Carlos Randolph

My favorite Recipe Manager for iOS

When I need to find a recipe I usually go to all recipes.com. I like the site because I can find things quickly and really rely on the comments/ratings that other people provide. For me it’s like Trip Advisor for recipes.

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Once I find one and want to use it, I bring up My Recipe Book on my phone or iPad to capture the recipe. It has an easy import feature where I can suck the recipe in from All Recipes. Once in I can categorize it, generate shopping lists, make notes, etc. Is it the most full featured App vs some of the others? Maybe not but it does the primary things I need easily and reliably for a very low price!

Relax, think, work…

I’m an IT Line Manager in my real life. Some managers manage very loosely, some manage very tightly and there are others that fall in between. Regardless of a manager’s style, there is one important trait that I think all managers should have; being calm under pressure.

Things go wrong. Nine times out of ten, how you handle the situation is what you will be judged on. You will be judged by those who report to you and those you report to. The people reporting to you need to have faith that you can guide them out of troubles. The people you report to need to have confidence that you can steer your ship when needed. Here are some signs that will tell you if you are doing this well:

Your employees are comfortable with bringing the issues up to you.
Your employees follow what you discuss and plan with them.
Your boss is not having to constantly step in and make decisions.
Your boss communicates through you and not around you.

When problems arise you should follow a process that you use to find your way out. You should follow the same process each time to establish a pattern/comfort level with your team and management. For me it is always the following:

Understand the problem – what is the real impact, what is really broke.
Before acting, decide if you really do need to act. Nothing is worse than making matters worse. I like the first rule of holes; when you are stuck in a hole – stop digging.
Establish a basic, bulleted list plan of what has to happen next. You don’t need to solve everything, just what will get you out of hot water.
Communicate, execute, communicate, execute…

While having troubles or problems is never a great thing. Nothing is more satisfying than solving problems successfully. Be thankful and acknowledge the hard work people do to assist. Yes, you are the captain but they are the ones putting the puck in the net.

eCigarettes and other items of DORK

I just walked over from my office building to the train station. While walking in the station I saw a lady in her 50’s walking and toking away one one of her eCigarette contraptions. There is a guy on my train whom I see everyday sitting there puffing away on his vapor stick. Let me cut to the chase of this entry:

YOU LOOK LIKE DORKS!

Seriously. Are you telling me that you can’t wait for an hour between cigarettes? You have to stand there looking like a fool because you have no control?? Wow.

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And while I’m at it, let me ask this. Do you walk around with that Bluetooth headset in your ear? DORK! I have one of these things that I use at my desk and when I leave my desk, I leave it there. I know, I shouldn’t be judgmental and all that but I am. It’s a shortcoming, oh well.

One month to the New Year!

I believe that New Years Eve is a great time of remorse and promise. It is the one time of the year where you can reflect on what you have done, what you hoped to do and what you will hope to do in the new year.

Most of my resolutions in the past have been inwardly focus. But now my children are at an age where day to day things I do are shaping how they behave and act. I spouted on Twitter yesterday that it would be a great idea to eliminate McDonald’s from our lives. Is it that McDonalds is bad? Well… yes. And if you spout off about a Salad I would rap my knuckles on your head.

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If I can eliminate “McDs” I think it starts to force/direct us to home. Home is good. Eating together is good. I think it’s something I want to start seeing more of. I want to start shaping my kids eating habits and I want them to learn from me on how to cook.

We’ll see. It’s a good idea for now but you know how these resolutions can turn…

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

When I cook or bake I usually pull recipes from one of three places:

Joy of Cooking
Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Julia)
Allrecipes.com

The books are my staple go to books. But I seem to find a lot of great choices from All Recipes. I think, like Trip Advisor, I appreciate the feedback and ratings from people. I look for recipes with 750+ ratings and high stars. I can’t really recall when one of these recipes have ever failed me. Between Julia’s pie crust recipe and the other two, I just whipped out 1 Flan, 2 Pumpkin Pies, 1 Apple Pie and and 1 Pecan Pie. They all look great and I can’t wait to dig into them later today. So if you are ever in a pinch, these are great sources.

Also I can’t forget Mr. Pepin. I follow a lot of his stuff to learn techniques….

Adverse uses of technology…

A neighborhood friend of mine posted an article link from Time on Facebook. The article is titled “The Secret Languages of Girls on Instagram”. You can find the article at:

http://time.com/3559340/instagram-tween-girls/

This gist of this article is that teen girls are using Instagram as a ranking mechanism. As girls post things the responses and the number of likes is used a status indicator. It is judge popularity and it can have an emotional impact on girls as they are developing.

I get that. But my first question whenever we start to point a finger at something is whether or not it has created the situation. If it didn’t create it, did it exasperate it? If it didn’t exasperate it, did it simply just allow it continue in a different fashion.

Instagram didn’t create this problem, that I know for sure. Where you sit in the cafeteria. Did you bring a lunch or was it a hot lunch? What clothes/labels are you wearing? Who you are talking to? Who are you not talking to? Whose locker did you stop at? We have always had social cues on our popularity and there has always been a mystic art to interpret it.

Did Instagram, Facebook, or other online apps exasperate it? It may feel that way but in the end I just think that it just changed what we or they look at. One thing that it does do is is allow the information to travel to more people than actual in life events. So something you were judged on by 10 people can now be judge by 100 people; that sounds bad but in the end you are still being judge.

I do believe these tools allowed this form of judging to continue.

So am I worried about this as much as being discussed in this article? No. My plan and how I raise my children is the same. When they do something that is “judging”, I correct them. When they talk to me about someone judging them, I explain why someone probably judged them and how it doesn’t really matter.

For example, my daughter and I worked on a art project this weekend. We were given carte blanche to decorate it in any manner. I sat down with my daughter and showed her how to draw some of it freehand on a digitizer tablet. I showed her how to find snippets of items on the web and fetch, resize, print and cut them out. Then we worked on actual drawing/coloring with art pencils. The art piece was very funny looking but the point is we had fun and we learned a lot.

Now zoom forward to this past Monday and when my daughter came home she was upset. A girl in her class was a bit rude and laughed at her work. My daughter felt her artwork was now “funny” looking and she was embarrassed. I had to sit there and explain to her why the image was “different” looking and to understand that our goals were to learn and have fun. I then pointed out that this girl who judged her was simply ignorant.

Artwork in class or a picture on Instagram. Same problem, different medium.

Brittany Maynard and the right to choose death with dignity..

Yesterday Brittany Maynard chose to take her life as she faced a terminal form of brain cancer. Lot’s of controversy regarding this. She moved to Oregon because the state supports a person being able to take their own life in these situations. The state supports self-assisted suicide.

My wife, rest her soul, fought through three years of an aggressive form of breast cancer that spread to her brain, lungs, spine and bone. The brain caused very painful moments. The lungs caused problems with spastic coughs. The spine cause walking/balance issues and even affected her ability to swallow. She fought every day until the end.

The question on my mind was why did these two strong women decide to end their lives in such different ways. To be blunt, one chose to fight and the other chose not to. If I had to guess, and these are only guesses, it is because of the following:

Age: Brittany was 29 and Margie was 40. There is a bit of wisdom difference between the two.
Children: Margie had two children, one being 3 weeks old when she was first diagnosed. Brittany didn’t have children.
Religion: I’m not sure of where Brittany’s faith aligned to. Margie was Catholic.

I’ve said this before, I support that Brittany had the right to choose but I don’t support the choice that she made. My vantage point is 10+ years older than hers and with two small children. And when the vantage point is that different I don’t think I can make sense of her choice. But I do want to try and make sense of the differences and how they impact our choices.

Their views about the fight for cancer seemed to be different. Brittany’s view was this is going to kill me so I want to control it before it gets bad. Margie’s view was to do everything she could to fight it, she knew that eventually she was going to pass but that didn’t matter. She was going to fight it and face all that it threw at her so she could have every last moment with her kids. She put the kids and others first and not herself. <— That is what troubles me with all of this. When you boil all of this down and strip away all of the noise, you get to one simple statement: One lady chose to fight and one lady chose not to.

All of this reverence for Brittany and “her courage to choose”. Bless Brittany, I won’t speak ill of her as she has passed. But revere the ladies who chose and choose to fight. The strong men and women who stand up, look a horrible disease/illness in the face and choose to fight it at all costs. Not because they are going to win, but because the fight is worth fighting. My wife was fighter and she gave every ounce of energy and she is the bravest woman I have ever known.

Halloween Makeup

I’m in my early 40’s and my first memories of Halloween was picking out a costume. The costume consisted of that really stinky plastic mask and the plastic suit. Simple. Done… But now you can get so elaborate for kids and adult costumes. My daughter, who is seven, decided to pick a “Corpse Bride” costume. Which is basically a thin spooky gown, some dead roses and most of the work is in the face makeup. I start picking up the pace paint stuff but then realize there is no way I’m going to make this look like what is on the package.

Last year I remembered that the salon I go to has one of ladies taking appointments for Halloween makeup sessions. I kind of giggled to myself wondering who would do/pay for that. But then again I thought, if I was going to a cool party where I wanted a really good look that it would make sense. Well anyway, it popped in my head and I figured my daughter would look great with that and she could have her first trip to a salon.

Well here is the result and it was great! She didn’t go nuts on on an overly elaborate design. She kept it simple and did a great job with the proper shading. Zoom forward to 4 hours later after my daughter was out trick or treating and running around, none of it was smudged or smeared. She looked as great when she got home as she did when she left the salon. So is it worth doing? I think so and we will probably do it again if the costume calls for it.

Happy Halloween!!

It’s Halloween and even though it’s just 8am, it’s already crazy at our house. Last night my daughter, who is all of seven, was looking online for stencils for me to carve her pumpkin. She picked this one out call it the funny man. She has no idea who this is but I laughed out loud. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

eBay to the Blog

I’m an avid eBayer and have been on there since 1997. I’ve now have a constant trickle of items for sale and was wondering if I could list a feed of my items on WordPress. I found a common plugin but it wanted an RSS feed from eBay. And of course they have taken that away and made it inconvenient to do. But after searching I found a simple solution:

Go to eBay and search for what you want
Sort it into the order you want (i.e Newest, Least Expensive, etc)
Copy the URL
Append “&_rss=1” to the end of the URL
Voila!

So at the top of this blog you will see a link to my listing page called “eBay”. Check it out!