Today, we actually have a guest post for you. Sara is trying like crazy to avoid the mommy-blogger label, and sends out missives from her secret New Mexico lair on Misfit In Any Space and Schizodigestive. Sara is also awesome, a dedicated reader, and you are commanded to love her.

It sucks to be poor. When you have no money — or when you’re being very careful with your money — it seems like commercials are everywhere. (Hint: This might be because they are.) I’m used to ads in magazines, on billboards, and of course on TV, but when the Internet was overtaken I despaired of ever finding useful stuff for free. Oh, my last bastion of freewheeling trade and barter had fallen! What should I do, what could I do?

After singing several lyrical laments, I started paying more attention to the online gizmos and techie nonsense that I’d previously ignored, and I was surprised to find some really useful (and easy! and free!) stuff. I am nothing if not avid to convert people to my way of life, so here is some stuff you should be using daily. No, really — these links will change your life. My lament has become an exuberant, yet still melodic, chant of joy.

Have you ever gone through your cabinet and fridge in dusgust, balefully eyeing your meager ingredients and wondering why none of them seem to make anything? I mean, maybe not — maybe you’re the kind of awesome chef who can combine week-old bread ends, ketchup, and wilted spinach into a delicious soufflé while holding your nose in the air and looking down upon the common folk — but I bet you have. SuperCook lets you enter whatever ingredients you have and provides recipes that use only those ingredients. Last night I realized that I had pork chops and garlic, but no oil or lime juice. My usual marinade was right out, it was 6:30 already, and I had some shredded mozzarella that really needed to be used. SuperCook offered up this recipe after reminding me that I also had brown sugar, and I had a delicious meal.

But let’s say you’re not a cook. Let’s say you’re more of a techie — the kind of techie who loves Linux but is stuck with Windows for some unfathomable reason. In that case, you’ll love Ulteo. Basically, it’s a virtual desktop that integrates Linux applications with Windows. You can use absolutely anything you want, from Firefox to Scribus, without having to run an obsure OS full-time. If you don’t want the whole shebang you can just use OpenOffice, or you can choose to run a solely online Linux desktop. (As opposed to the downloadable virtual version.) All the compatibility of Windows, all the functionality of Linux. (Also, if you’re like me? Linux is haarrrrd. This makes it so much easier to use — no fussing about with kernels or incomprehensible filenames. Love.)

On a related note, if you’re sick of selling your soul to Google or running out of harddrive space, drop.io is a nice solution. You upload, you name, you’re done — your file is stored at a short URL, available for sharing and editing if you choose, and always accessible. It’s simple and elegant, and I might have tried to make out with it a couple of times. (Especially when I noticed the optional password protection. I’ll never lose another first draft!)

Graphic editors are expensive and unwieldy. They take up tons of room on your harddrive, if you lose your $600 original copy you’re pretty much screwed, and they’re prone to crashing and burning. Enter FotoFlexer! If you’re looking to do basic-to-moderate image editing, this is the absolute shit — an online image editor that, well, edits images. I will note that it’s missing layering technology, but that’s the only real lack in technology here. All you do is upload an image and play around with it; the tools are clearly marked, intuitive, and fast. There’s a great support system — forums and email both — and FotoFlexer is instantly compatible with Picasa, Flickr, and other online photostorage systems. If you’re feeling a little silly there are fun “stickers” (similar to the stamp tool in Photoshop), but if you need to get serious there are strong workhorse tools for animation, clarity, color, and more. You will astound and amaze your friends with consistently gorgeous, artful, and stylish photos. Well, or you’ll do what I do: Add gigantic rubber lips and Coke-bottle glasses to pictures of people you want to mock. Whatever! FotoFlexer is here for you, man.

Finally, a couple of phone-related things. Long-distance calling still is not free and easy, unless you want to do it while chained to your computer via microphone. Talkster to the rescue! This site assigns local numbers to your far-away friends so that you can call them for free. You use their new number to call through your regular phone and it rings their regular phone. Then, you talk for as long as you want — for free. It works for international numbers as well as numbers Stateside, it takes about thirty seconds to assign a new number to someone, and I cannot stress this enough: it saves you tons of money. If you lose your phone while catching up with formerly expensive friends, there’s also PhoneMyPhone. Enter your phone number, hit “call now” and your phone will ring. It also allows you to delay the call, so if you get stuck in a boring meeting you can set up a ring. The excuse you give your boss is entirely up to you.

If you’re so inclined, we’d love to publish your guest post. All you have to do is email Mer at livingbehindthecurve dawtcom and we can work out the particulars.

A little bit Teriyaki, a little bit beef stew, and a whole lotta flavor…but not out of the freezer.  This meal was born last weekend, entirely out of “what do we have* that can be thrown in the slow cooker with these red potatoes?”, and turned out wonderfully.  I used my l33t “dump  and sniff” skills to add various things until it smelled just right, and damn, was it lovely.  I can’t attest first-hand for the survival of this dish in the freezer pre-cooking, but I can’t imagine there’d be any problems.  To SRSLY-ify this dish, skip the schmear and dump all of the ingredients in a bag instead of your slow cooker, and freeze until ready to roll.  And yep, that is our actual slow-cooker above, getting warmed up to cook this actual dish.

Sweet and Zippy Beef Stew

Ingredients:

• 2-3 lb. beef roast
• 4-5 tablespoons garlic and ginger paste
• 1 1/2 lbs. red potatoes, washed and quartered
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons teriyaki sauce
• 2 tablespoons mirin
• 3 tablespoons oyster sauce
• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 1 cup beef stock
• 3 tablespoons dijon mustard
• 1/3 cup ketchup
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• black pepper to taste
• 8 ounces canned bamboo shoots, drained
• 8 ounces canned water chestnuts, drained

Place potatoes and vegetables in bottom of crock pot.  Smear beef with garlic and ginger and set on top of potatoes.  Mix remaining ingredients and pour around and on top of roast.  Cover and cook on low until beef is cooked and the lovely sweet and zesty smell has permeated your entire house.

Serve with duck sauce (this is how I like it) or plain yogurt (Mer’s choice):

*After typing this, I realize that most people probably don’t have things like mirin and oyster sauce and sesame oil and teriyaki sauce bandying about their pantries.  All I can say is…you should!  Then you can make things like this and this and this and…well, they’re yummy, at any rate.  A pantry stocked with flavorful goos like this is a pantry that can make any plain Jane dish a superstar.

If you need, but don’t have, a drying rack for sweaters, but do have an old baby gate, balance the gate across two chairs and lay the sweater on that.

Brought to you by a difficult sweater and my own personal “duh” moment.

A number of months ago, I started hearing murmurs about some digital transition… thingy. I did some research, and marveled at the generalized lack of information on the internet.

Then I remembered I’m a blogger. I decided to make some information on the Digital Television Transition. And I figured out why there isn’t a whole lot of commentary on this upcoming event: for whatever reason, it’s damned hard to write an article about this stuff. So I took the lazy way out and created a FAQ. If I missed something, you know the drill.

What is the Digital Television Transition?
In 1996, Congress gave TV stations a second frequency so they could start simultaneously broadcasting in digital and analog. Congress also declared that all television stations broadcasting analog signals (UHF and VHF. Remember those?) must cease doing so and switch to digital signals completely on Feb 19, 2009.

No, I mean really. What is it?
Ok. In really simple terms, analog signals work by making an energy signal of a certain frequency, and then shaking that signal really carefully to transmit information.The receivers measure how hard the signal shakes (aka amplitude modulation), how fast it shakes (aka frequency modulation) or both. Analog TV signals exist between 30MHz and 3000MHz, but in the US, TV signals live between about 50 and 900MHz. FM radio lives in that same spectrum, towards the bottom. There is a problem, though, because air traffic controllers, rescue worker radios, HAM radio, marine radio networks, VOR networks (sort of a precursor to GPS for planes), wifi, cordless phones, two-way radios, and cellphones all use these frequencies, too.

Digital TV, on the other hand, works digitally. The signals live in about the same frequency range, but instead of having a shaking radio broadcast, it’s a stream of 1’s and 0’s. It’s sort of like flipping a light switch on and off really freaking fast, the signal is either on or off… but that’s a weak metaphor and it’s not entirely like that at all. TV stations are permitted to broadcast up to about 19 megabits/second, which means they can transmit one HD channel or several regular channels at once, thanks to a bunch of really nifty compression stuff.

A big part of the DTT is that old TV frequencies above about 740 are being reassigned for emergency frequencies.

What are the immediate effects of the DTT?
Television stations need to install new transmitters and shut down their old ones, if they haven’t already. Cable companies, satellite TV companies and individual consumers will need to upgrade their receiving hardware.

What does this mean for people who have cable or satellite TV?
Probably nothing. If you get cable, the cable and satellite TV companies do the receiving, not you. Satellite TV and digital cable customers have absolutely nothing to worry about. However, as far as I can tell, the fate of basic cable customers is still up in the air. Whether or not they’ll be required to upgrade to some level of digital service is unknown, so contacting your cable provider is your best bet.

Will cable companies try to force people into expensive digital service unnecessarily?
Yes, if they can. When contacting your cable provider, be alert to the difference between the hard sell or bullying you into upgrading and something like “if you don’t go digital, you won’t have any more TV and we’ll cancel your account”. You also want to check for new products or offerings from your cable company. As we get closer to the DTT, they will probably roll out new tiers of digital service that don’t include extra digital channels or on-demand services, or other less expensive options. Or something.

What if i don’t have cable or satellite TV?
If you use rabbit ears or a rooftop aerial antenna, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that the DTT is going to (probably) vastly improve the quality of your TV signal, and there will probably be more channels available to you. By some estimates, the channels you can receive could quadruple.

The bad news is, it’s very likely you’ll have to spend money on new hardware. If you remember, about 25 years ago, if you wanted to get cable but didn’t have a cable-ready TV, you got a little set-top cable box, plugged the cable into that, then plugged the box into the TV’s antenna connectors. Set top boxes like that have reappeared with the advent of digital cable. What you’ll need is essentially the same thing as those doodads: a set-top box that converts the TV signal into something your TV can understand.

It’s also worth mentioning that all TVs manufactured in the US or imported after March 1, 2007 must have a digital tuner, so if you’ve bought a TV since then, you may be ok. Be careful, though, because retailers can still sell old inventory. There’s a consumer warning in those cases that should have been posted, but who knows if your retailer complied or not.

Tell me more about these set-top boxes.
They’re really no big deal. The antenna gets plugged into one end, the TV into the other, and you’ll have a remote for the box itself. That’s it.

So, what’s this going to do to my TV-watching experience?
A couple of things, some good, and some… weird. The channels you tune in will be clearer and the sound should be better, more or less. If you’re used to watching regular broadcast television, you’re probably used to a certain degree of signal distortion, fuzziness and whatnot. Digital broadcast TV will probably be pretty strongly compressed, and will have some special distortion all it’s own, and very different from what you’re used to. For examples, go to YouTube and watch some vids on full screen, and you’ll get the idea. Regardless, it should be an overall improvement, particularly if you don’t have one of those fancy flat-panel TVs. (Which, if you’ve been rocking the rabbit ears all this time, why exactly did you bother?)

On to the weird. First, if you’ve ever watched digital cable before, you know there’s a little pause when you change channels. This is your cable box buffering the signal, sucking up signal so it can resolve and run smoothly. It the same thing that happens when you stream internet video and it doesn’t start right away. Not a big deal, but it is a change. A bigger deal is that you may not get all the channels you’re used to. As far as I can find out, the TV stations will be sending their TV signals the same distance as before, but the effective range is going to shrink. This could potentially be a big problem.

It works like this. When ever you get snow in a regular TV broadcast, it means that you’re not getting the full-power signal. It’s not a big problem, though, because you can still get most of the video and most of the audio and watch a percentage of the broadcast and still be able to tune in to the news. The signal is nothing but a big spectrum, so you can also view it on a spectrum. With digital, you can’t mess around with percentages. The signal itself is binary, either on or off, so what you can tune into can only be 100 percent, or nothing. If you lose bits from your signal, the signal breaks. No TV, or more likely, it’ll flash in and out every couple of seconds and still not be watchable. If you’re not within the official broadcast range of the channel you want to watch (well within, I suspect), you’re screwed.

So, while the TV you get will probably look better, unless you live in a major metropolitan area, you’ll probably get fewer channels. This will hopefully be balanced out by the fact that you can compress several channels into one digital broadcast, but I haven’t found any information on what that would actually mean, or whether or not any broadcasters are actually going to start doing that.

Another thing to worry about is that cell phones still work with the same frequencies at the TV stations, and cellphones near your antenna or even in the same house during a call could bork your TV. This is a problem over in the UK, where they already had their DTT.

Why should I spend money on a set-top box to watch free TV?
You don’t have to do that, you have two alternatives: buy a very expensive new television with a digital tuner already installed (some TV makers lie or mislead you about whether the TV has a real digital tuner, so do your homework so you’re not stuck with a “digital tuner display”), or you can stop watching TV. Your analog TV won’t be able to understand the signals coming from your antenna without help, plain and simple.

However, the government does recognize your plight, and acknowledges your constitutional right to sack out in front of the boob tube at no cost. You can go to this link and sign up for a coupon that will be good for $40 towards a new cable box. You can get up to two coupons per household. However, it’s worth noting that these coupons are only good for thirty days, digital set top boxes aren’t widely available yet, and it’s very likely that there will be a run on the boxes at the end of the year. Make sure you can get a box before you get the coupon, because if your coupons expire you’ll be shit out of luck.

How much will the boxes cost?
I predict that they’ll be no less than $40 and no more than about $100, depending on location, demand, and the gullibility of your neighbors.

Do I need to buy a new TV?
No. The only people that are telling you that you must buy a new TV are people trying to sell you expensive TVs. If you want to buy a new TV and need to convince your wife, husband or parents, this is a convenient excuse, but otherwise you’re on your own.

Anything else I should know?
The government, the broadcasters, other involved companies and consumer advocates haven’t ironed out all the details yet. For instance, right now it appears to be illegal for a cable provider to take the digital signal from your local PBS station and re-translate it into an analog signal to send down the wire to basic cable customers, but nobody is quite sure yet.

Isn’t this just a giant cable-company conspiracy to separate me from my money by manipulating the government?
Eh, maybe. I doubt the cable companies were that forward-thinking 12 years ago, but they’re going to do the best they can with what they have now.

Given the utter lack of new Living Behind the Curve material, the near-lack of fresh recipes at Catch the Spoon, and a new project on our plate (plus school, work, and our other ventures), it will probably come as no surprise to you, dear readers, that Mer and I are doggone burnt out. The extent of our overload came to a head about two months ago when, due to two torn tendons in my ankle, I became suddenly much less mobile (and unable to drive). Over the course of the positively dreadful week immediately following my injury, we cut our losses, paid someone to do our laundry, and talked to each other like we haven’t talked in a long time. (We also took a desperately-needed vacation day to sleep.)

It turns out that in the name of bettering ourselves through furthering our education, we completely lost sight of the things that are really important to us. We have been so focused on getting through the day and getting things done for school that we lost touch with each other, our goals, and our dreams. That stops now.

I like lists, and so in classic LBtC style, here are the eleven ways we’ll be getting ourselves, and our dreams, back on track. (Anyone remember 11 Things? Anyone? Sara?)

1. Take the summer off.
This decision had been made a few weeks ago, but it has taken on a new level of importance. Taking a break from school will give us the time we need to spend collating our feces, as it were.

2. Re-evaluate school.
We’ll be taking a good hard look at why we’re in school, and how that meshes with our goals. I am in it to prove to myself that I can do it - nothing more. That $25,000 piece of paper, when it’s all said and done, will be the fulfillment of a promise I made to myself when I dropped out of college the first time around, 11 years ago. Is that enough of a reason to push myself through it at a breakneck pace, taking on oodles of debt in the process? I’m not so sure anymore. Taking a class at a time (as opposed to my current full-time load), only as I can pay cash for them, may be a much better way to go. Mer has her own questions to answer - I’ll let her address those here if/when she so chooses.

3. Re-focus on spending.
Or, more accurately, re-focus on _not_ spending. This semester, our spending has gotten completely out-of-hand. We haven’t taken on any additional debt, mind you, but we’re not doing a whole lot of saving, either. Once the semester is done (4 weeks and counting!), there will be much less take-out and many less convenience items, and much more fresh food. (Even our SRSLY habits have fallen by the wayside.)

4. Put more time into our side projects.
More podcasts. More recipes. More tips on living fabulously. More jewelry crafts. More consulting. We started these things because we truly love them, and we enjoy spending time on them - we need to get back to that.

5. Sunshine daydream!
This is mostly for me - I get high on sunshine. No, really. I am a happier, more well-balanced person the more sunshine I get and the more time I spend outside. It’s the dirty tree-hugging goddess-worshiping hippie in me, I suppose, but it’s a part of life that I am desperately missing. The remedy? Well, for starters, my brother (a former landscaper) was kind enough to install a slate patio for us a few weekends ago. That gives me a place to chill outside with a good book and a cup of tea, and seems to be good for our creative juices - a re-branding package and site redesign was born out there.

6. Build positive income
This ties in closely to #4 above. We plan to put time into the things that we truly enjoy, and see if we can make money doing them. It’s all speculation at this point - we don’t want to make the kind of time commitment to our side jobs that we currently have to school, because that rather defeats the point. Instead, we’ll do what we like, and see if anything comes of it. (Need a website? Wanna buy a watch?)

7. Continue laying the foundation
We’ve come a long way from where we started, when Dykewaddery (our original concept) and Living Behind the Curve were born. The remainder of our credit card debt is now paid, Mer’s car (only ~2500 to go!) and the no-payments no-interest bed debt (~1900) will be next, and then there’s a whole lot of saving to look forward to.

8. Work on physical health
This is another one mostly for me. I love my elliptical machine and pilates exercises, but wrestling with crutches everyday for 5 weeks showed me that it’s just not enough. I’ve done some research into the exercise component of the Hacker Diet, and I’m planning to start those routines now that I am finally able to stand evenly on both feet. :)  We also have a Wii Fit on the way, something we’ve been planning for.  Wii Sports has done a lot of good for both of us, and I hope that the Wii Fit lives up to that standard.

9. Learn to count
Because really, an eleven things post without a number 9, which is how this post almost went live, isn’t exactly an eleven things post, now is it? Oh, you wanted actual content? Okay. Sing more. Music makes me happy, and I have Wii karaoke. Pbth.

10. Redefine the future
We’ve known for some time now what we wanted for the future, in general terms. What we’re discovering is that the future is a lot closer, and a lot easier to obtain, than we once thought. In the coming months and years, we’ll redefine and focus in on what that really means. Right now, it’s forests and land and bare feet and self-sufficiency. Over time, we’ll narrow that down to a time zone, a state, a decade, a year. The path to our dreams and intellectual freedom is hazy, but it’s in front of us. It’s tangible. It’s time for the haze to clear.

11. Spend time together.
Hands down, this is the most important item on this list, and frankly the most important item period. Our time together is awesome and precious and fun. When we’re together, we laugh and giggle and plan and dream and talk and intellectualize and process and snuggle and love. It’s what makes us who we are and what we are. Writing that now, it’s impossible to believe that we let that slip away in the name of “too busy” or “homework due”. Screw that. *This* is what’s important, and we’re idiots for thinking otherwise.

Things are, of course, a bit more complicated than that. But, 18 months or so after starting this journey, and almost precisely a year after this site was born, it’s good to see that we’ve made progress. Life is still freaking awesome, and getting better every minute. Next comes awesomer.

Your obligatory Dani fluff post for the month of May has been brought to you by Ancient Civilizations in World History, the Taming of the Shrew, and the letters P, F, and B (for procrastination, final exams, and burnout, doncha know.)