Daily Archives: August 5, 2007

Thoughts

Technorati’s new photo message

Logged into my Technorati account late last week to check my profile settings, and guess what I saw on my photo page? Granted, the message wasn’t for me, it was for every Technorati user, but I thought it was hilarious nonetheless:

For the benefit of those of you that can’t see the image above, let me quote the text:

“Tip: Please favor us with a photo that doesn’t depict your very special but also very private parts. We have to hunt down and quarantine those, and that’s bad for everyone.”

I guess they’re having problems with nasty people posting nasty pics of themselves, or else they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of warning users. That’s pretty sad — to know there are people out there with absolutely no sense of decency and self-control. Zooomr had a huge problem with this last year, in Mark II. You could browse its full photo stream — all public photos posted by users, as they posted them, and I did that a lot to discover great photographs. While I found plenty of great photographs that I faved, I also found plenty of pornographic images.

At any rate, that stuff was pretty nasty, and I spent plenty of time emailing Kris and Tom with specific links, and they would dutifully either make those photos private or remove them altogether. Flickr has the same problem, and that’s why they’re rating accounts as Safe, Moderate or Unsafe, which I think is a better approach than Zooomr’s — Kris and Tom are still stuck doing manual removals, even though they promised they’d introduce a feature to allow users to flag questionable photos.

My rantings aside, I thought Technorati’s approach was pretty funny, and I’m glad to see more companies do their part to make sure the nasties don’t get to poison everyone’s good time on the web with their filth.

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How To

The best tomatoes are homegrown

You can go to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, MOM’s, Safeway, Giant, Publix — you name it — and buy the most expensive tomatoes, but they’ll still taste just as flat as the cheapest ones you’ll find. I don’t care if they’re organic, hydroponic, vine-ripened or whatever — they still have no taste.

It’s a fact of life in America. I don’t know what our farmers do to their fruits and vegetables, but nothing tastes good when you buy it from the store. Most stuff tastes like cardboard, and if you’re lucky, it might have a semblance, a sad little ghost of the taste of the real thing. I call it the great American taste theft. It doesn’t matter if the stuff is cheap or expensive, it still tastes like crap. While I expect the cheap stuff to taste like that, I find it offensive and downright thieving to charge $3-7 dollars for a pound of tomatoes that tastes just like the ones that cost $1-2 dollars. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you haven’t gotten around much.

Our families have always grown their own vegetables, even when they lived in cities. Now that Ligia and I are on our own, and we’ve only got a terrace, we still grow a few vegetables, mostly tomatoes, every year. Let me tell you that there’s a world of difference between the tomatoes you grow at home and the ones you buy at the store. The ones over there might look better, cosmetically-speaking, but the ones you grow with your own love and care, without pesticides or fertilizers, are the ones that will blow you away every time you taste them. They may have a few blemishes, they may not be as big or pretty as the ones in the store (you know, the ones full of hormones and all sorts of crap that’s not good for you) but when you bite into one, that fragrance and taste explosion you’ll feel is proof of their pedigree.

Homegrown cherry tomatoes

Trust me, there’s no substitute. You don’t know what you’re missing if you don’t try it out. You may lose a few tomatoes to disease, but if you let them fend for themselves, and only feed them water, till the ground once in a while and prune them carefully, you’ll come to find out what I mean.

Homegrown tomatoes
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