leapinggnome.org

Man, August has gone by quickly. I had all these grand plans to post on some of the (many) projects I’ve been working on lately, but they’ve been keeping me exceptionally busy. Now I find myself with 1 week left still school starts and many loose ends that need to be wrapped up before then!

Ah well, such is life. Possibly the most notable news I have is that I finally took the motorcycle road test and obtained my Michigan motorcycle endorsement. That’s pretty cool. I can now legally ride alone, at night and can carry passengers. I also have my computer back on water cooling with a new CPU waterblock and a fancy speed controller to quiet the pump. I have my linux box up and running Ubuntu after a hard disk failure earlier this summer.

Right now I’m in the middle of a rear brake overhaul on the Taurus. They have been squeeking (ok squeeling) for a couple months now and I’d like to get it taken care of before I likely put another 1000 miles on it this coming weekend. The driver’s side rotor popped off quite nicely. Removing the passenger side rotor is proving to be a tremendous pain. Hopefully I can rent a large claw puller at the auto parts store tomorrow that will do the job — if not I am really out of ideas.

Well firmware 2.0 was rolled out for my iPod Touch last month. After much torture getting iTunes 7.7 to install, I decided to install the new firmware on my iPod. Before firmware 2.0 I was running a jailbroken firmware on my iPod, allowing me to run any 3rd party applications I wanted to. These included an IM application, a terminal emulator (and full BSD core utilities), a bible ebook and a couple other random things that I don’t remember.

I was a little nervous moving away from my jailbroken firmware, I had gotten rather used to the 3rd party apps. Especially the SSH client! But I am largely glad that I upgraded. Let me say that the app store is quite slick. Right when I upgraded I installed the Pandora music player app. I also installed an ebay application that makes browsing ebay much friendlier than using Safari. I installed a google search app, a new bible app, an AIM client and an iTunes remote control app. All these apps work really well, I’m pretty impressed.

All these praises aside, I am still missing an SSH client. A telnet client was recently released, but really that’s not too useful for me as I like my terminal connections to be secure. I really hope an SSH app is on the way soon.

I’m firmly convinced that the improvements brought on with firmware 2.0 will have me holding on to my iPod touch for quite a while. If I do replace it, it will be with a larger capacity iPod touch or perhaps even an iPhone. Or an Apple Newton 2 — I can dream, can’t I?

Pasties (plural form of pasty), for those of you not in the know, are a traditional Cornish food brought to my area of the UP in the early days of copper mining. The traditional Cornish pasty consists of a rather thin flakey crust and is filled with potatoes, carrots, beef, rutabagga, peas, etc. It is then baked. After it cools the pasty is portable, making it the perfect lunchtime food for miners (they couldn’t surface for lunch). It does all this while tasting good and providing plenty of nourishment.

I’m not sure when I had my first pasty. It was certainly not at least until my freshmen year of college. I had never heard of one before driving through the UP. My first one may have been in MTU’s dining halls. Let me just say that their pasties do them no justice. Rochelle and I tried our hands at making pasties a couple of months ago, and they turned out really well! They aren’t too tricky to make and they really do make for an amazing lunch, considering their low cost and it only takes a minute to heat one up in the microwave. Here’s the recipe we use:

Crust:
1 cup shortening
1 cup water
3+ cups flour
1/2 tsp salt

It’s best to microwave the shortening beforehand to get it soft. I find the dough usually needs a little more flour and sometimes more water to get it to roll out properly.

Filling:
Start with 1 lb of ground beef. Chop it up into small chunks and add a couple of carrots, potatoes and about half of a large onion (all items diced up). I also season with Lawry’s seasoned salt and pepper. Put 3/4 of a cup or so of this mix onto a large flattened out piece of crust. Close the dough into a pocket around the stuffing and crimp the edges. Then bake it for about an hour. They can also be frozen right away and baked later, this works nicely.