Darren's doing really well. He had a slight complication early on with jaundice -- caused by high biliruben levels -- which made him sleepy all the time. The issue got compounded with some nursing issues, leading to a bad cycle of not wanting to wake up to eat, and then not getting enough food energy to stay awake. Once we fully realized what was going on, we started subsidizing his feeding with bottled formula, and he's been steadily improving since. I'm now in the odd position where I really enjoy his crying (well, as much as anyone really can), since he didn't do much of it at first.

Amy and I are sleeping pretty well for new parents. We've been getting about 10 hours each night, but we get up every two hours for about 30 minutes to feed him. We usually manage to sneak in a two hour nap somewhere during the day.

Here are some photos of his first week home:

This might be my last baby post in a while, as the little guy is taking up pretty much all of my time these days. But if you just can't get enough Darren, check out the slideshows here, as I'll likely keep adding more photos

Allow me to introduce you to Darren John Cooney. Born at 12:35am on 08/12, and weighing 8 lbs even.

Everyone's healthy and doing fine.

2am. Arrive at the hospital, all looks good.

3am. Doctor says we can go home if we want. We want. Home we go, told to come back at 7:30.

7:30am. Back to hospital. Still no sizable contractions.

9am. Doc gives Amy some meds to move things along.

12pm. Contractions increasing, but still small. More serious induction meds coming till at 1.

1:30pm:

1:45pm. Meds doing their thing. Contractions coming every few minutes, but not too severe.

3:15pm. Contractions every three minutes or so now. Getting more intense.

4pm. Ditto

5:15pm. Discussing when to get the epidural.

6:00pm. Epidural

6:30pm. Epidural kicks in. A long stressful hour is over. Exam shows we still have a ways to go.

7:30pm. Kinda quiet.

9pm. Still no baby. Trying to nap.

9:45pm. Doctor says it'll likely be an 8/12/08 baby, though there has been progress since last check.

11:45pm. Ready to go. Pushing started

12:35am. Darren John Cooney is born. Everything went great. Pics and details to follow

Here's a closer look at one of the little critters on the wall:

They're stick-on decals called Blik, and I would recommend them to a friend. Very easy to apply, and I think they look great. And I'm sure they won't give Kevin, Jr.* any kind of scary-falling-blue-guy nightmares.

They also have awesome Nintendo decals, but I never got past level 1-2 on Mario Bros., so I passed on those.

* Names have been changed to keep the family guessing.

What I needed was a good way of labeling photos for easy retrieval later. Flickr does a great job with this by allowing users to "tag" photos. But I wanted to do this on my computer, so I'm not dependant on Flickr. Also, Flickr ain't free for large amounts of uploads (as would likely be the case for me). And for Pete's sake they can't even spell, how can I trust them with my precious family memories?

Picasa also has a way to tag photos, which wouldn't require uploading all my photos, but I'm not a huge fan of Picasa, due to its "What happens in Picasa, stays in Picasa" attitude. On the one hand, it's great that the original photo is always available, but sometimes I like to view photos outside of Picasa, which won't show those edits.

Then there's the big problem: I just don't have the discipline to sit down and tag photos, or the memory to remember to do it regularly. I think most families have two nicely organized photo books, and then 10 shoeboxes filled with piles of photos (or even just film canisters). If this was going to work, it had to be futureproof.

Then last year, I was getting an MRI (don't worry, I'm fine), so I had about an hour of staring at the ceiling to think about the situation. I had an insight: If I set my browser's homepage to a page that picked a photo at random and allowed me to tag it, I'd get through a few a day, and slowly tag my entire collection.

I already had my photos available from a webserver in my house, and I use a photo album program called phpAlbum, which can read these types of tags and search for them. So all I needed to do was write the program to allow me to insert the tags, and I'd be all set. So that's what I did.

I wrote it in PHP, using The PHP JPEG Metadata Toolkit, a library that can read and update the IPTC header of JPEG photos (a fancy way of saying it can edit tags within photo files). The tags get saved within the file itself, so if I ever switch computers, or systems, the tags will still be there.

Tags are entered as a comma-delimited list, like so:

Once saved, they can be searched for using phpAdmin:

Ta-Da!

It's been set as the homepage of our home computer for about two months now, and we've tagged about 30% of our photos. In addition to tags like "kevin" or "amy," we've also started using more abstract tags like "favorite" or "funny," which give some great sets of photos. Also, I've been using some practical tags like "rotate" or "redeye" so if I'm ever feeling motivated, I can easily find photos that need fixing.

The next step will be to build a process to generate lists of photos to be used for slideshows based on search results. For instance, if my family comes over for dinner, I'd like to only have family-related photos on my digital picture frame.

For the nerdly-inclined, the source code is here. It's not what I'd call "good" or "correct syntax", but it gets the job done.

Here's the picture I went with.

Amy had taken this one over the summer while I was gardening. To be perfectly honest, I think this picture makes me look better than I actually do in person. So it may be a bit unfair. Then again, I am gardening in the picture, which isn't a hobby guys usually list in personal ads. (Speaking of personal ads, I also made sure to pick a shot that had my wedding ring in it, so Amy wouldn't freak out to see my picture on that website.)

I was surprised to find I don't have many photos of just myself to choose from. In fact, here were the only other recent pictures that feature only me.

But my hair looked terrible in those, so I didn't use them. I didn't have time for a trip to Glamour Shots, so I went with the gardening photo instead.

The next morning, I checked back, and was shocked to discover I was a 9.9!

I'm as shocked as you are

"9.9," I asked myself, "out of what?"

It looks like they use a 10-point scale, but on further investigation, I'm not sure how they calculate that, as the vote count says it should be more like a seven (I think it's 7.125, to be precise, but then again, us hotties aren't usually very good at math). I'm guessing that's inflated by my flattering picture.

So bottom line: I'm about average looking.

I'll take it!

Of course, I took the news in stride

We had our second ultrasound on Wednesday, and everything checked out okay.

Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking does not brine his turkey.

I discovered this yesterday in an interview with Harold McGee in the New York Times. Needless to say, I didn't sleep last night. My mind replayed all the times where I spread the gospel of brining high and low, like the Johnny Appleseed of tryptophan. Could it have been for nothing?

Now don't get me wrong, the brined turkeys I've had have been the best I've ever tasted. But could there be a tastier method out there?

More importantly, if McGee is right, what do I make of Alton Brown, my culinary hero? He's a McGee fan, but a briner nonetheless. Who is right and who is wrong? It's as if Santa and Jesus disagreed on the best way to wrap presents.

For now, perhaps foolishly, I'm going to continue brining my bird. It's what I know. And it's delicious.

For those that have asked, here's the recipe I'm using: Good Eats Roast Turkey.

And here's the episode (in a few parts) where Alton gives the bird its bath:

This year I didn't have any Halloween parties to attend, so I wanted a costume that my co-workers would get a kick out of, as they'd be the only ones seeing it. But since I'd be at work, I also needed one that I could take off easily and still look relatively normal. (It's tough to take someone seriously in a meeting if he's dressed like Peter Pan.)

So this year, I was the iWon Prize Wheel. It's nerdy, it could be removable, it's perfect.

You can see the "real" one at IWON.com).

My basic vision was a cardboard wheel attached to my chest. Of course, it had to be spinnable. Otherwise, it's no fun. To take it even further, I thought it'd be funny to make it like the wheel on the site: The player has no control of the wheel, other than just pressing the start button. To get that type of control, I busted out the big (and nerdy) guns: My Vex robotics kit.

I cut a circle out of cardboard, and attached it to a wheel from the Vex kit. The Vex wheel would give my cardboard wheel a bit more mass, and more importantly, provide a sturdy way to grip the axle.

I mounted the wheel assembly on an axle, built a simple frame, and hooked up a motor. Now I could start and stop the wheel via the motor.

The guts of the operation. The motor is the green-and-black piece on the right. The red thing is my secret weapon. I'll get to that later.

Now that I knew the motor could spin the wheel, I needed a way to start and stop the wheel via a button. I also wanted a smooth start-up/slowdown, to make it look semi-natural. For that, I was going to need a microcontroller. The Vex kit also has one of those. I hooked everything up to the computer and got a'programming.

The Vex kit made this really easy. The coding environment doesn't really allow for robust (or pretty) code, but it does simple stuff well. Within about an hour I was able to make the button control the wheel, and add the nice acceleration/deceleration that I was looking for.

I embedded the spin button inside one of those cheap touch-lamps. Ideally, I would have been able to turn the light on and off using the Vex kit as well, but I couldn't figure it out in time, so I scratched that idea. Just having the big button was enough.

Spin Now!

One of these Vex buttons embedded inside the touchlamp

I built a frame out of the Vex erector-set-style pieces, and then embedded everything in a shoebox. I clipped on a few straps from laptop bags for straps, making sure that they clipped on to the metal frame, so that the cardboard wouldn't have to bear any of the weight. My basic costume was complete.

View from the front, sans-wheel

View from the back, nerdery on display

Next up: Cheating. The outcomes for the wheel on the site are controlled by odds, and I wanted mine to be controlled by me. That's where the red thing in the photo above comes into play. Basically, that box keeps track of how far the wheel has spun. Which means that at any point (even when the wheel is spinning), the Vex system will know where the wheel is positioned, and with some clever thinking, can predict where it would stop with reasonable certainty. So I just had to make sure it didn't start slowing the wheel down until it thought it would stop on the desired outcome. It's not perfect, but it was about 90% accurate.

Now that the Vex could determine the outcome, I needed a subtle way for me to tell it which outcome I wanted. Originally, I added two pushbuttons, but they protruded a bit, and made a clicking sound when pressed, so I was afraid people would catch on. Luckily, the Vex kit also has light sensors that act the same way as the buttons do. Once I added them to the frame, I'd be able to signal the Vex where to stop just by covering the "Win" or "Lose" sensor with my hand. I figured I'd be able to make it look like I was just stabilizing the frame while the wheel is spinning.

Here's are the sensors embedded in the top of the box.

The red and black piece is a light sensor

They were a bit too visible, so I disguised them a bit with electrical tape. It worked great, and the strip of tape just appeared to be keeping the box closed.

Covering the red part of the sensor really hid them well. No one spotted them all day.

The day before the contest, my office announced there would be a costume contest, with prizes going to winners in four categories. I think this is the first time in my life I knew that I'd win something. The prize I was shooting for:

Guitar Hero III for the Wii

The big day came, and the wheel was a huge hit. All my coworkers got the joke right away. I got a kick of watching their expressions when they realized it spun electronically. Sadly, my "cheating" feature didn't work reliably, so I gave up on it pretty early, but I really didn't mind, since everyone was enjoying the costume.

The final product

Thanks to Scott for taking this video of the wheel in action

I totally won the costume contest, and Amy and I are now addicted to Guitar Hero. Maybe that's what I'll be for Halloween next year.

Growing
I planted a vegetable/herb garden, and grew cilantro/coriander, thyme, rosemary, basil, tomatoes, bell peppers, green beans, and cucumbers. Just about everything came in great. I'm sorry I don't have pictures of the vegetables, but I ate them all.

Cooking
I also came up with a decent pasta sauce recipe, which, unsurprisingly, uses a lot of items from the garden:

Irish Boy tomato sauce
3-4 tomatoes
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp red wne vinegar
1/3 c wine (I used 2 tbsp vodka, since we're not a big wine house)
1-2 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp dried oregano
6-8 basil leaves, chopped
3-4 sprigs thyme (about 12 inches, total)
2 tbsp tomato paste (to thicken things a bit)

1) Combine the oil, garlic, onion, and pepper in a skillet over low heat until onions and peppers are soft, about 10-15 minutes
2) Slice and skin the tomatoes.
3) Squeeze each slice over a bowl, to extract juice and seeds. Add tomato slices to skillet.
3a) If you really want to go for broke, slide the pan under the broiler for 10-15 minutes (or until the tomatoes start to brown), stirring every 5 minutes or so.
4) Add vinegar and booze to the bowl with the tomato juice.
5) Strain this liquid into the skillet. Increase heat to medium
6) Add spices, sugar, and tomato paste to skillet.
7) Cook until sauce reduces to desired consistency
8) Blend, if desired

The first time I made this recipe, it turned out great. The next time, I burnt it.

Building
Amy and I made a cornhole set for my sister and her husband. They're big Red Sox fans, so we used a Red Sox design.

I grew kind of attached by the end of construction, but I was happy to give the boards to Laura and Jason, since they turned out so great.

It was a great summer, and I'm already looking forward to next year's projects

Just about any table can be used as a beer pong table, but ideally, it should be seven or eight feet long, and able to put up with quite a bit of spills. So our dining room set was out. I considered buying or renting a table, but to me, anything you make yourself is always cooler, and this way I'd get to keep it. However, this is Beer Pong, not Champagne Pong, so I didn't want to break the bank in the process.

So I devised a pretty cheap plan: Plywood on 2x4s on sawhorses. The wood's cheap, and the sawhorses would be re-usable. Home Depot sells 8'x4' sheets of 1/2" plywood for about $13, and eight-foot 2x4's are about $2.20 apiece. (I tried to find a source of used lumber to make this project a little eco-friendlier, but I didn't find anything in time. Sorry, environment, I'll have to get you next time) I already had access to one set of sawhorses, and I picked up some saw horse brackets and some more 2x4s for the other.

I had the Home Depot guy cut the plywood into two 8'x2' halves for me. Initially he was pretty unhelpful, but he struck me as a guy that has played Beer Pong a time or two (quite possibly on his lunch break that day, actually), so I shared my plan with him, and he was all smiles after that.

I managed to get everything home in the Prius (that little gal does a pretty good job with long material), and set to work. Construction was pretty straightforward. I just put four drywall screws through the plywood into each 2x4.

Next, I moved on to the sawhorses. The set I already had has an adjustable height setting that went down to 31". A little tall, but not bad, so I built the second set of sawhorses to this same height.

To prevent the table from sliding around on the sawhorses, Amy suggested putting a beam of wood across the 2x4s. This way, when the table is face-up, the beams would catch on the sawhorses. It was a great suggestion. I added clamps to further minimize sliding.

I was going to leave it at that, but I wasn't sure how bare plywood would hold up to spills, so I debated painting it. Then I had a great paint job idea, so it was decided.

Here's the final product:

The Pong-themed beer pong table

The tables got a lot of use, and held up great. The 2x4's under the plywood prevented the plywood from sagging, and the cross-beams prevented the table top from sliding around on the sawhorses. And it came out pretty cheap:

A little high, but I feel it's a bit inflated, since I can re-use the sawhorses, and barely put a dent in the screws, primer, or paint. And besides, who am I to put a price on fun?

I had the following conversation with the barista:

Kevin: I'll have a single espresso to go, please.
Barista: A single, to go?
Kevin: Yes, please.
Barista: Are you so busy you can't stop to drink one ounce of coffee in a ceramic cup?
Kevin: Uh, um... yes?
Barista: Okay, tree killer, one single espresso, coming up.

Dammit, he had me. Here I was, all smug about my earth-hugging ways, and it took about 8 seconds for him to put me back in my place.

I took my Bambi-killing paper cup, and left. Out of guilt, I sipped on that espresso for the next half-mile, and then used the cup four more times before finally discarding it. Thanks for keeping me humble, Barista guy.

See, Amy likes to know the weather forecast each morning (since she takes public transportation), and I need a traffic report to figure out which route to work I should take.

So, inspired by a similar project I read about in "Home Hacking Projects for Geeks", I combined my radio station with an RSS feed grabber and a computer text-to-voice program to create this:

(Well, actually, the Wallace & Grommit theme was at the beginning, so we don't wake up to a creepy robot voice, but I moved it to the end for the website version so you wouldn't have to sit through it)

I set my computer up to broadcast this file at the same time that the alarm clock goes off so we can wake up and get the weather, traffic, news, and reminders that are relevant to us before we get out of bed.

Sure, we could just turn on the news station in the morning, but then we'd have to sit through all commercials and a lot of stuff we're not interested in. Not to mention, all the traffic reports around here are NYC-oriented, which isn't much help to me. We could also check out the internet for this info, but we have our morning routine down to a science to allow us to sleep in as late as possible, and sitting down to the computer is not in the time budget.

And this is just cooler.

Now that we're in a house, I resurrected an old computer with the intention of broadcasting music on FM, so I can turn on any radio throughout the house and hear the same music.

That's pretty geekie, but it gets worse.

I wanted to have easy remote access to the computer, and customize it with my own scripts and such. So I installed Linux on it instead of Windows. Geeky, yes, but that's nothing.

Here's what I did:

I ordered an x10 wall switch online, a special type of switch that can be controlled by my computer. I replaced our outside porch light switch with it.

I then hooked up a bluetooth adapter to the Linux machine.

Once that was working, I wrote a program which senses the bluetooth on my phone (or Amy's phone) to detect when we arrive home for the day. If it's late, it turns on the porch light so we can see where we're going and get our key in the door.

So basically, I now use a linux computer, bluetooth, and x10 to do what a $30 motion sensing porch light from Home Depot would have done.

But mine is so much cooler.

A few examples.

Change, when I was renting:

Change, as a homeowner:

Other things I've noticed:

• I go to sleep early on Friday nights, so that I'll wake up early on Saturday morning to get stuff done.
• I'm willing to paint anything with just a few minutes notice.
• I can spend hours watching This Old House.
• I've started saying very grown-up things, like "Someone should really do something about these property taxes," and "We need to salt that sidewalk before someone slips and hurts themselves"

All in all, it's a great experience, but I haven't decided if I like how adult-like it makes me feel. I still think of myself as a college student. I'm like a walking frosted mini wheats commercial

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go yell at the people driving too fast down my street.

My 3- and 5-year-old nieces were celebrating their first Christmas in the States this year, and they asked Santa for a playkitchen. Amy and I volunteered to help Santa out by getting one for them. But after shopping around a bit, I couldn't help but think that I could make one myself (running the plumbing for the icemaker could be tricky, but the rest looked simple). My original thought was that a homemade one would be better and cheaper than a purchased one, but think I knew I was lying to myself. Mostly I just wanted to test out the skills I learned in a woodworking class I took a few years back but haven't really had a chance to use yet.

So in early December I got to work. Here's my design:

Created with SquigglyPlanner 4.0

The dimensions are 42"x42"x16". A fridge on the left, an oven on the right, with a stove and a sink above the oven. I'm not really sure how practical a sink above an oven would be in real life, but these girls wear princess dresses to bed, so I didn't think they'd notice.

I'm happy that I didn't have to change much from the initial design to the final product. It makes me optimistic about my future projects. I had hoped to put lights inside that would turn on and off when the doors opened and closed, but I ran out of time.

Construction took place in my parent's garage, using mostly their tools (thanks again, M&D). Here's a not-terribly-safe router table setup I used to round all the edges.

Here's one side of the oven that I'm rather proud of, since it involved so many curves.

And here's the final product:

Everything turned out great. Not as many bells and whistles as I would have liked, but the sink has knobs you can turn, and my mom stepped in with some touchlights to take the place of the lights I had originally hoped to make, so there was plenty for them to play with.

The only real problem I had was finding the right type of hinges for the fridge doors. I accidentally bought the wrong kind for the bottom door, and didn't notice until it was too late to go out and get the right ones, so I had to go with what I had. Sure enough, the door fell off on Christmas morning at just the wrong moment.

But I picked up the correct hinges a few days later and I was able to fix everything before we left for home.

One other mistake I made had to do with joining the fridge and the oven together. To fit it into our car (and to make sure it could be moved easily), I needed to make the two parts separable. The easiest thing to do would have been just to make them two distinct pieces. But MDF isn't exactly light, so I was afraid they would be too heavy. So to save weight, I used one side of the fridge as the side of the oven as well. The top and bottom of the oven joined to the fridge using dowels. This allowed me to snap the oven to the fridge rather securely, but still let me take it apart when needed. But as it turned out, weight wasn't a problem at all, and moving the oven without anything holding the left side together was pretty tricky. I should have taken the easy route and made the oven completely separate from the fridge.

But these were pretty small issues in the long run, and the girls have had a great time playing with it so far.

I'm sure it's fallen apart by now and Amy's family just doesn't have the heart to tell me. Next year, I think I'll go back to Christmas cards.

Here are some tools I found helpful in making this project. I get a bit of cash if anyone actually uses these links, so if you think you might pick any of these items up, perhaps you can help me out along the way?

I moved houses:
Ol' 'n' busted:

New Hotness:

After our last housing debacle, I was ready to give up on the real estate search. There just aren't enough houses in our area with firepoles to get downstairs. As luck would have it, a house just down the street from the last one (I'd say maybe one good catapult's throw away, actually) went up for sale, and it fit the bill perfectly. We happened to have several houndred thousand dollars that we were only using as the fourth leg on our coffee table, so we bought it.

Mainly, I just wanted a kitchen that photographed better so I can bring you better food shots.

I moved offices:
Ol' 'n' busted:

New Hotness:

Honestly, I don't want to talk about this one too much. My commute has doubled, I'm in a cubicle now, and I have to enter a five digit passcode to go to the bathroom.

I moved blogs.

A new blog started up at work, and I've been writing for them for a few months. Which is part of the reason I haven't written here in a while. The blog is called SmileyBuzz, and it's a companion blog to the products we make. You can find my posts here:
http://buzz.smileycentral.com/archive/author/id/8.html

I still plan on keeping up the kevincooney.com blog, but the posts will probably be weeks apart. If you want to save yourself some needless checking, I'd suggest using an RSS reader to subscribe to my feed. This way, my site will come to you, and not vice versa. If you're not familiar with RSS, then forget I said anything.

It's kind of a long post, so you'll have to bear with me.

This place has gourmet written all over it. Also, graffiti.

They knew what I was talking about -- even if I didn't -- and didn't even mind when I came up two bucks short and had to pay the rest in nickels. (I still owe them 25¢)

Anyway, back to the pig. Here's what the 8 pounds of future deliciousness looked like the day before:

The next morning I was up early to start smoking.

Apparently, there's a 5:30am, too.

8 pounds would take too long to cook, so I sliced off a two pound piece so they'd both cook faster. Here's what it looked like after being brined, cut, and covered in dry rub:

On to the fun part: The Smoker. Rather than pay $60 for an actual smoker, I paid $58 (plus gas and tolls looking for parts), for this:

Step one. Find a nice bit terra cotta planter ($13, Home Depot), and place it on some 2x4s (free, leftover from Cornhole).

Step two. Put an electric burner ($10, Walgreens, or $18 on Amazon) on the bottom, using the hole to run the cord through. Dial the burner to high, but don't plug it in yet.

Step three. Put a pie pan (or other heavy-duty pan) on the burner, and add some hardwood chips. Technically, they should be kind of old and dry, but I wouldn't be smoking for too long, so I just went with a piece of Maple 1x4 that I got at Home Depot ($???, Home Depot). I sliced it into 1 inch strips.

Step four. Put in a grill grate ($0, from my Weber grill, or $7 on Amazon). It lined up perfectly with the little lip on the inside of the pot. Someone at the terra-cotta factory watches Good Eats, apparently.

Step five. Top with an inverted planter, same width as the bottom one (also $13, from Home Depot). A replacement grill thermometer ($8, Home Depot, ) does double duty of filling in the hole and giving a temperature reading.

Step 6. Plug in the burner, and preheat to 220°. This took some fiddling with the burner to get it right. That's actually a big pain because you have to disassemble the whole thing to change it, so I recommend getting it right on the first try, or maybe hooking it up to a dimmer switch. Turns out for my burner I had to dial it to 11.

Once I had my smoker going, I just sat back with a book and waited, changing the chips whenever the smoke stopped (about once an hour).

Thawing my breakfast on my future dinner

I was pressed for time, so I cheated a bit and switched the meat to a 300° oven after 4 hours of smoking.

After pulling, here was the delicious result:

Sure, it took a while, but man, that was good.

It should make all my frying adventures a piece of cake. Mmmm... fried cake....

This man knows how to give gifts. He's taken three of the top five spots on my "Best Gifts I've ever received" (You all should consider that a challenge)

1.	"I'm just here for More Food" cookbook	Matt
2.	Gift of Life	Parents
3.	Deep Fryer	Matt
4.	Change Counting machine	Amy
5.	Cast Iron cornbread pan	Matt
6.	Wedded bliss	Amy
...
5,432	Smack on the ear, for putting our marriage 6th	Amy

]]> 2006-06-14T23:27:21Z 2006-06-14T18:27:21-05:00 tag:www.kevincooney.com,2006://2.137 2006-06-14T23:27:21Z

I hate Pop Tarts. I really do. They start with such a great premise -- pie, for breakfast, how great is that? -- but then completely fall short on the delivery. I fall for them every time I see one, too: "Oooh, Pop tarts! (munch, much) Ugh, Pop tarts..."

I like to imagine that one day at Kellogg's, the guy who hangs drywall collided with the guy from the supply room and had one of those "Hey, you guy rubber cement in my drywall", "Hey, you got drywall in my rubber cement. Wow, this tastes terrible" type moments. A guy from the marketing department happened to be walking by, and a viola! -- the PopTart was born. (Later, someone spilled some glue on a batch, and the icing versions were created.)

I guess Alton Brown experiences the same disappointment I do, since he went and came up with his own recipe for them, which I made this past weekend.

]]> The dough. Adorable, no? Looks like my brain (about the same size, too), but tastier. Although I'll never know for sure... After I rolled out the dough, cut it up, and added some filling. That, for the record, is too much filling. Most of it later burnt the hell out of my tongue and ended up on my shirt. I'm starting to see why Kellogg's is so stingy with theirs. Filling #1. Strawberry Rhubarb preserves, made by the Trappist monks. Good to see these monks are doing something productive. Not like those lazy ones who just pray all the time. Filling #2: Raspberry Jam. With a name like Smucker's, it's got to be good. Also, 90% seeds. (Still tasty, though) Putting a lid on it. Looks like a big ravioli, doesn't it? After the first bake. Just like Pop Tarts, they don't brown until you toast them. Unlike Pop Tarts, they're not terrible once you do. One of the wonkier-looking ones, toasted. It may look like a cheese calzone, but it tastes more like a raspberry one. Good stuff.

I was going to attempt some icing, but these were pretty gosh darned good without any.

It felt good to restore the good name of Pie for Breakfast. And I have a few more culinary adventures up my sleeve, so stay tuned.

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Anyhow, I was planning on writing a nice letter to the Jello company demanding that they reinstate Jello 1-2-3 or else I'd slip ground horse hooves in their products. But while searching the Internet, I discovered that (a) Jello already contains ground horse hooves, so my threat wouldn't carry much weight, and (b) someone already started a petition to bring back Jello 1-2-3

So all I can do now is encourage you to sign said petition and wait, spoon in hand, for the good people at Jello to do the right thing. I guess I can also get started on that petition to bring back Alf...

P.S. More posts a'coming in the next few days. Sorry for the slowness lately.

Just when the memory of our last Bad Carma incident was starting to fade, God/Zeus/Buddha/Charlton-Heston released his fury last weekend, and attempted to smite the Prius while Amy was driving back from the mall. Luckily, Amy escaped unharmed. The Prius, however, did not.

I won't go into details about the accident, but I've made an interactive recreation of how I believe it went down, for you to enjoy.

Can you stop the angry god from striking down the Prius?

We're debating what color we should pick for the body panels that need to be replaced, because at this rate, we'll have replaced them all by the end of the year, so we might as well get a new color.

For some more polished Flash games, head over to my friend Scott's games page
]]> 2006-04-14T13:30:57Z 2006-04-14T08:30:57-05:00 tag:www.kevincooney.com,2006://2.133 2006-04-14T13:30:57Z

As I'm sure your page-a-day-countdown calendar told you, Monday was my 28th birthday.

From the looks of my presents, though, I just turned 14.

What Amy was planning on getting me:

What I bought myself one week prior to my birthday, messing with Amy's plans:

She recovered well, though, and picked up a slew of add ons for the kit I bought. Awesome.

Unfortunately, the metal in my retainer causes interference with the remote control.

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In the interest of scientific research, and as practice for the main event, I cooked these other slices using a few different methods to see which came out best: Microwave, baking on a rack, and baking on the Kevin Cooney bac-o-matic (patent pending) -- a pan with wooden skewers instead of fixed metal rods, to allow the bacon to shrink, rather get stretched thin by a normal rack.

Amy and I preferred both baked methods to the microwave (too rubbery). As for the bac-o-matic, Amy couldn't tell the difference between those slices and the other baked slices. I thought the bac-o-matic was a bit better, but I'm partial. I'd like to try metal instead of wood next time, though.

Candy time
I have some nice pictures of the process below, but if you'd like to see more, you can head on over to the original recipe from VisualRecipes.

I gathered the caramel ingredients for a final family photo before the big melt. (The cream was still in the fridge). The brown stuff up front is a combo of maple syrup and bourbon, since the recipe called for either, and I happened to have both. I lightly toasted the almonds on the stove beforehand. I feel I should point out that I prepped way more almonds than I needed, but I doubt you'll actually be making this recipe, so I don't think it really matters.

What 11 slices of crumbled bacon looks like.

Since the bourbon was already out...

The melting pot. Note the ingenious use of paperclip for the thermometer probe. FoodNetwork, here I come!

Prepping the pan with some bacon on bottom. We wouldn't want it all on top, now would we?

Viola! Caramel, 10 slices of bacon, and some toasted almonds. Combined together, for some reason.

Dining
I finished cooking pretty late in the evening, and it needed 3 hours to cool, so I had to wait until the next day before trying my new creation. So I stashed it in the fridge and went to bed. This morning I brought the pan to work and had my first piece with my morning coffee (bacon is a breakfast food, after all).

The result? After only a 1.5"x1.5" piece, I feel like I've had a blood transfusion, but they hooked me up to the pickle juice machine by accident. I now have a bad case of the jitters, and I think my heart rate is up. (maybe coffee wasn't the best pairing).

In other words, it's delicious.

Okay, no, it's not delicious, but it's not bad either. The general opinion of those that have tasted it so far seems to be: "Hmm... it's not bad. I'll finish the rest of my piece later."

So, Bacon Caramel recipe, back to the recipe file you go. The big, circular file that gets taken out on Mondays and Thursdays.

Amy thinks it's because I demanded that the seller construct a pool and three-story waterslide before I sign the contract. If that's what caused the deal to go south, I'm fine with it. If I can't slide out of my bedroom to the pool for a quick game of Marco Polo, what's the point of even having a house?

In a related and funny-now-that-I-know-it-didn't-actually-happen story, we were almost homeless. I told our landlord that we might be leaving at the end of March, so he found a new renter and almost had them sign a lease. Luckily, we got to him just in time.

Celebrate good times

As you can see, we're really excited, and not nervous at all about scraping together all our money -- every savings account, paycheck, and every gift from birthdays, communion, bar mitzvah (I knew converting at 12 was a good idea), graduations, wedding, and other wedding -- to come up with a down payment. Lucky for us, I'll be able to sell some more of my blood in two weeks, which should give us enough for the down payment just in time for closing.

Oh, in case our prospective seller happens upon this site: I'm just kidding, we have plenty of money. The nice man from Nigeria will be transferring it next week, once my check clears.

Legal Notice: By reading this sentence you agree to help us move.

Update 2/15/06: We're now in contract with the seller, so while there's still some financial hoops to jump through, the purchase is looking good.

Update 3/02/06: Suddenly things aren't looking so good. I won't go into details, but basically the bank is not cooperating as we had hoped -- something about a bank error in my favor a few years back that they're still bitter about -- so this may not happen after all. I'm still optimistic, though.

Oh, and if you want a free monitor and/or a cheap 24-disc changer, let me know. Better act fast.

Monitor ($0): http://newyork.craigslist.org/wch/zip/127300869.html
CD changer ($10): http://newyork.craigslist.org/wch/ele/127295988.html

I've never seen another restaurant that serves anything like the Irish meat pie, and every other pumpkin beer I've tried tastes more like the Irish meat pie than their pumpkin beer. So I've decided to take matters into my own hands: I'm going to these things myself.

I've started with the Irish Meat Pie, since I don't like to cook after drinking. More importantly, I don't have a brewing kit. Yet.

Lucky for me, the restaurant posted their menu on their website (the fools!), so I was able to get the basic description to refresh my memory. After a few culinary disasters, I'm getting pretty darn close. Here's the basic operation:

"Damn You, MBC" meat pie (serves 2)

1lb sirloin steak
1c mashed potatoes
3/4c cheese. I went with colby-jack.
1 sheet puff pastry
1 egg
1 tbsp water
Flour for dusting, and for gravy-making
salt and pepper
herbs if you have 'em
vegetable oil

1. Defrost the pastry sheet according to instructions
2. Heat up a pan (preferably cast-iron), and preheat-oven to 500°. You can even heat the pan in the oven. How efficient
3. Prep the steak by oiling lightly with a neutral, high-heat oil, and seasoning with kosher salt and pepper.
4. Sear steak in a hot pan over high heat, about 1 minute one each side.
5. Move steak and pan to 500° oven, cook about 1-2 min on each side for medium rare. You want to undercook the steak in this step, since we'll be re-cooking them later in the pie, and we don't want it to overcook then
6. Remove steak from oven, and rest on a plate (the steak, not you).
7. Reduce oven temp to 400°
8. Make a bit of gravy using the flour and pan drippings if you can. (optional)
9. Prep the pastry: Lay it out flat, and push any ripped seams back together. Flour lightly on both sides.
10. Cut out about a 6½" square from the pastry. You'll be left with an L shaped piece. Cut the L into two 6½" long strips (you'll have a bit left). and patch the two pieces into another 6½" square. Place both squares on a lightly floured sheet pan.
11. Slice the steak crosswise into ¼" slices.
12. Mix the sliced steak, potatoes, cheese, sauce, and any herbs together
13. Place meat mixture into center of each pastry square. I should have measured here, but I didn't, so put in as much as you think it can hold.
    
14. Whisk egg and water together, brush some on as a border of the top side of the pastry square.
15. Fold up each corner of each pastry around the filling, and seal edges together by pinching. The egg wash should act as glue.
    
16. Brush the outside of the newly-formed pouches with the egg mixture.
17. Bake pouches at 400° for about 30 minutes until they crisp up and turn a pretty golden brown. Awwww...
    
18. Bonus: If you have any spare chocolate laying around, roll that up in the scrap piece of pastry, and bake it right along with the pies.
19. Eat, while planning how to get your wife to agree to buying a brewing kit.

As my gift to all of you this year, I give you a video Amy and I put together which shows how we've been preparing for the holiday season. You know, decking halls, wassailing, donning apparel -- pretty standard stuff really, but Amy and I make it interesting.

It's pretty good, so I hope you got me something nice in return.

How do I know that your turkey was a terrible, stringy embarrassment? Because odds are your turkey wasn't brined, like this one was:

Two turkeys

Therefore, it was terrible. Don't worry, though, brining is easy, so you can do it next year! Here's the method I used:

1. Procure a large bucket, preferably an empty one that does not have "industrial strength" and/or "hair removal" written on the outside. Mine at one point held the largest quantity of chicken salad known to man.
2. Fill bucket with brine, water, ice, and love.
3. Place turkey in brine. Add water until turkey sleeps with the fishes.
4. Place covered bucket in cold place (I used a garage) for 6 hours. Lie through teeth to assure wife that this is perfectly safe.
5. Remove turkey from brine, and cook at 500° for 30 minutes. Ignore/remove-batteries-from smoke alarms (mine only went off once).
6. Continue cooking turkey at 350° until done, about 90 minutes.

Yield: 1 moist, golden brown and delicious turkey, and dozens of compliments.]]> 2005-11-17T17:41:26Z 2005-11-17T12:41:26-05:00 tag:www.kevincooney.com,2005://2.118 2005-11-17T17:41:26Z

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I think I might be on a Notre Dame T-Shirt, and that I might find out for sure when I headed out to South Bend last week. Bad news, kids: The jury's still out.

The "pristine" version of The Shirt that I saw was framed in a bar -- everything worth seeing in Indiana is in a bar -- in a dark room quite above eye level. I wasn't able to get a good look at it, but I snapped a few shots with the camera above my head.

When I got home, I couldn't see much that my well-washed version didn't show, except this:

Some chick wearing a watch that I thought was on my arm. Damn. There goes that theory.

"Waaaiiiit a second....", I thought, "Is that Amy's sophomore-year-roommate Sally?" I checked with Amy, and she agreed that this might be her.

So seeing this version of The Shirt took away one clue, and added another. Time to track down the original creator to find that photo.

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BenRatesItAll.com

Ah, variety. It — along with cumin — is the spice of life. And BRIA certainly has it in spades (variety, not cumin). From White Plains to Bath Mats, Ben is all over the map with his reviews, and I admire that. While other ratings websites are becoming more and more specialized, Ben bucks the trend and reviews anything that strikes his fancy. He's a salmon, swimming upstream on the internet superhighway. Uh-oh, I'm mixing my metaphors... I'd best move on.

In addition to his variety, his reviews have practicality that an everyman like myself can appreciate. He's not rating tropical getaways in the South Pacific, or fancy sports cars. Rather, he gives us his views on things that we all come upon in our daily life. Like Beards.

So his reviews are good, but what about the site itself? While I obviously prefer the "pick-one-color and go with it" approach to Web design, Ben has taken the opposite tactic and used the entire palette for his page — surprisingly, it works. The colors don't clash or fight for attention, making for a cheerful, easy, browsing experience.

While I feel his navigation could use some improvements by including a non-search way to browse his categories, the rest of the navigation works well. The Comments and Suggestions pages are easy to find and work with.

Overall, I'd give BenRatesItAll a solid "A", but I'm kind of a jerk. So I'll go with A-.

Keep up the great work, Ben.

So you can imagine my anticipation for last weekend's Darpa Grand Challenge. Basically, robotic cars were racing across the desert, competing for $2 million dollars. It's like NASCAR for nerds. And if someone finished, odds are it would never happen again. Imagine if this upcoming World Series was the last ever, and the winning team would be World Series champs for life.

On Saturday, I woke up at 9am -- no small feat for me -- hooked up my laptop to my ethernet cable (wireless speeds just wouldn't cut it), and sat down for what I hoped would be an impressive webcast of the event. In-car cameras, cool animations, etc. Last time they did it, there was a semi-working video feed, so I was sure it would have improved since then. This was an event run for nerds, by nerds, so they were bound to have a great website, right?

Wrong. There was no video coverage. Not even audio coverage. I checked my local TV listings, in desperate hope that maybe ESPN 8 ("The Ocho") would possibly have it. No dice. In the end, I had to settle for semi-hourly audio updates, and DARPA's terrible "status board", which just showed a progress bar for each team. It was like watching 23 pieces of software being installed, except it took ten hours.

It's just like being there!

So here's a big thanks to DARPA, which gave 2 million of my tax dollars -- I pay a lot of taxes -- to a winner, and wouldn't even let me watch it. Thanks, DARPA. P.S. Your logo sucks.

Here's a picture of The Shirt from my sophomore year:

I wasn't a big fan of the color, but I've hung onto it for nostalgic reasons. Good thing too, since it turns out: I'm on the thing.

Bill was over to watch the ND game a few weeks ago, and we were trash-talking this year's yellow version. Amy says something to the effect of: "I always said that there's a picture of all of us on The Shirt from sophomore year, but no one ever believes me," which is news to Bill and me. She must have mentioned her theory while talking about us getting married or something, because I had no idea what she was talking about.

We fished out my version of The Shirt from the laundry basket, Febreezed it a few times, flipped it over, looked closely, and saw this:

Sweet Jesus, there we are! If that's not us, then cloning has advanced much farther that science is letting on.

We're trying to contact the designer of the shirt that year to get the original photo, but no luck so far. We'll also be heading to ND later this fall, where we'll check out The Shirts they have on display. Those probably haven't had as much beer spilled on them as mine.

Afterwards, we'll be suing the school for a chunk of those millions.

This is the second (thankfully) minor accident it's had in the eight months we've owned it. The first wasn't mentioned here because.... well, because it was my fault.

That's a scary accident rate. It's approaching Nick Nolte levels.

To really get a feel for it, I've run a computer simulation on the photo above, to project what the car will look like this time next year.

I think I should get a bus pass.

White socks and background chosen for contrast and comic effect

And now a little info about aloe: Aloe was discovered by the Native Americans to be an effective way to mess with people already in pain. The first documented use went something like this:

Running bear: "Boy, Pale-as-Snow is really being a pain about that sunburn."
Tan-like-oak: "No kidding. Hey, I've got a great idea. Let's tell him that this rubbing sticky stuff all over the burn will help."
Running bear: "What? That green stuff? He'll never buy it. All that does is make your leg hair sticky and cause your skin to tighten up."
Tan-like-oak: "Perfect."

Flash forward three hundred years later, and I'm lying on the couch with green goop on my legs, plotting my revenge on the sun.

Luckily, things have been healing nicely, and I own a lot of pants.

Amy emailed me at work to let me know it arrived, so on the way home that night I stopped home and picked up some cheap steaks, so the six-year-old inside me could play with his new toy A.S.A.P.

This was waiting when I got home

I tell you, there's nothing better than a freshly ground burger. Amy, not a big beef fan to begin with, didn't really notice any difference, although she did enjoy it. I will admit that the difference may be in my head -- not to mention that it's a bit creepy to insert beef, and see it come out the holes like a grown-up playdough factory -- but I think it's worth it the effort.

So if you need anything ground, I'm your man.

Around the same time, I headed to a party attended by some family-in-law. Someone at the party had read my site, and happened to have a spare stand mixer bowl kicking around the house -- but no stand mixer -- and had the forethought to bring it to the party to give to me. (I won't mention who it was, but many thanks to that person.)

So what's the lesson here? I think it's pretty clear: You should give me stuff.

I made quite a few things, but for now I'll focus on french fries, because it's the only meal I took pictures of before I battered, fried, and ate the camera.

Equipment:

One V-slicer. The V refers to the shape of cut that this will gauge out of your finger once you decide you don't need no stinkin' protective holder. Here I am displaying my new slicer with my best Barker-beauty hand motion.

One thermometer, attached securely to the pot with a paper clip found in the pencil drawer

Ingredients: One Russet potato. (Not pictured, since I'm pretty sure you know what one looks like.)

Step 1: Slice potato. Apply band-aids.

Step 2: Fry potato. Apply more band-aids.

Step 3: Eat potato, with hamburger, and cold, poorly-poured beer in frosty mug.

I tell you, that was some good stuff. Good, and good for you. Okay, well, one out of two ain't bad.

Other meals prepared during my fry-a-thon:

Pan-fried Chicken and homemade biscuits

Dramatic lighting optional. Actually, this picture was taken at noon, but all the oil droplets in the air made it look like it was taken at Delicious-thirty.

Doughnuts

I don't have any pictures of the delicious, delicious, finished product, but here's a quick tip: If the recipe says to let the dough rise for an hour, do not leave the house during that hour. I wasn't sure whether I should fry this, or give it to Mario so he can change to Super Mari