passive aggression

i love passive aggressive notes so here's my address and email address so you can send as many as you want:

1600 pennsylvania ave nw

washington, dc 20500

apparently, i'm a bigger fan of sarcasm.

homework

ruining friday nights since 1999.

chocolate snob

i'm not a snob about anything really.  i'm so easy going that you could vomit on me and i'd probably get you some club soda and then mop up.

i have a palate for great food and great anything for that matter, but i could just as easily go for taco trucks and mcdonalds.

but when it comes to dark chocolates, i can get persnickety.

i've had neuhaus, mast brothers, michel cluizel, leonidas, vosges, soft milk chocolates in japan, truffles from all over, and everything in between.  but i recently discovered something in my own backyard.

compartes chocolatier.

try it.

favorite reparation

"In a nationally publicized incident, [Mark Cuban] criticized the league's manager of officials, Ed T. Rush, saying that he 'wouldn't be able to manage a Dairy Queen'. Dairy Queen management took offense to Cuban's comments and invited him to manage a Dairy Queen restaurant for a day. Cuban accepted the company's invitation and worked for a day at a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas, where fans lined up in the street to get a Blizzard from the owner of the Mavericks."

sir edmund hillary

was probably not the first man to set foot on the highest point on earth sort of in the way that amerigo vespucci was not the first man to discover america.

there happened to be these natives, but we did away with most of them.

life is simply about making claims and recording them.

should an asteroid wipe out any trace of human existence and another intelligent specie emerge in half a billion years, someone will 'discover' whatever landmass or ocean that this will have become, someone will be the 'first' to summit everest, and someone will again wipe out colonies of natives.

may they be a more considerate, non-warring, intelligent, and unified specie.

the closer

the other morning, i was walking across moscone and i had to use the restroom badly.  i had been drinking coffee all morning and it caught up with me.

i still had my starbucks in hand from across the bay so my conscience figured it would be less impolite if i walked into the starbucks here to use their restroom.

i waltzed in, read "sorry, out of order :(" on the restroom door, went in anyway, fixed the toilet, used it, and walked out.

i may not always be the closer, but i will be the fixer.

Optimal Conditions of Cooler Aging for Beef

i found a beautifully marbled rib eye two days ago and put it in my steak aging fridge.

i threw in about a pound of salt to control the humidity.  recommended humidity is about 80%.

the fridge is still set to 1 C, but i'm considering raising it.  i was at whole foods yesterday and discovered that they have a dry aging fridge also!

i talked to one of the butchers about it for a while and they keep the fridge set at 41 F.

i did a bit more research on aging temperatures and came across this awesome paper.  as demibiologist, it's just what i needed.

it compares dry aging at 30 F vs 38 F, with resulting tenderness measured in shear force with protein degradation confirmed through gel electrophoresis.

the results were fairly surprising.  enzymatic activity decreases significantly below 0 C and ceases below -2 C, yet at 30 F (-1.111 C), both samples reached a similar shear force/tenderness.

i'm considering raising the fridge a degree or two, but also might lean towards cooler in case i have any random pernicious bacteria floating around the fridge.

if it's not

worth your time, it's not worth my time; if it's not worth my time, it's not worth yours.

life reminder

i was about to enter a grocery store when i saw girl scout cookies.  i thought to myself, i'll buy them on my way out.

by the time i came out, they had already packed up and left.

buy girl scout cookies as soon as you see them.

there will ALWAYS

be something new to discover.

if not, you need to open your eyes, your ears, your nostrils, your mouth, your palms.

bandwidth

CPU Usage: 100%
Physical Memory: 99%

seems my computer and i are in the same boat

project updates

finally setup the raspberry pi.  used disk imager to write wheezy raspbian to a 16gb sd card.  still debating what awesomeness will come of this.  maybe a dropbox or pirate box?  def think raspberry pi foundation should host a diagnostic hardware hackathon: building low-cost diagnostic tools for the developing world.  low-cost compact peripherals like life support systems, refractometers, facscount systems, imaging devices, hematology analyzers, and other processor dependent diagnostic and treatment devices.  this is coming up on my list.

as for the dry aged steak freezer, it's about ready to go.  nabbed a 110V willhi digital thermostat on ebay for about $15.  you could hardwire the whole thing to your fridge, but i yoinked out the analog thermostat (red and black wires) and connected it to the digital.  also cut an extension cord to use as an external power source.  i actually drilled a hole through the fridge and remounted the thermostat outside since i think the op temp needs to be > 0 C.  however, there are a handful of ways to do this.  you can connect your thermostat directly to your compressor if you want or if you rewire your fridge so that the electricity is connected directly to your compressor instead of through the internal thermostat, you can just wire the fridge's power source to the switch (red and black wires).

anyway, while the thermostat's control accuracy is 1 degree, the whole thing is in celsius so it's less accurate (by 20 to 180%) than fahrenheit.  i dropped the hysteresis from 5 degrees to one degree.  this means the compressor kicks in when the thermostat reaches one degree above your set temp.  dry aging meat has to be in a pretty sterile and controlled environment with the temperature between 34 and 36 fahrenheit, so i'll update on what happens with this celsius business.

as you can imagine, these fridges weren't built to be this cold so the insulation isn't all that great.  the cooling cycles were about 5 minutes so i put about three gallons of water in the fridge to stabilize the temperature (water has a high specific heat = loses and gains heat slowly).  haven't remeasured cooling cycle yet.

did some testing with paperclips and scotch tape (don't ever try that at home).

also been told that laminar air flow over the meat should be about 60cfm, but have seen people dry age in stagnant air.  i have some server fans handy, but i might give this a go as is for now.

more updates and photos to follow.

next steps, getting some water softener salt to suck moisture out and finding a well marbled steak.

how very american of us

the entire world

revolves around branding and marketing.

the branding of global warming.

the branding of politics.

the branding of commodities.

the branding of governments.

the branding of countries.

the vilification of dictatorships and terrorists.

the perception of companies, people, objects.

what you choose to wear.  how you present yourself.  who you choose to associate with.  the products that you affiliate yourself with.

benadryl

benadrly, you're my favorite drug
you give my H₁ receptors a hug

you're an antihistamine
and go by diphenhidramine

you stick quite well to my proteins
counter reactions to nuts and soy beans

you block my serotonin reuptake
all for happiness' sake

you bring sleep in an hr or two
in counting sheep's lieu

i've yet to encounter tachyphylaxis
so taking you can be a praxis

i can take you when i'm sneezy
or even when i'm queasy


cause you're a great antiemetic
and even good for the frenetic

you've got many an off label use

but not likely to encounter abuse

parkinson's got nothing on you
who makes it easier to tie a shoe

that's why you easily top my list
you're my favorite inverse antagonist

analogy

lotion : skin :: conditioner : hair