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:

Slacktivism and Boston Strong Social Media

I have lived in Boston for about 5 years now; I call it home. There was some kind of distance as the newscasters speculated, a sort of loneliness thinking about how tons of people would hear the news, but so few could actually relate to how I felt as a Bostonian.

But then people started changing their profile pictures on social media. Completely unexpectedly - seeing them actually made me glad.

 

Even though a #prayforboston tweet takes all of 5 seconds for someone to post - reading it makes me know that for at least those 5 seconds, someone cared about Boston - and that makes me happy.

The experience made me think of some other ostensibly shallow internet-only campaigns like the recent gay marriage avatar-changing "slacktivism"

Does the Supreme Court of the USA care about facebook profile images? I'm pretty sure that they don't. Do people who are gay care? I'll bet that they do.

Does the Israeli or Iranian government care about photos their citizens are posting? Maybe not. But do the citizens of those countries care? Yeah, they probably do.

This is so awesome - should we change our profile pictures for everything? Lets not get carried away.

DIY Immersion Circulator -- Version 2

I decided to upgrade my previous method of cooking sous vide. As I noted in that post, the original version left much to be desired in terms of safety and reliability. Although I originally intended to pack all the electronics into a PC power supply case, as a test of concept I used a plastic storage container:

With this arrangement I had a lot of space to fit everything. You'll also note the outlet on the front. This outlet is controlled by the PID-SSR combo, and leaves me a lot of flexibility for heating elements. Basically, instead of hard-wiring the heaters to the SSR, I wired them with a plug on the end, and it just plugs into the outlet. This leaves me the option of using the controller to regulate the temperature of other devices, like my smoker.
Now, the formerly-packed case just has the heaters and thermocouple attached:

This version also has a cooling fan for the SSR (I cut slots in the side of the container for airflow).

Thus far, I'm much happier with this version. After I've tested it for a bit and am sure that I really like this arrangement, I'm going to try and jam all the stuff into a PC power supply case so it takes up less space. Stay tuned for future updates.

Boston Marathon Update

I am okay. As far as I know - everyone I know is OK too.

Last night I took part in a midnight bicycle marathon, which took me right past the site of today's explosions. I really love this annual event (I've previously written about it here). It is usually filled with strangers encouraging and helping strangers, basically everyone is overjoyed about Boston's special holiday.

Not today.

My friend Sam Novey understands the marathon more than anyone. He's run it several times dressed in a patriotic burger costume to raise money for citizen schools - actually he's organized a group that does this every year. They were at the marathon today.

This is what Sam had to say this evening.

Skipped my first Boston Marathon in 5 years today.

The Boston Marathon is not only a great athletic event, it's one of the greatest community events in the world.

What happened today is not just an act of violence against individual people, it's an act of violence against all of us who seek to live meaningful lives where we approach our neighbors and public spaces with joy and love instead of fear.

If you have comments you can leave them below or directly on his post.