I recently had to replace a failing hard drive on a friend\’s laptop. Yeah, I can hear the groans. The key word was \”failing\”, not \”failed\”. I bought a new hard drive from NewEgg, and (here comes the testimonial part) I bought a thing called DriveWire from an outfit called Apricorn. This DriveWire thing consisted of a small interface box with connectors on all sides, a power cable, and a USB cable. The new drive plugged into one side, and the power and USB into another. (The other two are more connectors for different drive types).

It came with a CD, and promises that the data transfer would cause no pain. I popped the CD into the drive, powered up the laptop, and the CD booted to Apricorm\’s software. Basically, there was one button to push – \”Copy drive A to drive B\”. I pushed it. It started up, and a few hours later (OK, I don\’t know how long – I went to bed) the copy was completed. I swapped drives, powered up, and the laptop booted. I defragged the drive without problem, and other than the laptop saying \”Hey, I see a new hard drive\”, there was no muss, no fuss, no pain at all.

Just like I like it! I think this was the best $35 I\’ve ever spent.

I highly recommend the Apricorm DriveWire.

I also recommend NewEgg, but that\’s another story.

Really.  Yes, Christmas is coming, and I have done a little bit of on-line shopping, primarily for my wife, and for my Secret Santa victim this year. My siblings and I decided that a Secret Santa deal would be easier to manage (and afford, since there are a number of us), so we\’ve been doing that for four or five years.

This weekend I want to take my annual trek to Keene NH. It\’s a tradition of sorts. I go to the Colony Mill Marketplace on West Street, and stop by the Elm City Restaurant & Brewery for a pint (or so), then I meander through the converted mill building, scouring the neat little shops for \”stocking stuffers\” that Peg would enjoy. These typically include several pairs of $20 earrings, puppy socks, kazoos and other toys, mostly just fun stuff to unwrap from the stocking. It\’s a real event, but the shops have changed over time, and I\’ll be evaluating this year whether to return next.

After the shopping frenzy I go back to the Elm City Restaurant & Brewery again, ostensibly for lunch. They have a great smoked salmon starter – a 4oz slab of home-smoked salmon, several slices of hearty home-made bread, and a wonderful horseradish sauce. Their burgers are also quite good, and their Brewmaster\’s Special, consisting of bratwurst, knockwurst, sauerkraut and potato pancakes is really a great lunch on a cold winter day. But I\’ll have another beer. Maybe two, but I\’m driving. And the smoked salmon might well draw me back next year. It\’s a tradition, right?

From there, I\’ll try to slip down to Northampton, where my sister Jackie will be showing (and perhaps demonstrating technique) her artwork at the Valley Hands gallery. I have a few other stops I need to make, so that will be a short trip if I make it at all.

Happy Christmas!

OK, I know I\’m going to get a lot of mail saying \”Well, of COURSE, you dumbass\”, but I\’m going to risk it. I remember helping my mother make lasagna. I remember my Auntie Glenna making lasagna. I swear they cooked the noodles beforehand. I\’m pretty sure I\’ve made lasagna, and, well, I cooked the noodles beforehand. It was kind of a pain, keeping the noodles from sticking to one another while doing the whole assembly part, but if my mother did it, and my Auntie Glenna did it, then it must be the way things are done. (OK, I could get some wiggle room on the way Mom did things, but Auntie Glenna was an unearthly power to behold. She could, and did on a number of occasions, make anything, from her four daughters\’ (and my sister\’s) wedding dresses (yes, bridesmaids too), to indestructible piñatas, to a knitted (perhaps crocheted?) fully-stocked bomb shelter in the 1960\’s. So if Auntie Glenna did something in a particular way, then damn it, that\’s the way it should be done.)

A few years back, somebody came out with lasagna noodles that didn\’t have to be precooked. I figured they probably didn\’t taste as good (it\’s easy to dismiss stuff out-of-hand from this ivory tower), and we never really even tried them. (We to include my wife. We both cook. We both live in this ivory tower. We both tend to dismiss things out-of-hand.)

So it came as a complete surprise to me a few weeks ago, when, reading a lasagna box to find out how much of a pain it would be to make some lasagna (because, after all, it is a pretty tasty dish), that the recipe called for breaking the noodles to make them fit. Not cutting, but breaking. Now, I\’ve got a college education (yes, an accredited institution of higher learning), and I immediately caught the implication there. It\’s really really hard to break a cooked noodle, so the recipe author didn\’t precook the noodles.

Intrigued, I secreted away a box of lasagna noodles in my grocery cart, and headed back for ricotta, some shredded pizza cheese, a package of sweet Italian sausage, a bag of sliced pepperoni, and two jars of Paul Newman\’s (God bless his soul) Marinara sauce. That stuff is good enough where I don\’t put a whole lot of consideration into making my own sauce any more. And I can make a pretty good sauce. Besides, if the lasagna came out screwed up, I could blame it on a dead guy.

I read the instructions again, and there was nothing about precooking the noodles. So I went ahead with my grand experiment, mixing the ricotta with a couple of eggs and some parsley for color, precooking and slicing the sausage (after removing the casing, which gives Peg the willies), and assembling two pretty good-sized pans of lasagna. Then I put it into the oven and waited.

The suspense was palpable. I was certain (well, nearly so) that there was an unwritten rule in lasagna making that it\’s SO obvious that the noodles need to be precooked that they don\’t even BOTHER to include that part in the recipe on the box. So for an hour I waited, ticking off in my head all the excuses for such stupidity that I could use when the lasagna came out of the oven, crusty brown cheese, firmly set ricotta, and bubbling-hot marinara sauce ensconced in crunchy, inedible, uncooked lasagna noodles. I could fall back on my engineering background, where nothing is assumed, nothing is left to folk-lore, and everything that needs to be done in a specific manner is so documented. (Not that that is actually the truth, but we can usually fool the lay people with our \”disciplined engineering approach\” and \”proven scientific methodology\”).

I was pleasantly surprised. The noodles actually cooked in the lasagna, absorbing liquid from the sauce and ricotta, and it came out quite nicely!

I repeated the experiment tonight on a smaller scale just to validate the first experiment, and I\’m happy to say that the lasagna was delicious.

OK, so I probably should have done this a few years ago, but today, I\’ve written a note to our insurance guy (Chris Norton in Fitchburg – We started dealing with his Mom and Dad when we first moved to the area ) to drop the collision insurance on my 10-year-old truck.

Chris made an even more compelling argument for dropping it – the $500 deductible. I went to Kelly Blue Book (www.kbb.com) to check the value of this old (but still running well) beast.  A fair-condition 1999 Mazda B2500 SE Cab Plus 2WD with 183000 miles on it is worth about $1200.  More than I thought, but still at $150/year, counting the deductible, I\’d save that up in under six years. If I\’d taken the insurance off of it five years ago, I\’d be well ahead of the curve at this point.

Yes, folks, that\’s how boring my life has been over the past few months. I feel compelled to write that I\’ve canceled collision insurance on a 10-year-old pickup truck…

In July we traveled to West Virginia for Peg\’s Family Reunion, and did a little bit of touring around. Unfortunately those blog entries were lost in an inexcusable failure to backup my files prior to upgrading WordPress… Grrr.

But anyway, in the past couple of days we\’ve visited the New River Bridge, the Beckley Coal Mining Exhibition, Moundsville, and the Customs House in Wheeling, in an attempt to introduce some Culture and History into our lives…

The New River Bridge has some incredible view. It\’s VERY high over the river. We crossed that as we drove to Beckley for the Exhibition Coal Mine. The Exhibition is impressive – a retired coal mine was purchased by the City of Beckley to demonstrate the inner workings of a coal mine circa 1900. There is more modern equipment on display as well, but the docents (ours was Marvin – totally an enjoyable tour) describe how mining used to be done before all of the safety advances.

The Adena Indians populated the middle Ohio River valley circa 1000BC..100BC. They occasionally buried \”significant\” individuals in burial mounds, one of which is still in existence in Moundsville WV, just south of Wheeling.

Our last bit of History and Culture was a trip to the Customs House in Wheeling WV, also known as the West Virginia Independence Hall, which was where the Virginia separatists gathered and voted to secede from Virginia and form the new state of West Virginia.

Great fun, and we even learned something!

I have lately been playing with Facebook and today I discovered what might be a Godsend for a scatterbrain like myself – Remember The Milk – a task management tool from a bunch of blokes Down Under. From anywhere, you can access your list of things to do. No more excuses (well, I\’m sure I\’ll still come up with them, but I won\’t be as convincing).

Also, if you\’re a fan of the Firefox browser (maybe others?) get the StumbleUpon AddOn. It\’s just brilliant. Plug in your interests, and click on the Stumble! button to find yourself at a random page that you\’ll probably enjoy. Try not to use it at work – your productivity will suffer…

I\’ve been having fun of late playing with Twitter, (I was accidentally invited by my friend Adam), and Facebook, (invited by my niece Susenn). Facebook is pure fun social networking, and I\’ve reconnected with some friends, which is cool. Twitter allows you to post what you\’re doing so your friends can see. If you\’re going down to the local, they might join you.

Another good connecting point is LinkedIn, which is social networking, ostensibly for business purposes. Sort of like a more formal Facebook…

Facebook and Twitter are for fun, but I totally recommend signing up for LinkedIn – you can never tell when someone from your past is going to come up with a job for you. I\’ve always gotten jobs by recommendation. Never been on a cold call – and I\’ve been in this business for 25 years.

\”Cousin\” is probably a bit of a stretch. Three brothers, Michael, Matthew, and Edward, emigrated from England to Connecticut in 1630 – ten years after the Pilgrims managed to find shore near Plymouth Massachusetts when they realized they were out of beer and need to find a packie.

I forget which way it goes exactly, but I think Matthew was the progenitor of my family\’s branch, and Edward was the progenitor of Cheryl\’s branch. It really only matters to the geneologists of the group – I\’m not one of them, but Cheryl is, so she\’ll probably correct me – ever so politely, because that\’s her nature – if I am wrong.

Cheryl and I used to work at the same company a number of years ago, which is how we knew one another to begin with. While researching her family tree, Cheryl ran across my family name, and asked if perhaps, in my distant heritage, there might have been three brothers, Michael, Matthew, and Edward, who migrated from England about 1630 – ten years after the Pilgrims managed to find shore near Plymouth Massachusetts when they realized they were out of beer and need to find a packie.

\”Why, yes!\” I exclaimed (well, not really exclaimed, but I\’m trying to pump up my writing), and borrowed what few geneological references I knew about from my elder brother, and loaned them to Cheryl. We did have a connection going way, way, back (yes, when three brothers, blah, blah, blah). Now we refer to one another as \”Cousin\”.

This might seem rather a non-sequitur, but have you tried Linked-In? It\’s a marvelous web site, designed to let folks network to friends, family, co-workers, and that ilk. It can come in handy to have \”networked\” if you find yourself in need of a job. Anyway, I\’m a member, Cheryl\’s a member, and that\’s how we found one another again. Certainly the email addresses of our former defunct employer aren\’t worth a hill of beans for connecting.

It turns out that we now work about 15 minutes from one another. And that\’s on foot! So I walked over today and we chatted in the cafeteria for an hour and caught up a bit. I even got to see another former co-worker, and there are others who work there as well. It was like old home week.

So that was fun way to end the week!