Category: Weblog

How to prepare for SxSW

SxSW starts March 7th in Austin. This is my SIXTH year and these are my helpful tips for the novice. I had a great time last year.
Introduce Yourself – People are at SXSW because they want to meet people and see new things. Strangely, many of the blogger types that go are introverted types that are a bit shy. Do yourself a favor and say “Hello, I’m So-and-so” to that person you are sitting next to. (Don’t say So-and-so, use your name…) I guarantee that they will be happy to talk to you.
ABC – Always Be Charging – If you bring a laptop, you need to be charging it every single chance you get. No battery lasts long enough. Try to sit near an outlet in the session rooms. Share power outlets with others.
Kick – Kick is back! Saturday morning is a large kickball game. Good fun and you will have a chance to meet all kinds of new people.
Personal cards – Make up business cards with your name, email, and website info on them to hand out. Bring your regular business cards if you want, but what people really want is a card that ties you to your online persona so they can find you after SxSW.
Session Info – When you arrive on Friday go to the Convention Center and pick up your badge. They will give you a large canvas bag of swag. You don’t want to haul this around, so you need to figure a way to drop this off at your hotel before a long night of partying. In the bag are two crucial items. First is the program which has detailed session descriptions. Second is a small pocket card with the session schedule on it. You want these to be in your daily walk around bag, not in your hotel room.
Shiner Bock – Shiner Bock is a local Texas beer that you find everywhere. Often referred to as simply ‘Shiner’.
Fray Cafe – Go to the Fray Cafe on Sunday night. Fray is people telling truthful stories about their life. It’s one of the best things about SxSW. Baratunde is the new host and is generally hilarious. Get there early for a good seat, otherwise you will be standing for the whole thing.
Stay Warm – It can get cold and rain in Austin this time of year. Bring a good jacket or coat just in case.
Sharpeners – There are no pencil sharpeners at SXSW. People think writing on a pad of paper with a wooden pencil is a bit strange.
The Backchannel – Be aware that there is a backchannel of real-time IRC discussion going on. Probably on irc.freenode.net, probably on #sxsw. The trick is to not make the backchannel into the front channel for you. It can distract you from listening to the speaker/session that you paid to see…
Twitter – Be in the Twitter loop with your new friends. You’ll always know where the party is that way…
Secure connections – Wifi traffic is in the clear and people are sniffing packets all the time. Arrange for secure email, FTP, and if possible, secure browsing while at SXSW. It’s unlikely that a malicious hacker is gunna do bad things, but it’s best to be prepared.
Street Signs – For some reason, downtown Austin has few street signs. Get a map and study it before venturing out.
Food – Eat food. Austin has a great bar scene. You will be drinking. Don’t drink on an empty stomach. It also would be a good idea to keep a couple energy bars in your bag during sessions.
Texas BBQ – IMHO, Texas BBQ pales in comparison to BBQ in other areas like Kansas City and Carolina. That chopped beef sandwich stuff just doesn’t cut it, but people will want to eat it for lunch. That said, Stubbs makes a great brisket.
Say Hello to Me – I would love to meet Loyal Cruft Readers. There doesn’t appear to be Break Bread with Brad this year, but I will be bringing a few cigars to share with people. Email me or IM at pusateri AT gmail.com and I promise to respond.
Any questions?

Advertising this site

I read about The Million Zimbabwean Dollar Homepage on Boing Boing today. It’s a slightly different take on the original Million Dollar Homepage.
At those prices, I decided to do a little advertising. I think I spent $3.24 for 8100 pixels.
So if you go to The Million Zimbabwean Dollar Homepage you’ll see my ad on the left side. It will be interesting to track the stats of how many people arrive this way.
Get your now, the pixels are going fast!

Making gunpowder

A few months ago, I made corned beef from scratch. Part of that process involved me using saltpeter (potassium nitrate) to preserve the beef. Of course, I knew that saltpeter is a key ingredient in gunpowder. As I learned from the Gorn episode of Star Trek, all you need to do is mix, carbon, sulfur, and saltpeter, and you have gunpowder.
I had some time this weekend, so it was time to make gunpowder.


Obviously, making gunpowder is inherently dangerous, so I was carefully in my preparation and protection.
Carbon is readily available as charcoal. Sulfur is easily found at the gardening store. Saltpeter is a little tougher to find. I’m not saying it’s hard, but it’s not something you can find at any local store. I had mine leftover from making corned beef.

The sulfur came as small pellets, meant for spreading in your garden.

After about 5 minutes of grinding, the sulfur was as powdery as I was going to get it by hand.

The charcoal briquettes were a bit tougher to crush. I had to apply some real force to get these into grinding size. This made a bit of a mess.

But in the end, I had the charcoal ground into a powder as well.

The saltpeter was already ground fine for food usage. The exact recipe for gunpowder varies from purpose to purpose. My recipe was:

  • 1 part carbon
  • 1 part sulfur
  • 4 parts saltpeter

As I researched this, it was interesting to learn that saltpeter is the oxidizer for the reaction, meaning that gunpowder does not need air to burn. That means you can fire a gun in outer space! The molecules of saltpeter contain plenty of their own oxygen atoms.


To grind the components together, I wore gloves, long sleeve shirt, face and eye protection. I sure many people have been hurt making gunpowder. I can’t imagine what it took to make it hundreds of years ago.
After grinding for a bit, the gunpowder took on it’s characteristic grey appearance. Things were looking good so far.

For the initial test, I built a small test pan out of aluminum foil. I had also picked up green fuse to give me plenty of time to get to a safe distance.
Here is a video that shows what happened with my various tests.

Sure enough, my gunpowder worked.

In the Mini Rocket test, I used an old mini rocket that normally used an insertable motor. I filled it with gunpowder and attached a fuse. As you saw, it went nowhere, but did burn nicely.

I really wanted the gunpowder to work as a propellant, so I made rocket out of a old prescription (Rx) bottle. I placed that on the launcher and again, it went nowhere. You can hear the satisfying whoosh of the exhaust, but it just went nowhere.

The flames burned out the bottom of the bottle.

For the last attempt, I put all the remaining gunpowder into a second Rx Rocket and hoped for the best. As you saw, it made a satisfying whoosh and lots of smoke, but went nowhere. The lauching pad was completely destroyed.
I really need a nozzle to focus the exhaust. 😉
In one aspect, the experiment was a success. I did make gunpowder from scratch. This was not hard, but it would be hard to make it in large quantities. However, my attempts to use the gunpowder to launch a rocket, as is often seen in fireworks, was a failure. The combination of lacking a proper rocket body and a proper nozzle to direct the exhaust proved to be a serious flaw. I could simply get a bunch of model rocketry gear, but what’s the fun in that? It’s much more fun to try to launch plastic prescription bottles.
The biggest mistake I made ws using my wife’s mortar and pestle to make gunpowder. She was upset and now refuses to allow the mortar and pestle back into the kitchen. They are now sitting on my workbench in the garage. I have to buy a new mortar and pestle. In the future, I must avoid angering the wife.
Warning: I won’t tell you not to try this at home. If you are not an adult, do NOT even think about trying this. If you do duplicate this, please be careful. Gunpowder is dangerous stuff and you need to be very careful to avoid getting hurt. Wear protective clothing and eyewear at all times. And don’t use your wife’s kitchen gear in your experiment.

Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr Pepper

A few weeks ago I saw an ad for Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr Pepper on television. I had even seen the Cherry Chocolate Rain song by Tay Zonday on Youtube.


It took me a bit to find it, but I did. Quite an assortment of flavors we find here.

The soda itself really does have a red tinge to the normally caramel colored liquid. The smell was slightly sweet, with strong hints of cherry.
I could distinctly taste the cherry and chocolate flavors. Seemed to me that there was a bit of vanilla too. The Dr Pepper taste was in the background and subtle. The aftertaste is exactly that of a spoonful of Cherry Garcia from Ben & Jerry’s.
It’s quite a niche flavor. I can’t see drinking this day after day, but it would be good on occasion or as the base of some sort of mixed drink or shot.

Good movies

I’m not a huge TV watcher. I barely keep up with one television show at a time. But I do love a good movie, especially the classics.
Turner Classic Movies is airing 31 Days of Oscar this month. 5 classic movies a day with no commercial interruptions. It’s a Tivo owner’s dream.
Here’s an example of two days:
February 20th: Some Like it Hot, Stalag 17, The Caine Mutiny, The Buccaneer, On the Waterfront
February 29th: The Day of the Jackal, Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, The Boys from Brazil, Kotch
All without commercials…

Importing Photos in Vista

This post is for Vista users that might have run into the same problem.
I’ve been transitioning Michele from a homebuilt XP system to a iMac running Vista. Everything had been going along smoothly until I tried to import some photos. We’ve always used her computer as the import station for all our digital cameras. The photos are backed up on several other computers.
The issue is that the default Vista camera import method sucks, mainly because you can’t select which photos you want imported and where to put them. It’s an all or nothing arrangement. This may be great for for 90% of users, but many of us want to be a bit more selective about how we import and place our photos.
In XP, we had the Scanner and Camera Wizard, which was pretty damn good. I used it for years with no problem. Seemed simple enough to me.
The Vista team must have disagreed and made the new import system basically into a on-click, no options process. As a result, many people feel that the default Vista Import method is inferior to the XP import method.
The last couple days, I have done a bunch of research on alternatives. In the end, I found that Windows Live Photo Gallery is the solution. I’m not sure why it doesn’t come with Vista, but it’s a free download.
Importing with Windows Live Photo Gallery gives you back all the features of the XP Camera Wizard. It gives you the option to import everything or select individual photos or even groups of photos to import into specified folders and rename as you desire. There’s even an Autoplay option to always use it when you connect a camera.
I’m quite happy now with the solution and Michele is ready to move to her new computer full time.

A year in Hotel Rooms

I travel a lot and end up in a lot of hotel rooms. In 2007, I stayed in 16 different hotel rooms. That doesn’t include 2 vacations where I didn’t stay in hotels.
In 2006, I started making short videos of my hotel rooms to show to Michele and the girls. I’ve been posting them to my Vox account. Now that 2007 is over, I can present you with:
My Hotel Rooms of 2007
January 15th – San Jose, California
January 16th – Emeryville, California
February 6th – Toronto, Ontario, Canada
February 9th – Bellevue, Washington
February 24th – Las Vegas, Nevada
March 17th – Austin, Texas
March 27th – London, England
April 18th – Las Vegas, Nevada
May 14th – Cupertino, California
May 27th – San Francisco, California
July 1st – Long Beach, California
July 17th – London, England
August 24th – Seattle, Washington
October 10th – New York, New York
October 18th – San Francisco, California
December 5th – San Jose, California
Vox makes it very easy to upload videos when I’m in the road. They recently added the ability to embed Vox videos on other sites. Even if you already have a weblog, having a Vox blog is fun and useful.
As an example of the videos I made, here’s the one from Long Beach, when my daughters and I attended the Anime Expo.


My Hotel Room in Long Beach from https://cruftbox.vox.com/