Fresh Ideas

Archive for August, 2008

Ingredients:

• 455 g sweet Italian sausage
• 340 g lean ground beef
• 80 g minced onion
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
• 2 (6 ounce) cans tomato paste
• 364 g canned tomato sauce
• 120 ml water
• 25 g white sugar
• 1 g dried basil leaves
• 1 g fennel seeds
• 2 g Italian seasoning
• 20 g salt
• 0.5 g ground black pepper
• 15 g chopped fresh parsley
• 12 lasagna noodles
• 455 g ricotta cheese
• 1 egg
• 3 g salt
• 340 g mozzarella cheese, sliced
• 75 g grated Parmesan cheese

Directions:

1. In an oven, cook sausage, ground beef, onion, and garlic over medium heat until well browned. Stir in crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce, and water. Season with sugar, basil, fennel seeds, Italian seasoning, 1 tablespoon salt, pepper, and 2 tablespoons parsley. Simmer, covered, for about 1 1/2 hours, stirring occasionally.
2. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Cook lasagna noodles in boiling water for 8 to 10 minutes. Drain noodles, and rinse with cold water. In a mixing bowl, combine ricotta cheese with egg, remaining parsley, and 1/2 teaspoon salt.
3. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C).
4. To assemble, spread 1 1/2 cups of meat sauce in the bottom of a 9×13 inch baking dish. Arrange 6 noodles lengthwise over meat sauce. Spread with one half of the ricotta cheese mixture. Top with a third of mozzarella cheese slices. Spoon 1 1/2 cups meat sauce over mozzarella, and sprinkle with 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese. Repeat layers, and top with remaining mozzarella and Parmesan cheese. Cover with foil: to prevent sticking, either spray foil with cooking spray, or make sure the foil does not touch the cheese.
5. Bake in preheated oven for 25 minutes. Remove foil, and bake an additional 25 minutes. Cool for 15 minutes before serving.

Palm will be releasing a new smartphone that will come head to head with Apple’s iPhone. Palm is back with a vengeance and consumers will certainly be waiting for its arrival and nonetheless will be amazed by its new look and power-packed features!

The new Treo Pro is backed up with Windows Mobile 6.1 and has a built-in GPS system. Bluetooth version is 2.0 and has a 2-megapixel camera.

What’s hot is that you can watch streaming videos in YouTube through this phone.

The screen resolution is 320X320 and 3.5G connectivity.

The battery is also much better with a 1500 mAh lithium-ion. The memory is way bigger with 256MB and 100MB is available to the user.

It is also packed up with lots of built-in softwares that can balance mobile office and its phone features. You can easily synchronize office documents and email on your Exchange Server anywhere. Personal emails are also so easy to setup and synchronize.

What is really good about this phone is it is Wi-Fi ready.

Browsing through the web is so easy because of its mobile wireless broadband speed but of course this will depend on your network and on your data plan. You may even use your phone as a modem to your laptop while on the go.

This cute thing is so small and thin and only weighs 4.69 oz.

However, this superb phone is not yet available in the market and this is the next hot thing to have in your list of gadgets.

Time will come when you will run out of unique ways to describe your feelings to your partner. Certainly, at one point in our lives, we will think of how we can express our feelings without even saying it.

Here is a list that will really define that actions speaks louder than words:

1. Give her a soft kiss.
2. Spend quality time with the one you love.
3. Place notes in your lover’s lunch telling her how much you love her.
4. For a week, smothering your spouse with all the small intimate things they like.
5. Give your love a little note or sending her an e-mail with a poem in it.

A good friend of mine told me that Content is King. One good blog that I read mentioned that the Links are Queen and if they are together, a good dynasty will emerge. But let’s say, you are having problem creating new content on a daily basis? How can you resolve this to provide your audience with good materials and to make yourself more visible to search engines?

Here are my tips to re-create content for your blog:

• Split your article - If you have posted a long article, you may break it up to several topics. You may add different introductions and keywords with lots of related resource links. It is best to choose an article that has different segments that are good to splitting up.

• Re-write old articles - You may try to re-write old articles from different resources that were popular in those times. Good articles to re-write are posts that has insights, tips and how-to’s. These articles might get noticed again in this time and may even give you lots of comments from your audience and be bookmarked.

• Use press releases - Write press release articles in a very consumer-friendly manner. This will make the press release interesting and at the same time, you will get new articles. You may also create a link to the original press release.

• Interview posting - If you are lucky being interviewed via phone or email by other blogger, you may post that. It is much better if the prep questions are given ahead of time. You may simply transcribe your interview and post it. This is one good source of interesting articles for your blog.

• Share videos - Of course this tip is very familiar to everyone and most of you already knew this. You may simply put in links on the embedded videos that you posted into social networking sites to point out to the article that you created to your blog that also contained this video.

• Topics from your email - You may also strip off some contents from your daily emails and create a topic for your everyday article.

The action of combining several loans or liabilities into one loan. Put another way, debt consolidation is the process of taking out a new loan to pay off a number of other debts. Most people who consolidate their debt are usually doing it to attain a lower interest rate, or the simplicity of a single loan. Also known as a “consolidation loan”.

Notes:
This is common among companies or people with credit problems (maxed-out credit cards, car loans, student loans, etc.), who combine all their debts into one loan to create greater ease in repayment. In the case of credit card debt, this can often be advantageous since credit cards generally carry a high interest rate.

The suggestion of an Italian priest to stage an online pageant for nuns was stopped because he was misinterpreted.

Father Antonio Rungi told Reuters that his superiors were not pleased by his intention.

His idea was posted on his blog and would have started this September. He said that this idea was only presented to him by some nuns and was only misinterpreted by some as a “physical thing”.

His concept for this contest is each month, the nuns will vote for themselves and would be judged according to several criteria like their spirituality, charity, social awareness and other attributes. He said that the nuns will fill out a form together with their photograph.

Rungi said that he will not post nuns exposing most of their physical side.

He said that his intention is to show the world the “inner beauty” of nuns throughout the world.

When a consumer seeks out a home equity loan, they are looking for a loan that is secured by their home. For most individuals, there is a mortgage on a home for many of the first years that they own the home. This type of loan is determined based on the amount of money the homeowner still owes on their home and the current market value of the home if it were sold today. The difference from these two numbers is what the equity in the home is.

The term second mortgage is another term for home equity loan. The terms are used interchangeably. The implication here is that the homeowner is taking out another loan on the home in addition to their current mortgage. A second mortgage is obtained by any lender, not necessarily the lender that holds the first loan.

When a consumer considers this type of loan, it is very important for them to realize that the loan should be purchased only if you are sure that it can be paid off monthly. A payment for the second mortgage will be due each month just as it would be for the first mortgage. Also, this type of loan holds the home as collateral. That means that if the homeowner defaults on the loan, he will likely lose the home in the process.

Defining what a home equity loan is should be something that every consumer does. It can be beneficial to take out this type of loan for many reasons. IT can be used as a method of debt consolidation or one of funding a remodeling of the home. There are many uses for this type of loan and because it comes with such a low interest rate, it can be one of the best types of funding to take out.

2008 Beijing Olympics

The Beijing 2008 Olympic games has reached its peak and ends in a joyous closing ceremony at the National Stadium on Sunday, August 24, 2008.

Pyrotechnic display, silver bells dancers, light wheels and other performers made this closing event very special to more than 90,000 spectators.

The 16 days coverage of the Olympic games became the most watched television event of all time.

The performance in the closing ceremony was more lighter than the opening ceremony.

The host of the Summer Olympics has topped the count for gold medals, whilst the United States bagged the most number of medals.

Unfortunately for us Filipinos, we didn’t get any medals. However, even if our athletes returned to our homeland empty handed, we are still proud that they gave a hell of a fight. There should be no pinpointing of who’s fault and who’s to blame for the performance of our athletes. They compete hard and gave their very best . We are not just fortunate enough to win medals in this summer game. Maybe we’ll get lucky enough in 2012 in the UK!

The closing ceremony marked the start of London’s commitment as host for the 2012 Olympics.

Our recipe of the day is…

Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

• 4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 cups butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 (3.4 ounce) packages instant vanilla pudding mix
• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 4 cups semisweet chocolate chips
• 2 cups chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Sift together the flour and baking soda, set aside.
2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar. Beat in the instant pudding mix until blended. Stir in the eggs and vanilla. Blend in the flour mixture. Finally, stir in the chocolate chips and nuts. Drop cookies by rounded spoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets.
3. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes in the preheated oven. Edges should be golden brown.

colds, dry cough, swollen throat, fever, chills…what more can describe what I’m feeling now. If this is not flu, then what is it?

This feeling started last Monday, and it just started out as a sneeze. frequent sneeze to be exact. Then, I went to office to work, and suddenly, my throat hurts like hell, feels like a burning sensation..much like sandpaper was scratching inside of it. I shrugged it off, because I know for myself that my resistance was strong.

And now came Tuesday evening after I woke up, I didn’t felt much better. The colds was worse, my throat was really swollen and I couldn’t even speak. I tried my best calling out my supervisor to advise him that I cannot report to work because of my voice, and he advice me to come to the office and go to our clinic to be checked by our nurse.

I tried calling other supervisor to notify of my condition, and indeed, my prayers was answered. The other supervisor advised me to not go to the office and took a time off. It was a relief!

I tried taking some medicines for the cough, because I initially thought that this was a mere case of dry cough. That worked so far when I woke up the other day and I reported to work.

I went to our clinic to ask for some advice and medicine because I was chilling…and our nurse got the nerve to just say to me to double up my jacket without checking my temperature! What the f*ck!

If I only was rude, I would have shouted my lungs out to her that I am already not feeling well, and all she could offer was for me to wear another jacket! I don’t know where our company got this kind of medical staff to treat their hardworking employees.

Come Thursday after shift, the colds was really worse. Both of my nostrils was swamped and I can’t even breath. I am now taking medicines for the cough and colds. These didn’t helped actually, my voice were not in good condition, but instead of calling again my supervisor, I reported to work, because I know, deep inside my head that I will receive the same response from him.

I went to the office, and advised him of my condition and I went straight down to our clinic to have a checkup. Our nurse gave me some medicines for my throat, colds and cough. She also tried taking my temperature, and to my amazement, my temp only got 36 degrees, short of a measly 1 degree for it to be considered fever! I’m chilling inside and still my temperature didn’t showed it…well, I got one hell of a body resistance here hahaha!

So now, here I am, blogging my sickly experience here in front of computer, still staying in our office because my supervisor cannot let me go home and he is still thinking of what other work he wanted me to try because I cannot do what I’m supposed to do today…take calls…maybe he wanted me to just make him coffee just to be productive for Christ’s sake!