Month: May 2010

COC Lives!

/ hsoi

I like Down, but I love Corrosion of Conformity. However due to the successes of Down (and other things), COC’s been in limbo.

But good news, via COC’s Facebook page:

Mike Dean, Reed Mullin and I have been writing tunes and jamming. We’re gonna do a few shows this summer as a 3-piece and probably record as well. All four of us have expressed that when the time is right for everyone we’d like to do some more as a 4-piece with Pepper. Who knows what the future holds but we plan on having a good time and making good music. The Voyage of C.O.C. continues. -Woodroe

Well, it will be whatever it will be, and whatever it will be I’m looking forward to it. It’d be cool if those “few shows this summer” could include a trip down this-a-way.

Can’t wait to hear whatever they come up with!

Fast Enumeration is awesome

/ hsoi

Fast Enumeration, a facet of the Objective-C 2.0 language, is awesome.

I’m finally working on a project where Mac OS X 10.5 is the minimum, so I can start using more “modern” conveniences. And boy, being able to write:

for (id obj in container) {
[obj doSomething];
}

instead of:

NSEnumerator* containerEnumerator = [container objectEnumerator];
id obj = nil;
while ((obj = [containerEnumerator nextObject])) {
[obj doSomething];
}

is just awesome. I know it seems small, but when you type tons of code in a day, such simplicity in code is fantastic.

Don’t forget about the bathroom

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

I went to Subway to pick up sandwiches for Wife and Kids.

I go to open the door. It didn’t open. Huh? Maybe my fingers slipped, try again. Nope. I try yet again with a little more oomph, maybe the door is just stuck? The door still didn’t open. A few more tugs and eventually the “sandwich artists” realize the door is locked and one of the patrons unlocked it for me.

How… odd. Why would the front door to the Subway be locked? and how could it happen? It was a bolt, and when the other gentleman opened it for me it certainly took a few twists of the knob to get it to fully unlatch. So I highly doubt the bolt was in any sort of position where it could have dislodged on its own.

So, that immediately put me on edge. Apart from the 2 ladies working the counter, there were 3 other patrons: the older man who opened the door for me, then two younger tattooed guys. I have nothing against tattoos, but the way they were acting was something to note. Of course, those two guys were almost done getting their sandwich and the older guy was the last in line… the one closest to the door and likely the last one that came through that door before it locked. I kept an eye on everyone’s hands. I kept my distance, minded my location, and just watched and prepared. Yes, I was in Condition Orange.

Things progressed for a couple of minutes while sandwiches were being made.

Then — to my surprise — a young black male walked out from the back hallway, where the bathrooms are located. He walked out from there, through the door, and out the front door. No one else paid him any mind, so maybe he was a patron that had finished his sandwich and opted to use the facilities before leaving. But it doesn’t matter. The point was simple:

I had forgotten about the place I couldn’t see.

In the end, nothing happened. Got my sandwiches and left. I’m still curious how the door became locked, but it doesn’t really matter now. What sits with me more is that I missed thinking “hey, could there be someone or something going on in the back that I can’t see?”

Just sharing a little learning point. It reminded me of something, and hopefully you can learn from my mistake.

On Steak

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

The WSJ on steak, and why our steak has become what it’s become. In short, back in 1926 the USDA introduce “grading” to beef. And how is it graded? Fat.

How did the USDA separate the good beef from the bad? There was one thing everyone from ranchers and cowboys to butchers and USDA graders could agree on: fatter cattle tasted better than lean ones, so long as they weren’t too old. So that’s what they looked for: plump, well-fed cattle. They looked for fat on the ribs called feathering, and fat on the flank called frosting. If there was a great deal of that fat, the beef achieved the highest grade, Prime.

So, like any business, you look for ways to maximize your product and minimize your costs.

It’s the cattle industry that has changed. In the 1950s, cattlemen began sending their cattle to feedlots to get fat. A feedlot is a vast sprawl of fenced-in pens where tens of thousands of cattle eat grain—usually corn—out of concrete troughs. Soon after, cattlemen started using growth promotants—hormones and steroids, basically—to get cattle fat faster, and fed them antibiotics so they could eat corn in amounts that, under normal conditions, could kill them.

By the turn of the century, a new drug entered the scene: the beta2-adrenergic agonist, a muscle relaxant used in humans to treat heart and respiratory disease that makes cattle gain more muscle. And the corn cattle now eat, not surprisingly, has also taken great strides in efficiency, having been hybridized and genetically engineered to pack more fat-producing starch. More recently, we’ve been feeding cattle something called dried distillers grains, which is the muck that’s left over after corn is distilled into ethanol.

The result has been astonishing. In the 1950s, a cow was about two years old by the time it got fat. Today, it can be as young as one year old. An average carcass now yields 40% more beef than it did just 30 years ago. In short, the beef industry has experienced a tectonic supply-side shift. Production has become vastly more efficient. In 2009, beef cost 30% less than in 1974. Yet the average American is eating 20 pounds less of it per year.

But does more fat equal more flavor? Not necessarily. The article makes a good point: consider your wild game, which is amazingly lean but amazingly flavorful (and perhaps too flavorful for some). Yes, fat matters to some extent, but like all things there’s a limit and you can have too much of a good thing.

So what does the article say is best? Grass-fed beef, instead of corn-feedlot-based beef. But trying to find such a critter can be tough and expensive, and even then it’s no blanket guarantee for awesome beef. That’s one reason I’ve been enjoying doing my meat shopping away from the local grocer. At the local grocery store, who knows where or what the meat is. But if I go to a local butcher, I have more control. Furthermore, I can talk with local ranchers, or even kids selling their 4-H cattle at auction and get just what I want.  The article gives some guidelines:

The most important question to ask is age at slaughter. For flavor reasons, be wary of steak from a cow younger than 20 months. Ask how much the cow weighed when it was slaughtered, because any cow weighing less than 1,000 pounds is almost always too lean to be delicious. Ask about the breed. Be wary of “Continental” breeds, such as Charolais or Limousin, which do very well in feedlots and terribly on grass. Look for British breeds like Hereford, Galloway and Angus. And if you should find grass-fed Wagyu, buy it.

Elena Kagan, first impressions

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

Elena Kagan. Nominee for the SCOTUS.

I don’t know.

And that’s just the thing. None of us really know. Lots of searching around for information and there just isn’t a whole lot to go on. However, in just the 24 hours since the announcement more has been dug up and I’m sure more will continue to be dug up. Now, by “dug up” I’m not talking about dirt and tabloid sensational crap. I’m talking matters of substance, those things that really matter in terms of her sitting on the highest bench in the land.

The good folks at The Volokh Conspiracy have been writing furiously about her.

My take at this point? Well… Stevens is going to retire, you can’t stop that nor tell the man to not retire when he wants to retire. So that means the current administration is going to nominate someone, and that means I’m not going to get a candidate whom I would consider ideal. Nothing can be done to get “who I want” so the best I can hope for us someone who “sucks least”. Also remember that replacing a liberal with a liberal doesn’t stir things up too much.

From what I can read about Kagan so far, she actually doesn’t seem too bad — certainly there could be worse. I mean, again she’s not ideal in my mind, but one important impression I get about her is an actual willingness to listen to and consider opposing and alternative viewpoints. She’s no “wise Latina” and thank God for that, because that sort of “open-minded” behavior only serves a narrow few. So that Kagan appears to be actually willing to listen and consider, and could actually interpret the law like this job would require. That would be novel, wouldn’t it?

But then, I read stuff like this:

First, let me point out that this should make the teabaggers shudder.  She’s going to back Obama’s ability to control the Executive Branch– the FCC, health care regulators, to name two examples of why Obama may want her on the court.  Healthcare mandate Unconstitutional?  Unlikely with Kagan on the court (if it would ever get that far- which it wouldn’t).  More likely, Obama’s FCC protecting net neutrality: …only “the President has the ability to effect comprehensive, coherent change in administrative policymaking”

So, if she’s going to be such an executive branch backer, how will she then behave when a Republican is holding that office? Because it’s fair to reason that, if she did end up on the bench, sometime in her lifetime a non-Democrat/Liberal will be President. Will she remain consistent in her interpretation of the law?

These are just my initial impressions. So far, Kagan doesn’t come across like an ideal but I know I won’t get that. She doesn’t seem the worst of the bunch. But in the end, the devil will be in the details and we’ll see how things play out.

Updated: Of course, one big question on my mind has been gun rights. Her answers on that are well… not horrible, but kinda fabricated due to the context of the questioning. So via Uncle we have a link to a lot of documents from Kagan that discuss a host of her stances on things. (I’ll have to read it later, don’t have time right now). And David Codrea has more. David echos some of my sentiments on her:

By way of comparison, her position appears practically identical to that of “conservative Justice” Antonin Scalia. Yes, it falls far short of “shall not be infringed,” and I don’t think she’s going to be answering my Gun Rights Questionnaire any time soon, but I’m wondering if there is any Obama nominee—or any nominee a Republican would offer up, for that matter—who would give better answers.

That is, she isn’t what I want, but she may just “suck least” of those in the nominee pool.

IKImageView is… odd

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

Apple made a really cool thing in Image Kit and IKImageView. It’s an amazing amount of power in very easy-to-use drop-in components.

Or so you would think.

I spent the weekend battling with IKImageView, and I’m still not getting exactly what I want.

Right now, it’s a matter of scrolling behavior. Take a look at how the Preview.app works. In general, it opens up an image such that the image is autosized to fill the window, keeping the image’s aspect ratio intact. If you resize the window larger or smaller, the image resizes accordingly, again maintaining the aspect ratio. Note however that scrollbars never show up. In general, this is good because it shows the whole of the image, even if it’s scaling down the image’s size, because most people want to view the whole image, not just part and then having to scroll around. But, if you do want to scroll around you can. You can use a function such as “zoom in” to get closer to the image, which should then make scrollbars appear (if the sizes are right), and you scroll from there. It works out great in Preview.app.

I wonder if Apple uses IKImageView in Preview.app or not, because I can’t get the same behavior.

But then I noticed something.

In the few bits of sample code there are about using IKImageView, the nib/xib file doesn’t actually embed an IKImageView within it. It has an NSScrollView then within that is merely an NSView. But in editing the NSView within the nib it gets a “custom class” setting typed in of IKImageView. So I tried that, because why was it working in demos but not in my app? So, mirror what you see in the working copy.

Things work.

Say what?

So I even try it in the demo app. Change the NSView to an IKImageView, rebuild. Things no longer work.

Holy crap.

So I try it in my app, using an NSView, changing the type to IKImageView. And lo… it works. It’s not 100%, some of the functions like “size to fit” aren’t calculating the numbers perfectly, but it’s a heck of a lot better.

Then I figured to try building it all by-hand in code instead of nib/xib files. I can’t get that to work. The app constantly crashes on me. As I isolate it down, it’s something about IKImageView.

Go figure.

I’ll work on filing bugs with Apple about this. None of it makes sense, and it’s damn frustrating. But there’s so little information out there about using IKImageView it makes it even more frustrating. So much power, so much potential, and it just falls flat. 😦

Updated: OK, color me really confused now.

I started to write up a bug report for Apple, using Apple sample code as a basis to demonstrate the problem. Sure enough, I was able to demonstrate some of the problems, such as IKImageView not being playing well with autohiding scrollers. But the other problems I was seeing, I now couldn’t get them to reproduce.

Eh?

So I went back into my app, gutted things, and started from scratch.

Now it works.

Eh?

Granted, there are still some bugs and problems with IKImageView itself, but now that it’s working is very strange. I did add some workarounds for issues (e.g. I just don’t auto-hide scrollers, I subclassed and added an -isFlipped override.), but man… very strange. I did note that at one point InterfaceBuilder fired an internal assertion failure, so something was out of whack for sure. Maybe the xib was corrupted somehow in all of this? Who knows.

Still, IKImageView is really awesome, I just look forward to all the kinks being ironed out.

First tries in water buffalo cooking

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

So the water buffalo is back from the butcher. It was aged for about a week, then processed into the usual parts and cuts that you’d get out of wild game processing: roasts, ham steaks, backstraps, stew meat, hamburger, link/smoked sausage, breakfast sausage, ribs. Stuff like that.

Since water buffalo is close to beef, we figured to go with beef-based recipes.

First thing we did was a roast. Took a 3# bone-in roast and put it into the crock pot for about 8 hours (on low). The recipe was a basic beef style recipe, with carrots and potatoes and the like. Wife has the full recipe written down, not available to me at the time of this writing. It turned out great. Very tender, flavorful. Quite nice.

Second thing was pan sausage. I had the butcher make some breakfast/pan sausage. So it was 50% ground up water buffalo with 50% pork, then the butcher’s spice blend. Even with the added pork (thus fat), it cooked up very lean… little fat in the pan, but since we cooked it on a non-stick surface there was no need to add any fat/oil to keep it from sticking. Tasted very good. Oddly, the kids didn’t like it as much, seemed to be the smoother texture vs. the feral hog pan sausage we get. Personally, I liked the flavor a lot more than the hog sausage, and so did Wife.

Third thing we did was backstraps. The backstraps on this guy were huge, so all they were done for processing was to just clean them up and cut them into a manageable sized piece… probably a pound in weight, certainly not more than two pounds, and probably about 2 inches thick at the thickest part. I let them marinate in Stubb’s Beef Marinade for about 24 hours. I like that marinade because it’s got a good spice, a little heat, soy sauce based, very delicious. I put them on the grill. Now the trouble is my Weber grill is dying so I can’t do much for heat control *sigh* and have to do it via amount of coals. I put charcoal in both side baskets and let it burn down. Temperature was probably 400º… a little too hot, but I couldn’t do much about it. Threw a few small chunks of mesquite wood on the coals as well. Let it sit for about 90 minutes, temperature eventually dropped to 325º or so. Internal temperature on the meat got to about 150º, which is “medium”.  Took it off, let it sit for about 15 minutes, then slice it against the grain. The flavor was good, certainly a “medium” meat. The marinade didn’t do much; we thought it would have seeped deeper, but I guess the meat is too tight. Certainly the meat didn’t dry out, even after 90 minutes… hopefully that marinade helped in that regard. The meat tho was kinda tough… it’s that “chew” that I was talking about. Still, it was good enough to eat and fill your belly.

“Low and slow” has to be the way. The crock pot was low and slow, worked out great. The BBQ wasn’t low and slow (tho slicing against the grain is a must). I figure next time maybe 250º-ish, 6-8 hours. Certainly tho the meat will have to be wrapped in foil. My thinking is a good dry rub for 24 hours. Put it in foil but leave the foil a little open the first hour. After the first hour, baste in something like apple cider vinegar with some sliced white onion and other spices if desired. Then close up the foil… gotta keep in the moisture. Try to not poke at it too much, but ensure moisture stays in the foil. Keep it low and slow for 6-8 hours. Will it work? Don’t know, but it’s certainly the next way to go.

Anyway, it does taste good. The kids certainly love it. The leanness is awesome, but given the different muscle fibers and grain it’s certainly needing some experimentation for how to cook it.

Our Carolina Wrens

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

Home Depot has these “kids workshops” on the first Saturday of every month. We went to one of them some many months ago and made birdhouses. These particular birdhouses had clear back walls, with the intention of mounting them on a window so you could watch what was going on.

We came home, hung one up, and I admit… I never expected anything to nest in them.

For many months that bore out. We’d look and see nothing in there.

A few weeks ago, Daughter came to us saying that something was building a nest in the birdhouse. Oldest did some watching and identified the birds as Carolina Wrens. We did some further investigation and sure enough, it was a pair of Carolina Wrens building their nest. A little while later, we saw 5 eggs and a dedicated Mother sitting on them. With a gestation period of about 2 weeks, we knew it wouldn’t be long before we saw something.

And today — Mother’s Day — we see something. 🙂

Just a few minutes ago Daughter came running in saying she sees something in the nest. Sure enough, there’s a baby! It must be only a few hours old given how just a few hours ago I checked the nest and saw nothing.

What a wonderful thing, and on Mother’s Day to boot. 🙂

It’s hard to tell but it appears that 2 eggs have hatched. I certainly see one hungry mouth and I am not sure about the other… I *THINK* I see another body in there, but I’m not sure what the deal is. Is it actually another body? Is it sleeping? Alive? Dead? Hard to tell, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out in time. My understanding is the wrens lay one egg a day, so I would guess that over the next few days we’ll see the rest hatch.

We did most of our observing from inside the house, but I went out and looked through the “door” of the nest box. I heard the tiniest little chirp, so high-pitched, so soft… but it’s all the little guy can muster right now at this early stage of life. It’s very cute, and very humbling to listen to.

How neat!

I would love to share some pictures, but there’s no way I can get anything useful right now. And while I may try to get some pictures, I’m wary. It’s my understanding if we approach the nest too soon it could cause the babies to fledge before they’re ready, and I certainly do NOT want that to happen. So, pictures will happen if they can, but I’m not going to risk anything.

Now… let’s see if we can finally get some of these Muscovy Duck eggs to hatch. We’ve had numerous nests but for one reason or other nothing went all the way. The current momma duck is very dedicated, so we’re hopeful that within the nest few weeks we’ll have ducklings.

Sunday Metal – Corrosion of Conformity

/ hsoi

Check it out. The song is called “Dagger”, written during the “America’s Volume Dealer” sessions but it didn’t make the album. This was recorded in 1998 (geez… that album is THAT old?). Very good recording of the song… and yes, that main riff sounds like Kiss’ “God of Thunder” but still the song sounds good.

If COC is dead and gone (sounds like Pepper is making Down his #1 priority), it’d be nice if they at least collected all these various rarities and B-sides and such and released them.