unwiredben

I've been very lax about writing. In part, it's been because I've been busy and I can't talk about work things here. It's also because a lot of the general "what am I doing" stuff is now showing up in my Facebook profile.

Kittens
Velco and Magnolia continue to get bigger, but they're staying very cute. I think they're getting more cuddly as they grow up, although they still have their wild kitten fight times. We're letting them around the house more, although my office is still a no-cat zone and probably will remain that way for the foreseeable future. They just had their last vaccinations, and in March they will both get spayed. They sleep with us in the evening, although that does lead to some interesting bedtimes; last night, one of them kept attacking my toes under the cover, and it got really annoying. Usually, they're quite nice, and they often curl up and nap on our laps when we're watching TV in the main room.

Electronics
I've taken up electronics and microcontrollers as a new hobby, mostly inspired by the antics of Brooklyn's own NYC Resistor hackerspace. I've taken a few classes there where I made some programs run on an Arduino board, then I ordered myself a soldering iron and some kits and made all of those. The immediate feedback of having code you write run on a board and control basic electronics is really great, and there's enough momentum with sources like Make Magazine. I'm fortunate to have always had a small interest in this, but I never could get over the hump of designing circuits. I think I've finally found the right combination of development hardware and support network to get me into the game.

My favorite project so far has been a solder-it-together board called the Mignonette. It's a small AVR Atmega88 microcontroller with four push buttons as inputs and a 5x7 LED matrix display. It came preloaded with a test application and simple "Munch" game. Last night, I got the TinyUSBISP programmer that I built from a kit to work and loaded up another game, Attack. I'm in the middle to taking the source for Attack and converting it into a dice roller application that uses the four buttons to let you pick a die type, pick a multiplier (for doing 3d6, for example), and roll the die. Of course, I'd make it play some sort of beep over the speaker while it's rolling so no one rolls without being noticed.

Christmas Celebration
Annelies and I stayed in New York for Christmas, but we were in contact with our families. On Christmas Eve, we used Skype to do a video call with my mom, dad, and aunt back in Georgia and we opened presents over the webcam. Annelies got us a microwave oven for the kitchen, something I think we'd both been secretly craving. My dad made some gorgeous wood stands that he shipped up here. I got a printer stand for the desk that lets me use the room above my laser printer in the corner of my desk, while Annelies got an amazing music stand that rests on the edge of a bookshelf and lets her see her sheet music while she's practicing the violin.

We cooked a nice Christmas dinner for each other with Annelies making some delicious baked macaroni and cheese, and me making braised collard greens with garlic and onion. We've been doing a fair amount of cooking together, often inspired by the great selection of produce we can get at the Park Slope Co-op. Just last night, we made portabella mushroom soba noodles with roasted beets and turnips in a red wine reduction.

Family Travel
I got my sister an airline ticket to New York for her Christmas present. She's going to be coming here in mid-January for a week in the city away from the darkness of Copenhagen. I'm very excited to be taking here around and getting a chance to do some tourist stuff that I don't normally do. We don't have a formal plan, but she'll be here on January 20th during the presidential inauguration, so I'm sure we'll find a party that evening to attend.

With a new location, I get to start a new blog.  Tonight, I registered and set up Veg Out! Brooklyn, the followup to my successful Veg Out! Austin site.  That one has been taken over by lizardprincess who will start adding her own content soon.  The Brooklyn site is trying some different things, with the only categories being "News" and "Reviews", and everything else being done with tags.  I've got my first review up for a little cafe called the Perch Cafe. 

For the geeks out there, I formatted all the contact information using the hCard microformat so browsers and other tools can automatically recognize that there's an address on the page.  I installed the Operator plugin for Firefox, and it recognized the hCard right away, giving me the option of adding it to my address book or mapping it on Google.

I'm not going to publicize the new blog much until I can get some more content on it; I've been enough cool places in the last week to get started, but I won't really have time to write more until I get to California on Wednesday.

For a few days, I'm back in Austin... there's more travel coming soon, but nothing that will have me away for months at a time.

It's been a bit odd getting readjusted to life in suburbia. The distance from my house to the nearest shop (the Texan Mart) is about seven NYC city blocks, and the shop is far inferior to most of the not-so-great delis that were on Broadway or Amsterdam. Less foot traffic means fewer sales which means less selection and higher prices which means the store isn't very attractive. The distance between here and the closest eatery is about twelve blocks, and that's either the not-very-veggie Cool River or the not-that-great Bear Creek, and both of those require long walks through parking lots filled with cars that don't know what to do with pedestrians.

On the other hand, I've been really enjoying the local food that I've gotten to by car since arriving: Food Shui, Kerbey Lane, Alamo Drafthouse, Chuy's, and TacoDeli! I also got a jar of homemade pickles in the mail from my friend Jessi yesterday... I had a few last night, and they're spicy and delicious. I had some good food up there, but I like things better here.

I've been lax writing about my New York visit for the last few weeks since getting back from LinuxWorld in San Francisco. It's been a very busy time here in Morningside Heights. Annelies finished her summer associateship and has been working on papers for school during the day, and I've been busy with a lot of detailed work on speeding up the video playback on the Foleo.

We've been to a lot of cool restaurants. Just this evening, we headed over to downtown Brooklyn to visit Grimaldi's for some very yummy pizza. They've got a coal-fired oven that gets up to about 850 degrees, and it makes the crust really nice, crisp and chewy. They don't skimp on excellent toppings either.

On Saturday, we headed down to Chinatown to go to Vegetarian Dim Sum House, a place that serves all veggie dim sum (duh!) It was a bit of an adventure; I really loved the hot-and-sour soup, but some of the other items were a bit mushy and odd tasting. It was nice to have "pork" bun finally, and the place was hopping.

We also got to see some of the FringeNYC festival pieces. The first was "Galatea", an interesting take on Pygmalion, but its clunky takes on science and Buddhism and trite ending made us view it as a failed experiment. The better work was "Helmet", a videogame-themed take on the relationship between a troubled teen and a video-game store owner. It made clever use of gaming tropes and had sharp dialog and a lot of action.

There were more interesting food adventures. I recommend both Cafe Viva Natural Pizza on north Broadway and Hangawi, a really nice vegan Korean restaurant near the Empire State Building in Koreatown. I also really like the local bar and grill up here, The Heights, with their second floor dining room and great veggie-friendly lunch specials.

Finally worth noting: Nussbaum & Wu. It's a deli and bakery just a couple of blocks from year that makes lots of really delicious bagels. I've discovered the wonder of a good egg and cheese bagel; I'll have my last one (for now) this morning before we head out. They've helped me appreciate how good bagels can be.

I fly back to Austin on Monday. I really do love New York, and I don't think I'll wait another 33 years to return.

Did you hear about the cryptographer that tried to turn a mixture of peanut butter and mayonnaise into clarified butter? He wanted to do a Jiffy-Hellmann Ghee Exchange.

(To those of you who don't get this, be glad. To those of you that do, I'm very, very sorry.)

Today at lunch, I noticed that one of the two fair-trade coffee's brewed at the TacoDeli at Gracy Farms was Cafe Monteverde.  Yes, that's the same Monteverde that I just visited in Costa Rica; I'm pretty sure we drove by some of the coffee fields on the way out of town.  It's kinda cool to be able to pick up something here in Austin that was produced a thousand miles away in a little village where you've got friends.

I've had a very busy couple of weeks since getting back from Boston, so I'm just now finding time to talk about the last two days of my trip.

Saturday was a trip up to Salem, "Witch City".  It was an easy drive out of the city, passing through lots of smaller towns until we reached the coast.  For a while, Salem was the largest port in the US, with the largest business being fishing.  We got lost a few times and had to turn around after crossing the bridge to exit the city, but eventually we got a parking space near the Salem Commons.

A walk through the park in the rain, and we found lunch at a Mexican eatery, then we toured the Salem Wax Museum.  Lots of life-sized displays of early trading life and the horrors of the trials.  It was OK, but there was a pretty horrid statue that they were raising money to bronze.  We just said no to that.  We then toured one of the cemeteries, looking at graves from the 18th century, including that of Judge Hathorne.  That was followed by the Witch Village tour which started in this odd gift/magick shop which mixed kitch with Wicca stuff.   Our guide was a friendly young man who linked all sorts of early religious traditions to witchcraft and spun conspiracy theories about the Church's vilification of local healers in order to corner the market on medicine.  It ended with a stuffed dragon display and a speech about how dragons are like guardian angels.  It was cute but I had to stifle many laughs.

On Sunday, Annelies and I brought the car back to Harvard Square, then went to downtown Boston to visit the science museum.  It was fun; we got to see early computer artifacts and a demonstration of the world's largest Van De Graff generator.  We also got to see the Planetarium program on supernovas in chairs that leaned way back.  That was followed by a walk to the North End, a district filled with Italian restaurants.  We found a nice family-owned place for dinner where I had very spicy farfalle pasta with piles of mushrooms.

It was a really great trip, made even better by the ability to visit with my girlfriend and see lots of the city and surrounding area together.  She comes back to Austin in a month, and I'm really excited to be able to go do more with her soon!

The last work day of my trip was really a fun day.  The Palm group in Andover has an annual celebration where they do a company meeting in the morning and a big luncheon in the afternoon.  This year, they did the meeting at the Wentworth by the Sea resort along the north end of the New Hampshire coast.  It was a rainy morning and a bit of a drive along I-495 and I-95 to get to the location, but once I saw the ocean view, it was just fine.  That meeting went well, and we then drove seven miles down the coastline to Saunder's, a restaurant on Rye Harbor with a great view of the ocean and lots of the docked ships.

After lunch, I said goodbye to the team and headed down to Boston, hitting my first patch of bad traffic after crossing the Tobin bridge on US 1 ($3 toll, but only in one direction).  I managed to find the right route on the first try, making my way to Allston to see Annelies.  She had been planning something big; about 6PM, we took a bus trip to Harvard Square and found the American Repertory Theater where we saw their production of Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit", the play that provided us with the phrase "Hell is other people."  It was a very nice take on the material performed on a tilting stage that provided a physical analog to the mental tension between the three main actors.  Then, we walked a few blocks to UpStairs on the Square, where Ani had made reservations in their Soirée Dining Room where we have the five-course vegetarian tasting menu, including

• Salad of Roasted Beets, Horseradish Panna Cotta, Arugula & Passionfruit
• Green Garlic Soup with Fingerling Hash
• Ravioli of Sweet English Peas, Sweet Butter and Pecorino Romano

The chef also made us an appetizer asparagus soup served in a shot glass, with thick cream on the bottom and vegetable foam on top.  It was one of the best meals I'd had in terms of presentation and complex flavors, and it was a lovely birthday gift from a lovely woman.

More on our visit to Salem ("Witch City") and a Sunday in Downtown Boston in followup posts.

I've been in Andover all week working at the Palm office.  It's been a very productive trip, and tomorrow I get to drive out to the New Hampshire shore for an offsite meeting and lunch.  Unfortunately, it looks like it will be rainy all day, with a 90% chance of precipitation on the coast.  I'll try to take some pictures, but it will likely be grey and balmy.

Andover is a fairly upscale town, and I've had some quite nice meals, although there was some disappointment.  Monday night was a trip to Bertucci's, one of a regional chain of Italian diners.  The menu didn't have a lot of vegetarian choices, so I had an eggplant parma with a side of spinach.  Neither was good, with the eggplant having tough skin and a mushy mouthfeel and the spinach was drowned in butter.

Tuesday was dinner with my manager and the main sponsor of my project at a French bistro called Cassis.  The goat cheese and wild mushroom torte was a brilliant appetizer, with a delicate crust and a tart salad.  The server had the kitchen make a vegetable plate for me from the side dishes of the other items, and it was quite good, with roasted tomato, cous cous, and braised root vegetables.  My dining companions had various meaty things and French wine, and the total bill was over $200; I'm glad I get to turn in expenses.

Wednesday was quite nice.  Annelies came out on the train with her friend Andrew, and we met Alicia, Andrew's girlfriend, for a dinner at Mootone, a Japanese restaurant adjacent to the train station.  My miso soup was quite tasty as was the green salad with ginger dressing; the tempura vegetables were large and well coated, and it would have been nice to have had a knife to cut them into smaller pieces for sharing.  I had an asparagus roll and a pickled radish roll, and both were nicely prepared, delicious to both the eye and tongue.  I got to try a few pieces of Ani's sour plum and mint roll, which had an unexpectedly strong flavor; she didn't like it, but I thought it might merit an occasional order.  After dinner, we ventured down Main Street to a mini-golf course where we shot 18 holes and then had delicious roadside stand ice cream.

This evening, I joined a group of co-workers for another expense account dinner, this time at Glory, a restaurant and lounge on a downtown Andover side street.  My appetizer was one of the favorite things I've tried on this trip, an heirloom tomato and mozerella salad with a wonderful vinaigrette dressing.  Everything tasted crisp and fresh and the portion size was quite large.  My main dish was potato gnocci, a quite delicious pasta dish served with summer squash slivers and grated cheese.  It was followed by a plate of sorbets; they were nice, but I preferred the ice cream from the previous night.

I've really been doing a lot more than eating, but I can't tell you about that part :)  Things have been going well, though, and I feel like I won't be leaving too many loose threads over the weekend while I'm out running around New England.

My flight back to Austin in early Monday, with me getting into Bergstrom about 11:30AM after a Dallas connection.  I think I'll be living on tomato and cucumber salad next week to make up for the rich living while on the corporate dole.  In my defense, most of those places weren't my idea, although it's not taken a lot of arm twisting to get me to come along either :)

I got into Boston's Logan airport on Saturday night about 10:15PM, and before long kazanya was at the baggage claim to bring me back to her place. My first experience with the T (the rapid transit train system) was mostly positive. I've got three trips left on my card, one of which is allocated to my Monday morning run to the airport. I had a late dinner at Spike's Junkyard Dogs, a local hot dog chain that has a veggie dog option; I had Buffalo dog (blue cheese, buffalo wing sauce, scallions) and shared my curly fries with Ani.

On Sunday, we got up and walked over to Harvard Square, a nice hike in hot and humid conditions. It reminds me of a better version of the Drag, with nicer resturants and more shops. I finally got to visit a Newbury Comics store after seeing them mentioned online for years, and we shared some nice southern Indian food at a bruch buffet. I also got to visit a very cool kids' bookstore where I scanned through "Make Way for Ducklings", a classic illustrated book about a family of ducks living in the Boston parks.

We picked up my rental car and went back to Ani's place where we waited for her friend Andrew who was going to meet us to hang out and catch dinner. We went back to Cambridge, parking near Common Square, and ended up at an Ethopian place called Asmara, which serves on traditional basketwoven tables with portions distributed across big pieces of injara bread. It was quite yummy, and we followed up dinner with a car tour of downtown Boston, including a visit to the theater district and a stop at the Boston Natural Gardens. The Gardens were really pretty, and we were able to get pictures of all of us sitting on the statues of the ducks from "Make Way for Ducklings".

I made my way up to Andover for my work visit this morning, my first real experience with navigating in Boston and its surrounds. I was only 40 minutes late, after making at least five wrong turns where I had to reorient myself. On the drive up I-93, I had to swerve around an orange wheelbarrow that had fallen in the middle of the road; I hope no one hit it before they were able to get it removed.

I'm pretty tired right now, so I'm looking forward to a comfortable evening at my hotel. My next night of rest will likely be Thursday as plans have already been made for fun on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday nights.

Yesterday was my 32nd birthday, and I had a small cookout at tangoglenn's place in the late afternoon to celebrate.  There was much grilling of veggie burgers, bell peppers, squash, zuccinni, and sweet potato, along with a cucumber-and-tomato salad I made from kazanya's recipe, and some Central Market apple pie with ice cream on top.  Much good conversation, and I really appreciate all those who came.

However, I'm writing this to make a record of the "mad libs"-style birthday card that lizardprincess gave to me.  My friends aren't particularly ribald, so this is family friendly:

Friends, this is a surprise party for Ben (person).  We are here to celebrate her/his dog (noun).  I must say that she/he doesn't look a day over 6. (number)  Naturally, we have some smelly (adjective) presents for her/him.  And we had the bakery send up a huge loud (adjective) cheese (noun) with 12 (number) candles on it.  We all want to wish her/him a very green (adjective) birthday and many happy trees (plural noun).

Thanks, everyone.  Now, to get finshed packing and head to the airport for my flight to Cali!

I've been doing some rework over at Veg Out! Austin this morning.  I've cleaned up some borders, adjusted some font sizes, and added more pictures to the site.  I want to do some more extensive rework, especially with the way that lists of reviews are shown in the archive pages, but I think the changes already help a lot.  Now, I just need to write more content for the site.  I've been wanting to do a comparison piece on how different local places do nachos for several months now, and despite lots of research (hehe), I've not sat down to write everything up just yet.

One of these opened up just down the road from me, and I recently wrote about it over at Veg Out! Austin. However, I'm mainly using this post to test out my new scanner and to test our LJ's Scrapbook photo hosting service.

I saw this at a shopping center in Cupertino (near Apple's campus!) when I headed to lunch today. $3 is much, much, much too much to pay for that particular concoction.

New development on Parmer brings more neat places within a short walk of my house. From the sign, it looks like a sushi place and a Mexican cantina will soon join Bear Creek Cafe and It's a Grind. I'm hoping they aren't just soulless franchises, but instead locally owned businesses with cool people and veggie friendly menus. A guy can dream, right?

Update: the sushi place is called Tomo Sushi. It doesn't seem to be a chain, although it's a fairly common name. The Mexican place is Salsarita's, a fresh-mex chain based out of North Carolina. They have veggie stuff, but their site isn't very comprehensive. There's also a Kolache Factory, which promises to be "a whole new way to eat" -- they sell buns filled with stuff. The fruit kolaches and jalapeno and cheddar kolaches sounds like they've got potential.

Well, I've gotten everything cleaned up and back in place after a pretty successful Academy Awards party here at Chez Ben. This year, I had eight guests, including local film stars poyboy and senorjacob, taking a break from finishing up their new film "The Cassidy Kids" for its premiere at SXSW. Also in the audience was Bryan's friend Kim, his sister astraether and her boyfriend sentientkhan, my friends Patrick and Tiffany, and Tiff's friend Davide.

The show itself wasn't as exciting as ones in the past. Jon Stewart had a lot of funny moments, but it didn't seem like he was winning over the crowd in the Kodak theater. We didn't like the use of music during all of the speeches, but it did seem that no one went too long this year. Cheers to having the pimp song win for "Hustle and Flow", and it was fun seeing George Clooney mug through his one award. Kim had the record for the most correct predictions with 16 correct answers, including being the only guest who thought "Crash" was going to win best picture.

The food at the party went over well. I made chipotle black bean dip, fridge pickles, and pesto toast rounds with tomato and feta cheese. Davide brought some other more traditional bruschettas, Astra brought vegetables and dip, and the Sullivans provided some nice cheese cubes and chips.

In all, it was about the right size for my place -- I could have handled a couple more, but that would have been it The vibe was nice and low-key, and I hope everyone had a good time. I'll have to come up with a good reason to invite people over again later in the Spring.

(as seen at the local Thundercloud)

I've been getting into cooking lately. Actually, I'm not so much into cooking as I'm into cutting, dicing, peeling, and chopping. Doing violence to vegetables is such a lovely thing. First, there's the whole fridge pickle kick that I've been on since mid-January, and now I've discovered how easy it is to make homemade salsa. My first batch features one white onion, three Roma tomatoes, one large green bell pepper, six cloves of garlic, the juice of two small limes, a splash of vinegar, a dash of Louisiana hot sauce, some salt and freshly-ground pepper. I chopped all of this up and put it in a dish to sit in my fridge for several hours, then used my handy chopper to do the final blend for an individual serving. I tried it earlier without the blend, but it was a bit too chunky. Of course, this is a very mild salsa. I didn't have any strong peppers around to add to the mix, although there's sufficient volume remaining to do some experiments after a visit to the local grocery store.

I guess all those episodes of "Good Eats" are finally having an effect on me.

Tags: food

This has been a very busy Sunday. Lots of socializing and some interesting fun with food.

1) veggie sushi and tempura with lizardprincess and her fiancee, followed by viewing episodes of "Little Brittan" and "Good Eats".

2) After getting home, I took a hike to the local coffee shop to spend about 90 minutes on work stuff.

3) When I got home, I took my new kite out to catch some wind in the local school yard. I got it airborne, but it's listing to the right, so I need to make adjustments before the next windy afternoon.

4) I got to prepare a few of my spicy chipotle bean dip (a cooked mixture of refried black beans, refried pinto beans, whole black beans, and pured chipotle peppers), and I also setup a habenero cheddar cheese tray with crackers and a plate of refrigerator pickles, garnished with salt and freshly-ground black pepper.

5) Several friends from "The Show With No Name", including poyboy, came over to watch the Super Bowl in high def. I got to reconfigure my couch and some tables, and we had a really great time. I got to make a lot of jokes at the expense of the teams and officials, and we saw several really exciting plays and a pretty good half-time show by the Rolling Stones.

I'm now down here on the re-reconfigured couch, watching the recording of "Gray's Anatomy", and winding down a little before heading off to bed. Let's hope there's plenty of excitement to come this week.

It's been a while since a fortune cookie message made me laugh, but the one from lunch at Firebowl Cafe today did that. It was short and to the point: "You are not illiterate."