Grandma Passed Away and JSL is sick

Family, JSL, Life

Yesterday, JSL felt warm. We checked his temperature and it was high. We gave him Motrin and Tylenol but that didn’t take his fever down. Worried about another febrile seizure, we prepared to take him to Urgent Care. We were almost ready to go when the phone rang. It was my parents. Now, my parents don’t observe Shabbat as much as I do, but they *NEVER* call during Shabbat. The minute I saw their number come up on the caller ID, I knew it was bad news.

[thumb id=703]B got on the phone and talked with them. They told her that they were sitting down eating lunch with my grandmother when she said she wasn’t feeling well. She took another bite, then began to shake. My mother took her hand and she passed away. My parents called 911 but my grandmother was already gone by that point. Besides, she had a DNR. The fire department and ambulance left, but the police officer remained with them. My parents called the funeral home, but they refused to come get the body. They said that the coroner had to declare her dead and get the body. The coroner, however, refused to declare her dead and said her doctor had to do it. He was on vacation so they had trouble reaching her. This continued on for hours (hours that my father had to sit with the dead body of his mother in his house) until they got the doctor on the phone. The doctor declared her dead. The coroner said that the funeral home needed to pick up the body. When the funeral home still tried to insist that the coroner needed to get the body, the police officer got on the phone and ordered them to pick up the body.

Grandma was my last surviving grandparent. She was 94 years old, so she had a nice, long life. I have many great memories of her growing up. I’ve also taken it upon myself to collect the hundreds of photographs that she left behind and scan them in so that everyone in the family can have copies. (I’ll probably use a service like Scan My Photos.)

We finally did get to Urgent Care and found out that JSL has an ear infection. We got him antibiotics but even that, along with Motrin and Tylenol (dosed out every 2 hours last night), didn’t get his fever to drop. As it stands now, the funeral will be on Monday morning so I’m leaving today. B, JSL, and NHL will go to stay with B’s parents while I’m gone. I’m not entirely comfortable leaving them with JSL sick like this, but I also don’t want to miss my grandmother’s funeral. Hopefully, JSL will feel better by the time I get back on Tuesday.

Ode To Quinoa

Cooking, Food, Judaism

Usually, during Passover, your “bread” choices are limited. You have matzoh, matzoh and more matzoh. Leavened bread, rice, couscous, etc are all forbidden. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many rabbinical authorities permit Quinoa. Despite the box calling it a grain, Quinoa is actually a seed. It is related to beets and spinach, not wheat or rice. However, when cooked, it can act very much like a grain (specifically rice). It doesn’t rise though so there are no chametz issues.

[thumb id=731/]Anyway, I decided to try some Quinoa this year. For the second sedar, I made Quinoa pilaf. First I sauteed diced scallions, carrots, red pepper, and celery in olive oil for a few minutes. Then I tossed in the rinsed Quinoa. (It needs to be rinsed to wash off a bitter outside shell.) Finally, I poured in some chicken broth and let the whole thing simmer until the liquid was totally gone. This was a hit at the sedar. Nearly everyone took seconds of the Quinoa. The leftovers (which only existed because I made so much to begin with) were tasty too.

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Next, I tried some Breakfast Quinoa. For this one, I simply boiled the Quinoa in water. Once it was cooked, I added raisins, cinnamon, honey, and a little milk. We ate it like oatmeal. Not bad at all.

Below are some more photos of the Breakfast Quinoa:

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[thumb id=737 /] [thumb id=738 /] [thumb id=739 /]

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I’m not sure if I’ll make any more Quinoa before Passover ends, but I do have 2 more boxes and would like to try this Apple Cinnamon Breakfast Quinoa recipe that I found. Have you ever tried Quinoa? If so, do you have a favorite recipe?

This week in Tweets

This Week in Tweets
  • Happy Monday! Just messed up changing the office water cooler jug. Ignored the “remove this to install” sticker & removed the entire cap! #
  • Just found out that my favorite online computer retailer, NewEgg.com, is on Twitter: @EggXpert #
  • Running a poll to try to find out how many people the average Twitter user follows. Please answer & RT http://is.gd/r2To #
  • RT @foodbloggernews: Is Quinoa Kosher for Passover? http://tinyurl.com/dytsy9 <= I love loopholes. Can’t wait to eat Quinoa during Passover! #
  • POLL: How many people do you follow on Twitter? http://is.gd/r2To Please retweet. #
  • RT @donttrythis: I just talked to Grant here & it’s official @grantimahara is real, not some impostor, & the 2nd Mythbuster on Twitter! yay! #
  • Ate my breakfast. Still hungry. Is it bad that I want to go to the cafeteria and eat a bagel or something before its Passover? #
  • Apparently, my work’s web filter today thinks that all “bit.ly” shortened URLs are “Malicious Web Sites”. #
  • Is thinking that Passover would be so much easier if I could eat kitniyot like Sephardim do. Rice, beans, corn? I could live with those. #
  • Unfortunately, nothing’s marked “Kosher For Passover For Sephardic” so I can’t tell if that can of beans was made w/ chometz & can’t eat it. #
  • Just had a good customer service experience w/ @OhNuts. They sent the wrong item in my shipment. Sending the right item to arrive tomorrow. #
  • For the record, @OhNuts sent me this http://tinyurl.com/c5bmbc instead of this http://tinyurl.com/chmbfs #
  • RT @fitnessdiet is giving away a new Ipod Touch to 1 lucky winner. http://www.fitnessdiet.info/freeipodtouchcontest.php #
  • Organizing digital camera photos. Been putting it off for months. #

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Twitter Friend Averages: The Results

Internet, Twitter

In developing my Twitter application, I decided that I needed to know how many users the average Twitter user follows.  To accomplish this, I started a poll which was a pretty sad failure.  Only 5 people responded and two of them were myself and my wife.  However, all was not lost.  As part of my Twitter application, I cache lists of who a user follows.  (This helps reduce my impact on Twitter’s servers.)  I checked and I had over 10,000 users’ information cached.  So I wrote a quick script to query that information.  The results were quite enlightening.

  • 90.33% of users follow 2,600 people or less.
  • 75.67% of users follow 1,400 people or less.
  • 51.14% of users follow 500 people or less.

Using OpenOffice.org, I graphed the results and came up with this interesting chart:

As you can see, the percentage of users climbs sharply until around 2,500 followers.  Then it levels off for a slow ascent to 100%.  This really helps me.  If I make my application cut off checking the Friends list at 2,000 people, it will handle the complete lists for 85% of users.  I’m willing to have partial functionality for the top 15% of users (who are likely to not need my application as much) to preserve functionality for the bottom 85%.

If you’re interested in more data from this, let me know in the comments below and I’ll see what I can do.

Twitter Friend Averages (POLL)

Internet, Twitter, Web Development

I haven’t talked about it much (or at all) on my blog, but I’ve been developing a Twitter application for the past few months.  Every time, I think I’m done, my intrepid beta tester, HighTechDad, does what any good beta tester should do.  He finds where my application is severely lacking, sending me back for some furious code-rewriting sessions.  My latest versions seemed to work well enough for my Twitter username, but I ran into a problem when I attempted to "stress test" the application by running it through guykawasaki‘s name.  The web server runs out of memory trying to process the 100,000+ people he follows.

I was trying to think of a way around this, but then I thought: Perhaps it is best not to.  Perhaps Guy is such an edge scenario that I would be better off pulling the first 5,000 he follows and leaving it at that.  Not to give too much away, but my application is intended to analyze your following list in the hopes of finding more people for you to follow.  So the audience is most likely not someone already following over 100,000 people, but people following 1,000 or less people.

This led me to question what is the average number of people that Twitter users follow.  Is it 500?  1,000?  5,000?  More?  Less?  To help me answer this, please answer the following poll.  It is easy to determine how many people you follow.  Just stop by your Twitter page and note the number above "Following."  Then choose the answer in the poll that best matches how many people you follow.  NOTE:  Do not use the number above "Followers."  I’m not looking for the number of people that follow you.  I’m looking for the number of people that *YOU* follow.

[poll=2]

1 … 279 280 281 282 283 … 300