red beet factory inc.

I came back from Paris, France recently and had a fantastic time! The food, culture, language, beauty and architecture all around is great and I found myself eating baguettes with fois gras, mixed charcuterie and chamombert cheese just about every day in the various cafes found everywhere in the city. I also discovered some interesting drink new combinations, which inspired me to make up a new drink this evening.

I’ll call it Escape Port, because it’s red and looks (but doesn’t taste) like port. Ingredients:

1 oz tequila – (try Aha Toro sipping tequila, from Mexico)
1 oz Chambord – (chambord black raspberry liqueur, from France)
splash of your favourite red wine (optional)

Serve in a normal port glass.

What’s interesting to me is that even without the red wine, the drink resembles a port in its colour and is nice to sip.

The ingredients are an interesting mix, I know. I was wondering what I was going to do with that Cambord liqueur I bought… there you go.

Kelly

Ah the woes of getting older. My friend Bill sent this to me and I found it very funny!

I figure a screenplay about harvesting Saturn’s rings it could make for a good sci-fi movie taken place in the near future. Parhaps even inspired by Farscape [IMDb], with futuristic spaceships and some interplanetary rovers that NASA controls from the Earth, like it did with Spirit and Opportunity, and it plans to do now with Curiosity, the new Mars Science Laboratory [video link].

The Mars Rover Curiosity is on it’s way to Mars right now, and it looks to be significantly larger than the two previous Mars Rovers that explored the planet.

I’ve been searching for a modern ergonomic keyboard that is split and adjustable, with wireless Bluetooth and ideally, made out of aluminum with Apple-style illuminated keys. I am getting carpal tunnel syndrome in my hands, causing pain which is getting progressively worse over the years. I wish there were more good, ergonomic and Apple-compabitble keyboards on the market.

Let’s go retro for a minute. I did a search for “Used Apple Adjustable Keyboard with USB” on Google and found exactly none for sale, even though such a keyboard does indeed exist. Years ago, back in 1993 when it was first sold, the keyboard had an ADP port interface (whatever that is) and could work with a ADP-to-USB adapter, which was also sold for a short time before the hardware was discontinued. Newer Macs didn’t offer this keyboard any longer, and it seems they are now also difficult to find, likely due to their age. The keyboard had rave reviews by some, and I’d sure like to try one out. I love retro keyboards, and none more than the original Amiga 1000 keyboard with an RJ-11 (telephone style) connector). This Apple one must be a relatively rare keyboard, too, which makes me want it all that much more.

For a fleeting moment I wondered if I would have to buy the antique Apple computer that was sold attached to this keyboard just to get ahold of one, in an effort to reduce the carpel tunnel effect in my hands. Silly, I know. And then there is the ADP-to-USB adapter, what are the odds I could find one used, like on eBay? Well, I searched and found one. But I couldn’t find the Apple adjustable keyboard to pair with it… none are for sales. More searching and time wasted revealed some additional info. As it turns out, it was not a very reliable keyboard and was prone to breakage – likely one of the reasons it was discontinued.

So, I just bought a Maxim keyboard instead. It looks modern enough, has function keys (though I may need to label them), and it is split exactly how I need it to keep my wrists straight to save my hands from surgery, with a little luck. I also has wrist rests which look practical for carpel tunnel sufferers. Below is an image of it found and stored on the company’s website:

BTW, touch screens suck for typing today. Keyboards are here to stay. Fortunately, voice recognition is advancing rapidly (Siri), and that could also provide some relief.

Maybe I should try out Siri too! I could use a new phone. :)

Wish me luck with this new keyboard, and hopefully less pain…

I’m having problems using iTunes streaming services because it’s too slow, and I’m sure I’m not the only one finding this. It’s the limitation of a cloud-based service: no bandwidth, and it’s not going to work for you. But first, some background info.

I’m an avid fan of the cloud – as consumers we have a wide range of options available to us. For those of us who use iTunes for accessing media like music, movies and movie rentals, we are tied to Apple in some financial way. Generally speaking, I like my Apple experience so far. I was a long-time Windows user, and an Amiga and VIC-20 user long before that, so I’ve used various operating systems and computers for some time now. It’s pretty clear to me why Apple has leap-frogged many other companies to become the most valuable company (as calculated by market capitalization) in the world. Their iTunes and iPod products have been a real hit, but so has the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, and the iTunes Store with its set of applications and millions of developers. Steve Jobs was truly a visionary and it was a sad day when he succumbed to cancer at the young age of 56. Big company growing fast, it’s all fine and dandy right?

My problem with Apple at the moment is their complete and utter lack of sufficient network bandwidth for delivering its iTunes services here in Canada.

My wife and I have rented quite a few movies through iTunes, but our experience has continually degraded over the past few months to the point of frustration. Apple’s streaming speeds keep slowing down to the point of being unusable. Just the other night we rented the latest X-Men movieon our Apple TV for $6. However, it did not play. It did now download fast enough for us to watch it that evening – over even early the next day, for that matter. I have even upgraded my cable internet service to the fastest coaxial speed in North America (100 Mb downstream), every other major website jumped up in speed and yet Apple keeps getting slower. The estimated download time on my fast 100 Mb Shaw connection was approximately 24 hours for a file that was 900 Mb. Unacceptable. I tested the speed and quality of my connection just to make sure it wasn’t an issue on my end, and I was getting fast speeds everywhere else. Why was Apple’s iTunes so slow?

I was getting only 30 kb/sec or less among the three streams of downloads I was downloading concurrently. When I download files from other sites across the Internet, I can often get 5000 kb/sec or more.

Apple, please fix your bandwidth issue. You’re losing customers like me – because I won’t rent a movie that I have to wait a full day just to receive it. Clearly, heavy usage by Apple customer in the evenings is bringing Apple’s content delivery network to its knees. The next day, in the early morning I was able to finally download the rest of my purchases at well over 300 kb/sec with three concurrent downloads at a time – so almost 1Mb/sec. While that’s still not an impressive speed, it’s pretty much the minimum I’d expect from a $300+ Billion dollar company’s services.

Apple is making money hand-over-fist and yet my streaming iTunes experience is not a good one. I hope they see better days soon, because my wife and I won’t be renting any more movies from apple until they make them available for “instant watch” again.

I realize this is more of a compugripe than anything, but anyway… thanks for listening. If you have a similar problem please write a comment below and let me know.

Kelly