February, 2016

The brawn from yesterday’s cooking session is done, and I had some for lunch today. The flavor and texture are good, though I could have used a little less broth (gelatin) and weighted it down for a denser product. It’s certainly within the range of photos I’ve seen online.

The guanciale (un-smoked bacon made from hog jowl) is curing in the fridge, which will take about a week, then it has to hang to dry for about a month. I’m sure there will be more pictures of this process.

Kris came over today to help me cook the half pig’s head I got from Michael last fall. Here are Kris and Lis using dissection tools to remove the pig’s eye prior to cooking, which was surprisingly difficult. The difficulty was partially the head having been frozen then thawed, but mostly by none of us ever having done this before.

We made guanciale with the jowl, and brawn (head cheese) with the remainder of the head.

We had a great solar power day today, in fact our best so far. This photo is our system’s monitoring page, and it shows most of the panels at nearly their rated (280W) power.

This crocus may have been blooming at this time last year too, for all I know, but if it was we didn’t see it under all the snow.

Like Lis the other day, I am practicing posting from the tablet today.

This post is a little long-winded, so please bear with me.

The book you see here is the text from the first hard-core programming course I took in college. The class was taught by Prof. Alva Couch, a great teacher who got me started in the right direction toward my career.

One of my office’s summer interns from last year is a Tufts student, and has continued working on the intern project part-time for us during the school year. He’s taking a course with Couch this semester that is highly relevant to the intern project.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I had a video conference with Prof. Couch today. I was hugely flattered that he remembered me, 28 years after that first course.

Lines 2 & 3.

Today I made homemade sugar cubes. Because reasons. Mostly cocktail reasons.

I got my hair cut this morning, which is an activity I dislike. As a reward, I treated myself to a George Howell mocha made with Taza chocolate.

Here is one of those giant ice cubes I mentioned last week, in use in a Boulevardier.

This is the connector that broke on my mother in law’s tablet. This is a MicroUSB socket, with the metal shield folded back. The metal part is 7mm wide.  Do you see the piece of black plastic bent across the right-most metal finger? No? Look again; I’ll wait. This tiny sliver of plastic was insulating this one contact, preventing the charging cable from doing its job. Think about this next time you jam the charger into your smartphone for the night: be a little careful, make sure it’s lined up right. Or a 100-micrometer piece of plastic may mean you have a bad day tomorrow.