I’ve fallen behind in posting about the important stuff (food). Over the winter break we had a bit of a slowdown in the approximately weekly “family dinners” my house started in the Fall. Now they are back in full swing. Here is the quick run down of eating Filip’s pet birds, Megan and Gal’s slow cooked meals, and my crepes. As usual, it was a delicious exploration of traditional and world cuisine (I should go into marketing!).
Category Archives: fun
Canon Xti Test Pics
For my quarter century birthday I decided to think about the future and started a retirement fund at Vanguard. To balance out that amount of fiscal responsibility, I also bought myself a Canon Digital Rebel XTi SLR camera. I bought a refurbished model from Adorama.com, so it was (relatively) cheap, but probably still one of the more expensive purchases I’ve made in dollars per cubic inch. I’ll post more about my thoughts on the camera later, but here are some sample pictures I have taken. Additional photo credits go to Megan and Gal.
Winter View
We’ve had a very snowy winter this year in Massachusetts. This animated image shows the view from my bedroom window looking out down our driveway. The pictures were taken sporadically since we had a big snow in early December. Click the picture for a full version (a large 2MB file).
Since I’m sure to forget how I made this, here is what I did using the Imagemagick program:
- convert -delay 100 -loop 0 IMG*.jpg output.gif —– 1 second delay between fames, loops forever, uses all files like IMG_XXX.jpg to make the image
- convert output.gif -resize 20% small.gif —– resizes the image to 20%
Book Review Roundup
Since we don’t have classes for most of January, I’ve had some time to finish up a few books. Here are my condensed reviews, composed largely of subtitles.
Winter Cabining
Last weekend eight of us went camping at the Nunnemacher cabin in New Hampshire, run by the Dartmouth Outdoors Club. The cabin is nestled between some of the ski trails of the Dartmouth Ski Way. We spent two nights with no electricity or running water, and nothing but a drafty, ice cold privy. It was great. Continue reading
My First Book – a blurb.com review
Update 12/31/08: Since writing this I have also had another hardbound and a paperback book published by blurb. In all cases I have been very happy with the quality. Other family members have had good luck as well, although we have noticed that different print batches of the same book can come back with fairly significant differences in color. If you are looking for 100% color accuracy you may be slightly disappointed, but for most people blurb is a great deal and makes very nice products.
As a grad student I’ve had a few publications in conferences, but I recently published my first book. Unlike my previous work which was mostly technical giberish, my latest piece goes back to nature, and the backpacking trip that my dad, brother, and I took up Katahdin, an amazing mountain in Maine. Although the first print run was only two copies, it was very well received, and I’m planning to order a third copy soon. I made the book using software from Blurb.com, a site which makes it easy to create publish your own photo books. Continue reading
In Black and White
I’m a big fan of Google’s Picasa application. Its primary use is as a photo organizer, but it also has some photo touch up features that work pretty well. I was recently trying to turn some of my photos into black and whites, but wasn’t getting the results I was hoping for simply by transforming the image to gray scale in photoshop. Then I read a bit about how Ansel Adams made many of his images so impressive by applying red filters to his lenses. Using colored filters makes it so that different colors turn into different shades of gray. In many of his images, the red filter makes the sky much darker, providing greater contrast against snowy rocks and mountains. I knew I could do this kind of filtering in photoshop, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could also do it in Picasa with just a few easy clicks. Here are my results.
The Grand Canyon
Thanksgiving 2007
We hosted a pot luck thanksgiving dinner at our house this year with a bunch of friends from our department. In total, we had ten people: Megan, Gal, Stefan, Bobby, Brandon, Laura, Marek, Jana, Philipp, and myself. As you’d expect, we had a lot of good food: biscuits, pumpkin bread, spinach spread on toast, cubed beets and turnips, mixed vegies, potatoes au gratin, sweet potato soup, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, and apple pie. Oh, and a turkey too.
Straight Man: A Novel
I just finished reading Richard Russo’s Straight Man
BHD #8 – Spanish Tapas
On my dinner night I made two spanish dishes for Megan and Filip. The first was Patatas Bravas, the quintessential spanish appetizer of fried potatoes in a spicy sauce. This was accompanied by grilled pork on a stick, marinated in a mix of Spanish and Arabic spices.
I had made Patatas Bravas twice over the summer with a different recipe which had a separate, mayonnaise based sauce. The new recipe instead had you cook up the potatoes in spices and hot peppers, which was good, but I don’t think my sauce to potato ratio was quite right. I also had trouble getting the potatoes to brown while frying… I think in the past I’ve had better luck using vegetable oil rather than olive oil.
The second dish of grilled (actually broiled) pork skewers were marinated in a nice mix of coriander and cumin seeds, garlic, and paprika. Just like the potatoes, I’d like to try these again, but make more sauce and marinate the meat for longer.
I need a bit more practice before I can compete with some of the tapas places we visited on our trip to spain last spring, but it was still pretty good. Having the food with Este, one of the better Spanish red wine’s I’ve tried lately ($9 at Whole Foods), didn’t hurt either.