Scott King's Blog, page 32

Alfajores!

Alfajores are light short-bread-like cookies filled with dulce de leche and often topped with sugar or coconut. I had never heard of them until we moved to Houston, which makes sense because apparently they are a big South American dessert. What I found most surprising about them is how soft the cookie parts are. They are very tender and although they look dense they are very light and almost melt on your tongue.

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Blood Moon!

The blood moon just off the gulf coast of Texas!

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Pig Ears!

My next book is a middlegrade novel called “Cupcakes vs. Brownies” and I’ve been spending the last month wrapping up story edits and line edits. I can’t do that from home so I’ve been spending most of my days at Brew-n-Bake, a local coffee shop.

One of the most amazing things they serve there are Pig Ears! Pig Ears are basically pigs in a blanket, but more like a croissant than a biscuit. They are super delicious. If you are ever in this part of Texas you HAVE to try them.

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Storyteller Cards: Fantasy!

Jason Taigmaire the mega-mind behind Pixel Lincoln, Maximum Throwdown, and Seven Sevens has a new kickstarter for a fantasy themed version of his hit Storyteller Cards.

The deck of cards can be used for creativity exercises and inspiration, but it also comes with a free manual that lists a bunch of games that you can play. Even cooler is that I created a small game called Dueling Djinn (totally inspired by my upcoming book “Cupcakes vs. Brownies”) and you can check out the rules for it here.

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South of the Border!

You know what’s funny? I didn’t take this photo in Texas. I took it on the border of North & South Carolina!

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My Back-up Strategy!

Last weekend I had two hard drives fail and it’s taken me all week to deal with it. It’s been a major hassle, but luckily I’ve not lost any data.

How was I safe? One of the drives that failed was one I used for storage and the other drive was one of my back up drives. I ended up safe because I have a two back-up drives and I use Crashplan, an online backup service. So even even though I lost a full back-up I was able to restore everyting.

My exact back-up strategy is…

Time Machine back-up of my main hard drive and all other important files (photos, writings, comic pages, etc…).
Cloaned back-up of my main system and all important files using Superduper! Drive.
Crashplan subscription that back-ups EVERYTHING.

This three prong system works well because as it happened this weekend I lost both a big hard drive and a back-up within a day of each other. Having that second cloaned back-up on hand saved my butt. It’s really important to have a back-up for a back-up. Then I think using Crashplan or even Carbonite to back-up remotely is just as important because should my house suffer a fire, flood, or whatever my data will still be safe thanks to it.

Where I hit problems is that once I got everything up and running again (I now have two new 4TB hard drives) I decided it was time to upgrade to Mavericks the newest operating system for Macs. I re-backed up everything and then did the install. The install went smooth but once it was up and running a lot of programs didn’t work and required a clean install. That took more than a day and was a total pain in the butt. Plus there have been odd anomolies like how the new version of Quicktime won’t open a video file without first trying to convert it!

This week sucked but I’m ending it with all my data intact. My writings & photos are who I am and I would be devistated if I lost them all. So my advice is that if you don’t have a back-up system make sure you take the time to set one up.

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Delaware Bay!

This is the Delaware Bay seen from Cape Henelopen State park. It was one of my favorite places to walk and hike before we moved to Texas.

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Jambalaya!

I’ve heard of Cajun food before but down here it’s not actually referred to as Cajun. Everyone calls it creole. Other than the fact that a lot of it can be spicy it’s pretty darn good. We’ve become big fans of jambalaya, which is what is pictured here. I also really like crawfish etouffee and plan on shooting it soon.

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