Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog - 2 new articles

RSS to Email Service FeedBlitz Drops the Free Tag The Most Hard Working Tech Bloggers in the World More Recent Articles RSS to Email Service FeedBlitz Drops the Free Tag The email newsletter service of this blog is powered by FeedBlitz and I’m a pretty happy customer. The other good alternative to FeedBlitz is FeedBurner Email but I have a strong feeling that Google will merge this service with Google Groups... Read more.. » The Most Hard Working Tech Bloggers in the World Meet the hardest working people from the tech blogging world. The list is based on the number of blog posts written by any particular author blogger (in English) over a period of time. The Lifehacker editors take the top positions followed by... Read more.. » More Recent Articles Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files Parallels Workstation for Windows & Linux - Free Download Upload Pictures to Picasa Albums from Live Photo Gallery Google Updates Toolbar PageRank on New Year's Eve Perform Case Sensitive Search with Google

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Perfect Deviled Eggs

If you've got any New Year's parties to go to this weekend, this is a perfect dish to bring. Deviled eggs are super easy and cheap, and they are gobbled up like nobody's business by adults and kids alike. Don't worry about starting that diet quite yet. ;)

Here are some tips to make sure you get perfect hard-boiled eggs every time:

1) Fill your pot with enough water to completely cover the eggs. If you don't do this, your eggs won't cook all the way around.

2) Make sure you put your eggs into the water when it's still cold. If you put eggs into boiling water, the shells will crack open.

3) Put a lid on the pot, bring it to a boil and then remove the pot from the heat. Let the eggs sit there, covered, for about 25 minutes. This will perfectly hard-boil them without the risk of cracking the eggs.

4) Drain the hot water, then pour cold water over the eggs in another pot or bowl, letting them sit for about 15 minutes. Cooling them completely will make peeling them so much easier -- you won't burn your hands, and the shell wants to come off a lot easier once they're cooled.

5) Gently crack the shells by banging them against the side of your sink. Crack the shell all the way around. If you don't crack it all the way around, you can easily tear the egg white when you're removing the shell.

6) Remove the shell under running cold water. This will insure you don't have any pieces of shell stuck into your egg white that you can't see.


Ingredients:
6 eggs, hard-boiled, cooled, peeled and cut in half length-wise
5-6 slices bacon, sliced into thin strips, cooked and drained
3 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
salt and pepper, to taste
paprika

Remove egg yolks from each egg half. If your eggs are perfectly hard-boiled, the yolks will come out with little to no work on your part. The easiest way to get the yolk out is to hold the egg in your hand with your thumb on one end of the white, your pinky on the other and your index finger on the back side. Gently pull each end of the egg white back with your thumb and pinky while gently pushing with your index finger. The yolk should pop loose and should be easily removed.


Once all the yolks are in the bowl, add mayonnaise, mustard and salt and pepper, to taste. Mash well with the back of a fork until well-combined. Add bacon pieces and stir to combine. Then drop generous spoon fulls of yolk mixture back into each egg white. Lightly sprinkle the tops with paprika. Cayenne sprinkled on top is great, too! Refrigerate at least 20 minutes before serving.

.winter.

impressions of a wonderful day...

peace, hippiegirl♥

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

SUMMARY OF THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE by Stephen Covey

Habit 1: Be Proactive

Change starts from within, and highly effective people make the decision to improve their lives through the things that they can influence rather than by simply reacting to external forces.

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind

Develop a principle-centered personal mission statement. Extend the mission statement into long-term goals based on personal principles.

Habit 3: Put First Things First

Spend time doing what fits into your personal mission, observing the proper balance between production and building production capacity. Identify the key roles that you take on in life, and make time for each of them.

Habit 4: Think Win/Win

Seek agreements and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases where a "win/win" deal cannot be achieved, accept the fact that agreeing to make "no deal" may be the best alternative. In developing an organizational culture, be sure to reward win/win behavior among employees and avoid inadvertantly rewarding win/lose behavior.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

First seek to understand the other person, and only then try to be understood. Stephen Covey presents this habit as the most important principle of interpersonal relations. Effective listening is not simply echoing what the other person has said through the lens of one's own experience. Rather, it is putting oneself in the perspective of the other person, listening empathically for both feeling and meaning.

Habit 6: Synergize

Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, one often can solve conflicts and find a better solution than would have been obtained through either person's own solution.

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.

Photo: Claude Monet's Studio where he held workshops in Impressionistic Painting for American artists.

Garden of Hotel Baudy, Giverny, France

Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog - 2 new articles

Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files Parallels Workstation for Windows & Linux - Free Download More Recent Articles Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files Adobe PDF is the best format for sharing documents because they are compact, the formatting is preserved and most computers / mobile devices / ebook readers can easily handle PDF files. Here you’ll learn how to do just about everything with... Read more.. » Parallels Workstation for Windows & Linux - Free Download Parallels Workstation is a commercial desktop virtualization program that lets you run multiple Operating systems on the single physical computer and you can easily switch between them without rebooting. For instance, you could be running Windows... Read more.. » More Recent Articles Upload Pictures to Picasa Albums from Live Photo Gallery Google Updates Toolbar PageRank on New Year's Eve Perform Case Sensitive Search with Google Most Useful Web Applications for 2008 My Favorite Blogs & Websites of 2008

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.happy new year.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

WELCOME 2009 !!!

i hope you all had a lot of fun yesterday :)

i celebrated with about ten friends, we sat together and laughed a lot...

unfortunateley i didn't take any good photos..

my outfit was not very spectacular.. it was too cold for my black dress!

have a great first day in 2009,
kisses, hippiegirl

Beautiful New Zealand on Your Desktop

Crescent Moon (New Zealand)


Cloudscape (New Zealand)


Church of the Good Shepherd Lake Tekapo Near Christchurch (New Zealand)


Cattle Flats Dart River (New Zealand)


Auckland (New Zealand)


Aoraki Mount Cook National Park (New Zealand)


Anaura Bay Gisborne (New Zealand)


Beautiful New Zealand


A Pleasant View (New Zealand)


New Zealand


A Snap of a Lake (New Zealand)


Beautiful New Zealand in Mountains

Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog - 4 new articles

Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files Upload Pictures to Picasa Albums from Live Photo Gallery Google Updates Toolbar PageRank on New Year's Eve Perform Case Sensitive Search with Google More Recent Articles Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files Adobe PDF is the best format for sharing documents because they are compact, the formatting is preserved and most computers / mobile devices / ebook readers can easily handle PDF files. Here you’ll learn how to do just about everything with Adobe... Read more.. » Upload Pictures to Picasa Albums from Live Photo Gallery Picasa Publisher is a handy plug-in for people who use the Windows Live Photo Gallery software to manage their photos on the desktop but prefer using the Picasa Web Albums service for storing their pictures online. Picasa Publisher will add a new... Read more.. » Google Updates Toolbar PageRank on New Year's Eve Matt Cutts just confirmed that Google has updated PageRank values that are displayed on the Google Toolbar. CNN.com is now part of the elite Google PageRank 10 club while both Twitter.com and WordPress.com domains have climbed to Level 9. ... Read more.. » Perform Case Sensitive Search with Google Google says that they treat search queries as case-insensitive and all letters in a search phrase are always interpreted in lower case. For example, searches for barack obama, Barack Obama and BARACK OBAMA will all return the same results on Google. ... Read more.. » More Recent Articles Most Useful Web Applications for 2008 My Favorite Blogs & Websites of 2008 The Essential Guide to Internet & Software for First-Time Computer Users See Real Web Addresses Before Clicking any Short URL Identify Country Flags by their Appearance or Color

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Everything Else Is Secondary

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
Don't be trapped by dogma -
which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.

~ Steve Jobs
co-founder Apple

Photo: Chairs at UW Student Union
Madison, WI

Chili's Chicken Enchilada Soup

This soup is one of my favorites of all time. When we moved away to go to college in 2004, our new tiny town didn't have a Chili's, and I was so bummed. Every time we went home to visit, which was pretty often because we were only an hour and a half away, I'd always make sure I went to Chili's to get a bowl of soup to tie me over until next time.

Then, one day, I realized, DUH! I can find the recipe online and can make it at home! Wow, I'm smart. I couldn't find the exact recipe, but I found a few that gave me some good places to start, and then I tweaked it to make it a pretty darn good replica, if I do say so myself.

Each recipe I found for this soup used an ingredient I'd never heard of before, Masa Harina. So to spare you the temporary anxiety I had from not knowing what this ingredient was, let alone where to find it: it's a Mexican flour found in the baking section of your grocery store, and it's used to make tortillas, tamales and the like.


You can really use whatever you have on hand in this recipe. If I have cans of broth and enchilada sauce, I use that. But most of the time, I just use bouillon cubes and packaged enchilada sauce (both prepared according to package directions). It tastes fantastic either way. If you use bouillon cubes, though, use a little less salt than the recipe calls for. Those are much saltier than canned broths.

This makes a huge pot of soup. I made it the other night for my family of 5, and we all had 2 bowls, plus we all had some for lunch the next day, and I still have at least 1 more bowl's worth in my fridge. But it's so good that you won't mind eating it for like 3 days straight or longer. Oh, yum, now I know what I'm having for lunch!

Ingredients:
1 pound chicken breasts, cooked and diced or shredded
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup diced onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 cups chicken broth
1 cup Masa Harina
3 cups water
3 cups enchilada sauce
16 ounces Velveeta, cubed
1 tablespoon salt
1/2 tablespoon cumin
1 tablespoon chili powder

Garnish (pick and choose from this list -- they're all great!):
tortilla chips, crushed
cheddar cheese, shredded

AND/OR:
salsa
tomatoes, sliced or diced
avocado, sliced or diced
pico de gallo
red onion, diced
green onions, diced

Melt butter in a large soup pot over medium-low heat. Saute onions and garlic until onions are tender, about 3 minutes. Add chicken broth. Combine Masa Harina with 2 cups water, and whisk until well-blended. Add to soup. Add remaining water, enchilada sauce, Velveeta, chicken and spices. Bring to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes, or until thick.

Acts of Kindness Benefit Everyone

Do you really want to be happy? Everyone says yes, but the gateway to happiness makes some of us frown. The gateway to happiness, is giving to others. Think about this: "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." - The Dalai Lama

Some of us may feel that, if we give too much, our generosity, will be taken advantage of by others. This is true, and a few very selfish individuals can possibly perceive your good intentions as weakness.

However, people who seek to take advantage are in the minority. To quote Gandhi, "We must be the change, we wish to see in the world." Think about it, change has to start somewhere, so why not start with you and me, right now?

You can donate anything randomly, without seeking reward, and anonymously, without telling anyone. This is good for you, the universe, and those who receive your acts of kindness. Every time you give, you will receive – even, if you are not looking for a reward.

Try it, and you will see, what some call, “karma,” the law of cause and effect. It works like this: For every action there is a reaction. Let’s make sure the reactions to our actions are good ones.

Danny Thomas said, "All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don't discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others."

Share everything and you will achieve a legacy of kindness. Share nothing and people will, do their best, to forget you. When my life is over I will only leave memories, in the minds of others, and I want them all to be good ones.

So, how much should you give? It can start with, “heart felt”, kind words, a note, a card, or a flower. You will find that your gifts or donations won’t make you poor. As a result of this, you will see most people, naturally, return kindness to you.

You should also take the time to be polite to all of the people who perform services for you, every day. Many people do not bother to say hello to the maid, janitor, parking attendant, or service clerk.

Once you do, you may even learn their name, and you would be surprised how many of them will go out of their way to give you good service, just by addressing them by their first name.

If you establish sincerity and trust where ever you go, you will be loved by your fellow man. It is really that simple. As Mohammed said, "A person's true wealth is the good he or she does in the world."

Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog - 2 new articles

Most Useful Web Applications for 2008 My Favorite Blogs & Websites of 2008 More Recent Articles Most Useful Web Applications for 2008 As we bid adieu to 2008, let’s looks at some useful web applications that really made an impact. All these apps are available online for free and require no installation. ** The Best Free Web Apps for 2008 1. Zamzar – Your cell... Read more.. » My Favorite Blogs & Websites of 2008 Following are the top 20 websites / blogs that I pay most attention to as per FeedDemon. The snapshot on the left was captured in June (for comparison) while the one on right reflects my current reading habits. I was subscribed to some 1168... Read more.. » More Recent Articles The Essential Guide to Internet & Software for First-Time Computer Users See Real Web Addresses Before Clicking any Short URL Identify Country Flags by their Appearance or Color The Best Websites for Kids Packed inside a Browser - Kido'Z Is the Gmail Website Twice as Fast in Google Chrome Than IE 8

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