Hot Chocolate - Kevin stole my mug

We spent a lot of time cooking this holiday season. Most of our family gifts included homemade breads and other goodies, plus we cooked our usual holiday meals. In honor of our new kitchen, most of my gifts were cookbooks. (The cookbooks are also great photography books!)

Highlights here are both deep fried. Christmas dinner turkey (on Christmas Eve), and beignets from Cafe du Monde mix on Christmas morning. Both have been traditions in our family now for many years.

Deep Fried Turkey, waiting to be carved

Cafe du Monde Beignets

Sarah’s grandfather would make Rolly Pollys from scratch on occasion. Though they seem to be a lot like cinnamon rolls, her grandfather would prepare them for dessert. Tonight we did the same.

The dough is simple, and more like a crust than bread. Here’s his recipe:

ROLLY POLLYS

• 4 cups sifted flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 4 level teaspoons baking powder
• generous cup of shortening
• liquid (milk) to make a fairly soft dough.

Mix flour, salt & baking powder together. cut in shortening or rub it in until mixture is crumbly. add liquid to make a soft dough. roll dough to about 1 inch thick, spread 1/2 lb soft butter (not melted) then spread this over with light brown sugar to at least 1/2 inch thick, sprinkle with cinnamon, roll up into a long roll. cut slices 1 inch thick, grease pan & place rolly pollys right side, dont pack to tight in the pan. Bake in a hot over for 20 minutes or until light brown & sugar & butter begin to bubble. be careful they do not burn.

The process photos:

The recipe doesn’t say how much milk to use. I used a cup and a half, and that was about right. I also baked them at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. Because it’s a crust and not a bread it doesn’t turn brown like cinnamon rolls do. Critique from the expert also notes that the roll should be much tighter than the one I did.

Part of her happy memories was the mess that was created and that if you made them right you’d be covered with flour at the end. Success!

If you ever visit Monrovia Canyon Park, be sure to grab their “Top 10 Birds of Monrovia Canyon Park” handout. My Acorn Woodpecker photograph was used in it.

Yea Monrovia!

I wrote my first full Flash game over the weekend. It’s called Pong Pong and you can play it at
www.anirama.com/pongpong.

It’s a simple game. You have two paddles, one that moves vertically along the left wall, and one that moves horizontally along the bottom wall. Balls are served from the upper right corner. Using the mouse to control the paddles you need to keep the balls in play. After a number of successful hits additional balls are launched. The more balls you manage, the higher your score per hit.

My best score so far is 1250, with six balls in play. To be fair, I never had a chance to hit the sixth ball - I failed soon after it was launched.

Let me know how you do. Good luck!

Eye of Sauron

Another demo from our CMU ETC team working with the Magic Planet display. The Eye of Sauron will follow you around the room - it’s pretty creepy.

Details on the lighting: The high rim light came from overhead spot lights in the high ceiling, which also created the nice spills on the blue wall. I bounced my flash off a white wall to the right which gave just enough fill to catch the details in Michael’s face. I used a 1/10th second exposure so the globe would be lit enough by the internal projector.

I’m a Sudoku addict. There, I said it.

In particular, I like to solve them in pen, and without writing down little numbers all over the place. I take pride in a clean and solved sudoku - just correct numbers in their squares.

Over time, I developed a straightforward set of algorithms that I step through in my mind that solve all but the hardest puzzles. Since they are just a process I go through, I found I couldn’t actually verbalize them, I just knew how to look at the puzzle and find solutions. I thought it would be a fun exercise to try and program a sudoku solver, thus forcing me to be able to explain to myself the process I go through.

This solver is my current solution. It can’t yet solve every puzzle, but it gets as far as I do without guessing. I know the next algorithm that needs to be added to make it better, but as you can imagine they get harder and harder to implement as the complexity grows, and I haven’t quite got that code part figured out yet.

Feel free to play around with it. It has a few example puzzles built in and you can input your own. The ultimate solver (not mine!), with explanations of a few dozen algorithms is here.

Hey, it works! I moved my blog from using Movable Type over to WordPress. I had two reasons for wanting to do this.

First, I wanted a link at the bottom of the main page to older posts. This seems trivial, but Movable Type builds static pages so it’s a lot of work to get it to do that. WordPress serves up pages dynamically (meaning each page is created when it’s requested) so it’s easy. I don’t get enough traffic to need the performance increase that MT’s static pages give you, and if I did I’d set up caching to handle it.

Second, and even more significantly, I like the direct php access to WordPress templates. MT uses their own Template Tags which makes their templates easier to read but harder to customize.  MT allows you to include php in the pages, but I would have had to change all the URLs to end in .php rather than .html which I really don’t like.  Yeah, you can rewrite those in Apache but ugh. WP’s templates are all in php, so getting into them is easy, making integration into the rest of my site very simple.

As promised on WP’s site, it was fast and easy to install WP and import all my MT posts. Maybe 10 minutes. I spent a lot more time than that working on the templates (which is still a work in process).

Finally, I changed the URL from ‘weblog’ to just ‘blog’ - really, what was I thinking before??? I also did some Apache rewrites so that old links aren’t broken.

I enjoyed getting out and shooting again today. I visited the baylands in Redwood Shores and mostly photographed the birds, and though I wasn’t thrilled with any of the final shots I think I learned a lot about how to do better next time.

Afterwards, I wanted to do some macro-photography and walked along the levee. It isn’t very green there this time of year, and insect life wasn’t visible so I almost gave up. Then the dried plants along the side of the path caught my eye.

These first two images are both called “Glory Days”, as they looked as if they had had theirs. Springsteen’s song was running through my head the entire time.

Glory Days I

Glory Days II

The third is titled “Last Grasp.” It’s of dead Queen Anne’s Lace, and reminded me of small skeletal hands reaching up to the heavens.

Last Grasp

All these shots were heavily processed in Lightroom 2 to get the dreamy quality.

www.isobamapresident.com

My buddy Tom lent me this book over the summer. It’s a wonderful read - you get to know Wayne Henderson, one of the world’s premiere guitar builders, as you follow the process of him building a guitar for Clapton.

Wayne only builds a handful of guitars a year, and if you happen to get on his waiting list you might get yours in five or ten years - IF he decides yours is a priority.

The story is much more about Wayne and his circle of friends that it is about how the guitar is built. But through the process you discover the link between the craft and the art, and how it is that some people have that buried in their nature. The fact that it’s Clapton’s guitar is incidental, and in fact somewhat disappointing - you really want #326 to end up with someone who sat with Wayne through the process.