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This afternoon my wife had to work, so dinner was on me. She left me a bag of assorted frozen seafood we bought at Woodman's in Kenosha defrosting in the sink. What to do, what to do... I had a half a vadalia onion left over in the fridge. Image via Wikipedia One yellow bell pepper. One heaping teaspoon of chopped garlic ( from the jar ). One heaping teaspoon of ginger paste. One large tomato. Two heaping teaspoons of lemon grass ( from the jar ). 1/2 Can drained garbanzo ( chickpeas ) beans. 1 15oz can chicken broth . 1 15oz can coconut milk . 2 cans ( use one of the others you emptied ) water. 4 chicken bullion cubes. 1/2 teaspoon red chili pepper . 1 teaspoon ground coriander. 6 green cardomom seeds. 1/2 stick cinnamon. 1 teaspoon yellow curry. 1 teaspoon fish sauce . 2 teaspoons ghee . 2 tablespoons olive oil . Salt to taste. Holy crap, that's allot of ingredients. In large'ish pot, add ghee and oil (oil keeps ghee from burning...it tolerates higher heat). Add cho...

Recently I wrote a post about my search for a TIFF iFilter that would enable me to use VBScript to query a Windows Indexing Services server for file management. I found that since OCR is never always 100% accurate, neither were my attempts at sorting all the inbound EMR faxes we get each day. I did however, find Tesseract , a great product that was originally developed by HP and proprietary, and is now developed by Google and licensed under the Apache License v2, open source . It is one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. It is quite basic, and in the version you obtain from the project page , it only operates from the command line, and without the libtiff library, will only do it's work on un-compressed TIFFs. More information can be found on the project pages , and Wikipedia . Doing some scouring, I aso found a front-end , and ArchivistaBox, a complete document management system . Image via Wikipedia I'm using it in Windows, so I needed to do one of...

My wife, son and I recently took a trip to St Louis , to visit her Mom and Dad. We always have a good time, but don't look forward to the drive, as it takes 7 hours or so one way from 'lil old SE Wisconsin . Image via Wikipedia Thankfully, she looked into an older style of travel for our most recent trip to visit G'ma and G'pa; Amtrak . The cost is not much more than it is to drive. Fuel costs driving our mini-van is usually about $120, not to mention the fuel my son expends attempting to break out of his car seat ... The cost for our train ride was $188 with tax. Our son rode for 1/2 price since he is only 3. The trip took nearly the same amount of time, and we could ALL nap on the way down. We were able to bring a small cooler with lunch, play for a couple of hours in the dining car ( coloring books , puzzles, etc.) The only complaint I will lodge is customer service is a bit lacking. Our initial inquiries indicated we had the ability to check a bag, but foun...