TechLatte: Cheryl Marquez

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Domestic Technical Goddess: Saving Blackberry

December 15 & 16:
In the midst of my pozole making adventure, my daughter, technical goddess in training, thought she bricked her Blackberry by typing the wrong password too many times. I watched as she scoured the internet for the technical support number to see how she can fix it. She called technical support and they suggested she download the latest Blackberry Desktop Manager to restore her contacts. Unfortunately, she never synced her Blackberry to the desktop and since she uses Yahoo instead of Gmail, she lost everything on her phone except the pictures she saved to the microSD card.

After several calls to tech support and no success, she looked up the address to the cell phone store and asked if we can bring her phone in because only they would be able to restore the operating system. Her phone screen looked somewhat like the phone in the picture. The error message said something about the JVM and to reset it, if you select reset it just brings you back to this page. I told her I can fix her phone, so she left it behind for me to fix with a clear look of doubt in her eyes.

The day was consumed by making pozole so I didn’t get a chance to work on her phone until she got home. I downloaded the latest version of Blackberry Desktop Manager to my netbook. Once I launched Blackberry Desktop Manager, I plugged in her phone and selected the application loader. In about 5 minutes, I had her phone booting up and going through the setup process. The reason I didn’t help her until she asked was because I liked watching her take the initiative to fix her Blackberry on her own.I want her to get in the habit o taking the initiative to solve her own problems. It was also nice to see her try to solve the problem herself without asking for help until she exhausted all her options. My daughters’ most recent Facebook status, “well my mom is amazing! 😀 she fixed my phone!”. Didn’t she read my post about getting my Nextel Blackberry to work on Boost? 


I also told her she needed to get a Gmail account and use Google Sync to backup her contacts over the air or she would need to back her phone up to the computer so she doesn’t need to request all her contacts from her friends if that should happen to her phone again. If you lose your Blackberry OS in the future, here the instructions on how to get it back yourself.

To restore Blackberry OS:

  1. Download Blackberry Desktop Manager (North America link)
  • Select PC or Mac download
  • Plug in Blackberry using he USB cable which shipped with your phone
  • Select Application Loader
    • This will check to see what is loaded on your Blackberry
    • It will have checkmarks for the the bare minimum, I added Blackberry Messenger, Maps, etc.
  • Once it’s done loading the operating system and any additional application you’ve selected, it will bring you to the home page and let you go through the setup process like when you first got your phone out of the box.

    • Domestic Goddess: Making Pozole (not for beginners)

    Tuesday, December 15:  
    One of my favorite soups is pozole, it’s a Mexican soup with pork and hominy which is a little bit spicy or maybe it was spicy because I wasn’t sure which chile to put in the soup. Either way, it started to get chilly here in the desert and I thought, perfect, I’ll make pozole! How hard can it be? Throw some pork and canned hominy in the pot and let it simmer for a few hours, come back and enjoy…come to find out, it’s a little bit more involved than that. It’s especially confusing because I had to use 3 different recipes to arrive at the final product. Initially, I asked my friend Angela if she had a recipe for pozole because if she made it, I know she would find a way to make sure it’s pretty healthy and tasty at the same time. I was feeling like I was coming down with the flu on Monday so I texted her my question and knocked out shortly after.

    The next day I get her response and her fiance suggested I check out the Rick Bayless pozole recipe, so I took a look at it and it called for three different cuts of pork, I had 5 lbs of pork shoulder, didn’t know what “trotter” was or what that would taste like so I thought, skip that body part. The recipe also was made to feed an army, I only wanted to use 5 lbs of pork shoulder. Next, I read the rest of the recipe and I haven’t gone to the big Mexican grocery store my aunt recommended so I wasn’t going to be able to get  “3 pounds (about 7 cups) dried pozole corn, preferably red pozole corn, OR 4 pounds (about 10 cups) fresh or frozen nixtamal corn, well rinsed” I thought, I better find a recipe that lets me use canned hominy even though I read the real pozole corn tastes better.

    Here are the links to the other two recipes I integrated together.
    Pozole Recipe 2
    Pozole Recipe 3 – Chef Michael Chiarello’s from Travigne Restaurant – I recommend using this recipe for a smaller batch and the Rick Bayless recipe to feed 25 – 30 people.

    I ended up following most of Pozole Recipe 2, using the proportions from Pozole Recipe 3. Although, I might be using the third recipe in the future, I would have gone the Rick Bayless route but there were too many ingredients I was unfamiliar with. On Tuesday night after I made spanish rice, shrimp tacos, and fish tacos for dinner, I started the pozole making adventure. I chopped up the pork shoulder into pork chop slices, threw them into the pot, and covered with lightly salted water like the recipe asked. Then I put the 2 jalepenos into a pan and started browning it, it was kind of scaring me because it kept making these popping sounds, I was just hoping the jalepenos wouldn’t explode. I didn’t know if I should pierce them like a sausage to let whatever was popping escape.

    Next, I did a rough chop of the onions dumped them into the pot, along with garlic, threw in the Mexican oregano (thankfully it was labeled on the package at the store), then in went some cumin which I measured because I don’t like the taste of overpowering cumin. That was supposed to boil, then simmer for at least 45 minutes. In the meantime, the hominy was soaking, not sure if it needed to or not. Then I asked my dad for rubber gloves so I can chop up the chiles and jalepenos the next day.

    Wednesday, December 16:
    The recipe said to skim off the foam that showed up on top of the soup, I apparently missed the foam and wasn’t able to skim that off. My dad said the foam shows up right before boiling and gives the soup the clearness, why doesn’t the recipe say, BEFORE the soup boils watch for this foam.

    My mom helpd me skim the fat off the top of the stock, which to me was more important to get rid of excess fat than to get rid of foam. Since I had to cut the meat into 1 inch cubes, I also cut off any visible fat and threw that away to make it healthier. While cutting the onions, I had to leave the kitchen to rinse my eyes in the bathroom because they were tearing so much. I just watched Julie & Julia and Meryl Streep as Julia Child chopped a mountain of onions and didn’t tear at all! If only this was a movie, I could swap with the real chef for the next stage of the recipe. Janet commented on Facebook that she could see me in the kitchen with safety goggles and if I had thought of that I would have put on my snowboarding goggles to cut the onions. Here I thought I was prepared by getting the rubber gloves to chop the jalepenos. I know I’m a total wimp in the kitchen. At this point, I’m thinking, why didn’t I just want to make sopa de fideo??

    Browning the meat and the onions went without further incident, then I realized I didn’t know which chiles to use. I already had these 2 jalepenos but I didn’t know if I should use the ancho or the arbol chile. I mean the arbol chile is so tiny, how many of these would I need for the recipe?? The Rick Bayless recipe calls for a cup of the arbol chile, recipe 2 calls for 2 jalepenos, and recipe 3 calls for 3 whole ancho chiles. I decided to throw in 1 tiny arbol chile, the 2 jalepenos, and 1 ancho chile. Ummmm….I probably should have left one of those off because my lips were tingling when I ate it, my dad and sister thought it was good though and it tasted the way I wanted it to taste, except for the part where it was a bit too spicy for my other daughter to eat.

    I have to say, it was a lot of work, and it took a while for my eyes to stop burning. I think the end result was worth it, maybe next time I will be armed with snowboarding goggles, a big cleaver knife, gloves, and just the third recipe to simplify the process. Maybe no teeny arbol chile either…maybe I’m not meant to be a domestic goddess after all. The picture in this post is the end result of the two day pozole adventure.

    Life of Leisure: Friends & Confessions of a Shopaholic

    December 2009:
    When I started this life of leisure, I thought it would be full of fun and adventure. Little did I know that fun and adventure was heavily reliant on funds and friends. I’ve been in Arizona for about two months and my sister moved here only a few months prior, currently we don’t have an abundance of friends. I could honestly say, she is my ONLY friend and while my sister has friends in Arizona, she never sees them because she is working all the time. This is highlighted by something my sister said the other day. We were watching Julie & Julia with the kids and seeing all sorts of yummy French food with lots of butter being created. My sister says, “Do you remember Tasja’s cookie and white elephant exchange?” I said, “Yeah, that was a lot of fun!” She says, “WHEN we have friends, we’re going to have a cookie and white elephant exchange too!” My goal is to have one new local friend before the end of the year. I recently dropped my youngest daughter off at a birthday party and I told my sister, I think I will be friends with Kinzley’s mom, she seems nice and I’ve met her twice now! Now we have to find cool, new, local friends for my sister. While I love reading FB status and seeing pictures of my current friends, it would be nice to leave the house and meet up with friends who are not visiting from out of state.

    When we were in California, we had our close friends and we always made friends with the people we worked with everyday. Since I’m currently a stay at home mom, this is not an option for me and might not be an option for my sister either. While her coworkers are mostly female, most of them have ummm…how shall we say, spent some time on a government sponsored vacation which I can only imagine provided a small room with bars for decoration. I met these women and they are actually very nice and normal, you would never guess they ever had a record. Cassie & Janet, if you are reading this, don’t worry, Czarina will not be replacing you any time soon.

    More Time != More Travel
    As I previously mentioned, some adventure is dependent on funds. If I had more funds I could go to Chicago to visit my BFF Stef, who I’m sure is freezing to death or dying because it’s too cold for him to get to the Diesel store to buy new jeans. While in Chicago, I could also visit my cousins. I could also fly to California to visit friends or Manhattan to visit my east coast cousins. Since I’ve burned through most of my frequent flyer miles, I’m just “chillaxing” at home and reading books from the library which involve adventure around the globe. I also wouldn’t want to go to the east coast until after spring because I wouldn’t have any coats warm enough, the cold there makes you cold in your bones even when you’re sitting in front of the radiator trying to thaw out.

    Confessions of an Electronics Shopaholic
    I recently became obsessed with getting the iPhone 3GS and ALMOST bought it the other day. I had it in the AT&T shopping basket and only had to  choose between the 16 GB or 32 GB, then while I was waiting for friends to get back to me on which one to get I took my kids to Michael’s (craft store) to buy a couple T-shirts for projects. On a side-note, I love Facebook status messages to get a quick answer on whether or not to do something…more on this later. When we arrived at Michaels, I saw the AT&T store so I thought I better go in there and see if I can even text message on this thing because I LOVE texting or IMing. It would be a total deal-breaker if texting on a virtual keyboard was as hard as it was on the first generation iphone where I wanted to throw the thing at someone’s head because I was so frustrated with having to backspace because I couldn’t get my fingers to type the right letters. Anyway, it was much more accurate than I remember but the only reason I didn’t get it right then and there is because the guy wouldn’t let me get the iphone 3GS with just the required $30.00 data plan and unlimited messages. He said I had to buy a voice plan with it, which doesn’t make any sense to me, what do people do who can’t hear? They would only text right?

    Here is my logic, if the iphone is a crappy voice phone, then I don’t want the voice plan, I would rather have unlimited data and text which is what it is good at. The main reason I even wanted the new iphone is because it has a Kindle app and I have a list of electronic devices I wanted to get and a limited amount of funds, I don’t believe in credit card debt so everything needs to be paid out with cash.

    Here are the other things I wanted to get:

    HP Mini 311 (ION based netbook with an 11.6 inch screen) —obsessed with this even though I have the HP Mini 1000 with a cool tattoo inspired skin

    • Why: This netbook has HDMI out and VGA out so I can hook it up to a TV and stream my shows from the internet or when I get a UFC fight from a forum I can watch that on the big TV. For people who don’t do all their TV viewing on the computer, this netbook has a bit more power than existing netbooks with the Intel Atom processor because it off loads some of the processing to the GPU while still being small, light-weight and with good battery life. While I have no intention of doing any Photoshop on this thing, I expect I’ll be able to multi-task with a Word document and click around on Farmville with a little more zip.

    HD video camera (Flip or Samsung or iphone 3GS or Droid phone)

    • Why: I take videos of my niece or my kids from my Blackberry to upload into Facebook, it would be awesome to be able to take it with a higher resolution, not sure the iphone with guarantee a better resolution but it would narrow my wish list down if it did 
    • I’m not a camera person so for me to even want an HD video camera which isn’t integrated into a phone is huge compromise because I would have to throw another gadget into my purse.

    Kindle 2 

    • Why: to be able to share books with my sister! I am looking for Kindle alternatives because I don’t want to throw a Kindle, a phone, an HD video camera, and my netbook into my purse. I just downloaded the Kindle app for PC on my netbook and I LOVE it!  Sometimes though, I don’t want to turn on my netbook to read so an iphone would be great for this.

    Motorola DROID $199 with online discount on Verizon Wireless

    • Why: It has a better screen than the iphone, seems to take great pics with it’s 5 MP camera and it has a slide out keyboard. The only reason this wouldn’t be a good purchase for me is because it doesn’t have the Kindle app, which is one of the key selling points of the iphone. The bonus for the DROID is easy integration with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps all products I use almost everyday, if not more than once a day.
    • Cons: The slide out keyboard means there is a hinge for me to break on this phone, I’ve destroyed every single Motorola phone I’ve ever owned including the really rugged black and yellow Nextel phone but then I guess you’re not supposed to throw them at people you’re mad at or run them over with a car. The ones which weren’t thrown or run over just broke apart from the hinge because of repeatedly opening and slamming the phone shut to abruptly end heated phone exchanges with an exes who say annoying things. The slide out keyboard also means this phone will be too thick to put in the back pocket of my jeans. Why don’t cell phone manufacturers understand the back jeans pocket test for women? One of the selling points of the Nokia E71 was because it fit in my jeans without making my butt look big, plus it had a great phone, email, calendar, Pandora, FM radio, and wifi.

    DROID Eris by HTC $99 with the online discount through Verizon Wireless

    • Why: This phone is a thinner Andoid phone with wifi and a 5 MP camera, visual voicemail, and speech recognition and easy integration with Gmail, Google calendar, and Google maps. 
    • Cons: No Kindle app

    Dooney & Bourke Baby Satchel in black patent leather $195

    • I have a D&B black patent makeup case and when I start working again, I’m totally going to get this back or the red patent leather Coach purse, which means I would need to get red patent leather shoes to go with the purse. The reason I NEED the D&B purse is because it would go perfectly with my black patent leather Stuart Weitzman shoes which I love and were practically born on my feet, in English they are cute AND comfy! 
    • While this purse doesn’t fit into the category, it would perfectly hold the electronics I wish to put in my purse. I also understand I don’t NEED the purse, I have the makeup bag and need the matching purse to match my shoes…end of story!

    Life of Leisure: Thanksgiving


    Life of Leisure:  Thanksgiving 2009 
    I always look forward to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays filled with good food to eat. When I lived in California, I looked forward to drinking holidays, here in Arizona I look forward to eating holidays. Thankfully through diet and exercise or possibly just the heat in AZ, I weigh less than when I was in California.
    The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, my sister and I picked kids up from school, packed popcorn, licorice, bottled water, and hit the road to meet my parents at our baby sister’s house in San Diego. Just a side note, we stopped in Yuma to feed the kids real food at Texas Roadhouse, we also had the homemade pumpkin pie my daughter made at school that day, yummy! Otherwise, the road trip was fairly uneventful.
    We were excited to get to San Diego to catch up with my baby sister and her husband, see their newly built home and of course sit around the dinner table for hours eating and talking. (Note: priority level is eating before talking.) We got there shortly after 8 pm, unloaded the SUV, and had some of my mom’s machado, chicken affritada, and my dad made balsamic chicken. It seemed my insomnia disappeared the minute we crossed into California because all I remember of that night was unloading, eating, showering, and going to sleep fairly early, meaning before 10 pm.
    Meeting Teeny & Burger
    The next day we hung out at home while my sister and brother in law went to work. My kids, niece, and nephew played with Mikey and Julie’s dogs; Teeny and Burger. Mikey and Julie are my sisters roommates and fortunately were very nice about letting the kids play with their dogs. I think my niece might have aggravated Burger because Burger nipped at her pant legs and thereafter had to be on separate floors because they were afraid of each other. My mom surprisingly fell in love with Teeny who is the calmer, gray dog who looked like a stuffed animal and loved to lounge around sleeping while you petted her. If I could take care of a dog, I would have put her in my duffel bag and brought her home, which I’m sure the kids would have loved. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t last a week at our house because I would forget to feed her or forget we had a dog and it would probably run away.
    Unconventional Thanksgiving
    This Thanksgiving, instead of waking up early to watch Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, football, snacking all day while waiting impatiently for the Thanksgiving meal to be cooked, we decided to do something different. On Thanksgiving morning, we still woke up early, had breakfast, and then we all jumped into the SUV for the hour and a half drive to Knotts Berry Farm, which turned out to be about 3 hours because of the lovely SoCal traffic.
    It turned out it to be lot of fun, there were hardly any lines so the kids were able to go on their favorite rides several times with minimal waiting. By kids, I mean the little ones not me, my older daughter, and brother-in-law who rode all the roller coasters which were open. Mental note: you shouldn’t go on roller coasters that flip you around and around when you have a migraine. I stopped at a vending machine and got a sugar-free No Fear energy drink because I thought the caffeine would help the headache go away. Before it had a chance to kick in, we started going on the rides, I had to close my eyes on the first one to diminish the nausea. I’ve never done that on a ride before and it was a really cool flying feeling because we were on the ride where your feet dangle. The caffeine finally kicked in about the second ride, then I found a candy shop that sold Advil so I bought that and got the kids some spiral pops. When I looked in the bag to take the Advil, I found a $20 bill so it turns out I made about $10 on that transaction, score!!
    Tastes like chicken
    My mom is obsessed with Knotts Berry Farm fried chicken saying it’s the best EVER! Well, I’m a fan of Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles in Crenshaw so I had pretty high expectations of this chicken. The wait for the restaurant was about an hour and a half, we decided we were too hungry for that and went to TGI Fridays instead. Not to disappoint my mom, I went to the take out portion of the restaurant and ordered some fried chicken to go. We had the chicken as a snack when we got home from the park that evening and it was good, I wouldn’t call it the best ever. It probably made my mom’s weekend so we were happy about that.
    Waxing
    **Parents don’t try this at home, apparently the experiment can go awry even with a trained professional.** 
    When we go to my baby sisters’ house shes usually waxes our eyebrows, she went to school for that, she even held off waxing her own brows until we got there so she can do it all at once. While I was getting my eyebrows done, my 2 year old niece was watching and kept saying me too, me too! She is completely adorable and doesn’t need to fix a thing about her except sometimes she has a tendency to get a unibrow like her dad. Not cute for a girl of any age. Her mom actually said she can get her eyebrows done and we took a video of her first brow grooming experience and uploaded it into Facebook. If you are one of my friends you should be able to view the video. I was really impressed at how well she was able to handle the pain of waxing and although you can see she wanted to cry, we were cracking up so she started laughing instead. She even let me sister wax a little bit under the brows and do a little bit more cleanup after the initial waxing of the unibrow hair in the middle of her two eyebrows. What we didn’t expect is for this “bald patch” slightly above the brow line because apparently she has a hairy forehead. My sister had to wax a little bit to the left and to the right of the center just to blend the bald patch a little better. This was more hilarious because it reminded us of that scene in the 40 year old virgin when he was attempting to get his chest waxed. Parents, you’ve been warned, don’t blame me for your toddlers eyebrow mishaps, should you try to give them perfect eyebrows before kindergarten.
    Driving Home
    We went home on Saturday, it was pouring rain in San Diego when we left. When we got to the mountains there was snow, then when we crossed into Arizona it was sunny and warm. In the space of a few short hours we were able to experience all the seasons and if we weren’t on the freeway, we probably would have stopped to let the kids play in the snow.

    Insomniac Terminator

    November 12, 2009
    Lately, I’ve been an insomniac. I hate it because I LOVE the feeling of getting drowsy or being able to fall asleep while reading a good book. So tonight, I’m on Facebook entertaining myself by playing Mafia Wars, Cafe World, and Farmville since no one appreciates phone calls after midnight.

    I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye and I think, what IS that crawling across the tile? Is it a fly? Why would a fly be crawling on the floor, that’s just a thought which popped into my head, ironically, no flies in the house. Is it injured? What is that thing? Since I’m not naturally curious about creepy crawlies, I grab a magazine for cover, scoot over on the couch with my feet up so it can’t jump on me to take a closer look. If my brother-in-law hadn’t told me a story about hearing crickets in the house I would have thought it was a tan colored grasshopper. Either way, it was dead, more specifically it was a dead cricket. I leaned over and smashed it about 10 times to make sure it was dead before throwing the entire magazine out with the cricket.

    More creepy crawlies…
    A couple days before, I was at the post office and a woman a couple people ahead of me is talking about getting bitten or stung by a scorpion she found in her house. I’m thinking in my head, “ummmm….why are you trying to mail stuff, not really sure, but couldn’t that be dangerous and shouldn’t you be in the ER or something?” I’m new to living in the country and still not used to actually striking up conversations with total random people at the store. Everyone around is saying, you should put aloe vera on it, or giving her other home remedies. I’m frantically searching for signal so I can Google “scorpion stings and how to treat it” on my Blackberry. Then suddenly, she turns and walks out of the post office. I hope she got it taken care of.

    Another woman is talking about how her housekeeper has found scorpions in her home. If I was her housekeeper, I would have left, I’m sure she wasn’t paying scorpion hazard insurance. Anyway, pest control is definitely going to find me to be a loyal customer, they can come every month and spray all the pests dead all around the house, the yard, the garage, the neighbors house, etc.

    My mom didn’t mention scorpions getting inside the house when she was trying to get me to move out here. I wasn’t sold on the heat, which I don’t care for at all, still don’t. It’s unnatural to have 80+ degree weather in November. Fortunately, have not seen any scorpions in her house at all. Now I’m on the look out for insects and keep my sheepskin slippers close by in case I need to terminate another bug.

    Week 4: Life of Leisure Projects

    The original thinking when embarking on this Life of Leisure is to take about a year to relax, hang with the kids, and explore the next big idea. Here we are in week 4 and I’m officially bored. I’m obsessed with reading everything on Mashable, TechCrunch, Engadget, and now posting to the Snaptu forum because this application doesn’t work properly on my Blackberry 8350i. I know it’s not working right because I had it on my Nokia E71 and it worked perfectly there. By the way, just sold the Nokia E71 on Ebay, selling my Motorola RAZR on craigslist so I am officially getting rid of all my phones except for the one I’m currently using.

    I’ve officially decided I need to return to the workforce before my mind turns into jello. I even begged my sister to let me redo the powerpoint slides she was working on for a company called Isilon. I’m sure this isn’t normal behavior to volunteer to do powerpoint slides just to feel like a contributing member of society. Thankfully, she let me help her and it turns out her boss and the channel manager loved the deck, whoo-hoo!

    Laptop Keyboard
    My geek girl project for the week is to replace the keyboard on my mom’s laptop. I’ve already done the research and bookmarked the site detailing how to take the laptop apart to replace the keyboard. It seemed easier to replace the entire keyboard than to try to replace the 2 keys which kept falling off her keyboard. We initially took her laptop to Best Buy since it was still under warranty to get the keys replaced. Geek Squad said, they needed to send the entire laptop to California and it would take a month to get it back, then she would have had to pay $100+ to get a couple of keys replaced. I told my mom, no don’t do that. I will order an entire keyboard and replace it myself, should cost under $30. I ordered the new keyboard on Amazon and with shipping it came out to about $28.

    I received the keyboard today and my family thought it someone was sending me a birthday gift but it was actually the keyboard. I will update this post with how the installation went once I finish it.

    Learning to Create Dynamic Websites
    To keep my mind working, one of my goals is to create dynamic websites using SQL and PHP. I’ve come across an ebook from the library which will help me accomplish this using Dreamweaver as a shortcut, score! I already installed Dreamweaver so my next step is getting the server setup with GoDaddy  then I’ll be ready to get started. I can create the static websites but that is unexciting and I want to be able to create forms and get the form data into a database which sends out automated emails, etc. One of the reasons I wanted to learn PHP is to be able to prototype any Web 2.0 ideas.