Hooded

Last Thursday, at the same time as Stacy's graduation, was the hooding ceremony for my doctorate

Photo credit: http://keepingupwiththeparentalunits.blogspot.com/

Although I defended and completed all the paperwork last August, it is nice to have things all official:

Congratulations Stacy!

Stacy completed her MBA from NYU (while working full time, and raising two kids) and graduated today!

Congratulations Stacy!

So literal

Interesting drip pattern on my windshield

When driving into work today, I noticed an interesting way a raindrop ran down my windshield. It's a little difficult to see in this picture, but it would drip down in little steps; sometimes going more across than down, sometimes more down than across. I'm talking about the left-hand fork of the drip.

The angle is a little wonky, but you can sort of see it clearer here (it's the drip on the right fork here):

The "across" paths basically track the path of my windshield wipers. I wonder if sand or salt or something got dragged across the windshield by the wipers, and basically etched micro grooves into the windshield that channel the water.

Turn 2 cats into 1. Because Internet

So I made a website recently, just for the fun of it. What do you think?
http://www.concatenatez.com

Sous vide burgers

Quick on the heels of upgrading my sous vide controller last week, this past Sunday we had some friends over for a "barbecue" where I made sous vide burgers. The recipe was "simple," it only had two ingredients:

1. grind up a bunch of meat (sorry, didn't take any pictures of this)
2. add an amount of salt equal to 0.8% times the weight of the meat
3. shape into 160g patties, seal in bags (with about a teaspoon of oil [fine, three ingredients]) using the water-displacement method, and let sit in the fridge for an hour
4. cook sous vide at 131F (55C) until burgers reach a core temperature of 129F (54C)
5. sear on grill or with blowtorch
6. eat!

Here are all the burgers cooking:

Although it looks like the temperature is actually 2.2 degrees too hot, I haven't fixed the offset on the PID yet. It's actually at 55C.

The final result, perfectly medium-rare through and through, on a bun with mustard, tomato paste and vidalia onion: