Kirks Amazing Spinach Dip

2 large sweet onions diced (vidalia or oso)
8 diced garlic cloves
2 cans of diced tomatoes (petite work best)
20 diced serranos (completely optional, if you do use them chop them up very fine in a food processor)
2 blocks of Philadelphia Cream Cheese softened
1 pint of whole cream
4 cups of shredded sharp cheddar cheese
4 cups of shredded monterey jack cheese
4 table spoons of red wine vinegar
1 32oz bag of frozen chopped spinach
1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil

Saute olive oil, onions, garlic & serranos until soft.  Add tomatoes and spinach and bring to a boil.  Pour over cream cheese and mix thoroughly.  Stir in remaining ingredients.  Cover and bake at 375 for 40 minutes.  Stir and cool before serving.

Photo privacy

So for a while I’ve had photos scattered in a few different places, I’ve decided to consolidate everything onto flickr (at least for the time being).  I don’t love flickr’s presentation but I can’t argue with their usability.  There are just more tools out there and flikr is the 500lb gorilla as far as community and sharing sites.

The only photos that will be public are the ‘style’ type photos.  All the personal stuff will be Friend/Family only as appropriate.  I’m sure a time will come when I may want to be able to see pictures of my kids but for right now I’m going to protect their privacy.  Joining flickr is free and I recommend anyone interested in joining and adding me as a contact.  I’ll return the favor and you can see all the cuteness/etc to your hearts content.

The photostream will pull in on the sidebar and can be found directly at http://flickr.com/photos/stickm

My New Daughter

Today I upped my family by one, increased my available tax deductions and created another justification for a larger car.  My daughter Maggie Anne MacLeod was born at 12:52pm today, 8lbs 7os, 22″ long.  Mom and Maggie are doing just fine.  A few pictures can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/stick265/Maggie

Pullen Park

The weather was beautiful here so I spent a bit of time at pullen park taking some photos.

DIY Camera Fun

Using this I built my own remote shutter trigger this evening. I found a Body Glove Earglove Sport at Walmart for $10, sadly every Dollar store I tried didn’t have any wired mobile phone headsets, Big Lots was no help either.  As per instructions I did have to remove the microphone, but honestly the hardest part of the whole thing was getting into the housing the contained the button and the mic.  I tested it with about 15 shots in different modes with my Canon T1i and it works great.

The one drawback is that the button doesn’t depress half-way so you can’t enage focus lock without also engaging the shutter.  My plan to counter act that is to compose and focus beforehand then switch to MF to prevent AF from refocusing unintentionally, if anyone has any additional ideas leave them in the comments.

First Images

So I finally made my decision on a camera.  I settled on the Canon EOS T1i (500D).  So far I love it!  I went to the “Rose Garden” down by NCSU and shot a little bit this afternoon after having to work all day (on a Saturday).  This little guy came out pretty good, though upon reflection I should have stopped a little higher for a little more DoF.  Live and learn I guess.

I had half-heartedly thought about submitting one of these to an online photo contest but ultimately I decided that I need a bit more experience before I take that step.  That’s a post for another day, however.

Photonecromany

I’ve been interested in photography at various levels for some time.  I dabbled a bit in college with 35mm film but never really got into it, mainly due to cost.  Without access to your own darkroom developing film can be an expensive proposition.

I’ve been doing a lot of research about dSLR’s lately in prep to buy myself a dSLR.  I figured I’d detail my thoughts from a relative newbie’s perspective.  First a little bit on my parameters and intentions.

My budget is roughly $1000, I’m looking for a reasonable advanced camera that I can use as a learning tool.  The goal is to learn more about the technology of photography (hopefully dragging the art out of me kicking and screaming) as well as taking better pictures.  I’ll mostly be shooting sporting event type activities, (disc golf, kids in the backyard, etc) family stuff, but I do want to do a little bit of artistic photography.  Several of the new cameras have HD video as a feature.  While this isn’t real important to me, it’s a fun thing to play with.

Password Manager for iPhone

I’m on the hunt for a good password manager for the iPhone. But there’s a slight catch. I’m looking for something that works with fedora. I’d like to be able to sync it locally as well. There seem to be couple of things that will sync “to the cloud” but that seems to be a horrible idea for passwords.

Anyone have suggestions?

When security takes a backseat to process…

We are currently going through an ITIL implementation.  It’s had it’s ups and downs and philosophically I don’t really believe in it (certainly not in our implementation), but it’s had a few successes and a few failures.  Without droning too much about it, to make any ‘production’ change you have to file an RFC that gets reviewed by a management team.  There is a relatively recent DNS attack that involves using root zone recursion to DOS a target server.  We’re vulnerable to being used in this manner.  It really doesn’t affect us much  as that our servers handle the requests fine, but we’re assisting in a DDOS and that’s not good.  For us the fix is pretty straight forward, because of some historical decisions we have to allow recursion for certain ips, so I need to segment things off into a tighter view and eliminate recursion there.  This is a  pretty straight forward change and one that I would do without a second thought (after testing).  Due to our current climate of process I have to file an RFC, which is fine, I’m not real happy about it but I’ll live.

However my RFC was denied not because of any technical reason, not because of any concern over the technology, the implementation, or the timing.  It was denied because I didn’t put the correct information into the details page and because my dates were wrong.  I’m all for doing process right (when it makes sense), but does it make sense to derail a security fix for 4 days because the form was incorrect?  Especially when there exists a forum in which you can be asked to clarify anything regarding your RFC.

Now when security takes a backseat to process, your organization has truly begun the decent to failure.  This may indeed be the straw…

Journey into sync

I’m fairly picky when it comes to how I manage my personal data.  I like a fair amount of separation between things but I want everthing accessible.  Quite a while ago I moved my domain (for email, etc) over to google apps.  I can’t really understand why anyone with less than 3 or 4 thousand users would run their own mail servers, but that is a post for another day.  Since I’ve been a user of google apps for a while I’ve been looking for a good way to manage my calendars.  I’ve never been totally happy with GoogleCalendar especially when compared with iCal.  I’ve used both spanning sync as well as busy sync, but I never got enough use out of them to warrant paying for them.  Throw in the addition of my iphone and I just wasn’t happy with how things were setup.