2011

    Dennys grabbed this shot of me shooting in the snow today at Artist’s Point in Grand Marais.

    Person in red jacket and red winter hat photographing in heavy snowfall beside icy rock formations at Artists Point Grand Marais

    Just got an offer for tickets to see Def Leppard with Heart opening. Thought it was 1988 again.

    Lasagna on Big Green Egg

    This weekend we had friends over for dinner and I tried something new. I decided to try making my lasagna on the Big Green Egg. The Egg can work as an oven, so why not?

    I was also doing a squash for the side dish so I fired up both grills to get cooking.

    Two Big Green Egg ceramic grills open with flames visible inside, sitting on a wood table dusted with snow, with tongs and a red oven mitt between them.

    I made the lasagna exactly as I would have otherwise but instead of putting it in the oven I simply popped it into the Egg.

    Blue baking dish of cheesy golden-brown lasagna resting on the ceramic plate setter inside a Big Green Egg kamado grill outdoors.

    The squash got some brown sugar and butter with nutmeg and cinnamon.

    Two halved acorn squash with brown sugar butter filling cooking in a ceramic dish on a Big Green Egg grill, with burnt sugar residue visible.

    The lasagna came out pretty good. I learned a couple of things.

    • I placed the lasagna directly on the plate setter, with feet down. This was a bad call. The plate setter I suspect was hotter than 350 °F and it caused some burning in the pan. I should have done it feet up with the grid on to keep the pan isolated.
    • The lasagna comes out with a smoky flavor. It reminded me of smoked mozzarella. Just a thought, you could cover the lasagna with tinfoil for half of the time to reduce the smokiness. You could pretty much dial it wherever you want.
    • I would recommend using a ceramic baking dish. I used an enameled pan, and it was okay but I think a ceramic dish would have provided some needed protection for the pasta in the grill.

    I liked the end product and would definitely do lasagna in the Egg again.

    Tyler refused his morning nap after swim class this morning. By the time we got to lunch, he was too tired to eat.

    Blond baby in a plaid shirt resting his head on his hands at a highchair tray, eyes drooping with tiredness

    iPad 2 (0.34 inch thick) is 0.005 inches thicker than Kindle 2 (0.335 inch thick). I read that as “same”. Impressive.

    I gave a talk today at a class at the University of Minnesota. I used it as a trial run for presenting right off of my iPad in Keynote. Worked great! Was liberating to have such a small device to present from.

    iPad in a black case on a desk showing a Keynote presentation titled Ten Tech Topics, connected via a white cable to an HDMI adapter

    Digging out some SATA cables and bare drive adapter this afternoon to rescue a Mac. I always find this stuff fun, when it is easy. If you are curious, the funky bare drive adapter I have is the Newer Technology USB 2.0 Drive Adapter.

    A bare SATA hard drive connected via a Newer Technology USB 2.0 drive adapter with red, black, and yellow cables on a dark desk beside two laptops and a keyboard.

    Was Wrong on OpenID

    My friend John asked me to present at a class of his next week at the U of MN. I took an old Keynote presentation I had from a couple of years ago to start with and ran across this slide. I don’t think I could have been more wrong!

    Slide titled Future Case listing four bullet points about OpenID becoming a social graph, hCard, browser-integrated, and a customer gateway.

    I was definitely an OpenID advocate at the time, and for a long time before this talk. Makes me sad though since OpenID was open, and not owned by any one company. Hyperlinks between OpenID’s are such an elegant way of creating connections and is so web friendly.

    Ristretto

    Illy collection espresso cup filling with rich golden-brown crema on a stainless steel drip tray beneath an espresso machine grouphead

    Last night we had dinner at our friends the Rock’s. After dinner Mike fired up his Gaggia espresso machine and made some fabulous ristretto.

    Inspired I decided to bring my grind down a few clicks and the Andreja produced some awesome shots. So rich and delicious.

    Weeds Season 6 just hit iTunes. Yeah!

← Newer Posts Older Posts →