First Band Concert of the Summer

In the summertime in Lexington, there is a band concert every Tuesday night. The Lexington Bicentennial Band plays. They’re very good. Tonight was the first one for this season because the High School ran so late because of the flood in the fall. Tom's band teacher, Mr Leonard was the conductor. Luckily the weather held out tonight, although it looked a little iffy for a while. It was also colder than I expected, and I wished I had brought a jacket at times.

We brought along one of our favorite picnic dishes: Couscous Salad. Here's the recipe:

Chicken Couscous Salad
1 lb boneless chicken breasts
1 10oz box couscous (the quick kind, not the pearl)
1 tomato, diced or cherry tomatoes halved
3 scallions chopped
1 can chick peas (garbanzo beans)
1 red pepper diced
1/2 cup dried currants
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1/2 cup pine nuts

Cook the chicken breasts, shred the meat coarsely. You can saute the chicken or poach it in broth, either way is fine. Meanwhile bring 2 cups of water to a boil. Add the dried couscous, stir to moisten, and remove from the heat. Cover and let stand 5 minutes for the couscous to absorb the water. [I used tricolor couscous for extra color]. Mix the chicken and couscous in a large bowl. Pour the curry dressing (below) over the mixture and set it aside in the fridge to cool. While it's cooling, chop up the rest of the ingredients other than the pine nuts. If you can toast your pine nuts without getting distracted, by all means do that. It definitely tastes better, but nine times out of ten I end up burning the nuts so now I just use raw pine nuts and it's fine. Mix the veggies into the couscous mixture. Adjust the salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle the nuts over the top and serve. Or you can put it back in the fridge to chill, but I would wait to put the nuts on just before you serve it.

Curry Dressing

1/2 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup orange juice
3/4 cup olive oil
3/4 tsp ground cumin
1-2 tsp curry powder
2-4 dashes hot oil
1/2 tsp garlic powder
salt & pepper

Mix the juices with the spices. Slowly add the oil while whisking to combine.

For desert, we had a special treat. Tom had run down to the North End today with his friend Ben. They brought back some treats from Mike’s Pastry.

Yummmm…..

Garlic scapes

These beautiful curly greens are garlic scapes. I'd never actually had any before as you don't usually find them in stores. Our friends who have a CSA gave them to us along with a bunch of other yummy greens. At this point we've eaten all the other things in salads and pasta dishes, but I'm still deciding what to do with these. I did chop one up to include in the pasta dish with spinach, but they're just too elegant sitting there in the vase to use them up.

Pasta with Spinach & Bacon

4-5 slices bacon, roughly diced (I'd use pancetta if I had it)
3-4 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 cup heavy cream (maybe more I didn't measure)
big bag o' spinach (I have no idea how much it actually was!)
garlic scape, sliced
handful of pine nuts
1 lb pasta (farfalle, rotini, etc)

Rinse and clean the spinach. Tear it into pieces and get as much water as you can out of it. Put a large pot of water on to boil and cook the pasta al dente. Saute the bacon in a large pan until crispy and golden. Add the garlic and saute another minute or two until it starts to brown. Pour in the cream and bring to a boil. Boil for a couple of minutes to thicken a little bit. Add the pile of spinach and cook, stirring until it wilts. Pour the sauce over the drained pasta and toss to coat. Garnish with pine nuts and chopped scapes, passing freshly grated parmesan.

A day in the life

I had my birthday party today. We built forts of cardboard and duct tape (mostly duct tape). This was one of them. Then we proceeded to attack each other with foam and PVC weapons (with some of us wearing cardboard armor). I had built a breastplate and back plate (see photo below the one below). Fighting (I'm not in the picture).

CAKE TIME!!!!! (with me wearing the aforementioned armor) The cake (With lego Starcraft units (designed, built, and placed by me) on top)(We didn't eat them though) Yeah......It was fun. On a completely different note, there were some really cool pictures I was shown today. They are lego models of Starcraft II units. These are some of my favorites Banshee Probe Immortal Marines That was my day TGR

ProtoShield

One of the pieces that came with Pete’s Arduino is a ProtoShield. This is a little breadboard that sits on top of the Arduino and makes it easy to assemble projects with several components.

The ProtoShield comes as a bag of parts that need to be assembled, so that’s what Pete and I did tonight. Here’s a picture of us soldering all of those headers on.

These components are starting to get awfully small!

Notice Pete’s nice, new, summertime haircut.

Awesome car video

The British racing show Top Gear testdrove the FXX my favorite all time car watch the video here. It was driven by the Stig. This is a picture of my Lego FXX.

Tom Swifties

It was a couple of weeks ago now, but this was our favorite Schott's Vocab in recent memory.

Don't take my K-14 away

It's happened. Today Kodak sent out this really sad press release. Kodachrome was what I always shot before I finally went digital. I would occasionally stray to some new flavor of the week like Velvia, but I always went back to the good stuff.

If you aren’t familiar with the history of Kodachrome, it really is fascinating. It is the oldest color film (1935!) still in use, and it isn’t like any other type of film. In most color films, each layer of the emulsion has a dye coupler in it. This means that a single developer stage can process all three layers at once. That’s not how Kodachrome works. Its emulsion layers only contain silver. The dye coupler is adding during processing. This means that it requires 3 developer stages. It’s a very complicated process and there’s only one place left that does it. There are a number of benefits though. The emulsion layers are thinner and the grain is finer than other color films. Among photographers I knew, there was always the argument that the colors were purer because the remains of all of those extra dye couplers weren’t left behind, but I don’t know how much truth there is in that argument. One thing that is certainly true is that Kodachrome lasts longer than anything else. The colors don’t fade the way E-6 process colors do.

I don’t know how many rolls of the stuff I’ve got filed away. It must be in the hundreds. It has a beautiful, soft look at high magnification, and the colors just look right to me, even though it didn’t have the flashy blues and purples of some of the others.

Hardware Hacking

Peter got an Arduino board for his birthday. An Arduino is a tiny standalone computer that can connect to all sorts of input and output devices. After the obligatory blink sketch, he put a variant together that blinks back and forth between a red LED and a blue LED.

Here he is waving it in front of the slow camera in Chris’ iPhone.

And here he is messing around in the dark with it.

Trip report

I had a ton of fun at the party but I was sopping wet in maine.

Field Trip

Peter has a big field trip today. The entire 6th grade is going to Nubble Light. It's pouring buckets today. Can you imagine shepherding a couple of hundred twelve year olds along Marginal Way in the pouring rain?

The teachers have told them that anybody who gets wet is going to be in big trouble. I think they were talking about splashing in the ocean, but...

Construction

They've been replacing the water mains on our street for the last couple of weeks. This is what it has looked like around here lately starting 7:00 AM weekdays.

They seem to be getting near the end though. We're hooked back up to the water main and they've started removing the hoses. Most of the road is mud and gravel though. We're not sure how long before they plan to repave it.

Fish Story

Two weeks ago I found out about the Cape Ann Fresh Catch Community Suppported Fishery (CSF). The idea is just like a CSA (Community Supported Agricuture) share where you get a share of the farm's harvest each week, only in this case you get a share of the fishermen's catch. I thought this would be a great way to get more fish into our weekly meals, also a greater variety, along with supporting local fishery. Right now I'm really glad that I immediately signed us up for a share. They were featured in the Wall Street Journal today. Apparently they have 750 people signed up for shares, and 500 people on the waiting list. When they started this they thought they might get 50 people interested.

This week was the first pick up week. We're picking our fish up at the Codman Farm in Lincoln. Everyone was very friendly. I think a lot of people, like me, were a little nervous about what to do with a whole fish like the cod Frank (one of the fishermen) is holding.

But no matter, we have links to how-to videos on Youtube, and the folks there had lots of helpful tips. As soon as they can work out the details with the local board of health we may also get a live filleting demonstration when we pick up the fish.

So I decided to jump right in. Our (half) share this week is a 4lb cod. It's already cleaned, but otherwise it's the whole thing, eyes and all. Peter thought the eyes were fascinating. We sharpened a knife and I got started.

Ok, it took more than 30 minutes, but I ended up with two pretty good fillets. There's not much left on the main body of the fish as you can see. Since it took a while I decided to prepare them as simply as possible. I cut a fillet into 4 serving sized pieces, seasoned with salt and pepper, dredged in flour and then fried them in olive oil. While they cooked I melted some butter with garlic in the microwave and poured that over them when they were cooked. Yum! Now I'm turning the rest of the fish into fish stock - I'd better come up with something to do with it. It'll probably make a nice chowdah.

Look Up

There's a group called For Spacious Skies that used to run radio ads in the Boston area. They were very interesting ads. They just told you to stop and look up. The ads weren't trying to sell you anything. They were just trying to get you to look at the sky for a minute.

A similar group is the Cloud Appreciation Society.  They collect photos of clouds that users send in. They have thousands of them. The photos are all sorted and tagged. They're tagged by serious things like the Latin name for the type of cloud in the picture. But they're also tagged by things like whether they look like an elephant.

There really is something very relaxing about looking at the sky. Especially a blue sky with a few clouds in it. I don't think that I could live somewhere that was gray and overcast for long periods of time.

Tortellini Salad

This is a family favorite summer salad, and it's also very good at potlucks. It's easy to make and doesn't contain any mayo or eggs, so it's very forgiving in hot weather. Originally I got this recipe from my friend Colleen. She had this recipe from her sister, and brought a big bowlful over for us just after Peter was born in '97. We enjoyed it so much that I've been making it ever since.

Tortellini Salad
2 packages tricolor cheese tortellini
1.5 lb tomatoes (mix of colors is nice)
balsamic vinaigrette dressing**
1 can black pitted olives
fresh basil
olive oil
salt & pepper
crumbled feta cheese (optional)

Prepare the tortellini according to the package directions. Rinse in cold water to cool them down, drain and toss with olive oil so that they don't stick. Meanwhile dice the tomatoes into a fairly large dice (1/2 inch+ cubes). Use the olives whole if they're small or cut them in half or slices. Make a basil chiffonade using about 3-4 stems of basil, you can adjust this to your taste. Toss all the ingredients together with the vinaigrette, adding the feta if you want it.

Garnish with some basil leaves and some additional feta if you want. I often pass additional feta on the side for those who like it a lot.

Notes:I usually get the 12oz bags of tortellini from the frozen section, but I've also made it with dried tortellini and it comes out fine. Of course it's fine to use the plain tortellini, but the tri-color look prettier.

Balsamic Dressing

Any decent vinaigrette dressing will be fine. I like to make my own using a blend of herbs from Penzeys.
1-2 Tbsp Country French herb mix from Penzeys
1 Tbsp water
1-2 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp sugar
1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup olive oil
Mix herbs with water, sugar and mustard. Let sit for a few minutes. Stir in vinegar. Slowly add the olive oil in a thin stream while whisking to make an emulsion.

Its almost the end of school yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New Toy

The old air compressor that I bought back in high school when I was painting the MG, has been getting tired and cranky lately. It keeps overheating, and I've been feeling like I'm spending more time tuning it up than using it. Today Sears had a $80 off deal on a nice little 33 gallon air compressor. They even threw in a free impact wrench. So we went ahead and replaced the old one.

Here Tom and I are getting it out of the truck.

And here we are setting it up in the workshop.

Muffins (not waffles)

I made muffins today. They were peach and blueberry. They looked like this. They were a result of a sudden desire for muffins at breakfast. I ended up walking through the rain to get some of the ingredients, but it was OK because they are going to taste good.

A little something I made in Inkscape. It only took me a couple hours. Most like this will take me days. It was actually an assignment for school.

Buzz Aldrin at the Pops

We went to the Pops last night. It was a special event that was part of the Giant Leaps symposium at MIT, which was in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Buzz Aldrin narrated a special movie that had been produced as a background to Gustav Holst's Planets.
Our first surprise of the evening was where we were seated. I got these tickets at the last minute, so we expected to be seated in the back of the second balcony. Instead we managed to end up seated in the second row in the center, you couldn't ask for any better than that. As we sat down I said to Mike, "I wonder if we'll see anyone I know from Intermetrics?" Within 30 seconds we were joined at our tables by Intermetrics founders, Dan Lickly (along with his lovely wife) and Fred Martin. With a shock I realized we had somehow managed to be seated among all the folks that worked on Apollo, and to cap it off they happened to be people I knew from my time at Intermetrics. John Miller was there as well, sitting at a table on the other side of Buzz Aldrin who ended up sitting at the next table in the second half of the performance.

While watching Eye Turned Skyward, a short film documenting the lead up to landing on the moon, Mike whispered, "If you'd told the 10 year old me watching the moon landing that in 40 years you'll be sitting next to Buzz Aldrin in Symphony Hall watching the Pops, I'd have said you're crazy."

We also ran into Mike's old friends Bill Poduska and Dan Schwinn. All in all it was quite a night.

Balanced Ternary

Do you have a favorite number system? I do. Knuth said:

Perhaps the prettiest number system of all, is the balanced ternary notation.

Balanced ternary is a number system where the radix is 3, but the digits are not 0, 1, and 2. Instead, it uses the digits -1, 0, and 1. This seems pretty strange at first, but it’s actually quite elegant. Let’s look at a few examples. To make things easy to read, I’m going to use the character ‘u’ to represent 1, the character ‘o’ to represent 0, and the character ‘n’ to represent -1.

uuo = 1*3^2 + 1*3^1 + 0*3^0 = 9 +3 +0 = 12

That seems reasonable enough. And, of course, thirteen is:

uuu = 1*3^2 +1*3^1 +1*3^0 = 9 +3 +1 = 13

But what comes next? It looks like this:

unnn = 1*3^3 -1*3^2 -1*3^1 -1*3^0 = 27 -9 -3 -1 = 14

OK, that’s a little odd, but it makes sense. Let’s look at another one.

nuuu = -1*3^3 + 1*3^2 + 1*3^1 + 1*3^0 = -27 +9 +3 +1 = -14

Cool, it can represent negative numbers without using a minus sign! And yes, negating a number is as simple as swapping all of the ‘n’ and ‘u’ characters. You can tell positive numbers from negative numbers by looking at the first non-zero digit. If it’s a ‘u’, then the number is positive. If it’s a ‘n’, then the number is negative.


If you’d like to learn more about balanced ternary, there are some good articles at American Scientist’s website, Wikipedia, and the Wiki-wiki.

Class of 1984

Chris had her 25th college reunion last weekend. Quite a few of her friends were back in town.

Here's a picture of her with her friend Ellen at the big Saturday night gala.

And here are Ellen, Betty, Chris, and Sara at brunch at the presidents house the next morning.

And here are the kids of all of the alumni who returned:

 

Tom and Pete are the big, shaggy ones in the back row.

Hello Again

Peter hasn't really been posting much on his own, so we're adding the rest of the family as editors. Hopefully that'll result in a little better traffic.

Here's a picture of the kids at Scratch Day.

 

The after school Scratch club that Chris runs has wrapped up for the year. The kids in the club all did projects for class day. You can see some of them here.