American BBQ: Fire and Ice Salad

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Fire and Ice Tomatoes
(from S. Living 1987)

6 tomatoes, peeled and quartered
1 onion, sliced
1 green pepper
1 cucumber
¾ c cider vinegar
¼ c water
1 T plus 2 t. sugar
1 ½ t celery salt
1 ½ t. mustard seed
½ t. salt
½ t red pepper
1/8 t. pepper

Combine vegetables and set aside. Add the remaining ingredients in a saucepan and boil for one minute. Pour mixture over vegetables, cover and chill at least 8 hours. Serve with a slotted spoon. Yield: 10 servings.
Changes: added zucchini and yellow squash, sugar, vinegar and red pepper (ended up a little too much) to taste, celery seed instead of salt and fresh black pepper liberally.

American BBQ:

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Cobbler

2 ½ c fresh berries with 1 c sugar, let sit
½ c butter melted and let cool a bit

Mix together:
1 c flour
2 t. baking powder
½ t. salt

Add 1 c. milk, add butter and berries and mix gently. Bake at 375 for 45-55 minutes. I doubled this for the cooking club and it seemed to be doughier than usual. Used at least 8 c. of berries too. ?

SPAM

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Recently there was a post to an email list I’m on for Chatham county that I responded to, and I thought I’d include it here too:

> Hey all y’all savvy folk.
> I have been getting hit by unwanted, unsolicited, and
> apparently, untraceable emails from accounts that appear to
> be randomly generated.

Multiple layers of defense are needed. I run my own server so I have an advantage over using an ISP or free mail account in that I can tweak things in many ways, but I’ll run through my list anyway and say what ISPs/free mail folks are likely also doing. If you don’t have your own server, look at the last item to get the most bang for your buck. For those that run your own servers, I’ll include my postfix set up for spam at the bottom.

The latest big trick is sending emails with just 1 image, but altering the size, color, etc, so that it is not easy to detect. See #9 below for one way to handle these and other spam.

1. On the server, set up the mail system to reject mail from bad from/reply to addresses, ill-formed domains, etc. Most mail providers also do this.

2. Subscribe to free “real time blacklist” services. These list IP’s known to be sending spam, and the server rejects mail from those IP’s right way. Most mail providers do something like this.

3. On the server, set up greylisting. These means you reject all incoming mail the 1st time you see the sender. Real mail systems will attempt to re-send within a minute or two, and once that happens, the sender is validated. This catches a huge amount of current spam since much of it comes from compromised hosts (bot nets) that just send mail but never listen for incoming messages (such as rejects). Some mail providers do this.

4. On the server, set up a spam analyzing program that uses baseyan filters, such as spam assassin. Have it put headers in the mail before it puts them in the inbox that identify it as spam. Many mail providers do this, and they take the additional step of putting it in a spam folder. But then take the next step of having your mail client, which you said was thunderbird, “listen to spam headers from your server.” This is under tools -> junk mail controls -> trust mail from spam assassin.

5. As a final trick on the server side, I run postfix, which lets me use addresses like “sean+business@” That way whenever I sign up for something or order something from “business” I use that address. If I ever get spam to that address, I know which business gave out my email, and I can stop doing busines with them.

—- From here on you can do things like this on your mail client, this is specific to thunderbird since that is what I use for personal email, but I have similar items in place for outlook at work. —-

6. Set up thunderbird’s adaptive junk mail detection. Tools -> junk mail controls -> adaptive filter. And then train it! Every time a junk mail shows up in your inbox, tag it as junk.

7. I also like to have thunderbird just delete things when i mark them as junk. tools -> junk mail controls -> handling -> when I manually mark messages as junk -> delete them.

8. For mail that thunderbird tags as junk, I have it place it in the junk mail folder and automatically delete it after 3 days. Tools -> junk mail controls -> handling -> move incoming messages determined to be junk -> other -> junk mail -> delete after 3 days.

9. Configure your mail client to not display html emails, but to let you have it show html once you open the email only if you want to. And then tell it not to load images unless you want to.

—- postfix settings —-

For anyone that runs your own server and postfix, here are my settings. Some of these can just be turned on with no set up, while some do need other apps to be installed and running.

smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
permit_mynetworks,
check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/db/pop-smtp,
check_recipient_access hash:/etc/postfix/db/access,
reject_unauth_destination
reject_non_fqdn_hostname,
reject_non_fqdn_sender,
reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
reject_unauth_destination,
reject_unauth_pipelining,
reject_invalid_hostname
reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org,
reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org,
reject_rbl_client cbl.abuseat.org,
reject_rbl_client dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net,
reject_rbl_client opm.blitzed.org,
reject_rbl_client list.dsbl.org,
reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net,
reject_rbl_client sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:xxxxx

HuckaBuck Mountain Bike Race

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huckabuck.gif

This was my 1st race in way tooo long… I knew I missed racing — racing of any kind — but I didn’t know how much until I did this! It was a 12 mile course, 2 loops of 6 miles, and relatively flat for this area. It had been a couple years since I rode these trails so it was all new to me.

I signed up for Begginer Men, and ended up in 22nd out of about 40. But if you look at the times, it was less than 5 minutes slower than the winner. Overall not that bad considering almost all of my biking has been on paved roads or fire roads as I’ve worked on re-habing my knee post surgery. In fact, the knee did great — no discomfort the entire race, and here it is the next day and it is still fine. I was actually worse off cardiovasculalry, and even more than that, the hands, wrists, and forearms were dead after the 1st lap. I guess the lack of single track was really showing there.

Looking at the splits, I was just about even at 36 minutes per loop. The 1st 10 minutes or so was pretty slow, as I started near the rear of the pack as I wasn’t sure how I would do and I’ve never done a mass start for a mountain bike race where there was only 100 feet to the single track. So I had to work my way up as I figured out who was slow, and as others crashed. Then after that I was pretty much able to ride my own pace for the next 60 minutes, though whenever I heard someone trying to catch up, I was motivated to push it. I think I was passed only three times total, and probably passed about 20 or 25 riders.

So, overall I am happy. The knee handled it very well, and now I know I can at least bike at a decent clip. I have a ways to go on running before I can do even a short AR, though hiking is going really well so for a long AR, where there’s more hiking than running, I may be ok.

Now I need to find the next race to put on my calendar so I continue to train! 🙂

rss2email

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rss2email is a handy little program that I started using for all of my RSS/Atom feeds. I had been using Thunderbird, but it was a pain (not possible!) to keep feeds sync’d across different computers. I’m so used to imap for mail, which keeps everything sync’d, that feeds were a real problem.

rss2email is very simple to install and set up. It basically polls the feed site for new articles, and emails them to you if there are new ones. I ran rss2email on my old FreeBSD box for a few weeks, and then moved it to my new Debian box. Debian has a package so it is really easy, though I found that when I need to updated one of the components, I had to do that manually.

Basically all you need to do is “r2e add [email]>” where feed is the URL to the RSS or Atom feed, and email is option. I use email with something like “sean+RSS.” so that I get automatic filtering into imap folders… The “+” is a feature of postfix that is very nice. Then you need to use “r2e run,” to scan for new posts. I have this running in a cron job every 15 or 30 minutes.

Anyway, now all my RSS feeds go to my email, so no matter what computer I’m using, I’m in sync.

The only real drawback is that some feeds only give a link to the post. Thunderbird feed reader was smart enough to just load it in to the client window. But since the link is now in an email, thunderbird does not load the link. Not a big deal, and in someways this is more efficient as I don’t open every article.

/Sean

MOG and last.fm

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I’ve been playing with MOG and last.fm a little bit the last few days. For some reason, I’ve always been drawn to my listening habits as tracked by iTunes, so both of these seem interesting as they offer a way to track and “publish” that information.

Here is my MOG page.

Here is my last.fm page.

Both pages don’t have a whole lot of info yet, since I’ve only been using the services a copule of days. You can also click on last.fm under “pages” in the upper right to see local versions of my charts (more on this below).

Both are similar in that you download an application that then monitors and uploads information about what you are listening to to a web page you publish. MOG’s download is more of an agent, that runs in the background. last.fm is a plugin, at least for iTunes.

I thought they might upload historical data, but so far it only seems like data from the time you install the app going forward is uploaded.

MOG seems to be more of a social networking music site like myspace, where as last.fm is a bit more like pandora in that it helps you find music you may like based on what you listen to, and has a player. (MOG claims other MOG users will help you find music, not a “computer.”)

So far, I like last.fm a bit more. Being able to have charts on my personal home page is kind of cool. I’ve actually put them in my blogs pages section. I’ll keep playing with each for the next few days before I can definitively say which I’ll probably continue to use.

Adventure Racing

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A friend of mine posted this recently:

click here

And it reminded me of an old email I saw on the same subject that I saved because it was so well written. I figure posting it here is better than keeping it in my email with the chance of it never seeing the light of day.

It has now been 2 years and 1 month since I did my last big Adventure Race — the PHEAR race up in WV. Since then it has been a lot of work on my bum knee. I’m riding well these days — up to an hour with no ill side effects. Running is still tougher, but I did run 23 minutes just yesterday and i don’t feel any tendernesss at all. So hopefully things are coming together. Even if running never comes back to the level I need it to be to race (fast!) again, I’d be happy hiking, mountain biking, and paddling. But I do miss racing a ton!

Anyway, on to the article….


Why I do Adventure Racing:

By Bob Blundell-Team Pushin’ Up Daisies

It was one recent Monday afternoon at the gym and I was bent over studying the recent demise of my feet. I prodded several blisters that I had popped the previous day and marveled at the blackened toe nails that I sport pretty much year round; a byproduct of my chosen sport. While I’m performing this inspection, some guy next to me gags (maybe a little exaggeration) and says something like…”My God..what happened to your feet?

I smiled and responded cheerfully….” Did an adventure race over the weekend”

He nodded and started to say something.

“Adventure racing,” I explained. “You know like the Eco Challenge.”

He shrugged and looked again at my toes.

I started to explain that I’d just spent 32 hours at a race in Northern Georgia in sub-freezing weather. At one point I had spent 14 painful hours with my rear end on the seat of a mountain bike, pushing and sliding through snow in weather that never got above 30. I considered adding that blisters generally came with the territory in most cases, but these here were more likely the affects of trekking through snow for 16 more hours. By this time I noticed that he had opted to move a little further down the bench away from me and my feet.

I have to admit this wasn’t the first look of confusion, dismay, or incident where someone, upon inquiring about the sport I love, treated me more like a Leper than an endurance athlete. Often when I first meet people and tell them that I’m an adventure racer, they smile and nod their heads like they know what I’m talking about.

Sometimes they say things like “oh. Yeah…I’ve heard about those things.” or ” isn’t that kinda like a triathlon?” or maybe they don’t say anything at all and just look at me with a mild curiosity. That ‘s typically when that mild curiosity turns to total apathy.

As I think about this now it occurs to me that their lack of understanding probably stems more from my own inability to articulate and describe the sport I love, than some ineptness on their part. So now I sit and ponder…really think about what Adventure Racing is about.

Adventure racing is being around a bunch of people who are fit and strong and a little twisted. These people tend to like it when their knees bleed and they have mud on their legs, on their glasses, in their teeth, and on their bike. If after a race, they aren’t bent or broken, mangled, sprained or bloodied, they feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth. They’d rather have their butts on the seat of a mountain bike climbing some torturous hill from hell, than in a first class seat on some jet going somewhere (unless of course they’re flying to their next adventure race). These people feel like slugs when they only get an hour workout in a day and they believe muscle cramps are just God’s way to telling them they are still alive!

They’re generally a resourceful lot that can speak intelligently about many obscure topics. This may include:

+ the best and worst flavors of gu’s
+116 different uses for duct tape
+ the countless benefits of carrying Vaseline with you during a race
+ How long AA batteries in a head lamp will last in 30 degree weather

They often speak in a language foreign to most normal people. Words and phrases like TAs, and Sevvies, hard tails and soft tails, camelbaks, and azimuths are common in their conversations. They also possess skills unknown to most like:

+ knowing how to use a chain breaker at night
+ Knowing how to turn an old fishing rod and surgical tubing into a bike tow
assembly
+ Knowing how to duct tape a flashlight on top of a bike helmet

Unlike many people they gain pleasure from some of the simpler things in life. Things like:

+ That wonderful first drink of cold water after a long trekking leg
+ The sheer ecstasy of finding a wadded-up peanut butter sandwich in their backpack when they thought they had run out of food
+ The unadulterated joy felt when your teammate offers you a dry pair of socks after you’ve fallen into a ditch filled with cold water
+ The soothing calm felt after applying a liberal dollop of Vaseline to araw spot

The sport of adventure racing has given me the opportunity to travel to places and see things I would have otherwise missed in my life. I’ve seen the amber cast of the sun as it rises over snow capped mountains of northern Georgia. I’ve seen farmers, men, women, and children in rural parts of China stand along side poorly developed roads and cheer me and my team as we traveled through their villages by bike and by foot. I’ve watched the sun melt into the horizon of the mountains of west Texas. I’ve marveled at the
beauty of an east Texas swamp under a December full moon.

I’ve run or biked with deer and wild hogs and turkeys, and porcupines. I’ve paddled alongside alligators and nutria rats and been chased by bees and wasps and an assortment of other insects. I’ve gone three days without sleep and witnessed some of the most incredible hallucinations on that third day.

I’ve witnessed the courage of team mates and others as they struggle to continue on with races, hobbled by broken collar bones, sprained and bloodied knees, fever and chills, vomiting and diarreaha. All these experiences have marked me; made me a little different.

But when I think of adventure racing, and why I do it, I most often think of my teammates and the trials and tribulations we go through together.

I think adventure racing is about the relief one feels as you struggle up a never ending hill, worn out and downcast, wondering if you’ll make it to the top, and you suddenly feel the weight of your pack lifted off your shoulders by one of your team mates. It’s climbing up a rock slope on all 4s carrying your bike on your shoulder and getting to the top and seeing a team mate struggle with theirs. And it’s taking a few deep breaths and summoning the
strength to slide back down the hill to help them.

It’s having the feeling that you can’t put one foot in front of another, and a teammate placing a reassuring hand on your shoulder in support. It’s coming off a bitterly cold paddling leg and shivering uncontrollably with few dry clothes to change into and your teammate offering without hesitation, a dry shirt or pair of socks or gloves. It’s watching a teammate crash on their bike hard and getting up and fighting back the tears and climbing back on that monster again to press on; fearful of slowing the team down.

It’s about pulling and pushing each other to levels that you’d have thought not possible for you to physically achieve individually. It’s running and pulling your slower teammate at a pace you shouldn’t be able to maintain and hearing them challenge you and the team to keep going; all for the sanctity of the race. It’s the almost cosmic feeling of going faster and harder as a team than you thought possible. It’s seeing your nearest competition in the race on your tail and the three or four of you (your team) suddenly becoming one stronger, faster force.

It’s watching and feeling the total sense of unity as your team succeeds and it’s feeling an equal responsibility when you do not. It’s a sport where the strongest of the team is only really as strong and fast as the slowest member, forcing the Team to focus and excel as one unit. It’s a sport characterized by a myriad of changing human dynamics and moods within a race. One person emerges as the strength of the team only to be replaced by
another who grows stronger. It’s where you can one moment be almost paralyzed by with desperation one second and then driven to great heights because you just found a Hershey bar or a big handful of trail mix to eat.

It’s about screaming and cussing each other over not being able to find a checkpoint, or over losing the passport or just because you’re tired and worn down and filled with frustration. And it’s about freely bantering among the team with liberal spattering of FUs and other colorful forms of speech and then hugging each other at the end with those obscenities forgotten.

It’s asking your teammate for something….for anything and knowing without a doubt that they’ll give it to you if they have it to give.

So……….I guess that’s why I do adventure racing

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

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C.S. Lewis continues to amaze me as I work my way through his writings. While I wouldn’t rate this as highly as The Screw Tape Letters, it is still a great read. And a fast one at that. While it was 130+ pages, I read most of it in a (long) day while travelling from NC to Philly, in the restaurant waiting for my food, and in my hotel room.

The story is that of a dream the author is retelling, in which he finds himself in a strange, grey land, that he eventually learns is pergatory, or limbo, or hell, depending on your view point. He rides a bus to heaven, where he sees several conversations between his fellow passengers and people in heaven that have come to try to tell the person what they need to do to leave limbo and come to heaven. These interactions are each unique and fascinating, and show Lewis’s genius in very subtle froms.

I won’t got into details here on those conversations, but I of course have several quotes I want to include:

[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing Heave, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and ‘Ill take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death

‘Milton was right…’ The choice of ever lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than to server in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery…

There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in Got at all but only in what they say about Him.

I have to admit I had to read the following a few times, and here, out of context, it probably isn’t that useful. I am including it so that I will think on it further, and I think it relevant to some of our small group discussions recently, as well as the proverbs quote I posted, and the ActiveWord devotional which posted as a comment.

No. Because all answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if ye are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see–small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope–something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn’t is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it’s truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic’s vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom.’

Tortilla Soup

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From Sean and Kelly, base recipe found on epicurious.com:

Nonstick vegetable oil spray
3/4 cup chopped onion
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 teaspoon ground cumin
3/4 teaspoon chili powder
4 cups canned vegetable broth — [ I always use better than bullion — it’s the best broth by far if you can’t make your own!]
4 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

4 6-inch-diameter corn tortillas, cut into 1/2-inch-wide strips
1 1/2 cups chopped tomatoes
2/3 cup canned black beans, rinsed, drained
2/3 cup chopped zucchini
1 1/2 tablespoons minced seeded jalapeño chili

Spray large nonstick saucepan with vegetable oil spray. Add onion and garlic; cover and cook over medium-low heat until almost tender, stirring often, about 5 minutes. Stir in tomato paste, cumin and chili powder. Add broth and 2 tablespoons cilantro; bring to boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer until flavors blend, about 15 minutes. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover; chill. Bring to simmer before continuing.)

Add tortillas, tomatoes, beans, zucchini and jalapeñp to soup. Cover; simmer until zucchini is tender, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Ladle soup into bowls. Sprinkle with remaining 2 tablespoons cilantro.

[ Note: This could have used a bit more punch — maybe including all the seeds from the jalepeno?? Also, I would add corn and perhaps some canned chiles in the future. ]