Do you remember movie from 1993 called “Demolition Man”? In the year 1996 a cop is frozen in a “Cryo Prison”. He is later released in the year 2032. He has been in suspended animation for about 36 years and hasn’t aged at all. You don’t have to be an advanced technology scientist to create a cryo-prison for your coffee. I’m sure your purpose it’s not to stop them from being violent, you simply want to taste a fresh cup of coffee even if the beans are one month old, right?

It has been always been commonly recommended to buy a one week supply of whole bean coffee at a time. But what if you can’t use up your whole bean coffee within one week? You can still keep it fresh. How? Freezing is a great way to preserve whole bean coffee. Below is a list of four helpful tips to guarantee your more-than-one-week-old coffee tastes as good as just-roasted-coffee.

1. Airtight. Use the smallest practical airtight canister. Top it with coffee to allow the least amount of air inside it. Wrap the coffee beans using zipper valve-lock freezer bags.
2. Don’t unthaw. Grind your precious coffee beans unthawed. Remember, moisture is one of coffee beans’ worst enemy. Thawing coffee beans causes condensation and gathers water on their surface. If beans are saturated with water they will loose flavor.
3. Never refreeze. Once your beans have been frozen and thawed (they shouldn’t have been unthawed in the first place), do not refreeze them. Refreezing coffee beans will make them wet and therefore stale.
4. Two months. How long can frozen coffee beans stay fresh? Frozen whole-bean coffee remain yummy for about one to two months. Some people claim they remain fresh even longer than that.

Hopefully, when you take the coffee beans out of the freezer, they won’t wake up to possess some kind of knitting or computer hacking skills.

Do you feel you are not getting enough kick out of your morning cup? Go for the Plenta (128 fl oz) size at Starbucks coming up this Fall. Just like the Starbucks website puts it “the Plenta delivers coffee lovers record amounts of the world’s finest coffee beverages”.

Worried about over-sized cups polluting the environment? Well, Starbucks even suggests additional uses for the Plenta size cup which include “popcorn receptacle, rain hat, perennial planter, lampshade or yoga block”.

Check out the complete Starbucks blog entry for more information and photos: Starbucks Listens to Customer Request for More Sizes.

V Season 1, Episode 2: There Is No Normal Anymore

Visitor: This was nothing less than a complete abrogation of our agreement.
Decker: Abrogation? Nice. You have one of those word-a-day calendars?
Visitor: We’ll be looking for a journalist who knows better than to bite the hand that feeds him.

Abrogation means revoking conditions of a contract or, in a more casual context, to put an end to.

FlashForward Season 1, Episode 13: Blowback

Mark: Why were you so adamant when you started talking about D. Gibbons?
Lloyd (in his FlashForward): The man you call D. Gibbons lied to you.
Loyd (back in present day): I don’t know, I don’t know him.
Mark: I didn’t ask you if you knew him. I asked, why were you so adamant?

As an adjective it means “too hard to break” and can used to describe someone who is “resistant to reason” or “not giving way to persuasion”.

Some friends and I were discussing Lost on a private Buzz thread. Then Shannon posted her prediction for the finale.

Shannon:

There will be a final battle between everyone – the survivors, the others, the smoke thing. Everyone will suffer a violent, gruesome death. The island will then implode into itself and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Hurley will somehow manage to float away and watch the whole thing, and just say, “Dude. That sucked.”

The End.

Blank Google Voice Gadget

To make it work (at least for now), just add an “s” to “http://www.google.com/ig” on the Address Bar of your browser, like this: “https://www.google.com/ig”

Google Voice Gadget

One of the best ways to redirect search engines and Website visitors to a new Webpage location is by using 301 redirects. You can configure Apache with the Redirect directive to redirect traffic from an old url to a new one. The Redirect directive takes several arguments

• redirect code
• original URL location
• destination URL

You can set the status as a numeric HTTP code. HTTP code 301 represents a permanent change.

By using 301 Redirects you will let the search engines know that this is a new, permanent location and you might keep your search engine ranking. Keep in mind that any changes to your Website navigation structure can negatively influence your search engine rankings.

Create a new .htaccess or in your current .htaccess file.

To redirect a specific URL to a new URL

Redirect 301 /news/iphone http://mynewdomain.com/tech-news/iphone

To redirect everything from your original domain name to a new domain name.

Redirect 301 / http://mynewdomain.com

Upload the .htaccess file to your server. Make sure do include the dot on the filename “.htaccess”

The mysqldump command is simple. I never forgot it’s basic syntax.

mysqldump -u username -p dbname > dbbackup.sql

The reason why I never did is because the first time I tried it on a Windows XP machine, I logged in to MySQL prompt and tried to run the mysqldump command. It took me a couple hours to find out that I didn’t need to login to MySQL before running the command. I was just supposed to go to the MySQL bin directory and run the executable command.

Anyways, I suppose you are not making the same mistake because you are already getting the frustrating “Access is denied” error. Why?

Well, one of the differences between XP and Windows Vista you may have noticed first is that Vista keeps on asking for your permission when you try to do certain tasks. “Windows needs your permission to continue”.

Seems that Vista doesn’t let you create new files using the Command Prompt. So it’s a Windows error rather than a MySQL error.

So here is what you do: specify you are an Administrator for Vista by right-clicking the Command Prompt icon and select “Run as administrator” from the menu. That’s it. Navigate to the MySQL bin directory, run the mysqldump command and it should work.

Click the following link to see a live example of a PHP cookies-enabled check.

We will check if cookies are enabled by following these steps:

• Define a cookie
• Reload the page
• Check if the cookie we just defined is still there

Sounds plain and simple, right? It is! So, how do we express these 3 steps in code?

Steps 1 and 2: Define a cookie and reload the page

I’m going to explain steps 1 and 2 together so you understand how we use the $_GET['redirected'] variable included in the script.

if(!isset($_GET['redirected'])) {
    setcookie ('mycookie', 'test', time() + 60);
    header('location:'.$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'].'?redirected=1');
}

First, confirm that the page hasn’t been redirected already by checking if the $_GET['redirected'] variable is set. If the $_GET['redirected'] variable hasn’t been set, then the page will reload and set the $_GET['redirected'] variable on the query string. Just be careful not to create an endless loop of page redirection.

Before you output anything from your script, you should define the cookie. setcookie() defines a cookie named “mycookie” with value of “test” and the cookie is set to expire in sixty seconds or one minute. We set the cookie to expire in one minute because after we check if cookies are enabled or not we won’t longer need the cookie.

Step 3: Check if the cookie we just defined is still there

$cookie_message = '';
if(isset($_GET['redirected']) and $_GET['redirected']==1) {
    if(!isset($_COOKIE['mycookie'])) {
        $cookie_message = '
Cookies are NOT enabled on your browser. In order for us to process your request, we require cookies to be enabled. Please configure your browser to allow cookies.

';
    }
    else {
        $cookie_message = '
Cookies are enabled on your browser.

';
    }
}

Initialize the $cookie_message variable, which will be echoed later to let the user know if his/her browser accepts cookies.

Then, an if statement tests the $_GET['redirected'] variable to verify if the page has been reloaded. If the page has been reloaded, the next if/else statement checks if the $_COOKIE['mycookie'] variable exists and assigns a value to $cookie_message accordingly to be echoed later in the script.

This tutorial should help you get an overall idea of how to check if cookies are enabled. Customize the code to meet your needs. Don’t forget to include a cookies test script in all Web applications that handle cookies or sessions in some way.