There is just one button to press to stop all traffic to cross the road in any direction.

There are more plans for scramble intersections in B.C. They are definitely a great idea since it makes crossing roads considerably safer for pedestrians.

Linus was quoting from Luke 2:8-14,

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men.

Amen. God bless you and your family this Christmas.

When the world was a smaller place, people travelled short distances to get their water. This water was typically from a well and the quality was high and rich in minerals. I recently discovered a web site call find a spring.com where I found a well, Levity Artesian Spring, just 23 minutes from my home.

I drove by this well many times and would have never thought of stopping there to get water. Its near a truck stop and there are no signs indicating that fresh, spring water is there (see below).

The findaspring.com page only gives an approximate location and its easy to miss it. If your on the wrong side of the highway, there is a bit of driving before you can get on the right side. You should be on the side going north. The spring is the B location on the map below, and the GPS coordinates are N 49.112125, W 122.906776. I recommend using a GPS to get here because the location is easy to miss especially when your driving a highway speeds. The truck stop is between highway #10 and 64th Ave. in Delta.

Once you find the truck stop, getting to the well is a little challenging. You need to go on small path to the train tracks and then through a chain link fence by a creek.

Once your across the tracks, you need to go through the fence. Make sure your not wearing nice clothing or shoes because its very muddy there.

Its a very nice and short walk through a forest to the well. I saw a few joggers so there must be a path that is common for hikers here.

Keep walking until you see the old building. You will see the well nearby.

The Levity Artesian Spring! Its a 12 inch high pipe with water spraying out near the top. I always thought a well should be a large hole in the ground with a bucket that you lower, but we get a pipe instead. There isn’t much room for collecting water so you should be using a small water jug.

I collected a small amount of water just to try it out. Once home, my family tried the water and it tasted great. The water did taste different from tap water and from water from my Brita filter.

Well water is among the healthiest water that you can drink. Do we really need this kind of water? In Richmond, BC, our water comes from lakes in the mountains and the water is the cleanest in the world, but the journey from the lake to my cup does add contaminants. This isn’t a problem when your cooking with it and if you filter it, minerals may be removed from it as well. Well water doesn’t have these problems, other than the trip to get it and the effort to collect it.

I recommend that you go to findaspring.com so you can find a well. You may be surprised by the quality of the water.

Richmond Country Farms hosts a pumpkin patch each year around this time. I see it each year, but this year I took my family there during a professional development day at school. The Richmond Country Farm is a great place to buy fruits and vegetables that are locally grown. They also offer organic produce which is local as well which is a better choice for healthy eating.

The pumpkin patch is open from October 9 to 31 and there is dedicated parking for it beside the farmer’s market. The entrance fee is $10 for adults and $5 for kids and they accept credit cards. You’ll get one bag per person to carry a pumpkin that you pick. I advise you to wear clothes that you don’t mind getting muddy and boots, of which I came with neither and left the farm very dirty.

Overall, it was a great experience and I’ll make it a tradition to go each year to a pumpkin patch.

You have to walk by a few animals before entering the gate and paying the entrance fee. I think that’s the sheep from the Real Player software. If you’ve never seen a lama close up, this is a great place to view one.

Homes for the farm animals.

The ducks have a place to live too.

Vegetables welcoming you at the entrance gate.

The bridge to the fun area.

This is the first time I’ve seen a corn and pumpkin dance.

Finally! The ride to the pumpkin patch, accompanied by singing and country music along the way.

The pumpkin princess and her castle.

One of the three pumpkin patches available. Its muddier than it looks.

Managing Content

A more serious issue that developed was that the designer was not readily available to make quick updates to the web site. Changes were submitted to them, and it typically took 1 or 2 weeks before they were implemented. Critical changes were done quickly but required a phone call to express the urgency in them. Most changes were minor which were not high on the list of priorities the designer had while working on other client’s jobs.

An outside designer also doesn’t really understand your business, and it can be difficult and time consuming defining requirements with them.

The main advantage to switching over to a CMS was that the printing company now had control over their web content. They no longer needed to submit changes to their web designer and wait before they get uploaded to their web site. New content and edited content are now made instantly by the employees and the quality of content is also improved because the employees can spot problems that an outside designer would miss.

Changing the Web Site Design

With Joomla, its very easy to change the appearance of the entire site or portions of it with a different template. In a static HTMl site, you would have to change every page when you made major changes to a web site. I remember spending 3 hours making changes to an old web site of mine even for minor editing. Document Web Templates (DWT) that major web development tools like Dreamweaver allow global changes to a web site, but if you change the template, you would either have to use the same name in the web page, or edit each page with the new template. This would still be a time consuming task that Joomla users wouldn’t have to deal with.

Buggy Web Sites

No matter how hard you try or how efficient your quality assurance is, there will almost always be bugs in your web site. When bugs were found, they weren’t always instantly fixed by the web developer. Using a CMS built by a large community, bugs are found fairly quickly and minor updates to software are released to make updates to web sites. Bugs in HTML sites may also never get fixed depending on the skill level of the web designer. A community driven application tends to be used more heavily so problems will be found and fixed.

Extending Functionality

Installing a widget on an HTML site means modifying every page, assuming that widget exists. If not, the web developer would be required to create or find it. There is a large library of extensions available for Joomla, and quite probably the largest of any CMS in use today. You should be able to find any extension that you need and even find things that you never thought of while browsing Joomla’s extension directory.

I installed a module to display local weather and a countdown clock for the 2010 Winter Olympics’ start date. Both were existing widgets that required minor work for use in Joomla, but implementing them here was much easier than doing it on their earlier HTML site.

Creating forms in Joomla take some effort, but I used its libraries to save form data to a database and perform other functions with it like sending notifications. All of this could be done in a static HTML site, but it would require writing all of this code yourself. I was able to use Joomla’s libraries in creating forms and other custom components.

SEO Friendly Web Pages

The URL a static HTML site can look like www.website.com/about.html. The same page in Joomla would look like www.website.com/about. While this is a simple example, a URL in an HTML site can become very long and have pages that don’t have meaningful names. In Joomla, you can control the name of the page that appears and can make it so that its relevant so that its optimized for search engines.

Metatags are also easier to edit in Joomla. Google ignored metatags, but other search engines may use them. This information can now be editing by the employees and adjusted during an SEO campaign.

The Verdict

The printing company is happier with the site now that its a CMS instead of static HTML pages. They have more control over the site and don’t have to rely on outside sources for changes. The site can grow with the company and new content can be created by people internally who actually understand the business they are in.

The first thing you need is a food processor, preferably a good one. I bought a small one for around $50 that is powerful enough to liquefy food. You can buy a food processor which costs hundreds of dollars, but a lower cost one will be sufficient for this task.

The next thing you need is almonds. The best ones are raw, unprocessed, and organic. Put the almonds in the food processor and blend in the highest setting. A powerful food processor will eventually extract the oil from the almonds and you’ll have a buttery spread. My $50 processor can’t do this, and can only crush the almonds into a course powder.

If your food processor isn’t powerful enough, you can add coconut oil and blend it. The almonds will stick together and you’ll have a crunchy almond butter. You can improve the taste by blending it with a sweetener such as Xylitol. This is a natural sweetener which looks and tastes like sugar, but doesn’t have the problems associated with it.

Adding organic and unsweetened cocoa powder will make a chocolate spread. All of these should be added with oil since the almond butter becomes difficult to mix after the oil is used. You need to experiment with quantities depending on your taste. The more oil you use, the less dry the butter will be.

The final product is a sweet, chocolate almond butter. Leave it in a container at room temperature to keep it soft, or store it in the refrigerator to make it hard for snacking like a fudge treat.

If you use organic ingredients and avoid processed sugars, the almond butter will be a health snack on its own or on a gluten free biscuit.

—

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all up hill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don’t give up, though the pace seems slow –
You might succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up
When he might have captured the victor’s cup.
And he learned too late, when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out –
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt –
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar;
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit –
It’s when things seem worst that you mustn’t quit.

In the image below, the numbers show what percentage of users on cyprich.com have browsers that can view a resolution (defined by the vertical and horizonal numbers as pixels). A web site can be viewed with this information in the Browser Size site.

80% of users can see the entire blog, which is a good number. I was thinking of making site much wider, but after using Google’s site, it would be best to keep it under 1000 pixels wide for the largest audience. It might be a good idea placing ads on the left side as opposed to the right side, since more people would see it.

Credits: Michelle Milla

When people say this, what they really may be trying to do is avoid learning anything new. New products tend to be different enough to warrant jumping on the learning curve to understand them. Change is scary, and being forced to do something different leads to unpredictable results which make people uncomfortable. So, keep the wheel the way it is and we’re all happy.

Businesses also don’t like people enhancing wheels. The reason: competition! Re-invented wheels may be better than the ones they produce, which may lead to potential customers buying the new product and not their own. One job of a sales rep is to keep people from considering other products, even if they’re better.

Innovation in science and technology is caused by people not satisfied with what they have now. The product doesn’t fully meet their needs and most businesses have their own ideas which direction to go without the input from their customers. It’s also difficult making major changes and enhancements to an existing product. Besides, we have not reached the limits of technology and there is almost always a better way to do things.

So wheels will keep being re-invented.