Cute Kids
I love these kids…
My niece and nephew on Christmas morning at Ga & Pap’s house.
Bread 2.0
As I mentioned before, I had found a few discussions regarding the substitution of some beer and vinegar for part of the water in the no knead bread recipe I’ve been enjoying lately. Last night I mixed the dough for a batch and I just had the first slice a few minutes ago. I’m very, very pleased with this variation.
Here’s my ingredient list:
3 Cups Unbleached Bread Flour
1/2 Teaspoon Instant Yeast
1 Teaspoon Kosher Salt
1 Tablespoon Sugar
3/4 Cup Water
1/3 Cup Michelob Light Beer
1 Tablespoon Cider Vinegar
The modified recipe I found called for white vinegar but I forgot to pick any up at the grocery store yesterday, and all I had at home was cider vinegar.
I still maintain that this recipe is idiot proof despite my last episode with the salt in the batches I attempted on my birthday. This isn’t rocket science. Slight variations don’t seem to affect this recipe negatively at all.
My next attempt will increase the ratio of beer and vinegar to water. I want to see if I can push the flavor of the finished bread a little more. Dave and I have also been chatting about further variations… garlic, herbs, etc. I think a tomato & basil version would be pretty intense.
Dexter
The more I think about it, the more I’m thinking I could seriously get away without cable. All the good stuff ends up online now reasonably quickly and I prefer watching a bunch of episodes back to back anyway.
Last weekend, when I should have been doing more constructive things, I was making my way through Black Books, and this evening I started in on Dexter. I can easily recommend Black Books to anyone. It’s incredibly funny, and the characters are wonderfully twisted.
I’m enjoying Dexter just as much, but I can’t give it the same recommendation. First of all, it’s morbid as hell. I mean, the title character is a serial killer; a serial killer with morals, but still, a serial killer nonetheless. Being a product of cable television, It’s pretty graphic, and the language is a bit gratuitous at times. There’s a lot of very, very black humor, which appeals to me.
As for the constructive things I should have been doing last weekend (mostly Christmas related), they’ve been completed in one form or another, so I’ll be free to take advantage of the rainy weather tomorrow by curling up on the couch and slogging through the rest of season one.
And I’ll be baking bread tomorrow, too, after a trip to the grocery store. I read a couple tips for the no-knead bread that proposed substituting some beer and vinegar for the water to reate more of a sourdough style bread.
Bread and serial murder. Is there a better way to spend a gloomy Saturday afternoon?
Friendless
Poor Vader.
Neuros OSD
This looks interesting…
At $200, the price seems about right. This would be a nice solution for the upstairs TV. It seems that Neuros is marketing this mostly for it’s recording capabilities, but my interest is in using it for a networked media player. My plan is to rebuild the HTPC and the allow the XBox and whatever ends up upstairs to pull the video files saved by the HTPC.
I think there’s more research to be done, but right now the Neuros OSD is at the top of the list.
Sharing Media to an XBox 360
One of the reasons I finally bought an XBox was because of its supposed media player functionality. I wasn’t very impressed in the beginning… via WinXP there was no support for Divx/Xvid unless you transcoded via TVersity. While that worked, it was far from an elegant solution to the problem because there was no way to fast forward, rewind, or skip in a transcoded file (until the transcoding was completed). Also, I didn’t like the added strain that the TVersity Server app put on my desktop machine.
Lo and behold, the December XBox firmware update came along and we’re finally able to play Divx & Xvid natively.
But here’s the rub: while I can add media files from a network share (my ReadyNAS server in this case) to the Windows Media Library, those remote files won’t show up on the XBox. I found a thread somewhere about hacking the registry (EnableRemoteFileSharing or something) to get around this problem. That got me a step closer, but even though the files showed up on the Xbox interface, they wouldn’t play.
So I went back to TVersity, and you know what, remotely hosted Divx/Xvid files WILL play with all the regular functionality included. Which is all I really want. Because it sucks really bad to have to start from the beginning of a file when the Xbox drops the connection.
I’ve started researching another networked media player for the bedroom TV, but the reviews aren’t too good. The one or two that have even marginal reviews cost nearly as much as a core Xbox. I’d rather deal with the devils I know, than the devils I don’t know, if you know what I mean, so I’m considering another XBox console for the bedroom to enable media viewing on the TV up there. This isn’t anything I’m going to do immediately, but it’s something to think about.
I’m also planning to put my old media server machine back together so that I can quit paying Comcast their DVR blood money.
Vase Like Thing
I’m not really sure what to call this, so I’ve been referring to it as the VLT.
I finished it a last week I think but I forgot to post pictures. The wine bottle is there so you can get a sense of scale. David rightly pointed out that it’s the biggest mache piece I’ve made yet.
And while I’m thinking of it, I’m not sure if it’s even accurate to call this paper mache. What would be considered paper mache on these pieces is almost an after thought… it’s simply a veneer. The real substance is plain old masking tape. Whatever. I’m still pleased with them and those who’ve seen them have been at least marginally impressed so far.
I think this weekend I’ll be working on a piece for Mom. She requested something to go over her couch early in the summer. I’ve been kicking around some ideas for a while now, and I think I finally know what I’m going to do. It’s going to be a mixed media piece. Whether or not the final product ends up being what I have in mind now is another thing altogether.
Cut Loose
Heres what I don’t get… rather than get pissed off at the people who actually caused them to be laid off, members of the non-writing staff of The Tonight Show have started bellyaching because Leno isn’t covering them the same way Conan O’Brien is covering his staff.
Wtf, people?
Sure, he can probably afford it, but still, why is it his responsibility? He’s not the one causing you to be unemployed, the writers are.
Shared Birthdays
Yeah, yeah, Woody Allen’s birthday is the same as mine. I’ve known about that for awhile. I just learned that the following very cool people also share my birthday: Musician Extraordinaire Jonathan Coulton and the ever so funny Sarah Silverman.
