This caught my eye in one of the Dark Reading emails that hit my box awhile back--How I Would Hack Your Network (If I Woke Up Evil). It mentions some tools that are definitely worth a look, but I don't want to look at them right now.

I did a Google search for "talking over people." Most of the posts were about why people do it and how to work around it, but I was looking for tips on how to do it myself.  I found a thread called Wait vs. Interrupt Culture that not only contained a lot of perspective on that topic, but one of the posters also mentioned about how his conversation is shaped by his aphasia. The only time I'd heard the term aphasia was an episode of Deep Space Nine. But what the poster described reminded me of some of my own issues communicating. I looked up aphasia on Wikipedia, and found that my issue falls into the category of anomic aphasia. The difference with me is that the word usually comes to me. It couldl take anywhere from 3 seconds to 5 minutes, but the word always comes. It wasn't clear from Wikipedia or from the poster whether the word ever comes to them or whether it is just lost.  Of course, even a 3 second gap in conversation can throw things off. The thing that got my attention was that it is linked to brain damage and Alzheimer's.  I think I'll go back to my primary care manager and follow up on this.

Top 10 Qualities of a Great Engineer

Even thought my days in the IT field may be numbered, I think this list may come in handy in the future. Top 10 Qualities of a Great Engineer is a product of engineeringschools.com; I hope it doesn't go away anytime soon...

Pina Colada Crunch Cake

Okay, so I'm not going to make this right now, and I probably won't follow the recipe either, but I definitely want to come back and make this Pina Colada Crunch Cake at some point.  At first glance, it reminded me of Aunt Jean's Cherry Cheesecake recipe, and upon inspection, I think it could be improved by borrowing from that recipe a bit. The main thought is that this recipe needs to be frozen to be firm, but the cheesecake needs no freezing.  Basically, remove the pudding and the condensed milk (heartbreaking, I know) and substitute some sweetened coconut flakes.  The hook for this was "The Best Dessert You've Never Heard Of." It got my attention at least.  Maybe some day we'll see if that claim is true.