Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

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The banshee screams for antelope meat.

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

From the police blotter: our local sheriff’s office busted a couple for breaking into a place called “Wild Bubba’s Wild Game Grill” (no, really!) in Del Valle.

Our fun couple, the female half of which goes by the name “Amber”, are accused of prying open the front door and stealing:

  • a bottle of Tito’s vodka. Well, I give them some credit for stealing good vodka, but wouldn’t it have been easier to hit a liquor store? There’s no shortage of them out that way.
  • a TV and VCR. Shoot, guys, you probably could have picked those up at a garage sale, if not the Goodwill.
  • and 25 pounds of beef, buffalo, and antelope meat.

For this, “Amber” and her guy pal are facing felony burglary charges. As Jay G. says, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

More interesting to me, though, is the very existence of Wild Bubba’s, which had previously escaped my notice. I sense a road trip coming on in the next few weeks (as soon as some things get resolved and some scheduled events pass).

Posted in Beef, Clippings, Food, Law, Stupid | Comments Closed

The Thais that bind.

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Rob Balon wonders in his latest blog entry, “why so many Austinites seem to be either indifferent toward or uncomfortable with Thai food“. As Dr. Balon frequently does, he suggests that Austinites are so used to barbecue and TexMex that “something relatively unfamiliar has a hard time breaking through”.

Dr.  Balon’s essay is curious for a few reasons. First of all, he’s talking about Thai food, yet completely omits the longest lived (as far as I know) and single most successful group of Thai restaurants in Austin. We could argue about the merits of Thai Kitchen versus Madam Mam’s all day long, but just simply ignoring the metaphorical 800-pound elephant in the room is…curious, to say the least.

Dr. Balon does mention Madam Mam’s, but I find his comments kind of dismissive. He doesn’t even note that there are actually three locations; the third one is near the Alamo Drafthouse in the Village, and to my untrained eye appears to be doing well.

“And yet just a few miles south on W 6th st. fine restaurants like Lemongrass and Thai Tara have languished and ultimately closed.” I would have to go back to the archives and do some research, but my recollection is that the closing of Lemongrass was a lot more complicated than that. As for Thai Tara, it stayed open much longer than I would have expected; I’d suggest that it closed almost entirely due to a bad location, and especially due to parking issues downtown.

Dr. Balon mentions relatively new places such as Chon Som and Titaya, but I see even more Thai places that he doesn’t mention popping up on street corners all over town. (For example, Pad Thai on Guadalupe, and Thai Cuisine at Parmer and I-35.) Thai Village seems to be doing much better than the shopping center it’s in. Bangkok Cuisine has stayed in business for many years (how, I don’t exactly know). Compared to the Thai situation in, say, 2007, we’re living in a golden age.

Could some of these places (like Satay) use more customers? Dr. Balon seems to know more about this than I do. But let’s say that they could use more customers; is that because they serve Thai food, or is that because of the economy in general? If we compared Thai places to TexMex places, or barbecue joints, would we see a similar trend towards a smaller customer base?

Dr. Balon may have a point, but I don’t think he’s mustered the evidence to back it up.

Posted in Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

After action report: Las Vegas, NV.

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

I covered a lot of stuff in my previous travel report, so this will mostly just be updates.

  • Project e worked spectacularly well at DEFCON. This is the first chance I’ve had to really push the battery life, and I was able to get an good 12+ hours out of the battery without running it totally dry. (This was with the machine set to “powersave” and putting it into “standby” or “hibernate” when I was in the dealer’s room, or driving around with Mike the Musicologist and Andrew. Continuous usage with the wireless would have been more like 6+ hours, I think, which is still pretty impressive.)
  • My one regret is that I forgot my Alfa external WiFi adapter. I would have enjoyed playing with that at the convention.
  • The 5.11 bailout bag also worked out well for lugging around Project e and various other equipment. Again, I was able to carry a pretty good load, including the laptop, charger, books, a couple of bottles of water,  the small camera, and miscellaneous other necessities.
  • MtM has the Nikon with him and has been taking a lot of photos. As you saw below, I did use the Nikon to take some Gehry photos. When I have more time, I’m going to put up an expanded and annotated Flickr photo set; I did some side-by-side experiments with aperture priority vs. automatic exposure.
  • Food in Las Vegas was, without exception, pretty darn good. The worst meal I had (at the Four Kegs) was still better than average (and I didn’t order the stromboli, which is the house specialty). We also had a very good (if loud) tapas meal at Firefly* on Paradise, the usual wonderful meal at Lotus of Siam, the previously mentioned dinner at Shabu-Shabu Paradise, and a Moroccan meal at Marrakech. (I had not previously had Moroccan food, so I can’t comment on how authentic it was. I certainly enjoyed my meal, and the belly dancer didn’t hurt.)

    Vegas does have something of a shortage of good breakfast places outside of the casinos (and even inside of the casinos, if you’re not looking for a buffet). We had several good breakfasts at Blueberry Hill on Flamingo and one excellent breakfast at The Egg and I on Sahara. I know that MtM and Andrew went to a good Italian place in New York, New York while I was at the convention, and I’ll let them comment on that.
  • Between Tucson and Las Vegas, the refurbished Kindle I ordered arrived, and it went on this trip. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the Kindle later on, but my first impression is “Meh”. I did manage to read John Clark’s Ignition! in PDF format and a Project Gutenberg MOBI format copy of Heart of Darkness without too much trouble, but my experiences with other PDF files and eBooks have been inconsistent.
  • On the other hand, I finished, and highly recommend, Ubuntu for Non-Geeks 4th Edition and am almost finished with Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2nd Edition (also recommended). No Starch Press rocks. And the coupon code “DEFCON18” will get you a 30% discount. And they’re running a half-price sale on all e-books.
  • My Southwest experience this time was much more pleasant. No misplaced bags, and no flight delays. One thing that was particularly unusual was going through the security line in Las Vegas; I had, literally, no wait. Just walked straight up to the TSA agent and got in line for the metal detector. It took longer to take my shoes off and the laptop out than it did to get through the rest of security.

My thanks to, in no particular order, the DEFCON 18 staff and presenters, No Starch Press, UNIX Surplus, SEREPick, Lotus of Siam, Shabu-Shabu Paradise, Sarah at the iBar in the Rio, and the unknown belly dancer at Marrakech.

Special thanks to my high-speed, low-drag travel companions in the primary, Mike the Musicologist and Andrew “Porous concrete? What were they thinking?” Wimsatt.

Posted in asus_eee, Books, DEFCON 18, Endorsements, Food, Gehry, Kindleing, linux, Photography, project_e, Thanks, Travel | 3 Comments »

Running on empty.

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

I’m home and safe, but still running a little behind. I hope to have the DEFCON 18 Day 3 notes up tonight, along with an after-action report on Las Vegas.

While I was on the road, there were reports that Angela Spaccia, the assistant city manager of Bell and the interim city manager of Maywood, had resigned from the Maywood position. Apparently, that’s not exactly the case; the Maywood City Council didn’t accept Spaccia’s resignation at their meeting Monday night. However, they did accept the resignation of Maywood City Attorney Edward Lee. Curiously enough, Lee is also the city attorney of Bell, and states he needs to resign his Maywood position to focus on the issues in Bell.

Obit watch: Mitch Miller.

Morrie Yohai, inventor of Cheez Doodles.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

DEFCON 18 notes: Day 2.

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

Saturday was kind of a rough day at DEFCON 18. But then, Saturday is always a rough day at DEFCON.

I don’t feel it’d be fair to review or summarize the “Extreme-range RFID Tracking” panel; I came in about 20 minutes late. (We lingered a bit over a very good breakfast at Blueberry Hill.) What I was able to gather is that Padget’s set a new record for long distance RFID reading, and that upping the radio power works for increasing RFID reading range up to a point. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added link to Black Hat 2010 version of paper. Here’s a link to Paget’s blog entry about the session.)

I was not able to get into “Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines Redux” due to extreme overcrowding. (Edited to add 8/9/2010: The Black Hat website has what purports to be MP4 video of Jack’s version of the presentation at Black Hat 2010. I have not sat down and watched it yet.)

I did attend the “This is not the droid you’re looking for…” panel, mostly because I was camping out for the next talk. This panel turned out to be more interesting than I expected; the presenters demonstrated a proof-of-concept rootkit for Android phones that allows you to do all sorts of fun stuff; grab contact information, grab SMS messages, grab location information (all three of these are stored in SQLite databases on the Android), and even make phone calls from the phone. The presenters haven’t weaponized the attack yet, but claim it should be easy to do so.

“Practical Cellphone Spying“: Another nifty panel. Padget discussed the concepts behind IMSI catching, and gave a live demo of cellphone interception on the AT&T network. The key takeaway here for me was that the same technology used by law enforcement to intercept calls is now coming down to the point where it will be wrapped in a turnkey package and sold to people with more questionable motivations. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added link to Paget’s blog entry which includes slides.)

“How to Hack Millions of Routers“: I went to this because Lawrence put in a special request. The short version is that a large number of commercially available routers (such as those used by Verizon FIOS) are vulnerable to a clever attack using DNS rebinding and load balancing. Heffner has also released a tool that automates this attack. (This is another Black Hat talk that got a lot of attention in the press; the link above includes a copy of Heffner’s white paper which details the attack vector.)

(Edited to add 8/9/2010: I’ve added a link to Heffner’s Black Hat version of this talk, which as far as I can tell, is pretty similar to the DEFCON 18 version.)

I didn’t attend either “Hacking with Hardware: Introducing the Universal RF Usb Keboard Emulation Device – URFUKED” or “Programmable HID USB Keystroke Dongle: Using the Teensy as a Pen Testing Device“. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added a link to the Teensy project from the Irongeek website. The bottom of that page has a link to the DEFCON presentation. I’ve also added a link to HackerWarrior.com for the USB Keyboard Emulation Device; that directory appears to contain a copy of the presentation, plus code.)

Instead, I left a little early, had a very nice sake fueled dinner at Shabu-Shabu Paradise in Henderson (a restaurant I enthusiastically endorse), sidecars at the iBar in the Rio (sadly, we did not get to play with the Microsoft Surface), and Penn & Teller.

The three of us saw Penn and Teller back in 2006, and we wondered how much the show had changed since then. Mike the Musicologist estimated that about 50% of the show was new; I think the percentage is a little higher than that, but my memory may be faulty. I was not unhappy that they ended the show with the .357 magnums; the bullet-catching illusion fascinates me, and I’m still trying to figure out how Penn and Teller do it. (Jim Steinmeyer’s The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo is a very good history of the bullet-catching illusion, and yet another book I strongly recommend to anyone with even a casual interest in the history of magic.)

The other thing we all noticed is that Penn and Teller’s show has become a bit more explicitly political; in addition to the .357 magnum closer, which has always included 2nd Amendment references (and big kudos to P&T for reciting the Four Rules), the show also included references to flag burning, the Chinese Bill of Rights (“What Chinese Bill of Rights?” Exactly.) and the stupidity of the TSA. Penn and Teller even sell the Security Edition of the Bill of Rights in their gift shop for a lousy $5. (Quote: “We want McCarran Airport to be flooded with these.”) Not that any of us were bothered by the politics; I think all three of us lay claim to at least some form of Libertarianism. And if you’re the kind of person who would take offense at Penn and Teller’s politics, I won’t tell you “don’t go”; I’ll tell you “go, and have your world view challenged”.

(I’d also like to give Penn and Teller kudos for keeping gift shop prices low. Both Andrew and I picked up DVDs of the Teller-directed “Macbeth” for only $10. Teller, if you’re reading this, thanks for signing my copy. And for everything else you do, too.)

Posted in Books, DEFCON 18, Endorsements, Food, Geek, Guns, Magic, Radio, Travel | 1 Comment »

0 Day DEFCON 18 notes.

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

This year, I got in on Wednesday, which reduced the stress level considerably. Mike the Musicologist met me here; Andrew “Swordfish Trombone” Wimsatt is flying in tonight.

Mike and I had a pretty good (and cheap!) dinner Wednesday night at Four Kegs, which some of you may recognize from “Diners,  Drive-Ins, and Dives“.

DEFCON 18 panels that I may, or may not, attend, but will point out for Lawrence‘s benefit:

“Weaponizing Lady Gaga, Psychosonic Attacks”

I’ve already missed the “Hardware Black Magic: Designing Printed Circuit Boards” and “Go Go Gadget Python: Introduction to Hardware Hacking” panels, but I figure most of the information from those is on the DEFCON 18 CD.

Panels I want to attend:

I’m torn between the annual “Making of the Badge” panel, and the “How To Get Your FBI File (and Other Information You Want From the Federal Government)” panel. If I do get moving that early, I suspect I’ll end up at the latter one.

“Build a Lie Detector/Beat a Lie Detector“. My desire to attend this is mostly based on nostalgia. When I was a young boy, my dad gave me several of the Radio Shack 50-in-1/100-in-1/250-in-1 electronic kits for Christmas. One of the projects in those was always a lie detector, and I always built that project.

“Build your own UAV 2.0 – Wireless Mayhem from the Heavens!” How could anyone not go to that panel?

“Exploiting Digital Cameras“. Another panel that seems designed to push multiple buttons on my user interface at once.

“DCFluX in: Moon-bouncer“. Looks like it could be a fun panel on alternative methods of communication in a critical situation, like moon-bounce (something I’ve heard of from the amateur radio community).

“Black Ops Of Fundamental Defense: Web Edition“. Dan Kaminsky. Again, enough said.

“Extreme Range RFID Tracking“. I haven’t gotten that deep into RFID hacking yet (though I might change that this year), but I’m interested in this long-range low-power radio device stuff. Also, this is one of two Padget talks I want to see.

“Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines Redux” The Black Hat version of this talk is already getting a lot of attention.

I’m having trouble deciding between “This Needs to be Fixed, and Other Jokes in Commit Statements“, which sounds like it could be very funny, and “Insecurity Engineering of Physical Security Systems: Locks, Lies, and Videotape“; I have a lot of respect for Tobias’ work.

“Practical Cellphone Spying” is the other Padget talk I want to see.

“We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges: Hacking Electronic Door Access Controllers“: besides the title reference, this might make good background for that novel. I’m also considering “Wardriving the Smart Grid: Practical Approaches to Attacking Utility Packet Radios” as another possibility; I’d really like to see both.

“Physical Security : You’re Doing It Wrong!” Well, if he’s going to talk about how to get vendors to take you to lunch, sure!

“Physical Computing, Virtual Security: Adding the Arduino Microcontroller Development Environment to Your Security Toolbox“. I’ve been thinking about getting into microcontroller hacking, and this seems like it might be a good introduction to the Arduino (which is one of the environments I’ve considered).

“Hacking with Hardware: Introducing the Universal RF Usb Keboard Emulation Device – URFUKED” and “Programmable HID USB Keystroke Dongle: Using the Teensy as a Pen Testing Device“: it sounds like there could be a lot of overlap between these two panels.

“The Search for Perfect Handcuffs… and the Perfect Handcuff Key“. You never know when you might need to get out of a pair of handcuffs…

I haven’t decided between “Attack the Key, Own the Lock“, which sounds like it may be a rehash of some panels at previous DEFCONs, and “Constricting the Web: Offensive Python for Web Hackers“, which pushes the Python button.

“Electronic Weaponry or How to Rule the World While Shopping at Radio Shack“. Not a lot of information on the DEFCON site; I’ll probably go and leave if I get bored.

“Breaking Bluetooth By Being Bored“. I’m fascinated by Bluetooth attacks, so this is a must-see for me.

Panels I won’t be attending:

“Getting Root: Remote Viewing, Non-local Consciousness, Big Picture Hacking, and Knowing Who You Are“. The usual hippie horse-pucky.

Any suggestions from anyone else who may be attending? Or presenting? Or wanted to go, but couldn’t?

Posted in Bluetooth, DEFCON 18, Food, Geek, Photography, Python, Radio | 1 Comment »

Steak!

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

The LAT writes about the closing of Edward’s Steak House, a 64-year old steak house in El Monte. I’ve never eaten there, but it sounds like a place I would have enjoyed trying.

By way of Marginal Revolution, I found out about a fairly new book that’s relevant to my interests: Steak: One Man’s Search for the World’s Tastiest Piece of Beef.

Posted in Beef, Books, Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

After action report: Tucson, AZ.

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

My regular readers (and my irregular readers, too; come to think of it, “Whipped Cream Irregulars” would be a good name for a band) may have figured out by now that I’ve spent much of the past week on the road. Specifically, I was in Tucson for the annual convention of the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association. (You might have been able to guess that I also made a brief trip to the Phoenix/Scottsdale area so I could visit Taliesin West.)

I’m not going to talk much about what went on at that convention here, since it is a closed private convention, and I’m not comfortable discussing the organization’s affairs on a public blog. (Jay G. and the rest of the Vicious Circle gang might be amused to know that there was an actual S&W police bike, manufactured in Springfield, MA and complete with lights and siren, on display at the convention. I didn’t get a chance to take a photo.) I will say I had a great time at the convention, and in Tucson in general. Sadly, I didn’t have time to hit any used bookstores or gun stores in the area, but maybe next time.

This is the first extended road trip I’ve taken since last year’s DEFCON, so I thought it might be interesting to do some notes about what worked and didn’t work on this trip.

(more…)

Posted in Apple, asus_eee, Endorsements, Food, Geek, Guns, linux, Museums, netbook, Photography, Planes, project_e, Travel | 2 Comments »

Push my buttons some more, please.

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

The French Culinary Institute has a blog, “Cooking Issues“, which they describe as a “Tech’N Stuff Blog”.

Boy howdy, they’re right. This seems to be the blog for Ferran Adrià fans.

For example, check out this post, in which the author describes the use of rotary evaporators in the kitchen.

Because rotovaps distill gently at low temperature under vacuum, they happen to also be good at preserving flavors — much better than traditional distillation.

Note that these machines were originally designed to be used in labs, for evaporating off solvents.

Fed up, I bought an early 80’s EL131 Buchi rotary evaporator on eBay the next year (they’re cheap at auction – check it out).

  1. I did check it out. The cheapest one I found was $1,500, and I’m not sure that was a complete unit. I’ll admit the 20-liter one is probably overkill for kitchen use. (Edited to add: Lawrence pointed out some cheaper ones that came up using different search terms, but many of those looked incomplete or non-functional.)
  2. I wonder if these would be legal in Texas without a permit. My reading of the DPS site suggests that these would fall under “distilling apparatus”.

Or you could make “stretchy chewy ice cream“. That actually sounds like a fun summer project for those of you who have kids.

I got a kick out of this quote:

We’ve been using our centrifuge to make cured olive oil.

Because, you know, everyone has a centrifuge in their kitchen. (But they seem to be much cheaper on eBay than rotovaps.)

TJIC actually tipped me off to this when he noted their post on using liquid nitrogen in the kitchen. Short version: be careful, this stuff will kill you dead.

Posted in Food, Geek | Comments Closed

A large black cherry for me, please.

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Today’s outrage from the Statesman: a local vendor of snow cones is upset that the health department has shut down his stand.

Zapffe said he had no other realistic option when the Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services Department required that he take his stand — an old catering truck — to department offices in East Austin for its annual inspection and operating sticker. But Zapffe, whose sticker expired May 31, said that the stand hasn’t been mobile for years and that he’d never been required to drive the truck for inspection before. Health department inspectors always came out to check the stand, he said.

I’ve stated before that I’m a libertarian. Thus, I think in an ideal world, it would be up to the customer to make the decision on purchasing snow cones, or bacon wrapped hot dogs, or tacos, from whatever trailer they want to purchase from. I figure people can make their own decisions based on how sketchy the trailer looks.

But.

The health department makes a good point, further on in the article, that they’re trying to enforce the same rules for everyone; food vending trailers are supposed to be readily mobile. I know something about this. My folks owned a snow cone trailer for a while, so I’ve gotten an earful on the restrictions they had to obey.

In addition, it isn’t like they ran the guy out of business. This particular “trailer” sits in the parking lot of the restaurant owned by the same guy. As the article notes, now that the “trailer” is shut down, he’s serving snow cones out of the restaurant itself.

I know this area very well; this is where Tex-Guns is located. As the Statesman notes (buried in the second to last paragraph of the article) there’s another snow cone vendor – a real trailer, on wheels, which can be moved – within 50 feet of this guy’s establishment.

Why does Zapffe deserve a break, when South Austin Sno doesn’t?

Edited to add: And in LA, one councilman is trying to restrict food trucks on city streets. Let me just say this: “kimchi quesadillas”? I think I just threw up a little.

Edited to add 2: No, not NYC as well! Could this be the end of the schnitzel truck? Say it isn’t so!

Also, I somehow managed to miss this NYT article on the new wave of shaved ice.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Ice | 1 Comment »

And the head coach wants no sissies…

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Happy Bloomsday, everyone!

Use your freedom of Joyce!

For some reason, I started thinking about food, and stumbled across these two links to Bloomsday Breakfasts. Enjoy. As for me, I think I’ll stick to some Gorgonzola and a glass of Burgundy; I’m not much for the inner organs of beasts, with or without relish.

One of these years, I’m going to get it together enough to do my own Bloomsday greeting cards.

(Subject line hattip, for those of you who didn’t get enough Dr. Demento as a child.)

Posted in Books, Food | Comments Closed

Ring, ring, ring, banana phone!

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

The International Banana Museum is moving.

Obit watch: Abraham Nathanson, inventor of Bananagrams.

And the judge in the Nicaraguan banana pesticide fraud case feels threatened.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Fruit, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Sigh.

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

I just found out (by way of Rob Balon) that the local outpost of Roy’s has shut down.

While I regret the loss of jobs among the staff, this does not fill me with a great sadness. However, I did want to single out a quote from Mr. Balon for comment:

A few of the dishes might have been a bit too sophisticated and nuanced for that portion of our city that loves Tex Mex, steak, and BBQ. But diversity of dining is what makes a great city. At some point, we’re going to have to figure that out!

“too sophisticated and nuanced”? With all due respect to Mr. Balon, let’s try this as an alternative explanation: Austin is experiencing tough economic times, and the food at Roy’s was expensive relative to what you got. In addition, that Roy’s faced tough competition from the Flemming’s right next door, as well as Fogo de Chao and The Melting Pot across the street.

I’m not buying the diversity argument.

Posted in Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

A long strange trip.

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

I also wanted to link to this post over at Houston’s Clear Thinkers about the strange history of Landry’s Restaurants, Inc., and their stock.

I realize I may be one of only about three people in the world (excluding Tilman Fertitta and Landry’s stockholders) who find this interesting. But then again, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

Posted in Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 17, 2010.

Monday, May 17th, 2010

So when Gourmet folded, lots of other magazines apparently thought, “Great! We’ll pick up their subscribers and advertisers!” Yeah, about that: not so much.

Half a year after Gourmet’s final issue, in November, the Gourmet readership and ad base seem to have largely vanished.

I didn’t get a chance to blog this on Friday, as I was distracted by other things, but: the City of Austin released the full, unredacted report on the Quintana shooting incident, blogged here previously. Link goes to a PDF version of the report on the Statesman website.

Edited to add: Also forgot to give the Houston Astros update on Friday, so let’s take care of that now: 13-24, .351 winning percentage, projected 56.862 wins over the 162 game season.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law, Loser, Media | Comments Closed

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