Happy Pumpkin Wednesday! Tips to Prolong Your Laptop's Life

Hello all and Happy Pumpkin Wednesday!  You are halfway through the work week, and only two days until the weekend!

While we are working during the day, Pumpkin spends some time resting and lounging,

I like to start the day by realxing

Eating,

Then Noms, so essential

Exercising/Jumping in and Out of Cardboard Boxes,

Jump in, Jump Out, Repeat.

and exploring the interwebs for things to blog about on her weekly post

What, no Wikipedia?

Pumpkin spends so much time on the laptop researching for the blog that she is very aware of how to best keep my laptop in tip top shape.

To make sure that she can use my computer without causing too many problems, she adheres to a few rules:

1. To maximize the battery life of the laptop, Pumpkin always unplugs the power cord once the battery reaches 100% charge.  Your laptop battery becomes weaker the more it charges and discharges, and keeping it plugged into the wall keeps your battery in a state of constant charge/recharge. 
2. Pumpkin keeps her fur out of the keyboard by cleaning it often.  Using a can of compressed air, she can clean between the keys without having to the keys off (paws make tasks like that difficult.) 
3. Pumpkin remembers to use the laptop on a hard surface, not on the couch or on the bed.  When you put the computer on a soft surface, it blocks the ventilation and cooling system for your laptop.
4. Just like with cell phone and smart phone screens as discussed in an earlier post here, you want to use designated computer screen wipes to clean your laptop screen.  Don't grab your household cleaners because they contain additional chemicals that can destroy parts of your screen.
5. Pumpkin knows better (don't make her tell you the story about how she ruined my first laptop) than to have any liquids around the computer.  Many warranties do not cover water damage, and even if you are an awesome liar, it's likely that your computer repair company will know when something has been damaged by water versus dropped or just broken.

How have you extended the life of your computer/laptop?

Looking forward to a lovely Thursday!

Miscellaneous Monday: Welcome Back, Welcome Back, Welcome Back

Hello friends!  I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and have been nicely welcomed in 2012!

In an attempt to keep this blog from becoming all about my cat, I'm going to work on bringing you more helpful tips and recipes in 2012...


This week I'll  start with a newsworthy item.  This morning, Zappos announced that hackers compromised the security of the website and the personal information of millions of its customers.  Luckily, there was no breach of the part of the website that stores credit card and financial information.

Photo by: Andres Rueda Used pursuant to creative commons license. 

Mulitple news articles are reminding you savvy online shoppers to take the time to make multiple, complex passwords on all sites where you input credit card information.  The danger with a hack at Zappos, is that your password information, if the same across multiple sites, could lead a hacker to easily determine your passwords and financial information at other sites.

Lock up your personal information with a high quality password

You can protect yourself by making a more complicated password.  One easy way to get a random password is to use a "pass phrase."  The pass phrase is a sentence you make up, and then you take the first letter of each word in that sentence to use as your password.  For example:  I was a law student and i drank too much coffee, becomes "iwalsaidtmc."  To the outside observer, its a completely nonsensical group of letters, but to you, an easy to remember phrase and a tough to guess password.

If you want to find out how tough a password is to guess, head to "How Secure is My Password" and give a password a test.  The phrase I just entered above would take 169 days to hack.  Add in a few numbers and symbols and you are in a good position to protect yourself online.  Just to complete the conspiracy theory, don't enter your real passwords on the site (who knows where it goes after all).



For all those times you aren't shopping online, or making up new passwords, you might be trying to come up with new recipes.  I did some traveling over New Years, and although it's not very thrifty, I always pick up a few magazines in the airport.  The latest issue of Cooking Light has 25 chicken recipes, something that is welcome in our house, where we eat a lot of bird.

One recipe I tried last week was the Mustard and Maple Glazed chicken.  It's a quick and easy recipe and although I don't have pictures, I can say it is delicious:

Who doesn't love syrup?  Photo by rasdourian under creative commons license.

Ingredients:

2 teaspoons olive oil

4 skinless boneless chicken breast halves

freshly ground black pepper

salt

1/4 cup low sodium chicken broth

1/4 cup maple syrup

2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme

3 medium garlic cloves, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

2 tablespoons stone ground mustard

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

2.  Heat a large oven ready skillet and add the oil to coat the pan.  Season the chicken breasts on both sides with salt and pepper and place them in the hot pan.  Cook the chicken until browned, about 2 minutes each side.

3.  Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside.  Add the chicken broth, syrup, thyme and garlic to the pan, and bring to a boil.  Scrape the pan to loosen any of the browned bits from the chicken.  Cook the syrup mixture for about 2 minutes, stirring frequently (syrup can burn!).  Add the vinegar and mustard and cook for one more minute, stirring constantly.

4.  Put the chicken back in the pan and spoon the mustard mixture over the chicken.  Place the skillet in the oven for 10 minutes or until the chciekn is done.  Remove the chicken from the pan and let stand 5 minutes.

5.  Be careful when grabbing the hot pan, but put the pan with the juices back on the stove.  Cook the mustard syrup mixture for 2 minutes or until it is syrupy.  Serve the sauce over the chicken.


What recipes are you adding to your rotation?  Have you changed your password so it's not your pet's name?

Looking forward to a lovely Tuesday!