Slacker!

I have been a TOTAL slacker! 

Ok, maybe not.  I did read 121 books and start on Harry Potter in Turkish (which I do not speak or read – yet!) I also made my first pair of gloves and created a new candy recipe.

Starting January I am getting back on track with 2 major recipe projects:

The Retro Recipe project & 52 Weeks, 52 soups Project

I have a recipe hoard from my two grandmothers that I am trying to organize.  Thankfully one of them didn't actually cook so there is less then 300 recipe cards to go through (and a few seem to be duplicates.)  I am thinking to combine recipes with genealogy (which my mother does) for X-mas gifts.  I even have a recipe from my great-grandfather who was a well-known ENT doctor in Minneapolis.  His recipe starts out with take 18# grapes, stems removed (no rotten ones!)  . . .

Of course to me the most important one is Vernie’s Rice Pudding.  If I have it correct she was my great-grandmothers sister’s daughter and was born 03/08/1889 in Center City, Minnesota.    I always request this for the holidays and family get togethers.

I had already started on the hoard of my other grandmother (My Grandmother's Blue Books) so I will continue with that.

52 Weeks, 52 soups

The hubby & I are planning to try one new soup recipe a week this year.  They are great for lunches.  We have a pressure canner so we can make a big batch and can it.  He made some roasted carrot & tomato soup that was really good this month.

Media Monday - Perspective

Perspective

The proper or accurate point of view or the ability to see it.

We have an ugly truck, a really ugly rusty white truck.  It sits in the driveway collecting dirt and leaves most of the time.  But if you look at it the right way it can be very picturesque – it all depends on your perspective.

So take your camera out and look at things differently then you do every day.

Foodie Friday - Cocoa-peanut logs

Cocoa Krispies was introduced in the United States in 1958.  It is a chocolate flavored version of Rice Krispies. 

Rice Krispies (also known as Rice Bubbles in New Zealand and Australia) is a breakfast cereal created by Clayton Rindlisbacher for Kelloggs and was introduced in 1928.  It is created by making a paste of rice and sugar which is then formed into rice shapes (called berries) and then cooked, dried and toasted.  The rice berries expand and form a hollow rice shape with very thin walls that are crunchy and crispy.  They are famous for their ‘snap, crackle and pop’ sound when milk is poured on them.

The Kellogg company was started by two brothers, Will Keith (W.K.) Kellogg and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in Battle Creek MI.  They entered the cereal business in 1906 with Kelloggs Corn Flakes.  The company believed that everyone, not just those on special diets, could be interested in wholesome cereal foods.  They continually improved their product line and packaging techniques to meet the changing needs of consumers.

The introduction of pasteurized milk greatly helped to expand the appeal of breakfast cereals.

The depression brought hard times to many people.  WK Kellogg responded by doubling his advertising spending and reduced the hours of the three plant shift to create a fourth shift enabling more people to work.  Mr Kellogg declared – “I’ll invest my money in people.”

Malitta Jensen and Mildred Day, were the inventors of Rice Krispy Treats the most well known recipe or ‘treat’ using Rice Krispies.  They invented the recipe as a Campfire Girls fundraiser.

But so far I have found two recipes that do not use marshmallows.

According to Wikipedeia Ogg the Caveman was the mascot for Cocoa Krispies from 1968 to 1971, so we can narrow down the age of this clipping to that time period.  There is a copyright date of 1964 on the bottom of the clipping so we will have to assume that that is the date that the recipe was originally published.

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On a personal note –

Joel Rosenberg, 1954-2011

We were very saddened to find out that our friend, Joel, passed away yesterday.

He will be missed very much, but will live on in his family and through his many books starting with his first book -

Joel made us laugh, and was always up for a good argument.  He was devoted to freedom and was a very active gun rights activist.  If more people were like Joel that world would be a much better place.

Thursday In the Life - Volunteer!

Volunteer – meet new people, build stronger communities.

Is life just about going to work and then going home and sitting in front of the TV?  With the economy being what it is – not good – there is a lot of negative talk every where.  People want to blame someone, something, but don’t seem to want to do anything to change it.

So why not do something positive and volunteer? I have yet to find an organization that says that they have too many volunteers.  The MN Literacy Council has pre-service training for ESL tutors twice a month, I was told that they average about 30 students for each class, and they still wish that they had more volunteers.

Not sure what you could volunteer for?  Check out volunteer opportunities on the internet.   

I looked at http://www.volunteermatch.org/ and found 1716 volunteer opportunities within a 20 mile radius of Minneapolis.  They range from giving manicures to senior residents, letter writing , bingo assistants, Wii gaming experts, sewers to help mend clothes, it seems whatever your skills there is something that you can help with.

It is even more important now when services are being cut due to lack of funding that people get out and get more involved in their communities.  If you have children get them involved too. 

My daughter volunteered at the MN Historical Society* when she was in high school.  She did activities for small children, cataloging & organizing artifacts and other projects. They had a family weekend where we sorted documents from WWI. By volunteering she was able to do go to the exhibits and learn how important volunteers are to organizations like this and got an idea of some of the things that go on behind the scenes in a museum.

VOLUNTEER, have fun, share your skills.
*The Minnesota Historical Society is a non-profit educational and cultural institution created by the Territorial Legislature in 1849 as one of its first acts, even before statehood. Its essence is to illuminate the past as a way to shed light on the future. The Society collects, preserves and tells the story of Minnesota’s past through museum exhibits, libraries and collections, historic sites, educational programs and book publishing. 

The Minnesota Historical Society preserves collections that tell the story of Minnesota through the ages. Some artifacts are thousands of years old. Many items predate the history of the state itself. Included are:

• 176,712 Books
• 70,369 Periodicals
• 166,700 Pamphlets
• 353,178 Photographs
• 1,437 Sound Recordings
• 1,114 Films and Videos
• 19,277 Maps and 2,027 Atlases
• 6,072 Art Works
• 1,783 Oral History Interviews
• 4,139 Newspaper Titles; Newspapers are on 69,484 Microfilm Reels
• 36,538 cubic feet of Manuscripts, 5,922 Microfilm Reels
• 54,743 cubic feet of State Archives, 11,853 Microfilm Reels
• 232,456 Historical Objects
• 1,152,504 Archeological Artifacts

Since 2001, the Society's budget has been reduced by about $5 million per year, or approximately 18%. (In FY 2003, the state appropriation for MHS was $27,395,000. In FY 2005, that appropriation was $22,280,000.)

In 2010 more than 2,300 volunteers contributed 48,335 hours in 32 programs with 129 staff coordinating volunteers.  For the first time, the value of volunteer contributions exceeded $1 million, equivalent to 23 full-time employees. This value is calculated using data developed by the Independent Sector

If you are in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and have never visited the MN Historical Society I urge you to check it out.  It might be more interesting then you think!  Really!  I am not a big museum goer and I enjoyed it.  I even got to see Prince's purple coat!

Travel Tuesday - Scandia MN

I have been a bit busy lately; June is very busy in our household as we prepare for CONvergence.  We say that we are going to be better prepared next year, but you know how that works!  So here are some pictures of Scandia, MN.

Scandia is believed to be the first Swedish immigrant settlement in the State of Minnesota.  It even has Dalecarlian horse (or in Swedish: Dalahäst) statues.  My great-grandmother, my fathers mother's mother, Anna Ericson was born in Scandia. I think that there are also relatives from my grandfathers side too, but I am kind of fuzzy on that.

Below is a picture of what I beleive was my great-great Grandparents house on my fathers, mothers side.  Their last name was Peterson.

It would have been interesting to know the story of how she left Scandia to become an opera singer . . .and a woman who preferred to have her pedicure before she got out of bed.

Media Monday - 2011 Kral awards & Tarkan's new video

Last week Kral TV had their 17^th annual music awards in Istanbul.  I am happy to say that my current favorite group Gripin won the award for best group while Tarkan and his last album Adımı Kalbine Yaz won the most awards:

• best album (Adımı Kalbine Yaz)
• best video (Öp)
• best lyrics- Aysel Gürel (Sevdanın Son Vuruşu)
• best composition-Tarkan(Sevdanın Son Vuruşu)
• best arrangement- Ozan Çolakoğlu (Sevdanın Son Vuruşu)
• best song (Sevdanın Son Vuruşu)

Tarkan also won best male artist and the artist played the most on the radio.  It is interesting to note that the Turkish word for ‘played’ (çalınan) also means ‘stolen’.

Berkay won for the best break through artist; hopefully iTunes will have some of his music available soon.

You can check out the songs from Tarkan’s album at – www.tarkan.com

Last week also saw a video for the title song from Adımı Kalbine Yaz (Write My Name on Your Heart) on Tarkan’s official website.  It is similar to the video for Öp in that it shows Tarkan facing the camera while walking and singing, but it also incorporates concert footage and still photos.  What I like about it is how it shows the fans too, girls with Tarkan’s name written on body parts, girls singing and dancing along with the music and gives you a feel of what his concerts are like.  There is a good shot in the beginning showing all the cell phones and cameras out during the concert.

Media Monday - iTunes Genius and Pandora Work

How Do Programs like iTunes Genius and Pandora Work?

My music tastes aren’t really main stream and usually I find the talk and commercials on the radio annoying. So the question is - how to find new music?  Do I spend hours listening to short pieces of songs on iTunes?  Do I surf the web and check out the top 100 hits?  Do I try out Pandora? Where they don’t even have a lot of my favorite artists? How does iTunes Genius and Pandora work?  Can I figure out a way to make them work better for me?

So say you use iTunes.  It looks at what songs you have and how often you play them, and it compares them to the collections of other iTunes users. Statistics are generated for each song. Apple engineer Erik Goldman says "These statistics are computed globally at regular intervals and stored in a cache." And then they apply fancy algorithms.

But it is how they define the factor that gives more weight to the things that really matters.  The usual way to do this is with tf-idf or term frequency–inverse document frequency.

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Wikipedia says –

 “the tf–idf weight (term frequency–inverse document frequency) is a weight often used in information retrieval and text mining. This weight is a statistical measure used to evaluate how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus. The importance increases proportionally to the number of times a word appears in the document but is offset by the frequency of the word in the corpus. Variations of the tf–idf weighting scheme are often used by search engines as a central tool in scoring and ranking a document's relevance given a user query. Tf-idf can be successfully used for stop-words filtering in various subject fields including text summarization and classification.”

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Ok, tf-idf is easy for documents that are full of words, but music is different right?  You don’t like a song because it uses the word ‘cloud’ or something do you? No it’s the sound of the music, the rhythm, the intruments and other factors. Apple, being Apple isn’t really forthcoming on how they determine these factors. Pandora is more open about how they pick songs.

Pandora has the Music Genome Project which is an effort to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level".   Pandora uses almost 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.  Songs listed on Pandora are represented by a vector (a list of attributes) containing approximately 400 "genes". 

The genes correspond to musical characteristics.  The songs are analyzed by musicians who follow in-house standards and assign the musical characteristics.  It takes 20-30 minutes to anyalyze each song.

According to a quick spreadsheet that I made using some information from Pandora the songs that I like are likely to have: vocal-centric aesthetic, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, major key tonality, mild rhythmic syncopation, and vocal harmony.  Of course they don’t have Turkish music like Tarkan or Gripin.  It seems that Tarkan’s Come Closer album features modern r & b styling, melodic songwriting, call and answer vocal harmony (Antiphony), and electronica influences. Unfortunately I could not find a list of attributes for my favorite song on the album – If You Only Knew. What can I say, it’s a waltz; I am hopelessly romantic. 

The problem that I have with iTunes Genius is if I use is to make a playlist say based on Gripin’s song Cok Kisa (Acoustic Version) I get a playlist of 100 songs, and the only Turkish music is by Gripin.  This is actually great, I now know that they are similar to some of the older U2 music, Sting, Snow Patrol and others that I have.  I can use this information to create a station on Pandora which will then play songs that I haven’t heard before.  Of course this doesn’t help me find new Turkish music, which would be really nice, but maybe sometime in the future I will be able to.

When I base a Genius playlist on any song by Tarkan the ONLY music I get is by Turkish artists, or I am told that there are not enough related songs to create a playlist.  Urgh.  I even get only Turkish artists when I am able to create a playlist using one of his English songs! (BTW - Start The Fire is the only song on the English album that Genius can create a playlist for.)

I really wanted to find more artists like Tarkan. (Yes, I know there can be only one. . . )  But I can’t create a station on Pandora to look for music similar to Tarkan’s music because I don’t know what artists are similar. I will have to do more looking to see what else I can try.  I wonder if you can create a station on Pandora based on attributes . . . ?