We just got a letter from Freedom Financial Partners. I thought it was a routine “Do we have a new loan for you!” letter, and I tossed it. But my wife had seen it first and was worried that it said our house was in jeopardy due to a loan default.

So I fished it out of the recycling, and sure enough, she was right – the letter did say that.

OK – first, some background info on the wonderful Freedom Financial. Their website seems to be here. Note the link to the BBB. I’m really not a big fan of the BBB. As a business owner myself, I feel like they extort a yearly fee in exchange for a good review of your business. But click the Freedom Financial BBB link. Nada. No reviews. But they link there. Pathetic.

Next, the ways to contact them. On their website, they have a comcast.net email address. On the letter, it’s a gmail address. For a company with a domain name and a website, this seems a bit strange. Is it operated on public computers where they need webmail?

As for physical location, their area code (724) puts them in Pennsylvania. But their BBB info puts them in Utah. Their whois info is hidden. You guys really know how to gain the trust of your customers.

Here’s the key line from the letter: If none of this is true, I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you by sending this letter. Wow. So if you’ve scared perfectly mortgage-paying homeowners into wasting their time, and possibly calling you, you’re sorry. Even in Stockton, California (with its 10% foreclosure rate – reportedly the highest in the country) you’d only be right up to 10% of the time, so you’d be wrong 90% of the time. In the rest of the country, you’d be wrong 90%+ of the time. Truly pathetic.

Freedom Financial Partners: Please! Have some personal integrity! Do the right thing here! Does scaring people into contacting you ever work?

I just got back from Astro Camp in Idyllwild, California. I went as a chaperone on a class trip with my kids.

Everything you’ve heard about the food is true. Many had warned me, so I came prepared. I won’t harp on it too much except to say that you should get to the salad bar fast. Since the main courses are essentially inedible, you need to get to the very busy salad bar before you end up with lettuce in a soup of cold water and the dregs of the vegetables. Also, at breakfast, the fruit is at the salad bar station, and being largely untouched by the ‘cooks,’ it’s very popular and goes fast.

OK, now that that’s past I’ll move on to the great features of Astro Camp, namely, the classes.

As far as I understand the process, the school selects the classes or segments that the students will participate in during their stay. So I’m really not sure what else is out there, but I’ll give a rundown of what we did. As usual, our school’s amazing teachers really picked interesting, engaging activities for the students.

Soda Bottle Rocket Launch – Using a two liter bottle as the main body, we learned how to build on a nose cone out of clay, and cardboard fins. This activity was in part just a lot of fun, but was also a lesson in several aspects of physics and motion including how heavier objects move slower with the same amount of force and gravity (with calculations to determine the height of the rockets). In addition, this activity gave the more artistic kids a chance to build based on more unique ideas.

Zip Line – Really, all fun. 700 feet of zip line here. I was expecting some physics lesson, but it was just for sheer fun. Maybe there was a little bit of overcoming acrophobia on the platform, but otherwise, it was a blast.

Catwalk – Like the zip line in that it wasn’t about a science lesson, but this one took more nerve than the zip line. It also delivered a bigger sense of accomplishment to the kids. It’s amazing how a completely safe, controlled environment like this can still frighten. I didn’t get a chance to walk it (we ran out of time) but I was definitely a bit scared just looking up there. Some kids scrambled up and practically ran across. Others needed a little convincing and some couldn’t bring themselves to do it. But for those who needed convincing, they were ecstatic and full of pride when it was over.

Gases Class – A great lesson in physics from college, with all the good experiments in one class. We ate frozen potato chips from a liquid nitrogen bath, exploded hydrogen, imploded cans, and used vacuums to do crazy things to marshmallows and shaving cream. Oh – and the frozen balloon was completely surprising. This was a quick overview of the properties of gases in a way that challenge your imagination. Most of the kids will clearly need some more explanation of these events, although our excellent teacher Dave did have a way of describing the salient points with concision.

Beyond those classes, there was an underwater class demonstrating cooperation and non-verbal communication. There was a rock wall climb that relied on trivia facts for access. And there was a night hike complete with time at telescopes trained on amazing views. I’ll never forget the way I saw Saturn that night!

I’m not sure how Postini works from the algorithm level, but it doesn’t seem to do anything about two sets of emails, and I must be on the top of the least for each of them.

The first are emails with titles like “85% discount. Coupon #PqG1.” After I get a few thousand of these, won’t Postini figure this out? By the way, the body of these emails is usually something like “Dear michael, be intelligent, buy your meds from the best shop since 2000. ” So there isn’t even a hyperlink in there. I wonder how low of a response they’re looking for. Since they also spoofed the return address, I’d have to work really, really hard to patronize these guys.

Next, my next job as a Rebate Processor seems assured. I’ve got hundreds of offers here:

These all came in a row, but I’ve got many more. Will Postini catch on here?

Now, granted, I’m very happy with Postini. I came from SpamAssassin, and I really, really prefer Postini. But they must have tens or hundreds of thousands of these identical emails – I have over a thousand. So why am I seeing them? They weed out plenty of other garbage from my bulk mail – please get rid of these too!

We were looking for something quick, local, and mostly veggie for dinner, so my wife came up with the idea of takeout from Holy Cow (3rd and La Cienega – in the minimall with Mishima and Kiwiberry). I’m not the biggest fan of takeout; I like to sit and relax, and I don’t like soggy food from containers, so Indian works pretty well. I can sit and the food can sit and not get soggy. Good combo.

This was our first time at Holy Cow. We’ll definitely go again.

The woman taking the phone order was nice, helpful, and clear. Unfortunately, they were out of several items we wanted, but with a good attitude from the woman, we basically didn’t mind.

We ordered four veggie entrees, plus raita, which was fine but nothing special. Of the four dishes, the weakest, surprisingly, was the dal. I often think of dal as the cheese pizza or the mu shu pork of Indian food – the standard dish that every place serves with their own flavor, and that gives you an idea of the quality and the seasonings of the restaurant. It was a red-herring here. It just wasn’t that great. Having eaten a lot of dal at a lot of restaurants, I’m guessing that theirs changes nightly or at least from time to time, so it may be worth another shot.

The other dishes were, frankly, great. Even from takeout containers. The spinach with garbanzo beans (channa sag) had a very fresh flavor, having likely been made from fresh spinach. Next, the tofu masala was in a wonderful red masala sauce that was reminiscent of a really good pasta sauce, again, with fresh vegetables. And the star of the show was the bharta – and I’m not even really a big fan of eggplant. But this is as must-get.

The nan was, well, nan-like.

Close to home, good service, and fresh, good food. No question, we’ll be back.

Last night I went to Soot Bull Jeep for dinner. Hadn’t been for a while. Since it was a guys-night-out, we decided to go for the marinated squid – something that our wives would have objected to.

I’ve got to say, we eat pretty much everything, but when this plate landed on the table, we were pretty shocked:

I was expecting maybe a plateful of normal-sized squids, cut open, or rings, or something similar. But this was essentially a giant squid (not too huge, but not quite related to the calamari variety). If you ever get squid leg at a Japanese restaurant, you’ve seen part of this beast. It looked like an alien creature.

Anyway, we threw it on the grill and it started to look a bit more like food. 

Finally, the waiter came over with scissors and cut it up into pieces for us. In the end, actually, it was really good!

Long time readers will know that I just started this blog.

Since I installed this on my Mac Mini, I decided I needed a way to back up the SQL data. If this Mac fails, this blog is toast. Most of what follows applies to any Linux machine.

I wrote a pretty simple script to run the backup. If you want to do something similar, use Terminal on the host Mac (or you can login remotely, but that’s another story). Go to a directory where you keep scripts (maybe “/usr/sbin” – you can do that by typing cd /usr/sbin).

Then create a file named something like blogbackup.sh (to do that, type vi blogbackup.sh).

Then, since you’re in the editor vi, you’ll need to press “a” then paste the following, replacing password with your SQL password, and backup with your secondary hard drive (or replacing /Volumes/backup with a different location on your primary drive, but that defeats half the purpose . . .).

 #!/bin/sh
mysqldump --add-drop-table -ppassword wordpress | bzip2 -c > blog.bak.sql.bz2
cp blog.bak.sql.bz2 /Volumes/backup/blog.bak.sql.bz2

To save in vi, press ESC then :w then :q.

Set the permissions to be sure this will execute:

chmod 777 blogbackup.sh

chmod +x blogbackup.sh

(I confess to not being a chmod expert, so those commands might be overlapping.)

To test out the script, type: 

 ./blogbackup.sh

From there, you should set up a recurring crontab to take care of the job. I set mine up as the superuser so that it would run without interruption. To do that, you’ll need root access – that’s a whole different story. But once you have it, here’s what you do:

crontab -e

brings up the list of cron jobs. To add a new one, paste in a line like this:

10 2 * * * /usr/sbin/blogbackup.sh

That basically says at 2:10 AM, run that script everyday. Save and quit with :w then :q.

Making pasta at home is definitely time-consuming, but just as rewarding. The flavor and texture of the pasta can’t be beat, even by buying fresh pasta from a pasta store, in my opinion. Further, if you want to use quality, healthy ingredients (whole grain flour, organic eggs) you can. And then there’s the volcano aspect . . .

Here’s the (easy) list of ingredients:

Mound the flour on a clean surface and clear out a hole in the middle. Crack the eggs in the hole, add the salt and olive oil to the center, and start beating the egg with a fork. The edges of the volcano of flour will just work their way into the egg mixture. Once the mixture is pretty smooth, you might need to help the flour walls come in a little bit – just be careful to help from the highest peaks first. Once the fork isn’t really doing the trick, start kneading. After about five minutes of kneading, wrap the ball in plastic wrap and refrigerate for half an hour.

Using extra flour, roll out small chunks of the dough into large ovals about 1/4″ thick. Use a piece of dough about the size of a clementine, or a little larger, per oval. Use plenty of extra flour here to keep this from sticking.

Get out your trusty Imperia pasta machine. Roll the ovals through the bottom area starting at level 1 and going to levels 3 then 5, with about three passes through each size with each oval. If any weak spots or holes appear in the dough, just fold it over and keep rolling it through.

Then, flour the sheets again. Finally, you can roll them through the cutting areas, or cut the sheets manually to make other shapes. Tonight we made small rectangles, wet the middle, and folded them into bowties.

August 24th and August 25th at the Hollywood Bowl.

Tickets aren’t on sale yet. No more info on their site, but that’s where the ticket link will be, when it happens.