Omar Shahine's blog

yet another Microsoft blogger

Avoiding plastic in kids dinnerware

It’s really hard to avoid plastic these days. It’s everywhere. A few years ago, when our first daughter was born, and before we all knew what BPA was, I did some research on the topic. It was all rather fascinating. Fast forward 5 years and you won’t find a baby bottle that contains BPA. They are all either made of Polymide.

By now you should know that there are three kinds of plastics

1)       Good Plastics

2)       Bad Plastics

3)       Unknown Plastics

Good plastics are as far as we know, safe for things like food (including heating them up). Things like Polypropylene, High-Density Polyethylene, Low-Density & Polyethylene are all “safe plastics”.

The bad plastics, things like Polycarbonate, are almost gone entirely as containers for food items, replaced by things like Eastman Tritan. They look the same (clear plastic), but are branded with new “BPA free” stickers. But we still have PVC and Polystyrene (the coffee lids you use from Starbucks) which I am sure are leaching into our bodies (the coffee lids at Microsoft are finally compostable and made of corn).

That leaves the “unknowns”. Things like melamine. Your kids dishes and cups are made of this stuff. That is unless they are ceramic, porcelain, glass or stainless steel. But, sadly all those things break. It’s not clear if they are safe or not. I am a skeptical person when it comes to this stuff. We only ask science to answer certain questions, and the answers to this one are not conclusive. For one thing melamine will melt in a microwave, does that mean it’s not going to leech chemicals in a dishwasher, which can reach in excess of 100 degrees?

It’s seriously hard to figure all this stuff out (that is if you care to figure it out, many people don’t). I do care, so when I have time, I do research on the topic. We’ve pretty much tried as hard as we could to use glass and stainless steel with our kids. We look for things like borosilicate glass (that’s what Pyrex is made of). But for dishes I recently discovered something that’s been around forever. Dishware made by Corelle. It comes in lots of colors and shapes, and they have a lot of styles that will appeal to kids. The best part is, they are made of glass, but are really resistant to breaking. It’s basically a laminated tempered glass (like your windshield). They are readily available from Amazon and Amazon Fresh.

Here is what we got for Sarah:

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And so far, she is a big fan.

Here’s to one less plastic food vehicle in our house.

So long Mint, Hello Quicken

In 2007 I started to use Mint.com. I used it side by side with Microsoft Money. In 2008 I stopped using Microsoft Money because the product was put out to pasture. Microsoft Money served me well for about 6 years, starting in 2001. It was one of the reasons I starting using my PC more than my Mac.

Anyway, I think Mint.com sort of sucks now. Here is why:
  1. They frequently can't connect to my financial institutions. They could not connect to Fidelity for over a week.
  2. They frequently duplicate my transactions. For a few days, every single Wells Fargo transaction was duplicated
  3. Their automatic "renaming" and "categorization" feature sucks. It doesn't work. For example, every purchase at my grocery store "Bert's Red Apple" is named "Apple Computer" an categorized as electronics
  4. For 5 months now, my investment accounts don't have charts
  5. My 401 cost basis and balances are never the same as Fidelity
From what I can tell, no one is working on the software.

So I did something I swore I would never do (credit to Mike Torres for convincing me). I purchased Quicken 2011. And while I feel like I am stuck in the 90s sometimes, I have to give Intuit credit for actually improving the product from the last time I tried it (2009). I can deal with the fact that the dialogs look like Windows 95, and that the "Preferences" entry is under "Edit" (a throwback to the Mac origins of Quicken) and that there seems to be two features that control everything around categories and renames because at the end of the day Quicken makes me feel in control of my finance and budget. I can actually project my cashflow and bills over the next 30 days, and see my investment performance... 

Anyways, it feels good to be back, and it's always easiest to start with a new finance package in January so that come December, I can track my performance against my budget and financial goals.

Mail Me, my first Windows Phone 7 app

One of my goals over the holiday break was to learn how to write a Windows Phone 7 application. Well my app is now published to the app store. I had a lot of fun writing it and hope you enjoy it.

One thing that I do a lot is send myself email messages. It's a bit cumbersome to do this on the phone so I decided to write an application to make this just a few quick taps  (when pinned to the start screen).

Mail Me allows you to configure a pre-determined subject line and up to 3 email addresses (only 1 in trial mode) to send mail to. Selecting an address will then bring up the mail compose screen on your phone allowing you to type the body and hit send.

This application is really quite simple but it exercises a bunch of functionality on the phone. Learning Silverlight was a bit of a challenge at first since I'm a pure Windows Forms and ASP.NET (hobby) developer. Anyways, hopefully this app is of use to you. The trial version doesn't nag you or anything and you can use that as long as you want if you just need to quickly send email to a single address.

In my case I configure all 3: my personal email, my work email, and my Remember The Milk task inbox (creates tasks via email).

In the future, I hope to be able to add such features as recording and attaching a voice note once the phone APIs allow that (currently you can record audio but cannot attach it to an email).

You can get the app here.

(download)