Dining in Madson

Dawn got back in town last night, which was a couple of days earlier than she had originally planned. To celebrate her return we decided to go out and try someplace new. Pauli’s Bar and Grill in Madison has recently opened a “Tapas Parlor“ called Vinotini next door to their existing restaurant.

The food was pretty good. The current standard bearer for tapas in Huntsville, as far as I know, is the Chef’s Table. I’m not prepared to say that what we tried matched Chef’s Table offerings. However, it’s hard not to be proud of Maidson, after all, we have a wine bar AND a tapas restaurant now. Dawn ordered some crab cakes which were very tasty…they just were not over the top. I had a martini, some marinated artichokes, olives, red peppers with a side order of spicy pecans. The marinated veggies were standard fare (the ones you get served at the Chef’s Table when you sit down are better). The spicy pecans were really good and I’d order those again. Obviously we were out to eat light.

The vibe of the place is really cool. I’d definitely take friends there to hang out. It feels more like a martini bar to me. Speaking of which, they have a pretty good martini menu if you like fru-fru martinis.

I have both cheers and jeers to hand out for the martini I ordered. I’ll start with the cheers. The martinis come in small martini glasses with a sidecar. The sidecar is a giant snifter filled with water and ice with a little Florence flask in the center holding the rest of your martini. I really like this set up compared to the giant-ass meniscus testing martini served at Surin. Having the assorted glassware on the table in front of you makes you feel like a bistro chemist performing a tasty tasty experiment. Science can be fun. On the practical side, it ensures that the second half of your martini will still be nice and cold when you get to it. That’s something that can’t be said of the giant single serving.

It was a tasty martini, perhaps a tiny bit watered down. That may have something to do with the fact that instead of shaking or stirring their martinis, they muddle them in ice (which is kind of fun to watch.)

My biggest jeer has to do with the wording of my martini on the menu. It said something like:

Classic Martini: Think James Bond.

I found this to be confusing, is the martini gin or vodka? A classic martini would be gin, but James Bond always drank vodka martinis…. I had to ask the waitress if the classic martini was a gin martini or not. It turns out the classic martini is a gin martini. She agreed with me that the menu was perplexing and the wording bothered her as well.

All-in-all Vinotini was a fun experience, but it’s kind of hard not to have fun hanging out in a “parlor” discussing the onomastics of martinis.

Need Room To Grow

I really like my job. It features low stress, a great boss who always seems to be looking out for my best interests, and completely 100% pays for school (and I’m not talking about that we’ll reimburse you later crap either). One of my job perks is an honest to god office instead of a cube. How many offices can boast 30 foot ceilings? Mine can.

For the most part I’ve had the office all to myself for the last year. A couple of months ago I got a student assistant who now shares the office with me. There is plenty of room for two people so I’ve had no complaints.

Yesterday I found out that I’m getting a second student. There was a young but exceptionally promising candidate that my boss decided he wanted to snatch up. Being that his interest is in software he’s being assigned to me. I’ll now have two of the youngest, and arguably brightest, employees our center has.

When notified about the addition I raised an eyebrow as I tried to figure out how to add a third person to my office. There is room, but I might have to lower my standard of personal workspace luxury. Currently my personal setup consists of four monitors and two desks. I personally consume three of the four available network jacks in the room.

I commented about having to consolidate my swank pad in order to make room for the new guy. My boss raised his eyebrow and suggested that instead I just get a bigger office. The ceilings won’t be 30 feet high but there will be a window. I’ll actually have room to expand my personal workspace (which is probably a bad idea, right now it borders on ridiculous) and have room for a couple of minions. Things just keep coming up Bill. I pointed out that the new office only had four network drops, obviously not enough for three people if one of them is consuming three of them. I was told not to worry; we’d get some more installed.

The really funny part is there are already people in the proposed new office, three of them. The plan is for us to simply switch offices. So while my current office to too small for me and the minions my boss deems it the right size for them. Awesome.

Probing the Depths of Terror

Oh gentle reader, I have such a harrowing tale to tell. They say the man with two watches never knows what time it is. Let me tell you about the man with four probe thermometer probes, two probe thermometer base stations, an Evil Egg grill dome thermometer, and two Stoker Temperature Controller probes. (By the way, I say the man with two or more watch should be commended on his stylish accessories…)

I read somewhere about analog probe thermometers, like the one that monitors the Black Evil Egg’s dome temperature, getting a bit out of whack. I thought about that thermometer, out there, exposed to the elements, and furrowed my brow. Then I read that fortunately they are easy to calibrate.

So I decide to check and see if my egg thermometer is legit, this seems like a fruitful endeavor because I can also check the probes that come with the Stoker Temperature Controller that I got for my birthday. After all what’s the point of it constantly monitoring my grill if it isn’t polling the correct temperatures? While I’m at it I might as well check all the probe thermometers in the kitchen; the more the merrier, right?

So I need something to calibrate against, a pot of boiling water seems to be a popular choice. Ought to be 212°, right? Well, barometric pressure will throw that off a bit. Usually barometric pressure changes with elevation so water will boil at a bit lower temperature at higher elevations. I don’t expect Huntsville’s elevation to a big factor….but I go ahead and check it out.

I find out that weather will also play with the barometric pressure, meaning that water will boil at slightly different temperatures on different days. That’s kind of neat. I probably haven’t thought about since science class in elementary school. I also find a couple of javascript applications that will calculate the temperature that water will boil at written for nerds like me. A quick trip to weather.com to find the current barometric pressure for Huntsville and I’m in business. Based on my pressure and elevation water ought to boil at 210.2° Good deal.

I start a pot of water boiling. I decide to do my kitchen probe thermometers first. I notice that I have four of them in the drawer and two base stations. I plug the first one in and plunge it in the water (without touching the sides or bottom). 179°, that’s not right. I plug the second one in, 208°, ah that’s more like it. The third and forth measure at 176° and 177° respectively. I’m starting to panic, I place the Evil Egg dome thermometer in….150°. This is a disaster.

I try my other base station. The temperatures are 210°, 250°, 209°, and 210.° Ah, I think I see what’s going on here. I the connectors on top of the probes are different colors, I bet three of them belong to one base state and one belongs to the other one. That would make since. I’ve never been real careful about matching them up, but with this evidence in hand it seems pretty obvious that a thermocouple is not simply a thermocouple. I bet Dawn could have told me that. Lesson learned; probes may not be swappable.

Now that the kitchen probes are sorted out I find a wrench and calibrate the Evil Egg thermometer. It turns out that calibrating the analog thermometer is a simple adjustment. Phew.

Lastly, I place the Stoker’s probes in the water….206.4° and 209.1°. The fact that it reports tenths of a degree is kind of cool….but I would have hoped for it to be more accurate. A quick trip to the manual that comes with it reveals that the Stoke is smart. Very smart. There is a way to digitally calibrate it! A little bit a fiddling and the new readings are 210.2° and 210.6° Much better.
They say that ignorance is bliss. All I know for sure is multiple thermometers lying to me is torment. I’m glad I was able to help them get their stories straight. I’ve also gained a new found skepticism for their information. A skepticism which I am sure is healthy. Here that thermometers of the world…I got my eye on you.

Cooking for one, no fun?

I enjoy cooking, but apparently only if there is someone else to cook for. How messed up is that?

I’ve noticed the trend before. If Dawn or a friend is around I’ll gladly launch into preparing a feast. When it’s just me, ramen noodles will suffice.

It makes me angry. I have a fairly high opinion of myself, surely I think myself worthy of the effort? Yes, of course I do.

Perhaps I’m afraid of the staggering amount of food I might prepare. I’ve never really gotten the nak of cooking for two. I routinely overshoot all my estimates and make a glut of food more fitting for four. Dawn thinks it must be my up upbringing, and I imagine that she’s right. Who knows what crazy amount of food I’d concoct for one.

I’ve decide I’m going to stop falling prey to whatever strange notion might present itself against cooking for one. From now on my stove will happily serve a party of one….unless of course cooking will steal too much time away from Super Paper Mario. After all, it’s important to remember one’s priorities…

Everday is a lolcat day

Are you familiar with lolcats? I assume most of you nodded your heads. If you’re not familiar with lolcats let me take a moment to acquaint you with them. It will help give context to the rest of this post.

A lolcat is a picture of a cat, usually being cute, on which someone has placed text. The text can be anything, but text that somehow relates to what is going on in the photo is preferable. Extra points are awarded for poor grammar and horrendous spelling. I can has cheeseburger will serve most of your lolcat needs.

Dawn and I are burdened with a cat, Riblet. I’ve included a picture of Riblet for reference.

While shopping last weekend Dawn found some post-it notes that had a picture of a cat on them that had a striking resemblance to Riblet. The post-it notes also had a thought bubble over the cat’s head so you could insert what the cat was thinking. Obviously Dawn bought several packs of these so we could help annotate our house with Riblet’s thoughts. Our very own lolcat.

Riblet and Her Language
Now, some of you might not be familiar with Riblet. The first thing you should know is Riblet has deplorable language. She swears non-stop. Her filthy language is one of the primary reasons she is an inside only cat. When she does go outside she must be placed on a harness with a responsible adult in order to protect our neighbors from her caustic language. While outside she spends an inordinate amount of time swearing at birds.

Riblet and Her Mother
The second thing you should know about Riblet is she has an antagonistic relationship with her mother. She spends a lot of time swearing about her mother (it’s something the two of them have in common). However, at the end of each day both Dawn and Riblet eventually get sleepy and curl up on the bed and nap together.

Riblet and Her Logic
Recently, Riblet spent a lot of time helping me work on my logic project. I had research papers strewed about my office and she was napping and bathing around and on them. I guess in the process of bathing she took a break to read a few of them. We were startled to find this recent thought expressed in first order logic. Roughly translated it states: “for all stinky fish, there exist some stinky fish, such that stinky fish in my bowl.” I think she botched a bit of it, we both need to work on our use of quantifiers…but not bad for her first attempt at logic.

Caution. Dorks Grilling.

I’ve been posting a lot of grill related stuff recently, and that’s likely to continue as precision grilling is my current subject of obsession. I’m always happiest when I can drive my time into researching something really frivolous. I hope the appeal of precision grilling is obvious: technology + cooking = happy Bill.

Fortunately I’m not alone. There are other maladjusted people out there. I was greatly relieved when I first discovered Alton Brown. It’s nice to know that in the pantheon of Food Network smiling charismatic chefs, there was room for an OCD geek cook. Huzzah.

I also recently ran across my man Amir. Amir also owns a Stoker automatic temperature control system for his grill. One of the really cool things about the Stoker is the ethernet port which allows you to monitor its progress over the internet. Amir realized that if you can monitor the Stoker in real time, then you can write a data acquisition program to log and analyze your grilling experience! Did you feel that? If you’re like me you might have felt a bit of a shiver when you read that. Goosebumps rise on your arms? Oh yeah, we’re totally going to geek out on this.

Amir has made his program publicly available and I can’t wait to install and test it out at home. In addition to simply logging Stoker data, his program uses regression analysis to try and predict when food will reach its target temperature. That sounds pretty cool; I wonder how accurate it really is? It also makes graphs….GRAPHS. Not only will I be able to cook tasty food over absurdly long stretches of time (and maybe know when it will be done with some degree of certainty), I’ll be able to look at the graph of the food’s thermal history while I’m eating it!

Holiday Gift Giving Guide

Many, many years ago, when I was still in high school, I remember being over at David’s house and watching Conan O’Brien. What makes this memory hard to forget, besides David’s smooth operator style, is a bit Conan did about Hello Kitty.

The premise of the bit was Hello Kitty versus the Fisher Price Little People. You may recall the Fisher Price Little People as the creepy paraplegic toys that where basically a peg with a round head on top.

The bit was melodramatic and portrayed the fisher Price Little People as “good” while Hello Kitty was “evil.” It was basically a series of images: an image of the Little People, an image of some peaceful scene, the words “good,” an image of Hello Kitty, an image of something disturbing, then the words “evil.” The images kept alternating back and forth with Carmina Burana blaring in the background for maximum dramatic effect.

There is a kernel of truth in that bit. Somehow Hello Kitty inspires evil. I posted the Hello Kitty murderbot last week. This week I give you the “hello kitty transformation set.”

This got the most attention from Gizmodo, which titled it the “Hello Kitty Cat Humiliation System.” Gizmodo stated that the Japanese auto-translated version of the original Gizmodo Japan page is funny. They weren’t kidding.

Allow me to post some examples for you non-link clickers.
“This the commodity is not daily arrival and the collar. It will stop the use and unreasonable wearing of long haul. “Foppery” to be delightful is potato excessively for the cat.”

“So, when the [ya] it is you dress in the cat of the foppish class upper-class person, attracting the attention of the camera young priest in oneself you are not wrong the shank!”

Oh man. I think we all know what our cats will be getting for Christmas this year. Pretty soon everyone’s cat will be dressed in the manner of a foppish upper-class person. If you don’t have a cat perhaps you can still find a use for a transformation kit. The kit looks to be about baby sized. I don’t expect there is anything that can make a baby cute….but this probably couldn’t hurt.