Go ahead - laugh your head off. But after so many years I'm too embarrassed to say, I was sick of looking at Apple.com as my homepage. I mean crap, how many ads for iSomethings can a gal not look at?
So my husband, bless his computer-smart soul, showed me how to use iGoogle to access the variety of news I longed for and my Google alerts just didn't provide. Good ol' Google, the techno boy scout. If it can't help you one way, it will find another.
You go to google.ca/ig and cherry-pick the sites you want from a palette of categories - news, tools, finance, whatever.
Now I'm a worse news junkie than ever. Never mind all the news stories. How cool is it to compare top headlines from around the world and see who deems what important?
EU seeks better crisis response; Car bomb in central Iraq kills 23; U2's Bono has emergency surgery (BBC World Edition). EU promises tighter debt rules; Deadly blast hits Iraqi city; US accuses BP of oil spill cover-up (Al Jazeera English). Arizona Law Reveals Tension in G.O.P. on Immigration; Judges Rule Against Detainees Held at Afghan Air Base; Cosmopolitan Era Ends With Baghdad Oasis in Rubble - the most moving story of all ( New York Times ).
If you don't see a category you want in the pre-set menu, you can search for your own "gadgets." Don't bother with "art" - the choices are pathetic. But "food" is another matter, with more selections than an urban food court.
First up is the Daily Nutrition Checklist that, once you customize it with your age, gender and timed amount of exercise, provides you with the number of calories you should consume daily (about 1,800 for me) and the number of "extra" calories from fat and sugar that you should consume (195 for me).
It also gives you a list of food groups or types, including water, grains and "oils" you should be covering off, presumably every day. Many, like eggs and fish, are conspicuous by their absence.
Each group is followed by a row of boxes you can tick which, I assume, represent the pre-calculated number of units each person who signs up for the Daily Nutrition Checklist is advised to eat based on the info they input. I have five boxes to tick, one for each of the five teaspoons of oils I should eat, three boxes for each of the three cups of milk I should drink, and so on.
You don't have to be a dietician or doctor to wonder how useful such a generic checklist could be. First, there's no opportunity to input important details that would impact one's nutritional needs such as the intensity of your activity level or other details about your health and physical condition, including basics like weight and height.
And other than maybe getting people to drink more water, the food checklist itself is so woefully lacking as to render it useless if not downright dangerous. I can picture some poor sot somewhere dutifully pouring out five teaspoons of "oils" each day and eating them along with his meals, which could all be junk food disasters, for as much as this checklist guides you. It didn't take me long to hit delete.
Then there are a plethora of recipe gadgets for the taking. For instance, Betty Crocker®'s Recipe of the Day offers, what else, a new recipe each day featuring - surprise! - some kind of product from Betty Crocker®.
Today's recipe is Strawberry-Rhubarb Trifle that you'll need to buy a box of Betty Crocker® pound cake mix for. Another recipe found through the link, Blueberry-Rhubarb Crisp, needs two cups of Honey Nut Clusters® cereal, also produced by General Mills, which owns the Betty Crocker® brand.
Both products have hot links to coupons to other General Mills products that you can print and redeem. But here's the next real surprise - the coupons aren't even for the pound cake mix or the Honey Nut Clusters®. They're for an assortment of products, some of which I didn't even know existed, like Green Giant® Create a Meal!® Stir Fry Frozen Meal Starter and Betty Crocker® Warm Delights® Bowls. (Now you know how I shop for groceries.)
You gotta wonder about the deal between Google and General Mills. And you gotta remember that Betty Crocker is a complete construction - she never was a real person, even back in the 1920s when she was invented by a savvy home economist, a woman, I might add.
iGoogle offers a host of other recipe gadgets. Allrecipes.com, touted as America's No. 1 food website, offers one gadget for Main Courses and another for Healthy Eating.
Then there's Epicurious.com., which is owned by Condé Nast Digital, part of the empire of Condé Nast Publications, which also owns CondeNet, provider of an iPhone application for Epicurious that includes thousands of recipes plus the capability for you to save favorites and create shopping lists based on those recipes. And here you thought you needed a cookbook and a pen.
I take Epicurious.com at their word that they are offering genuinely new recipes, in other words, ones they have developed themselves. All of them look trendy and some of them look intriguing, if not a bit challenging in terms of ingredients.
For instance, you'll have to find Manchego cheese for the grilled arepas recipe. If you're like me, you won't even know what arepas are (grilled corn cakes from Venezuela and Colombia).
But the real food gadget winner for me was the US Food and Drug Administration's Recalls/Safety Alerts. I don't see a way to customize it for Canada but, still, it's a gold mine of food product information.
Where else can you so quickly learn about the recall of Hylenex, a "tissue permeability modifier"? Or Caldwell Fresh Food's recall of alfalfa sprouts sold under three different brand names, due to the possibility of salmonella contamination?
From there you can carry on and get a tiny glimpse of the kind of food distribution chains and networks we consumers have to contend with. Those contaminated sprouts alone have moved through at least 10 states via outlets ranging from Wal-Mart to Trader Joe's.
It's all enough to make you unplug and get outside, in your garden or otherwise. Have fun.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who just changed her homepage yet again.
