December 2007 Archives

I returned home from Houston to this. Three of my malibou lights were destroyed. I wonder why they do this?

Wow, I can't believe that this is the third year of Lone Star. More after the cut...

Believe it or not, it is a candy dispenser. Penguin poop!

And what do you know, here are some sugar cookies to the rescue. I was a little worried during the baking. Because, when I heated up the Dulce de Leche in the microwave, it bubbled all over the place. But it was rather refined in the oven.

So soon after making caramel, I am off trying out another version. Why so quickly? It was this recipe which inspired me. And also just how easy the preparation was. Above is the result. Although, if I could take that picture over again, I would have somehow raised the spoon to show off more of the texture. It just blends in with the mixture too much right now.

You start off by heating a quart (four cups) of milk and a cup of sugar in a pot with large sides until it moderately simmers. Why use large side, you ask? It is because boiling milk will bubble over. And also, because when you add 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda dissolved in water to the milk it will seriously bubble up!

Now a classical recipe of Dulce de Leche is just milk and sugar. So why then is baking soda added? Because Alton Brown explains that it prevents the whey proteins from coagulating and forming gritty particles. It will also increase the acidity of the mixture and promote browning.

All you have to do after stirring down the bubbling mixture from the baking soda is to wait. And wait. And wait. The liquid will reduce and darken. And it is up to you just how dark and how reduced you will let the liquid become. I went for "jelly like" and overshot into "peanut butter" consistency. I think this calls for some shortbread cookies to spread it on!

Wow. It is amazing how much progress has been made on certain computer fronts. I came across this article about serving your media files with Amazon's S3 service and decided to take the plunge. I have been reading a lot of good things about S3. Like how you can treat it as a remote backup location. Like how SmugMug uses it under the covers to store their data. And now this article. Apparently you can store any file and S3 will just serve it up.

And it really was easy. Well almost. Signing up for the service is a snap. I used S3Fox to transfer my images over. My first problem was realizing that the default ACL was that only you could read (or write) the file. So I had to change all of the ACLs such that everyone could at least read the files. But I don't think that S3Fox is designed for as many files as I had. I had 1920 files and only the first 1000 had the correct ACLs. I finally got frustrated enough to write a Python script to change the ACLs of any file that did not have public access.

Then I had to add a new subdomain that would resolve to S3 domain. That was very easy with zoneedit.com! I love zoneedit. And its a free service if you are a relatively unknown person like myself.

Next up was changing over 700 entries in Movable Type. I had to change all img's and href's to the new location. Fortunately, MT has a global search and replace feature! And it worked for 90% of the entries. I had to fix a couple after MT borked them.

So tell me if you notice anything different. Or broken.

I had a good practice throw on hole 3. Close enough for a birdie.

The wind was brutal today! And the discs performed strangely, if they flew on target at all.

With our third meeting of the meetup group, no one else showed up. Not too surprising, I guess. The meetup people are rather flakey. John started off by throwing his second throw into the tree...

How odd. Someone parked their car in the middle of the field. I wonder why?

This ball of Mistletoe is quite heavy! It is almost going to rip that branch down. John and I maintained our separate ways around that obstacle.

On hole 8, I had a great throw! But could not convert it into a birdie.

Bunte Runde

While we waited for the rest of the crew to show up, we played Bunte Runde. Knizia's lightweight (but still meaty) filler game. In fact some of the players were taking a while to make their moves. Which made it a little less enjoyable than it could have been.

Caylus

Hrm, five people... what shall we play with five people. With many, many games to choose from, we chose Caylus. Which had not seen the table in quite some time. This game was rather unique. (Aren't they all in their own special way?) The resources were smothered in this game. It started off with stone. And it continued for all of the other one resource tiles. Until they all disappeared. Another factor in this problem was that only one two resource tile was built. This made building pieces in the castle rather scarce.

Aladdin's Dragons

Next up was another game that we have rarely played. In fact, I have only played it once over six years ago. Its not a bad game if you like blind area majority games.

Tichu

To finish out the night, we played another game of Tichu. My first Tichu was a little risky when I called it. And when Nick over Tichued me, I was worried. But I went out first. My next Tichu was a over Tichu to Nick's. With two aces, a Dragon, a bomb, and a length 5 straight, it was not a hard choice to make.

Towards the end, the opposing team got desperate. And then the final hand happened. We only need 10 points for the win. So John was very careful. Careful enough not to call Tichu with an Ace bomb and the Dragon.

My Aunt sent me some old photos in her Christmas card. Old memories make for a great present.

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I had my first almost ace today at the Lutheran Church on hole 3. My throw hit the chains of the basket and bounced out. Wah! So close. I wonder if a double set of chains would have grabbed that disc?

I went out to Dot's for lunch today and just happened upon its first year anniversary. I wonder if everyone knows of its new location? It hasn't been as crowded as the old place was. But its still just as good as ever...

While I was taking a new set of photos of the disc golf at Pease Park, I came across this tree. And just had to take a picture of it. The stream has eroded the ground covering its roots almost away. And look how much Spanish Moss is using it as a home. I bet they rob the tree's leaves of some needed light.

Austin has been in a Churrascaria drought for a long time. But that dam has finally broken. Last year, Estancia Churrascaria opened up on Mopac and 290. And next up was Fogo De Chao. I just had to try it out. It is located on East 3rd Street next to the Convention Center (and next to the Melting Pot). Which makes it closer to me, but parking is harder (and costs money). The salad and meat selection was as good as ever.

"Mark, Welcome to Austin." Oooh, how scary. I wonder if it is a coincidence? Or are they scanning my blue-tooth phone?

John and I went to another ice hockey game. This season, the Ice Bat's games are held at a much smaller venue. There were only 5 rows and the seating was only around half of the rink. Even with the tiny size, the game was not sold out. This seems like a bad sign. I don't think anyone around here cares about ice hockey much.

Today was the second week of the meetup disc golf. And we went to the same place again! Sigh. There are many, many disc golf courses around Austin. Why keep coming to the same place? I wanted to go down to Pease, but John was tied to Cat Hollow.

Supposedly, someone was supposed to show up. But they never did. So we played alone. I had a pretty good throw on hole 2.

Chapel inspired me to make another HDR picture. My first HDR picture was essentially bringing multiple exposures into one picture. When you take a picture of the sky, it requires a different exposure than one for something which does not contain the brighter sky.

However, there are other uses that I see for HDR. Besides playing with saturation, you can also play with the color mapping that is almost hidden within a picture. There are contour maps that can be brought out at the same time that you mess with colors.

Photoshop offers four 32->8 conversion routines: Exposure and Gamma, Highlight Compression, Equalize Histogram, and Local Adaptation. The first three are essentially flat mappings with very little options. They did not mix very well with the lighting in this picture. Which was flat and even as well. So I went with the last option. In the toning curve and histogram section, you can define a mapping function. And here is where you can really play with it. I chose a result that was other worldly. And those funky colors create the same look and feel of the funky colors in other HDR photos. Well, the other extreme HDR photos that I have seen.

When taking this picture, I relied on my Expodisk. It is amazing how much different the lighting color is between different sources.

This is what the light looks like with the CFLs on inside of the ceiling fan. Keep in mind, this is at the same time as when the fan blades are spinning. With some of the light reflecting back down off of the dark brown fan blades, it gives the light a decidedly brown tint.

With the fan blades off, the light is much more even. And much closer to white (or grey in this 18% capture).

And even with the fan's light on, if I were to use a flash, the flash's bright bluish-white light overpowers the other light.

I think that could then selectively pull in the HDR's colors into the starting picture to create an emphasis. I would like to try this with Antiquity's pollution markers in my next HDR picture. It would make them look more radioactive.

Key Harvest

First up was a new Essen game, Key Harvest. It took a little while to grasp the strategy and game play and by then it was too late. But the game did seem interesting. And I want to try it again. But who knows if everyone will want to play it again.

Basically, this is a set collecting game. You want to collect two groups of tiles that are close to the same size. You score one point per tile in your biggest group and two points per tile in your second biggest group. In order to acquire the tiles, you want to sell tiles to other people to get money in the five different kinds of currency. You then use that money to buy tiles from other people. Or, you can get the tiles for yourself. But you give up what money you put on it as its cost to other players (which you would have gotten back if they bought it).

There are also workers which "farm" the tiles. They score points at the end of the game. They cannot touch each other and must touch a minimum number of tiles as its victory points. Since it costs you turns to put them down and pick them up, you want to place them such that you get a free rearrangement action when you place a new tile on the spot that they were occupying.

Tichu

To finish out the night, we played some Tichu. Our team was doing quite well. But then the luck went the other way. And the opposing team caught up. In the end, I should have dogged my partner to set Jon's Tichu call. But I chose not to and we lost.

For a while now I have wanted to try out Hoover's Cooking. Mainly because of their chicken fried steak. But also because they have a lot of good southern foods on the menu.

I had the homemade lemonade which was served in a large pitcher style cup. And I also had the chicken fried steak, butter beans, and mustard greens. Jon had the broiled catfish, mashed potatoes and gravy, and Caribbean rice. It was pretty good. But it left us too full to try out the desserts.

For lunch, I tried out the newer Salt Lick in Austin. It is located on 360 south of the bridge. And it is different enough from the original one. It is more upscale. Although they do still have BBQ plate choices... And they do offer to sell meat by the pound, which is nice.

I wonder what happened to the plans to open a branch in Round Rock next to the Dell Diamond?

Jon and I ran across this tiny electric car in the IBM parking garage.

How, odd. That is not what I expect from this neighborhood...

John created another meetup group for disc golf. I guess that the RRGDG group fell apart for him. This has some pros and cons. The pros are I know everyone in RRGDG and they are all good disc golfers. The cons are this meetup group has a lot of people who only come one time or they are very new to disc golf.

Today, we had Robin who is new to disc golf and a dam inspector (and coincidently, news8austin is running an expose on the state of our dams) and Tony who has been playing disc golf for a while and prefers to run the course while playing.

Afterwards, we went to Chuy's for lunch.

Mordred

Tonight was another 1st week in a month with The Central Texas Boardgames Meetup Group. We started out with a couple of hands of Escalation!. Next up was a Wallace game that I wanted to try out -- a reprint of one of his older games called Mordred. It certainly looked interesting. The rules were simple. They even promised that the game would play quickly. And with one of three possible ending conditions, it looked likely. However. And this is a big however. Our game was the complete opposite of quick. It must have dragged on for hours. Not all of it was the game's fault. Rules explainers were dragged off. People took breaks to get munchies. And the players were far too conservative. But I will give this game another chance...

John and I played at the Old Settler's Park Winter course. But we didn't have enough time to finish it. First Friday Fluff was on later tonight and John had to leave early to prepare.

Cuba

Jon held game day at his house this time. And all of the games that we played came from John's "box of fluff." But these weren't fluffy. So there's hope for John after all.

First up was Cuba. This time I went for "the blue strategy." I was second to start and I was worried that someone else would take my building. So my first action was to build the Dam. Jon apparently was going to go for that one as well (I learned this after the game). Instead, he took the Hotel (2 victory point generator). I wasn't worried that someone would take the Golf Course (convert water into victory points). So I took the Inn. And, on the next turn, I built the Golf Course. On the third turn, both the Duty Act and the Subsidy Act were the water ones. Clearly, I needed to win that vote. But I made the mistake of not spending all of my money (I decided to keep a couple of bucks). Jon did the team thing and stopped me from winning the vote. This took me out of a first place win. Instead, I ended up second.

I don't know about the water (or blue) strategy. I did not produce that many goods. And, consequently, I didn't ship that many (or fulfill the Duty Act) either. The four water resources and one victory point gave me a constant increase of 5 victory points a turn. Which is not bad. But the rum or cigar cafes will allow you to get a maximum of 6 victory points per turn. While the red, white, or blue cube converters only allow a maximum of 4.

Gipsy King

Next up was Gipsy King. Which I missed playing at BGG.con. This is a lighter but still meaty game. And its a perfect one for lunch. I view it as a purely abstract game. In fact, I don't even know what the "theme" is. I suspect that it may involve Gypsies. But I could be wrong.

This is a block placement game where you are trying to get long chains of your blocks. The longer the better. And, secondarily, you also try and get majority control of lakes with fishes. If you control a lake, you get a number of victory points that equal the amount of fishes in it (small numbers). Ties are good. Everyone shares the points equally. The real big amounts of victory points come from the length of your chain. You score triangle points based on the length.

There are two round in the game. You start surrounding lake number one and continue until the highest lake is surrounded. On the next round, you start at the highest number and move down to one. You can either place one of your blocks on a hex surround the lake in question. Or, you can pass and enter the queue for placement at the next lake. This is sometimes a good thing indeed, as you are trying to connect your chains. And you will skip areas to concentrate on others.

Tichu

We ended the night with a game of Tichu...

...scored on a cute pad of paper!

This thread on BGG got me motivated to get my old computer out of the closet and take a picture of it.

My what progress we have made... Have 101 programming tips & tricks books been around that long?

There was quite a surprise when I opened my malibou light to replace a burned out light bulb. I found a whole ecology inside! Of course, there was light and air, but also flora, predators and prey. My last surprise inside a Malibou light was an ant farm. It was filled to the brim with dirt... and ants.

I received the latest Cook's Illustrated in the mail. And I just had to try out the new bread recipe. While not a true "no-knead" recipe (you do it about 10 to 15 times), it is pretty close. But that was not what was interesting about this recipe. The first unique thing was cooking it in a preheated dutch oven. This created a nice and steamy sauna for the bread to cook in. The other thing was using lager beer (Moosehead in this instance) and white vinegar to simulate sourdough starters.

When I went to turn on the oven to 500, I noticed this sourdough chip laying in the dripping pan. My last batch of sourdough starter was overly expansionistic and I forgot about its escapees. Millions of them gave their lives to become this chip.

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Lately I have been experimenting with sweet potatoes. My current recipe for making them uses two main ingredients: the potatoes themselves and caramel. The first step is to cook the potatoes in an oven. I use my convection toaster oven set to 350 or so and leave them in for an hour... ish. Make sure that you poke holes in the potatoes you really don't want those suckers to explode in your oven. I've had that happen and its not pretty.

While the potatoes are cooking, make the caramel. At its most basic level all it really involves is to toast some sugar and pour some heavy cream in to smooth it out. But there are multiple ways of doing this. I usually do the dry method. Which is to pour sugar into a nonstick skillet and heat it until it liquefies and turns brown. But this method is prone to scorching. Another way is the wet method. Add water to the sugar and boil it until the water evaporates. By then, the sugar will have melted and you can continue boiling until the sugar caramelizes nicely. But this method has a risk of crystals forming. You have to babysit the pan and wet or grease the sides down to discourage crystallization.

I tried a new method recommended by one of my favorite cookbook authors: Shirley Corriher. This is to use a microwave. To prevent crystals from forming, Corriher explains that the substance must be impure. The impurities that you can add to the caramel come in different forms of sugar. Table sugar is a double sugar which consists of fructose and glucose that are joined together. By adding corn syrup (mostly glucose) and by adding lemon juice (an acid which cuts the sugar into fructose and glucose), you have a mixture of three kinds of sugar. These molecules are different enough to prevent crystallization.

In a microwave safe pyrex bowl, add 1 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of corn syrup, and 10 drops of lemon juice. Thoroughly mix together (adding a little bit of water if needed). Microwave on high for a couple of minutes until the mixture starts bubbling. Now, closely watch it until it turns light brown. When it does, turn off the microwave! Carryover cooking will continue to brown the mixture. Keep in mind that this liquid sugar is close to 250 degrees Fahrenheit.

Next add heavy whipping cream. But this time I used evaporated whole milk. This is by far the hardest part. In a saucepan, boil the cream (or evaporated milk). Pour the still molten sugar in and step back. That cream will bubble furiously! And the sugar will instantly harden rock solid. Turn off the heat and stir the mixture. Eventually, if you work hard enough, the sugar will melt back into the liquid. Also be aware that if you use water rather than cream or milk that you are creating an exothermic reaction. The mixture will actually heat up. And another thing to keep in mind, perhaps the most important thing, is that the stages of sugar cooking are rather thin. The firm ball stage of sugar syrup is from 244 to 248 degrees Fahrenheit. Not a very large margin of error.

You can make the caramel ahead of time. And you can let the potatoes cool down for a while. Or even cook them ahead of time as well. All you need to do is to whip up the potatoes and add whatever amount of caramel you want. And if you are A. R. enough, you can strain the sweet potatoes through a food mill to help reduce the stringy fibers. Don't forget to add salt and pepper while you mix it...

The final result is a medley of roasted notes. The roasted sugars in the potatoes, the roasted sugar in the caramel, and the roasted milk sugars from the evaporated milk.

I haven't made a pizza in a while now... its about time to experiment! This time, I am in the mood some Thanksgiving meal in pizza form. To me, the quintessential Thanksgiving food is turkey, sweet potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. So I decide to spread my roasted sweet potato puree instead of tomato sauce. For the turkey, I chopped up some leftover Rudy's smoked turkey. I quavered on whether to put stuffing on or not. In the end, I decided not to. But I did sprinkle on some dried cranberries.

The results turned out to be better than I imagined. The individual flavors were not out of balance and melded beautifully. Next time I will add the stuffing in some form. I think that maybe croûtons would work. The steam generated by the cooking would soften them up...