A Possible Cure for Celiac??

Trials are currently underway for a possible cure for celiac disease!

http://www.celiac.com/articles/23034/1/Celiac-Disease-Vaccine-Enters-Phase-1-Clinical-Trials-in-US/Page1.html

My Ongoing List of Gluten-Free Foods

I started accumulating a list of restaurant menu items, candies, and retail items that are gluten-free.  Google Docs and my Android phone make it really easy to quickly reference the document when I'm trying to find something to eat from a single place rather than having to navigate all the different web sites.  I decided to share this document in case anyone else finds it useful.  Obviously, there are no guarantees it is completely up-to-date, but I will attempt to validate and continually add new items.

Stephen's Ongoing List of Gluten-Free Foods

A New Frontier: Celiac and Gluten-Free

Since being diagnosed with celiac disease by biopsy on July 31, 2012, I've been attempting to eat gluten-free.  It hasn't been ridiculously difficult, although there have been a few times I almost decided not to eat lunch simply because I was unsure of what I could eat.  Bread isn't the worst part - I can live without that.  Cookies, cake, pizza, etc. have been the toughest things to avoid.  Eating at restaurants can be a pain as well since you never know what's in the stuff you're eating.  I'm quickly discovering people at restaurants have no idea what it really means when you say you need to avoid gluten.  For example, I ordered something just the other day and the waitress seemed to understand when I said I had to avoid gluten so I needed to leave off the gravy, but then she brought my plate out with a roll on it.

I'm going to attempt to find organize the celiac and gluten-free resources (e.g. URLs, Twitter feeds, etc.) on this blog in case others are attempting to local similar information.  If nothing else, I'll at least have things organized for myself if and when I need to find it again in the future.

New Google Image Search

At the time of the post, Facebook has close to (or maybe even has reached) 700 million users.  Before too many more years Google will be able to index the pictures of most humans that have access to some form of electronic communication and the rest will likely be tagged in at least one Facebook photo that someone else posts.  With the new Google Image Search (now available from browsers @ images.google.com), the FBI and all your ex-girl/boyfriends will be able to find out what you are up to.  Well, maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but I thought it would be fun to drop in my own picture and see what would come up.  It (as expected) was able to find this blog - no real surprise.  However, more interestingly the "visually similar images" section at the bottom of the search results made me realize I am really a female in my mid-20s from the Philippines!

I guess I better go for now.  I have to go ask my Mom what she has been holding back from me and make an appointment with my therapist.

Managing Your Social Presence

There are so many different social sites to share information (blogs, facebook, twitter, buzz, etc.), but it's really a pain to update them all with things you think others may care about.  There are also different audiences that may care about different types of information.  I've personally settled on three information channels - blog, twitter, and facebook:

1. My facebook friends are mainly people I went to school with and likely don't care much about software, cell phones, techie articles, etc.  I don't post often to facebook, but when I do it's something pretty casual and more personal.
2. Twitter on the other hand has become one of my primary news sources.  It's also where I interact with people I usually don't know and I post more technical topics or just things I find interesting.  Also, it's a great avenue to post my little 140 character comment or reaffirm something someone has posted (the infamous retweet).
3. Lastly, my blog is more of an information capturing mechanism where I write about what's on my mind so I can go back later and remember what I found/did.  It's basically the "dumping ground" for something interesting I've found and think others may care to read.  It takes more thought and time to post on the blog so it's usually something that's left an impression or I think could be helpful.

Now the question is how to manage the different sources.  Currently (no doubt this could change anytime), my approach is this:

1. Use TweetDeck on Android to post to twitter, facebook, or both when applicable.  It's as easy as selecting one or both in the app.
2. I subscribe to RSS feeds using Google Reader.  This is where I get a lot of funny and techie/cell phone related information.  When I find an article I like, I simply click "share".
3. I use Google's Blogspot for my blog which has widgets to automatically show my shared content from Google Reader and my tweets.  I add those widgets to my blog and never really think about it again.

To tie everything together I use Twitterfeed.  It monitors the RSS feed of my Google Reader shared items and posts them to twitter.  It also monitors my blog and posts that to twitter.  If you like, Twitterfeed can post to the same (or a subset) to facebook.  I'm not very active on facebook and since those folks probably don't care so much about the latest cell phone update, I personally haven't hooked facebook into Twitterfeed but it's easy to do.

I know it sounds a little confusing, but in reality it's not that complicated.  I use a couple of main information sources and can easily share across one or all of the main social sites without even thinking about it.

Processing Credit Cards on Android with Square

I downloaded the Square app from the Android market (free).  The cool thing about this app is it allows you to process credit card transactions on your Android phone (iPhone and iPad versions available too). The even cooler part... when you login to the squareup.com site on a PC and fill out all the information, they send a free "square" that plugs into the phone's headphone jack and reads the magnetic strip on a swiped credit card!
The square app has email receipts with the transaction location and map on the receipt along with an optional picture of your choosing. Rates are on a per transaction basis and reasonable especially since there are no fees for hardware, software, separate merchant account, etc.
My "square" is on the way and will hopefully be here in a few days. I'll post an update when I've tried it out.

UPDATE:  The Square came in the mail in just a few days.  It fits very nicely in the headphone jack and works great.  I also associated my checking account online.  They made two small deposits and one withdrawal (the sum of the two deposits).  I entered those in my account setup to validate the associated checking account and now I'm free to process credit cards and receive the money in my bank account.  I can see this coming in handy for people in service industries (e.g. onsite computer support, wrecker drivers, etc.) or, more likely for me, at a yard sale when the interested buyer just doesn't have enough cash to buy that old couch.  Great idea by the Square Inc. guys and I hope to you use it more soon.

Tweetdeck for Android

I had downloaded TweetDeck from the Android market once before but didn't keep it.  To be completely honest, I'm not sure why I uninstalled.  I saw a new post the other day about a recent update and decided to give it another shot.  Also, there is a Chrome app that I downloaded.  Since TweetDeck can check twitter and Facebook, I got rid of my current Tweetcaster and Facebook widgets on my Android phone and switched over to the single TweetDeck widget.  Now the experiment begins to see if one widget updating runs the battery down as much as the two widgets updating separately.  It took me a while to get the whole "column" concept in TweetDeck, but I'm starting to like it.  For example, it allows one to search for something on twitter and make that a column which will also update on an interval.  That's not to mention the whole combined list of showing everything from twitter, Facebook, Buzz, and Foursquare together with different color-coded backgrounds for the particular message source.  The widget needs work.  Would be great to have a full-screen widget that scrolls the column without having to go into the actual application.

I did have some problems with the Chrome app though.  I thought (right or wrong) that logging in to TweetDeck and creating "columns" would also show up the same way on my mobile phone.  Maybe it will but I  haven't played enough with it.  Also, it appears the Chrome app doesn't save the changes across logins. I'm sure this is a bug or something since that's got to be the intent for the single, separate login with TweetDeck.

I'm going to play more and I'll post what I ultimately decide.  Right now I'm more than moderately impressed.

UPDATE:  Really liking the Android version of TweetDeck.  Again, not sure about the Chrome browser app nor the synchronize option in the Android app, but very nice on the battery, eliminates the need for multiple apps, LOVE the column feature for searches/etc.  However, I did hear that Tweetcaster is releasing an update in the next day or so.  I'll definitely have to check that out, but TweetDeck has an upper hand by nicely combining multiple social sites.

My New Roku

I purchased a Roku XD for my bedroom and am loving it!  In addition to the large selection of channels in the Roku Channel Store there are lots of private channels out there that I can add (here's just one Roku channel list I found... there are many others).  So far it looks great and the network setup was very simple.  I received a $20 coupon from Amazon which made my Roku XD only $59.99.

One thing I'm really interested in taking a look at is Roksbox which is supposed to give me the ability to play my own movies, videos, music, pictures, etc.  I also signed up for the developer site, but have not explored the Roku SDK yet.

The New (to me) Cool Thing

I finally broke down and bought a Blu Ray player.  I have been hearing all the hype about streaming Netflix and, like probably half the U.S. population, I have used Netflix in the past to get DVDs.  I did the whole Slingbox thing a long time ago but haven't done much with streaming content since then other than playing with Orb  (when it was free and young) on my smartphone.  I have to say I am very amazed at what Netflix has done with streaming media.  If it were up to me I would never use another DVD again.  It is a great service with some content limits right now, but it really is pretty amazing.  Obviously there are licensing issues to work out to get more recent content for streaming, but I have read Netflix is working on that.  Wonder service and I cannot wait to get it on my Android device.  Let's hope that's soon!!  I'm tempted to buy a Roku XD for the bedroom, too.

Web Developer Tools

I found some pretty cool tools for web developers.  If you are interested in what your web app is doing, where it is spending its time, areas for improvement, etc., take a look at the following...

1. Firebug
2. Page Speed
3. YSlow
4. HttpWatch [Update]

Page Speed and YSlow need Firebug (a Firefox plugin) to work.  Firebug is very impressive with all the details it provides and ability to inspect and alter the page.  Both Page Speed and YSlow give a type of rating for a page and offer advice for areas of improvement.

I'm not sure which one I like best, but no doubt Firebug is pretty amazing.  I took a look at msfast which is a tool born out of Myspace.  I couldn't find enough information about it and usage docs were almost non-existent so I decided to give up and pursue the others mentioned above.

I'll post with an update when I find which one provides the best information based on what I'm trying to do at the moment.

Update:  I actually went with all of them, but Firebug and HttpWatch helped the most for what I was doing.  A plus about HttpWatch... it works on IE (even though I don't like IE, but I really needed to use it for this exercise if possible) and it also works on Firefox.