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Janine had come home with me and we spent the next morning trying to get a Team Fortress 2 Dodgeball server up and running. First, I loaded the wrong server type, then I loaded the wrong server type again, then I put it in the wrong place, then we learned the plugin was borked. It only took us four tries to do what we found out we couldn’t do. I consider that a successful morning.

Suzie came over later for baby back ribs, rib eye, and peanut butter pie during a “steak n’ cake” luncheon. The baby back ribs were good but not so much better than the spare ribs to justify their being triple the price.

I dropped off Janine and made my way home to get ready for my first day of work. I went to bed at a little after 10pm, stared at the ceiling for 45 minutes then walked until I was exhausted around 4am. I’m going to be totally fresh for my first day of work.

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Makers to me are latest embodiment of the cyclical interest in crafts. This incarnation marries modernity with the craft skill set to make either interesting things at scale or in ways previously impossible. For instance, 3D printing has allowed almost anyone with an interesting widget idea to make said widget. Additionally, access to supply chains have allowed new people to make things with previously unavailable parts whether it be cheap micro controllers or GPS chips with what was previously military-level accuracy.

The first presentation I went to was by Seth Goden who commented on the failure of the US education system to produce useful results. He spoke very well without notes and had some good one-liners:

  • If what you’re doing doesn’t have a chance of failure, you’re not making.
  • The person who invented the ship also invented the shipwreck.
  • The first person to put a urinal in a public space was Marcel Deauchamp, an artist. The second was a plumber.
  • If you make something amazing, how dare you not share it.
  • Freelancers are paid to work, entrepreneurs use other people’s money to make something bigger than themselves to make money while they sleep.

During the Question and Answer segment, a person asked him to comment on how the internet had killed the serendipity of the library. He replied that he would do so only if the questioner could say that they’d never gotten lost on wikipedia.

The next presentation involved Bre Pettis and Chris Anderson talking about 3D printing and the lack of a next industrial revolution. Both were interesting and compelling and both agreed that should kickstarter.com stay relevant it will have completely changed how gadget start-ups work.

After this, I walked around the venue a bit and started experiencing camera trouble which put the kibosh on many of the shots I wanted to take.

One display that struck me was the nerdy derby where one could race on a pinewood derby track with any car they wished and even with auxiliary power. There both a hump in the track and overhang bar that prevented abuse of external power sources. This is something I’d like to bring to Scouting in the area.

The final presentation was on The Illuminator which beamed populist messages on surfaces around New York City. My respect of the presenters rose appreciably when I found out that they had day jobs.

On the way home, I executed one of my five most illegal driving maneuvers by making a U-turn in the middle of a six-way intersection.

[flickr album=72157632108716873 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

The ride home was quiet and I had dinner in the sous vide rig in the form of spare ribs. They turned out quite well as indicated by the near reverent silence in which they were eaten.

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I left Pat’s house at around 3am and made it home by a little after 8am shaving a full two hours off of the Google estimated drive time. During the drive I listed to “Automate This” an unremarkable book on the importance of algorithms in the modern world. The periodic asides into the personalities involved didn’t justify it’s length and often the author sounded like he was waving a magic wand labeled “computers”.

This trip represented my last lark, my last time when I’d just kind of take a trip for the hell of it, at least for a bit. The money-time equation has tilted back toward time being the valuable resource.

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Yesterday evening we dropped 10 lbs of short ribs into the water oven and then went to sleep. Today, Pat and I went to the Rochester Museum and Science Center and it was surprisingly good. I purchased a student pass and reached for my ID but the teller stopped me saying “you look honest”. Pat and I took our time and learned about local… things and I learned that Pat was thinking of becoming a falconer. This sounded lame until I learned that after raising a falcon and receiving several more years of training Pat could capture and train owls. F-ing owls. How bad ass is that? I’d totally train burrowing owls and just have this team of them scurry across the ground and attack people’s ankles.

The museum had a nice collection of displays centered around the last ice age and fought the good fight on evolution and the timescales of paleontology. After the museum, Pat and I stopped at a butcher shop and he talked about arranging some expensive cut of meat to be available for him for Thanksgiving. I didn’t follow most of the conversation except for the line “and then you hold its still-beating heart” was said.

Clara returned home and we had the spare ribs. For $2.00 a lb plus spicing and electricity, those spare ribs may be the best flavor per dollar ratio food I’ve ever had.

That evening, Pat and I took a long walk around Rochester of about four miles. Rochester is a small big town rather than a big small town and it had all the trappings of a major city but simply smaller. Parking everywhere cost about $1.00 and there was a tiny tiny arts and culture district. It seemed just large enough that it would take one a full day to become familiar with it.

We had fourth meal at a diner and returned to Pat’s. We talked, and not wanting to miss an engagement tomorrow evening, I left for home.

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Pat and I stayed up late enough that we were able to drop Clara off at work at 5am. She’s in her residency and her standard shift is at least 12 hours. Pat and I retired and when our day started around the crack of 2pm we went to the largest Wegman’s in North America. Wegman’s home base is in Rochester and the store is quite nice. We purchased seasoned chicken breasts in plastic vacuum packs with the idea that we could save a vacuum step. They had artisanal cheeses and being a sucker for such things, acquire the makings of a lovely cheese plate.

Returning to Pat’s house, the rig was brought to temperature and the food simply dropped in. The elegance of the water bath as a cooking method tickles my love of parsimony. There is also a trade off in precision when cooking via sous vide. One trades thermal precision for temporal freedom. The cook times with sous vide are often 30 minute windows as opposed to the 60 second window during which a steak can go from caramelized to burnt.

We talked, tweaked, salivated and picked up Clara. She was concerned that we’d left the rig running while we were out but once we served dinner all objections dropped. The chicken was either the best or the second best chicken I’ve had in my life, only possibly being rivaled by a plate from The Brothers’ Moon in Pennington where I received two chicken tenderloin pieces that clocked in at $28.00. This plate of broccoli, pork tenderloin, and chicken cost about $6.00 including the power to run the device. Clara was equally pleased and the rig joined the cats as Pat and Clara’s newest family proxies.

That evening Pat and I walked around the High Falls area of Rochester and I took pictures.

Favorite Rochester Bridge

This was my favorite bridge shot.  The symmetry is delicious.

 

White Balance Blend

Rarely do I like clashing white balances.  This is an exception.

Just Water

Pools of light.

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“Go climbing” was an item I’ve been itching to remove from my “Reasons I Hate Being Fat” list and today, with the help of Bill Schilling, I successfully left the ground.

A few things quickly became apparent:
*My hands sweat profusely. To maintain a reasonable level of grip I had to chalk my hands every 10-15 minutes. Luckily, chalk isn’t an expensive commodity.
*I have no concept of height. I winced when I had to make a leap of about four feet but had no problem when I fell from a height of about eight feet.
*I go “hm…” a lot when I climb.
*Climbing is the most effective way to destroy every muscle between your neck and nipples. Later on, I proved incapable of properly putting on my seatbelt, operating a door latch, and opening a jar of pickles. It hurt so good.

The attendant staff member had incredible hair. I claimed it was network anchor hair and Bill said that it was shampoo commercial hair. Either way, it was a spectacular mane of which I hope he was proud.

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I wound up leaving Randy’s at around 7am, getting home at 8am, and waking up at 2pm. This isn’t the weirdest schedule I’ve slipped into but it was a bit stranger than I wanted. I spent the afternoon and evening walking on my treadmill and catching up on miscellaneous things until I got bored around 9pm.

I still had a lot of cakes and wanted social engagement so I called Stomping Grounds Games and offered to trade them cakes for the right to steal an arbitrary number of sodas and waters from them when I visited. They accepted by terms and the 10 or so people at the store ate their fill of my baked bounty. Someone recommended I sell what I made, a suggestion at which I scoffed, but I thought about it and thought it’d be fair to offer a cake as a prize for a Magic tournament and shortly thereafter the Stomping Grounds Diabetes Open was born. Right now the top prize is a peanut butter brownie mousse pie and top 8 gets creme brûlée. I’m curious to see how it develops.

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Randy Booz was having a birthday party this evening and I was supposed to pick up someone on the way over. I received a message that they were delayed so I went to Randy’s first. In a way I’m glad. I didn’t actually have room for them with all the space in my car occupied by cakes.

Randy’s party was enjoyable and it was the first time I had taken my attempt at a beard out in public. It was well received and someone asked me why I hadn’t done it sooner. After chewing on it a bit, I realized that one of the things I hated about having a five o’clock shadow was that it made my double chin pronounced. Now that I no longer have one, I wonder if a beard is something I would have stumbled upon if it hadn’t been otherwise recommended.

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I’ve gotten better at baking over time. This may sound obvious but today the contrast was stark. The first carrot cake with cream cheese frosting I ever made took me about six hours. Of this, three was actual work and the rest was baking, cooling, and other time where I could do other things. Today, I did this all in about two with one hour being baking time.

Here’s what I think I’ve done differently:
*I use 1 more bowl – In baking, many ingredients can be done in sets. For instance, fats and sugars in cakes will usually be done together. Historically, I tried to use as few bowls as possible, but you can speed up prep by measuring the next ingredient in another bowl while the previous one mixes. This saves the time of removing the mixing bowl from the stand mixer and returning it.
*Knowing when I can over mix – Some ingredients will over mix. For instance, once flour is added, you can mix too much and the gluten in the flour will make the dough tough. It’s hard to over mix butter/sugar and somewhat hard to over mix the semi-final batter. This lets me do a step without watching the mixer.
*Prepping Butter – When I’m going to bake a lot of things, the night before, I leave 2 lbs of butter on the counter still wrapped in a sealed container. Room temperature butter is so much easier to work with.
*Excess Inventory – I follow a simple rule for common ingredients. Always have an open bag and backup bag of something. This means that I always have 2 bags of chocolate morsels, one in use, one in reserve at all times. It requires extra space, but this extra space doesn’t often get accessed so things can be arranged snugly in it. This has almost eliminated emergency store trips.
*Split Recipes – Some recipes are “bases”. The cheesecake recipe I use makes 2 9″ rounds so making two cheesecakes of different types is easy. In this case, ½ was kept plain, the other had cookie crumbs added to it.
*Better balance – A good kitchen balance is indispensable. My previous balance was 5g accurate so I needed a second smaller balance for things like salt. I purchased a $40 quality balance that is gram accurate up to 5 kilos and haven’t looked back.
*Clean everything all the time – I have a half dozen kitchen towels on hand at all times. This allows me to clean as I go. You figure I can probably re-use some dirty bowls between cakes but for whatever reason I find it easier to just clean everything each time and never have to think about where to put something.

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Randy Booz turns… something in a week or so and I need to make him a large quantity of cakes because of a promise made while running a half-marathon. Long story short, Randy doesn’t often reply to text messages, I said that if he replied to the string I had sent him I’d bake him a cake for each, I had issued nine messages at that point, thus nine cakes.

Here was the spread:
Carrot Cake
Angel Food Cake
German Chocolate Cake (actually named after a guy not the nation-state)
Oreo Cheesecake
Berry Cheesecake
Apple Cake
Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheese Bar
Peanut Butter Mousse Pie
Butter Cream-frosted Gold Cake

To prepare, I purchased 36 eggs, 6 lbs of cream cheese, 10 lbs of sugar, 10 lbs of flour, a pint of vanilla, 8 lbs of various fruits, 2 lbs of cookies and 38 oz of pepperoni. Why the pepperoni? Because before I started making nine of the tastiest cakes of my life I was sure as heck going back to a low-carb diet.