I noticed a bump in my blog traffic the day before Thanksgivig. Wow, 50 visits in one day! I'm big time...
It took me a few minutes to figure out why I was getting all the traffic, until I figured out which page everyone was visiting from Google:
Pie Crust For Fun and ProfitGotta love the pie.
Our refrigerator door has never been very good about closing, but things got particularly bad in the last week. Specifically, a few chunks of mangled plastic fell off the base of the door and suddenly it didn't want to close at all. To actually get it to close, you had to physically lift the door about an inch and shove it into place. Not exactly great.
I decided to try to fix it myself, since getting our landlord and most likely a repairmen involved seemed like a pain. I'm posting this mostly so anyone Googling about their GE Model # TFF22RC or TFF22RCB refrigerator and its broken door might learn something useful.
I taped some plastic where the door used to be, since the operation takes some time. At this point you can get a clearer look at the hinge and the mangled cam:
So I've been working on a project called http://onebusaway.org/ since early summer. OneBusAway provides an easy-to-use interface to real-time bus tracking data provided by Metro King County. The main killer feature is a phone number you can call, punch in your bus number, and the system will then tell you the predicted arrival time for the buses at that stop. The key here is "predicted", as the system can tell you when your bus is running late or if it's already gone by. OneBusAway is made for all the cold and rainy nights here in Seattle when you can't help but wonder if your bus is ever going to come. In addition to the phone number, there is a website, iphone, and SMS interface.
The system currently gets about 400 hits a day on the website. It's interesting to see the usage patterns:
Last weekend, I rendezvoused with my sister Elizabeth and my dad down in San Luis Obispo, where my dad is working. After taking in the local wildlife:
Back in the fall of 2007 (yup, I've been delinquent about posting this), I took a class in the School of Art here at UW called ART 383 - Interaction Design - Designing Behaviors. The class basically involved building cool interactive robots with Leog Mindstorm robotic kits. What's not to love about that?
My team built a drawing robot:
We called it the Spydr bot: it hung on a white board using two almost invisible strands of fishing line, making it appear to float in space as it moved over the surface of the board.
Once we worked out the crazy math involved in converting geometric drawing commands into the proper motor controls, we could do some relatively precise drawing:
From there, the sky is the limit. Check out this highly stylized Mona Lisa:
The class was a blast, and though it didn't put me any closer to graduation, I would definitely take it again. I mean, come on. Legos!
Tuesday... was good. Obama won! Dino lost! Prop 1 passed here in Seattle.
Also, I made my friend Nancy an Obama cake for her birthday:
I went over to watch the Eurocup 2008 final at a friends house today and I promised I would bring a pie. Here is the pie:
I've never made a blueberry pie before. Seemed to turn out ok. My friend lives a little over 7 miles away in Mt. Baker. Getting there by bus would have required two transfers, so I decided to bike it. That means I needed some sort of pie transport unit for my bike. Thanks to Emily and Mark's recent wedding present and a little bit of ingenuity, I came up with the following:
It actually worked really well in that the pie made it with narry a misplaced berry. I wish I could say the same. I sort of got "lost" on my way there and ended up going up and down a few too many hills in Madrona. I earned my piece of pie to say the least.
Procrastinators of the world! Troubling news...
I'm a big fan of Google Reader, and by big fan I mean total addict. I need my feeds and I need them now. However, it looks like there was an update to the program last Wednesday, and I've got bugs! Specifically, I'm a big fan of the keyboard shortcuts (j and k for life) and they are not working like they should. When I click a link to read a story, read said story, close the tab and come back to Google Reader, the keyboard shortcuts don't work until I click in the window. I've confirmed the bug on Firefox 2.0.0.12 on both Mac OS X and Linux. This may sound trivial, but it has really cut into my procrastination productivity.
If you are a fan of Google Reader (bonus points if you are reading this in Google Reader right now) and have also noticed this bug, let Google know by posting a message to the bug's thread on the official Google Reader problems forum.
Melanie challenged us to roast a chicken, so I did. I followed the recipe she posted, and I have to admit that I was a little skeptical of the dry salt rub. I guess I never fully understood why brining works in the first place. From what I remember of high school chemistry, when you have a high concentration salt solution (the brine) and a low concentration salt solution (any liquid already in the chicken), the liquid would flow from low to high to equalize the concentrations, the exact opposite of what we want! Yet brined chickens and turkeys are definitely more juicy... what gives?
Thankfully, this post on brining at cooking for engineers explains it all:
Obviously, there's more going on than simple osmosis. It is true that salt enters the meat (it tastes more salty after brining). But why is it also more juicy? Well, when water flows out of the meat, salt flows in and begins to break down some of the proteins in the cells. In the broken down state, the molecules become more concentrated and the solute levels rise within the meat. This causes additional water to flow into the meat.
Well said sir. Thus, a dry salt brine will theoretically do the same work as a regular brine. But will it really? Here's what it will do: turn your chicken pink!
I had originally planned to cook my chicken on Friday night after a few hours in the fridge. However, Amy and I were both tired and not very hungry, so we decided to delay until Saturday night. However, we were out late bouncing around post-caucus parties, so I didn't end up cooking it until Sunday night. The recipe states a max of two days in the fridge, so I was still ok for time... but during all that time in the fridge, my chicken started to turn pink. I don't know if it was the salt or just the time in the open air, but it was definitely an interesting look.
Color aside, time to roast. I stuff my chicken with a sliced up Meyer lemon and maybe eight cloves of garlic, chopped up in big chunks. I didn't have any twine, so I twisted up some tin foil into sort of a homemade twist-tie and used that to tie the legs. Olive oil and pepper on the outside (I skipped the sugar suggested by the recipe). Roast! Except I did it backwards. You are supposed to start it breast-side down for the first 30 minutes, but I totally did it backwards. Oh well. Not exactly a disaster.
Here begins the hardest part of roasting a chicken... is it done? I hit the requested temperature on my thermometer and let the chicken rest for 30 minutes, but even so, I still feel like I had some pink spots near the thigh joint. I know there is a major wow factor in presenting a whole roasted chicken or turkey at the table, but I usually end up carving the entire thing up into component parts almost immediately. I think in the future I'm going to lean towards carving up the bird before roasting. Takes less time to cook and more consistent cooking. We'll see.
I whipped up a quick marsala gravy (same recipe as the pinot noir gravy from thanksgiving, but with marsala wine instead). Tasted ok, but didn't rock my world. Once everything was prepped, it was off to the HCI potluck and my bird's date with destiny. I had promised Kayur, the organizer, that I was "bringing meat." Mission accomplished. I also made rolls:
Oh baby.
We have the Democratic caucuses in less than an hour. I have a lot of persuasive arguments lined up for why you should choose Barack Obama, but there is really only one reason you need to consider:
Obama Cupcakes
I made Amy's red velvet cupcakes and attempted to do justice to the Obama logo. Eat em up.
I made doughnuts for Friday Morning Grad Student breakfast this morning. I think this counts as the first time I've successfully made doughnuts, which may come as a shock to some of you. I've actually tried making cake doughnuts before, but I failed miserably. I went with a yeasty doughnut this time, and had a lot more success.
I used the recipe for dough from this Epicurious recipe, and it worked pretty well. The texture was more dense than a KK doughnut, but still tasty. I didn't bother making the jelly doughnuts as described in the recipe, but instead went crazy with a variety of frostings and fillings after I fried them up.
You can click on those photos to get the annotated version of which doughnuts is which, but all told I made:
All in all, the doughnuts were a hit. Now I just need to nap off the food coma I'm in.
