2nd Place is not bad eitther...

Second Place

Great Lefse Story
Submitted by Roberta Scot

This is a photo of Dawn Crawford (left) and Roberta Scott (right) who have been friends since college days. We began our annual lefse making get togethers many years ago, as both are from Scandinavian backgrounds. We both live near Boise, Idaho and Dawn's Mother is in Ohio. Tradition has it we were always trying to duplicate the lefse we grew up with. Each year Dawn sends a batch of our lefse efforts to her Mother. The first few years our lefse was thick, hard or rubbery with black spots! Initially her mother wondered what it was between the layers of wax paper, but eventually it began to look and taste more and more like lefse! We began by using a cast iron skillet and regular rolling pin with whipped (using beaters) potatoes. Boy - have we evolved over the years!! We added the pastry cloth and rolling pin (Roberta is always the roller) and then the lefse sticks. Dawn has always been the one cooking. Dawn gave Roberta a lefse griddle for Christmas and with all the right tools we are now making delectible lefse! The funny part is year before last (photo above) was the year to try out the new lefse griddle. We also borrowed a German made heavy duty ricer from my friend Carla. I followed a recipe that came with the griddle and riced the potatoes. The dough was just creamy, soft and wonderful!! When Dawn showed up at my home to begin cooking our lefse, she showed up in near matching outfit to Roberta! How funny! We both had on green courderoy pants and black shirts! With 'dualing lefse sticks' we present out photograph that represents a wonderful, long friendship with memories of annual lefse get togethers. Wherever we end up living in the future, I will always take my lefse griddle and head to Dawn's before Christmas to continue this tradition! Last year's lefse was nearly perfect to our childhood memories. Dawn's Mother got her annual batch as usual and now recognizes the improvements that actually looks and tastes like real lefse!! The correct tools and years of practice, along with a fond friendship, makes the finest lefse!

Lefse Contest Winner

First Place

You want lefse?
Submitted by Cordell Haugen

Growing up in a Norwegian immigrant family in Northern Minnesota, lefse was always an important ingredient in our lives. Not the small little lefse rounds that are now available in markets and popular with people of all backgrounds who know good food when they taste it, but the big ones that my grandmother used to make. It was in the early 1940s, during World War II, and visits to my paternal grandmother were major outings. Gasoline and other rationed items were in such short supply, that no one went far, or often. Grandma lived on a small farm about seven miles from the little town where we had lived since my father lost our farm during the Great Depression, before I was born. Grandpa had died in 1903, when my father was only eight years old, and Grandma was really a link with the past. Her English was limited to a few phrases, only those most necessary to the hard life to which she had become accustomed.

The one I remember most was 'You want lefse?' Yes, she had that sing-song 'brogue' that people make fun of today when they joke about Minnesota Norwegians. But to us it was like the voice of an angel. When she asked that question, she was singing our song. My brother Jim and I were the youngest in the family, and we were always less frightened of our grandma with her stern countenance when she made such an offer. We would nod our reply and wait for a sign. She would almost smile, then point to the bedroom, which opened off of the living room. It was our cue.

We'd run the few steps to her bedroom, lift the spread and from under the old frame bed, we would slide out a huge box that kept the treasure. It was cold in there, far from the only stove in the home, and clearly the best place to store the staple. She didn't have an ice box. We would open the box and there, between sheets of wax paper, were dozens of huge lefse, folded once into half-rounds each about 20-22 inches across.

From her seat next to the old wood stove, on top of which she baked these gems, came Grandma's voice again. 'One,' she said firmly. 'One,' she would repeat in a voice as stern and commanding as her facial expression.

We would each take one, cover the top layer again with the wax paper, and fold closed the dish towel made from a flour sack. We'd close up the box and timidly find our way back to the kitchen, where our mother had butter and sugar ready to finish up our treat.

If we ate the whole thing, Grandma would wait for what seemed forever, then ask 'You want lefse? And we'd repeat the exercise. Usually, two was all we could eat ... two each, that is. But, if we were really hungry and she thought we could handle a third, the exercise was repeated. By then, you could see a smile of pleasure on her face.

She knew the way to our hearts. She never hugged us; never kissed us; never told us that she loved us. But we knew. If she didn't love us, why would she have treated to her lefse?

XRX

Editors note: A request for an open mind from a reliable source. - JoeNovell


XRX: Simple, Elegant, Disruptive
listen
Friday May 23, 2008 5:43AM
by Dan McCreary in Articles

XRX is a new web development architecture that is a milestone in elegant simplicity. XRX stands for:
XForms on the client
REST interfaces
and XQuery on the server
Because XRX uses a single model for data (XML) it avoids the translation complexity of other architectures. The simplicity and elegance of XRX allows developers to focus on other value-added features of web application development and enables non-programmers to create a rich web interaction experience without the need to use procedural programming languages.
Our Request: An Open Mind
Before you begin …take a deep breath. Some of the thoughts expressed in this article may be unsettling, especially for those of you, like me, who have invested years into the learning of procedural programming languages like Java and JavaScript. Those skills may become obsolete if trends, predicted in this article, happen.
This begins a series of articles to describe how one can become an early adopter of this innovative technology. As organizations become more aware, the ability to quickly build rich-client web applications will spread beyond programmers to less technical audiences thus empowering a new class of web application developers. As you proceed, we ask you keep an open mind about how emerging technology will affect IT as well as business end-users.
Use Case for Real Estate Forms
For the last five years, developers have queried their peers “Can we create rich web applications using only XML technologies.” In January 2007, Kurt Cagle encouraged me to use XForms with an open source native XML database/web-server called eXist. EXist developers selected an innovative architecture where every XQuery is directly callable from a REST interface which is exactly what XForms applications need to directly send and receive data to the database. Kurt’s suggestion came at a very opportune time. I was working on a project with real-estate transactions that had many associated complex real-estate forms. Traditional methods required approximately 40 inserts into separate tables within a relational database. The use of XForms and eXist resulted in one line of XQuery code:
store(collection, file, data)
That was it. Simple. Elegant.
I was hooked. After spending over 20 years building applications with a variety of procedural languages I found my preferred architecture. I have seen the power of XForms and eXist and can’t conceive of returning to my procedural programming ways. It is my hope, that I can convey to you my excitement about this architecture.
This is not the first time an attempt to use a non-translation architecture has been made. In the late ’90s tens of millions of dollars funded object-oriented database initiatives with the hope that objects on fat-clients or middle tiers could be stored a queried without translation. However, for all the promises that object-oriented databases made, they lacked standard interfaces and query languages. Further, IT strategists could not overcome their proprietary system lock-in fear. As web-clients expanded, object-oriented databases soon became niche products for specific industries.
It has only in the last year that the combination of XForms, REST and XQuery has piqued interest of application architects trying to optimize software development lifecycles. XRX promises to not only change the role of the software developer but also the role of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Business Analysts.
Proof of Architecture: FireFox and eXist
XForms, REST, and XQuery has matured in an environment that not dominated by a single vendor or product. XRX did not originate in the labs of Silicon Valley which seems to favor traditional brute-force procedural languages like Java and JavaScript. It was rather, championed by a group international software developer’s lead by German, Wolfgang Meier.
This collaboration of developers from IBM, Xerox, Novell and other organizations started by building an impressive XForms extension to FireFox. As people combined these disparate systems with REST interfaces, the overall architectural benefits began to emerge. One should not think that XRX is a mature technology. To date, there are no fully integrated development environments for XRX model and due to vendor and browser support issues; integrated development tools will be slow in coming. However, if you believe that superior application architecture will trump vendor-locking strategies, you should closely examine XRX, even in its current form.
XRX represents the confluence of mature declarative client architecture in XForms and the ability of persistence engines to easily store and query XML datasets. The term declarative identifies XForms as a set of XML elements that tell a client “what” the functionality of an interface is, and leaves the “how” to a standardized software system. With XRX, a single line of XML can declare your desired functionality and allows graphical tools to manipulate these blocks of code resulting in non-programmer tools.
The Translation Pain Chain
To understand the elegant simplicity of XRX, look at the problem of English language translation. Select any passage from any book and enter it into a translation program such as Google Translate. Perform a translation from English to Spanish and from Spanish to German. Then reverse the process by translating the German to Spanish and the Spanish back to the original English. The result will have little resemblance to the original text and will require manual cleanup.
Here is a roundtrip for-step translation using Google Translate of the Gettysburg Address from English to Spanish to German to Spanish and back into English:
Score six fifty-six years ago our fathers came to this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the idea that all men are created equal.
We are now in the midst of a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We have mounted a major battlefield in this war. We have come to dedicate a portion of this area and as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is entirely appropriate and proper that we should do this.
But in a broader sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate, we can not on this sacred ground. The brave men, living and dead, have fought enshrined here, far above our poor power to add or subtract. The World little note nor long remember what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It gives us life and that is not a case pending struggled here, have so far progressed so noble. Rather us to be here dedicated to the great task before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause was, during the last full devotion that we here highly resolve that these deaths are not in vain - that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people and for the people not perish from the earth.
Now compare this process with what web application developers are doing today in a three-tier stack using Java or .Net systems. Each time one writes a web application using standard HTML forms, those key-value pairs in the form must be converted to a set of middle tier objects using an object-oriented language. When the objects are in memory they are translated from the object type libraries to a set of tabular data streams that use the database type libraries and then inserted into the correct order in one or more relational database tables. When a user wants to view or update the data, he/she must gather the data from all of the tables, put it into objects and then translate back to a set of attribute-value pairs and displayed in a web form.
The Disruptive Change of Elegant Simplicity
If you have studied advanced math and physics, you are mostly likely familiar with Maxwell’s Equations. James Clerk Maxwell discovered four simple elegant mathematical equations to describe the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Prior to Maxwell’s discovery, the fields of electricity and magnetism were considered separate where each used disparate complex mathematics to show their relationship. Maxwell demonstrated that by looking at problems from a new perspective that many pages of equations can be represented in four simple and elegant equations that can be printed on a T-shirts in a science museum gift shop.
We believe that XRX will do for web development what Maxwells equations did for the study of electricity and magnetism. Briefly stated:
XForms+REST+XQuery = XRX = High ROI for Web Developers
XRX gives developers the luxury of using the same data selection language (XPath) on both the client and server. The same expressions can be used in your MVC bind on the client and in Schematron data validation rules on the server. This however, is not the motivation for migrating to XRX. Declarative techniques that use XML structures tend to accelerate the creation of domain-specific languages (DSLs). DSLs are easier to manage with forms and graphical user interfaces which makes them more useable by SME’s and BA’s. XRX is the front runner in the declarative revolution and the forces empowering non-programmers. This is not to say that XRX will not have opposition. Vendors selling operating-specific client APIs or SQL products will resist XRX technologies for the foreseeable future. An entire community of AJAX developers has grown up around the lack of declarative technologies in our browsers. But in the long term these opponents will be required to compete against a simpler and superior architecture. Future articles will explore the hidden benefits of the XRX architecture and the challenges XRX presents to large-scale application developers.
Summary
In the past, the ability to create rich-client web applications was limited to small groups of highly trained and motivated application developers proficient in procedural scripting languages. XRX and declarative programming will expand this community to include a much larger audience, and with it a shift in power will occur. However, in most organizations this will occur only if IT leadership is interested in empowering business units to solve technically challenging problems and create high-quality user experiences. XRX evangelists are needed to break down the walls between IT and the business. We hope this and future articles will be useful as a tool and as a guide for the faithful.

Cerf and JoeNovell

EDITORS NOTE: "Vint Cerf Supports Municipal Broadband Networks"
by Nancy Gohring
IDG News Service

Generated a lot of interest here at LinuxViews as we have a similar belief system. Read on and discover the similarities of Cerf and JoeNovell - EDITOR
Friday, May 09, 2008 5:10 PM PDT
Municipal broadband networks could help boost the availability of high-speed Internet access and even help to ensure Net neutrality in the U.S., said Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google.

Cerf, known as one of the fathers of the Internet for his role in creating its basic architecture, spoke at a lunch in Seattle, a city that is investigating the possibility of building its own broadband network. Seattle would follow its southern neighbor Tacoma, which has been operating its own fiber network for several years.

Cerf disputed arguments that operators sometimes give for why they should be able to limit or block bandwidth-hungry applications on their networks, and suggested that since they don't have technology facts to back up their arguments, people should be able to build their own networks to meet their needs.

"Many people raise the issue that video use on the Net is somehow going to drive it into congestion," he said. While in certain scenarios that could be true, the reality is that increasing the throughput solves the problem, he said.

A person could transfer an hour's worth of video over a gigabit channel in about 16 seconds, he said. That means that rather than streaming video, which is indeed taxing on the Internet, users would download it instead. "It's much easier on the network, and people have more than enough storage to download," he said.

Some operators also talk about the capacity of the Internet backbone itself. "As for running out of capacity, we've barely touched the surface of the fiber capacity. We are far from having exhausted this capacity," he said.

Operators may simply not want to invest in their networks to bring higher bandwidth to users, he said. "That comes back to the municipal argument. Citizens that want the capacity should be able to decide among themselves to put the resources in place to get that kind of capacity," he said.

Some operators contend that municipal networks create competition between the government and private companies. "That's nonsense," Cerf said. Governments would contract with the private sector to build the network and maybe even operate it, he said, so the two would be partners. In Tacoma the city maintains the network, but other companies serve as ISPs (Internet service providers), selling access to end-users.

Cerf's comments come as a new bill was introduced by lawmakers in the U.S. this week that would subject broadband providers to antitrust violations if they block or slow Internet traffic. Some lawmakers and operators argue that such legislation is unnecessary and would slow investment in broadband networks. The bill follows discussions across the industry and by government leaders around practices at Comcast, which says it has slowed some customer access to the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol during times of network congestion.

Cerf has been a vocal opponent of operators that limit access to certain applications. "I still think it's not a bad idea to have legislation that says don't discriminate unfairly simply because you happen to have control over this shared resource," he said on Friday.

Liberals Fail to Understand Bush's Speech

As a JC supporter of Lee Atwater and his conservative support of Ronald Wilson Reagan, it was especially rewarding to hear President Bush’s fairly veiled attack against Senators Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their liberal friends in front of Israel’s Parliament. In a speech honoring Israel’s 60th anniversary, President Bush likened those who call for talks with “terrorists and radicals” to those who appeased the Nazis.

“We have an obligation to call this what it is,” he declared, “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” "There are few words more fraught than “appeasement” and no place where they carry more emotional weight than in Israel."

So, here at LinuxViews we will refrain from talking about Obama's big ears. his mother, his grandmother, his church, his father, his terrorist friends, his schooling, his patriotism, his lapel pin (or lack of...) and drug use as we await further instructions in this area of taboo indexing from our patriotic friends in the liberal press.

What is next from this crowd?

Most Enjoyable Lunch

Spencer Hall

He will always invite you to sit in a flashy, fast and turbo'ed automobile when you receive the lunch appointment (Spencer does NOT drive cars). ABOUT the PHOTO: This, is the view from the passenger side of any of the rides I have had with young Spencer. My feet were always looking for a brake or clutch petal to help him slow down. As I recall, I have experienced this ride many many times and in three different vehicles.

Trust me me. Spencer Hall takes you to the "Best Lunch Ever!". See how the plastic Jesus hangs on?

If you employ Spencer, please, give him more time for lunch, please?

Email from San Diego

A lecturer when explaining stress management to an audience,
Raised a glass of water and asked
"How heavy is this glass of water?"

Answers called out ranged from 200g to 500g.

The lecturer replied, "The absolute weight doesn't matter.
It depends on how long you try to hold it.

If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem.

If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm.

If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance.

In each case, it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes."

He continued,

"And that's the way it is with stress management.
If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later,
As the burden becomes increasingly heavy,

We won't be able to carry on. "

"As with the glass of water,

You have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again.

When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden."

"So, before you return home tonight, put the burden of work down.

Don't carry it home.

You can pick it up tomorrow.

Whatever burdens you're carrying now,

Let them down for a moment if you can."

So, my friend, Put down anything that may be a burden to you right now.

Don't pick it up again until after you've rested a while

Here are some great ways of dealing with the burdens of life:

Accept that some days you're the pigeon,
And some days you're the statue.

* Always keep your words soft and sweet,
Just in case you have to eat them.

* Always read stuff that will make you look good
If you die in the middle of it.

* Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be
Recalled by their maker.

* If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.

* If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again,
It was probably worth it.

* It may be that your sole purpose in l ife is simply be kind to others.

* Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time,
Because then you won't have a leg to stand on.

* Nobody cares if you can't dance well.
Just get up and dance.

* Since it's the early worm that gets eaten by the bird, sleep late.

* The second mouse gets the cheese.

When everything's coming your way,
You're in the wrong lane.

* Birthdays are good for you.
The more you have, the longer you live.

* You may be only one person in the world,
But you may also be the world to one person.

* Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.

* We could learn a lot from crayons..... Some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull. Some have weird names, and all are different colors, but they all have to live in the same box.


*A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Have an awesome day and know that someone has thought about you today...I did.

When I started the research on "Marblehead" I began here...

From the New York Times, this calf is named, "Timeless" and it marked the end of 122 years of stock yard.

Click here.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/us/20080414_LAND_FEATURE/index.html

Oscar Malm was mayor if the nearly new town of South Saint Paul in 1900. His tenure preceded his marriage to Hazel Gilbert of Chicago by just 2 years. I have a receipt for his dining room table and dinner silver totalling 3.20 USD and an agreement to pay the merchant .15 cents a month for the agreed to balance. In addition to treasure like grandma Hazel's prayer book, I found a newspaper article tucked into that palm sized volumn. The article chronicled her marriage and the 'street car ride' to the South Saint Paul reception in 1903. My great-uncles (all five of the Malm boys and a horse named, "Molly") were instrumental in the building of South Saint Paul and directly my 'Holmgren' family spanning the states of Minnesota, Florida, California, Colorado and Arizona.

Hundreds of families are linked to these stockyards and there subsequent impact to red meat eating mammals. Oscar worked in these stock yards most of his life and provided me my own deep love of 'football' with his gift of a leather football helmet and the positive stories of his own football challenges circa 1920.

Change never killed anyone.

JoeNovell

Pay Taxes and have a brew....

This is an article from the Rueters News Service that caught my eye. I love the timely subject matter as I complete bottling operations of my latest batch and marshall the collection of California employment resources for the pending tax event. - Joe Novell

By Marcy Nicholson

HOBOKEN, New Jersey (Reuters) - The sounds of the Rolling Stones pour from the speakers while beer glasses are filled and a jovial game of darts takes place 10 feet away. It's just another night at the office for Carmine Sodora, certified public accountant.

Sodora founded Tavern Tax in 2005. For 10 weeks leading up to the April 15 deadline to submit U.S. income tax returns, he brings his tax-filing services to bars on weekday nights and weekend afternoons. He didn't know of anyone else offering such a service.

"I always say to people, 'Where's your beer? I can't have one but you can,'" Sodora said.
Although this year he has focused on Hoboken -- a small New Jersey city across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and home to 53 bars and a young population -- he has worked out of New York City bars in the past.

"I was looking to expand my personal tax business. It's primarily to go after a demographic -- yuppies," the 30-year-old said, referring to young urban professionals. "I've seen a 75 percent repeat, year after year."

At an Irish pub on Wednesday night, Sodora set up shop under a "Tavern Tax" sign with a fold-up table covered with a framed photo of laughing friends, his laptop and a lamp.

One by one, clients relaxed in the chair across from him, handing over documents and sipping on beer.

"It's more relaxed. Everyone hates to do their taxes," said Hoboken resident Juliet Murphy, 32. "If you can combine it with something you like, it numbs the tax pain."