House of Annie

Contrary to this post's title, there isn't a foolproof way to prevent a determined thief from copying pictures from your website or blog to theirs. If you put a picture out there for all to see, someone may want to take it for themselves. For the most part, you have to respect your readers and expect them to show you the same respect in return.

Still, you can take steps to protect your pictures from being inadvertently misused. I have started placing watermarks on my photos and also appending a copyright message at the end of the filename. To do this, I use a program called waterMark v2 from PMlabs.

We're lucky to have a good, artisanal bakery in the Bay Area known as Acme Breads. We bought (and devoured) a few loaves from their stall at the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmer's Market. Recently, they debuted a cranberry-walnut whole-wheat bread that was divine. Annie tasted some during a trip to Lunardi's and immediately placed an order for a boule.

A few days later, when that boule was but a happy memory, she decided to make her own cranberry-walnut bread, based on the "Cranberry-Walnut Celebration Bread" recipe in "The Bread Baker's Apprentice".

Though the recipe called for 3 cups of white flour, she substituted one cup of whole wheat flour and added some vital wheat gluten. She also added some golden raisins to the mix.

Here is the bread at the first rise after kneading.

I am a barbecue aficionado. Before my "awakening", I used to think that Tony Roma's was the best place for ribs. But then I found out that true barbecue does not involve boiling or steaming meat to tenderize it before slathering it with sauce and throwing it on the grill. True barbecue comes by slowly cooking meat in the heat and smoke of a wood fire. Sauce, if it is to be served, should be on the side so as not to hide any imperfections but complement the meat's smokiness.

I like to think that I can turn out some pretty good ribs, which rival or beat any restaurant ribs, including specialty barbecue joints. That could be easy to do here in the south SF Bay Area, but Texas is a different story. Texas is one of the hotbeds of barbecue.

One joint that was recommended to us by a friend is Rudy's. My uncle, himself an experienced barbecuer, claims they make the best brisket. So while we were in San Antonio we decided to visit Rudy's for a late lunch / early dinner. We chose to go to the location near SeaWorld.

The brisket had a nice smoke ring, but somehow not much smokiness. I also thought it was not moist enough. Definitely needed some sauce, but the sauce didn't match very well.

The chicken was very tasty and moist, and went perfectly with the sauce.

The ribs were so-so. The had a good amount of smoke, and black pepper, but I wouldn't call them awesome or anything. We definitely felt that I make better ribs at home.

The side of creamed corn was great, but the pinto beans nothing to shout about.

Overall, I'd say that Rudy's was a miss for us. We won't go back.

More pics from our Texas trip on my Ball of Dirt journal at http://www.ballofdirt.com/journeys/17578.html

Aloha.

The food pics you see here in my blog are also posted to the Usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.food. Recently, Fosco discovered a website that was reposting all the content from ABF and presenting it in a discussion forum format. To make matters worse, that website inserted ads from Google Adsense into the forums. If anyone clicked on those ads, the website owner would get a kickback from Google.

Essentially, the website was making money off of my and other people's copyrighted content.

Reposting of copyrighted content is rampant on the Internet, but that doesn't make it right. If you or I post something on a website, blog or Usenet newsgroup, we do not automatically give up our rights to that content. No one can just take our content and use it as they please, especially if they benefit financially from that use.

I used the information found from a timely post on Food Blog S'cool to contact the website's author, the site's hosting provider, and Google Adsense support and asked them to remove my content. Fortunately, the site's admin complied after I informed him that what he was doing is illegal.

I've now added a copyright notice to the sidebar to make it clear that my permission is needed before my content can be republished elsewhere. I'm also taking steps to protect my pictures from being misused as well. Those I will detail in a future post.

Aloha.