Sunday Link Dump the 5th

Sorry for the disappearance, life gets crazy sometimes and finals are usually one of those times. But, I return now with a new set of links, and promise of some wine reviews by the end of the month, and maybe a recipe too.

Berlin Picture Gallery - A gallery of images of the Berlin wall, before, during, and after the fall
College Band - Here at the end of football season I'll post this video of the band from Penn State doing their stuff
Documentary - A Video Documentary about the Beatles, or so they think
Electricity - Story via Cracked about things that you could, but really shouldn't, do with electricity
Twitter Fun - And finally some things which are probably not a good idea to tweet

This has been another dump from the internet, hope you all enjoy.

Sunday Link Dump the 4th

Sunday morning means another link dump. Got 5 links for you today, so without much fluff here you are.

Cool Math Teacher A video of a teacher's Halloween activities in his class.
Tangerine An amusing mash-up video of some lines from Dark Knight.
15 of the Worst Products in the World The title there really says all I feel it needs to, thanks to Raf for this one.
Poker Face A dramatic reading of the song by Lady Gaga
A Costume A wonderful costume straight from Imperial R&D.

Here's hoping I can get a few more posts going on than I have been. Either way, I'll be back next Sunday with more links.

A Random Crazy Idea

As most likely all the people who will read this via my facebook,  and almost certainly the few who read this via my blog, know, I'm getting married. In case you didn't already know, the likely date is to be next August. Lara doesn't particularly like to fly, and we were both interested in going to the family reunion being held the end of next August in Nova Scotia, so we hit upon the idea of driving. It would be a long trip, but we could use it as an excuse to see a lot of cool things and visit people neither of us sees often.

Why am I telling you this? I've never been to many of the places we'd be driving through, and you might have. As a result you may have useful insight into things that are fun to do. If you do, feel free to post a comment. A Google map of the currently planned route can be found here. And at the bottom of this post I'll drop a list, in order, of the current states/provinces that the route would take us through. In addition to fun things to see, suggestions of places to stay and eat are more than welcome. Those of you who are friends with Lara on her facebook have possibly seen her note about this, so don't feel compelled to post here too.

Italicized states are those that are close to the planned path and as a result we'd probably pass through if we can just to say we did (I'm a completionist like that, have to hit all the states someday :P) Stuff in parenthesis are places we'd likely visit, usually because one of us has family there. We've been tossing around a few alterations to the map, like going through Missouri and Kansas instead of Iowa and Nebraska, but this is what we're looking at right now at least.

So feel free to comment with ideas, telling me I'm crazy, or just whatever.

U.S.
New Mexico
Texas
Louisiana
Mississippi
Alabama
Georgia (Atlanta)
South Carolina (Greenville)
North Carolina
Virginia
West Virginia
Maryland
Washington, D.C.
Pennsylvania
Delaware
New Jersey
New York
Connecticut
Rhode Island
Massachusetts
Vermont
New Hampshire
Maine

Canada
New Brunswick
Nova Scotia (probably visiting Prince Edward Island, and Fort Halifax)
New Brunswick
Quebec
Ontario

U.S.
Michigan
Indiana
Illinois (Chicago)
Iowa
Nebraska
Colorado (Denver)
Wyoming
Utah
Nevada
California
Arizona

Sunday Link Dump the 3rd

Sunday morning, time for another batch of links from around the net.

Giant Treehouse Like many, I will admit having desired as a child to make a giant treehouse similar to this type of thing. It's awesome to see that someone actually did.
Alt-F4ever! A video from the SMBC Theater site, this one a Halloween special.
Anvil Launching You read that right. Anvil Launching. Thanks go to Daniel R. for the link.

I'm hoping that this week at least 1 non-linky post will pop up.

Sunday Link Dump the 2nd

Here we are on another Sunday morning, and I'm back with more links.

Ridiculous Halloween Costumes I've seen this linked to by a number of people this week, but I think it's worth posting anyway.
Charmin Job For those of you who may be interested in a job, don't say I haven't tried to help you. - Thanks to Julie H. for this link.
Backflip This video I think came to me through Digg, simple yet enjoyable.
How to Disarm a Chimp This article comes from Cracked.com and made me laugh (beware the chimpanzee menace)

That's it for this week, as always if you have links you think are great you can send them to me.

Sunday Link Dump

Good morning.

This is the first post in what I hope to be an ongoing series dedicated to posting links to the stuff I come across during the week. I'm hoping to be able to come up with 5 or so things to put here each week, so if you find things you think are worth putting here, let me know and they might show up.

Invisible weapons I think the name really says all I want to about this one. - thanks to Julie H. for linking me to that one
Money as Art There are a lot of things out there you can put art on, these are some of the best ones that use money.
Space Exploration A really cool composite of Earth's space exploration.
Ultraviolet image of M31 An image of another galaxy taken in the Ultraviolet spectrum.

And that's what I've got for this week, hope you enjoy.

Playing with Biscuits

    Being a fairly busy college student I don't always have time to make everything I'd like to make from scratch when cooking dinner. As a result I was often finding myself buying and making biscuits from a tube, something I was hoping to avoid out of a desire to be more aware of what's in some of the things I eat.
    One solution to the tube problem is frozen ready made biscuits, you just buy a bag, throw as many or as few as you want on a baking sheet and bake them up. This is a great idea. Saves me a lot of time and is closer to what I wanted, but they still came from the store, and biscuits are pretty simple. All you need to make a good biscuit is some fat, some flour, and some liquid; and sometimes those ingredients get merged together to make it even simpler. I decided that I'd duplicate these freeze and bake biscuits so that I could make them at home and have them whenever I wanted a hot homemade biscuit.
    They really ended up being pretty simple after some tinkering with the recipe, and a lot of batches of tasty biscuits that just weren't quite up to snuff.

• 2 1/4 cups "Pancake and Baking mix" - comes in a yellow box, you've probably got it lying around
• 1/2 tsp. Baking Soda - you can leave this out if you really want, but if you do they won't rise well
• 1/3 cup (5 1/3 Tbs.) Butter
• 2/3 cup Milk - I suppose you could use buttermilk or something like that but I find the "mix" above does a pretty good job of that

1. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly
2. Cut in butter
3. Mix in the milk
4. Mix by hand until the dough comes together, you may need to add more "mix" by spoonfuls until it stops sticking to the bowl and your hands
5. Roll out to 1/4-1/2 inch thickness and cut into rounds; you want to try and get as many rounds out of each rolling as the more you roll it the more melted the butter gets and the tougher the biscuits will get
6. Bake any that you want to bake immediately at 450° for 8-10 minutes
7. Any that you don't want to bake immediately, put on a plate and place in the freezer. Leave them in the freezer until they are frozen solid, then put them in a plastic zip-top bag; if you through then into the bag before they freeze completely they will turn into a big lump which is just a mess.

    When you want to bake any of the frozen ones, just take the ones you want out and put them on a baking sheet while you preheat the oven. Once the oven is preheated you can bake as per the normal directions. Hope that someone else out there finds this useful.

The Bacon Explosion

    In June I got bored with just working and going to class all the time and decided that an experiment in food was well called for. Really it wasn't so much "experimental" since I was following a method, not really a recipe, but it was new for me and everyone else involved.

    We decided to make an event of it and had the Heart Attack Dinner. Served would be one whole bacon explosion, a double batch of my grandmother's Sour Cream Biscuit recipe, personal-size macaroni and cheese casseroles, and Chocolate Peanut-Butter Brownies.

    First the simple things: the Mac and Cheese and the Brownies were just like normal recipes for the same thing except I split them into a muffin pan so that all of the dishes for the night would come out around the same size. The brownie recipe was modified by adding peanut-butter chips, like chocolate chips only peanut-butter flavored.

    Next, the Bacon Explosion. The method of making a bacon explosion can be found multiple places around the internet, so I'll be brief here and include pictures as I have them.

1. Take your raw bacon and weave it, like a basket, into a tight lattice around 5 strips in each direction. It's very important that you get a tight weave or you'll run into problems later.
2. Apply to the top of this your sausage in a fairly flat layer, making sure to leave some space around the edges for when you roll it.
3. The first deviation that I had was now. I added a pound of shredded cheese, because cheese is delicious.  I also added some dried minced garlic, a little bit of salt, and some ground black pepper.
4. After that I crumbled some previously cooked bacon on top of it. Shown here with a handy T-Square provided by one of my friends, and dinner attendees, Julie.
5. After that it was a complicated matter of rolling it. When I said earlier to make a tight weave and leave room around the edges, this was why. If you didn't do those things it's gonna be really big, bursting at the seams, and just not very nice looking.
6. After you manage to get it rolled up into a nice log shape, you bake it. Most recipes call for adding BBQ sauce inside before you roll it and brushing it on the outside before smoking it. I didn't have any BBQ sauce, don't really care for the stuff, or a smoker, so I used what I did have: the oven.
7. Once it's finished baking let it cool some to set the grease juices before slicing it into rings and serving. 

In that last picture you can see the Macaroni and Cheese bites on their plate, and the bowl containing the biscuits.

    The results of this dinner were amazingly delicious, if horribly unhealthy. This is not a food for the faint of heart. I may make this again in the future using what I've learned, but probably not for a while.

Some observations from College

I've been pondering over writing this post for a while now, and have only finally gotten the time to actually put it together and put it up here, enjoy.

The longer I've been here at college the more I feel like I haven't learned anything in my classes. I'm here in my fourth year now, and a large fraction of my time in classes is spent thinking things like "I know this already I learned it in," some other class from my first year or two here, or wondering how other people in the class tie their shoes at night, let alone how they have managed to get into an upper level class without grasping things like parsing English sentences.

Recently when I've found myself lamenting that class is a waste of my time I've tried to ask myself what I have been getting out of college. I've found that "the least of learning is done in the classrooms" is really a very applicable statement to my experience here, so thanks go out to Thomas Merton for saying that so I could quote him.

One of the things I've been thinking over in relation to this post was the idea of making a series of posts about "things I learned from college". This may or may not come to pass, only time will tell. I can say with certainty however, that no matter how little I feel like I've actually learned from my classes, I've learned many things from being here at the University that I wouldn't have been able to find so easily had I been somewhere else.

Musings on iTunes 9

As many of you are probably aware, iTunes 9 came out today. I felt that I should bless you all with my thoughts on the changes.

iTunes Store features:

First, I'll be discussing the two features that I probably will be least likely to use, but still bear mention. iTunes LP is a great step forward in the field of replacing hard copy CD sales in my opinion. Album art, Liner notes, and Lyrics (which hopefully will be automatically added to files) are great additions that could prove a turning point in how some people buy their music. Extras for movies could similarly prove to be a turning point feature for some peoples movie purchasing.

Neither will change my buying habits much at all simply because of my preference for getting a hard copy of media I purchase. They are closer than ever before to the point at which I switch, but I'm a stickler for the physical copies of my DVDs and music.

Aside: Just in case you are a person who purchased things using the Shopping Cart be aware: it isn't there anymore. It's been replaced with wishlists, see this TUAW Article for details.

Genius:

I've liked the Genius feature since I tried it for the first time. However, I've always had one minor problem with it, the playlists it created were too short and so I heard them over and over again in many cases. iTunes 9 fixes that for me. Genius Playlists now have a length that can be set at 25, 50, 75, or 100 songs. This is a great thing in my opinion.

Another new feature in this version is Genius Mixes. They look promising, but I haven't had the chance to play with them too much yet. They look like they may be a great addition simply because they will keep playing without me having to intervene at all for the duration of my listening session. I'm not sure how you "seed" them or select what their themes are at this point however so it remains to be seen exactly how useful the feature will prove.

Smart Playlists:

Smart Playlists just got smarter in iTunes 9, with the inclusion of a trick from Finder's Smart Folders. Smart Playlists can now include multiple sections broken up with their own criteria, for example the Classical Music playlist that I found added to my sidebar when I launched iTunes 9 for the first time. Using this ability I was able to merge what had previously been 3 playlists I used to make sure my music had all the proper meta-data set the way I wanted it became 1 playlist, and 2 playlists to control the syncing of my Nano became 1 playlist.

Syncing:

This sounds like a good time to talk about the changes to how syncing works. Now instead of just being able to sync using playlists you can tell iTunes to sync all music by artists you select, all music within a genre, and playlists you choose, all at the same time. This is something a lot of people had been using Smart Playlists to do for a while, and now it's built into the core feature set. I'm told photo syncing has been improved to interact with the '09 version of the iLife suite, ie Faces and Events, but I can't confirm this as I don't have iLife '09 to test it out.

Sharing:

Home Sharing is a feature that I probably won't take too much advantage of, but it's certainly useful if I choose to. Being able to share music within a household is something that I'm of the opinion shouldn't be made difficult, and it would seem that Apple agrees.

Social Media sharing seems to have come to the Store, at least in some respects. iTunes still lacks the sharing feature that I would like, but am well aware is unlikely to ever happen: integration enough with Facebook so as to show what's been played recently by my iTunes from within my Facebook as I currently do with iLike. I'm understanding that it is unlikely because it means Apple would have to either acquire iLike or make a Facebook app duplicating the functionality, neither of which is likely. Frankly, that's fine with me.

Final Thoughts:

For the price it's a really great upgrade. It fixes some annoyances I've had because of the way in which I use iTunes, and made those things much easier to do. I still can't search for music based on whether or not it has artwork or lyrics associated with it, but those are probably not features that the average user would have a need for. I like the changes to the appearance of the player and the store, though my gut tells me that the search for podcasts is less flexible than it used to be, I suspect my gut is saying that under the influence of a quesadilla.

A Brief Introduction

Greetings and welcome to my blog. This won't be something that gets updated all the time, more a "when I feel I have something fun to post" sort of thing. The content is also likely to be of an unpredictable nature. I've got a few ideas for things I might post in the future, but we'll have to see what time and creativity allow.