It’s been a hard month for Los Angeles radio listeners.
First, Indie 103.1 goes off the air. It’s online still at indie1031.com, but 103.1 is now ranchero music. A sad state for the station once named by Rolling Stone magazine as best radio station in America. Of course Michele would argue that WOXY is the best radio station.
Second, KLSX flipped formats and the Adam Carolla Show is off the air. I really enjoyed Adam’s show. It was a bright spot everyday. I would listen live when I could, but mainly listened to the podcast, which was a segmented recording of the actual show.
CBS Radio, in their corporate wisdom, decided that Los Angeles would be better served by a Top 40 (CHR) format station. And so, KLSX died and Adam was off the air.
Not a quitter, Adam decided to continue his “conversation with listeners”. His words, not mine. His new site carollaradio.com is now posting daily podcasts he produces at home with help from friends and former co-workers. His very first podcast, had over 200,000 downloads. Those numbers make any podcast saavy person sit up and recognize the size of his fanbase.
Adam absolutely gets where media consumption is going and is working to give it a shot and see what happens. Jesse Thorn (the man behind the wonderful Sound of Young America show) agrees and posted a good bit of Adam’s rant with a little commentary. I agree with Jesse, if you think of Adam as just the Man Show/Crank Yankers guy, you are missing what he’s all about. He’s honest and a bit of a blowhard, you won’t agree with everything he says, in fact you’ll sometimes think he’s wrong. But he speaks how he feels without resorting the the usual talk radio hyperbole where jocks say anything to get the audience revved up. That’s a very rare thing today, where almost all radio bits are heavily scripted, edited, and basically fake.
Give it a listen. Adam curses a bit on the podcast, so I’d call it NSFW, but it’s better than anything else on the radio these days.
Author: Michael
Soda Roundup
Over the last few weeks, I’ve picked up a few random sodas. Finally I gave them all a test.
First up was the pair of sodas based on ice cream floats.
The Root Beer Float is a traditional dessert and A&W is well known root beer. The Orange Soda Float? Not so traditional, but hey they are trying something new.
The root beer float tasted like a melted root beer float. The ingredients include things like pectin and propylene glycol alginate to make it taste creamy. Not so much. While the root beer flavor is good, I would rather simply have a root beer rather than try to recreate a float.
The orange soda float was a bit strange. Not quite a melted 50/50 bar, the thickening stuff made the orange soda simply strange. I’m not a big fan of orange soda, to begin with, so I wasn’t impressed at all.
Every year, Jones soda puts out a few flavors for Halloween. This year I picked up Dread Apple and Monster Mojito.
Amazingly, the Dread Apple tasted like carbonated apple juice and the Monster Mojito tasted like a non-alcoholic mojito, a little bitter with a hint of mint. Surprising, I know. Michele enjoys mojitos and gave it a test. She said it tastes “exactly” like a mojito. I’ll take here word for it. Personally I don’t like the whole muddling trend at bars these days.
I guess I was hopping for something strange or extraordinary here, but alas, it’s just soda pop.
Halloween 2008 with Timelapse Movie
Halloween is today. We gave out full size candy again this year much to the delight of all the trick or treaters.
Once again, I set up my timelapse photography gear and made video of the door from 6:15PM to 9:15PM as I sat there handing out candy. We had some friends stop by during the evening I had help with logging costumes and handing out candy.
Halloween 2008 Timelapse from Michael Pusateri on Vimeo.
As I have in 2005, 2006,and 2007 I asked every person what they were dressed as and wrote down the answers.
Here are the top ten costumes for the last four years compared.
Batman makes a triumphant return to the list and the scream mask disappears.
Here is this year’s costume list, with a total of 150 people.
6 Batman
5 Cat
5 Pirate
5 Skeleton
5 Vampire
4 Snow White
4 Witch
3 Bee
3 Devil
3 Fairy
2 50s Girl
2 Angel
2 Ariel, the Little Mermaid
2 Banana
2 Basketball Player, Lakers
2 Buzz Lightyear
2 Cinderella
2 Darth Vader
2 Jason Vorhees
2 Minnie Mouse
2 Sleeping Beauty
2 Spiderman
2 Tinkerbell
2 Werewolf
1 70s Girl
1 80s Girl
1 Alice in Wonderland
1 Baby
1 Bart Simpson
1 Basketball Player
1 BMX Rider
1 Boxer
1 Bunny
1 Captain
1 Chip & Dales
1 Clown
1 Dark Angel
1 Dead Guy
1 Death
1 Death Joker
1 Dinosaur
1 Dragon Warrior
1 Elephant
1 Elphaba, Wicked Witch of the West
1 Eyore
1 Fireman on Vacation
1 Frankenstein
1 Ghost Lady
1 Glam Witch
1 Hannah Montana
1 Harry Potter
1 High School Musical Cheerleader
1 Hot Rod
1 Incredible Hulk
1 Injured Skater
1 Insane-o Man
1 Invader Zim
1 IT the Clown
1 John McCain
1 Karate Man
1 Kim Possible
1 Knight
1 Leatherface
1 Little Bo Peep
1 Little Dutch Girl
1 Little Red Riding Hood
1 Luchadore
1 Maid
1 Monk
1 Monster
1 Nerd
1 Ninja
1 Olive Oyl
1 Optimus Prime
1 Pink Poodle
1 Pipi Longstocking
1 Policeman
1 Popeye
1 Power Ranger
1 Power Ranger, Blue
1 Power Ranger, Green
1 Power Ranger, Red
1 Princess
1 Ringo Starr
1 Sailor
1 Sanjaya
1 School Girl
1 Scream Mask
1 Secret Jedi
1 Sharpei from High School Musical
1 Skeleton Punk
1 Skunk
1 Supergirl
1 The Hamburglar
1 The Riddler
1 Tofu
1 Ultraman
1 Vampire Priest
1 Wicked Witch
1 Winnie The Pooh
1 Wonder Bread
1 Zombie
1 Zombie Skate Punk
Lame Halloween Candy
On a recent trip to 7-Eleven this weekend I spotted some Halloween themed candy.
Obviously, I was intrigued. Did these candies have something new to them? Could it be peanut butter & pumpkin, together at last?
First I tried the Snickers Creme Pumpkin. New mold in a nice jack-o-lantern shape. But the candy itself tasted just like a regular Snickers. Nothing special at all.
Surely the Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkin would be something special. Alas, the mold was lame and the taste no different than a regular Peanut Butter Cup.
We need something more than a new mold folks. Color me unimpressed.
How to make beef jerky
Recently I went on a four day rafting trip. Before I went, I made some beef jerky. Here’s how I did it.
My method is based on my father’s method, as I was taught as a boy.
We start with a few pounds of flank steak.
Flank steak is a long cut. I cut with the grain as thin as I can, a little less than 1/4 inch thick. I cut about 3 pounds of beef.
I gathered up all the ingredients.
1 1/2 cup Soy Sauce
1/2 cup Worcestershire Sauce
1 cup light brown sugar
2 teaspoons liquid smoke
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1 teaspoon onion powder
I actually smoke the jerky, but if you aren’t going to smoke it, you can add 2 teaspoons of liquid smoke.
Once the marinade is mixed up and the beef is cut, you’ll need a container to soak it in.
I soak the beef at least overnight. The salt in the sauces will cure the meat to help preserve it as well as let the flavor get deep into the meat.
The next day, I set up my smoker and laid out the strips.
After about 6 hours, the jerky was ready. It depends how dry you like your jerky. I tend to like is a little dryer.
When you fully dry out the meat, you have basically preserved for a good long time. It’s interesting to think that preserving meat like this was an essential task our ancestors used before the invention of refrigeration.
Testing a tuner for digital off-air television
I’m a professional TV engineer. For the last 15 years or so, those of us in the profession have been talking about the end of analog television. Next year, on February 17th, television stations will turn off their analog broadcasts and switch to digital only.
For TVs that use rabbit ears or a rooftop antenna, they will need a digital TV tuner. We engineers refer to it as an ATSC tuner, but most will simply call it a HDTV or DTV tuner. If you have cable or satellite TV, you won’t need this.
For a while, I’ve wondered what these inexpensive tuners would be like. When I saw my first tuner years ago, it was around $500 and had terrible performance. This weekend, I stopped by radio Shack this weekend and picked up a Digital Stream DTX9900 DTV tuner. The box cost $60. BTW, the government is offering $40 off coupons to people to help defer the cost.
The tuner itself is fairly small and light.
The tuner takes the input from your antenna and converts to either video and audio on RCA jacks or a channel 3/4 RF signal. Very straightforward and simple. For me, I used the RF signal since it was the simplest cabling.
We have a very cute TV in the kitchen that Michele that uses rabbit ears. She doesn’t want a new digital TV, she wants me to simply make it better. So, it gets the DTV tuner.
I hooked things up in about 5 minutes and got good signals right away. The picture looked good. We are in a class A contour so we get great reception. The key is a good antenna. I use a traditional UHF loop antenna and it seems to pick things up well. If you are a distance away, you are probably going to need a yagi style antenna.
I was pleased to see a fairly good user interface. The Info button brought up data about the channel, show, and even reception strength.
The picture was good, but on some channels with poor reception, the picture broke up. With analog channels, the picture would get snowy and the audio start to fuzz with poor reception. With digital channels, you get the cliff effect, where the picture pixelates and in some cases freezes or drops altogether.
One of the benefits of digital television is that broadcasters are sending data along with the picture, such as seeing what’s coming up next on the channel.
Here’s a short video of using the tuner.
Overall, the tuner is impressive. I think the average person will be able to use it and get better pictures than they have now. Some people will have problems if they are in areas with poor UHF reception, but that’s an antenna problem.
Blogging NAB
Here’s what it looks like to write about a non-blogging conference. This is regarding the NAB Show for television and radio that I am attending in Las Vegas. This is my 16th time in 18 years to go to NAB.
This is an email that I sent out to my co-workers about interesting things:
Besides the usual array of monitors, MPEG compressors, proxy viewing, and ‘breakthrough’ products, here are a few things I saw.
Clustermedia Labs – Voice recognition of people and events in video footage by analyzing voiceprints
GameCaster – A setup that allows recording of video inside videogames by the use of traditional camera hand controls
Bug TV – Class-R – Ingest of multiple video streams via Final Cut Pro
Bluray/DVD Duplicators – There was a literal army of these robotic duplicators on the floor. Anyone know how to choose?
Telestream – Episode Engine Pro – can do transcoding of JPEG 2000 files in a distributed environment at 7-8 times real time
Studio Network Solutions – Postmap – Snoops and indexes varied file systems to find files and search via various attributes. Similar to Mega/Cobweb…
Digital Rapids – CarbonHD does realtime ingest of JPEG 2000 HD files. Actually a DDR, but the files are ready for immedaite access. Stream Z HD platform coming for faster JPEG 2000 transcoding.
Nano-spindt – High Frame Rate FED Monitor – runs at 240 frames per second – amazing look
NHK Ultra HDTV – In the back of the Central Hall, the NHK booth is showing new demos of their Ultra HD system. A must see.
Overall, the post side of the house has tons going on and the South hall is packed. The more traditional areas like lighting, jibs, transmitters are calmer and not so packed.
What I’ve been doing instead of blogging
I’ve been helping with science projects…
Schick Quattro Razor & MP3 Docking Station
Yesterday I was at Target doing some shopping, when I spotted this on sale for $6.99.
A strange marketing combination to be sure, but look, they got me to pick up the box. The picture is obviously of a Zune, but the box says it is iPod compatible. Visions of cool docking systems swam through my mind. For $7 I would get a razor, 6 blades, an MP3 speaker set, and 4 AAA batteries. Of course, I bought it. Cruft Labs always needs new things to examine.
When I opened the package, I found the speakers folded up. I put in the batteries and attached the actual holder for the MP3 player.
I was disappointed, that there was no docking in the traditional sense with the multi-pin conncector found on the bottom of most major MP3 players. The was simply a headphone jack that I needed to plug into the MP3 player.
In my first test with an iPhone, the infamous headphone connector problem was in full effect. I had to trim down the plastic on the speaker set connector to get it to fit. As you can see, there’s a on/off switch, a volume control, and even a DC power connection.
The sound was mediocre. Way worse that most of the other speaker setups we have around the house from the Muji Cardboard Speakers to the Tivoli PAL. But for $7 I’m not expecting much.
I put the Zune in place, and unsurprisingly it worked just fine, just like the cover of the box.
I also tried a video iPod. Like the others, it fit well and I could see using on an ongoing basis.
At this point, my daughter Mira came in and wanted to see it. She put on Ratatouille and shooed me a way so she could watch the movie. She could have gone 25 feet into the family room and watched the same film on a HDTV set off of the Apple TV, but she preferred this way. I think this says something for what the younger generations will expect when it comes to personal media. She picked up the set and walked out of the room.
Now that I was no longer in possession of the speakers, I took a look at the razor part of the boxed set. In the past, I tried a Schick 4 blade razor and was unimpressed. Keeping an open mind, I wanted to give it a second chance. Currently I prefer a Gillette Sensor 3 . I have backed away from the Gillette Fusion since I reviewed it.
The head of the Schick seems to be a step back toward sanity from the gel surrounded razor I last tried. The design is simple in comparison. I prefer to shave in the shower and use Kiehl’s Shave Cream (as should you if you want a close shave).
The razor went pretty smoothly on the flats, but just didn’t feel right on the curves. It just couldn’t stay as close as I’ve come to expect. Perhaps that the head size is bigger than what I’m used to these days. But the Schick did feel much better than the previous one I tried. Very comparable to the Gillette Fusion. On the back of the razor is a trim blade. Nice idea, but when I’m in the shower, sans contacts, I can’t see well enough to trim my sideburns.
Overall, I’m pleased with my purchase. I will keep the razor as a backup and I will actually use the speaker set when I travel.
How to make home made pastrami and corned beef
A few months ago, I tried making my own pastrami, starting from some pre-corned beef. I was OK, but not great, I decided to try again, this time, making everything from scratch.
As I mentioned before, the difference between corned beef and pastrami is subtle. In both cases, a beef brisket is ‘corned’ by curing it in a salt brine for a couple weeks. This comes from the days before refrigeration, where the use of salt and sugar to preserve meat for a long time was common. The term ‘corn’ comes from the fact that long ago, the salt used to preserve beef was roughly the shape of a corn kernel.
To turn the corned brisket into a corned beef, you boil the meat.
To turn the corned brisket into pastrami, you smoke the meat.
First I bought a large brisket. I cut the brisket in half, one half to make into pastrami and one half to make into corned beef. Now I had to corn the beef.
The recipe I used was:
2 quarts water
3/4 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
10 whole cloves
1 tablespoon pickling spices
2 tablespoons saltpeter (potassium nitrate)
The saltpeter is not essential, but it acts as a preservative and keeps the red color of the meat. I want the meat to look authentic and red, so I order saltpeter, since you really can’t buy it in a store these days.
I placed the beef in large bags with the corning brine. I doubled the bags up just in case of leakage.
The bags were then placed in the bottom of the fridge for two weeks. Thanks to my wife, Michele, for putting up with a drawer full of corning beef for two weeks.
After two long weeks, I pulled the bags out the fridge.
Out of the bag, the outside looked a little gray and I had my concerns about the effectiveness of the saltpeter. The meat smelled fresh. I guess this preserving thing really does work.
For the pastrami, I used the same rub from my previous pastrami cooking. I felt the flavor was good, so why mess with it.
Here it it going into the smoker. I smoked it for about 6 hours, changing the chips once, to give it a little extra smokiness.
After resting, this is the pastrami. It smelled pretty damn good, and I was anxious to give it a try.
The color was great. The saltpeter worked!
Alas, the meat was a bit tough. The flavor was good, but the toughness was a problem. Also, it was quite salty.
My friend Ken came over and we discussed it. There are a couple possibilities as to why it didn’t come out as good as I had hoped.
The main mistake was leaving it open in the smoker too long. When I make a brisket, I usually smoke it for 2 hours, then wrap it up in aluminum foil to seal in the moisture. I should have done that in this case. Also, several pastrami recipes recommend soaking the corned beef in water for an hour or so to pull out some of the salt. Next time, I’ll give this a try.
Now it was time to make the corned beef. The meat looked good and was even still red on the outside.
I wanted authentic corned beef, so that means corned beef and cabbage.
I modified this recipe a bit, dropping the butter, bay leaves, and carrots. Here’s the meat starting to cook with the whole onion keeping it company.
After 3 hours on the stove, I pulled the meat out and let it rest. Then I sliced it up, hoping for the best.
The meat was fantastic. The color was great, once again proving the value of the saltpeter. The flavor was perfect and the mouth feel was wonderful. Rich and flavorful, while melting in the mouth. I am very happy with the results.
Of course, it wouldn’t be traditional corned beef without the cabbage and potatoes. It all tasted great together.
While it took some time to make, i definitely recommend trying this yourself. The corned beef especially, as it was much simpler than the pastrami. I need to keep trying to perfect my pastrami though. Stay tuned.