Mahimahi with Charred Onion, Tomatoes, and Tapanade Vinaigrette

September 22nd, 2008

From Gourmet, July 2007

1 medium red onion, cut lengthwise into 1/2-inch-thick wedges
3/4 pound cherry tomatoes
6 tablespoons olive oil, divided
4 (6-ounces) skinless mahimahi fillets (1 inch thick)
1 tablespoon red-wine vinegar
2 teaspoons black or green tapenade (olive paste)

Accompaniment: plain or parmesan couscous

Preheat broiler and line a large shallow baking pan with foil. 

Toss onion and tomatoes with 3 tablespoons oil, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in lined baking pan, then spread evenly in one half of pan.

Pat fish dry and sprinkle with 1/4 teaspoon each of salt and pepper, then arrange, skinned side down and spaced apart, next to vegetables in other half of pan. Drizzle fish with 1 tablespoon oil and broil 4 to 6 inches from heat until vegetables are charred and slightly wilted and fish is just cooked thourough, 12 to 15 minutes. 

Meanwhile, whisk together vinegar, tapenade, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, and remaining 2 tablespoons oil. 

Serve fish and vegetables over couscous. Stir pan juices into vinaigrette and drizzle on top.

Notes:

We used haddock instead.  Still good.

HTPC

July 26th, 2008

We’ve been talking about ditching Cable TV for a while.  We pay over $700/year for a few hundred channels that we don’t watch.  There’s never anything on, the DVR that comes from the CableCo is crap, and we don’t feel like buying a new TiVO to handle HD content.

The MythTV setup we have is OK, but it’s SD-only, and without the tuner we’re missing out on a bunch of the channels anyhow.

So, what now?  I’ve spent some time looking at VUDU, AppleTV, and other options.  VUDU seems kinda neat, but we already have an xbox 360 and the HD movie rentals on it look just fine.  What I’m interested in is AppleTV’s ability to get real TV programming, legitimately.  Torrents are fun and all, but A. I don’t feel like being on the wrong end of an IP infringement suit, and B. torrents have a low WAF value.

Having decided to hitch my wagon to the Cupertino star, I came pretty close to pulling the trigger on a 160GB AppleTV, when it occurred to me that I might not have done enough research.  After poking around some more, I’ve decided that the best option is a Mac Mini…  It’s a few hundred bucks more, but totally worth it.  There’s no downside…  The Mini comes with FrontRow, same as the AppleTV.  But it also comes with a DVD player, a full OS with web browser and all that good stuff, and it can play formats other than .mp4.  Now it’s a no-brainer.

Let’s look at the math:

Cable TV: $720/year

1.83 GHz/1GB/80GB Mac Mini + mighty mouse + keyboard: $728

HDMI <-> DVI Cable: $20

headphone <-> RCA adapter: already have one in my bins somewhere

For hardware, the first year would be a wash.  But, we need to factor in content costs…

Figure that on average, we watch 1-2 hours of TV every day.  Usually, though, that’s just crap that we can both agree on, or else Law & Order before bed.  Looking through the store, there are a bunch of shows (Weeds, other Showtime/HBO stuff) that are a bargain to get, and we’d both find interesting.

In the end, I’m not sure that we’d save all that much in month-to-month costs.  However, we wouldn’t be paying good money to subsidize the 99% of crap that goes alongside the 1% of interesting stuff we want to watch.  Plus, cable companies suck.

WRT54GS and Tomato

June 27th, 2008

Just a plug for the Tomato replacement firmware for Linksys WRT-based routers.  What a beautiful bunch of work.  I haven’t really looked at options since the openwrt WhiteRussian 0.9 days, and Tomato blew me away.  I’ve just heard about x-wrt too, but I really can’t find anything lacking in Tomato.

My Dreams… They are crushed.

June 26th, 2008

I had an awesome plan to become a billionaire this morning.  Unfortunately, Forex.com won’t sell Zimbabwean dollars to me.

Sigh.

Buggy Bug Bug

June 25th, 2008

I was outside killing a hornets nest when I looked down and saw a lovely specimen of calosoma scrutator.  I’d never seen one before, and was somewhat baffled by it.  My initial guess was that it was some kind of beetle larva, given that it had six legs but no wings.  I wasn’t sure, though.

I brought it inside for L to see…  She was impressed, but more interested in making a house for it than identifying it.  I took it upstairs and tried to take a few macro shots of it, but the bugger moved around so much that getting any good detail was difficult.  I gave up after a while and let the beastie have its freedom (away from the now-dead hornets nest).

After L’s bedtime, I did some wandering through the entomology section of Wikipedia, and while fascinating (did you know that Wood Lice (aka pill bugs, roly-polys, doodlebugs, etc.) are land-adapted crustaceans?), I wasn’t able to identify my critter.  I was able to narrow down my search to beetles, however.  Under Hexapoda, there are only two major classes, and I knew my bug wasn’t in Entognatha (weirdos).  Drilling down into Insecta, I looked at Archeognatha, because they’re wingless.  My bug didn’t have the distinct three-pronged tails that those guys do (think jumping silverfish).  Definitely not Thysanura (non-jumping silverfish).

I started looking at the sub-clades of Neoptera, because the other stuff seemed too weird.  The only thing that seemed to fit was Coleoptera (beetles), but this didn’t feel right because my bug didn’t have wings.  Then I read about how some female beetles retain their larval form into adulthood, and this made me remember what female lighting bugs look like, and my earlier guess.  OK, so I knew it was a beetle larva, but didn’t know what kind of beetle.

After a lot of digging, I came across an entry on whatsthatbug.com, and there it was.  That’s an awesome site.  Excitement abounds.  Anyhow, here’s a picture of one of the gruesome monster’s kin.  Apparently these things are very good for taking out infestations of things like gypsy moth caterpillars.  I’m glad I let it go.

Caterpillar Hunter Larva

Damn Skippy.

June 19th, 2008

Everyone else is making big announcements and putting out new stuff…  So we figured we’d get on the bandwagon.

We’d wanted to distribute an actual ISO, rather than this hokey “build your own ISO” script, but our lawyers are protecting us from ourselves, or something.  Makia did several presentations about our product at ISC, and so far the feedback we’ve gotten has been good.  I guess we did something right!

Some of us saw the wrong side of dawn a few times, but it’s done.  We’ll take a few minutes to breathe, and then push on to make the product that we really wanted to put out there.

mountains

June 16th, 2008

I was traveling for business, but staying in someone’s house while they weren’t there.  The house was in europe, somewhere.  Switzerland?  Huge mountains rising up abruptly out of a plain.  The plain was covered with absolutely HUGE radio towers.   The bases were 10 miles on a side.

Anyhow, the car had GPS, but that’s not all…  It drove itself.  I got the impression that it used a combination of GPS and LIDAR to figure out appropriate speeds for upcoming turns.  Not unlike CMU’s robot, I suppose.  This was particularly cool because I could sleep, although I was nervous about letting it drive by itself on the wind-ey mountain roads.

I think it was an Audi.  Was red, anyhow.  Oh, and it had a huge amount of power.  The road from the plain up into the mountains was pretty much a single slope instead of switchbacks.  And the car was able to race up several thousand feet in just a minute or so.

flyin’

May 27th, 2008

…  ur doin’ it rong

Me and Batman…

April 29th, 2008

Chillin…  Listening to Martin Mickos speak at the Sun auditorium in Second Life.

Back from CO

April 18th, 2008

Flew out to Denver for a team meeting in Broomfield this week.  Was nice to see everyone again.  We seemed to get a lot of planning done, and there was much team bonding via imbibing in the evenings.

Travel home yesterday sucked, though.  I changed my return flight from an afternoon to a morning flight, which was canceled.  The whole point of leaving earlier was that I wanted to get home before midnight, and the new itinerary would have had me home at 22:30.  D’oh.  I put on my best “poor me” routine and managed to get standby on a flight to Boston (without having to pay the difference in fare), and then took the train home.

Got home early enough to do bedtime for L, so it worked out as well as it could have, I guess.