Ah, what a dinner!

Ah, what a dinner!  Debbie and I started cooking around 9 am yesterday morning, and (along with my brother Scott) we sat down to eat at around 2 pm.  The menu had only three items: lobster l'americaine, peas, and creme brulee.  We'd made the creme brulee the day before, which meant it was in the refrigerator and nicely cold by yesterday.  Nearly all the cookery yesterday revolved around that lobster l'americaine: Julia Child's recipe, which we've made twice before with excellent results.

The first step was to boil those three lovely lobsters (photo at right).  We have a gigantic (25 quart) cauldron that Debbie uses for soup and chili; this made a fine boiling pot for our three ocean-going bugs.  Debbie had to leave the kitchen for this part; she's quite squeamish about executing lobsters for culinary purposes.  Generally her squeamishness is directly proportional to the cuteness of the animal involved, but that surely cannot explain her reluctance to off a lobster!  So that was entirely my job. :)  As usual, the lobster's claws were held shut with thick rubber bands.  I'd always removed them in the past, but it occurred to me that I didn't know if I actually needed to risk having a lobster pinch me (they can get you pretty good!).  So, being 2017, I googled it – and discovered that there is quite the debate about this on the intertubes.  One fellow waxed eloquent on how removing the rubber bands connected him with the lobster.  That article didn't help me at all.  Another, from a famous restaurant, revealed their dirty secret: they'd been boiling lobsters with rubber bands for years, and nobody ever noticed any odd flavor.  Another cook said she couldn't detect any rubber band flavor either, but that she just couldn't abide the thought of boiling lobsters with rubber.  I decided she had the right idea, and removed the rubber bands once more.  I escaped with all my fingers, despite the best efforts of the biggest one of the three.

The next step was the most challenging one: disassembling the boiled lobsters into their essential four parts.  Actually, this was less challenging than it was tedious.  It involved some muscles, though, and a few tools (tools - yay!).  The basic idea was to extract the four key components of the lobster for the purposes of lobster l'americaine: the meat, the shell, the coral (roe), and the tomalley.  If you've ever eaten a lobster, you know there's not much left after extracting those four elements: just the “guts”, which we discarded.  Some people use them in the lobster l'americaine sauce, too, but some of the intestinal tract is quite bitter and I prefer the milder flavor without it.  At left you can see the “parts” of our three lobsters after two hours of disassembly.  Starting with the big red bowl and going clockwise: the shells, chopped or torn into small pieces, the coral (roe) from the two female lobsters we had, the tomalley, and the meat.

The next step was very much like making soup stock from a chicken or turkey skeleton.  In our biggest frying pan I sauteed the shell fragments along with some celery, onions, and carrots.  After that I poured some cognac on the shells, and set it on fire.  Julia Child specifies this in her recipe without explanation; I'm not sure what that adds to the end result – but the end result is so good that I'm disinclined to mess with the recipe!  Then I simmered that mixture along with some vermouth, tomatoes and herbs.  The kitchen smelled wonderful during that process!  The frying pan didn't look very tasty, though, with all those shell fragments in there.  After about 45 minutes, we ran all the stuff in that pan through a fine-meshed strainer, squeezing out every drop of the juices that we could  What remained was an almost-clear broth that absolutely reeked of lobster.  We thickened it per Julia's recipe, with butter and flour paste, and colored and flavored it with some tomato paste.

After that, the rest of the recipe was really easy.  We sauteed the lobster meat in butter (a little bit of it accidentally fell into my mouth at that point), added the sauce, the coral, and the tomalley, got it nice and hot, then ladled it over some freshly cooked white rice.  We ate it immediately, and I forgot to take a photo of it.  Fortunately my brother Scott went back for seconds, and I got a photo of his round two.  The green herbs are a mixture of parsley and tarragon, and the white is grated Parmesan.

That was one heavenly main course.

For dessert we waited a couple of hours, then had the creme brulee that we'd made the day before.  We put some brown sugar on top, popped them in the broiler to caramelize the sugar, then sat down to eat them.  The custard was still cold while the sugar was hot, just as it should be.  This creme brulee recipe is one we got years ago from the Gastrognome restaurant in Idyllwild, California.   We'd had their creme brulee for dessert and loved it, and to our surprise they happily shared the recipe with us.  It's still the best we've ever had, even in my travels to Europe.

The lobsters have arrived!

The lobsters have arrived!  Three beautiful, live 2 1/2 pounders from Young's Lobster Pound in Belfast, Maine.  Our Christmas feast (which is actually happening tomorrow) menu: lobster a l'americaine over white rice, scalded fresh green beans, and creme brulee.  You should all be envious!  :)

A bit of this and that...

A bit of this and that...  I took the photo at right (click on it to embiggen) last night, standing on our deck and looking northeast, after the sun had set on the valley but while it was still playing on the Wasatch Mountains to our east.  As we like to say: we live in a postcard...

I've spent a few days basically sitting at the kitchen table.  At first that was because I was feeding the Plex monster (copying BluRays, DVDs, and music CDs).  Later it was because I didn't feel much like doing anything at all, and feeding the Plex monster was about as challenging as I cared to get.  This morning I'm feeling much better, and I wandered out to my office to wrap Debbie's presents and catch up on things a bit.

As I walked into my office, the Sisyphus table was churning away.  I took the photo at left a few days ago, but it was finishing up the same pattern when I walked in this morning.  And speaking of Sisyphus...  The Sisyphus app lets you upload vector graphics (.SVG) files to make your own patterns.  I couldn't make it work with any hand-crafted files, though, and I couldn't figure out why.  I asked the Sisyphus folks for some help, but it turns out this is a feature they haven't explored much themselves!  They couldn't even give me a sample file, and it turns out they use a completely different mechanism to make pattern files themselves.  After a few emails back and forth, their tech Micah felt sorry for me, and made some test files with Adobe Illustrator (which I don't have) and emailed them to me.  They worked!  With an example in front of me, I was able to make my own file that also worked.  And that means I can write software to make arbitrary files to print whatever pattern I want to.  This is gonna be fun!

We had snow a few days ago, and again yesterday (I had to go out and plow for the second time this year).  That put the kibosh on any more rock work getting done.  The good news, though, is that they're largely finished with the rock work.  All three walkways are complete, and all the retaining walls are in place.  All that remains, so far as I know, is gluing the top few runs of rock on the retaining walls, and backfilling the dirt-facing side.  Some photos of the rock work below.  You wouldn't know it from the photos, but the rock is actually quite colorful and full of sparkly material.  At the moment it's all covered with frozen mud and rock dust, so it will probably be spring before we can pressure-wash it and get the nice stuff showing again.  The rock is heavy and non-porous, with the general look and feel of amorphous quartz with colored impurities.  It's the perfect sort of rock for a walkway that will suffer the abuse of grinding boots and winter salts...

A bit under the weather, am I...

A bit under the weather, am I...  Yesterday I felt kind of blech all day long, and unfortunately I'm not feeling any better this morning.  Despite the blechs, we managed to get some errands done (mainly grocery shopping) and mostly I spent the day at the kitchen table loading content into our new Plex server.  That was a nice, easy job that felt within my limited capabilities for the day. :)

Below is a sample page (click to embiggen) from our new Plex server, with the movie Casablanca.  We can now see this on every device we own: Macbooks, iMacs, iPads, and iPhones.  We can see it anywhere our WiFi reaches, which includes the entire house, barn, and about three acres of our yard.  I've got movies, TV shows (like Pride and Prejudice), music, and (soon) videos and photos.  All of this content is being backed up into the cloud, using my favorite service (Backblaze).  If I choose to, I can make this Plex server available to the Internet, which means we could access all of it even when on the road.  It's very easy to operate if you want to browse and watch (or listen to) any of the content.  Putting the content up there isn't terribly difficult, but it does help if you have a bit of technical knowledge, are comfortable using a variety of ripping software, and understand file system organization.  Setting up the server in the first place is likewise not terrifyingly hard, but does require a bit of ability with program installation, configuration, and even router configuration.

One very pleasant surprise for me is the quality of the user interface.  It's superb, which is all the more remarkable because this program is free open source software.  Well-crafted, polished user interfaces like this take an amazing amount of work to get right.  They are generally the kind of thing only funded by large companies.  Plex is built entirely by unpaid volunteers, and in this case, some darned good ones!

Several people have asked me...

Several people have asked me ... what I think about yesterday's repeal of “net neutrality”.  The left half of the world is quite predictably declaring the repeal to be a disaster that will end the Internet as we've known it.

The short version of my reaction: exactly the opposite is true.  The imposition of “net neutrality” (which is actually just code for what really happened: the first regulation of the Internet in the U.S.) is what would end the Internet as we've known it.

The hysterical reaction to this from the left is actually quite funny, as it ignores just about every observable fact on the ground.  The first amusing aspect is that we had no “net neutrality” before 2015, when the Obama administration imposed it.  Perhaps I'm unobservant, but it doesn't seem to me that the Internet suffered from all the ills proffered as the reasons for needing “net neutrality” in the first place.  Nobody in the U.S. was suffering from slow Internet on some services and not on others.  Nobody had to pay to get fast Google or Netflix.  So why all this talk about “net neutrality”?  That's very straightforward, and abundantly documented in the political debates of 2014/2015: the left had an agenda of regulating the Internet as a public utility, but they needed something to scare people into supporting it.  The real agenda – the regulation – was to gain some control over the content on the Internet.  “Net neutrality” was never their goal – regulation was the goal, and they achieved it.

And regulation is what was repealed yesterday, not specifically “net neutrality”.

So why do I think regulation was a bad idea?  Part of me wants to scream it out: if you have even the tiniest bit of business understanding, you would immediately know why regulation (including the “net neutrality” provisions, but even worse the inevitable incremental accumulation of regulatory control that would occur) is bad for business, for innovation, and for the customers of that business.  Regulation is always bad for the broadest definitions of business and customer, and always good mainly for the business incumbents, and the bureaucrats and legislators who regulate them.

But so many people seem unable to grasp this, despite the myriad examples before them.

So here's a thought experiment for those amongst my readers who have bought into the “net neutrality” hype.

Think about the parcel business.  Imagine for a moment that they had a regulation imposed upon them that required all parcels to be delivered in the same amount of time.   You can't charge more for delivering parcels faster.  You can't charge less for delivering parcels more slowly.  You can't charge more for heavy parcels, or less for lightweight ones.  You can't take more money from Amazon to deliver parcels faster.  You can't offer discounts to volume shippers.  None of that.  Just one price for one class of service.  You could call this “parcel neutrality”.  It is exactly what the 2015 imposition of “net neutrality” regulations required of the Internet service providers, but for data packets rather than parcels.

Now think about what that would mean for parcel shipping customers.  That means ... you couldn't pay extra to get that Christmas present on time.  When you need to get paperwork to a bank across the country quickly ... you couldn't.  If you're Amazon and you fill 10,000 UPS trucks a day ... you get no price break for volume.  You don't have to think about that very hard to see that it's not exactly a brilliant idea.  Pricing is a wonderful way to allocate a scarce resource (shipping capacity) intelligently according to the needs of the customers.  You know it is, because you use variable pricing all the time.

But what about from the shipping companies' perspective?  Suppose we had “parcel neutrality” – what would that mean to the shipping company?  For starters, consider their motivation to innovate to provide faster service.  Would Federal Express invest in more planes to enable better overnight service?  Of course not, because they couldn't charge any more for overnight service, so they have zero incentive to do so – they wouldn't have overnight service in the first place.  Federal Express would never have existed.  Would UPS invest in more automated parcel sorters, so they could accept higher volumes of parcels from Amazon?  Of course not, because they couldn't cut any deals with Amazon to make more money from this capability, so they'd have no incentive to do so.  In fact, “parcel neutrality” provides the most incentive to make no investment in innovation at all!  The best best course of business for the shipping companies is to exploit their current infrastructure to the max, make no investments in new infrastructure, and to pay their employees as little as possible (since their performance has no impact on revenue).

I have another phrase for “net neutrality” that I think is both more accurate and more descriptive: “net socialism”.  The underlying notion of fairness in the “net neutrality” arguments closely resembles the notions of fairness from supporters of socialism.

If you know me at all, then you know I'm the original anti-socialist. :)  So I am certainly no supporter of net socialism (or parcel socialism).  I opposed the imposition of Internet regulation in 2015, and I'm delighted to see it rolled back two years later...

I've been waiting so long...

I've been waiting so long ... (since 2007!) for Apple to come out with a workstation with the features that I wanted.   I scrapped my Windows PC just weeks after starting work at ServiceNow in 2007, and ever since then I've been working from laptops.  Nice laptops, to be sure – but without the memory, I/O, storage, and screen capability that I really wanted.  They just started selling a great new workstation today: the new iMac Pro.  Mine is on order, should be here in a couple of weeks.  I can hardly wait...

Plex...

Plex...  A friend recently told us about a free, open-source program named Plex.  With this program, their family was able to view any movies that anyone in the family owned, whether they were at home or anywhere else with an Internet connection.  They could watch the movies on their iPads, on their phones, or on their TVs.  That seemed like magic to me, so I went and checked it out.

The basic idea behind Plex is that you host a server that has copies of your DVDs and Blu Ray disks, which must be ripped (copied) using other software.  Free ripping software is available on just about every platform under the sun.  The Plex server can run on a Mac, a Windows PC, or a Linux box.  You can also attach tuners and video capture devices, and the Plex server can act as a DVR.  The real magic with the Plex server is that Plex clients can attach to it to view any content held on the server, and those clients are available for PCs, laptops, IOS devices (iPads and iPhones), and Android devices.  Furthermore, there's a relatively simple way to expose your Plex server to the Internet, so mobile devices that are not on your home network can attach to it.  All your content, anywhere you want it, any time you want it.  Pretty good trick!

The biggest challenges the designers of Plex faced, I think, are these:

1. The user interface had to be easy enough for Grandma to use (it is).
2. No matter what the source of content is, and no matter what bandwidth the connection to the client is, the content must be streamable.  This requires a technical operation called “transcoding” (converting from one compressed format to another), and this is something the Plex server is very good at. 

One thing the Plex designers didn't do (and wisely, I think) was attempt to make the setup and installation so easy that grandma could do it.  To get Plex running well, you have to have a real server – a computer with a fairly beefy CPU, lots of memory, a DVD/Blu Ray reader, and (most especially) lots of hard disk storage.

After checking it out thoroughly, and seeing what Debbie thought of the idea of “content everywhere” (she loved it), we decided to get Plexed ourselves.  I chose a Mac Mini as the server computer, then added an external 6TB hard disk disk storage subsystem and an external DVD/Blu Ray reader (actually, it's a writer as well).  These three pieces of kit are remarkably small and completely silent, two attributes we prized for something that would be in our TV room.  Also, the choice of a Mac box (versus Linux) brought another benefit: it means I can use BackBlaze as a backup service.  Their service has no limitation on the size of the backups for a single flat rate – perfect for backing up our content library.  Should we ever need a restore, they'll deliver it on a loaner hard disk.

So we ordered the components, and the last of them arrived on Tuesday afternoon.  Yesterday I spent the entire day installing, configuring, and starting to load content into our Plex server.  I've got a client installed on our TV, on our iPads, and on my iPhone – it all works flawlessly.  There's a bit of a learning curve (which I'm still climbing) when it comes to ripping the content, but none of it is really difficult and there's lots of help online.  For a modest outlay, we've got a very interesting new capability.  Not the least of the benefits is one I haven't mentioned yet: the Plex server keeps a searchable database of all your content – no more searching your shelves and boxes for your DVDs or Blu Rays – just type a few characters of a movie's name and poof! – there it is!

No Geminids for us :(...

No Geminids for us :(...  The pre-dawn sky this morning should be the absolute peak of the annual Geminids meteor shower, and this year was supposed to be better than most – maybe better than ever.  The haze is thick here right now, though.  I can just barely make out a planet and a few bright stars, and (of course) the moon – all else is invisible.  Only the very brightest of meteors would show through this muck, dang it.

Years ago we had a memorable Geminids viewing opportunity: on the western slopes of Mauna Kea, on the Big Island of Hawai'i.  We drove up to about 8,000' altitude, well above any hint of haze or pollution.  The air is so clean there that distant lights of Kona (the largest city on the west coast) had no discernible effect on our viewing.  We saw a lot of meteors that early morning, just lying on our backs on a field of cinders...

Christmas trivia...

Christmas trivia...  Last year we bought a new Christmas tree stand, the first one we've ever owned that actually did make it easy to set up our tree.  Click on the image at right to take you to Amazon's page for it.  We got our tree a couple days ago, and once again this year we had it up in just seconds, perfectly straight, with no rusty screws to tighten.  These things are made in Germany, and the mechanical workings are quite clever.  There's a water gauge, too – quite a handy thing, actually, because you no longer have to stick your finger in the water to see where the level is.

Something I saw last year at Home Depot, but stupidly did not buy, is a crazy-long funnel for filling the Christmas tree stand with water.  I rectified that this year – I bought the one pictured at left.  It's about 3 feet long, just the right length to let me stand alongside the tree while I fill the stand.  I've filled it three times so far, and haven't spilled a drop of water yet.  Genius!

And speaking of trees, here's a photo of our tree this year in the dark.  It's a seven-footer, the perfect height for our living room.  The lights on it are the same string of individually-blinking LEDs that we used last year – both of us love those things.  They remind me of the “transformer lights” my dad bought for our tree when I was young.  Those lights ran on 24VAC, and each bulb blinked individually.  Those blinking incandescent bulbs used to be readily available, but not any more – I did find some a few years ago, but they were outrageously expensive and poorly made.  Those bulbs worked mechanically, using a bi-metal strip that bent as it heated and cooled.  The LED string we have uses electronics in each bulb; they should last basically forever.

Just as we did last year, we bought the tree from a family-owned Christmas tree farm from Kalispell, Montana.  Their trees are beautiful specimens well cared for – not at all like the typical junky trees we see at the larger commercial outfits.  One thing we particularly like about their trees is that they have a lot of natural variation.  We like our tree a bit more sparsely branched than most people seem to like, as we want room for the lights and ornaments.  The Robinson family sends a truck and a couple of employees all the way down here to Logan (about 500 miles) each year to sell their trees.  When I looked them up on the Internet, I discovered they have a few other lots they sell from, all in northern Utah.  It's an interesting story.

Those blinking bulbs were originally meant to simulate the really old-fashioned way to put lights on a Christmas tree: with candles.  I remember one Christmas – just one – when I was dispatched to my grandparents house (on the same farm I grew up on) to help with their Christmas tree.  This was while my great-grandmother was still alive and before my grandfather's terrible auto accident, so I'm guessing '58 or '59 – I'd have been 6 or 7 years old, and that feels about right.  I remember clearly just two things about that experience.  First was the tinsel.  It was carefully packed in funny-smelling tissue paper, and had been used in many previous years.  There wasn't a whole lot of it – maybe 50 strands – and my grandmother was very protective of it.  The tinsel was made of very thin, very shiny metal – possibly actual silver (which is what tinsel was originally made of), stored in anti-oxidant tissue.  My great-grandmother and my grandmother carefully placed each individual strand.  I wasn't allow to touch it. :)  The other thing I remember is the candles: dozens and dozens of tiny candles, slightly larger than what you'd see on a birthday cake.  They were in small tin or aluminum holders that hung on the tree.  I lit a few of them myself, carefully supervised.  Can you imagine putting flames on a Christmas tree?  Those candles only burned for 30 minutes or so before they were exhausted, and we stayed right by the tree until they were done – but still.  Flames?!?!

Debbie and some local friends made two beautiful wreaths for our house last Friday.  I keep forgetting to take photos, but finally here they are.  The left-hand one is on our interior kitchen door, the right-hand one on our exterior front door.

Internet vulnerabilities...

Internet vulnerabilities...  Over my career I've been responsible for running several Internet-facing datacenters.  These all ran businesses that were utterly dependent on the Internet, so we paid a lot of attention to failure modes – ways that things could go wrong that would result in a business interruption.  We eventually waded through enough data on actual failures that we could identify three primary concerns.  Together these accounted for all but a tiny percentage of outages actually experienced by real datacenters.  In order, these were (ten years ago; things may have changed):

1. Backhoes.  Most datacenters are connected to the Internet by just one or two fiber-optic connections.  The most common cause of an Internet outage in a datacenter is a backhoe cutting through one or both of these connections.  Often the failover to the backup connection is inadequately tested, and cutting one cable results in an outage.  Also, all too commonly both connections run in the same underground route, and a single backhoe swipe can sever them both.
2. Undersea or buried backhaul connections.  That's what this article is all about, focusing on undersea cables.  Buried cables on land are, if anything, even more vulnerable – there are hundreds of miles of them running along Interstate highways and railroad right-of-ways that have nobody guarding them.  A bad actor with a backhoe could sever one in minutes.  A single cable cut wouldn't severely impact the Internet – but cut several carefully chosen cables at once and you could.  This sort of attack is within the capability of any but the most feeble American adversaries, and requires minimal cleverness.  Detailed information like this is readily available to anyone.
3. NAPs and MAEs.  Network Access Points and Metropolitan Area Exchanges are a largely American phenomenon.  These are the places where major customers connect to the Internet, and where various Internet carriers interconnect with each other.  There are a relatively small number of these, and while they have some security they are not secure against a determined military attack – and certainly not against an artillery or rocket attack.  If you were a well-funded adversary to America, and you wanted to maximize your impact on American commerce and communications ... these would be obvious targets.  

Having pointed out the vulnerabilities, I'd also like to point out something else: the Internet, with all it's redundancies, is not a trivial thing to damage.  You'd have to make quite a few breaks in the system to seriously and broadly impact Internet connectivity in the U.S.  Damaging a particular customer or geographic area is somewhat less difficult.  However, it could be done by a determined (and sufficiently funded) adversary – and I don't immediately see how to defend against such an attack other than by increasing the amount of redundancies and diluting the points of concentration (meaning, mainly, MAEs and NAPs) by making more and smaller interconnections.  The latter is challenging because the economics greatly favor fewer and larger interconnection points...

It's a winter wonderland here...

It's a winter wonderland here ... because of weather conditions that have given us lots of hoar-frost here for the past few days.  I took the photos below yesterday morning, but this morning it looks just like that.  When the fog clears (generally around noon), for an hour or so we have brightly lighted frosted trees (and irrigation pipes, fences, cars, etc.) everywhere in the valley.  We look out the window of our home, or from our car as we drive, and marvel at the beauty all around us.  We've seen this occasionally in the past, but this morning makes the fifth or sixth morning in a row with these sights all around us.  We're driving to Tremonton this morning to pick up our granite shelves, and we're expecting to see this all the way there.

The word “hoar” is derived from the Old English word meaning “venerable” or “august”, itself derived from an Old High German word of similar meaning.  It's pronounced identically to the word “whore” – a word with a notably different meaning.  Last year, while on a drive with a good friend here – a Mormon woman, about 45 years old – I mentioned the beauty of the hoarfrost.  She was absolutely shocked, and could not bring herself to say the word – much to the amusement of Debbie and I.  We found out last week that after that conversation, she went home and looked up the word – she was skeptical of my explanation. :)  This year, she's able to say the word – as now she's certain that I'm not playing a trick on her!

I took the photos below yesterday – the first batch before the fog cleared, the second batch after.  The last photo is a bit different: it shows the shadow of my car on our driveway pavement.  Before the sun broke through, the entire driveway was covered with hoar-frost.  After the sun broke through, the frost on all the unshaded parts of the driveway sublimated within a few minutes.  If you look in the shaded part of that photo, you'll see that the frost is still there – as it is in a thin band around the edge of the shadow, where the frost was so recently exposed to the sun that it had not yet sublimated.  You could measure the time of sublimation by measuring the width of that band and doing a little math, but I didn't think of that in time to make the measurement...

Best. Illusion. Evah!

Best. Illusion. Evah!  This is a really powerful optical illusion.  All the lines in the image at right are sinusoidal curves.  Yes, even those lines that appear to be triangular.  Click the image to embiggen it, then put a ruler up against the “straight” lines.  They're curved exactly like the ones that appear curved!

Most illusions I can sort of “talk” myself into a state where the illusion disappears.  Not this one.  Much more on it here...

Snowflakes in action...

Snowflakes in action...  A group of Cambridge University students has created a database listing over 1,000 movies that contain scenes of rape, abuse, and sexual harassment.  Their objective was to allow sexual assault survivors to vet what they watch.  A laudable enough goal, though I do wonder whether it's actually a good idea for assault victims to avoid exposure to fictional depictions of things which actually do occur in the real world.  The whole notion of “triggering” strikes me as questionable.

But that's not what caught my eye about the story above.  This did: in that database is the Christmas classic It's A Wonderful Life.  It's cited for a scene of a man chasing a housekeeper while insisting he's in love with her, and another where a woman is being ogled on the street.  Really!  If someone needs to be protected from scenes like that, how could they possibly function in the actual world?

I once read a science fiction story about a human society so uncomfortable with personal interactions that everyone lived alone, isolated, communicating with others only by means they found comfortable.  In the story, a person from a different society came along and basically conquered the world simply because he was willing to knock on doors and confront people face-to-face.  At the time I read this, perhaps 50 years ago, I thought the underlying notion quite far-fetched.  Maybe not...

Sisyphus table in action...

Sisyphus table in action...  And a couple more photos.  The video at right shows the Sisyphus doing an “erase”; it's nearly finished.  The photos below show a few more patterns.

I've had a few questions asked about the table...  The patterns it makes are preprogrammed.  The device comes with a couple dozen patterns, and there is a community where people can share others.  It runs continuously, day and night, though the company says they have plans for a scheduler.  You can control the speed of the ball, and I have it running slowly to minimize the noise (which is nearly zero when slow).  You can make your own patterns simply by creating an SVG file with a single path.  Lots of graphics tools let you make SVG files, but what's most interesting to me is that it's easy to create them in software – they're just specially formatted XML files, which is an especially easy file format to create in a program...

A fun morning...

A fun morning ... is what we have in store.  We're headed first to the Christmas Wish Craft Boutique at the Box Elder County Fairgrounds, then to lunch at The Grille in Tremonton.  I suspect we will be returning with a bunch of craft stuff.  :)

Acceptance...

Acceptance...  Once again this year we were invited to the local LDS church ward's Christmas party.  We went last year, and greatly enjoyed it.  Last night we went for the second year, and enjoyed it just as much.  Mid-way through the experience last night I got to pondering just why I derived so much enjoyment from this event.  It's certainly not the religious aspect, as none of what was being celebrated is meaningful for me.  It wasn't the quality of the production (ward kids doing a Nativity sketch), as from any objective perspective that was simply awful.  Sweet, cute, and full of laughs – but the singing was atrocious, the kids were all over the place, and the plot was hard to discern.  The food was darned good, but we can get great food in lots of places here.  The essence, I think, is that we were amongst friends – lots of them – and neighbors who have accepted us into their community.  Though we don't share their religion and don't behave in ways they approve of, they treat us exactly as though we did.  We count members of this group as our close friends, and vice versa.  Any of these people would help us if we needed it, and we've been able to help some of them when they needed it.  We're part of a real community here, fully accepted into it – and that's what made the evening so enjoyable...

Sisyphus table...

Sisyphus table...  If you're an ancient enough American, you may have learned enough about Greek mythology to have encountered Sisyphus: the king who was being punished by forever rolling a boulder uphill, only to have it roll back down and run over him.  It was the first “Groundhog Day” I ever encountered, only his never ended.

Well over a year ago, a small group with both artists and technologists started a Kickstarter project named after Sisyphus, because their intended product worked by endlessly rolling a boulder (actually a steel ball bearing) around.  They called it a “kinetic art table”; I call it intriguing and beautiful.  Basically it draws patterns in a thin layer of fine white sand – any pattern you want.  When I decided to back this project, for almost $1,000, it was by far the biggest Kickstarter project I'd ever backed – most of them were well under $50.  It felt like a big risk, but everything I read about the team sounded good – and they had a working prototype.  So I took a chance on it.

Yesterday my Sisyphus was delivered.  The company did a beautiful job with it, including in oft-missed details like packing and directions.  I had it unpacked, assembled, and running it's first pattern (at left, below) within 15 minutes.  The center photo below shows it nearly finished with an erase cycle.  At right is a new pattern just barely started (and you can easily see the ball at top center).  It's fascinating to watch it work.  Except for the moving steel ball, the mechanism is completely hidden – if you didn't know how it works, it would look magical, with a steel ball moving in a precise pattern of its own volition. 

So how does it work?  Well, underneath the table is a strong magnet that attracts the steel ball above.  That magnet is moved under the control of a computer (a Raspberry Pi 3B, in fact).  There are two stepper motors and a “rho-theta” positioning mechanism, meaning that the magnet can be positioned at any angle from the center, and at any distance from the center.  That's an interesting choice; the more conventional solution would be an X-Y positioner – but the rho-theta mechanism perfectly suits a round table (an X-Y positioner would fit a rectangular table perfectly).

There is a Sisyphus community that has lots of downloadable patterns – and it's possible to make your own patterns.  I'm going to have some fun with this thing!

Well, yesterday didn't go quite as expected...

Well, yesterday didn't go quite as expected...  Our house has two furnaces, one that heats the basement and first floor, the other for the second floor.  Last night the temperature got down to 4°F – and both furnaces went on the fritz!  The downstairs furnace is brand-new, just installed a couple of months ago, so I wasn't happy with that situation at all.  However, with a little troubleshooting I figured out that it wasn't the furnace itself that was busted, but rather the external condensate pump.  I just unhooked the pump and put a five gallon bucket under the condensate line, and the heater started working again.  Phew!  Within an hour the house went from 55°F or so up to 70°F where we like to keep it during the daytime in the winter.  Our (wonderful!) HVAC guys showed up just after noon, replaced that condensate pump (after verifying my diagnosis), and then troubleshot the upstairs furnace.  The problem with it turned out to be mineral “growths” of some sort in an odd-shaped plastic chamber that routes condensate away from the manifold pressure sensor.  They got that out and managed to clean it up; slapped it back in the furnace and everything started working.  They're both still working fine this morning (the next day)...

Yesterday morning I visited a lawyer – not something I expected to do in my retirement! :)  I was there with a friend, to sign documents establishing a trust for her and her (many!) children.  It felt rather odd to be in a lawyer's office again – last time I did that, it was as CEO of a public company, back in about 2002.  I've managed to successfully avoid it ever since. :)  One element that made the visit especially odd was the apparent age of the attorney: roughly 12.  This fellow actually graduated from law school in 2014, but he's blessed with a very young-looking face.  He doesn't look old enough to have a driver's license, much less a license to practice law! 

We were quite surprised yesterday when our contractors showed up to work on our retaining walls and walkways.  It was cold outside, well below freezing all day long, and yet these four guys were out there playing in the dirt.  They got the old, temporary, wooden retaining walls removed and started on the footing preparation (compacting, then a layer of road base, then pea gravel, then rock fines).  If they come back today they'll actually be placing rock.   It's way too cold for me to be doing work like that, but somehow they're managing...

Yesterday evening Debbie and I drove down to see the Christmas lights in Ogden's “Christmas Village” and at Willard Bay State Park.  Both were really nice, but my favorite was the Christmas Village.  We just drove around it in the car, but we're going to go down again to park and walk through it.  Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys the spectacle of Christmas lights!

Baby, it's really cold outside!

Baby, it's really cold outside!  Just 4°F as I write.  Sheesh!  And naturally our heater picked this morning to act up...

Just called...

Just called ... Young's Lobster Pound in Maine to order lobsters for our Christmas dinner (Lobster a l’Americaine is the planned entree).  A woman answered the phone there, and my ear was full of that Maine accent – surfacing all kinds of wonderful memories.  I'd have been happy to talk with her for a few hours, just to hear that accent, but unfortunately she was obviously busy (lunch rush was just starting for them).  She recognized our surname, so obviously she's been working there for a while – don't think any of the clan has been there recently...

Baby, it's cold outside...

Baby, it's cold outside...  Just 9°F (about -13°C) right now.  The snow the melted on our driveway is now solid ice, so it's slippery out.  This is the kind of weather that fills our ERs with broken bones.  Be careful, everyone!

Last year at about this time...

Last year at about this time ... I noticed that very few people seemed to think of December 7th as having any particular significance.  That surprised me, living as I do in an area that's very pro-military and generally more aware of history than was the California I escaped from in 2014.  So this year, for about the past week, I've been informally polling many people I run into to see what their awareness of December 7th is. These short conversations are all happening spontaneously, so I don't have any formal records of the results.  I have spoken with roughly 30 people, many of them clerks at cash registers and my fellow waiters-in-line.  The ages of people I spoke with varied from teenagers to octogenarians.

The results were consistent with my observations from last year.  I found just one person who knew that December 7th was the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.  Just one.  That person was a woman, perhaps 50 years old, whose father was there (and survived) – a medic working out of the hospital on base.  As you might imagine, she reported December 7th was a somber day of remembrance at her house.

I was able to speak further with many of the people who didn't know what happened on December 7th.  I'm not happy with what I discovered while doing that: more than half of them had no idea that Japan had ever attacked the U.S.  A significant number of these people clearly thought I was some kind of kook for believing such nonsense, though only one of them actually verbalized this (a young woman who looked like she needed to holler for help).  Something so momentous, so full of consequence, that happened just 76 years ago has nearly been erased from the memories of our citizens.  This immediately leads me to wonder about similarly consequential events from the more distant past (say, the Civil War, or the War of 1812) ... but I think I won't probe that, as I'm already depressed enough about my Pearl Harbor “investigation”...

I'm less surprised now, though, about our apparent inability to learn from the lessons of history.  One can't learn from history one doesn't know!

Veteran's discounts...

Veteran's discounts...  They are very common around here, not so much in the San Diego area where we used to live, though a few national chains offered them.  Dozens of local stores and restaurants offer discounts for veterans here, including Home Depot (10%), Walmart (10%), Lowe's (15%), and several others we regularly patronize.  Most of them don't advertise the discount – you have to ask for it.  Some local locations of national chains (Lowe's is a good example) offer discounts where the national chain does not – I attribute that to the generally pro-military attitude that is the norm here.

Generally speaking these stores have either just taken my word for having served in the Navy, or they ask for my DD214 as proof of an honorable discharge.  Recently a clerk in Home Depot told me about a better alternative, one that I hadn't known about: it's possible to get a Utah driver's license with a “veteran’s indicator” on it, and the stores will take that as proof of being a veteran with an honorable discharge.  The DMV also requires your DD214 for proof – but you only need to carry it the one time.

So a couple of days ago I visited our local DMV license division office.  Just as on the first time, my visit was stunningly pleasant and convenient.  There was no waiting.  None.  The employees were uniformly pleasant, helpful, and engaged.  One was even quite entertaining!  There was no useless, stupid paperwork.  None.  In just ten minutes I had my photo taken, my signature captured, my application filled out, my $18 fee collected, and I was out the door with a temporary license in hand and a promise of my new license with veteran's indicator within 10 days.  The last time they told me 10 days it actually only took 4 – we'll see what it takes this time.  As a reluctant veteran of dozens of painful, boring, confused hours in California DMV locations, this contrasting experience in Utah still just blows my mind...

We love living in northern Utah...

We love living in northern Utah ... for lots of reasons.  But this week we've discovered a few new reasons.  First, we found out that on most Thursday evenings the Mormon Tabernacle Choir holds rehearsals, and the public is invited.  For free.  We're planning to go on the evening of December 21st.  Second, a local friend told us about a famous Christmas light exhibit at Willard Bay State Park, a 40 minute drive from home.  We're going to go see this one night this week, and also stop in to see Ogden's Christmas Village (we saw this during the day on Sunday, and it was beautiful even then).  Finally, a repeat of last year, we were invited to the local LDS ward's Christmas party on Thursday evening this week.  We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at the party last year...

The key to efficient snowplowing...

The key to efficient snowplowing ... isn't finding the route for your snowplow that scrapes all the driveway/parking lot surface most efficiently.  In fact, that's almost irrelevant.  The key, my fellow snowplowers, is finding the route that most efficiently pushes all that snow to somewhere where you can pile it up.  The periphery of my driveway is roughly 50% places where I can't pile snow (because of trees, etc.), and 50% places where I can.  The entire trick to getting the snowplowing done quickly is to plot routes for the snow I scrape to those allowable depositories.  It took me a while to figure that out the first year I plowed snow up here.  Now it's second nature...

Paradise ponders: snow day edition...

Paradise ponders: snow day edition...  We just had our first “real” snow of the season, with about 4" on the ground.  I took this photo off our deck this morning, by the light of our backyard floodlights.  As you can see, the dogs have already been out exploring!  :)

My writing this morning is accompanied by the happy slurping sounds of five dogs simultaneously attacking their morning kibble.  I'm in the kitchen, and I just put their dishes down.  The three puppies are in their crates drying off, as they're soaked from their outdoor adventures.  The kitchen is full of an ... interesting ... aroma comprised of roughly equal parts kibble and wet dog.  Next up: doggie bananas.  There will be much wiggling...

After that, I'm headed outside for the seasons first battle against the snow: there will be much plowing, shoveling, and salting.  Also, I need to feed the birds ... the feeders look low...

Paradise ponders, a day of beginnings edition...

Paradise ponders, a day of beginnings edition...  I spent a surprising amount of time yesterday working on a plan – for building a “rack” for my computer equipment.  It seems like such a simple thing – basically a set of wooden shelves – but to make it look the way I wanted it to, and to have the features I wanted, that took more design work than I'd anticipated.  Then to make it strong, without a back on it (because I want free space for cables), was another bit of a challenge.  So yesterday I made an outline of all the things I needed to do, and parts that I needed.  That resulted in a shopping list, some of which went on order online, some of which I ran down to Tractor Supply and bought.  I love tractor supply for routine hardware (nuts, bolts, etc.), because they sell it all by the pound, very reasonably.  This morning I started on the actual fabrication: planing one wide face of the nine Douglas Fir 4x6s that the rack will use, and then planing both narrow faces of three of those 4x6s.  You can see the result of that at right.  If you know anything about cabinetry or furniture building, you may well be surprised to hear I'm using ordinary, common-grade Douglas Fir lumber – but I've built quite a few quite nice pieces of furniture over the years with just those materials.  However, this rack is the most ambitious of these projects by quite a good margin.  It will be interesting to see how it turns out!

The special features I'm looking for in the rack are its appearance (rustic, heavy), largely hidden power strips and cable-ways (these will all be attached to the back of the rack, onto 3.5" wide sides of 4x6s, and so mostly out of view unless you peek in from the back or sides), and a couple of steel bars on the underside of the top frame piece.  The latter will be used for magnetically mounted wooden cases for Raspberry Pi computers and other electronics.  The smaller stuff is actually slightly challenging to house, as they're so light that the cables attached to them move them around!  The magnets should stop that.

We had another beginning yesterday, too – our contractor (finally!) showed up again, and began work on a retaining wall and three walkways.  The rock has been delivered: 18 tons of beautiful stone.  Six tons of that are flag stones that are roughly 2" thick, the rest are mostly thicker and smaller pieces that will be dry-stacked to form our short retaining wall.  There's also a pile of rock fines in our driveway, along with some road base and pea gravel; all of that for the bedding for the fence and walkways.  Yesterday the workers cut the pathways out of our lawn with a sod cutter, and today they're digging the trenches for the bedding to go in – and actually starting on the bedding.  At the rate they're going, I could imagine there might be one of the walkways installed by this evening, but I'm probably dreaming. :)

Paradise ponders: just another nice day edition...

Paradise ponders: just another nice day edition...  We did lots of running around today: to Home Depot for parts (they had everything I was looking for), to the dry cleaners to pick up our quilt we had cleaned, to the barber shop for me to lose about 3" of hair (where I still have any), to the grocery store for turkey-and-biscuit fixings, to the post office, and then to Valley View Granite where they've been storing part of a slab we bought three years ago to make our bathroom vanity.  Every single stop involved an enjoyable interaction with one or more people, which is one of the joys of living here – so many gosh darned nice people, wherever you may go.

We've long had plans to use that leftover granite slab – beautiful rock that Debbie located while we were building our new bathroom in 2014.  We had to get it shipped from San Diego to Tremonton, where Valley View granite is, and then they worked with us to get us exactly what we were looking for.  They did spectacularly good work; that vanity top is the centerpiece of our very pretty bathroom.  But it only used about 1/3 of the slab we bought – the prettiest 1/3, but the remaining 2/3s was still beautiful rock.

So today we drove down there to claim our slab remainder, and to start the process of fabricating shelves from it.  Those shelves are going to go in my office, where I'm in desperate need of storage space.  They'll make gorgeous shelves!  I'm going to make wooden corbels from 4x6 sections to hold them up; it should be an attractive combination of materials.

While we were in Tremonton, we had ourselves a little lunch, at a restaurant we've never been to before: The Grille.  We both had the smoked pulled pork sandwiches.  Debbie got hers with fries, I got baked beans.  The sandwich came with a very fresh cole slaw, the sauce the perfect blend of sweet and acid.  For me the highlight of the meal was an unlikely one: the baked beans.  These are obviously homemade, with lots of meat (cubes of ham, pieces of bacon, and bits of beef) and veggies (mostly onions and green peppers).  The sauce had a smoky barbecue flavor.  I could easily have made a meal of a big serving of those beans!  But the smoked pulled pork was also excellent, as was the bun it was served in (homemade, we think).  The sandwich came with a selection of six different sauces to put on it; I liked the plain barbecue, and Debbie liked the “barbecue ranch”  – a 50/50 mix of barbecue sauce and ranch salad dressing.  We were both very happy with that meal, and I strongly suspect we'll be back there again when something takes us to Tremonton...

When we got home this afternoon, I installed two shelves that I purchased from an Etsy shop.  These arrived yesterday, and I got them up in about an hour, right over my desk.  They're made from reclaimed wood – barn rafters, in this case.  They came with a matching steel invisible mount, which was easy as pie to put up.  The biggest challenge was making them level. :)  I'm very glad to have even this little bit of storage – when you have none at all, a couple of square feet feels rather luxurious!

Paradise ponders: kitchen lights, roast turkeys, and delicious pasta edition...

Paradise ponders: kitchen lights, roast turkeys, and delicious pasta edition...  I completed a nice little project yesterday: installing a new lighting fixture to brighten up a formerly rather dim corner of our kitchen, right where we have our little kitchen table.  That's a place where we typically spend several hours a day, so the dim light was something we weren't very happy about.  The perfect place for a new light would have been directly over the kitchen table – but there was no obvious way to get power to that location unless we tore up a whole bunch of wallboard.  One day a couple weeks ago it dawned on me that there was a power outlet near the floor right next to one side of the kitchen table.  That meant a straight shot up to the top of the wall, presumably with empty space between studs – so it should be possible to “fish” a wire through that space to a light.  That would give me power – but how do we control the light?

What I needed was some kind of remote switch, where the electronics for the switch could be hidden inside the wall, near the light.  I searched all over Amazon and found nothing that looked like it might work.  Then I tried eBay, and bingo! – a remote-controlled relay, controlled by RF through a little transmitter.  At $13.95, I could hardly complain about the price.  In fact, that's so cheap I was worried about it being junk – though the photo looked like a well-made device.  I took a chance and ordered it.  It came very quickly, and I opened it up to see if it matched the photos.  It did, in every respect – and with the opportunity to make a close inspection, I'm actually pretty impressed with its design and construction.  The relay is a hard-contact relay, which made me feel better about hiding it in the wall: those old-fashioned relays are more likely to fail than a modern solid-state relay, but much less likely to burst into flames under any failure mode.

So yesterday I dragged out my tools and started making holes in the kitchen wall.  To Debbie's credit, she didn't panic when I took out my oscillating saw and attacked the wallboard. :)  The only real challenge to the project was getting the wire from the outlet down low to my new hole up high.  I used a fiberglass rod “fish” to get through a new hole in the outlet's box to my new high hole; that worked out quite nicely.  The rest was just screws and wiring.  When I got it all hooked up, I took out the remote control – and it all worked on the very first try.  That's $13.95 I'm very happy to have spent!

While I was working away on the new light, Debbie was roasting a turkey.  It was finished not long after I finished putting the light up.  That turkey wasn't for our meal: we're going to debone it, use the carcass for soup stock, and cut up the meat for sandwiches and for addition to some turkey tlapeno soup.  Yum!  What we had for our dinner yesterday was some pasta and sauce we bought last week from Caputo's, dolled up with burger, ground pork, onions, green peppers, and mushrooms.  That was some darned good pasta!  We ate about a quarter of the gigantic batch Debbie made; the rest is all vacuum-packed and frozen now.

This morning we're headed down to Salt Lake City to raid MacBeath Hardwood.  I've never been there, but it looks like a place I will actually enjoy shopping in.  We'll likely stop again at Caputo's, at the very least to pick up another panettone (we got one last week that was simply outstanding).  I suspect we'll also be grabbing some lunch down there...

Paradise ponders: overdue updates edition...

Paradise ponders: overdue updates edition...  First, Kalea the kitten: he's doing great!  As you can see in the video at right, having nearly starved doesn't seem to have dampened his spirits at all.  Lifting our spirits: the wonderful news that he is FeLV-negative and that our vet could find no other health issue to be worried about.  That means he's cleared to join the horde of cats in our cattery, and we've already started to introduce him, under supervision.  One thing we can see already: exactly like Konani before him, this little guy is completely and utterly fearless.  We suspect he's seen enough really scary things to be ... unimpressed ... with the posturings of the milquetoasts in our cattery. :)

Last week Debbie and I journeyed down to Salt Lake City to get a recall issue in our Model X taken care of.  The issue was of almost zero importance to us (the left back seat might accidentally fold down in a sudden stop) as we only rarely have any passengers in ours, and the rear seats are almost always folded down.  But we did it anyway.  It took longer (over three hours) than we expected, but when we got our car back to our surprise it had been detailed.  They hollered at me for not having replaced my tires yet, and tried to sell me a set of the same kind shipped on our car.  I turned that down, and instead went (on Friday) to our local Les Schwab's and had a set of Toyo tires installed: much heavier tread, stronger sidewalls, longer tread life, less money, and I got to patronize a vendor who has treated me very well in the past.  Once again they provided great service, alerting me to a slightly bent wheel (not a current issue, but might become one) and doing a fantastic job of balancing the wheels.  The 22" wheels considerably limit the selection of tires available, especially because the rear tires are a different width than the front tires (this makes it challenging to find matching tires).

On that same trip, we had lunch at Bambara's, a new place for us.  Short review: it's excellent, and we recommend it.  We both had their silky corn bisque, and we were very glad we did – that's one outstanding soup.  Debbie had a seared ahi nicoise, which she devoured while making happy noises.  I tasted the fish; very good, it was.  I had a chicken club sandwich with bacon and roast tomatoes on homemade ciabatta bread; also excellent.  One big surprise for me: the fries that came with it were outstanding, and I am not normally one who gets excited about fries.  Just as much fun as our food was our server, Brad.  We were there after normal lunch hours and he wasn't busy, so we got to have quite a nice conversation.  The whole experience was most enjoyable.

Before lunch we spent a couple hours at the Utah Museum of Natural History, concentrating on their Viking display.  It wasn't crowded, a pleasant surprise.  The display was very well done, and most educational.  Debbie and I both came away with a very different impression of the Vikings than we'd had previously.  My big takeaway was the quality of their craftsmanship – they made some truly beautiful things of wood, bone, and metal.  Debbie's big takeaway was how small they were – she was expecting them to look like Thor in the Marvel series, and the truth is they were more the size of my dad (who was a small man by today's standards).

I'll wrap up with a less cheerful review: Jimmy John's “gourmet sandwiches”.  This is a place that was highly recommended to me by several local acquaintances, but I'd never tried it before – mainly because whenever I felt like a sandwich I'd go to Logan's Heroes, which has about the best sandwiches I've ever had in my life.  But for some reason I can't recall, a few days ago I decided to try Jimmy John's.  The most positive thing I can think of to say about the experience is ... at least I know now that I need never think of going there again.  Oh, and I didn't actually get sick, and the service was amazingly fast.  Self-serve at the local dumpster would be fast, too – and probably just as good.  And have more meat.  And fresher bread.  And cheaper.   You get the idea...

Paradise ponders: this 'n that edition...

Paradise ponders: this 'n that edition...  A few days ago Debbie and I took a drive over the mountains west of Clarkston, Utah – there's a pretty road there that we quite enjoy.  I took some photos along the way, of Debbie meeting a couple of horses:

A day earlier I caught this nice sunset over the field north of our house, with our valley dark but the Wasatch Mountains to our east still lit.  We'll have lots of beautiful sunrises and sunsets in the winter months...

And finally, here's the current state of my fan controller computer. :)  This is sitting on my desk right now, beeping and booping away. The larger board is a Raspberry Pi 3B computer.  To the right and below it in the photo is a small board with four bits of digital I/O controlled by a PCA9536 chip.  One of those bits is attached to a relay.  I'll use one for a signal switch input, and two for LED outputs.  The small board to the right and up from the Pi is a two-channel 4-20 ma sensor receiver, based on an ADS1115 A/D converter chip.  That chip is a mind-boggler for this ancient electrical engineer: it's a delta-sigma converter with 16 bits of resolution, handling up to 8 conversions per second.  On the same chip is a 4 input multiplexer and a precision voltage reference.  That's far better performance than the refrigerator-sized, million-dollar units I worked on in the Navy in the '70s - and this one cost about $4 and is the size of the head engraved on a U.S. dime.  The blue circular widget above the Pi is another little marvel.  The three leads on the top go to a standard PT100 thermistor for precision temperature measurement.  The electronics in the blue widget linearize the thermistor and produces a 4-20 ma signal proportional to the temperature measured.  I'll have two of those thermistors, two of the blue widgets, and the two-channel 4-20 ma sensor receiver - total price under $40, giving my little Raspberry Pi dual temperature measurements accurate to +/- 0.5 °C (roughly 1 °F).  What an amazing world we live in, where just about anybody can afford to make something like this!

Paradise ponders: post-Thanksgiving pain edition...

Paradise ponders: post-Thanksgiving pain edition...  Our b'stilla yesterday was, we think, the best one we've made yet.  I did some research yesterday on the web, looking for advice on making them, as our past efforts, while good, didn't taste quite like the version we had at the restaurant.  I found a post allegedly by a Moroccan woman who was ranting about how Americans screwed up b'stilla. :)  She had two criticisms: one was that Americans crushed their almonds instead of grinding them (something she apparently thought was pretty close to heretic), the other was that Americans used too much water when cooking the chicken and vegetables, leading to watery broth.  Well, both of those were definitely possibilities for us – we crushed our almonds and quite likely used too much water. 

The almond rant particularly interested me, as the Moroccan woman went to some trouble to explain why it mattered.  According to her, unless you ground the almonds they wouldn't express any oil, which provides a key element of flavoring for the b'stilla.  Our crushed almonds (toasted) were always dry as dust, so I was really curious if grinding them would actually result in what she said: something akin to crunchy peanut butter.  So I whipped out our meat grinder (which we haven't used in years) and ground up our toasted almonds.  The result was ... exactly as she described: just like crunchy peanut butter, and very oily.  As directed, I mixed that with sugar and cinnamon, and the resulting concoction was way different than anything we'd used before when making a b'stilla.  And the resulting dish, I have to say, bears out that woman's rant.  I also measured the water we used very carefully, and in fact we ended up with ingredients that matched the recipe.  I think we might have done it right this time!

And there are leftovers!

The carrot salad was not what we remembered, but it was pretty good nonetheless.  This recipe had cayenne pepper in it, and we won't do that again.  Even without the pepper, though, it wouldn't have matched our memory.  We'll keep searching for the right recipe.

The chocolate mousse also came out wonderfully.  I modified Julia Child's recipe slightly (gasp!): I eliminated the coffee (going for pure, unadulterated chocolate flavor) and I increased the butter from 6 ounces to 8.  It was pretty much perfect. :)

Our little canine friends were not left out, either.  They got several treats yesterday: an extra banana (3 for 5 dogs, instead of 2), milk on their kibble, egg yolks, and the cream leftover from making the mousse.  They were all quite happy with that! :)

My brother Scott, Debbie, and I played a traditional family game last night: Oh, Shit.  Scott won. :)