A few nights ago I caught an episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown managed to spend 30 glorious minutes discussing popcorn (video embedded below). Today I hit up the co-op for some peanut oil and multi-colored popcorn… I suspect these are the cereal version of heirloom tomatoes. Brown’s directions are simple enough, though I’ve adjusted the amounts downward slightly.
Add 1/3 cup of popcorn to a metal bowl with a couple of tablespoons of oil.
Sprinkle a couple of pinches of salt on top and swirl it all together.
Cover the bowl with foil, slicing a few air vents in the top. As it turns out, if you make these big, you get sprayed with hot oil
Place the bowl over medium heat and shake it (I didn’t have metal tongs, so I just used a hot pad) frequently until the popping stops.
Season with a pinch of rosemary and thyme (the oil really seems to obviate the need for butter)
Absolutely brilliant! Now I’ve a big bowl of the stuff, and am ready to queue up Lost on the Tivo!
And, because Alton Brown is infinitely more amusing than I am, a video of him explaining the same recipe:
So for the past week I’ve been meaning to write up a description of the general awesomeness that was IUI ’09, but with end-of-term craziness in full force, it’s going to have to wait. Suffice to say it was a fabulous week full of wonderful people and some fascinating research. Photos are slowly making their way from my notebook to Flickr, and once the VLHCC ’09 submission deadline passes, the process should speed up.
Speaking of, the past week has flown by as we prepare our paper, and I’m certain the next two will be similar. Today and tomorrow I’ve eight transcripts to code, plus an abstract to write and a clever title to generate. Feeling pretty good about it all at this particular moment, though; met up with Andrea at a funky new coffee shop (Vibe) downtown this morning, and ran into her friend Lisa as well. Now I’m exporting our final transcript video from the lab, then heading home to throw open some windows, put on a kettle, and code until I can code no more (and maybe a bit past that, we’ll see). The past few evenings have ended with mini-marathons of Series Three Doctor Who, and I’m looking forward to finishing that off late tonight.
Twenty-five hours after leaving Corvallis, I’ve finally made it to Florida, site of IUI 2009. Taking the red-eye in order to sleep on the flight totally and hilariously back-fired; I haven’t fallen asleep since Thursday night. Instead, I got a haircut in Portland, then wandered about the city for a bit. The number of shops closing up downtown is a little frightening, it looked an awful lot like Michigan did when I was back over the holidays. One of my favorite boutiques, Same Underneath, totally cut their inventory to just a handful of relatively tired-looking styles. Not a good sign.
I got to PDX way ahead of time and got some work done, then boarded a plane on which my legs simply couldn’t get comfortable (that has never happened before, I usually fit just fine into the tiny amount of legroom). Four restless hours later, I watched the sun rise behind the smudged glass of ATL:
Sunrise in Atlanta
The flight down to Fort Myers was exciting, we got stuck on the runway for an hour when an engine wouldn’t start. All was well, though, and looking down on gulf-coastal islands made me wish my camera wasn’t stowed in the overhead. I took a cab ride from a local artist, originally from Italy, who proudly showed me a regional publication with his face on the cover: it was without a doubt the most interesting taxi ride of my life. Now I’m at the Sundial resort, staying in someone’s condo and searching for vegetarian options from the bar menu. Also, prepping for tomorrow’s day-long workshop, after which I really need to finish up my presentation. I’m getting nervous now that I’m here. But! This condo has a screened-in porch with a lovely view:
Poor Henri… it’s so hard to leave that little guy alone for a week. I swear he can tell when I’m about to go, he was all extra lovey and adorable this morning. I dropped by Justin and Caitlyn’s last night and noticed how affectionaite they are with their cats, so I’m sure he’ll be in good hands while I’m gone, but still… I hate being unable to tell him, “Don’t worry little man, I’ll be back in a week!”
In case anyone else had as much trouble figuring this out as I did… if you want to break up a cell in the Mac edition of Microsoft Excel into multiple lines, you need to hold down the Option and Command keys while pressing Return. This is a little different than the Windows edition of Excel, where you hold down Alt while pressing Return. Anyway, it seems to work well, and now I can get nicely-formatted text into my Excel documents!
Backstory: Today in the lab, I found myself listening to some of the old local Detroit bands in my music collection. It got me feeling a bit nostalgic, especially when some tracks came on from an old friend’s punk band, the Bourgeois Filth. Shortly before the band split, he’d given me a demo tape of some very rad, very different stuff the band was working on, but I must have lost it years ago… I can’t even remember the last time I had a cassette player, let alone anything to play in one. I still have their sole CD release, but this afternoon I really wanted to listen through that old tape again.
So anyway, tonight I Googled around a bit. The band’s old webpage is still up on AngelFire (Seriously? I had no idea AngelFire was still around…), but hasn’t been updated since their reunion show 9 years ago. Seems like they never got much attention outside of Detroit; I really can’t seem to find anything useful on the Internets about them. What I did find, however, was an old-school German FTP listing of MP3 sites that probably went dark a decade ago. Including, I think, my old dual Pentium Pro basement server. Near the top of the list is an entry for ftp://216.25.7.132/, sharing albums from such fine musicians as Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, Orbital, and the Bourgeois Filth. I’m reading through this thinking, “Wow, that’s exactly what I used to listen to…” when I notice one of the band names: Semblance of Self. That was the name I released my own material under! Seriously! As much as I’d like to think that someone found those tunes cool enough to bother mirroring them on their own FTP server, I really can’t believe anyone did. So… someone’s still linking to an FTP site I ran during the 90′s, and specifically mentions my old band name. Bizarre!
Tragically, I still can’t seem to find anyone who had a copy of that Bourgeois Filth tape and bothered to encode it into MP3s
Update: Since a few of you have expressed interest, I’ve uploaded the original Bourgeois Filth album. If anyone has MP3s of their last demo tape, I’d love to get a copy!
Friday I leave for IUI 2009, where I’ll be presenting a formative study about end users debugging machine-learned programs. This will be my first conference presentation, and I’m about equal parts excited and nervous. At the very least, I should a chance to head out with my camera in sunny Florida. I’ve hardly even taken it out of its bag this past month, and that needs to change.
I finally finished running participants for our current research study… now to start analyzing the data. The paper deadline is March 8th, which feels like it’s approaching rudely fast. But hey, at least we’re still on track. I’d been worried that bringing in participants would become a 2 or 3-week nightmare like our last study, which would have pushed things way too close to the deadline.
This weekend I bought Henri T. Cat a new scratching board, which he promptly fell in love with. Maybe now he’ll leave my couch alone.
Also, yesterday I learned that I’ll be going to CHI 2009 in Boston! First big conference, eep!
Actually I’m cheating: just like with Ol’ 55, the guitar on this tune was recorded a while ago. Tonight I just redid the vocals. Unlike Ol’ 55, these vocals were done post-martinis, though at the moment I’m not certain if that makes any obvious difference. I suppose we’ll see in the morning.
Update: Oh god. Oh god. Yeah, gin makes a difference. I’ll try redoing this one some other time, I’m removing it for now.
