I've been reluctant to post about this episode

My oldest went an did something that had me looking like this about a week ago:


As some who know me well may know, I'm a Mac fan. I've got a first gen 13" MacBook that I adore. Well, Melanie calls me at work last Tuesday night to let me know that Wally had got up on the kitchen bar, where my gorgeous little notebook was happily residing harmlessly. Wally decided that my notebook needed a little cleaning up, apparently, and proceeded to drown the keyboard with Softsoap. Mel pleasnatly informed me that the computer appeared to be running just fine regardless of the slimy mess that was slowly working its way through the electronics of a $1000 piece of computing hardware. She didn't even bother to turn the computer off!

After a short, one-sided, conversation about the evils of water based liquids being introduced to otherwise dry environ devices, I convinced Mel to turn of my computer before any more serious damage was done.

I came home to a closed notebook, with the unwelcome red glow eminating from the still connected mouse, and a slowly flashing front bezel light indicating that the lid was simply shut, putting the notebook to sleep, and nothing was shutdown properly. So now neither my son, who has been told repeatedly to stay off the kitchen bar, nor my wife can follow the simplest of instruction. I'm sure both would beg to differ, but they can do that in their own blogs.

Anyways... I'm writing this from my MacBook. Of course I'm using a USB keyboard and mouse. I took the MacBook apart yesterday and tried to clean up the keyboard as best I could, but the keyboard only has about 30% function, not even enough to login. eBay has used replacements in the $60-70 range + shipping, or I can get a new one from a couple different sources online for around $130. That's a bit more than the cost of a new keyboard for the desktop, but I cant bear to sit here with a notebook attached to all these peripherals for very long. It's embarrassing!

Trying to get one of my inboxes cleaned up a little

And I'm also trying to utilize a recent feature from Microsoft's Live. They've got this thing called Sky Drive, where you can save up to 5GB of files and share them if you like.

I've been saving a number of recipes from Weber Barbecue's "Recipe of the Week" that I get via email. I'm converting a number of them to PDF and saving them to my MS Sky Drive. From there I'm sharing them publicly.

There's a link along the right side of this page.

I'm also considering trying to put them in another format, and possibly in another location, such as http://docs.google.com, where I can share them as well, but I can't use PDF.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Sounds like PETA's recruitment handbook

Warmer weather doesn't normally make for ...

Good beer brewing. The Belgians make some really great ales that are fermented at what are considered high temperatures by most everyone else, but the Belgians are looking for the "funky" flavors that are produced at these temps. They also have very particular conditions and yeast that work well for this. Most homebrewers want to keep ambient temps below 70°F, and the wort below 75°F for most ales.

That same temperature range works well for white wines too. Red wine, on the other hand, does well in temps up into the 80°F range, and summer seems to be a good time to make red wine. That's exactly what I've got going at the moment, an Aussie Shiraz, but I'm thinking that I might even need to get some more red wine going when the current batch comes out of the primary fermentation bucket. I would really like to do a Pinot Noir, or a nice subtle Merlot. I tend to prefer the fruitier reds these days. I'll have to see what kits are available at a decent price.

I think I'm also gravitating towards wine at the moment because the act of cooking the wort for beer really heats up the house too much if done on the stovetop, and it's just too damn hot outside to be stirring 7-8 gallons of boiling liquid on a propane cookstove outside too! I guess I could make an extract batch or two that don't require anywhere near the same amount of cooking as all grain, but now that I've started doing all grain it'd be kind of a bummer to go back. Perhaps I'm just looking at it the wrong way.

Making a beer from a kit, using a canned liquid malt extract, is very much like making a boxed cake mix. Even though making a cake from scratch can produce an outstanding end product, making one from a box of ingredients makes a good cake, and almost more importantly, a consistent end product. It's all in the preparation and actions one takes during the process of making the cake, or beer, that makes a difference, as long as the ingredients are quality ones to begin with.

Another problem is expense. A decent extract beer kit is over $35 these days. I'm making batch of IPA for under $30, and a basic ale for under $20 with all grain ingredients. My last wine kit was around $60, but that also represents a significant savings over commercial store bought bottled wine. The beer, not so much. You can do the math yourself, but 28-30 bottles of wine for $60 comes in at, or just slightly over, $2 a bottle. Considering that any decent 750ml bottle of wine is going to be over $5, you're saving a bunch. But 5 gallons of beer is roughly 48-54 bottles, or 2 cases and a few extra. A decent commercial beer, like a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale runs in the neighborhood of $24 a case at my Costco, or around a buck a bottle. I can make my own good beer (notice I say good, not some sugar-added hooch) for around ¢60-70 a bottle, which isn't anywhere near the same savings as wine. But since it's still cheaper to make beer as a whole, I guess it all comes out in the wash...

I guess I'm just kind of thinking out loud here.

That does it, I'm an old fart now!

I had to fast for about 36 hours. I was on a liquid diet, and a "clear" one at that. No, it wasn't a scientology clear, but a lack of red food coloring clear. I also had to drink a bunch of vile tasting sodium phosphate concoction. Yup, I got the Katie Couric treatment, but I didn't have live TV cameras in there to speak to and that's a good thing. I don't recall much, and that is also a good thing.

That's the first time I recall ever having an IV, and I don't remember ever being anesthetized before, at least not in a medical sense. I would say it was neat, or a great feeling, but I honestly don't remeber anything except the sound of the heart monitor changing in a weird way, like I imagine they used to replicate in acid rock shows. I do know there was a couple points I felt some pain, but I guess it wasn't too bad, as I don't feel any discomfort now.

Back to the central theme here, the second half of the day brought the second key piece of old-mandom, the dreaded minivan...

We took delivery of a 2008 Honda Odyssey this afternoon. I'm going to be paying for the new vehicle for quite some time, but after driving the Chrysler, the Honda really doesn't feel like a van. Well, not until you turn around and look back while pulling out of a parking spot, but the camera in the rear view mirror really makes that much easier too. And talk about room! This thing has seating for 8. Now that would be 8 adult sized good friends, or 8 kids, but it'll fit them. I'm already thinking about how the Ducati's going to fit back there if I ever get the funds and time to try a track day...

So I'm just those couple more points into old age.

Man, I need to go fishin'..........

Picked up a new wine kit this afternoon

I had a little bit of time between an afternoon appointment and getting to the evening job, so I stopped by my brew supply store, Lumina Winery, and I let Dave, the owner, talk me into giving a R.J. Sphttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifagnols wine kit a shot. I got a , in the Australian Shiraz type. This will be the second grape wine I've made, the first being a Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay that actually came out pretty good. My dad, the wine snob, even enjoyed that Chardonnay, so if this wine comes out as good I'll be real happy.

Unlike the beermaking, which isn't really saving much money over Miller High Life, but produce much better beer, winemaking presents a big potential savings over store bought. At a little more than $60 for a decent wine kit, which produces 28-30 750ml bottles, you pay just a bit more than $2 per bottle. Many of the items needed to make wine are the same ones used for making beer, so I didn't have a huge bunch of expenses for new equipment. The most expensive tool for wine so far has been the Portuguese Floor Corker, which is an awesome piece of equipment, and I highly recommend one if you get into the hobby.

Father's Day this year should be fun, with plans so far to included both a batch of beer and a batch of wine on the fermenting stand by the end of the day.

(I borrowed the picture above from wine.appellationamerica.com)

I stopped watching pro basketball...

Following the Lakers vs. the Kings in 2002. It was obvious to me that the fix was in, and that the Kings were being denied the championship by the NBA. I've said this for years now, but now there's someone out there actually confirming this for me.

Tim Donaghy, an NBA ref, is saying exactly what I believe to be true. The fix was in, and the Lakers were given that championship.

The NBA is no better that Pro Wrestling. Watching either one is basically watching scripted theater.

So I made some Blondies

And they are tasty!

I made mine with dates and walnuts instead of chocolate chips, but don't fret, they're plenty sweet.


I baked these the whole 25 minutes recommended by the aforementioned website, but I think they could have used another 5 minutes. No biggie, they're nice and gooey! Flavor is wonderful and I almost wish I would have slipped in around 25% whole wheat flour in the recipe in place of part of the AP flour, but I'll be making this recipe again, so I'll give that a try next time.

"Doughing In..."

Of another kind.

I'm making a Blondie recipe from Smitten Kitchen. No, I have no idea who's blog that is; it's just a recipe I found on a Google search. I'm making mine as a double batch, with chopped dates and walnuts.

Updates and a review later.

Trippa update

OK, it wasn't my thing.

Now I just need to find Sweetbreads, and make 'em like the Far Western Tavern in Guadalupe, CA....

I almost forgot to update...

about the tripe.

I chickened out last night. Well, not exactly, as I didn't finish preparing the dish until well after 11:30 PM, and I had been snacking while cooking, so I wasn't really hungry by the time the dish was finished. I packed it all away in the fridge, so hopefully I give it a taste tonight, once all the flavors have melded.

I don't recall if I've mentioned it here before

But I am really digging Portable Apps on my thumbdrive. The Portable Apps website has a few different base downloads that have guidelines for varying sizes of flash memory USB drives. If you've purchased a halfway decent drive recently, then you probably got at the very least a 1GB one, but more likely a 2 or 4 GB model, that will handle every application they have, which is quite a bunch.

While I've been a big fan of U3 recently, not all drive manufacturers are U3 capable, and there's also a number of applications for U3 that cost money, while Portable Apps are all open source (free).

One of the most used programs on my thumbdrive is Firefox. While it may be a bit faster to use it from the internal hard drive on your PC, that isn't always an option, particularly when you're not at your own computer. For those times you're at a work or borrowed computer you might really want to consider using a thumbdrive based browser, both for courtesy and security. It's courteous because you don't have to go log someone out of all their websites and email accounts to access your own, and you aren't tempted to change all the default settings someone else has setup on their profile. You can have all the plugins and skins etc. you like on your own copy of the program. For security you have your own password manager running, with your own master password, and you keep all the session history and cookies on your own drive. You don't have to wipe out someone else's cookies just to satisfy your own paranoia.

Another application I can't say enough good things about is VideoLan Player, VideoLan play about everything I throw at it. WMV, AVI, MOV and all the rest, including Divx. The interface is boring, but it's simple and it just plain works. What more could you ask for.

There's also built-in backup provisions, with a nice simple process for backing up your drive and restoring it. I used this function recently to backup my 2GB drive, and then restored everything to my newer 4GB drive, and I kept all my browser cookies, and passwords etc. in tact. I then used the Eraser application to wipe out the older 2GB drive, and now I can re-install the Portable Apps Suite on that and give it to a friend to get them hooked on it.

It's kind of funny how many alternative applications to programs there are that we normally don't consider, like PDF readers and file compression tools. It's amazing at how bloated the shareware versions of these commercial programs have become, and how simple and compact the open source versions are.

All in all, if you carry a thumbdrive around these days it's worth checking out. If you're already using one take a look at what Portable Apps has to offer, even if you're running a U3 drive, you can still load applications from Portable Apps on it.

It's food experiment night at my house!

I've decided to try something new, and kind of out there.

Normally I like to try new things when I dine out, but I'll tend to stick to known dishes at home, even if I've never made it before. I know if I like the dish before I attempt it.

Tripe.

That's right, cow stomach, or at least one of a cow's stomachs.

I keep perusing the meat section at the supermarket, and this mass of white flesh keeps on staring back when I pass. It kept daring me, and with a price of about a buck and a quarter a pound, a couple pounds for a taste test isn't going to break the bank.

I'm making a recipe from Mario Batali from the Food Network, and it's an Italian dish, as if the name Mario didn't give that away. I could have gone the expected route and done a proper Mexican Menudo, but I just have to do things differently.

I am at this point simmering the dish, and it's got less than 10 minutes to go, but I'm not going to write about it until I've really had a chance to taste it, not just have a bite.

Wish me luck!