I bought some different drinks at Central Market today. The first was chocolate milk. It is a Danish product called Cocio. The other was a soda made with a sweetener from an herb. It is called Zevia.
Monthly Archives: August 2008
Disc Golf 08/30/08
It has been a while since I’ve been down to Pease Park. And, with Marty potentially showing up, we decided to play there today. Through a fluke, we took 35 to 290 which turns into 2222 as it heads West. And, along the way, Jon noticed Kick Butt Coffee. Since it was advertised in the Chronicle, he decided to patronize it.
There is new construction going on at the park. Hole 6 was taken out for the time being.
Luckily, the disc golfers have done something about it. They split up hole 7 into two holes.
You throw first at the old hole 7. And then you tee off here. Which is up the side a little ways.
We stopped off for lunch at Wahoo’s and had some fish tacos.
What an intense coffee smell!
Here I am in the middle of making some Hatch chile sauce. These chiles have been fire roasted by the grocery store. The skin has been blackened into a state resembling activated charcoal. And nothing has been done to these chiles before roasting, so I have to remove the stem, seeds, and blackened skin. I add some onion, chicken stock, and vegetable stock.
Now I consider a thickening agent. And I am in the mood for a roux. I put two tablespoons of butter and flour in a small non-stick pan and stir vigorously over a medium heat. The mixture turns from white, to yellow, to light brown, to coffee milk color, to peanut butter color. I remove the pan from the stove and continue to stir madly. There is a lot of residual heat left. Even when I dump the mixture into the sauce, the super heated oil flash boils the sauce. Which is when the smell overwhelms me. And I bath in a primal memory of coffee…
Disc Golf 08/29/08
With the Labor Day weekend coming up, we got a half day at work. So I convinced Jon to play disc golf at Wilco. Of course, I told him that it wasn’t going to rain when I was on the phone. But, when we were out there, I was proved wrong. You could see rain off in the distance and the temperature was dropping as well.
Game Day 08/28/08
Age of Steam Expansion – Texas, Oklahoma & New Mexico
Winsome’s 2008 Essen pack was shipped early to me. In it was an Age of Steam expansion about Texas and cattle. We tried it out. Of course we got a couple of the rules wrong. But that did not make this game broken. In fact, it made it harder. Which, in my opinion is a good thing. This expansion is designed to make it easier for beginners. There is the normal goods on the board. And there also is a bunch of cattle which can be transported as goods. This is way too many goods for a group of seasoned players. So the mistake of not filling up the new goods section turned this game into a more normal version. With an interesting cattle twist.
We finished up with an abbreviated game of Suicide Tichu. This was Marty’s first time and he liked it.
| GT/T | Team #1 | GT/T | GT/T | Team #2 | GT/T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MarkH & MikeCh | Marty & Jon | ||||
| T- | -100 | T+ | 300 | ||
| GT+ |
175
|
225 | T- | ||
| 475 | T+ | T- | 125 | ||
| T- | 370 | T+ |
330
|
||
| T+ | 470 | T- |
330
|
||
| 415 | T- | T+ |
485
|
Can’t miss this
You certainly cannot miss this vehicle. The paint scheme is rather intense. I bet that the yellow is the reflective type as well. And that is ignoring all of the lights all over the vehicle. I wonder if you could paint your car this scheme without getting in trouble…
I haven’t even heard of Fayette County before this. Only to find out as I write this that it is located 60 miles away. I wonder what they were doing in downtown Austin.
Sampaio’s
Marty suggested a Brazilian restaurant named Sampaio’s. He had really liked the coffee crusted pork tenderloin. I couldn’t make the dinner that he was setting up. So I went there for lunch. Unfortunately, they had a different menu for lunch.
I did have the special which was Garlic shrimp served in a spicy coconut sauce. It was served on rice cakes with collard greens. It was pretty good. I think that this was the first time that I have eaten collard greens raw. Their strong taste balanced out the dish and was mellowed out by the sauce. The only negative thing was that the shrimp were not that garlicly at all.
The one odd thing that I noticed was that the chef loves collard greens. Many menu items contain them.
First Solo game of Agricola
Jon played a solo game of Agricola and told me what cards he drew and what score he got (20 points). This made me want to see how I would do at it. I received 45 points. Which is below the minimum required for the first round (50 points). This got me thinking how I could improve my play. So I set out to see if I could better my score. This time, I scored 52 points. Can someone else do better?
Incredibly detailed minutia follows…
First try at Photosynth
I was tempted to play around with Microsoft’s Photosynth. It looked really interesting when it first made the news. Recently, they allowed the public to access it to add their own pictures.
This was my first attempt.
My first complaint is that you cannot modify an existing photosynth by adding pictures to it.
My next try will be a game in progress. Perhaps Formula De? Or Heroscape (which I would have to borrow since I don’t own). I am thinking that the EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM and EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lenses will come in handy for this.
links
Tiny mango pies link1 link2 via
Diffusing the built in flash with a film canister link via
Gary Coleman Pitches Outrageous 99.25% APR Loans link via
Al Franken Draws The United States Of America link via
Speed Racer Video Mosaic link via
6.6 degrees of separation link via
Researchers craft curved, eyelike electronic camera link via
Fluid stop-motion animation link via
Periodic table of awesomness link via
Water drop refraction link via
Every 10 years, everyone in the town performs a play link via
Thinkpad with monitor calibration and Wacom digitizer link via
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene link via
The Genetic Map of Europe link via
Death Star over San Francisco link via
Erotic Drawing Illusion (NSFW) link via
Face Swapping: Automatically Replacing Faces in Photographs link via
Ray Bradbury’s futuristic prune commercial link via
Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to create a book about cat stories link via
Michael Phelps recommended calorie intake is 8,000 to 10,000 calories link1 link2 via
Why people pirate stuff link via
Very long term backup link via
An overheard conversation at the suburban neighborhood pool, if the suburban neighborhood pool were in deadwood. link via
Pizza Oven + Inkjet Printer + Nail Polish = Solar Cell link via