Was reading Techcrunch this morning and saw the terrible news regarding the passing of Rob Williams. My thoughts go out to his family and friends. On top of this, I've been intently following the developing story of the four football players who were lost at sea (one rescued so far). I'm hoping for a good outcome there.
 
A friend of mine, Maurice, is an avid sailor and he suggested carrying an emergency homing GPS when embarking on any slightly adventurous trip. These things cost about $750-$1,000 but allow search and rescue teams to know exactly where you're at within a 50-75 foot radius, anywhere in the world. And Maurice definitely knows a thing or two about search and rescue - check out the video below.
 

I've been trying for a few weeks now to perfect a soft-boiled egg. Not much luck. I've tried a few boiling methods with mixed success. First was to bring the water to a boil, then drop the eggs in. Problem with this method was that I would often have the shells crack while boiling releasing the white cloud into the water (yuck). I then read about the method where you put the eggs in and then bring the water to a boil. Problem with that method was that I couldn't consistently get a timing on when to pull the eggs out for a soft boil. I finally settled on the method of bringing the water to a boil with the eggs in from the beginning. Once the water started a roiling boil, I'd remove it from heat and then wait a few minutes before peeling. It took me a few tries but I finally got it to the point where I got a great soft-boiled egg. Here's my steps with photos:
 
1. Put eggs in water with a little sea salt. Turn heat to medium high.
2. Once water first reaches the roiling boil, turn off the heat.
3. After 2 minutes, pour out the hot water and run the eggs under cold water. Then drain the cold water and peel.
4. Here you see the peeled product (with a nice latte). As you can see, the outer yolk is solid but not cooked through. I don't like the really soft-boiled eggs where the yolk is completely raw. Have to work on my peeling technique though. Took more egg white off than I wanted.
5. Just bit into the yolk. Still soft on the inside but nicely encapsulated by a thin layer of cooked yolk!
 
Practice makes perfect. Gotta get it to the right point where the peeling of the eggs is easy. Supposedly, I have to time the peeling so there is a tiny layer of steam between the shell and the egg white which makes peeling a snap.

Last month, I wrote a post about California's absurdly high unemployment rate (9.3%). Today, news is released that the unemployment rate is now up to 10.1%. I guess my hope that last month was the bottom was wrong. Another thing wrong was my calculation of how many people were actually unemployed. I originally said 3.5 million Californians were out of work (9.3% multiplied by the population of California or 35M). However, it seems the EDD calculated the number for January as 1.7M and the number for February as 1.8M. What I should have done was multiplied the unemployment rate not by the total population but by the labor force. Still, 1.7M and 1.8M people not working is a huge number.

This is a great video. Created by Jonathan Jarvis and on his website www.crisisofcredit.com. Check it out and send him a donation!

By the way, I just finally figured out how to embed tags within my post via the subject line.  Also, gotta give much props to Posterous for making embedding video so easy.  I just put the URL of the Vimeo video in the email body and bam, there it goes.  Used to take me a while to embed YouTube videos just right when I tried blogging on my own platform.

Exercise has remained the same. Definitely not eating properly. Not that it has anything to do with my weight but just started taking fish oil pills. Omega 3 whatever. Supposed to be good for my ticker.