well since this month turned out to be much more pricey than planned

• ticket to germany 700$
• visa fee 200$
• conference fee 200$ (should get reimbursed in the next view weeks)
• smoker 350$ (including needed stuff like coal and wood)

and next month is going to be the same game

• rent deposit 500$
• last month rent 500$
• paying rent for 2 places 750-1000$

well I need a new cheap hobby, which won't cost more than 50$ a month and the eququiment should be also affordable/rentable.

Solution?

I will try to pick up free climbing, which will also help me to conquer my fear of heights. And also will try to survive on 500$ of food (so no more chocolate and soda)

so what's new,

• my experiment to live on 100$ a week worked quite well, only 2 days left and I still have 2 whole chickens in the freezer, which are going to visit the smoker tomorrow
• for some reasons my back is killing me time to try a different workout and I'm looking forward to swimming again
• booking a flight to germany and a visa appointment and screwing it up, now I have only a 2 day window to get my visa delivered
• trying to learn and understand ajax
• trying to work more with groovy and grails
• learning a new IDE (IntelliJ 8) and so far I love it
• switching from firefox to safari for internet related stuff, since firefox is so slow
• looking for a small ultra portable laptop with 10 hours of battery live

just another saturday, well since I decided to skip carmel this weekend and stay in davis, since friends are in town, well I decided to use this weekend and give the smoker a run for it's money.

So today we make trout spread for bagels and smoked trout.

• buy 4 trouts = 10$
• buy cottage cheese and cream cheese = 5$
• buy 12 bagels = 6$

ok now this is out of the way time to setup the smoker, this time we use apple wood chips to see how they work.

First we brine the trouts for an hour in sugar and salt (lesson for next time, brine 2 - 3 hours, they are a bit dry and needed a lot of salt), while setting up the fire. It turned out that the new york times is an aweful starter, so let's try another newspaper the next time.

The trouts are now happily smoking for 3 hours at 220-240 Fahrenheit and I use this time to be productive, equals watching cheesy movies.

Once the trout were done, we had one for lunch, put away one for dinner and mixed 2 for the spread.

• sellery
• onion
• garlic
• cottage cheese
• cream cheese

It turned out that my hand blender is broken, our other blender is not strong enough and a fork is a lot of work. So the spread is a bit chunky, but very tasty!
And I also have about 2 pound of spread now, which has to be eaten in the next 4 days, so 2 bagels for breakfast everyday and if somebody want's some spread, call me.
(It has some fishbones, blame the blender...)

About the smoked trout in general? It's is amaizingly tasty and quite a fat fish. I like it.

so the smoker finally arrived and so we started to cook our first dish.

The lesson of the day? It's not worth it to cook a single chicken, since you need way to much charcoal and wood for it. It was like 5$ worth of charcoal.

lesson 2:

one chicken is not enough, they are so damn tasty you want a second one 5 minutes later

how too?

• soak chicken in solution of salt and sugar for 2 hours
  
• try chicken
• put pepper on chicken
• preheat smoker to 250 degrees fahrenheit
• leave chicken in there for 3h
• try to understand where you need to put the thermometer and figure out why it constantly looses connection
• figure out a way to kill the coals and wood once you are done, since it makes me nervous as hell to leave the bbq on over night and going to bed
• carve the chicken, executed by ashley!

todo:

get more chickens and repeat!

step two:

the smoker is ordered and on its way...
and so is the meat thermometer

(no more dining out this month...)

step three:

get wood and charcoal

step four:

get some ribs and smoke them tomorrow night till the early morning

BBQ season has started and this year I will full fill my desire and buy a smoker.

But first time to read up where I can get what parts of beef and the parts for the smoker. Like wood and so.

You know, the usual...

well I'm back from phillidelphia and the first thing we did was a nice picnic in sacramento. We also looked at some town houses and discovered a small honey store.

It's amaizing how different honey can taste. From delicious to disgusting is just a spoon apart

• orange blossom - yummy
• clover - yummy
• sage - ok and very mild
• eucalyptus - disgusting
  
• several other kind's I can't remember

I only bought 2 pounds of honey, but it was so much cheaper than grocery stores.

...time to make some tea...

the last day in philli seems to follow a trend, it's raining and we are waiting impatiently for our flight and hope to be back in the warms of California soon.
It was a fun week, but pretty stressful. Short a day on the pool in the sun sounds great.

so it's always sunny in Philadelphia? Nah it's a freaking lie! Never believe in TV Shows! Why are I'm surrounded by thunderstorms and rain.

I should had brought shoes besides sandals...

Anyway the poster presentation is done and the response was quite nice. It also looks that everybody starts to agree with our point:

You need a database for your results!

So the last 7 years start to pay off. Several people congratulated us to the software we wrote and are highly impressed. I'm still surprised that I was brave enough to actually participate in the discussion, in front of 300 people about the different approaches to annotate massspecs. Who all have fancy titles and are accepted experts in the field of metabolomics.

What else, the first people which were fun to hangout with already left and so I have to work again tonight to find new people to talk too.

current location: philidelphia
current food: gyros
food of the last days: philli cheesesteaks
busy with: looking so far at 1400 posters, 1400 more are comming
mistake: not staying the weekend here and driving to new york = bad planning from me

why such a short post?

got no time, have to run to a talk and the internet is so damn unreliable...

sometimes things take a bit longer, like create a raid6 system over 16 harddrives 1TB with software raid...

Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md2 : active raid6 sdp[12](S) sdo[13](S) sdn[11] sdm[10] sdl[9] sdk[8] sdj[7] sdi[6] sdh[5] sdg[4] sdf[3] sde[2] sdd[1] sdc[0]
9765518720 blocks level 6, 16k chunk, algorithm 2 [12/12] [UUUUUUUUUUUU]
[>....................] resync = 0.1% (1393856/976551872) finish=25232.3min speed=643K/sec

25k minutes? I really hope the estimate is a bit off. Cause I'm not going to wait for 17 days after each test of the raid system...

getting up at 5.30 -> arg!
waiting for 30 minutes in the cold -> arg!
spending an awesome day in nappa -> awesome!

basically we had a wonderful winetasting event, thx to the metacancer team, in nappa. The wineries were sterling (Oh I love there pinot grigo and sauvignon blanc) and rubicon (to much red wines for my taste and the chadonay was to sour) Short I'm a white wine person, but it was interresting to taste the different kind of red wines.

And we finished the day with a nice dinner a buckhorn.

Now If I just had a reflector with me, I could had really make some stunning pictures. There was so beautiful light!

well today we went kayaking in sacramento river and had a nice bbq afterward. Short it was fun and fixie performed without any problems. It looks like the car is finally happy and running as it's supposed to.

Well if I get a visa, I guess it's time to get a roof rack for the snowboards and bikes...

after working for more than 10 years with sql based languages I discovered something new again. The case statement, which is pretty damn slow (table of a couple of million entries) but it saves me the time to work with some statistical software.

dinner for tonight?

cedar smoked lemon salmon with arugula salad.

short I love the wood planks I got for my BBQ and going to cook more often like this!

it's been quiete lately, which is mostly related to the fact that I discovered that Alexandre Dumas wrote a complete series about the adventures of D'Artangan.

And so I'm slowly fighting my way throw his books and love my ebook reader more and more and can't understand how I could live without it. I mean it's so great to lay at the pool and read gigantic novels in the sun, in such a tiny device.

done:

• the three musketeers

togo:

• 20 years later
• the man in the iron mask
• the vicomte de bragelonne
• 10 years later
  
• Loiuse de la Valliere

and that's just one author...

so all i can say if you like to read and like to read classic novel, get your self an ebook reader, but be prepared to go missing...

I just created a new blog, just to keep track to the stuff my passat does to me

It starts to get annoying. Now 'fixie' is leaking transmission oil.

Another 150$ for parts and 150$ for labor, cause there is no way I can do this my self. I actually have the tools by now and the procedure is not that complicated. But there is no way I can get the car of ground and it's going to be level.

So far this month:

300$ tools and power steering fluid
230$ parts for transmission and PCV system

Well I wanted to flush the transmission anyway.

while reading at the beach in montery and getting a nice sunburn I discovered a bird of prey. Most likely a buzzard or hawk. 60 Minutes later I finally captured it on chip...

a week now I was thinking about the perfect name for my car...

it was between jasmine and fixie.

Fixie it is! Since it developed a power steering fluid leak now and another leak, which leaks very very slowly a fluid I just can't diagnose....

Work done in the last two days:

• changed the light bulb
• stripped a screw, found a way to get it off and bought a new screw
• flushed the power steering fluid

it really starts to get expensive...

But at least now I can reset the check engine light my self and diagnose it my self. Yes I bought a code reader...