Chocolate Chip Cookies: the Experiment

~ katiebonn ~ 2 Comments

I love Matt’s Chocolate Chip Cookies. If you’ve never had them, you can get them at most co-ops or where organic foods are sold. A year or two ago I decided to try to duplicate their soft texture and subtle sweetness. It couldn’t be too hard considering one can actually read the ingredient list. The main substitutions I determined I would need from my regular Toll House recipe were soybean oil and wheat flour. Well, I wasn’t quite able to reproduce Matt’s cookies to my liking (until recently…but that’s a story for another blog post), but I was able to make some darn tasty cookies with similar ingredients.

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Here’s my recipe and technique: Continue reading →

Bucky Balls, Power Balls and Energy Orbs

~ katiebonn ~ 3 Comments

I’ve been reading Crystal and Ryan’s blog, Cafe Cyan, ever since Crystal commented on one of my posts long ago, I checked out her site and thought, “pictures of food! Sweet!”. Well, the other day I came across their post about energy orbs and was curiously intrigued.

I’ve never really had the pleasure of eating dates much so I was a little hesitant about the ingredients, but they looked so yummy and seemed highly recommended so I decided to give them a shot and googled for the recipe and found it on Compassionate Consumption. She likes to call them “Bucky Balls”. I like that name better too, geeky AND tasty! Dave has taken to calling them Power Balls, just like the lottery!

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I’ve included the recipe with my comments and additions: Continue reading →

RAWR! Microsoft Hungry!

~ katiebonn ~ 5 Comments

Today it was announced that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion. I am not a financial analyst or highly trained in business, but when I read, “With Microsoft paying a full price for a broken business where there’s not accelerating organic growth, I can’t make that work at all. I don’t see what they get out of it. The strategy behind the deal was wrong.” (Jon Fisher) the first thing that comes to mind is that Microsoft is simply not concerned about purchasing a successful business. They are interested in removing potential competition.

Then I read that “the Justice Department said it is ‘interested’ in reviewing antitrust issues” and realized that I don’t need to be an expert to question the motivations of a monster corporation that’s been scrutinized in the past. (I originally read about antitrust issues in this article, but upon reloading the page I noticed that sentence had mysteriously disappeared. Is that part now deemed unimportant?)

What kind of changes would MS make with their newly acquired toy?
Continue reading →

Soul Sloshing in the Bay

~ katiebonn ~ 12 Comments

A frequent question Dave and I are faced with since moving to the San Francisco bay area a few months ago is, “how’s California”. I enjoy talking about myself as much as anyone, but I have trouble answering the same question regularly especially when it feels rhetorical and the simple answer, “good” rolls off my tongue so quickly. In lieu of an emotionless canned response I’ve decided to create a video:

Didja catch all that? I am now open to specific questions relating to the contents of the video. Anything beyond, “how’s California/mountain view/yahoo/the west coast/the warmer weather?” etc. is acceptable.

A Perilous Visit to Santa Cruz

~ katiebonn ~ 2 Comments

Since Dave had a long weekend and we didn’t plan far enough in advance to take a flight anywhere, we decided to go to Santa Cruz last week, Martin Luther King Jr Day, to commemorate the civil rights movement properly. We celebrated our right as an inter-racial couple to drive through the mountains to the ocean and enjoy a nice seafood dinner. Apparently, the powers-that-be wanted us to work for it.

Our journey started out with a near-empty tank of gas and an overwhelming confidence that we’d make it to the Costco in Santa Cruz, for the cheapest gas around, before it ran dry. Continue reading →

Facebook Swings and Misses with Beacon

~ katiebonn ~ 3 Comments

After reading the TechCrunch article about Mark Zuckerberg’s 60 Minutes interview in which he said “Beacon makes Facebook less commercial”, I wondered “what is this Beacon and why haven’t I heard of it before?”

I did some checking and decided that while not keeping up with my RSS reader will most definitely keep me in the dark, I shouldn’t have to rely on it to find out Facebook is stalking me on the internet and posting my seemingly private information on their newsfeed. I’ve read that despite the privacy issue Facebook created, they haven’t lost many of their users. Could this possibly be because, like me, there are others out there who didn’t know a thing about it?

True, I’m not rushing out to delete my Facebook account, but I did spend a fair amount of time reading up on the issue and making sure I was opted out in any way I could. If you’d like to do the same, there’s are step-by-step instructions I found on WikiHow.

Strike one, Facebook. Hopefully there are enough internet watchdogs out there to keep you in line ’cause I don’t think I’ll be letting you get up to strike three.

Will Yahoo Lay Off My Husband?

~ katiebonn ~ 2 Comments

Rumors that Yahoo is gearing up to lay off employees that will number in the thousands have been circulating lately. Believe me, we’ve heard about it. Not only from friends and our RSS feeds, but also from Dave’s mom.

I even heard that an Indian newspaper reported there would be 14,000 Yahoos left without a job, but they later retracted that story. I’m not so sure about that one considering a quick search for Indian news sources shows most of them reporting the total number of Yahoo employees at 14,000. Interesting how rumors get all crazy once they’re removed a few steps from their source.

Dave and I could enjoy a good game of telephone to determine our fate, but personally I’d prefer to just wait and see. Will we be packing up and moving back to Minnesota dejected and vowing to never leave again? Not likely. But don’t be surprised if you hear about me knocking on a little wood.