I was looking for this many years ago, and the Grande sized ones were selling for almost $80 on ebay. They were discontinued many years ago.

Specs:

• Venti Sized – slightly bigger to accomodate the double walls
• Double Walled Insulated to keep moisture off the outside, and keeping it cold longer on the inside
• $.10 off all iced drinks
• There is a bulb on the end of the straw to keep it from being pulled out (wonderful with kids around.
• The lid screws on and has a rubber seal to keep it tight:

Although I do enjoy Iced Coffee, I mostly use the cup for water. Up until today, I have been collecting iced coffee cups to use around the house much to my wifes chagrin. Now I have a free drawer:

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Chocolate Chip Cookies Adapted from Jacques Torres

Time: 45 minutes (for 1 6-cookie batch), plus at least 24 hours’ chilling

Ingredients

2 cups minus 2 tablespoons
(8 1/2 ounces) cake flour
1 2/3 cups (8 1/2 ounces) bread flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
2 1/2 sticks (1 1/4 cups) unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups (10 ounces) light brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (8 ounces) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract
1 1/4 pounds bittersweet chocolate disks or fèves, at least 60 percent cacao content
Sea salt.

Directions

1. Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Set aside.
2. Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Drop chocolate pieces in and incorporate them without breaking them. Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.
3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat. Set aside.
4. Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet, making sure to turn horizontally any chocolate pieces that are poking up; it will make for a more attractive cookie. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 18 to 20 minutes. Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to cool a bit more. Repeat with remaining dough, or reserve dough, refrigerated, for baking remaining batches the next day. Eat warm, with a big napkin.

Yield: 1 1/2 dozen 5-inch cookies.

Note: Disks are sold at Jacques Torres Chocolate; Valrhona fèves, oval-shaped chocolate pieces, are at Whole Foods.

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2009 Disneyland Annual Pass Options

• Premium (365 days) – $389
• Deluxe (315 days) – $269
• So Cal (215 days) -$174
• So Cal Select (170 days) – $134

Refer to the Combined Disneyland Blockout Calendar I wrote about prior for the large version.

Questionnaire

1. Do you want/need to go on the weekends?

If yes, So Cal Select is out since that is only for weekdays.

2. Do you want/need to go on Saturdays?

If yes, then all So Cal passes are out since they only allow you to go on Sundays and week days.

3. Do you want/need to go during Summer or Spring break?

If yes, then all So Cal passes are out.

4. Do you want/need to go on holidays (e.g. X-Mas, Independence Day, Thanksgiving)?

If yes, then you must get Premium.

5. Do you want to go only when it is not super crowded?

If yes, So Cal Select is the best option since you can’t go during the main part of the summer, weekends or holidays.

In Conclusion

Premium – Perfect if you have the money, have kids in school, and don’t mind going when the park is its busiest.

Deluxe – More economical, but you still want to go during the summer and don’t mind not going on the few dates you can’t go since they are absolutely INSANELY busy.

So Cal – Perfect if you need to go on Sundays and don’t care about going during the Summer and Spring break.

So Cal Select – Perfect if you want to avoid all crowds and can go during the week.

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1. Disneyland Blockout Dates Calendar

The blockout dates are additive – meaning, the Southern California blockouts are all the blue days PLUS all the yellow Deluxe days.  Therefore, the Southern California Select Annual Pass blockouts are all the orange, blue and yellow days.

(The Southern California Annual Passes are only available for people living in Southern California, hence the name.)

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2. Charles L. Black on Louis Armstrong

They charged me $40 for the phone activation, and $7.50 a month as the bare-bones rate to have the phone line.  No matter what I said, they wouldn’t get rid of the activation.

Today I called to cancel it when I realized that the VOIP system I am going to try out, Magic Jack, doesn’t allow number portability yet.

Without even asking, the woman offered to remove the activation charge, and when I said that I still wasn’t interested, she offered to lower my bill $5 for a year.

So, in the process of a 5 minute phone call, I got a phone line with AT&T for $2.50 a month (before taxes), with no activation fee.

Magic Jack says that they will start porting numbers sometime this year, so hopefully it will be sooner than later.

It may be smart to call AT&T and see what savings you can get…

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Where as the old box suggested to change every 3 months, now it tells us to switch every 30 days.

Since the boxes and ingredients haven’t changed, it would appear to be an attempt to scam consumers into buying more Arm & Hammer.

I don’t like to feel taken advantage of and will not be buying their brand any longer – even if it is a relatively cheap product.

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The red badge tells me that the person is who they say they are, and the blue lock tells me that the message is encrypted.

Not only is this functionally important, but it really makes their email stand out and appear important.

This is accomplished by the use of a Personal E-mail Certificate, and is pretty easy to make work once you know the basics.

1.  In order to “digitally sign” your emails going out, you first need to find a provider to issue you one.  I used Thawte, which offers one for free:

http://www.thawte.com/secure-email/personal-email-certificates/index.html?click=DoYouNeedTo-SecureMail

Look for the “Click here to get your Personal E-mail Certificate now!” near the bottom of the page to start the process.

2. You will be asked many personal questions which will set you up with your credentials to login to Thawte.  You won’t ever have to do this again once you complete this process.

3. Next, you with see a screen to start the certificate process:

When you click the red “request” button under “X.509 Format Certificates”, you will get a popup similar to the one above.

4. In order to generate a Outlook compatible certificate, it told me that I had to use Internet Explorer, but Thawte’s site wouldn’t work with IE7.  It would just give me a VBScript error 3/4 through the wizard. 

To get around it, I found a machine to use IE6, which worked flawlessly.  The rest of the tutorial is assuming you are using that browser.  If you need the certificate for Thunderbird, you can just use Firefox.

5.  Once you finish the wizard, you will see the following screen and all the certificates you created.  It only takes a few minutes to change the status from “Pending” to “Issued”.

6. Click the “MSIE” link for the certificate you just created, which will open this page:

7.  Click on the “fetch” button at the bottom of the page, agree to all the prompts, and the certificate will be installed into your IE6 browser.

8.  Now we need to export the certificate.  First, go into your IE6 options, and click the content tab:

9. Click “Certificates…”

10.  And finally, highlight the certificate and click “Export…”.  I just put “C:\scott-key.pfx”.  It will append the “pfx” to the end if you don’t add it.

In this wizard, make sure you select to export your private key, and to delete it once you have successfully exported it.  It will ask for a password at one point, and you will use that same password when importing later.

11.  Now we need to install the certificate into Outlook.  For Outlook 2007, click on Tools > Trust Center > E-mail Security:

12.  Click both the “Add digital signature to outgoing messages” and “Send clear text signed message when sending signed messages” checkboxes.

13.  Now click “Import/Export”, browse to where you saved your certificate, and it will ask you for the password you used while exporting it.

14.  Try sending an email, and it should ask you to confirm the association between the certificate and your email.  Agree to the dialog box.

15.  Once you send some email, look at your sent folder to make sure they are all signed!

Now that this is complete, you also have the ability to easily encrypt your messages if the person you are sending to also has a certificate.  I will go through that process soon.

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Charlie Black, a freshman from University of Texas, happened to go see Louis Armstrong at a club in 1931.  He knew nothing of jazz and never heard of Louis Armstrong.

“He played mostly w/ his eyes closed.  Letting flow from that inner space of music things that had never existed.

He was the first genius I’d ever seen. It is impossible to underestimate the significance of a 16 year old southern boy seeing genius for the first time in a black person.

We literally never saw a black man in anything but a servants capacity.

Louis opened my eyes wide and put to me a choice:  Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place’, but what was the place of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?’”

Charles L. Black
Excerpt from Ken Burns’ Jazz Documentary

Charles L. Black went on to become a distinguished teacher of Constitutional Law at Yale and in 1954 was on the team of lawyers to convince the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregating school children on the basis of race and color was unconstitutional.

Inspiring.

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I have made this a half dozen times and each time people are completely blown away on how good it is.

The only problem I keep running into having to watch the video each time to figure out the recipe because for some reason, the I’m Cooked website is broken and won’t email it to me.

Here is the recipe followed by the video where I learned about it:

• 1/2 Stick Butter
• 4 Cloves Garlic
• Thyme / Rosemary to taste (I like a lot)
• Lemon Zest
• 1 Lemon
• 1 tspn Salt
• 1 tspn Black Pepper

Follow the directions in the video and cook it for about an hour at 400 degrees until the breast internal temperature is 160 degrees.

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Here is a great tip that could save you over $500 a year:  You no longer need to keep a home phone just for internet access.

Costs and Savings

Historically, DSL or “Digital Subscriber Line” worked over your home phone line, which forced us to have to pay for basic phone service in order to get DSL.

Not only is this no longer true, but you would be astounded how much money you could save by eliminating the phone cost.

For example, my wife and I never use our home phone – it was a number we gave out to people that we didn’t want to talk to.  For this ability we were paying the BARE MINIMUM $9 a month.  But after scrutinizing our bill each month, we were actually paying $22 with all the surcharges and taxes added in.  FOR BARE MINIMUM SERVICE AND NO PHONE PLAN.

If you add a phone plan and long distance, you can easily be paying $40 or $50 a month.  And most of you don’t realize that you are paying probably another $10 a month for Caller ID, *69 and other product.  My mother-in-law pays over $60 a month!

Here are the current published rates for AT&T DSL with Phone:

and then for just DSL:

So although you will pay about $10 extra for the naked DSL, you should be saving $20 – $40 in phone charges.

My Experience

I found out about this last year when I saw a story about Naked DSL from Arstechnica, and then went about figuring out how to make it work.  I called my carrier, AT&T, and asked for “Naked DSL”.

The representative was surprised I knew of the term and proceeded to ask me how I knew of it and even told me of the savings.

At one point in the call, he tried to “do his job” by telling me that I could get basic phone service for “just” $9 a month.  I replied, “After all the fees it was more like $20”, and he laughed and agreed. (Pretty funny he said that.)

All in all it took a solid thirty minutes where I learned the following:

1. Instead of a phone number, I would have a “Dry Loop Number”.  So when I call in and they ask for my phone number, this is what I give them.  DON’T EVER LOSE THIS NUMBER – TRUST ME.
2. To switch over to my new “number”, I needed to schedule a day for it to happen where I can be without internet service for a bit.

I scheduled the switch-over to happen while I was out of town for Independence day, so when I would get back it would just be magically working.

But then we started getting bills from AT&T with my old phone number for 0 dollars two months in a row.

Then our internet just stopped working.

When I called AT&T, they asked for my phone number, and not knowing that I had to remember my Dry Loop Number, they couldn’t help me.  They told me to look at my bill, but it only showed my old number.

After about two hours of holding, screaming, and talking to supervisors, someone finally found my number.

Apparently my account was not transferred correctly over, so for the last month I was still using my old internet account, which just got shut off.

They fixed the problem, and then after I rebooted my modem, internet was back on.

Caveats

I have found that the main way the carriers will scare you into keeping your phone is by telling you that you won’t have 911 access.  So be aware that if you really want this ability, you need to keep your phone.  We have several cell phones, so as long as one is always near us, it isn’t that important.

Secondly, if you have a home security system that relies on having a home phone, you will either have to upgrade it to to use a wireless module (which is safer anyway), use a service that can communicate over the internet, or turn it off.

In Conclusion

With people looking for many ways to save money, this could be a simple action, with minimal impact to do so.

While it is not for everyone, it is a no-brainer for those willing to try it.

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