Author: Michael

Sunday stuff

I still haven’t finished my E3 stuff yet. I suck. I know.
Dad Stuff
Zoe and I went to a horse show where she won her event.


She’s becoming quite the horsewoman.
Other stuff
My project for the day was making some pulled pork. I bought a pork shoulder at the supermaket. I had spoken to Martin about it previously and had my game plan laid out.

I put my smoke rub on the shoulder and got the smoker smoking.

This is what the shoulder looked like after eight hours in the smoker.

The pork fell apart in my hands and I was able to easily shred it and discard the bones. The fat had all melted away and the meat was easy to handle.
I made a BBQ sauce based on KC Masterpiece that I found on the net. The sauce was pretty good, but a little vinegary. Perhaps overnight in the fridge will mellow it a bit.

The BeerNeck

Several weeks about, I was watching the Daily Show and on the screen came Curt “The BeerNeck Guy” Silbert talking about his new invention, the BeerNeck.
The BeerNeck is of course, irresistable to me. I am always setting my beer down and forgetting where I put it. I needed the Ultimate Drinking Tool.
I ordered the BeerNeck and forgot about it. Several weeks later, when I was out of town, the BeerNeck arrived in the mail. The same day, Curt Silbert, Chief of BeerNeck.com, actually called my home to make sure the package had arrived. Michele took the call and said, “He was very, very enthusiastic.” Now that’s what I call customer service.



Here is the BeerNeck. Note the neoprene case is for insulation.

The cap has an embedded opener for opening the bottle. Ingenious!

The bottle fit in perfectly and it was easy to zip up.

The cap then fits on top of the bottle to prevent spillage while I walked around.

The elastic lanyard is soft and the beer felt comfortable hanging there.
I did a few normal tasks around the house like cooking, taking out the trash, and sitting at the computer.
The BeerNeck never got in the way.

With a quick flip of my thumb to open the top, I was able to partake of cold, tasty beer.

The BeerNeck gets two thumbs up from me. At $10-$12 depending on style, it’s worth the money. The style points alone you’ll receive at your next BBQ are worth the price.

Planning

Thursday is Thanksgiving and I have the task of smoking the turkey and the briskets. I picked up the meat this morning and put it in the fridge.
Smoking the food takes time and I need to plan ahead to make sure it’s ready on time. The meat needs to be done at 2:30 PM on Thursday so we can hit the road and be at my parent’s house around 3:30 PM.
I just so happen to be learning to use Microsoft Project at work and came up with this:

So, it looks like I’ll be up in the wee hours before Thanksgiving to get everything in order. I hope my Mom has the coffee ready when I arrive.

Geeking

Earlier in the week, one of the fans in my computer started to go bad. The offending fan started to make a noise and pin slowly. I knew I’d have to replace it or the BIOS chip would burn up in short order.
I went to the hellhole known as Fry’s and found a fan that would work, but was not an exact replacement. Close enough till I could pull the original and get a proper replacement.
With the case covers off and a flashlight pointed inside, I saw the usual dust accumulation on the cooling fans. I got a small brush to clean things up. Mira was hovering, as see does any time I puli out tools to work on things. She asked if she could help.
Why the hell not? I gave her the brush and her to clean the dust off.


Mira earning her keep as a tech

I ordered the correct replacement fan and few other cools things. Arrival next week some time.
BBQ
The smoking of the brisket went well. The meat was most tasty and made for an enjoyable dinner. Michele made mashed potatoes and buttered carrots to go along with the brisket. De-lic-ious.
If you want to see pictures and read a bit more story, hit the MORE link.

Continue reading “Geeking”

Halloween Stats

Being Daddy has a great post on Trick or Treaters.
I like his idea of stats on the costumes of those that appear at the door. Next year, I’m all over this plan.
His plan for a sign that says “No Costume, No Candy” is also great, and I will be copying that as well next year.
On a different note, my brother Matt, went from being the hero of the neighborhood to “that grumpy guy who isn’t giving out any candy”

Smoky

Today started quietly as I made an electric smoker out of a trash can. I gave the smoker a quick test before starting out on the other events of the day. When I get a chance, I’ll write up a page about making the smoker.
We got rolling with a trip to the mall to get the girls some shoes. Success was found early with each girls getting two pairs of sneakers. We celebrated with candy and lunch at the mall.
Zoe had her soccer game at 2 PM and then went to go play at a friends house. That left me with time to mix up a dry rub and get a pair of top sirloin steaks smoking. I know that tri-tip is the preferred item to smoke, but the market was out and the butchers recommended this.
I got the meat into the smoker and sat down with a beer to wait it out. While I was sitting outside, supervising the smoke, I finished the Cory Doctorow book, A Place So Foreign.
The book was a good set of short stories. I had already read two of them in other publications, A Place So Foreign in the now defunct SciFi Age magazine, and Ownz0red at Salon.com. The other stories were good, but tantalizingly short. After tasting a full novel of a fully concieved world in Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom, all of the stories left me wanting more.
You can check out more about the book at Cory’s site, where you can even download the book for free.
Around 8:30 or so, the meat was finally done and I pulled it out to rest for a 1/2 hour. It was most tasty as Michele & James can attest.
To wrap up the day I watched Samurai Rebellion. I had Tivo’ed it the day before and enjoyed it immensely. Toshirô Mifune plays the lead character and is fantastic as usual. The only bad thing is that the recording ended before the movie was over. I don’t know what happens in the very end! If you know, please tell me what happens after the battle in the field.
Tomorrow I’ll be looking around to find a place to rent the film.
Time for sleep.

Referrers

I’m having trouble getting my work email at home, so I thought I’d goof off.
Referrers
Like most webloggers, I peruse my stats and look at what pages are linking to my site. These are commonly know as ‘referrers’. I look at these regularly. OK, I check them daily.
Many of the referrers are search engines. As an example, here are the top keyword searches from this month so far including the number of times someone has gotten to my site from a search engine.
Atari 10-in-1 57
how to make a cup of tea 20
important quotes 19
buildabear 15
crawfish boil 13
history of hdtv 12
baseball cap washer 12
cantenna 12
washing baseball caps 9
Clan MacGregor scotch 7
“Pictures of dead people” 7
burger king tacos 6
Dr. Pepper and the imposters 6
Beyond the keyword, it’s always interesting to see the site that point to me.
Here are a few examples…
An eBay auction is pointing at my cantenna page. If he sells it, I wonder if I get a cut.
Adventures into the Well Known has a link to me somewhere. When I read the About page I saw that he must be part of Matt’s circle of DC bloggers. I then read that he grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. Small world. Guess who else grew up in Lawrence, Kansas? Yeppers, Martin and Jennifer!
There’s a link from g2gk.com. I’m not sure what g2gk.com is about, but they like the site.
That’s just an example of what I see in the referrer links. Now I need to see if I can check my work email.

Nice

Wow, 20 blurkers forced into the light. Well done folks.
As promised, here is a picture of Michele in the new car.

It’s a been a light week for weblogging and heavy week for work. The company is trying to get it’s shit together, but it’s not easy to turn the wheel of the ship. A few of us try to sneak into the wheelhouse and spin the wheel until someone tells us to stop.
The good thing about work today was that I got to play with the HDTV Tivo. It is quite sweet. The picture loks great adn they are recording the full ATSC data stream, and aren’t compressing it at all. It’s probably a year away from being in stores, but I lust after it already. The picture is quite tasty.
I also had a chance to play with the Series 2 Tivos with the new features. We don’t watch enough TV to justify to have two, but the access from the internet is enticing.
Lastly, I got the door prize at the meeting. It was a Wristlinx wrist FRS/GMRS radio. I tried it out with Zoe a bit but everything was distorted. I think that they could have been too close. I’ll try it again tomorrow outside.
Linkage:
We had the Superbowl party on Sunday and Brad wrote up the story of the broken window.
My wife, Michele appears to have her weblog groove on.
Via Rebecca Blood, here is the crayon stain removal page.

Friday Night

I moved the beer from the primary fermenter to the secondary fermenter. I measured the specific gravity and the rough calculation is 4% beer. Not bad. A few more days to eek out the last bit of fermentation and I’ll bottle it.
Tivo News:
Tivo announced several new options today at CES. They are all great. I don’t knwo which one to get…
You can get a Tivo with a DVD player built-in.
You can get a Tivo with broadand access that you can access from the internet and move clips to other Tivos in your house.
You can get a Tivo that records and plays HDTV.
Health Update:
Will all you stop worrying about me? Sheesh it’s not like I’m gunna keel over.