15.5 pound brisket, $3.78 per pound, Sam’s in Idaho Falls, 4 Tbsp salt, 4 Tbsp pepper, 2 Tbsp garlic powder. Gonna put them on at 225℉ to start.
1810, 9 Nov: brisket on the smoker.
1830: sourdough is fermenting.
2200: flat is at 160℉, point at 142℉.
0210, 10 Nov: flat is 166℉, point 164℉. Crutched it!
0730: flat is 186℉, point 187℉. Turned temperature up to 250℉.
0845: put the rest of the ingredients in the bread. I’ve continued doing the 1 tsp regular yeast along with the sourdough starter, and doubling sourdough starter over the Josie Baker recommendation.
CybatiWorks is an educational and research tool for learning about Industrial Control System cyber components. I haven’t used it much, but it looks like it’ll simulate a PLC controlling a process, and it’ll do it on a Raspberry PI, GPIO-connected hardware, and a controlling HMI (Human-Machine Interface) desktop. You can buy the hardware pre-setup, then use it in a course.
The person who runs the company is Matthew Luallen, and he’s quite responsive over email. I’ve been trying to look into the system a bit, and CybatiWorks offers the RasPI image for free through their “Community” program. Unfortunately that’s run by Google+, and is now a broken link. Emailing the responsive founder, however, will get you a link to the necessary image.
I’ve done some small research about blockchain recently, and just want to put my thoughts down on paperblog so I can stop thinking them. Most of this is rehashing information I’ve read, but the “signed code verification” piece towards the end is an idea of mine that I’ve not read about elsewhere.
Blockchain is a hot term these days. It’s a popular management buzzword, and as such it can get thrown about as a cure for just about all that ails you. All businesses need to store data, and blockchain is known as a data-store, so everyone wants to make sure you’ve considered their (probably expensive) blockchain solution for data storage…
Time to make sourdough again! The starter has been going for a couple weeks, but during that time it never adopted the stinkiness I associated with the early starter stages last time. It does seem to grow after feeding, it produces some alcohol on top… It’s probably doing it’s thing enough to make some bread, so it’s time to try that out.
I was trying to diagnose the difference between the starter this time and last, and the best I can come up with is that the whole wheat flour is pretty old this time. It’s only a couple months away from it’s best-by date, so it has been sitting on the shelf for almost a year. I think in that time the natural yeasts and bacteria in the flour maybe mostly died. This, the harder time starting out. If this loaf is sour and good, perhaps this is really the better situation. Maybe the yeast just went into suspension, and the bacteria died, for instance, letting me skip the “stinky gym socks” state of starter. I don’t know.
Well, we’re still unpacking things, but we’ve been here for a bit. One of the things I was most excited to have arrive is the smoker - not gonna lie, that was a top priority. I’ve been looking forward to having some smoked Salmon again, and Sarah has mentioned it a couple times too.
There’s a Sam’s Club more convenient these days, so I picked up some salmon there. They had Sockeye for about $12 a pound, and “Atlantic” for about $9. I went with the Atlantic to see how it’d go. This looks like the same fish I was buying back at Costco in MD. I’ve heard the Sockeye is amazing - maybe next time. At that price though, I’ll probably smoke some other fish to see how it goes. Trout? This time I picked up two fillets totaling about 5.5 lbs.
Everybody spends time advocating for something. “Pitching” something. You want your boss to consider a smarter way of working, one that you’ve come up with? You pitch it to her. You want someone to use an open-source project you’ve created? You pitch it to them.
A recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast covered meetings. Two or more people gathering to accomplish the business of business, as they defined it. It gave me some things I hope I remember the next time I’m organizing a recurring staff meeting…
Organize an agenda around questions-to-answer
Hold smaller meetings
Keep track and time
Meetings need agendas, just about every book I’ve read which touches on meetings agrees on this point. The agenda needs to be communicated to participants in advance, so folks can come ready to accomplish it. Folks need to know what to expect. Without an agenda meetings usually devolve into chaos, although sometimes it takes a couple aimless meetings in a row to hit this point. Staff meetings often don’t have a pre-published agenda, but they generally do have a set of topics they proceed through in a set order, and that becomes the known-agenda for the group.
To improve innovation on a team, consider building a team differently based on the problem you’re facing. There are many ways of categorizing a problem your team must solve, but one is along the axis of well-definedness.
Well-defined problems – here, you know what you’re trying to solve, you know what end-state your audience will find acceptable, maybe you’ve seen similar problems solved elsewhere or you even know some current acceptable solutions.
Everybody has a strength. Probably more than one. We are better-employed when we use our strengths. When possible, improving your weaknesses can make you a more effective individual… But we already possess our strengths and can put them to work now.
Build on My Strengths and on My Peoples’ Strengths
Know your peoples’ strengths and put those strengths to work. Build teams with a diversity of strengths. When a task lines up with an individual’s strengths, put them on that task.
When I was flight commander, supervising a group of fellow nerds with nerd jobs, I spent almost all of my time on the administrative requirements. They needed me to do the boss stuff - that was my official position!
I really wanted to do the nerd stuff though. It’s more fun, it’s my strength, and I’ve got more experience with it… I’ll admit that as the boss I had input into many nerdy problems, and having that was rewarding.