This morning I finished Planet Money’s Episode 963: 13,000 Economists. 1 Question.. These fine folks make one of my favorite podcasts - each week is a different look at something weird from a weird perspective. It sounds like it’s very market/economy focused, but it’s really focused on everything economics. In the past decades economics has branched out to look at nearly every field of human endeavor with a mathematical eye. It’s not always very successful, but the economist perspective does make me look at things differently.
A friend and coworker told me about intermittent fasting a few years ago. She was doing it as part of a weight loss competition at work… She was one of those folks that says they want to lose weight, but - I’m not really sure why they actually need to? My wife does that too - doesn’t need to lose weight but makes plans to do-so anyway.
Anyway - this woman was doing intermittent fasting by not eating for most of the day. At the time I thought I’d never do that… I’d just get “hangry” and be mean to folks around me. I didn’t want to do that…
I recently converted this blog over from a WordPress installation to use static pages generated by Hugo. I’ve used Hugo for my other recent web creations and I’ve been very impressed. The templating system is very nice, the page generation is lightning fast, and I’m always able to find something near what I need in the themes.
One WordPress feature I liked was the listing of articles by year and month… My blog had a little timeline on the side with each year and month listed, annotated with the number of postings I made during each. This let me look back through my ramblings chronologically, which is how a lot of them are organized in my head.
File "asdf.py", line 2
print("Result is: {}".format(result))
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
result = ((5*10) +15print("Result is: {}".format(result))
Two lines of code… Syntax error on the print line, evidently. But where? That line looks so simple and correct! And pointing directly at the t?
Well - it’s not really on the print line. Folks who have done any amount of programming will look at the preceeding line fairly quickly and notice the missing parenthesis.
We were out of sourdough once again, so it was time to make some fresh! About halfway through I realized we didn’t have enough of the bread flour I needed. Instead of 375g, I put in the 200g we had, then about 75g whole wheat flour and 100g all purpose flour.
And how did it turn out? The dough rose as normal, baked as normal, and tastes almost normal. The result is maybe a little tougher than usual, and slightly darker. It’s still great though.
I was thinking this morning about how I might manage an Air Force unit that provides networked server management services. For some reason. I realized that, while I know a bit about some of the technology used to provide cloud services, and manage a server farm - or at least what’s used by some cloud providers - I don’t know much about how they organize their business. I started to wonder if someone from Rackspace, or AWS, or DigitalOcean had written a book about their management practices, or company organization.
Alright! It’s Christmas! I meant to do this a week ago, but the turkey was still frozen, so we’re doing it today. If it turns out terrible we’ll be eating Chinese for dinner.
I got a pre-brined 12 lbs turkey for less than $1 per pound, put olive oil on the skin, then sprinkled on the rub I use on pork butt because it’s similar to what this person recommends anyway. We’ll smoke it at 225℉, and it should take about 6 hours at that temperature. We’ve got temperature probes in the turkey, so we should know when it’s done.
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.