Hank's Birthday Ghetto Croquembouche

Experiment: 20100115

When I asked my friend Hank if he wanted a cake for his birthday this year he said "HELL YES I WANT A CAKE! As to the kind I am thinking about a chocolate and caramel croquembouche."  ....  Apparently my friends are trying to get me to expand my Cake-Artistry skills....  However, when I advised this was going to take at least five hours to make, he was going to have to pick a Saturday starting no earlier than 3:00 PM for when we would get together, and that I would not be able to be the Dungeon Master for gaming that day, he started back-pedaling pretty fast.  Unfortunately for Hank, the comments from my other friends about his request started giving me ideas.  Evil, evil time-saving ideas.  And thus, from an unholy collection of Krispy Kreme Doughnut Holes, Zingers, Twinkies, and several boxes of Hostess 100 Calorie Packs of Chocolate Cupcakes, Strawberry Cupcakes, and Twinkie Bites was born the dreaded Ghetto Croquembouche.

2009 Year End Update

Well, 2009 is almost at an end, and I can't say that I'm too sorry to see it go.  The second half of the year has been particularly rough, but new adventures await just around the corner.  Since I haven't been horribly active over the last few months I thought I'd finish up the year with a mini-update and a few of the pictures I did manage to take.

Here's a quick snapshot of the Birthday Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting I made for my friend Swain in mid-November.  Nothing fancy, but I think the colored coconut is a nice touch.

Next we have a snapshot of the massive feast that Kathy, my Mom, Step-Dad, and I had for Thanksgiving this year.  0_0  Might need a bigger table next year....

 This is a set of before-and-after Xmas Loot pictures.  As always Kathy managed to find me some really nifty toys to unwrap even on our pretty tight budget.  I particularly like the MP3 player upgrade to an 8GB Sansa Clip.  I've really gotten addicted to audio books over the last half-year.

And finally, for an extra dose of uber-cute we have a picture of our pet ferrets Floozie and Mozilla.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

DragonCon 2009

Adventure: 20090904









Another DragonCon has come and gone, and unfortunately I think this will probably be the last one I attend.  Frankly, I think DragonCon has just grown too large for my tastes and admittedly rather hermit-like tolerances.  Luckily I did manage to get to see Pete Abrams (Sluggy Freelance), Jennie Breeden (The Devil's Panties), Ryan Sohmer and Lar Desouza (Least I Could Do and Looking For Group) as well as attend the live recording for Sword and Laser with Veronica Belmont (This WEEK in TECH).  I unfortunately made it to nothing else I wanted to see because of the ridiculous crowds and lines.  (I think the most annoying failure was my attempt to see Randal Schwartz (FLOSS Weekly) which involved getting a cab to drive back to the con from the hotel, showing up a half hour early, and finding that although there were still seats they were all "saved"....  I nearly blew a gasket.)  Kathy did manage to get some pretty decent pictures and I think this collage pretty much conveys the DragonCon experience.

I think I did pretty well for loot though.  My favorite is the 2d20 damage flail.  ^_^

Gaming table UPGRADE

Experiment: 20090715

Under the heading of "better late than never" we have the entry of a much delayed blog post about the new downstairs gaming table. Over the winter it became very obvious that the old gaming table with it's covering of five year old shelf-paper needed a major over-haul so after the removal of the two middle legs (much hated and always in the way) all of the old shelf paper was painfully striped off first by hand, then by razor blade, and then finally (because I was about to take a hatchet to the whole thing and start over) by use of a wire paint-stripper cup brush. Once the basic structure of the table had been laid bare I slowly built the finish back up with three layers of latex base, a massive amount of sanding, four layers of white board paint, and three layers of very nice green semi-gloss latex. I think the final product turned out rather well.

G-FORCE

Adventure 20090711

Kathy and I were lucky enough to be invited to an advance screening of Disney's new movie G-FORCE 3-D, and I have to say that I was quite impressed. I'm not a movie critic, and frankly would never want to be one, but what I look for in any movie is a sense of immersion. It seems to me that too often the gimmicks available to the movie industry distract and subtract from the experience rather than draw the audience further in. I generally gauge a movie by how often my attention wanders from the screen and using that measure G-FORCE did surprisingly well. Now don't get me wrong, this is definitely another movie targeted at the family audience with the intention of making large profits off of toy sales, but is that really a bad thing? Frankly, my life is complicated enough right now, and a little break for some mindless entertainment was greatly appreciated. My suggestion is that you see this one in the theater, pay the extra for the 3-D, and let yourself revel in the ability to take your mind off of the hook for two hours.

What I learned at CodeStock 2009

Adventure 20090626

One of my recent long term projects has been an attempt to upgrade my programming skills to "Developer" level, and during one of my research session for that goal I stumbled across a development conference being held here in Knoxville less than a half mile from where I work. I really enjoyed CodeStock and thought that I would share which of the sessions I attended and the links to the nifty tools everyone provided

Friday Sessions:

• Mindstorming 101 by Nathan Blevins. Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2 is definitely under the "Cool Tools" category and is what I will be using during the design phase of creating my robotic minions.

• A Developers Guide to SQL Server Integration Services by Robert C. Cain

• Open Spaces track facilitated by Alan Stevens and the Friday lunch discussion of "Job advancement that doesn't suck"

• 5 Classic Patterns in Everyday Code by Brian H. Prince

• Back to the Basics: A Programmer's Primer Programming in C# by Keith Elder

• The Basics of ASP.NET by Jeff Blankenburg

Saturday Sessions:

• Getting started with WPF by John Kellar

• Regular Expressions Revisited by Colin Neller. Regulazy by Roy Osherove is an excellent free mini-tool for working with and testing Regular Expressions. The Added Bytes Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet is very nicely formatted and is now hanging on my cubicle wall.

• Be a Better Developer by Michael Wood. Mike Wood was by far the best speaker of the convention, and during his session I ended up taking dozens of little TODOs for books I need to read or re-read, lectures I need to watch, and better habits I am going to try and develop going forward. Some of the highlights are re-reading Getting Things Done and making a habit of re-reading it again every year, reading How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, reading Code Complete, watching the Last Lecture series by Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, making a habit of finding and using one new keyboard shortcut combo each week, and making a habit to do a "Better than" Google search review of all tools every half year or so.
  

• jQuery 101 by Rod Paddock

• How to make your application awesome with JSON, REST and WCF by James Bender

Greg's Birthday and Thermite Experiment Part Two

Experiment: 20090515

When I asked my friend Greg what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday this year he said "You make great Red Velvet Cakes with the White icing... (yeah, I'm in a predictable rut...). As for shape, well feel free to think Steampunk." And thus, as foretold in the prophecy, his doom was sealed.... Err.... I mean, so then I made him a perfectly nice and normal cake with lots of Steampunk-ish flourishes.



After the cake had been devoured we headed out into the backyard for a second try at the Thermite Experiment. This time we increased the quantity, mixed the ignition mixture in with the thermite, wrapped a full coil of magnesium ribbon around the two iron bars, and used plastic army men to show the extent of the heat.







Here's a quick video clip showing just how much more energetic this attempt was than the last one.



And finally, just to add a finale to our geek extravaganza we finished the day with a Diet Coke and Mentos fountain.