CarltonFoster.com

If you had been a subscriber on this site but are not any more, please feel free to re-register.  However, this time, please at least fill out part of the user info beyond just email.  I regularly delete all registered users that I think are spam registrations (grouchy that way).  If the registration seems questionable, it goes.

Sorry.  I just have little patience for annoyances…

Carl tells me that today- 101010 is 42 in binary so happy 42!

Why in the world did you decide to kick the bucket behind the veggie garden? You’re stinky! Thankfully it’s been raining or you’d smell even worse. Hopefully some nice guy or gal will be coming to remove you from that corner tomorrow. ICK!

This is for Cleo. Brandon said the filling wasn’t turning out quite right for you and since I don’t know if he passed along the tip to add powdered sugar to the peanut butter, I’m posting the whole recipe here.

For the chocolate cups:

12oz bag of semi sweet chocolate chips

2 TBSP vegetable shortening

paper or foil liners

For the filling:

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup powdered sugar

1 TBSP butter, melted

For the filling: Mix the peanut butter, powdered sugar and melted butter together then put in the fridge to chill.

To make the cups: Put the chocolate chips and vegetable shortening in the top of a double boiler. Stir until smooth. Set the paper liners on a cookie sheet and fill about 1/4 to 1/3 full with the melted chocolate. Spread the chocolate up the sides of the paper liner. Put in freezer for a couple of minutes to set.

Once the filling and the cups have chilled and set up, start making balls of filling to go in the cups.  They should be large enough when flattened to almost fill the cups, but small enough to leave room for more chocolate to cover them. Once all of the cups are filled with the peanut butter filling, spoon melted chocolate over the top to cover. If you want to add chopped nuts or sprinkles to the tops, do that before they set. Put the finished pb cups in the fridge to harden.  If you left the tops plain and want to drizzle a white chocolate or dark chocolate over the tops, you can do that before or after they have hardened.

The number of cups made depends on what size you make them and how thick or think the chocolate is.  If you are going to use the standard size muffin cups or the jumbo muffin size, I recommend putting the paper liners in a muffin tin and not a cookie sheet. The larger liners can flop open instead of holding their shape when you want the chocolate to set up.

I am going to start posting the recipes for the baked goods I send in for the brown bags. If anyone wants the recipe, I can direct them here instead of trying to track them down. I will also have the recipe handy in case I can’t find where I have it written down.

These brownies use almost every size measuring cup from the set I have. If you just have a basic set (1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1 cup,) you’ll have to do some rinsing/wiping of your measuring cups. They are yummy brownies that you can dress up by icing them or by adding chopped chocolate. I usually just make them plain.

1 2/3 cup granulated sugar

1 1/2 sticks butter, melted

2 TBSP water

2 large eggs

2 tsp vanilla

1 1/3 cup flour

3/4 cup baking cocoa (I used regular unsweetened, but you can use dark unsweetened or a combo of the 2)

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 350 and grease a 9″ x 13″ pan.

Mix the sugar, melted butter, and water together in a medium sized bowl. Add the eggs and vanilla, stirring well.

In another bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt. Stir into the wet ingredients.

Pour into prepared pan and bake 20- 25 minutes. The brownies should pull away from the edges a bit and a tooth pick inserted near the middle should pull out with just a few crumbs or just a little streaky. If you pull out the tooth pick and it’s coated with batter, it’s not done yet.

As a side note: I was stumbling around today and ended up on a food blog. I swear it was written by a 3rd grader. The grammar mistakes were more than just basic typos. I can ignore things like teh or spacing errors where the first letter of one word ends up on the end of the one before it. But oh my cow, if you are going to offer giveaways sponsored by well meaning companies, please learn the difference between accept and except and when to use a and an.  If you are trying to make money with your blog, you really need to try to communicate with at least a middle school level grasp of the language. Spell check can only do so much to catch mistakes.

Last year when we got back from vacation, Carl and the boy made me 2 garden boxes. I planted some beans, 2 types of lettuce and spinach. I also planted broccoli. The beans and leafy stuff did really well. The broccoli did ok. I got 3 tiny heads of broccoli that looked more like an individual floret than a head of broccoli. Gardening is always an experiment and the broccoli just wasn’t the best one.

Anyway, I have already started on the Spring garden. I have corn, peas, green beans, 2 types of tomato, anahiem peppers for the girl, zucchini, black tulips, rosemary, chives, and parsley. The girl wants to grow mint so I have a pot ready for that whenever the garden store gets in mint plants.  I also have a cayenne pepper plant to give as a birthday gift. We’re trying out some citronella plants to see how well they work at keeping the mosquitoes away. Those are in pots so we can move them around as needed.

The peas, beans and corn have come up. The tomatoes and peppers are starting to sprout. The zucchini were seedlings I bought so they were already sprouted.

OH! I also put in 4 blueberry bushes. They when in last night. Two of them have some nice green growth on them and they should do ok, but I’m not too sure how the other 2 will do.

It seems to have been a few months since anything was posted.  I’ll have to try to do a better job to post to the website and not let 3 months go by between posts.

Update it to the newest version and then do this:

1. Launch Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
2. Select Edit>Preferences
3. Select the JavaScript Category
4. Uncheck the ‘Enable Acrobat JavaScript’ option
5. Click OK

Howdy Foster Family and Friends! It’s baking day!  There are baking ingredients all over the kitchen today. Chocolate chips, sugar, butter eggs, marshmallows and other assorted ingredients are on the counters and table. The pool table is covered with a tablecloth so it can serve as a cooling rack.

So far there are peanut butter cookies cooling on the table and english toffee that is setting up on the kitchen table. Soon there will be chocolate chip cookies joining hte peanut butter cookies. The cherries for the chocolate mice are sitting on a cooling rack to dry before getting dipped in chocolate. Some of the peanut butter cookies will get dipped in chocolate after I make the mice. I have sugar cookie dough in the fridge waiting to be rolled out. Those will get iced tomorrow. I also plan to make some maple syrup fudge.

“Hey, did you hear there’s a new voice mail from Tiger Woods?”

“What was that recipe for coconut cake?”

“My video isn’t playing properly, do I need new codecs?”

Simple, innocent questions like these can lead to not so innocent results… but why? There’s a term in search technology called Search Engine Optimization or SEO for those with lazy fingers. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results… like Google’s search algorithm, PageRank.

Here’s a quick peek at PageRank:

For a more detailed and explained breakdown:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

But I digress… how does all this turn into a user getting infected?

In recent years, hacker SEO tactics, also called spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service. Some of the tactics include: keyword stuffing, hidden text and links, doorway and cloaked pages, link farming and blog comment spam.

Criminals are using tools such as Google Trends to identify the most popular and current Internet search terms. The same criminals then use new blogs on free hosting sites, such as Windows Live Spaces, Blogspot, and AOL Journals, featuring the same search terms. When an Internet user then makes a search using those popular terms they get multiple links to these hosted blog sites in their search results.

If the user then clicks on the link, thinking it is relevant to their desired search, they are taken to a blog site with an apparent embedded video player. If the user clicks on the video player, they are prompted to load a ‘codec’, which surreptitiously loads malware, including fake anti-virus software that promises to clean non existent viruses from the computer in return for their credit card details.

Our advice is to not blindly trust results from Google searches, and be wary of these kinds of links to hosted blog sites. One simple way to assist in identifying possible bad sites is using the Firefox add-on Web Of Trust. While their primary source of knowledge is ratings from other users, they also take advantage of nearly a hundred carefully chosen trusted sources, such as listings of phishing sites. This provides WOT with a fast, automated and reliable means of protecting their users from new, rapidly spreading online threats.

You can find it here:
http://www.mywot.com/en/download/ff

And as always, if you find yourself the victim of such nefarious techniques, please call IT Security at x44200