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Easter Salad

March 27, 2005

[Crossposted to and .]

Click for huuuuuge!

I thought people might be interested in seeing a picture of the impromptu salad that I made up for part of Easter dinner at my parents house. It’s baby spinach, watercress, roma tomato, and carrot. To the above picture I added a mushroom blend containing baby bella, shittake, and oyster mushrooms, but only once I was at my parents house, because I didn’t want them to get soggy. The dressing I chose is Brianna’s Real French Vinaigrette which seemed especially wonderful because it doesn’t contain any typical pre-made salad dressing crap like sugar, corn syrup, etc.

Also, I mixed it up in a bus tray, which is especially convenient because it provides plenty of room for mixing things around, properly tossing a salad, etc. And it’s easily washed / sterilized.

While I had no idea how the salad was going to come out (I threw it together while walking through the market yesterday) it ended up being extremely tasty, and almost all of it was eaten.

Here’s the pictures relating to the salad, all in one place:
· Salad mixed up in the bus tray.
· Mushroom blend used in the salad.
· Salad, mushrooms, and dressing.
· A piece of a slug which I found in the watercress when washing it.

food moved from livejournal

VoodooPad

March 24, 2005

After a recommendation from I keep trying to find a way to utilize Flying Meat‘s VoodooPad. This is a sort of desktop wiki system that has ready support for publishing notes online, to iPods, or all sorts of other places. It seems like it would be really useful for getting a handle on random little notes that I have, but I’m not quite sure where to start.

computers moved from livejournal

Sour Mash Beer…

March 23, 2005

Click for lots of detail…

Well, there it is, beer batch #4 all fermenting away. It’s been about 20 hours since the yeast was pitched, and it’s happily fermenting. I attached my new digital thermometer to the side in order to keep an eye on things. It’s currently at 70.3ºF which is a bit hotter than the recipe calls for, but it should be all right. Maybe I’ll knock the temp in the house down a degree to try and bring it down a little.

Regardless, it’s fermenting away… Hopefully it’ll be good. Oh, this is the batch that was made with the sour mash. I overshot in adding water, so it’s a little weaker than I intended with an OG (original gravity, or density before yeast is added) of 1.040. The target was 1.045 or something like that. This means it’ll be a little lighter and slightly less alcoholic than intended, but not by much…

Oh, and if you want to see a video of the beer churning around, look here: http://www.nuxx.net/albums/brewing_beer/DSCN0458.mov

That THUNK THUNK THUNK sound in the background is the bubbles coming out of the blowoff hose and reverberating through the bathtub. Each bubble is about half the size of a ping pong ball, so you see that making beer really kicks out a lot of CO₂.

beer making things moved from livejournal

Help!

March 21, 2005

Could someone who’s familiar with Apache’s mod_rewrite and regexp help me understand what’s wrong with the following statements?

# Slashdot video…
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://*slashdot* [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} /files/videos/bull_512k.mov [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /files/videos/sorry_slashdot.mov [R=301,L]

I know I’m doing something wrong, but I’m not sure what…

Thank you. :)

computers moved from livejournal

The New Deal at The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor

March 20, 2005

Well, as I mentioned not a few minutes ago, and I just returned from a most wonderful show. See, Midwest Product was playing tonight, opening up for a Toronto band that neither of us had heard of, The New Deal.

Well, to make a long story short, we went, and were quickly blown away. One guy with five analog synths (Nord Lead, Juno 106, Moog something or other, Rhodes Organ, and a Korg Drawbar organ), a bassist with a boatload of effects, and a drummer with a rather interesting kit, and the only microphones on stage.

Over the course of two and a half hours they played five total ‘songs’. Well, there were only four recognizable breaks between things, including intermission and a pause for an encore.

They played an incredibly tight set, as if they’ve been playing together for years. They may have, but I’m not sure… Regardless, it was an absolutely amazing show.

Here’s some video that shot with his nifty pocket sized camera that he, unlike my forgetful ass, remembered to bring. They came out extremely well, with excellent sound:

· The New Deal – Clip 1 (Drummer – 1010 KB – MPEG-4)
· The New Deal – Clip 2 (Audience / Drummer / Keyboardist – 1.6MB – MPEG-4)
· Midwest Product (600 KB MPEG-4)

So, yeah. Definitely check those videos out, and the next time they come to town, or if you are lucky enough to be able to see them in their native Toronto, go! You won’t be disappointed… I have never seen a completely live band play together so wonderfully as these guys.

In addition, the person selling their CDs told me that the show was audience recorded (there was a guy with a laptop and stereo mic setup) and will likely end up on The Internet Archive‘s Live Music Archive. I cannot wait to get a copy of it to listen to.

Wow. Just…. Wow.

moved from livejournal music

Rot!

March 19, 2005

Hmm, well, there is a pot of chilled wort sitting on the counter, all covered up. Hopefully it’ll start rotting soon. I’d like to be able to brew Sunday or Monday, but it might go off a bit further than that.

I’ve actually had a similar kind of rot happen before, by filling up a mixing bowl from chocolate chip cookies with straight water and letting it sit for a while. After about a week there’d be a bit of scum with bubbles in it, and a nasty sour stink. That’s almost exactly what I’m looking for, but it’s intentional this time.

Oh, and for anyone who won’t try this because of how it’s made, know that lambics are fermented in a similar manner. You just toss all the stuff in, expose it to the air, and let it go. Completely natural…

Hmm, maybe I’ll do a raspberry lambic when summer rolls around. I’ll just let it sit outside or in front of the cracked doorwall for a while…

beer food moved from livejournal

Rot!

March 18, 2005

Tonight I have to add some grains to a pot of water, then let them rot.

Literally.

I’m making up some beer that supposedly gets a bunch of it’s flavor from sour mash, and I need to make some. Yes, this is the same stuff as some whiskeys are made from. Basically, you let grain steep at a high enough temperature to mash the grains into sugar, then cover it and let it be. It’s supposed to be used once it’s so stinky you think it should be thrown out.

This should be interesting.

beer food moved from livejournal

GNU netcat under Cygwin

March 15, 2005

To compile a static copy of GNU netcat under Cygwin:

CFLAGS=-static ./configure –disable-nls ; make

Guh. Finally. Too bad I need to include cygwin1.dll with it all…

computers moved from livejournal

Geek Help

March 14, 2005

Help! I’m having an issue that I just can’t seem to figure out… Hopefully someone here will be able to point me in the right direction. I *think* the problem is with pipes in Windows (XP SP2 specifically) but I’m not completely sure.

Basically, I’m doing this: nc 192.168.0.1 10567 < hugefile.gz on the Windows box, and the destination has been Linux, Windows XP, and OS X, all with the same result.

Hugefile is somewhere around 22GB… What happens is that seemingly no matter where the destination is, it just stops sending after a while, usually with the output file on the target machine being 23MB-24MB. This size is not consistant. I’ve also gotten these results across a pocket-sized 100MB switch, the company’s switch to which I’m connected, etc.

I really don’t know what’s up… I think it’s Windows pipes, or some sort of buffer somewhere?

Sending from Linux to Windows works just fine, as this was how I created the image. (dd if=/dev/hda | gzip -c | nc -w 15 192.168.0.2)

Does anyone have any ideas? I’m really lost…

UPDATE: A bit more info… This is what I see on the sending side:

nc -v -v -v -w 30 130.175.142.190 10567 < createdimage.gz p-p-p-powerbook.XXXXX.XX.XXX.XXX [XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] 10567 (?) open net timeout sent 24887296, rcvd 0: NOTSOCK

And on the target side:

nc -l -v -v -v -p 10567 > createdimage.gz
listening on [any] 10567 …
connect to [130.175.142.190] from XXXXXX-notebook.XXXXX.XX.XXX.XXX [XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] 4244
sent 0, rcvd 24215552

So, yeah. I’m running out of ideas…

computers moved from livejournal

Holland Ponds Park in Shelby Township, Michigan

March 9, 2005

Click for more…

On Sunday I decided to celebrate the warmish weather and go for a walk through one of my favorite, curious local parks, Holland Ponds. (Thanks to for reminding me of the proper name of this facility.) For an hour or two I wandered through the park, looking around, taking pictures of various things. For those who don’t know, this park is located right next to the G&H Landfill site, an EPA Superfund project. It’s really interesting to see how far the site has come from it’s previous use as a waste dump. While I did find some barrels ( 1 · 2 ) floating in the river – which I reported to the EPA and National Response Center (Report #752142) – this was a really nice walk and I got a much better feel for how everything is laid out there. By the time I was done, my boots and the lower half of my pants were completely saturated, but it was worth it. All the snow was melting, the sun was out, and it was almost 50°F that day.

So, if you’d like to see some pictures from the walk, give this link a click. Towards the end of the gallery there are some interesting concrete textures that I grabbed from the foundation of a barn.

moved from livejournal outdoors