Author: Michael

I have been watching several podcasts, including Ctrl-Alt-Chicken. Recently they did a short segment on making Cheese Pie. Go ahead and watch it. This entry won’t make a ton of sense if you don’t watch it first.
The girls love cheese, so I thought it might be fun to make the Cheese Pie per the Ctrl-Alt-Chicken recipe.
Enjoy the first episode of Control-Alt-Children:

Bacon is favorite in Cruft Manor. Typically, bacon is cooked in the microwave here. It is quite a production with separating the strips on a plate and careful placement.
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Infected, and Martin, Joey, and the Gator were discussing how to cook bacon. Gator suggested that you cook bacon “like a man” and toss the slab in without separating anything.
Now Gator ain’t a man to steer me wrong, so I gave it a try.

Thanks to a tip from Art at the office, Cruft Manor is now a viewer of Funimation Channel, a free 24 hour a day anime channel.

A few other things I have been remiss in not posting:
Mister P. writes about a Doonesberry comic that involves my alma mater, RPI
My cousin Richard is now blogging at Otigoji.com
If you want a visual display of what’s on your hard drive, try SequoiaView Windows software (via dl.tv)
Strenghting my geek cred, I had a story I submitted to Slashdot approved.
I am now a writer for the Metroblogging Azeroth site, focused on World of Warcraft news and issues.
A good article on HDTV standards, focusing on 1080p in next gen DVD and gaming displays. (via digg)
Sean “Internet Mogul” Bonner doesn’t get Second Life either.
And finally, 30+ years into my readership, Legion of Superheroes is coming to television in 2007 on the WB.
Sidenote: I really do need to get around to making a linkblog thingie for this site…

I’ve been a reader of PC Gamer magazine for years, ever since the death of my beloved PC Accelerator magazine. Recently, they started a podcast about PC game news and discussion and I’ve been listening.

Several shows ago, the initial host of the show Dan Morris left and was abruptly replaced by Greg ‘theVede’ Vederman to lead the discussion. I wondered what had happened, but didn’t think much more about it. After three or four shows, the issue was finally addressed.

What happened was the Dan became Associate Publisher of PC Gamer, formally moving to the business side of the magazine. In the world of journalism, the wall between the business side and the editorial side is significant. There is a real concern about the influence of ad sales money and business relationships with the journalists to not taint the news with concern over the business impact.

Taking over the podcast reins was Greg Vederman, new Editor-in-Chief of PC Gamer, who felt that ethically it would be wrong to have Dan on the podcast, on the journalism side, now that he worked on the business side. So in the most recent podcast, they openly discuss the issue. Talking about both sides and weighing the impact. Even if you aren’t a gamer, give it a listen, it’s the first thing they talk about, so you don’t have to sit through the gaming chat. Although if you are a PC gamer, listen to the whole thing.

I called my father-in-law Tony, an editor at a major midwestern newspaper, to get his take. He felt that the ‘firewall’ between the business side and the journalism side had eroded over the last several decades. He said that as the internet and new technologies enable things like weblogs and podcasts, the guidelines are unclear on how to deal with them. He mentioned that as newspapers embrace weblogs and citzen journalism, it’s not easy. He said it’s demonstrated in the recent controversy over a “Grandma In Iraq” weblog that the paper was running.

Back at PC Gamer, they have take an interesting approach on how to resolve the issue of whether Dan Morris will contribute to the podcast or not. They are leaving it up to the readers and listeners. On the front page of the PC Gamer Podcast site is a poll to let Dan’s fate be decided.

I’ve read a number of discussions about these kind of ethics regarding weblogs, but not much in the realm of podcasts. With many podcasts vying for the almighty dollar of advertising these days there are bound to be issues raised since podcast advertising is not as firewalled as placing Google or Yahoo ads on a web page. With podcast advertising, there is a direct relationship between the performer/journalist and the buyer of advertising. Who knows what the future holds in this area, controversy is for sure…

We had a little Halloween get-together at Cruft Manor tonight. Besides the normal events, I tried a few new things.

Exactly one year ago, I bet Phil Torrone, one of the Make guys, that the term ‘podcast’ woudl be gone in a year.
This morning I opened the local paper and this is what I saw.

I enjoy good gyro meat in sandwiches or in a greek salad. There’s a good place near the office (with a surly owner) that makes pretty good stuff. For those that don’t know, gyro meat is cooked on a vertical skewer and cooked with radiated heat. As the meat browns, the outer meat is sliced off and served.
One day, my co-worker Yoshi mentioned that Alton Brown of Good Eats had discussed making gyros. I love Alton Brown and if he said it could be done, then I could do it. Yoshi mentioned that his plan kinda sucked because it wasn’t cooked by the traditional method of a rotisserie. At that point I decided to build my own gyro cooker.

Continue reading “How to make a gyro cooker”