The commercial was met with mixed criticism from viewers. Some found the happy golden dancing people and their intentionally obnoxious singing so annoying that they associated the Folgers brand with that annoyance rather than the intended way to get around it. Others met the commercial with optimism and found the song humorous and memorable. Each chorus was met with an increase of volume and the commercial song even featured a bridge with a rising key-change: both musical qualities emphasize the rising sun rays getting stronger and more invasive. It’s a beautiful example of music-psychology.

As for the video, imagine Ned Flanders dancing around, playing the kazoo in a blond wig, basking in morning sunlight as the Sun’s rays force through the curtains of Homer’s window. It’s quite frankly what every parent with young children have to face on a daily basis.

Sadly, the http://toleratemornings.com/ website and all its goodness is no more, and it doesn’t ever last on YouTube for more than a few months before being removed. I think Folgers insistence of wiping the commercial from existence on all the video boards shows some backward thinking. After all, this is a commercial that they payed television stations to air and these fans are posting it up on the internet for people to watch without Folgers having to pay another dime. It’s a good commercial and they should have made more. Maybe showing the ramifications of a dry dessert that can be overcome by the dark brown richness from a hot cup of Folgers coffee.

Well… here are the lyrics to the best of my knowledge:

[Think Jimmy Durante]
Hah cha cha chahhh
Hah cha cha chahhh

Hello World, we’re shining so bright.
A new day’s here, it’s really dynamite.
Feel the love. Savor the door.
There’s a rainbow for each girl and boy.

On this [clap clap] happy morning! (Rise and shine!)
[clap clap] happy morning! (We’re doin’ fine!)
Get up, get out of bed. You can sleep when you are dead.

Partied hard; stayed up real late.
It’s time for work and you can hardly wait.
Scrub-a-dub-dub. Doodily-doo.
Spread the sunshine inside of you.

‘Cause it’s a [clap clap] happy morning! (Happy day!)
[clap clap] happy morning! (It’s nice today!)
Wake up you sleepy head. You can sleep when you are dead …

You can sleep when you are … [very bad Yamaha recorder instrumental]

La la la laaa
La la la laaa

[key change - rises like the sun]

Chahhhhh! Happy morning. (Rise and shine!)
Happy morning. (It’s wake-up time!)
Wake up you sleepy head, you can sleep when you are …
[clap clap]
Happy morning. (Happy day!)
Happy morning. (Feel right today!)
Wake up you sleepy head … [fade]

I enjoyed the song so much that I made it into a ringtone (or more appropriately, a wake-up alarm on my iPhone). The audio had to be stripped out of the commercial then carefully amplified and cut to produce the result. Audacity was used for the editing. I can’t remember what was used to pull the audio out of the video file.

Happy Morning Short Edit.m4r for the iPhone.

happy_morning_short_edit.mp3 for other devices.

This year I’ve already canned a delicious apple-orange jelly. Apples tend to have so much pectin in them that only a little acidic fruit is needed to make them congeal. Of course, that tends to make the jelly juice a little bitter. A generous 2.25 cups of sugar for each 2.33 cups of juice makes the jelly sweet and preserves the jelly for up to two years after canning. (The sugar acts as an anti-bacterial agent. It’s yeast that likes sugar, not bacteria.)

Making jelly involves a two-step cooking process. The first step is cooking raw fruit to draw out their juices. The juices are then strained into a pot. The second step involves adding sugar and sometimes pectin to the juice then cooking it for an additional period to set the jelly. After this comes the canning stage.

The following form is used to calculate the number of cups of juice within a cylindrical container based on the inner dimensions of that container. This is helpful for jelly making when juice has been strained into a pot for the second stage. If you know the ratio of sugar to juice, it can calculate the number of cups of sugar to add, too.

Open the Popup Jelly Making Sugar Calculator

Next time I’m going to use an industrial juicer to draw out that delicious golden liquid from the apples. I figure it will take less time initially, but I’ll need to heat it up a little longer in the second stage to kill the enzymes that are usually killed in the first stage.

Enzymes are a primary cause for the break-down of fruit after it’s dead. If you don’t kill those proteins before canning the jelly, your product would only last a few weeks at best.

Oh – and that apple-orange jelly recipe?

Software
• 3 lb cooking apples
• 3 medium or 2 large oranges
• 5 cups of water
• approximately 5 1/2 cups of sugar

Hardware
• Juice Bag or a Stainless-Steel Chinois Set or a 2′ Square of Clean, Never-dyed, Prewashed, Coarse Cotton Muslin with Butchers Twine
• Cheesecloth and Butchers Twine (optional)
• 4 qt Stainless-Steel Pot or Larger To heat The Fruit And Jelly
• 2 qt Glass bowl or 2 qt Measuring Cup or 2+ qt Pot/Pan To Capture Juice
• 8 16-oz Canning Jars With Lids and Rims To Keep The Jelly
• Canner with Jar Rack To Preserve The Jelly
• Canning Kit With Thongs To Keep From Burning Your Fingers
• Wooden Spoon To Stir The Juice Since Wood Doesn’t Change The Jelly’s Temperature
• Slotted Stainless-Steel Spoon To Scoop Off The Tart Scum
• Paring Knife To Cut The Fruit
• A Refrigerated Saucer To Test The Jelly
• Clean Towels And a Very Clean Counter

You want a large wooden spoon since it doesn’t change the temperature of your jelly mixture. Making jelly is akin to making candy. Sudden drops in temperature can cause nasty results. If you’re making this at high altitudes, like I do, make sure you boil your jars an extra 6 minutes and watch your jelly very carefully. It will burn and make a nasty mess if you’re not careful. Watch your barometric pressure, too. I’m not joking. If there’s a storm coming in, do your jelly making another day. At sea level, watching the weather and adding time to sterilizing your jars and making the jelly isn’t necessary.

Peeling and coring the apples helps them break down faster, but keep the peels and the cores, as they add to the pectin. Chop, but don’t peel, the oranges. If you want to have an easier time straining the fruit, tie up the the peels and seeds in a cheesecloth before you toss it in the pot with the rest of the fruit. After all the fruit is chopped up and prepared, put all the chunks in a large pot and add the water. Bring this up to a rapid boil then turn it down to a heavy simmer for about an hour. If the pot is uncovered, you might want to add an additional 1/4 cup of water to offset the evaporation.

While the fruit is boiling, prepare your straining method. Pour boiling hot water over the jelly straining bag, chinois, or Muslin. If you’re using the muslin cloth, get some twine ready to tie the pulp into a ball and find some place to hang it where juice will drip into your juice-holding vessel.

After about an hour the apples should be practically disintegrated. If not, squish them with your slotted or wooden spoon. (Temperature is more important in the next phase, so it doesn’t matter if the liquid in the pot cools a few degrees while you’re squishing the fruit.) Take out the cheesecloth if you did that and carefully pour the juicy pulp into the bag/chinois/muslin while the device is over your 2-quart bowl/pan. Set it up so that the dripping can occur overnight. Now get some sleep and dream of warm home-made buttermilk biscuits coated with dripping butter and delicious apple-orange jelly.

At this point you should have about 5 cups of juice, but you need to know exactly. Calculate the diameter of your juice-holding vessel. Now calculate how high the juice is in that vessel and type some numbers into the calculator. Also put in 2.25 for the sugar and 2.33 for the juice ratios. The calculator will tell you how much sugar to add. Don’t skimp or you’ll be sorry.

Get out your canner. Fill it with water set it to boiling on the stove-top. Once the water is at a hard boil, carefully insert clean jars for them to sterilize over the course of 12-18 minutes. Sterilize the rims, too, but not the lids until the last 2-5 minutes because they have a wax seal that needs delicate treatment. Set out your sterilized jars, lids and rims on a clean towel drawn over the counter but keep the canner boiling. You’ll need it again in about 15 minutes.

Pour the sugar in the 4-qt pot and put it in the oven at 170 degrees for 15 minutes. Warming the sugar will help it dissolve. Now pour the juice into the pot containing the warmed sugar and place it on the stove-top. Start stirring and turn the burner on high to bring this to a rapid boil. You must dissolve all the sugar and you want to do so as quickly as possible to keep it from burning. This is where you’ll use that long-handled wooden spoon. Now stir like a madman!

Once the sugar is well dissolved, stop stirring and watch. This next step takes about 10 minutes but is vital to the success of your jelly. If it starts to over-boil, turn down the heat only slightly and gently stir the mixture with the wooden spoon, but only if you have to. It’s better not to stir this at all.

You’ll see some foam on the top that looks like a dreamsicle. This foam needs to be scraped off the top of the jelly, but you can save it in a bowl for making tarts later as it makes a fantastic tart filling. Carefully spoon this foam (sometimes called scum) from the top of the pot into a bowl. It’s okay to use a metal spoon at the top of the jelly, just not inside. Keep scooping out that froth until all you see in the pot is a clear amber color.

Now test to see if the jelly has set. Spoon a little of the jelly onto a cold saucer. Wait a few seconds then push with your finger. If it clumps in front of your finger, it’s ready. The harder it clumps or ripples, the harder the jelly will set. For other ways to check if the jelly has set – consult Google.

Ladle out the hot golden jelly into jars, wipe off the rims, gently place the lids over the top
and lightly tighten the rims. Don’t tighten them too hard or the canning process won’t create the vacuum seal.

Place the jelly-filled, gently-lidded jars in the canner for 8-14 minutes. You should see small bubbles come up from the jars. This is normal and good. The air pressure inside the jars is building up as heat causes it to expand. This pressure will counter that of the water in the canner to keep the jars free of seepage.

Once time is up, pull out the jars and set them on the counter. Don’t tighten the rings just yet. In time you’ll hear metal popping. That’s the beautiful sound of vacuum pressure sealing and protecting your jelly for up to two years. If the lid doesn’t do this the jelly must be stored in the fridge and consumed within the next few weeks.

An hour after pulling the jars from the canner, tighten the rims and decorate with labels and ribbon. Hey – I might be a man, but I’ve got to make things pretty for the ladies!

When I was young I just wanted to make stuff for the pleasure of it. When I got older I was told that wasn’t a way to make a living.

I disagree. God made things for a living so I guess those people’s attempts to civilize me into a common worker bee never quite stuck because of my higher childlike “ideals”.

My parents were pretty good with supporting me through it. Mom is an excellent painter and Dad is a great musician. They weren’t like the other grown ups who usually attended school board council meetings. That is, they weren’t looking for a way to build a society – just looking for a way to raise great kids.

If more people took up their personal responsibility to raise their kids instead of handing their kids off to the village (idiots) to raise them, I think they would discover that children are important… they’re a joy… they bring back those squishy playdough, colored in fingerpaint, bruised knees from playing in the rocks moments. That imagination is never really lost – not completely, anyway – it’s just suppressed. And like a good expectorant, when you have kids that creativity just spits right back up!

Enjoy the free cave and art textures:
Cave Textures
Art Textures

I’m cheap. If someone offers a good free product, it draws more attention than a paid one. Below are some free audio book resources online. All legal. All public domain.

The Human-Read audio books at Project Gutenberg contains a series of LibriVox recordings. What sets LibriVox apart is it’s community oriented style. People record themselves reading a chapter of a book then submit it. Though most books appear to be read by the same person, there are times that different chapters are read by different people throughout the experience.

I try to avoid the automated text to speech processes. The old ones were horrific and sounded more like a 1980′s TI-99. The newer ones sound like they recorded a person speaking a few hundred words then vicariously cut and pasted the audio. Although an improvement, it lacks the tonal inflection and emotion that makes story listening a pleasurable experience.

Of course, the best way to get enjoyable audio from a good book is to have a loved one read it. I read to my children almost every night and even record a few books for times when I’m away on business. Reading becomes interactive as the children start asking questions and adding their own commentary. It gives me insight to their likes and dislikes and provides the benefit of reminiscing over childrens’ books that have been long forgotten from my own youth.

The IT Crowd Ringtone.
It’s the free remix track offered by Painting By Numbers trimmed down to fit and converted to be read as an iPhone ringtone. Certainly it would have been nice to keep the full 47 second hum-dinger, but Apple forces some limits on this no matter what the file size.

Originally, I wanted to make a ringtone that would loop nicely – and did, but it didn’t start off where I wanted it to. Besides, who lets their phone ring for more than 30 seconds?

So I opted to just trim out the middle – you get the start and the finish. It’s like a bologna sandwich without the bologna!

The IT Crowd (remix for ringtones).m4r

For those who can play regular mp3s as ringtones, we’ve got you covered:
The IT Crowd remix ringtone.mp3

High altitude is great for crisp dry air, beautiful winter snow and alpine flowers. It is not good for baking, candy making or jelly making. I nearly fumbled the jelly this year by trying to follow the recipe. I don’t see any high-altitude directions, so assumed there weren’t any major differences. How wrong I was!

Trying to get the pectin, fruit juice and sugar to set at 220 Fahrenheit is next to impossible. Why? Water at this altitude boils at 200 degrees, not 212. By the time you reach 220 degrees you’ve well over burned your jelly or candy. That means the jelly-set temperature is closer to 207 degrees, adjusted for percentage – not geometric difference. For those higher in altitude than the mile-high city, I suggest you start testing your jelly around 206 degrees on a frozen saucer(freeze a few saucers for multiple tests).

Barometric pressure also plays a factor. It changes widely and quickly in the mountains and can really mess up your candies and jellies if not watched after.

A candy maker told me that in this area you have to watch the weather for a solid clear sky and check for storm patterns when making your candies or they won’t come out.

Chocolate and fudge is a little more forgiving. Still, I’ve even had some crystallized fudge from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory before so even well seasoned candy makers can have their off-days.

So how did the black raspberry — red currant jelly come out? Much of the water boiled out leaving a very thick, very hard set, very strong jelly. Not burned, thank goodness, but it almost did.

It’s as black and dense as midnight though clear as a jewel and spreads on a deep, rich, royal purple. It would probably do better spooned out and diluted to be served as a syrup because of its intense raspberry flavor, but still goes well with the hearty flavor of hearty-grained or strong buttermilk breads. It probably wouldn’t do well on water crackers.

I had another interesting and fun basic geometric math problem to solve while making the jelly. The recipe calls for 2.25 cups of sugar for every 2.5 cups of juice after straining. All the juice had been strained in the pot it would be made in and I didn’t want to make a mess of the dark juice. I remembered that you could convert metric volume into liters – that, after all, is the definition of a liter. Liters could be converted into cups, which could then be multiplied by the ratio of sugar to juice for the correct amount of sugar without ever needing to pour the juice out of the pot.

The diameter of the pot is 24cm. The depth of the juice was 2.6cm. ( pi*(24/2)^2 ) * 2.6 is roughly 1176.212 milliliters or 1.176212 liters. There are 4.22675282 cups in a liter. That ends up being roughly 5 cups of juice, which means 4.5 cups of sugar was needed. It was a perfect example of my math teacher saying “You may want to do this someday…” becoming true.

Fantastic jelly, geeky math fun, and a story to tell. What more could you want to do with your evening … other than sharing a piece of jelly emblazoned toast with your inspiring wife?

Most results when searching for freebies online take you to participation businesses. You sign up for 9 credit cards (along with your soul) and they (just might) give you an iPod. I’ve been instructed to be wary of such ventures.

Fortunately, there is a site which tracks down the old fashioned freebie forms, though most forms require eMail these days. Absurdly Cool Freebie Finder provides a list of sites where you generally enter in a short form and wait for the goods to roll in. Just like the good ol’ days.

It’s even cheaper than the $39 Experiment since you don’t spend money on postage, though Tom Locke gets double-snaps for his humor and creativity. Someday I’ll do the same with my children to teach them the value of humor and not being afraid to ask.

What makes Absurdly Cool Freebie Finder really stand apart is that it has a mixture of free Christian resources side by side with fizzy bath tablets, McGruff (the Crime Dog) Trading Cards and a Monkey Brains (oatmeal) goodies bag. Fun stuff for kids, useful stuff for families.

Read the instructions on each site for privacy policies and restrictions. For example, there’s a limit of one Monkey Brains Goody bag per household, but each child’s name may be submitted for the McGruff trading cards.

Have Fun!

Lately I’ve been on a paper-craft kick. When I was younger, it had to be solid square sheet origami. Sometimes, however, you’ve got to cut paper into funny shapes and glue them together… take a look at the Millennium Falcon!

I finished working on the TIE-Fighter. If you plan to do the same, make sure you print the wing sheet 4 times. This will provide you with the pieces the inside and outside of each wing.

Go Build Your Own!
SF PaperCraftGallery

Take “The Fly” for instance. The original movie with Vincent Price had a dark sepia-like quality to it. By sepia-like quality I’m referring to the dark, rich dripping feel that the characters (most notably from Vincent) brought. It may not have been film-noir, but it felt similar. It also had distinctive rights and wrongs put in situations where grey decisions had to be made and the overall plot was focused on the question of where the soul lies. At what point, when a man is part beast, does the soul no longer exist? It also had some underpinning ideas on mercy killing, love, death and the macabre. Grey.

The more recent remake with Jeff Goldblum also had a dark quality to it, but it was more in the lighting and effects. Some camera angles also presented the overbearing nature of beastly instinct over the meek and gentle scientist. It was a much more classic and less sophisticated “Frankenstein” story. Science goes out of control and trying to act like God comes at a mortal price. In my opinion it was more gore than plot, though still fun in its own right.

Well – it turns out that our friends over at archive.org have been accumulating some very good full-length feature films over the years. Although neither version of “The Fly” is available in public domain, there are still some fantastic gems and some notable clods are available for our enjoyment. It only costs the resources to download and burn to DVD.

Note for techno-phobes: Some of these titles you’ll recognize on the WalMart discount $2 DVD shelf. That $2 gets you $0.20 in packaging and DVD and saves you the hassle of downloading and burning it yourself.

• Rodger Corman’s “The Little Shop of Horrors” starring Jack Nicholson in his film debut.
• Stanley Kramer’s “Cyrano De Bergerac” starring Jose Ferrer.
• Dozens of Charlie Chaplain’s works including the iconic film “The Tramp“
• Howard Hank’s “His Girl Friday” starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
• H. Bruce Humberstone’s “Happy Go Lucky” starring David Niven, Vera-Ellen and Cesar Romero
• Gregory La Cava’s Frank-Capra-Like film “My Man Godfrey“.
• Even Nicholas Webster’s notoriously bad “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians“… It’s so terrible, it’s funny.

There are over 1300 to choose from. Obviously, there’s no way to go through all of them in any reasonable amount of time, so I suggest you browse through and search for topics, genres and actors you like and try those first.

Flickr is amazing. It’s API is moderately impressive, too. I thought: “What if I could go through all the tags of all my favorite photos up on flickr, ordered them by popularity, then did a search for photos that matched the top X tags in that list?”

I expected to discover some incredible art that would be right in line with what I already enjoyed. BTW – what is it that I enjoyed?

First, I discovered that flickr can only handle searches up to 20 tags. Any more than that and you get back zip – zilch – nada. Doesn’t matter if any photo in their database actually contains all 21 tags – you get nothing back.

Second, I discovered that some people out there have over 150 tags on the photos of which only 2 tags might apply. As a result, when searching by relevance you get these over-tagged photos in the list along with the worthy ones.

Blame the upload tools. They don’t ask the user to tag each photo, but rather to list out all the tags used for the batch of photos being uploaded. Non-savvy users might batch upload a photograph of a donkey and another of a stop sign. Given only one box for all photos to list their tags they would enter something that places stop-sign related tags on the donkey and vice-versa.

All the same – try the tool out, it actually does a shot-gun result of what I hoped for. Try sorting by “interestingness, descending” for the most polished works first, then try the others for works that are “sleepers” (fantastic photos that are uploaded while people are dozing off, and therefore rarely discovered).

Not Yet Flickr Favorites