August 18th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Ryan
I was going to write this whole big post about how I never liked or understood Twitter and how I only checked it out because I felt it was part of my responsibility as a web developer to keep on top of the trends of what is currently popular on the Internet and blah blah blah…
I won’t bore you with any of that. The short version is, I didn’t understand it then but now I’m a fan, simply because a lot of the time I don’t have enough to say to fill up a whole blog post anyway. Since a Twitter post is limited to 140 characters, it forces everyone to just get to the point and I like that. I really like that. I added my Twitter feed to this site a while ago for those of you that don’t have a Twitter account. For those of you that do, follow me here: http://twitter.com/rminnick
Posted in: Technology
Tags: Twitter
July 30th, 2009 / 2 Comments » / by Ryan
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, blogging is hard (for me anyway). I’ve read a lot of articles about blogging and how hard it is to make a living as a blogger and all the tips and tricks and guidelines to make it work. I don’t worry about it too much because honestly I didn’t ever hope that I’d be able to quit my day job because of this blog.
I follow a lot of different blogs, and I was recently noticing that one blog in particular – not going to name names – has not posted a single thing this whole year (which is particularly annoying because there is no RSS feed so I have to manually go check the site for new posts). Looking a little further I saw that there were only 3 posts in 2008, 5 in 2007, 4 in 2006, 8 in 2005 and 18 in 2004. In 2003 there were 34 posts, which is a more “acceptable” level of posts by blogging standards, but even that many is less than 1 per week and that was over 5 years ago! The blog in question is still considered to be pretty popular and even scored the owner a book deal and corresponding book tour. So how is it that a blog with such a shoddy track record became so popular? My guess is that it’s just plain dumb luck. Someone in the right place at the right time by pure coincidence. I was watching an interview with a software developer recently where attributing his success he says he “stumbled into a big steaming pile of gold”. I think that sums it up nicely.
I know there are bloggers out there that really work at what they do, and there are also those who really work at it AND have a bit of luck to kick them up the ranks. Then there’s me, who doesn’t really do either of those. But I’ve got the making a few sporadic posts per year part down, so I’m ready for the dumb luck and a book deal part. Who am I kidding, I don’t have enough to say to fill up a book. At least there’s no pressure on me to blog more often.
Posted in: Thoughts
July 7th, 2009 / 2 Comments » / by Ryan
On my wife’s old blog (which is no longer active) there was a recipe for healthy cookie bars. We tweaked it a little bit to make it even healthier and I wanted to write it down here because they are too good to forget.
Combine:
3/4 cup canola oil (I suppose you could use olive oil, but I don’t know how the taste would change)
1 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
2 tsp vanilla
Sift in and blend:
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
Stir in:
1 cups quick oats
1/2 cup chocolate chips (more or less, depending on preference)
Press into 9×13 glass pan, sprayed with olive oil (or other nonfat cooking spray). Bake at 350 for 14 minutes. Set glass pan on cooling rack to let cool.
EDIT: Ok, so I realize that a lot of people are probably put off by the fact that “healthy” and “cookie” are in the same sentence. I’ll post a picture the next time I make these to help convince you that these are GOOD. Don’t write them off just because it says they are “healthy”.
Posted in: Random
Tags: Food