Month: November 2008

A quick note about Jason’s 4 minute tuna steaks – Yum!

As we were leaving the house yesterday morning, Diane noted that she’d picked an extra lemon earlier in the week and we might want to use it soon. We’d already had lemon chicken this week, so I wanted to try something different — tuna seemed like it might be a good idea, so I Googled for “recipe lemon tuna steak” and the top hit was Jason’s 4-minute tuna steaks.

The “4-minute” part sounded good — of course, that was just the cooking time, but when I looked at the recipe, the prep didn’t seem too onerous, so I Sametime’d the URL to Diane to look at and she said “yes”.

I didn’t follow the recipe exactly (our lemons are oversized, but I cut everything else by 50% because I was only cooking for two — and I substituted crushed red pepper for the chili flakes), but it was very tasty and I’d happily make it again. More to the point, I’d happily eat it again, so I’m posting about it so I don’t lose the pointer to the recipe.

Thanks, Helen!

Twitter Search beats Google — malware attack averted

As I was driving to work this morning, my iPhone tinged, letting me know I had a new SMS awaiting me. And it tinged a second time as I pulled into my parking place, since I don’t check SMS messages while I’m driving.

It was a Facebook notification from an IBM colleague with a subject of “How did you manage to get on this video?”, sent to me and 19 others, with a link to a geocities.com page.

I was immediately suspicious, because the note wasn’t in my colleague’s style — but it was rather short, so perhaps that wasn’t valid. I was also suspicious because the names on the note were a rather mixed bag.

But it was vaguely possible that the video had something to do with IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, so I didn’t want to discard the note.

Instead, I did the obvious thing: I Googled for “Facebook” and “get on this video”, looking for reports of malware. But I found nothing. I tried a few other variants, including “Facebook malware” and still found nothing.

So I went to plan B: Twitter. Nothing was obvious on my home page, so I posted a query: “Just got suspicious-looking facebook msg: ‘How did you manage to get on this video?’ with a link to GeoCities. Anyone know if it’s malware?”

While I waited for an answer, I tried Twitter Search, using “Facebook” as my query. Within seconds, I had my answer — yes, it was malware, and apparently virulent stuff.

And when I went back to my Twitter page, I’d gotten three replies from friends telling me the same thing (the first one arrived less than a minute after my tweet).

For timely questions, Twitter is my new go-to tool — sure, Google has depth, but it’s not instantaneous. Twitter gives me three paths to an answer:

  • Stumbling on it in my friends’ tweetstream without ever asking the question
  • Asking the question and hoping a friend answers
  • Using Twitter Search

My search strategy on Twitter is different than what I’d use on Google, though. On Google, it helps to be specific — a search on “Facebook” alone would be pretty useless, hence my attempts to qualify with the hook phrase and the word “malware”.

In contrast, on Twitter, timeliness is your friend — a one-word query (“Facebook”) is just fine, because you’re going to get the current conversation, and the human eye can do a good job of picking out the pay dirt if there is any.

I guess I’ll never find out how I got on that video, though.