“From an IT security point of view this unfortunate incident is just another fruit ripe for the picking as far as malware writers are concerned.
says Symantec employee Hon Lau, writing on  their security blog on Saturday. “So it comes as no surprise that the creators of rogue antivirus or misleading application software have already jumped on the bandwagon and attempted to poison web search engine results to take advantage of this spike in web search activity.”

Symantec advises searchers to make sure their internet security software is up-to-date, and to be wary of any site that tries to strong-arm you into buying antivirus software.

That’s pretty grim.

Now I’m pretty sure you’re not eating that way. In fact, I know you aren’t. You are trying hard to eat with the seasons, to bring a rainbow of colors to your plate, striving for variety. After all, you’re independant. You’re not a creature of habit. You are living a modern life.

Modern life is exactly why our fruits and vegetables are no longer seasonal. I wasn’t raised on a farm but I spent a lot of time on them. I remember picking Saskatoon berries with my cousin Heather down in the same coulee that my sister Bridget says that cousin Daryl left her all alone; I remember my aunt Dorothy’s full-to-the rim freezer stocked with everything you could imagine; I remember harvest meals at the Weisshauer farm outside of Wilcox, Saskatchewan where everything was fresh from the garden, fresh from the oven, delicious.

I also remember that somewhere along the way, I got this idea in my head that having a vegetable garden was old fashioned.

Or not. Okay, I admit it. I am guilty of routine meal preparation and my family has been a victim of my actions. I have gone grocery shopping and felt deja vu — yep, the same things in the cart this week as last. That’s how it was. Week after week. Year after year. But this is another thing that I am trying to change. I’ve been encouraged, inspired and, well, embarassed by Plenty, a book by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon that chronicles their year of eating locally. They got me thinking about things I had never thought about. Like the true seasonality of fruits and vegetables. I know that asparagus comes out in the spring — but greenhouse agriculture has made us lose our seasons, making a lot of our seasonal food available at our grocery stores year round. Or if not year round, nearly year round.

What that means, of course, is the produce that we’re consuming isn’t coming from our local farms anymore. Our fruits and vegetables are sometimes grown one thousand — two thousand — or even more MILES from where we live. It looks good because it’s designed to be fresh once it hits the supermarket. And often it’s grown outside of the US because labor is cheap and the laborers are willing to work at those jobs; and the price of fuel is still cheap enough to make the harvesting, packaging, shipping and distribution profitable.

Well…we don’t have spaghetti every Wednesday. We don’t eat the same cereal every morning.

But variety is sometimes hard to do.

You come home from the grocery store or farmers market armed with good intentions for your family. Did you know that what you do next will make a big difference about how long those wonderful fresh those fruits and vegetables will keep fresh?

Now where do you put what? We’ll start with the outside and work our way in. Store potatoes, onions and garlic in your pantry or garage or basement — somewhere dark and cool. And don’t put the onions next to the potatoes because each produces a gas that helps each other deteriorate quicker. And when your garlic starts to sprout, throw it out.

Unripe bananas and pineapples be kept on a counter away from direct sunlight. Bananas can be stored on hooks, which helps prevent bruising while they ripen. Once ripe, you can put them in the fridge and they will stay ripe and tasty for a couple more days even if the skin has turned black. And if they’ve turned black on the counter and you don’t have enough time to make a banana loaf (as black bananas give banana loaf the best taste), then throw them in the freezer and use them when you need them. Over ripe bananas also make great smoothies!

Tomatoes shouldn’t be put in the fridge either because the cold takes away the flavor. Unless you want your tomatoes to taste like nothing, they should also be kept in a cool place, out of direct sunlight (so not on the windowsill) and keep the stem side down. If your grocer keeps the tomatoes in the refridgerated area of the store, then find another grocer because the deterioration process will have started already and your tomatoes won’t taste good.

Apples, too, are best stored outside of the fridge — and that also helps the rest of the produce in your fridge because they too give off a gas that speeds up the ripening process of other foods. Having said that, you can use that to your advantage if you’re trying to speed up the ripening process of other foods.

When it comes to your fridge, don’t just pile the new stuff on top of the old in your crisper drawers. Empty out your crispers, getting rid of everything that no longer resembles food and line the bottom of them with newspaper, paper towel or a hand towel or two. Newspaper (don’t be stingy about how much you use) can act as a cushion against fruits bruising, and for moist produce like salad, it can help reduce the amount of humidity in your crisper.

I don’t know about you, but I have personal experience of fostering ”the forgotten drawers”, the deep dark places of our fridges where mold and squishy stuff replace the healthy produce they once were! Peek into those forgotten drawers each time you open your fridge drawer and eureka you might start nibbling on carrots and celery instead of pulling out the Toblerone from that secret compartment at the top!

The Empire State Bulding has gone green.

Buildings account for nearly 1/3 of America’s energy costs according to The Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, entrepreneurial, nonprofit think-and-do tank™. Much of that energy is wasted because of inefficient design. The Empire State Building’s retrofit program has put the focus on energy savings — of 35-45%, reducing its carbon footprint by 105,000 tonnes of CO2 over the next 15 years, and making it a comfortable place to work.

If they can do it to The Empire State Building, shouldn’t I be finding ways to reduce my carbon footprint at home?

Here are eight easy ways to make a difference and save energy at home:

1. Turn off the lights when you leave the room (I said these would be simple).
2. If you’ve got a leaky faucet, get it fixed. That water being wasted and is costing you money.
3. Check your air conditioner filter. A dirty filter uses up to 5% more energy than a clean one.
4. Still on the subject of air conditioning: set your thermostat to 78 degrees Fahrenheit for the summer months. That’s the most energy efficient temperature.
5. Replace old appliances with ENERGY STAR appliances. ENERGY STAR products use 15 to 75% less energy to operate than standard models, without sacrificing product features or performance! And don’t give that old fridge away: recycle it. Old, non-energy efficient fridges can cost around $100 a year to run. You can get a 1.7 Cu. ft. compact refridgerator with an ENERGY STAR Qualfied rating at Best Buy for $129.99
6. Replace your thermostat with a programmable thermostat — that way your house doesn’t need to be summertime cool or winter warm when you aren’t there. These cost between $29 and $98 at Lowes - and some carry the ENERGY STAR rating.
7. Turn your water heater down to 120ºF. Most water heaters are set to 140ºF (manufacturers’ recommendations) but each time you reduce your water heater temperature by 10ºF, you can save an additional 3-5% in energy costs. And running your water heater at a lower temperature also helps slow down mineral buildup and corrosion in your equipment!
8. Turn your PC into a Green PC. Norton has a Green PC Service ($19.99) where an expert will connect to your PC and optimize your power management settings — which can save you up to $75 a year. 

For more tips, check out EnergyStar.gov or EnergySavers or your local electrical utility.

*After the Twin Towers were destroyed on September 11th, the Empire State Building regained her status as that city’s tallest building. 

** The Seven Wonders of the Modern world are: The Empire State Building, Channel Tunnel, the CN Tower, The Golden Gate Bridge, Itaipu Dam, Netherlands North Sea Protection Works and the Panama Canal. See a cool video on these here.

I didn’t make that up. That’s what “F as in Fat 2009” - a report just published today - tells us.

And by “fat” they don’t mean an extra few pounds. They mean overweight. And obese. And it’s everyone. Men. Women. Children. And it’s not just here or there. It’s everywhere.

Okay so maybe you knew that, or guessed that. But guess what? The 2009 results are even worse than the 2008 results. So we’re getting cumulatively fatter year over year.

And bigger clothing sizes and portions and diabetes cures aren’t going to make a difference to our fat nation. We need to throw out the bad habits we’ve learned and take on new ones.

But how did we get here?

Our eating habits have changed drastically in the past five decades, but even that date is expandable. Mr. J.L. Kraft applied for his processed cheese patent way back in 1916 — that’s 95 years ago — and McDonalds started in 1940 — nearly 70 years ago — two of the most recognizable American food corporations. With women moving out of the home and into the workforce, food manufacturers started looking for ways to make products that were cheap to produce and easy to sell with pitches promising less time in the kitchen. Products like instant rice and canned soups were born, and the lines of instant or fast, easy to prepare foods have expanded dramatically since then.

“The average number of products carried by a typical supermarket has more than tripled since 1980, from 15,000 to 50,000,” according to a 2002 article by Marian Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, New York University.

Each year, ten thousand plus food products are introduced into the market in an attempt to satisfy the American consumers’ hunger for fast, easy ways to satisfy our growling stomachs, and most of these are packed with sugar and calories. But they go well with our Cafe Latte Grande’s that we’re sipping on the way in to the office — they don’t leave crumbs all over the car like homemade cakes might, or drip juice on our suits like a ripe peach or even an apple might do. We are a nation of telecommeaters.

And, with “food” like this, all this convenience is making us lazy. And we’re getting lazier by the day, as “F as in Fat 2009″ underscores.

Food Inc. is a movie by Robert Kenner which shows us how the American food industry works — and it’s not appetizing. Using real people to explain the food world as they know it, Kenner has farmers talking about the food they produce because of what the market demands. One farmer says “If it can take you only 49 days to grow a chicken to full size, why would you want one that you grow in 3 months?”

But people can make a difference by stop buying all that junk and demanding good ingredients, and perhaps films like Kenner’s can help the wave of change — because it is out there, popping up in mainstream articles on vegetarian cooking, on 60-Minutes, in best-selling books. Speaking of which Kenner also interviews author and whole food evangelist Michael Pollan – who wants consumers to get back to basics — and this is how he thinks we should do it:

1. Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
2. Don’t eat anything that contains more than 5 ingredients
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket — shop on the perimeter where the real food tends to be.
4. Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.
5. Always leave the table a little hungry
6. Enjoy meals with the people you love
7. Don’t buy food where you buy gasoline.

I have written this because as a new US resident coming from Europe, I came close to a panic attack the first time I stepped into a supermarket here. There was so much choice of things I had never known I would want, and it made me anxious to think that these are the things that my neighbors buy the most of, otherwise they wouldn’t be on their shelves.

And by instinct rather than instruction, I found myself clinging to the outside aisles of these stores, searching for vegetables and fruits grown as close to where I live as possible in the hope that the “fresh” I’d be serving for my family was not a carefully timed ship to market facade of looking good and tasting dull which often can be the case — moreso in supermarket-bought organics. I have searched for Farmers’ Markets in my area but sadly they are not as common here as in other cities I’ve lived in, including my hometown (population 205,000).

But convincing the American public to change their eating style will be the hardest thing ever. It won’t be hard to convince the people in the know — remember when Barack Obama was in Whole Foods buying arugala? As Kenner points out, shoppers are faced with blatant economic decisions each time they enter a store: when the cost of one piece of fruit is the same as 2 hamburgers, which are you going to buy? Cheap, starchy, fatty food may eventually pack on the pounds but their lower cost or convenience factor makes them still the most attractive option to many Americans on a budget.

Things to do:

>Go see the movie Food Inc. 
>Go buy one of Michael Pollan’s books, such as In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
>Go shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s
>Tell me your suggestions.

I didn’t know anything about it, so I googled it and found that 5 days ago, two 50-something men were stopped by customs officers on a train in Italy on their way into Switzerland. The customs officers found $134 billion worth of undeclared US bonds in a false bottom of their suitcase(s). The men have been described as being Japanese, but that may not be true.

Bloomberg published an article about this on June 12th saying the Italians have asked the US to confirm the validity of the bonds…. “If the notes are genuine, the pair would be the U.S. government’s fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the U.K. with $128 billion of U.S. debt and just behind Russia, which is owed $138 billion. ”

According to Wikipedia, Japan is the second largest foreign creditor, holdiing 20.6% of U.S. Treasury Securities. China is #1.

I have found two YouTube videos on this. One is from FoxNews, where Glenn Beck says that if they’re fake, that would be bad, and if they’re real, it will be worse. He goes on to interview Joe Weistenthal, Editor of Clusterstock (http://www.businessinsider.com) – who points out that fake or real, some government is probably behind it. The second is from AsiaNews.It who shows what the bonds look like, and propose they are most likely fake.

If they are real, it looks like Italy will win BIG and could even wipe out its national debt by taking a big chunkola of the money as there’s some rule about declaring transferable funds in amounts greater than 10,000 Euros. On xe.com, at today’s rate, $134 billion converts to 96,830,389,024.68 EUR, so that’s way above that 10,000 Euro mark!!!

According to an article on Yahoo Canada, that fine would be $53 billion - (or $58 billion for you Canadian readers).

So why isn’t anyone talking about it? Maybe the numbers are too big and we can’t understand them. Maybe if the press starts talking about it, the market will collapse even more than they already have, and no country wants that. Maybe the story is too obscure: Italy, Switzerland, Japan - who cares???

 60 Minutes this week showed that a guy named Harry Markopolos tried to get the SEC to investigate Bernie Madoff years ago, and he was ignored. Until the bubble broke.

Not only are software publishers like Symantec jumping on to the bandwagon with their mobile site for the Norton brand (norton.mobi) but radio stations like NPR, newspapers like the Globe & Mail (Canada) and movie distributors like Warner Brothers are discovering that .mobi has an audience.

dotMobi, the .mobi domain registry, released a report in a couple of weeks ago that shows just how relevant the domain is. They estimate around 1.1 million mobile site addresses now exist - in 2008 there were only 150,000. And in 2007, only 25,000.

Even phone manufacturers are finding ways to make the .mobi extension more user friendly. Samsung’s Instinct smartphone has a .mobi key on its screen to give users faster access to that domain. This is in addition to a slew of others, including .com, .org, .gov and a few more.

With mobile phones having greater capabilities than ever before, and more people have fast and cheap access to mobile phones, the .mobi domain may be the domain of the future. And the folks at dotMobi aren’t just sitting on their haunches. They’ve just rolled out the WordPress Mobile Pack - a plug-in for that automatically generates a mobile version of their WordPress site.

Thinking about going mobile? Here are some useful links:

 http://mtld.mobi/ - for more information on buying a domain, setting it up - a really great site

AdMob is a great site with metrics on mobile phone use.  One of the best places to find out which phone models / platforms are most popular.  What is great about AdMob is that their figures are based on phones being used to surf, not phones sold. http://www.admob.com/marketing/pdf/mobile_metrics_jan_09.pdf

There are very little browser standards on mobile platforms.  As a result making your pages work on all browsers is hard work. This Wiki page gives an overview of the broswers used by different platforms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbrowser

http://emulator.mtld.mobi/emulator.php - see what your site looks like on a Sony Eriksson K750 or a Nokia N70

http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN - find out how well your mobile site runs

http://mobility.mobi/ - the largest .mobi and mobile web forum

http://okok.com/ - For great .mobi and Mobile news

Only seconds earlier, the crowd were rolling their eyes, cynical that this woman could ever do anything special. Let alone stand up to the talent that is on tap for these kinds of shows.

Executive Producer and panelist Simon Cowell said in his typical sarcastic fashion, “That’s a big song!” - when Susan explained she’d be singing “I Dreamed a Dream,” from the musical “Les Misérables”. The audience wondered just how could this old aunty possibly entertain them — except perhaps to get them rolling on the floor with laughter as she made a stock of herself. Like the dog trick where the dog came to a skidding stop, refusing to jump through the burning hoop — now that was funny stuff.

There was nervous movements from the audience. People were clearing their throats. Rolling their eyes.

And then she began to sing. And the audience embraced her.

Can it be that Susan Boyle is what singing is all about, and something we’ve been missing and not even known that we’ve been missing it? She’s not sexy. Or pretty. Or gimmicky. Or polished — she’s not the kind of star material that the recording companies get behind. She’s just got a voice that melts our hearts and brings tears to our eyes.

She is in a class of great female singers, and when I thought about who those great singers are, my list is rather sparse. Kate Smith,  (”God Bless America“). Vera Lynn (”We’ll Meet Again“). Marlene Dietrich (”Falling In Love Again”, “Lili Marlene“). Edith Piaf (”La Vie En Rose“). Cas Elliot (”Dream A Little Dream”). Barbra Streisand (”Memories“). Celine Dion (”Pour que tu m’aimes encore“).

Could we possibly be starting to realize that the shiny stuff doesn’t count? That all we’re all looking for something real?

Susan Boyle may be more than the most talented Britain there is. She may be the marker we’ve been looking for all along. A reality check.

But things are getting too strange since the airing of the season opener of House on Monday night. Kutner (Kal Penn) is dead, either by suicide or murdered, which is a big shocker cause to all of us sitting in our living rooms, he’s the guy with the head screwed on best. He doesn’t take things too hard, he’s a roller with the punches. He even let Taub (Peter Jacobson) take the credit for something he discovered in the episode before this one, and when House asked him about it, he shrugged it off. And we believed him.

It’s not the death that is so disturbing, however. It’s the fact that Fox, at the end of the show, broadcast a URL for a memorial to Kutner. And if you went there, you’d think the guy had been real. And then there’s the Facebook version too.

I didn’t go to the Fox site after the credits had finished rolling. But today in the In the News section on Google News, I saw the name “Laurence Kutner” and couldn’t believe my eyes. This tv character has become real and now Laurence (we didn’t even really know he had a first name) Kutner is one of the most searched for/talked about “people” on the net.

Don’t we need a reality check here? Since when does pretend become reality? Well it has with House. And I think this is crossing the line.

I went to Macy’s for their President’s Day sale. Macy’s was trying to clear out their previously un-cleared out winter merchandise, and like two-day old Swedish Meatballs, the offers were delicious.

Macy’s is a chain of department stores selling products in the mid to high-end range. According to Wikipedia, Macy’s has about as many employees as former President Bill Clinton’s home town of Little Rock has residents — around 180,000. It’s feeling the economic slowdown, though, and that number is going to fall. At the beginning of this month, layoffs in the range of 7,000 were announced, and stores from New York to San Fransisco will be handing out pink slips to people — people who have a reputation of being friendly and customer service oriented.

That’s sad. Even sadder is when it’s hard to find personnel to help you pay for your purchases in the store — in women’s wear, I went to three empty sales desks before finally finding someone “open” where I could check my choices out.

And what choices they were. I bought two party dresses — 80% off with an additional 30% at the cash desk. Both were originally priced close to $200 — and one cost me $12.50 and the other $32. Unbelievable. And when I asked the sales clerk if this was a final sale, she said “Of course not, honey, you have 6 months to return them.”

“Six months?” I asked, my shock level growing even higher.

“Yes, six months. Of course we prefer you bringing them back earlier, but you have six months.”

 I got to thinking about this and called my sister Bridget, the world’s foremost expert on shopping. She said, “Remember when I worked at The Gap? We had a 6 month return policy even 10 years ago. People would bring things back and we’d mark them down and put them on the super sales rack and those things would move.” I bet they would.

But really, do we need 6 months to make up our minds about a dress that’s been marked down to $12.50? I don’t think so. Perhaps 2 weeks, but 6 months? That’s far too generous. And that’s got to cost a store a lot of money — especially on merchandise that’s already been heavily marked down. Like my $12.50 party dress.

Please President Obama,, make the retailers of this country make the consumers more responsible about their purchasing decisions. Pass a bill that limits returns on merchandise to a more reasonable level, like two weeks. Or even four. This will help the retailers avoid old stock problems, and help their bottom lines in a natural way.

And with healthier bottom lines, perhaps I’ll be able to find sales people manning the tills next President’s Day.

Tough times call for tough strategies; desperate times make for desperate measures. The folks at the top are telling their sales people to pull out all the plugs and do absolutely everything they can to make the sale. And no one is trying harder then the US auto industry to make this happen. But what happens when customer service goes over the top?

Under the gun with millions of dollars already owed to the American Government, I’m sure the word from the top is “Find every way possible to find the customers. React to every lead. And close the deal.”

And so they are.

Radio and tv stations are broadcasting ads that talk about special employee pricing deals. Valentine’s Day specials; President’s Day Extraveganzas. The online world is busy trying to sell too. Go searching for a car online using a site like AutoTrader and you’ll probably find ads interspersed through the search results promoting their special offers.

I made a search like this for a Ford Edge because I’ve liked the looks of it ever since I laid eyes on a white one at the Aral Gas Station in Gonderange, Luxembourg. That’s a bit ironic when I think about it now because Ford is promoting this crossover as a car that lets you ‘Drive Past Gas Stations Faster’. But I digress. Now that I’m in Illinois and in the market for a car, I thought I’d check it out.

I clicked on the ad and went to the Ford site and, well, those crossovers sure look nice, so maybe I should find out if I can get pre-approved for their 0% 60 month financing deals. On a secure site. They’ll tell you immediately if you’re approved.

Before you can spell Mississippi backwards, I had real people calling me, thanking me, genuinely interested in getting my business. No slimy Danny DeVito-type salesman. Very professional. Very nice. Very keen. I expressed my interest to him and I will visit the dealership on the weekend.

And the online quote - well that hit my inbox around the same time that the fellow from the dealership called. This was all within 12 hours of my online application.

Less than 36 hours later, I received an email with a link to an online survey to find out if someone had actually contacted me. Because the email was so nice and short and gave me clear options - click here if you’ve been contacted - click here if you haven’t been contacted - I clicked the link. There was also a promise of a $150 draw for people who responded –so there was a carrot for the stick — but carrot aside, I was interested to know what they were asking.

Okay the survey was quite relatively short, I would say 10 questions, and it seems they wanted to be 100% sure that no one was dropping the ball on this. They asked my opinion of the salesperson, the service I’d received, how responsive I was and if I’d been shopping around to other manufacturers and if so, which ones.

An hour later, the phone rang and it was a very friendly lady calling from a call center to find out if I’d been contacted concerning the Ford Edge. At this point, I started feeling edgy. I told her that I had, and I had just finished the online survey. She explained they have a VIP Program that would allow me to book an appointment at my convenience and schedule a test-drive, would I like to do that now?

Well, I know that it’s a buyer’s market. I have seen that with the housing market here and with the car market too. I’ve been cruising the car lots where salespeople jump out of their cubbyholes the moment the tires of my car hits their lot. I know that if I want to buy a particular car, they are going to jump hoops.

But I don’t really want them to jump so many hoops. I know they are desperate. I also know that I don’t want them to be desperate. I want everyone to keep their jobs, that no more factories close, that the markets will only rise.

I told her that I would be trying the car out on the weekend, that I don’t need to be a VIP. And she asked if there was anything else they could do to get my business, I said, “Yes. Please stop bothering me.”

—————————————

As an afterthought, I thought I should let you know that the bag packers at my local grocery store pack the bags better than I do, and I am always impressed that the like things always go together. It’s as if they know where everything is kept in my kitchen!