Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Many bloggers fashion themselves foodbloggers with reviews of high end and specialty restaurants. Me, not so much.
My food exploration takes place at home or at a convenience store…
Michele showed me the this page in Martha Stewart Living.

Now, I must agree that Martha is a genius when it comes to innovation in the home. You simply must give her snaps for continuously raising the bar.
But at Cruft Manor, we put a subtle twist on her idea.
I give you Spamcakes!

Spam is a favorite around here, I’ve written about it a few times.

This is a simple dish with the hardest part being getting a nice look to the spam and not overdoing it.

Just put a spam slice down and pour the batter on top of it. Wait until the bubbles start to form and then flip as you would a regular pancake.

I had a nice serving plate of Spamcakes in no time. Strangely, Michele and the girls wanted nothing to do with the testing.

You have to admit, that looks good. Simpler than Pigs in a Blanket and obviously more fun that using bacon like Martha.

How did it taste? Good.
With hints of cassis, earthy undertones, and whiffs of blackberries. Wait I’m not reviewing wine, where they make the flavors up…
It tasted like a pancake with a crispy bit of salty meat to offset the sweetness of the maple syrup and the softness of the pancake itself.
Give it a try and tell me what you think.

Dogs have their own version of cyberspace, here is how to translate:
Dog peeing – sending an email
Dog sniffing – reading an email
Dog pooping – making an attachment
Dog peeing/sniffing a tree/pole – posting on a message board
Dog sniffing the butt of another dog – exchanging a PGP key
Dog barking – instant messaging
Dog howling – blog posting
Dog growling – commenting on post
Dog looking through fence – watching television
Dog on a walk – surfing the web
Dog digging a hole – creating a web site
Dog sticking head out a car window – using an RSS feed reader
Dog chasing a cat/squirrel – stopping a virus
Dog fetching a stick/toy – video gaming
Dog eating human food – wanking to porn
Lastly:
Dogs run Windows
Cats run OS X
Anything I missed?

I finally received one of the new dollar coins from the bank today.

I’ve always been partial to the dollar coin. As a child, my Uncle Joe would give us the large Eisenhower dollars and then seemed huge and impressive. When in England, it seems so natural to use the pound and two pound coins I’ve never understood why it hasn’t been more popular in the US.
Recently the US Mint released the series of Presidential $1 Coins, hoping to revitalize interest in using the dollar coin. The State Quarter series is popular with just about everyone.
Back in 1979, the Mint began striking the Susan B. Anthony dollars. After two years, they stopped and no new dollar coins were made until 2000, when the Sacagawea Dollar Coins were introduced. You can read more Dollar Coin history at wikipedia, of course.
I liked the Susan B. Anthony dollars quite a bit. The story of Women’s Suffrage in the US is an important thing to remember as we struggle with new issues of equality and human rights.
But I must say, the new dollars are pretty nice, with a good look and color.

The reverse sides are interesting as well. If you can’t tell, the reverse of the Anthony shows an eagle landing on the Moon with the earth in the background. How sweet is that?
The new reverse on the Presidential Dollar is great as well. The simplicity of the design and the move from ONE DOLLAR to $1 is nice.
If we all start using dollar coins for our daily business, it will get them into the register tills and back into the hands of others. So start using the dollar coin and stop using the dollar bill.

Stress is a monkey.
Flings poo in your head and pees
In your coffee cup.

On the way to work, I stopped by McDonald’s for a cup of coffee. I’ve written about coffee at McDonald’s before.
As I made my order in the drive thru, they asked if I wanted cream and sugar. I told them one cream and two sugars. They offered to mix it for me. I told them that it would be great if they could. Sure enough, they handed me a cup of coffee ready to drink.
In the past, you get a cup of coffee and a bag with creme and sugar in it and have to mix it together yourself in your car as you drive away. Now, McDonald’s has given people a good reason to stop there for coffee, customer service.
This a straightforward and simple change, but for some reason no one seems to have thought about it before.
As I drove away, I wondered, why doesn’t Starbucks offer this service? That little crowd smush up at the coffee condiments bar could be avoided by most people leaving it to the wack-jobs that put cinnamon in their coffee. I predict Starbucks will offer this service within 3 months.

Michele and I were at the 7-Eleven on Friday getting coffee, when we saw this.

Sitting with the various creamers were two large boxes of Stok coffee shots. Upon further inspection, the Stok shots are simply caffeine shots. The silver one is sweetened and the gold one is just caffeine. There’s no dairy in it, so it’s likely a purely chemical concoction and even good for vegans…
At 40 milligrams of caffeine per shot, that’s a heavy duty boost. It’s half of the caffeine you get in a can of Red Bull.

I popped one of the sweet ones into my coffee and headed off to work. I didn’t notice anything spectacular, but it’s a pretty cool idea.
The note on the package of “limit 2/day” is just begging to be tested by someone.
According to the fine people at Energy Fiend, it would take around 300 Stok coffee shots to kill a 175 lb. person. Putting that in to realistic terms, that would mean drinking a gallon of Stok.
So get yourself to 7-Eleven and Stok up! (ha-ha-ha-ha)

Not to go completely against the general flow of the blogosphere general consensus regarding Digg and the AACS issue, but the recommendation at Demand Satisfaction is unrealistic and unpractical.
Digg posted publicly about their decision at 1PM on the day of the ‘revolt’. Jay was clear on exactly why they made their decision. Digg censors all kinds of things from porn to torrent sites to hate speech routinely. There is no dialog about this. No transparency or ‘candid feedback’ on those types of posts is necessary.
By the evening the Digg users had turned into an unruly mob that overwhelmed Digg’s systems. In the larger scheme of things, the 09 number itself is no big deal and already revoked, but somehow it caught the attention of Digg’s users and the mob was not a pretty sight.
Faced with the complete loss of control of the site, Kevin, Jay, and the rest of Digg were faced with a simple decision:
Is the risk of a DMCA lawsuit worse than the risk of losing the Digg users (the essential element to their success) ?
Obviously they felt that the risk of lawsuit was lower and bowed to the wishes of the mob on this issue within 8 hours. It had nothing to do with the right or wrong of the DMCA/AACS issue and everything to do with Digg staying in business. Consider that if tonight, the Digg users decided they wanted to fill the front page with porn links, they could do that as well. What stops them from doing that? I don’t know exactly what, but it sure isn’t ‘transparency’ or ‘candid feedback’ on why porn is not allowed on Digg.
The suggestion at Demand Satisfaction that calm, reasoned debate would have worked is laughable. Reasoned debate and the interweb do not belong in the same sentence. Discussions on long running sites like Metafilter or Kuros5in are hardly make people feel they are part of “the decision”. Go read any MetaTalk thread and see the snarkfest it routinely descends into on the simplest decision like changing colors. The wing nuts over at Flickr that freaked out over the ‘Old Skool’ message are just another example of catering too much to a vocal minority and over-explaining your rationale.
The kind of warm and fuzzy thinking at Demand Satisfaction is nice in an academic sense, but anyone trying to run their business that way, by explaining every decision, is fooling themselves. You will never please everyone and often make the problem worse, the more you try to explain. Everything doesn’t need to be a discussion. You need to pick your discussions just as you pick your battles.
Yes, dialog with your users is an important tool for any web site or business for that matter, but it is not the only tool. Many people seems to think that giving the users control is the only tool you need. Those people are wrong. Do not forget the old saying, ‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’

The people are Vroom Foods, makers of the Buzz Bites caffeinated chocolates, sent me some samples to try. They included some Foosh Mints as well.

Now, I’m not a full fledged caffeine fiend, like some people, so this dosage of caffeine is pretty strong in my book. 100 milligrams is a whole bunch of caffeine compared to a can of soda.

They tossed a bunch of other stuff like, Taurine, Ginseng, and some of the B vitamins. The B vitamins are supposed to boost your energy level as well. If you look at what’s in most of the energy drinks out there today, it’s the same basic list.

The mints themselves are fairly large, I guess to pack in all the caffeine, you need some bulk. The mints themselves taste very much like Altoids with a strong taste. I wouldn’t eat them for fun, but if I needed a lift, they’d be great.