CarltonFoster.com

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

Happy Thanksgiving Foster Family and Friends!

today is the boy’s birthday. i asked him a couple of days ago what kind of cake would he like for his birthday. he told me a vanilla cake with blue icing. when i asked what shape he wanted, he said he didn’t care. i offered a computer shaped cake, or round, or square, and he said he didn’t care what shape. so this is what he got.

it’s been awhile since i put in the fall garden and so far it has gone well. i have picked some of the romaine and butter crisp lettuce. both of them were tasty. the spinach is good as well. a couple of the carrots got fat enough to be picked and were good in a taco salad. i have given away some of the lettuce and still have plenty so i think that was a successful crop. i will leave the rest of the carrots to get bigger. i planted the tulip bulbs today. those will bloom in the spring. the broccoli hasn’t produced anything other than leaves so far, but they have grown better than i thought they would.

So we spent most of this past weekend building and filling 4′x8′ planters. Thank you Carl! Today, I got some plants to put in for the fall. I have romaine lettuce, another lettuce, spinach, broccoli, rosemary, and just for some color, some mums.

Hopefully in a few weeks the lettuce and spinach will have grown enough to have salads and the broccoli shouldn’t be too far behind them.

In my profile, I mentioned that I am a Tupperware consultant. At the end of the month, there is a new catalog coming out for the holidays that will have some limited time offerings, and some neat new items. And starting this Saturday are the new monthly specials. This month is focusing on the microwave cookware line, Vent ‘N Serve. If you are interested in the Vent ‘N Serve line, August is the time to get it as there are some great deals available on it.  For those of you out of town where i can’t hand you a catalog, you can shop on my website at www.my2.tupperware.com/janiefoster

Happy Sunday!