Twitter & the New York Times

The New York Times now has a set of Twitter feeds. Follow them, and you get your news via Twitter.
I’ll let the rest of the blogosphere blather on about Twitter and it’s impact. Maybe they will stop navel gazing about a blogger code of conduct for a few moments to make profound statements about paradigm shifts.
To me, I find the agility of the New York Times to adapt to new concepts to be amazing. Anyone who counts out newspapers as a viable media business is simply wrong.

Making Pastrami

One day while out shopping, Michele bought a corned brisket. She’s aways on the lookout for new things and knew that I’d be interested in a whole corned beef that wasn’t sliced.
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.
To turn the corned brisket into a corned beef, you boil the meat.
To turn the corned brisket into pastrami, you smoke the meat.
Loyal Cruft Readers will know that I love to smoke meats, so I decided to make pastrami.
Here is the brisket.


To smoke the meat, I needed a pastrami rub recipe to properly season it. I found this pastrami rub recipe and decided it looked good.

* 5 tablespoons kosher salt
* 4 tablespoons paprika
* 3 tablespoons coriander seeds
* 3 tablespoons brown sugar
* 2 tablespoons black peppercorns
* 2 tablespoons yellow mustard seeds
* 1 tablespoon white peppercorns
* 8 cloves garlic, minced
I enjoy making my own spice rubs. It’s fun to grind things up and mix things together. The smell is amazing.

The rub is applied liberally to the corned brisket.

And into the smoker it goes.

I hit it with smoke for about two hours and then gave it about 3 more hours of straight heat.
The pastrami looked pretty good coming out and definitely had a bit of the ‘pastrami smell’. I was quite encouraged.

Slicing the pastrami revealed a nice look of pink meat, typical of corned meat. Normally cooking meat this long would have turned it gray. Thanks to the nitrates in the corning brine, the color is maintained.
Of course, the real test is the taste. I’ll have to admit, I was a little disappointed. While is had a hint of the pastrami flavor, it tasted much stronger of a traditional corned beef. Maybe I should have soaked it in water a bit to release more salt or maybe they had pre-boiled the meat.

We enjoyed the pastrami, but I know I can do better. I will buy a raw brisket and corn it myself this time. Alton Brown, my culinary hero, did an episode on corning beef, and I will follow his recipe.
Let me know if you have any suggestions, I haven’t found a lot of home pastrami makers out there.

Twitter’s Secret Plot

I have uncovered the true business plan for Twitter.
Twitter is a front organization for the cell phone battery manufacturers.
Their nefarious plot is to make your mobile phone vibrate so much from Twitter messages that the batteries literally wear out and you need to buy replacements.
Doubt me? Then you come up with a business model for Twitter that makes better sense.

Battlefield 2142 and Vista

For those of you trying to get Battlefield 2142 running under Vista, I feel your pain.
Here is what I did to get it running:
1) Fully install and patch up BF2142
2) Go to the Punkbuster site for BF2142 and get the latest update. I recommend the simple PBSetup program that handles it all for you. Install the latest updates to Punkbuster.
3) Right-click on the BF2142 shortcut and choose Properties. Got to the Compatibility tab and select Run this program as an administrator.


This should allow BF2142 to run and not get you kicked out due to Punkbuster not being able to do it’s job.
If you have User Access Control turned on, it will ask you if you allow BF2142 to run as administrator. You have have to say Allow, every single time. Yes, that sucks…
Even with this, BF2142 still crashes on occasion. It doesn’t crash the whole machine, and Vista recovers from it easily, but it is a pain. I hope EA releases a Vista patch to help things.
Here’s another tip to auto-login you solider. Right-click on the BF2142 shortcut and choose Properties. Got to the Shortcut tab, and add this info to the Target field at the end
+eaAccountName YourAccountName +eaAccountPassword YourPassword +soldierName YourSoldier

You can’t avoid the starting movie other than hitting ESC after the earth rises, but then it will take you directly to the BFHQ screen.
This and other command line tricks can be found at the great Tweakguides 2142 site.
Good luck and see you on the Battlefield.

Burbank Fire

Last Friday, there was a fire in Burbank, very near my office. On the way back from Lunch, it was just starting. This is what it looked like early.


Then it really started going as you can see by the flames here.

The flames created a huge plume of smoke that was noticeable everywhere in the LA basin.

You probably saw similar pictures in the newspaper and on the internet.
What you probably didn’t see was the aftermath. This is the same hillside on Monday morning.

So you can tell the extent of the fire’s damage, I’ve made it a bit clearer for you.
BTW, the round roofed buildings in the foreground are on the Warner Brothers Studio Lot.

Thanks to the LAFD and other involved agencies who put the fire down quickly. It was amazing to watch the water drops placed so accurately.