Mmm... those who know me know I'm passionate about food -- so I was glad that Cari McGee took the initiative to post a few restaurant reviews for some of my favorite places to eat in Richland. Make sure to swing by and read her reviews (and my comments), and provide your own input.
Stone Soup
Rosy's Diner
Atomic Brewpub
Cafe at Queensgate
[edited for link corrections]
There's a running almost-joke between me and some of my friends. Like many creative people with ADHD, I'm constantly coming up with ideas. Some far fetched, some fairly down to earth, some complex, some brilliantly simple. The funny part is that without exception any ideas I come up with are patented or at least announced via a press release anywhere from 2 days to 2 years after I think them up.
I've heard of the philosophy that "there are no new ideas" -- but this has reached a level of incredulity. Every. Single. Time. The average time span between my brainstorm and someone else coming out with it seems to be about 3 months... often too short of a time for me to realistically pull any resources together and develop my idea into a product/service.
So what I really need to do, since it seems that I most likely won't have the opportunity to benefit from my ideas directly, is to find a way to benefit from the fact that I have these ideas at all -- and before they're announced. So if you're in charge of a giant think tank that wants to contract me to sole-source provide you with a head-start on what will be hitting the markets/internet, let me know :)
And until someone decides to take me up on that offer, I'm going to start throwing my ideas on this blog as I have time. So here are a few I had yesterday evening and this afternoon.
I hate unlocking my phone/PDA. It's a pain, but a necessary pain. I believe the technology and expertise exists for someone to develop a removable memory card (e.g., SD) that not only can function as a normal storage device, but also contains the circuitry necessary to communicate with a corresponding linked chip via wireless (RFID, wifi, zigbee, NFC, or proprietary) . The two chips/devices working in tandem with some software on the smartphone itself would utilize PKI techniques to ensure that my smartphone was unlocked whenever it was within range of my person, and automatically locked if it goes out of range. Simple, right? Get to work, Eye-Fi dudes :)
The idea I had this afternoon is a pretty simple idea that would be fairly tricky technically... basically I want a couple things:
I'd like the ability to set my double-home button push on the iPhone to be able to launch any application I desire. This isn't mandatory for the success of the idea, but would be very useful.
And I'd like an application that would launch another application on my iPhone by using voice recognition.
Example -- when driving, I often hear songs on the radio station which I'm unfamiliar with. The station does a lousy job (as in almost never) of announcing the artist & title, so I'm left fumbling for my iPhone so I can page through my app listings to find & launch Midomi. It'd be sweet if I could just double-tap home to launch my "voice launchpad" and then tell it, "Midomi."
There you go. Get to work, invisible code monkeys.
I made some phenomenally tasty lamb curry last night, followed by some yummy dessert. My house smelled like an Indian restaurant -- the only thing missing was some naan bread.
Lamb Curry
1 sweet potato, peeled & cubed
1/2 carrot, cubed
1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1/2 jalapeño or other pepper, diced
1 stick of celery, diced
1/2 cup of sun-dried tomatoes, diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 Tbsp garlic, diced
3 medium tomatoes, cubed
1 lb. lamb steak, cut into 3/4 inch cubes
1 tsp black pepper, ground
1 cup red wine
1 package of S&B - Golden Curry Sauce Mix, chopped up well
1 1/2 Tbsp Mae Ploy Yellow Curry paste
1 Tbsp Mae Ploy Red Curry paste
Cut & add the ingredients in the order listed to a slow-cooker and mix well.
I assembled everything the night before and put it into the refridgerator overnight. The next day I had Carmen take it out & plug it in on low when she got up -- so it was going pretty much all day.
When I got home, I made up some saffron rice:
Saffron Rice
2 cups water
1 1/4 cups jasmine rice
1 tsp salt
1 pinch of saffron
Mix & bring to a boil, put on simmer and let cook for 20 minutes. Fluff.
That was dinner... and it was really, really good. I would have felt a bit better had I actually made the curry myself -- I have everything I need (including the fermented shrimp paste -- don't ask). But the night I assembled everything I was also making our our regular dinner for that evening (Eggplant Parmesean) as well as cooking up some organic carrot puree for Hunter... so I don't feel *too* bad about using store-bought curries. It ended up tasting very close to a Massamam style curry. Mmmm.
For dessert, I made Indian Spiced Rice Pudding -- a recipe I saw yesterday on one of the cooking blogs I follow, http://coconutlime.blogspot.com/
I only ended up making a small modification -- I didn't feel like going spice-cabinet-spelunking to look for my nutmeg pods and then getting the mace from them (too much work). So instead of mace I ended up using a scant 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg & 1/4 tsp of allspice. And fresh ground cardamom.
These are chewy gelatin/jelly candies, similar to the famous Aplets & Cotlets.
2 c applesauce
1 c sugar
3 pkgs unflavored gelatin
1 box (3oz ) cherry flavored gelatin (jell-o, etc)
2 Tbsp lemonjuice
2 Tbsp cornstarch
---
1 c chopped dried cranberries (craisins)
1 tsp vanilla
1 c nuts, chopped (optional)
heavy aluminum foil
cornstarch
Combine first 6 ingredients in a pot & let sit about 5 minutes while you line a baking pan or shallow-sided cookie sheet with heavy aluminum foil.
Cook the mixture, stirring occasionally, until it reaches a boil. If using craisins, dump them in now. Continue to cook it for another 2 or 3 minutes, then pull off the stove and stir in the vanilla and nuts (if you're using them). Pour into the lined baking pan & let sit until cool. You can put it into the freezer to set up once it's cooled down a bit. After it's well set, peel off the aluminum foil, cut into pieces, and dust the pieces with cornstarch (doesn't get sticky & won't affect the taste, unlike powdered sugar).
Never underestimate the power of the internet. A short while ago some kind anonymous soul (thank you!) noticed my write-up and some of the issues I had with the Chenbro case (specifically, the SATA hot-swap backplane). They let the manufacturer know, and Chenbro tech support posted a comment with a possible fix.
Their fix was to solder pin 11 to either pin 10 or pin 12 on the connectors to disable the staggered spin-up. Since my soldering iron is kinda chunky, and I didn't really want to do anything permanent to the boards in case this wasn't actually going to result in a fix, I busted out my multimeter and looked for alternatives.
Each board has two drive connectors... one of the pins for one of the connectors traces out to a jumper, but my luck ran out there -- the other traces out and terminates at some teensy-tiny little fleck of metal that would be just as hard to solder to. Strike one.
I tried Arctic Silver... which, as it turns out, doesn't conduct. Strike two.
Next I tried a loop of wire... and that seemed like it might work, but the positioning was tricky. In the end I used a piece of stripped conductor from a cat-5 cable (nice and thin gauge), bent it into a "U" shape, and pushed through the gap between the connector and the board, then twisted it together -- effectively grounding pin 11 to pin 12. I made sure to test that pins 14 & 9 weren't grounded, and that 10, 11, and 12 all were grounded.
