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Truth-in-advertising laws must have been suspended the day this product reached market. The only thing hot about it is…nothing. Green Mountain Gringos must be truly afraid of the heat if this is their interpretation of hot.

Chili-heads: Don’t even bother. You’d do better to just eat flavorful, fresh tomato sauce.
Novices: Knock yourselves out with this one. You shouldn’t fear this one at all.

Olive flavored (if you like olives, that is a good thing. I don’t like olives, so it’s an obvious turn-off), with some small amount of heat.

Chili-heads: Not worth mentioning for heat. You might like the flavor.
Novices: Enjoy. This is right up your alley.

Lame. Hell in Jamaica must be a comfortable, temperate place.

Chili-heads: Use with abandon.
Novices: Exercise restraint until you become comfortable with the heat.

Spicy, and hot. Has a different flavor than many other habanero sauces. Probably due to the fact that green habaneros, instead of red habaneros (and carrots) are used.

Hot pepper novices should use this sauce in moderation. Chili-heads will enjoy it, and should exercise some restraint until they judge how it is for themselves.

Good stuff. Good flavor, good heat. Not for hot pepper novices.

Lame. Really, really lame. I used 1/8 of the bottle on a taco salad and still thought that I would have done better to use Tabasco.

Those who don’t like hot and spicy foods, but want to give the impression of doing so, should use this sauce in the presence of those they are trying to impress. However, make sure to disallow the other party the use of the bottle as they will surely discover how lame this sauce really is once they try it.

Gives Belize a bad name.

Actually does contain habanero peppers and is actually quite hot and spicy. Will only be enjoyed by chili-heads. All others would be advised to steer clear or use in extreme moderation.

The original and still among the best. Certainly not the hottest one out there, but it gets points for being hot, flavorful, and very widely available.

Safe for use by all palates, though those who appreciate less spicy food should use it cautiously. Chili-heads: use it with abandon.

Unlike many supposedly hot salsas, this one will make you sit up and take notice of its heat.

Will most likely only be appreciated by those who like really hot and spicy foods.

Last night at the grocery store, I noticed a cereal made by Kellogs named Frosted Mini-Wheats Big Bite. The premise seems to be that the cereal in question is larger than the Bite Size version of Frosted Mini-Wheats.

Exactly when does a product stop being “mini” if it is also “big”?The whole premise behind frosted mini-wheats is that they are smaller than regular shredded wheat. For whatever reason, shredded wheat’s native size seems to be that of a small paperback book. It’s not clear to me what culinary and marketing genius decided to make a cereal that was ten times larger than the average spoon. Predictably, such a cereal turned off that portion of the American population that didn’t see the point in saving the manufacturer money by spending the time to break cereal into bite size chunks.

So, Post came out with spoon size shredded wheat. This was an improvement as it allowed Americans to pour the shredded wheat into a bowl, cover it with milk, and start eating without that messy deconstruction step.

What market research showed, however, was that shredded wheat tasted like wood mulch, and since Americans generally don’t eat wood mulch for any meal, much less breakfast, it was back to the drawing board for Post.

Finally, the food scientists figured out that if they made shredded wheat in a size that fit the average spoon, and if that shredded wheat was covered in an incredibly sweet, hard, white frosting (just like Frosted Flakes….Hmm…wonder where they got the idea for this frosting coating…Hmmm…) Americans just might buy it. Hence, Frosted Spoon Size Shredded Wheat was born.

Somewhere along the line, Kelloggs jumped into the action with corporate predictability by copying its rival’s product, creating the Frosted Mini-Wheat. It is clear, however, that Kelloggs has learned nothing from the past.

Frosted Mini-Wheats Big Bite, translated into English from Marketer Speak, is literally “big little sugary whole wheat cereal.” Doesn’t that make the whole issue clearer?

For the longest time (too long really), I hadn’t really bothered to learn much about how to use XML, nor had I made the leap into using XML. In the past few months, that situation has changed dramatically.After spending the time to figure out how to use XML, and where to use XML, I use it all over the place. All the config files I write for perl apps are written in XML. I’ve even gone back and rewritten perl apps that functioned just fine (for years, in some cases) just because the apps did not use XML and they seemed so clumsy without it.

Today, I went crazy with XML-RPC. I’d been hearing about that technology for some time, but had never had reason or time to figure out how to use it or why I might want to use it.

Replacing perl apps that called each other via basic CGI calls with perl apps that use XML-RPC was a brain-dead decision. In fact, the apps got significantly easier to write and understand once I dumped the kludgy CGI interconnection and moved strictly to XML-RPC.

If you need a quick and easy way to connect several disparate perl apps (even ones running on different platforms), I suggest taking a look at XML-RPC.

We saw The Terminal last week and both of us liked it. If you find yourself seeking a refuge from the summer heat, and if that refuge is the movieplex, check out the latest offering from Spielberg and Hanks. You won’t be disappointed.

In a few weeks, we are embarking upon a camping trip in northern Wisconsin for a long weekend. To get from the car to our campsite, we’ll have to paddle our canoe across a lake. With that in mind, we decided that it would not be the worst idea to figure out ahead of time just how Dalla would handle a ride in a canoe.We don’t want to leave Dalla at a kennel for a weekend, but we’re also not interested in retrieving all of our camping gear off the lake bottom after the dog tips a fully loaded canoe.

So, yesterday, we took Dalla out on to Lake Mendota for a half-hour canoe expedition. She was somewhat less than impressed by the whole experience. When we led her on to the dock to which we had the canoe secured, she walked very tentatively (and with all of her claws out) after she looked down through the slats of the dock and saw the lake underneath.

Then, I got into the canoe and tried to coax her into the canoe with me. She would have none of that! So, I grabbed her and lifted her into the canoe in front of me. I wanted to keep her under close control because our canoe is meant for relatively shallow, calm fresh water and the lake yesterday was choppy from the wind and periodic speedboat wakes.

Once we got her in the canoe, she whined for five minutes or so while clearly looking unhappy. However, after that, she started to settle down and tried to get comfortable. If we had put down something on the canoe bottom on which she could walk, she might even have gone to sleep. As it was, the bottom of the (fiberglass) canoe is slick, and she couldn’t get any purchase to keep from sliding back and forth in the canoe when we hit a particularly large wave.

After getting the canoe back to the dock, and on top of the car, we took her over to the dog beach to try and coax her to swim. Sarah waded out into the lake and called the dog. Dalla would then wade out into the water, but as soon as she started to float (rather than walking on the lake bottom) she would execute some sort of caterpillar-contraction maneuver to get her feet back on the bottom. So, no swimming yet, but we’ll keep trying.

After our marraige last September, Sarah and I just never quite got around to taking our honeymoon. We always had some scheme in mind, but we never found a way to make it work for reasons of schedule, money, timing, or a combination of the above.However, we are finally taking off this summer for our honeymoon. For two weeks in August we’ll be traveling around Europe, taking in the sights.

Our current itinerary calls for us to travel Air India from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany. Once we hit the ground in Germany, we’ll probably spend the night in Frankfurt before moving on to other destinations. We haven’t decided yet exactly how much of our travel to plan, but most likely we will travel casually, holding to little or no schedule.

Sarah and I are both looking forward to trip. Last summer, we never really left Madison because we were so busy planning for our wedding and dealing with our newly purchased house and newly adopted dog. This summer, we’ve been able to take more time for ourselves, and a long trip out of the country will fit into that scheme just fine.