Big Ass Bird!!

I was wandering around in the woods behind the house a few days ago when, all of a sudden, this very large creature rose from the ground. It was a big ass Owl. He landed on a branch and stared right at me. He looked pissed. So I ran into the house and got my trusty digital camera. I took 3 pictures of the sucker, but only one was unblurry enough to make out the owl. It's times like this when I think I need a camera with a good zoom lens, maybe one of those expensive SLR digitals. Anyhow, here he is.



It's hard to tell from the picture how big this guy is but I would estimate him to be about 14-18 inches tall, or maybe bigger, sitting up on that branch. Anyhow, I tried to get closer and he flew away.

I think he lives back in woods behind the house. Often, if I'm outside at night, I can hear a pretty loud hooting not far from the house, just into the woods. He's helping the cats rid the area of rodents. He's a good neighbor and I like him, even if he don't like me.

I'm gonna go look in Wikipedia and see if I can find out more about him.

Bye for now.

OK, I'm back. Wikipedia was not very helpful in figuring out what kind of owl it was so I went downstairs and got out our Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds. It's a Barred Owl. If you search Barred Owl in Wikipedia, you get better information. There's even an audio clip of the barred owl. However, the audio doesn't sound like the sound that I hear in the woods at night. Maybe it's something different, like Sasquatch, maybe.

OK, bye for good this time.

OK, I'm back again. The idea of having Sasquatch in the back yard got me a bit concerned so I did a bit more digging. I looked up "owl sounds" in Google and found, can you believe this, all the damn owl sounds you could ever imagine. There were 4 different ones for the Barred owl. The first two sounded like the one from Wikipedia, but the third, the "hoo-wah" sound, was like the sound I hear in the woods at night. So it is my friend, the barred owl and not sasquatch after all.

Now I can sleep soundly. Bye, and I'm serious this time.

A Simple Test of Google's Picture Thing

I recently signed up for the Google Picassa picture thing that lets you put pictures on the web so that other people can see them. I'm sure Google is doing this so that they can plaster ads next to your pictures and rake in more revenue. I tend to like the stuff Google does because they tend to make it simple to use and they have the motto "Don't be evil". So I have, for better or worse, decided to trust them with a lot of stuff.

I'm now going to test the utility of their photo warehousing for putting things in a blog. I have a picture of some of my sand art. I'm no longer a sand castle builder, there are way too many people out there that do it better than me. I am now a sand artist. OK here goes...

Crap! It doesn't work. Now I'll have to post it the old-fashion way since you're all excited about seeing my sand art. OK here goes again...



Crap! It came in sideways. How did that happen? Let's try again. OK here goes again...

Crap! It came in sideways again. I won' bother to show it to you again. OK, one more try.


There, I finally got it right. It appears that if you rotate a photo and save it, what you really save is the photo in the original orientation and an instruction to rotate it. When you open it again, some document will read the instruction and some will ignore it. Apparently, all the programs I use read the instruction and Google Upload does not. So I had to actually display the picture with the correct orientation and do a screen capture to get what I wanted. I bet the image quality suffered but I'm not going to do anymore work here to find out.

So what started out as a simple blog to test something, turned into a lot more work. But, who cares? I'm on vacation. You got to see some really nice sand art and I killed an hour.

So that's it for today.

Merry Christmas.

My Morning Walk

I haven't written in this old blog in a while so I figured it's about time to try again. Tonight I'm going to talk about my morning walks. I started a new job back in April at a little company in downtown Durham. Here's a picture of the building. This has nothing to do with my story of my walk but I like to post pictures.



Anyhow, when I started working there, it became obvious that this crowd was a bit more into physical activity than some groups I've been associated with. My boss runs marathons, one guy rides his bike to work on occasion. Lots of people run. So I decided that I needed to get some exercise. I hate to run. I never liked it even when I ran track in high school. But I like a good walk. But walking doesn't give you enough of a workout in a short enough time. So I figured maybe a good hill or two might do the trick. I've been doing this since sometime in June of this year.

So here's my morning routine. The damn alarm clock goes off at 6:15 AM. I still hate to get up in the morning but now I do it pretty quickly anyhow. There's nobody to talk to so it doesn't matter if I'm grumpy. I sit up and put on the underwear and socks lying on the floor from the night before. I stand up and put on some shorts or new exercise pants that my wife recently bought me, depending on the weather. Then I put on a t-shirt followed by a fleece shirt if it's cool. Finally, I put on some old tennis shoes and make my way down stairs. Oh yeah, somewhere in the first few minutes I manage to pee. Anyhow, once downstairs I usually feed the cats and, if it's cold, put on a jacket and cap and head out the door. This is usually around 6:22 AM.

Here's an aerial photo of my walk. My guess is that its about 1.4 miles long.



We live on a decent hill so I get to start out on a pretty steep downhill. That's good since I'm rarely awake enough to climb up a hill. I just stumble along for the first few hundred feet. This time of year the sun hasn't come up yet and it's still pretty dark. I like that except it can be a little scary at times. This morning as I was passing the woods on the way down the first hill, a loud snort followed by a lot of rustling in the woods startled me a bit. I quickly realized it was probably deer. The deer get up early. Yesterday, as I was leaving the house, five of the suckers were peacefully munching on the neighbor's shrubberies. I smiled, waved and went on my way. Anyhow, I venture down the hill till I get to North Lakeshore Drive and walk along it for a short piece and then head up the big hill. When I first started walking, this hill would have me seriously puffing by the time I got to the top. It's gotten a bit easier but I still warm up a bit going up the hill and still look longingly at the peak on the way up. Then it's a short downhill followed by long gentle incline and then another little drop and I'm about half-way through.

So now I hit the second heart-smart hill. It's not quite as long as the first but I know it's there. At the peak, I take a long slow downhill back down to the lake and a flat walk back to my street. My street is nice and steep so that gets my heart going once more before I get back to the house around 6:45 AM. In the meantime, the sun's come up and the coffee has brewed and I get to kick back with a poptart and some coffee and surf the net for the days news for a half hour before I'm off to the shower, shave and out the door to work.

I don't walk on weekends.

So that's it for now.

Sometime soon I plan to talk about razors. I recently got a promo razor in the mail that has 6 blades. That should be worth a story.

Ultimatum Gone Awry!

I was looking through some of my old photos and saw this ad. I guess I thought it was funny enough to save. So I guess it's funny enough to share.



Hmmm! As I looked further down the list. I found another interesting advertisement related to cats. I think this is pretty cool, too.

So enough for today and enough on cats for a while.

Cats Need Water Too

Where does your cat get water? Some cats have water bowls. Actually, a lot of cats have water bowls, but only a few drink out of them. Most cats drink out of the toilet or, when they are otuside, they drink from the bird bath. But my cat Lucy will only drink from the sink. If she's thirsty and she sees you loitering around the sink, she'll leap up on the table and then across to the counter and the walk up behind the sink. She's gotten too fat to leap directly from the foor to the counter. Then she just looks at you like you know exactly what she wants. Which, of course, you do. So you start a slow stream of water and she leans over lapping until she's had her fill. This is usually followed by a short period of cat sneezing. She then jumps down and is on her way.

Office Guys

Good evening. I just wanted to update you all on where my friends, the office guys, have gone. They no longer stand on my macs at home but have moved to where office guys ought to be. They're at my office standing on my big IBM computer. Here's a picture.




Maybe I'll get a better, less washed out picture later. But for now...

The Wonders of Wireless


I was looking under my computer the other day and noticed that, although it has 2 forms of wireless communication, it still has a boat load of wires. Here, look for yourself.



See, that's a lot of wires. So I decided to figure out what all those wires were doing, you know, sort of map it out. Oh, I knew what each wire was for when I added it to the heap, but after a while, it's gotten to be a bit of a mess. So I sat down on the old Mac (see previous post), launched a CAD program, drew out each wire. Here's my diagram. You can click on it to see a bigger version.



You'll notice from looking at the legend on the right, that not only are there a lot of wires, there are a lot of different things being carried on those wires, in lots of different ways and with different protocols.

First there's the power. The power is AC, 110V at 60 Hz coming out of the wall. From there, it goes to the surge protector into which lots of things are plugged, including a power strip. Most of the things that are plugged in are those nasty little transformer boxes that Martha Stewart was complaining about at the last SONY shareholders meeting. These convert the AC (alternating current) into DC (direct current) and drop the voltage down to about 12 V in the process. Everything, except the monitor, has a little box.

Next comes the USB 2.0 wires. USB 2.0 is a protocol for plugging things into your computer. It's a very common protocol and is used to connect the printer and the TV (yes, my computer has a TV) to the computer. A USB 2.0 line runs to the monitor which acts as a hub for even more USB things including the mouse and the camera and ipods when needed. When USB 2.0 came along, it replaced the much slower USB 1.0 and allowed USB to be used for many more things.

Next is the cable TV line. The cable presents all sorts of goodies over one line and the devices on the end suck out the part they need. We get TV, internet and phone over the cable in our house. Time-Warner gets a big check every month. So the cable comes into a splitter. One line goes to the TV tuner, which sucks out the TV signal. The other line goes to the cable modem which sucks out the internet and the phone and sends them separate ways. The internet protocol is called TCP/IP. Guess what IP stands for? The phone protocol is called VOIP or voice over IP, which, I think is a subset of TCP/IP. The TV signal is just a big nasty analog signal which the TV tuner splits out into the various channels.

OK, next in line is the FireWire cable that connects to an old 80G external hard drive. FireWire was introduced by Apple a number of years ago for fast data transfer. It made streaming of video straight from your didital camcorder to your computer possible. SONY uses it with its camcorders and calls it something else (iSight?). Nerds call it IEEE 1394. It almost made it big until USB 2.0, which is almost as fast, came along. It's slowly going away, but you have to admit, "FireWire" is a cool name.

Next in line is Ethernet. The cable modem takes the cable signal and sucks out the internet and sends it to the wireless router with an ethernet wire. The protocol is still TCP/IP. The router then sends the internet out over more ethernet wires to the old Mac, the new Mac, and the 40G Snap Server. The router also sends the internet out in other ways which I'll mention later. All the wires and wireless communication on this side of the cable modem is handled by the router and is called a LAN, or Local Area Network.

No modern electronic equipment would be complete without shipping around some sound and so there is an analog audio signal going to the headphones and one going from the old analog camcorder to the digitizing box which also happens to be the TV tuner mentioned earlier. I need to buy some better speakers for this setup. Of course that would mean more wires.

You have to get the lovely graphics out of the computer to the monitor and there is a cable to do that. I think it's called DVI or something. It has a complex looking plug with lots of thingys in it. It runs from the computer to the monitor and is, by far, the fattest wire of the bunch.

I mentioned earlier that we get our telephone out of the cable line. The cable modem converts the digital info from the cable into analog and sends it into a box connected to our old analog phone system. There's a little splitter box so that I can run a phone connection back to our printer, which also happens to be a FAX machine and therefore needs a phone line.

The reason that I started talking about all this is that I was stuck by the irony of having so many wires in the face of wireless technology. Well, this is the other thing that the router does. Using a protocol called 802.11g, it send out information embedding the TCP/IP protocol in radio waves. That way, my wife can sit downstairs and get to the internet (and play on-line poker) without having to run an ethernet cable down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the family room. My son can also connect when he comes home from college without wires. This 802.11g is better known as WiFi. It's the stuff you can also get at StarBucks. Ain't wireless great!!

USB 2.0 is a great way to do wires, but for some types of short range communication, there is another wireless protocol called BlueTooth. BlueTooth is actually the name of some sea god, but it's been stolen to describe this short range protocol used for peripherals. My keyboard communicates with the computer via BlueTooth. I also had a BlueTooth mouse but it weighed so much that I switched it out for a cheap lightweight multibuttoned USB mouse. Bluetooth is slowly taking over USB for some peripherals. You'll see phones advertised on TV as having BlueTooth that let you suck calendars and addresses and phone numbers and songs off your computer without having to find the right wire.

And last on my list is the analog video signal coming from the old camcorder to the digitizer in the TV box. This is so I can convert all my old camcorder movies to digital to save for posterity. When I get through digitizing the 8mm tapes, I'll move on to the even older VCR camcorder tapes.

So there you have it -- The wires in my life and why they are all important to me. Thanks for paying attention.

Finally, here's a dynamic picture of my wires so you can watch each one being added. I think you have to click on it to see it in action.

Boring Life

I sometimes think that maybe I have a boring life. Just to drive the point home, I'm going to describe my Saturday morning. Of course, I'll throw in the usual historical perspective to set the mood.

It was pretty dry around here from July through August, so the grass in the yard pretty much quit growing and in many places, especially the shady spots, it just died and turned to dirt. At lease it looks like it turned to dirt, since there's no grass there. However, starting in September, with the arrival of the pretty wimpy hurricane, Ernesto, we've gotten a fair amount of rain. Maybe 6 or 7 inches already this month. Consequently, the grass that had barely survived sprung back into action. I mowed the front lawn last Saturday and it needed it pretty bad again this week. Here's what it looked like before I started:



That's a lot of grass for just one week. So I got out my trusty mower. This lawn mower is pretty amazing. When I needed a new lawn mower about 16 years ago, I looked in Consumer Reports and they rated a cheap no-frills Sears mower as a "Best Buy". I think it cost about $110 dollars. So I bought it. I was intent on taking care of my new mower so I looked in the manual to see how to do it right. They said you should drain the oil every winter and replace it in the spring when you start using it again. I did that for the first year. Since then it's gotten zero maintenance. I mean none, nadda, zip. Oh I would occasionally put some oil in it when it got low, but I haven't even done that for a couple of years. I'm scared to look at the oil level. I don't think it would be detectable. For the last few years, I think the only form of lubrication that it gets is the heavy parts of the gasoline that squeak past the piston rings. Given its age and the wear on the rings, that may be substantial. But it just keeps running. I pull it out of the garage, pump the gas thingy a few times, pull the cord a couple of times and off we go. I guess it's about 123 years old in mower years. Here she is:


It takes about 35 minutes to mow the entire lawn. I did the front first and then moved to the back. While I was working on the back, my lovely wife came out and started a job she's wanted to do for years, edging the sidewalk and driveway. That means cutting the grass cleanly away from the concrete with a little trench looking thing between the two. She saw how my sister had done it when we were at their house a few weeks ago. My sister's yard looks real nice. I think they work on it a lot. I mentioned that we would have a nice yard too but that our children take up so much of our time. My much ignored high school age daughter thought that was funny. My son, who is off at college, would have laughed too if he had been there. The thing is, yards are a competitive sport in North Raleigh and Cary. In Chapel Hill the tendency is more to let things "go natural." My wife would have none of such nonsense. Respectable people have little trenches between their grass and concrete and we are respectable people and so, for the next few hours, we were involved in putting little trenches between our grass and concrete. We eventually got the job done and although it looks a little ragged, I think it will heal with a bit of wind and rain and look real nice. Here's the finished product:



So job done, I went into the house, took an ibuprofen, and chilled with some ice water while surfing the web.

Till next time.

Same as Usual

On the way home from picking up my daughter at the annual youth choir kickoff pizza party, I noticed an interesting sign posted by one of those mini-storage places in Carrboro. You know, those places where serial killers hide bodies.

Anyhow, it was getting dark but I stopped and got a snapshot. Good sense of humor for a somewhat dry business. I guess there's no reason to drop by again tommorrow after all,

New Blogger

Today I just switched over to the new version of Google's blogging thingy. I'll do a few Blogs and let you know how it works. So far it looks about the same.

Bye!

The Blue Chairs

A long time ago, maybe 14 years or so, my wife bought a couple of very Blue Plastic Beach Chairs. Every time we went to the beach, I packed up those lovely Blue Chairs. Here's a picture of my lovely wife sitting in one of the two Blue Beach Chairs. This was taken in the summer of 1994.



Anyhow, starting sometime in the nineties, we began staying in the same beach house each year. And each year I would pack up the Blue Chairs and take them to the beach. Problem was, my wife hated the Blue Beach Chairs. They were too low, they didn't have arms, they got hot out in the sun and they were a little heavy. They were made of a lot of very fine Blue Plastic. About eight years ago we decided to get rid of the Blue Chairs, so we just left them down at the beach house. For the next few years they were always there when we came back. Their devotion to us didn't endear them to my wife. She still hated them. About four years ago, when we returned again in the summer, the Blue Chairs were gone. For me, that vacation just wasn't the same. We didn't actually take them down to the beach with us, but knowing that they were there always provided a sense of continuity for me.

This year we went back to the beach again as usual. The pain of losing the Blue Chairs was ebbing but I still felt it some extent. One day, as we were sitting out on the beach, building sand castles, catching some rays and waves and downing some brewskies, my cousin shouted out, "It's the Blue Chairs". We all turned around and looked and, I'll be damned, there were the Blue Chairs out sitting under an umbrella, enjoying the sun, just like the good old days. Turns out they had only moved over one house. I spoke with the renters who had brought them down to the beach, explained my special attachment to the Blue Chairs and asked if I could take a picture. They clearly thought I was crazy but indulged me anyhow. And here they are, twelve years later. They're aging much better than any of us.



And that's the end of my story of the Blue Chairs.

Bye for now.

NC Boys Choir's Chamber Choir Reunion

A few years ago, when my son was still in high school, we sang in the Chamber Choir associated with the NC Boys Choir. The Chamber Choir was composed of some high school kids who had sung in the main choir as kids, some dads, and a few friends who liked to sing. At our Christmas 2004 concert in Henderson NC, I was able to persuade the high school kids in the choir to pose while showing off one of the neat features of our new choir robes. I posted that picture on this blog some time ago.



Last night, thanks to organizing by Adrian Randall, the high school guys, most of whom are now in college, got together at BoJangles. I was invited along as the honorary "Old Man". We all ate a "Chicken Supreme Meal" which has 3 week's worth of the RDA for grease and calories and drank Sweet Tea which is 57.3% sugar.

Afterwards, I took a picture of the group.



Bye!

Pictures from Sunset Beach

Hi Blog readers. Not much to say right now. We went to Sunset Beach last week and had a great time. For now I'll just post the pictures that I took. Sorry, but they're a little heavy on the sand castles and I didn't bother to rotate a couple of them.

Enjoy. See you later.

Pictures from the Beach 2006

Fire Hydrant Update

On the way to work this morning I noticed that the fire hydrant has been removed. I wonder if city workers did this or maybe it's sitting in some Duke dormroom. The orange barrels are still there and the flange is still sticking up out of the asphalt.

Bye for now.

A Misplaced Fire Hydrant

I recently took a new job in downtown Durham, NC. Durham, once the Bull City and now the City of Medicine, is one of those once important North Carolina cities that has fallen on hard times but is always on the verge of a comeback.

Recently, something minor happened that gave me some insight into the bureaucracy of the city of Durham and suggested that maybe that comeback might not be just around the corner.

On my way to work one morning, as I was turning onto Foster street, I was greeted by an absolutely absurd site. Someone, I guess a city employee or two, had installed a fire hydrant right in the middle of the street. Well, it wasn't in the middle of the street, but it was in the path that a car would take. It was about 3 feet away from the curb. It was sticking up out of the asphalt just waiting to get slammed by a car. The more bizarre thing is that there was already a perfectly fine fire hydrant up on the sidwalk where they belong. To someone's credit, there was a traffic barrel in front of the hydrant to sugggests that you might not want to run over it.

Well, it lasted about a week before someone actually did run over the thing. The hydrant is just lying there in the street, next to the exposed flange, it's twisted bolts glistening in the midday sun. I think of it as a monument to the incompetance of city hall.

You might think that such a scenario would be an embarrassment to some town officials and the whole mess would get cleaned up. Not in Downtown Durham. It's still just sitting there. Has been for about three weeks now.

Last Friday, a coworker and I walked down to inspect it during lunch and I took the opportunity to take a few photos which I am happy to share with you today. I hope you enjoy them. Please notice how nicely the awning, in the photograph above, matches the traffic cones. You might also notice a building with Oprah in the window. I'll save that for a later post (as soon as I figure out what that's all about).

Bye for now!

Good afternoon Blogging fans, all two or three of you. This morning I did some weeding. Our house sits off of a little island (the concrete kind) along a dead end street. Heere's an arial view of the island:



Every once in a while the island starts to look a bit ragged so one of many neighbors will be moved to do something about it. This was my morning. The weather was a bit cooler and I felt like doing something mildly useful.

So I got out the wheel barrow and an assortment of tools and went down to the island to do a bit of weeding. It was about 10:00 AM. I had already had a few cups of coffee and had done the daily Jumble and crossword puzzle before I went out. I took a picture of the weeds before I got started. It was mostly some kind of grassy crap.



This turned out to be a bit of work. I couldn't just pull the crap out. I had to go into the ground with the dandelion tool and break off the roots about an inch below the surface. After about an hour, I took another picture.



Looks much better doesn't it? I worked for about one hour more, then I came in and ate lunch. I've done enough yard work for one day.

Bye!

It's blogging time again. Tonight I'm going to talk about my new computer.

Recently, I needed to use a computer to get on the web and do something useful. Well, actually, it probably wasn't something useful that I needed to do. Maybe I just needed to surf the web to feel like I was connected to the world. They say it's like an addiction, where if you don't get on the internet at regular intervals, you go into withdraw and start twitching and feeling helpless and lost.

So I went upstairs to connect. My wife was working away on my Dell laptop on something important, maybe video poker or a Sudoku puzzle. My daughter was also doing something equally important on the old mac. She might even have been writing a paper for homework, otherwise, I'd have tossed her off. I was twitching pretty bad by this time. There was no way I was going to get on my son's computer. He was locked in a battle to the death with some pretty evil looking beasts in one of those online multiplayer games.

That's when I summoned up the courage and announced that I was getting a new computer so I could get on when I wanted to. And guess what? Much to my surprise, my accountant, I mean wife, said "Sure, what kind are you gonna get? A Mac or a PC?" What a silly question. Of course, I was getting a Mac. I've got one of those white Apple decals in my car window and I'm a major Apple stockholder. OK, I'm a minor stockholder. Anyhow, It's been 8 years since we got our last computer, which was our third Mac. I don't count the Dell since that was purchased by my business strictly for business purposes.

To make a long story less boring, I bought a Mac Mini, one of those new Duo Core, Intel Macs. I also bought a wirelss keyboard and a wireless mouse. Cool!! But I'm not crazy about the wireless mouse. It's heavier than a regular mouse and the response isn't as crisp. I also needed a monitor. I could have bought a nice Apple monitor. They look real good and go for something between 2 and 7 million dollars. I ended up buying a Dell monitor from Costco. It was rated high by Consumer Reports but not recommended because it listed for almost $400 when they tested it. I could get it from Dell for $309 but Costco had it for only $259. I went for it.

Of course, I have no software for my new computer besides all the stuff that comes with it (which, by the way is fairly substantial). But these days, who needs software? All you need is a browser and a Google account and you can still figure out how to waste endless hours on the computer and never spend any more money. Except, of course, for that monthly bill from Time-Warner for high speed internet access.

OK, time for some pictures. I'll get a little help from a couple of my business partners, who will stand next to each computer so you can judge the sizes better.

Here's the old Mac with the ViewSonic monitor perched on top.

And here's a close up so you can see my business partners better.

And here's the new computer. Notice that there ain't no wires connecting the computer to the keyboard or the mouse. That gives you the freedon to have incredibly poor posture as you surf the web.

And of course, a close up with my business partners standing on top of the computer. As you can see, it's much smaller but it's much more powerful.

OK, that's all for now. I'd write more and put in some more pictures but it takes so long to upload the pictures. You have to watch this silly spinning forever.

Goodnight.

Boiled Peanuts

Recently, my wife moved the portable computer down to the living room so she could play poker on line while she watched TV. She would generally play two tables at once and surf the TV channels. Talk about the need for mental stimulation. Recently, she's been slacking off the 'puter a bit so, since the computer is sitting in the living room already, I can blog while I'm vegging on the TV.

Today I want to talk about boiled peanuts, or more specifically, how to use science to cook them. If you look in a thousand books and on the internet, you can get lots of history and a bunch of recipes. After perusing them for a bit, I discovered the secret. A lot of recipes tell you to boil them for a couple of hours in salt water and serve. Well, I can tell you that don't work. The peanuts aren't even close to being done. The secret is to get the juice into the nut so that they taste right. "Right" being salty and juicy.

OK, here's the science. It's mostly physics or maybe chemistry if you believe that the behavior of liquids and gasses is the domain of chemistry rather than physics. But because there is little or no bond breaking, I, being an organic chemist, tend to think of this as physics. So, the problem is to get the juice into the peanut.

You start out with a peanut that is filled with air inside sitting in a pot that has water outside the peanut. As you heat the liquid, the air (gas) inside the peanut expands and builds up pressure which does a great job of keeping any water out. As you boil away, some of the gas escapes through the shell into the water, but for the most part, a positive pressure remains inside keeping the water out. This is not what you want.

So what you do is heat the peanuts in water for a while, say about an hour. During this time, some gas escapes from the inside of the peanut. Then you let the peanuts cool. Because much of the gas escaped through the shell, when the peanuts cool back down, the gas contracts to occupy less space than originally needed. When this happens, an actual vacuum is created inside the peanut which sucks in that succulent salt water infused with all the flavoring of the peanut shells. Then you heat the suckers back up again and this time the peanuts inside the shell are bathed in a salty solution. As they heat up, they cook inside the little pressure cooker of the shell. Of course, the shells are somewhat permeable so the peanuts leak out a bit of the air and juice to avoid exploding.

So here's my recipe.

Get a bunch of fresh peanuts and wash off any dirt that's on them. A quick rinse will do. Don't get anal about this step.

Get a big pot and pour in a bunch of water and a bunch of salt and a dash or two of winegar. Then toss in the goobers and heat for 1 and 1/2 hours. Turn off the heat and remove from the burner and let the brew cool off for one hour. Then return to the burner and boil for another 1.5 hours.

You can eat the peanuts now.

Peanuts are best eaten with your hands. Squeeze the shell and the secret opening reveals itself. Pry the shell apart with your fingers and place the peanuts up next to your lips. With a loud slurping sound and a great sucking motion, the peanuts will fly out of their shell into your mouth. Munch them down quickly so that you can get another one up next to your lips before the flavor fades. You should repeat the process as fast as you can till you reach a state of life altering euphoria. If you're fast, you'll also eat more than the other fool slurping away across the table.

Hope this helps. I know it still takes 4 hours, but if you leave out the cool down step, the peanuts will still be hard as a rock after 4 hours and you will be abondoning science when you need it most.

So till next time.

It's been a while since I've posted so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm sitting here watching the Canes (short for Hurricanes) play the Oilers for the Stanley Cup. Normally I don't give a flying phooey about ice hockey, but every once in a couple of years a local team makes it to the latter stages of the play-offs and all of a sudden the whole Triangle is into hockey like a bunch of canucks.

It's just before the start of the third period of the second game. The Canes are up 3-0. They won the first game 5-4. Both of these games have been in the RBC center over in Raleigh. I'm a bit curious about this 3 period thing that they have in hockey. All the other sports seem to go in halves or quarters, there's a definitive half-time so you can sell some kick-ass advertising time. But not hockey. I guess I forgot about baseball. It's got nine innings. That's pretty odd too, I guess.

Well the third third has started and I have to go back to watching. Hockey is a low scoring game so you have to watch it intently to have any chance of seeing something happen in real time. Most of the time you just watch a lot of guys do a whole lot of random stuff. I think there are some rules but there doesn't seem to be any good reason have any. You can't watch and see any rules having any effect.

Crap. I missed it. The Canes just scored again. Oh no! They disallowed it. The guy kicked it in. Oh yes! They just allowed it again. You can't kick the puck into the goal but you can use your foot to deflect the puck into the goal. The consensus was that it was a deflection and the goal counts.

The Oilers are pissed and beginning to act nasty. Being down 4-0, they don't have much of a chance of pulling this out. So all they can get out of here with is a bit of flesh. One of the Oilers whacked a Cane up side the head and got put in the penalty box so the Canes get to play with an extra player for a couple of minutes. It's called a power play. Whoops! Carolina just scored again on the power play.

5-0

Back to full strength. Looking bad for the Oilers. I'm gonna quit writing and go back to watching. Oops. Those nasty oilers just whacked another Cane with a stick. On the replay it didn't look intentional. Back to another power play.

Gotta run. Go Canes.

Hi there,

For those that occasionally read my blog, I started a new job on Monday, April 10. I think I will like it but it will take a few weeks to work out the kinks. The name of the company is not very different from the name of the compan that I left. I believe there will be more difference than there is in the names.

Here's a new post for those that care. I'm trying to put in a clock. How boring is that?

Hi There Choir Music Singing Fans,

Let's say you're in a choir and you like to sing and you prefer to sing well or at least you prefer to hit the right notes and you don't know music like that smarty pants that always gets the right answer when you don't even understand the question. Well, you can learn music theory and learn to play a piano and punch out your part and try to sing along.

Or you can cheat. For myself, I prefer to cheat.

Thanks to the internet, there are lots of ways to cheat these days. You really don't have to know anything any more. You just type it into Google and there it is, all the answers you ever needed for all of life's questions.

For learning choral music, I found a neat little crutch that's almost as useful as letting Dale Bailey learn it first and just copying what he does. It's called the

"Silvis Woodshed"

It's a site with lots of midi files of lots of the music that we sing from time to time. Midi files are just files of notes and not the sound files like ".mp3's". and the good thing is that they only have the vocal parts so you don't have to listen to a bunch of strings while you try to figure out what part belongs to you. It's got Durufle's Ubi Carritas, Brukner's Christus factus est, even Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and, of course, Handel's Messiah among many others.

If you click on a file, most computers will go ahead and play it for you. If you want to get a little fancier, you can download the file and play it in one of the many players that are available. A few are suggested on the Silvis Woodshed website. You have to download and install them.

I like Melody Assistant. It's written by some French people and has way too many features which confuse me, but it does allow one to read in a midi file and easily adjust the volume of the various parts. The program can do lots of things and if you send them $20.00, they'll send you a secret code that let's you do even more.

Have fun.

As an added note, one of my fellow choir members had asked me just how to adjust the volumes of the various parts in Melody Assistant. I can never remember how but I can usually figure it out. What you do is click and drag on the little volume control icon running down the left side near the bottom. When you click down, the panel shows up. If you then drag across the page, it won't disappear when you release the mouse button. Here's a picture of this in action.

There are a lot of other sites where you can find choral music stiff. You can try

The Classical Music Archives

Or I like:

the Choral Public Domain Library

I found a .pdf file of the score of Bruckner's Christus factus est along with an different midi file.

So enough for now. Hope this helps.

OK, time for another post.

I recently found this bit of video on Google video. If you want to watch it you may have to download the video viewer. But it's worth it. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.

Whale of a Story

Enjoy,

Later....

Hi There Sports Fans,

Like always, it's been a while since I've blogged. Today I thought I might spend a few minutes describing something I did last night that was, at best, a pretty useless waste of time.

Over the last umpteen years, we've had this big plastic coke bottle that, I guess, is supposed to be some kind of bank. I hate to carry change and never do. So anytime I have change in my pocket I put it on the bedside table at night and then drop it in the big plastic coke bottle in the morning on the way downstairs.

I've been wondering lately how much was now in the bottle. A few years ago, my wife actually counted it and found that it contained about $400.00 and it was only about a third full. Lately it been getting closer to the top and I've been wondering what's in it now. So I decided to count it. I told my wife and she understood cause she had been wondering herself. I asked her for an estimate. She said $1,200. I guessed it was a little bit lower, maybe $1,100.

So here's the numbers.

First of all, it weighed about 88 pounds. If you knew something about the statistics of change, like how often you got quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies in an average financial transaction, you could probably calculate how much was there. But I can count better than I can do statistics.

So I set about separating out the coins. I worked on it about an hour and then had to go fix supper. I do supper on Saturday night. Burgers on the grill. After supper I went back to work with help from my daughter. She'd just had an argument with her mother and found separating coins to be therapeutic. As we separated the coins into piles of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and a few Sacagawea dollar coins, I stacked the quarters into a box in 20 dollar (40 coin) stacks. Basically, I count one stack and make the rest match the height After about 3 hours we were finished. I then stacked up the dimes in 5 dollar stacks and the nickels in 2 dollar stacks. I didn't feel like stacking the pennies so we weighed them and divided their weight (22 pounds) by the weight of a penny (2.5 g) to get a count.


Final count:


coin_______________total val_______number_______weight g
Sacagawea dollars_____8.00___________8____________64.8 Quarters____________790.00_________3160________17917.2
Dimes_______________230.00_________2300_________5216.4
Nickels______________70.00_________1400_________7000.0
Pennies______________41.00_________4100________10250.0

Total_____________$1139.00_____________________40448.4 g = 89 lbs.

The total value comes from adding up the values of the stacks, except for the pennies. The number comes from dividing the total value by the value of the coin. The weight comes from multiplying the number by the weight of each coin (which I got from wikipedia). The total calculated weight is close to the experimental weight of 88 pounds so I guess the count is fairly accurate (1-2%).

So then I tossed them back in the bottle till the day when we fill it up. And now it goes back in the closet. It looks like this: