Archive for the 'Life' Category

I have been very very busy working on lots of things that I can’t talk about.

Roger is but days away from his 8th birthday. In this photo, he is illuminated by the same LEDs I used to illuminate my self-portrait with a bit of emphasis on the less extreme range of lighting.

I like the result. Captured Roger nicely in one of his rare quiet moments.

I also grabbed an extreme close-up of the LEDs reflected in his eye. You can see the shape of the source of illumination.

Prior to prohibition in the United States, gathering together in a party atmosphere, collecting fine quality ingredients, and precisely mixing/serving cocktails was a popular pastime.

Much like microbrewing, much of the lore of fine cocktailing was lost during prohibition. After prohibition ended, the large liquor and beer companies lobbied like hell to pass laws to prevent the resurrection of the craft alcohol and microbrew markets.

In the past 15 or so years, we have enjoyed a huge resurgence of craft brewing. Similarly, about the last decade has seen a growing interest in the art of fine cocktail mixology.

While this has included the rise of some very fine drinking establishments focused on classic cocktails, the hobbyist mixology market is growing rapidly, too.

If you are going to get into Mixology, you need a good recipe guide. Many paper guides exist, the best (that I know of) being Cunningham’s Bartender’s Black Book.

However, you can’t easily search a book by ingredient or flavor. You can’t be standing in a liquor store and think “I have bourbon, what do I need to make a couple of fine cocktails”. Nor can you experience a minor quake while in the liquor store and immediately look up quake related cocktails.

For that, you need an electronic guide and, with the advent of the iPhone application store, wouldn’t it be nice if such a guide were to be available in a device that you are likely already carrying anyway?

Enter Skorpiostech’s Cocktails.

With over 1,400 cocktail recipes, Cocktails contains a fairly comprehensive list of classic and modern cocktails.

Drinks are indexed by ingredients, flavors, base ingredient, and several other categories.

It is easy to search for a particular ingredient, making it possible to get an idea of the set of drinks you might be able to make given what you have on hand.

As well, you can easily share drinks via email or twitterrific.

All in all, the app is a very solid offering for 1.0. There are some obvious areas for refinement or expansion and I’m looking forward to watching this app evolve.

However, that isn’t the reason why I’m reviewing this otherwise very useful application.

Specifically, I’m calling it out because of the design value.

Cocktails is simply a beautiful app to look at and use. While the list of cocktails is relatively normal looking, the glass icon being the graphical element standout, it is really the recipe page — seen to the right — that shows an incredible attention to detail.

The typography is precise and crisp, with appropriate bits of unicode characters used when necessary.

Also, the background changes color depending on the age of the drink. For example, the Manhattan cocktail dates back to 1888, yet there are many modern versions, too. If you were to flick that recipe to the left, the backgrounds of the recipe would become lighter as the age of the recipe lessens.

A minor detail, sure, but it actually contributes considerably to the usability when simply browsing for a recipe!

As my sister so eloquently documented, our Apricot tree has gone completely bonkers this year. The last time I saw an apricot tree produce in this volume was Andrew Stone’s tree during the summer I was living & coding at Stone Design.

The fruit is just now starting to ripen and today was the first day that I could pick any quantity of apricots.

And Pick I did.

And pick again — three days later, I just picked an equal number.

I basically culled the tree for apricots that were ready to pick, while also removing any nearly-ready ‘cots that were weighing down branches to the point of potentially breaking them.

Even so, you can’t tell that a single apricot was removed from the tree! It looks like I have at least 3 to 4 more weeks of fruit to harvest!

Of course, the question is, what to do with all those apricots?

Eat ‘em!
Freeze ‘em!

Make: Jam! Pie! Pancakes! Ice Cream! Cheese! Poached Salmon!

The possibilities are endless. In this case, I quartered the apricots into vacuum bags and froze them for the non-apricot season.

However, not all… some were set aside for eating and a couple were turned into a muddled apricot margarita with a blueberry juice float (which can be seen next to that gigantic bowl of ‘cot quarters).

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Apparently, George Carlin will rise from the dead on 7/23/08 at 7:30pm to entertain audiences one last time.

At least, according to TicketMaster (at this time).

(Somehow, Carlin would probably find this funny. Hell, he’d turn it into a 15 minute rant of brilliance and profanity that would leave me laughing my ass off while illuminating some vastly screwed up bit of our world. I’ll miss you terribly, Mr. Carlin.)

When I posted What is good tequila? I had no idea that it would generate anywhere near the number of comments that it has.

Great stuff. Thank you for taking the time to respond (mostly– one or two jackasses out there, no surprise).

I wanted to respond inline, but there were so many comments so fast, that I couldn’t keep up. So, I have selected the ones that I wanted to respond to, pulled out quotes, and responded in this post.

The next post will be my personal list of favorite tequilas. It will be long. And opinionated. And highly centric to the current state of the market in the San Francisco bay area.

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I cancelled our Netflix subscription today.

In answering their “why terminate service?” survey, it really came down to several reasons.

The Apple TV has spoiled us. Even with its currently limited (though growing) selection, we can make a decision about what we want to watch less than 5 minutes before we want to start watching it.

Too often, we would look at the three Netflix envelopes and say “No… Nah… Uh uh…” and then either watch some stupid TV (back when we still had Direct TV) or grab something via Apple TV.

Given the 50,000 movies delivered per day to Apple TV and iTunes users, it is clear that we aren’t the only ones seeking immediate gratification.

Sadly, the once nimble Netflix doesn’t seem to really get it.

Their “primary reasons for canceling” selections do not include Apple TV, Amazon’s Unboxed, or any other “the market has evolved beyond physical media” selections. And their “what will be your new primary source?” question has “I will download movies over the internet” as the only appropriate answer. Hopefully, Netflix won’t dump that list on the MPAA as I’m sure they would interpret it as evidence of further supposed infringement!

I was really hoping that Netflix’s online delivery play with Roku would be compelling.

Not to be. The diskless set-top box does not have the space to fully download any given piece of content. Thus, the box requires that the internet connection provide a stable, consistently high bandwidth, connection. In the face of lower bandwidth connections, it compensates by dropping back to fairly low quality bit rates.

My experience with all of the broadband internet connections I have ever had is that they tend to get very bursty in the evening hours as the whole neighborhood takes to their internet connections.

The last thing I want is to deal with an angry family when the quality of some movie drops to crap or drops out completely in the middle of playback.

With the Apple TV, we frequently had playback of an HD movie catch up to the download because available bandwidth dropped off during playback. Of course, the Apple TV has built in storage capable of storing the full movie and, thus, fixing this is as simple as starting the download of the movie before taking the ten minutes to make a bowl of popcorn!

None of this is to say that Netflix is a failure. It isn’t. If you are really into movies are like to watch lots of TV Shows, Netflix’s selection is unparalleled and the price can’t be beat.

I’ll revisit their service if they release a device that offers reliable playback compatible with realities of US broadband service. We do watch enough movies that Netflix’s monthly rates combined with such a device would be fiscally attractive.

In any case, farewell for now, Netflix, it was sometimes fun, but mostly disappointing.

This weblog post is at least a decade in the making. Seriously. I wrote the original version of this sometime in the late ’90s as a mailing list post, then revised it again when someone at Apple asked for tequila recommendations. Likely forwarded it a dozen times or so in the interim years.

Every time I forward it, I said “I should weblog this thing”. So, here it is — with some additional edits, too. Like my “So you wanna buy a big green egg” post, I’ll likely edit this over the coming years, too.

I’m going to break this into two separate posts; one about tequila and one about margaritas. Eventually, I’ll make a third post about cooking, agave, and tequila.

First, Cuervo Gold is not good tequila. It is actually a really terrible product, quality wise, backed by some brilliant market. Sadly, most of the tequila consumed in the United States is Cuervo Gold or something equally as bad. And by “bad”, I mean bad taste and vicious hangover.

Good tequila is almost always a tequila that is made from alcohol distilled from 100% blue agave. Specifically, the species Agave Weber Tequilana. This plant of the class Liliopsida (Lilies) has nothing to do with cactus. Blue agave is grown primarily in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

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Things have been a bit quiet around here. I have been a bit distracted over the last week.

Today was spent doing a mass amount of yard work; trimming, cleaning, weeding, mowing, watering and all kinds of other yard activities that require no thought.

However, I did make it out to a friend’s birthday party where his girlfriend brought him something like 2 lbs of freshly picked Morel Mushrooms. We made — I volunteered to man the stove — morel fondue, morel cream sauce on pasta, and pan fried smoked pork with morels.

The smoked pork, not surprisingly, was of my own making. I had a frozen butt that I had reheated earlier and, thus, it was best served with a bit of saucing.

To wit:

• Heat 1/2 cup of butter in metal pan until it just starts to brown.
• Add diced onions, diced peppers, and morel mushrooms (halve or quarter any large ones). Simmer until tender.
• While simmering, spice veggies with a bit of salt, pepper, cayenne, and whatever strikes your fancy. I added a bit of dried lemon (really, it was a “jamaican spice” but it was mostly dried citrus, salt, and pepper).
• Shred smoked pork into pan.
• Continuing mixing ingredients over low heat until pork is warm through.
• Add a splash of white wine and mix in some melty cheese– mozzarella works just fine.
• Stir until cheese is thoroughly melted and wine is somewhat reduced– you don’t want it too soupy!
• Sprinkle corn meal lightly over the pork and then stir in. No more than 1/4 cup.
• Increase heat and sauce with a decent BBQ sauce. Whereby “decent” means that it is sweetened primarily with fruit and cane sugars. No HFCS!
• Stir for a couple of more minutes to let the sugars caramelize slightly.

In our case, we served it with pita bread and most folks made quarter-pita tacos. It was delicious. The morels added an earthy essence to an otherwise relatively traditional pan fried pork.

If apples or pears were available, I would diced same and simmered it with the onions/peppers/morels.

The photo has nothing to do with anything (it isn’t a morel). It looks like a little laughing mushroom cyclops dude and, thus, captures the rather relaxed mood I’m in after a totally awesome WWDC.

While out and about today, Christine picked up a Turbo Bubble Machine.

We tossed the bubble solution into it and set it up on a pot in the middle of the backyard.

Roger and Ruby had a blast chasing bubbles, popping bubbles, eating bubbles….

Ruby is obsessed with anything that refracts light. To the point where she will ignore food if there is a shadow, point of light, or something shiny to chase.

So, of course, she was completely enamored with bubbles.

She needed a good long drink of water after playing to get all the bubbles out.




“Mmmmm.. bubbles are tasty!”

For mother’s day, one of my wonderful wife’s requests was to have a bit of a Ms. PacMan marathon.

So, out came the ghetto arcade controller and, a bit longer than expected later, a Ms. PacMan marathon she had! (A bit longer because a nasty latency bug has cropped up in MAME OS X somewhere along the way. I found a workaround. But, yuck.)

Now, MAME is full screen and pausing the game just to deal with iTunes shuffle play song selection suckage (since iTunes on the MAME machine sends tunage to the garage workspace) is not considered good gaming etiquette.

Clearly, I need a shell script to control iTunes. Remote Buddy is cool, but it is too slow, requires too much configuration, and, after much use, has proven a bit flaky. A simple, straightforward, shell script is sufficient and, certainly, I cannot have been the first too think of this.

I wasn’t! I found this ancient hint on MacOSXHints.com.

David Schlosnagle — who seems to have disappeared — wrote a very useful little shell script that can play, pause, go to the next track, and set the output volume. The script, as posted, doesn’t quite work all the time due to (I presume) shell changes between 10.0(?) and Leopard.

So, I grabbed a copy of the script, dropped it in my hacques repository, and have updated it for Leopard. I also added the ability to set ratings from the command line (and the status command will show the currently playing track’s rating). Minor changes, really.

The latest version can always be had at http://svn.red-bean.com/bbum/trunk/hacques/itunes.sh.

Thanks to David for doing this in the first place!!