I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is that B, NHL, JSL and I have been turned into zombies.  The good news is that I’m going to use this opportunity to correct up a few zombie stereotypes.

First of all, zombies aren’t always calm, shuffling, hungry for brains folks.  Sometimes we can be quite angry.

Especially if we don’t get the brains.

Secondly, zombies can also be quite thoughtful.

Mostly, we’re thinking about how to catch more people with tasty, tasty brains.

Finally, you might think that zombies don’t have any heart.  While ours might not be beating, we still feel love.  Zombie love.

After this photo was taken, we dined on the photographer’s tasty brains…..  It was very romantic.

Well, I hope that’s cleared a few things up.  I’ve got to shuffle off now.  Here’s hoping you have a wonderful Halloween.

P.S. Remember to click on the photos for up close and personal zombie photos.  We promise not to jump out of your screen at you… Maybe.

P.P.S. Zombification is thanks to Google Plus’s new photo editing tools (powered by Picnik).

At the time of this writing, I’m dreading a horrible, awful event that is going on outside: The first snowfall.

For the longest time, I was in denial that the summer was over.  Through September, it was easy to keep this up.  The weather was still pretty warm and the leaves were green.  Then the leaves began changing and falling to the ground and the air got a chill in it.  I’ve made my peace that autumn is here.

But snow?  Now?  I’m not ready to admit that winter is on the way.  I know that, officially, winter doesn’t arrive until the 22nd of December, but here winter weather doesn’t wait until then.  By then, we’ve already had a few snowstorms.

This one isn’t predicted to deposit much snow.  Half of an inch at most.  Still, it’s the principle of the thing.  I’m not ready for snow and resent winter sticking its frozen head into the autumn that I just got used to.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Are you ready for winter weather to arrive?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #111

With all of the fuss over Klout dropping their score, I’ve decided to reveal my super secret Twitter application: Rout.  No longer do you need to fret over low social media ranking scores.  Don’t like your Rout score?  Generate another one.  My score is 65.  No, wait, it’s 87.  No, wait, it’s 15.  No, wait, it’s 3.  THREE?!!!  Whew, 96.  As you can see, I’m extremely influential.  Rout is powered by a highly scientific process called Picking Random Numbers From Random.org.

Generate your Rout score here.

Ok, obviously, this is a joke.  What isn’t a joke, though, is that I have a super-secret Twitter application under development.  I’ve been delaying it due to bug fixes and paid freelance projects, but I think it’s finally ready for prime time.  Or, wide-spread beta testing, at least.  I’m setting November 1st as the release date, so stop back on Tuesday for the real announcement.  Until then, have fun generating Rout scores!

It’s inevitable.  You buy a bunch of bananas and though you use many, one or two start to turn brown.  Not just normal brown, though.  Those are still good to eat, but threatening-to-go-mushy-any-day brown.  Time to toss out the bananas and buy a new bunch, right?  Wrong.  Well, maybe buy a new bunch, but don’t toss those old ones.  Any baker will tell you that many a great banana-based recipe can use ripe bananas.  Banana bread.  Banana pancakes.  Banana pudding.  Banana muffins.  Ice cream.

Yes, you read that last one right.  Using only bananas and one other ingredient, you can make ice cream!  That other ingredient isn’t even milk.

First, let’s start with the bananas.

Peel and slice the bananas.  Stick them into ziploc bags and put them into the freezer.  I usually put about 1 to 2 bananas per bag.  Allow them to freeze for awhile.  This might take a couple of hours, but you could also just put bananas in as you have them until you’ve collected enough.

Once you have quite a few bananas, you can make the ice cream.  Take out your bananas and a jar of Peanut Butter & Co’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter.

First, put the bananas in your blender.

I usually work in batches of 2 bananas.  I made a 4 banana batch once and it overwhelmed my poor blender.  With the bananas in, turn the blender on.  After awhile, the bananas will turn crumbly.  You might have to stop a few times to move bananas off the blender’s sides and towards the middle.

Finally, the whole thing will take on a creamy, almost soft-serve texture.

At this point, toss in the dark chocolate peanut butter.  One tablespoon per banana.

Turn the blender back on and puree the mixture together.

You now have soft serve dark chocolate peanut butter banana ice cream!  If you want your ice cream more like hard ice cream, just put it in a container in the freezer for about 3 hours.

There you go.  Hard dark chocolate peanut butter ice cream!

Given that this is only bananas and peanut butter, it’s probably healthy, right?  Well, I came up with this little nutritional chart to the right.  As you can see,

1 banana’s worth of the ice cream is under 200 calories, has only 7 grams of fat, and has 4 grams of fiber.  Plus, it has 35% of your daily requirement of B6 and 20% of your daily requirement of Vitamin C.  Let’s see plain ice cream do this!

Of course, it could be the healthiest ice cream in the world, but it wouldn’t matter if it tasted horrible.  Luckily, it tastes great.  I gave it to my boys and they loved it.  I toyed with hiding the secret, non-dairy aspect of the ice cream from them, but decided to let them in on the secret.  They still begged for bowls of it every night.  They even tried asking for it for breakfast.

“After all”, NHL reasoned, "it’s peanut butter and bananas.  It’s healthy!”

I’ve got to admit that I seriously entertained the notion of breakfast ice cream.  Sadly, for the kids, I eventually turned them down.  Still, I don’t mind giving them a bowl or two for dessert and they don’t mind gobbling it up.

… I have no idea where he gets this silly streak from. *whistles innocently*

Yesterday, I wrote about my father-in-law’s dead hard drive with the proprietary plug.  To continue the tale, we must first go back a bit.  My father-in-law and mother-in-law recently went on a trip to Disney World.  (Side Note: Given our Trip That Never Was, I’m jealous of them.)  During their trip, they found that their many photos and videos was causing them to run out of memory card space.

They had no computer to offload the photos to, but they did have their iPad.  Off went the photos and videos to the iPad.  Photos were deleted from the camera and they had room for more photos until they bought an additional memory card.  Problem solved, right?

Well, not so much.  Recently, they saw that their iPad was going to be upgraded to iOS 5.  From reports we’ve heard, this can cause data loss at times.  In any event, it is always a good idea to do a full backup before any major upgrade.  Indeed, it is a good idea to backup your files on a regular basis.  Besides, iTunes was reporting that they didn’t have enough disk space free to install iOS 5.

After freeing up some disk space, we went through the process of getting their photos and videos off the iPad.  When we plugged the iPad into the computer’s USB port, I expected it to show up as a drive.  This is what happens with pretty much any device I hook up to my computer.  My camera shows up as a drive.  My phone shows up as a drive.  Even Kimberly Kindle lets me transfer files via a mounted drive when it is connected via a USB cable.

The iPad does show up as a device and we can use a file transfer wizard to get the photos, but the two problems that persist are:

1) The photos are renamed.  Instead of being named along the lines of P12345.jpg, they are named “Disney Photo 001.jpg”.  To make matters worse, the photo order is messed up.  “Disney Photo 023” might have actually been taken before “Disney Photo 022” and after “Disney Photo 024”.

2) The videos aren’t transferred.  This is huge.  They captured some really nice videos at Disney and loss of them is just not an option.

NOTE: We can’t simply sync using iTunes because iTunes insists that it needs to load iOS 5 during the next sync.  We also can’t, apparently, stick in a blank SD card and transfer files to that. The Apple store representative told us that file transfers from SD cards are one way only.  To the iPad.

Luckily, I’ve done some research and I’ve come up with two possibilities.  Note, I’m just presenting these as options.  I haven’t tried these (as of this writing) so they may or may not work properly (or they might work properly but not solve the particular need I have).

The first option is an app called GoodReader ($4.99).  This app, among other things, lets you sync your files across an FTP folder.  I could set up my father-in-law with some FTP space, sync up his files and then FTP them back to his computer.  This seems a bit convoluted, though.  It’d be better if I could just sync directly with his computer.  Enter option 2.

The second option is iPad Manager ($25).  This looks like it could be what we are looking for.  It claims to allow the user to plug the iPad into a PC’s USB port and transfer videos, photos, songs, etc.

While this sounds good, a more standards-compliant approach, such as showing a mounted drive on the computer, would have been preferable.  Then, we could have used the built-in file explorer that every computer (Mac or PC) to copy the files.  Alternatively, allowing you to copy files to an inserted SD card would have sufficed.  To require you to jump through hoops or use additional programs just to retrieve your own photos/videos seems completely unnecessary.  For a company which prides itself on a smooth user experience, this has been quite the bumpy ride.

Have you ever transferred videos/photos off of an iPad?  If so, what did you use?

My father-in-law and mother-in-law recently found themselves in need of a backup solution.  (The driver for this was an iPad which needed to be backed up and low hard drive space.  That full story will come another day.)  My preferred backup solution is an extra hard drive.  They are easy to store and work with and can be hooked up to any computer.  So we went out and helped my father-in-law buy a 1TB external hard drive.  We got back to his house, plugged it in, and I talked him through backing up his files.

At this point, I just want to step aside and say that I got a bad feeling about this drive from the moment we unboxed it.  No, it wasn’t banged up or anything.  Instead, I looked at the USB cord and saw this.

Notice the indentation on the cord?  That’s not a standard cord.  With the external hard drives I have, if I lose the cord I could use any standard cord (of the same type) and access my data.  If my father-in-law lost this cord, or if it went bad, then he’d have to hope the hard drive manufacturer would sell him a new one.  And that it wouldn’t be too costly.  Otherwise, he’d be SOL.

Putting aside my concerns, though, we proceeded with the backup.  Everything was working fine until we got to a few of the last files.  Then the computer reported having trouble writing the files.  My Computer reported that the drive simply wasn’t there.  We checked all of the plugs, both in the computer and in the drive.  Nothing.  We tried plugging it into B’s computer.  Nada.  Less than two hours after opening the box and the drive was effectively dead.

Before the drive died, it copied files.  We didn’t want to simply return the drive, with my father-in-law’s files on it.  Neither, however, could we erase those files prior to returning it.  Had the cord been a non-proprietary one, I could have swapped out a different cord.  This would have at least narrowed down the problem to the drive or cord.  Instead, we’re at the mercy of the hard drive manufacturer’s support to figure out what’s wrong and figure out how we can delete our data prior to returning it.

Tomorrow, I’ll post Part 2 where I discuss the frustrations of retrieving data from an iPad.

Lately, I’ve been having a hard time getting a good night’s sleep.  Part of it is my own fault.  I tend to get a “second wind” at night and then crash at or after midnight.  I need to start heading to bed sooner.

Besides my late bedtime, the other reason I haven’t felt rested have been my dreams.  Instead of nice, peaceful dreams, I’ve been having weird dreams and outright nightmares.

Last week, I dreamt that NHL had a febrile seizure.  He’s had one before, when he was 11 months old.  For awhile, he turned blue and stopped moving.  It was among the most frightening moments in my life.  JSL has also had multiple febrile seizures.

In my dream, it was just NHL and me.  JSL and B were nowhere to be found.  Even around us, there was nothing.  Just a big emptiness containing NHL and me.  NHL collapsed into my arms suffering from a febrile seizure.  (Somehow in the dream logic, I knew exactly what it was causing this.)  NHL wouldn’t respond to me.  I screamed for someone to help me.  No response.  Just me and my child lifeless in my arms.

I woke up at this point, but was understandably rattled.  The dream had seemed so real and it brought back fears and feelings that I never wanted to experience again.  I hate feeling helpless.  Seeing my child lifeless before me with nothing I can do is the most helpless I’ve ever felt.

Earlier this week, I had a different sort of dream.  It wasn’t a nightmare, per se, but it was very disturbing.  In the dream, I was in my parents’ house.  Specifically, I was standing by the sliding glass door at the back of their house.  There was a light snow outside and NHL was spending some time outdoors while I watched him from the other side of the glass.

I noticed that NHL was walking towards a bug.  A sort of beetle.  It wasn’t a normal beetle, though.  It was big.  And by big, I mean about 3 feet tall and one and a half feet wide.  Yes, this was a seriously large bug.  I called for NHL to come in, but he didn’t.  Finally, as the bug moved towards him and the house, he came inside.  At this point it was too late, though.  The bug was trying to get in the house and we needed to wrestle it and push it back.  I woke up tired from a long night of beetle wrestling.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you have weird dreams or nightmares?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #110