Thanks to multiple ways to keep informed available and the
hard limit of 24 hours in every day, keeping up with the news is harder than
ever. So as a semi-regular service of the SoundOff! Team, we bring you a few
stories you may have missed that you'll wish later you hadn't.

I don't always waste time surfing the InterWebs on Friday afternoons, but when I do, I often end up at recipe sites. And it's true, what the tweet that sent me here said. This is the best dumb recipe evah! How to make ice cubes! The comments are good too.

This just in from our "Out of Control buddy, Joe Kaulfersch, via Facebook. Karl Benz drives the first automobile, July 3, 1886. So blame Karl for the crummy traffic tomorrow.

Last week our siter publication posted on their STEM to the Core blog a picture of one of our reader's son "reading" one of our 1993 issues of Control (see "The Influence of Control"). Today, that young reader is a biomedical engineering student at Texas A&M University. Yesterday I was browsing our archives looking for an article one of our readers requested, and I came upon the cutest Control cover I have ever seen. Well, I only say that because I'm an animal lover and anything that involves a dog makes go "awwww." Well, once I saw our October 2002 cover I knew I had to blog about. If you like dogs as much as I do, I'm sure you'll love this cover too.

"But what is it you actually do?" demands your mom, your non-engineering friends, the guy down the block and the annoying guy at the neighborhood barbeque party.  It's hard to come up with an "elevator ride" answer on the spur of the moment. Engineering's complicated.

Surfing the Net and ended up at one of my favorite food porn sites, GiltTaste.com. (It was on my lunch hour, boss. Honest!) Here of all places, I found a neat basic process manufacturing project.

Here's a bit of help from our IT department. No, actually it comes from our resident wag, Joe Kaulfersch at Pepperl + Fuchs.

Ten Ways You Know Your Internet Connection Is a Little Slow

Right before Christmas, I posted a link from Eric Byres at Tofino Security about his sous-vide hack. For the uninitiated, a sous-vide is a vacuum cooker used in many restaurants. The real deal, even a "home cook" model, tips the register at $400+. Byres designed his own and planned to build it. Here's an update.

or is too cheap to buy his wife her own sous-vide cooker. Eric Byres of Tofino Security is a man of many parts.

Not only is he a process systems security expert, but he enjoys gourmet food and is familiar enough with fine dining to know the term "sous-vide," and clever enough to figure out a work-around for this expensive piece of kitchen equipment.

Messing around in the social media corner of the Internet today (specifically Twitter) and found this item thanks to Jason Hiner, The editor in chief at TechRepublic.  Proverbs about programming and other technical adventures. Worth a few minutes of your time.