact" in our writing, we would have lost a letter grade in many classes. We were taught a fact is always true. Anything else should receive qualifiers. For example, a perceived fact, an assumed fact, a…

We're still having the OS wars? So many lives lost to the flames of this senseless war over the years. When will we learn? I like 'em all for different reasons. I don't like some things about any one of them. Big deal. We're like a compu-hippie-commune in this house. Every OS welcome...except BeOS. Screw anyone who…

For my entire life, I have hated mushrooms of nearly every variety. However, after deciding on a whim several years ago to do this very thing, I discovered how to love them. I still don't care for them individually, but I buy the dried shiitakes and grind them very fine and use them in sauces and broths of all kinds.…

Like many others here, I've been using mine for a million things for a long while. I can't live without it. It's by far my favorite egg cooking tool. It's thin enough to slip under eggs for the perfect flip, but also the angle makes it so much better to work with when scrambling. I use and wash mine every single day…

You may be overlooking all those GPIO pins that allow for robotics and sensors, which give you home automation, any conceivable prototype imaginable, custom car computing, data collection for analysis, the list of things you can do is literally endless. But it's true it will make a nice little media center as well so…

I reread Moby Dick this year because I promised a college professor I would once I reached middle age. It was part of a deal she made with me to allow me to pass her class after too many absences. Anyway, the book was a completely new experience this time. It was heartbreaking, and I loved it.

I would hope to fail the test of someone who feels men shouldn't eat salad or women shouldn't eat meat or moreover the idea that women shouldn't be aggressive or for that matter any dependence on what a person orders in a restaurant as part of their hiring process. Thankfully, I've had the good fortune to not be hired…

I'm in the middle of buying a car, and this information was incredibly helpful. The comments too were very helpful and provided some great links. Let me share my experience so far. First, I got my financing arranged in advance through a credit union. That worked well for me for a number of reasons. I got a rate of…

I'm in the middle of buying a car right now. This article was very helpful, but I'd love to ask someone, like yourself, a few questions. If you have the time or inclination, let me know.

My daughter didn't start walking until she was thirteen months old—about the time all the baby books said I would need to consult a doctor if she wasn't walking by then. So of course I stressed about it. She was also in pull-up diapers longer than other kids in her daycare (a stranger even once remarked to me in a…

It took me a long time to learn to apologize without qualifying it. When you screw up, suck it up and don't make excuses. That doesn't mean I don't try to explain that my intention wasn't to be a dick, but I screwed it up...or that I misunderstood the situation and didn't mean to be a dick. Either way, like you say,…

I love having my kids cook with me. My 2 year old mostly just makes messes so I can control that with what I choose to let him have. My 7 yr old, though, she's mixing sauces and whipping creams and helping me bake. Yes, frequently it means a big spill or an eggshell or some other complete, global catastrophe...or it's…

I definitely have a hard time with advice like this. I don't mean I don't like it or don't want to accept it. I mean I have a hard time implementing it. I'm told it takes practice, and I believe that, but after a while it's hard to wonder when the positive effects will take. On those days when it feels like my whole…

PHONE for Google (also called MO+ GV Phone it appears)

My favorite salsa recipe is to stop by La Fiesta on the way home from work, chat with the fellas about kids, work, weather, the UT football team (since none of us knows anything about football, it's pretty funny), then buy a pint of their salsa and go home.

I get my stuff from Adafruit. A garage door opener was my first project other than going through the learning sketches. Mine was laughably simple, but it worked. I hooked the Arduino to a desktop because it didn't have networking. I then used twitter (with TweetMyPC I believe) and I wired an old garage door opener to…

I know where you're coming from, and here's how we broke ourselves in. We joined a gym that has child care. Good stuff, we get to watch movies in the cardio theater while the kids are in the next room. The gym also has Parents' Night Out where you pay $15 and you get four hours to eat, see a movie, take a nap,…

My aunt Minerva went that way. We tried to rush her to the local hippie supply and incense store, but we were too late. In the end, she smelled of wet dog and could only gurgle out her pleas for a lotion or bath salt made of lemongrass oil. God rest her smelly soul.