めんどうくさい

Still Cooking, Less Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:54:00 +0000

Regretfully I've failed to keep doing the Adventures in Cooking posts. There are one or two more sets of photos I have that I need to do write-ups for, but in the meantime I've got a new habit I'm trying to form: I'm trying to avoid eating out for the month of Feburary (with one or two exceptions for travel) meaning I'm doing some less-interesting cooking more and more.

I've also decided to mimic Minjie and Shawn and try to take photos every day. I suppose with my one-tracked mind a lot of these will be of said cooking experiments. Rather than follow their lead and post photos here I've been uploading them to flickr. If I get adventurous enough I'll go back and put them here since blogger should theoretically let me backdate things.

Adventures in Cooking: What the Hefe?

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 03:55:00 +0000

I've been brewing beer from time since I came back from my internship in Germany. I've gone from humble brewing beer in a house we were renting in college to uh... humble brewing in a smaller apartment. Anyhow, a new batch has been long overdue so I decided to brew a German Hefeweizen for the summer.

Naturally, as I type this Washington is having an unseasonably rainy August. Well, you can't win them all.

Many friends have asked me about brewing, assuming that it is very interesting. They don't believe me when I assure them that it is not, so here is a new episode of Adventures in Cooking, which may beat out Ramen for "most pictures of boiling water."

Here are the ingredients; as I'm in a small one-bedroom apartment I stick to extract brewing instead of buying the bulky and expensive equipment for going all-grain. I expect someone will snidely remark that it's not that bulky and doesn't have to be that expensive, but my kitchen is small. Also, shut up.

Now, in other sessions my drinking a beer while cooking could be classified as irresponsible or a number of other unkind words. However, this episode of Adventures in Cooking is about making beer, and any brewer worth his or her uh, brew, will tell you that it is essential that you drink a beer while you brew. This session's beer was Phin & Matt's Extraordinary Ale from Southern Tier brewing. I don't know about extraordinary, but it was good.

The first step is to steep the grains. This involves bringing about two and a half gallons of water to 150 degrees (F) and making some tasty looking grain tea.

It takes a little while for the water to get this hot, and since a watched pot never boils, I figure it's a good idea to start sanitizing the carboy. The carboy is a 6.5 gallon container where the wort (the not-ready-yet beer) will live while the yeast party like it's 1999. Sanitizing the carboy involves first cleaning it the old fashion way (soap and water), and then pouring a solution called StarSan in and filling it with water. This ensures that no one else is invited to the yeast's party.

Here is the milled grain. It's grain, I can't come up with something amusing to say about it.

The grain goes in a cheesecloth sock, giving one the largest tea bag in the history of man (possibly hyperbole).

And when the water is the right temperature, the grain bag gets tossed in and steeps for 20 minutes or so. When this is done, the grain bag is removed and its time to mix in the remaining malt extracts!

Now this is starting to look like beer. A sweet, not alcoholic, flat, and probably not all that tasty beer. But beer. Yeah. The next step is to bring this mixture to a boil, stirring to avoid overflow (I failed). The brew will then boil for an hour. In brewing terms, this is known as "the boil."

This rabbit-food looking stuff is pelletized hops. Normally hops come in leaves, but even professional brewers use the pelletized stuff a lot since it's much more compact and you get more bang for your pellet.

The hops go into a cheesecloth bag just like the grains and get to hang out in the boil for different times depending on your recipe. In this recipe, most of them went in right away and the next batch went in 40 minutes into the boil. Typically this is so that the earlier hops can provide bitterness to the beer while the later hops provide more aroma than anything else.

Now we have the wort; the un-fermented beer product. Unfortunately, this substance is way too hot for yeast to perform their magic in, so it needs to be (somewhat) quickly cooled. The quickness is to ensure that other wild yeast don't show up before the yeast that we like get to do their job. In this case, I dump a whole bunch of ice in my sink and run cold water around the really, really hot pot.

There are devices called immersion chillers, and I actually own one, but I feel like it negatively impacts the taste of the beer. It's basically a big copper coil that you can submerge in the wort and run cold water through.

Once the hot wort has cooled down to something manageable, it needs to be siphoned into the carboy. The first time I brewed I had to do this the hard way (sucking on the tube), but now I have a super awesome racking cane so all I do is pump to get things started.

Once the wort is in the carboy, the yeast is added and the airlock put on the carboy. Now comes the waiting game; the wort gets to ferment initially for 7-10 days.

As the beer ferments, a healthy head of foam will start to form on the wort, sediment will form on the bottom, and during the stronger parts of fermentation the airlock will bubble a lot and hopefully you're a light sleeper if you're like me and keep your carboy in your bedroom closet.

I was taught that the right time to rack the beer to secondary is when the head of foam dies down. Once this happens the brew is siphoned to a smaller 5 gallon carboy. This filters the brew away from the sediment of dead yeast that have formed on the bottom of the carboy from primary fermentation and then allows it to ferment a little more for another week or so.

When the beer is done in secondary it's time to keg; I didn't bother photographing this as it's not too different from the other siphoning photos. The keg is cleaned and sanitized in the same manner as the carboys and the beer is poured directly in. Once that's done, it's capped, put in the fridge, and 13lbs of CO2 applied. After another week or so, it's time to start drinking!

Cheers!

Adventures in Cooking: The Wrath of Manjuu (カレマン）

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:53:00 +0000

I decided early on when I made my first batch of manjuu that I would make more; it's such a versatile idea that I knew there would be varieties other than anman that I'd want to make. Thus, instead of something sweet like anman I decided to make something more savory; curry manjuu (or カレマン [kareman]). Once again I followed the recipe here, and the steps are pretty much the same with a slightly different cast.

Here were the culprits; the big change from last time is the curry mix, chicken, carrots, and onion. I grabbed fryer chicken, but any chicken probably would have sufficed.

This time around I picked up a limited edition beer from Red Hook; a tripel. I'm not sure that it's really a good pairing, but I didn't eat these the same night so all was good.

The first thing I did was start baking the chicken; I rubbed a little bit of salt and pepper on the chicken and proceeded to bake it for about half an hour, turning it partway through. While this was going on, I started on some familiar steps like...

...proofing the yeast! Exciting, I know.

I also mixed the dough (and the yeast) while waiting for the chicken to bake. Due to the addition of tumeric to the dough, there's a nice strong yellow color to the dough. This means the manjuu will be even more delicious.

Now I'm stuck waiting for the chicken to bake and the dough to rise, so I suppose I should start with the rest of the manjuu filling. Similar to melting the chocolate for brownies, I started melting the curry roux blocks.

Eventually, the chicken finished baking and I pulled it out of the oven, cut it into pieces, and proceeded to chop the carrot and onion as well as some chives. As I chopped everything it ended up in a bowl, ready to go.

When the curry had melted, I went ahead and stirred it in with the other fillings. The mess didn't look appealing, but it's quite tasty!

As with last time, when the dough had finished rising I cut it into several small balls and rolled them out. When the dough was rolled out it was time to put a spoonful of filling on there and wrap up the manjuu.

And eventually I finished rolling up the manjuu! I definitely rolled several of them too thin, but they work. I proceeded to cover the completed manjuu and let it sit in my fridge overnight. The following day I put them in a plastic bag and put them in the freezer. Except for one, which I proceeded to cook...

.. and they were super tasty! I'm not sure I'd do anything different other than try to exercise a little more caution rolling out the dough. I've been cooking these for breakfast for a little while now.

I'm running low though, and may need to start another batch. They're super easy to cook since they just steam for 15-20 minutes making them an ideal breakfast.

Adventures in Cooking: Tonkotsu Ramen

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:28:00 +0000

Since going to Japan I've really had a strong urge to try my hand at making some ramen broth; I've been thinking of trying to make stock of some sort and ramen seems like a good idea (or a bad idea). While there Lyle took us to a place called Daruma Ramen in Haruna, where I had what I think was hands down some of the best ramen I've ever had. When I arrived back in the States I started searching the web for a good recipe and stumbled upon this one. With a recipe in hand, I was ready to try my hand at making some super-unhealthy ramen of my own!

This time the ingredients are presented in waves; first we have our pork. I used about 4 pounds of pork bones (half were pork necks and half were just labeled pork bones), some pig feet, and some back fat. The first step is to bring a ton of water (about 2.5 gallons) to just below a simmer and throw in the meats minus the back fat.

I probably kept things a little too cool resulting in a thinner broth, but it did end up working out. While the meat is simmering you'll need to keep scooping off a layer of scum that forms on the surface of the water. I followed some advice from Alton Brown and used a strainer. I let the meat simmer alone for about half an hour before adding the back fat, and then let it simmer for another 20 minutes or so.

Now for some healthier stuff. I cut the onions and apples in half and threw them in the stock pot and only used about an inch of the ginger. From here it's a matter of letting things continue to simmer for several hours; I took the time to go to a friend's BBQ.

The recipe says to let things simmer for 5 hours, but since I think I had the heat a bit too low I tried adjusting it after 5 and came back after another 4 hours or so. I put a vegetable steamer in the pot as well to keep as many of the ingredients as possible submerged and to give me a place where I could try to scoop out any scum that might show up on the surface. Very little if any showed up at this point, though sometimes there would be a thin layer of fat from the back fat.

I don't have a picture, but the broth had reduced *quite* a bit after 9 or so hours. It tasted a bit thin, but it was getting late and I went ahead and froze the broth in several Tupperware containers as well as some ice trays (again, straight out of an Alton Brown episode on broth).

A few days later I decided it was time to make my ramen! I decided that sake would be appropriate as something to drink while cooking and eating, and picked up a random nigori at Uwajimaya. It has a bit stronger floral taste than I'd prefer, but it's pretty good.

Here are the day-of ingredients; noodles and the components for what the website with the recipe calls chashu, but I sort of doubt it's authenticity as chashu after looking it up online. In any event, it has shoyu in it, which I knew to be a vital component to the broth.

After mixing the ginger, shoyu, mirin, sake, and about a cup (6 ice cubes) of the broth, I let them simmer for a little bit before adding some pork belly and letting it boil/simmer for about 20-30 minutes. Towards the end of the boil I started poaching an egg and cooking the ramen noodles, since these both take about 1-2 minutes.

When everything was nice and cooked, I took about two tablespoons of the chashu liquid, poured some noodles over it, and then filled the bowl with broth. Then I added the poached egg, some chives, and some of the pork belly. This batch tasted like the broth was a little thin, but was still pretty delicious.

However I poured the chashu into a container to store overnight and attempted to make things again the next day but used about four tablespoons of the chashu and this largely resolved my issues with the thinness of the broth; I don't know if it was the extra time boiling/simmering, the time sitting in my fridge, or what, but the broth was awesome the second time. Not perfect, but delicious; thinking about it makes me wish I was eating some noodles while writing this post.

All in all, this sore into a new dish was totally worth it. I'd like to try it again tweaking some of the broth ingredients to get a deeper flavor without the chashu and see how that changes things. Perhaps I'll try another noodle; udon or perhaps some pho-style dish.

Adventures in Cooking: Brownies Mexicanos

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:29:00 +0000

Normally brownies wouldn't be something that I'd consider to qualify as an 'adventure in cooking,' but when perusing some cooking forums someone suggested something that never crossed my mind; using Mexican chocolate for brownies. I had been introduced to Mexican chocolate at university but all we ever used it for was for hot chocolate (which, by the way, is awesome and you should totally make it; heat some milk in a saucepan and mix the chopped chocolate in and stir until it's done. Amazingly delicious on colder evenings)

Anyhow, this got me searching for recipes and I decided to follow this one. I had most of the ingredients lying around, except for the unsweetened chocolate, so after picking that and a new beer up I was ready to go!

Here are the culprits. As with last time, the beer is just something to tide me over while food cooks. The only unusual thing is the Mexican chocolate; I used Ibarra, which I've never had any trouble finding in west coast grocery stores.

The first step is melting the chocolates and butter; the website I linked doesn't suggest doing it, but roommates in university ingrained the notion that doing otherwise is a mortal sin; I melted the ingredients in a makeshift double boiler. It's probably fine to do it in the saucepan alone, but superstition can be fun sometimes.

Anyhow dropped the chocolate and butter in the double boiler and stirred until melted. It doesn't take too long and is pretty straight-forward. When it's done, I pulled out the bowl from the double boiler and poured the remaining ingredients in and stirred until mixed well.

Mixing things isn't interesting at all; just stir.

This doesn't take long; so it's time to pour the mixture in a glass pan and shove in the oven.

This takes around half an hour to bake, leaving me with some time on my hands. There are two good things that I think come out of baking; it often has good opportunities to clean my kitchen and when I'm done with that I might as well crack open a beer.

Well, that and lick the stirring spoon once the rest of the batter is in the oven. This is the best tasting thing ever.

And in what will likely be a trend, I drink while cooking; this session's beer is Captain Sig's Northwestern Ale by Rogue. I love Rogue's stuff and the premise of a Deadliest-catch beer was amusing enough to buy it.

And eventually after the kitchen is cleaner than when I started and the beer is partially consumed, the brownies are done cooking. It's time to pull them out and let them cool down. After letting them cool for a bit I tried one and it was good; I brought the rest into work the following day.

All in all, I was fairly satisfied with these; I don't think I can bear to make regular brownies again. I simply love the cinnamon-y taste of Mexican chocolate too much.

Adventures in Cooking: Manjuu (あんまん)

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:55:00 +0000

In an attempt to post something more often I'm going to try something new. I'm really awful about cooking for myself, but I frequently get into moods where I want to bake or otherwise cook something that's impractical often but is a nice way to spend an evening. So in the style of a Goons with Spoons post, I figure I'll document various cooking projects I do.

This weekend's project was manjuu. I stumbled on a recipe for the bun here and decided to just go with a simple anko filling rather than going too crazy.

The truth of the matter is I've had a bit of an anko craving recently.

The ingredients are nothing special for bread; the anko was the only thing a little challenging to find. I had actually looked for this at the local Uwajimaya a few months back and completely missed it. After asking around at work I was told it really should be there, and some more thoughtful looking turned it up. I used koshian, the paste-like version that is free of bean husks. The recipe called for 'oil' which I decided meant 'butter.'

The beer was a very important "something to drink while cooking" ingredient. Though since I forgot to pull out the yeast for the photo you could say it represents that.

Omitted from the ingredient picture earlier was the yeast; the site linked earlier has a baking soda recipe, but I prefer using yeast when I can. Step 1 was mixing the sugar and slightly warmed in the microwave milk with the yeast and letting it chill out for about 10 minutes while I worked on the beer.

Waiting for yeast to proof is a great excuse to drink.

After the yeast had been sitting long enough to develop a small layer of foam, I mixed in the melted tablespoon of butter (which I had let cool a bit while the yeast was proofing), stirred well and poured it into the flour. The recipe said to mix and kneed by hand, but I bought a KitchenAid mixer recently and opted to use that instead.

As with just about any bread-like thing, I let it mix until the dough stopped sticking to the pan and then switched to the dough hook for a bit. When I was convinced it was done, I pulled the bowl out, threw a clean dish towel over it and let it sit for a while to rise (probably 30-40 minutes).

When the dough had risen enough, which in this case means, when I got impatient after 30-40 minutes, I split the dough into 10 roughly even shaped lumps and began rolling.

I've never been able to roll dough out to look very circular, but at least for this sort of thing it doesn't matter too much. I topped the rolled out dough with a nice helping of anko and then proceeded to messily fold up the manjuu. To make things look authentic one should twist the balls shut, but I just folded it in half and then in half again. Perhaps that's how it's always done in America, or so I'll claim.

Once the manjuu were rolled up and ready to go, I let them sit a bit covered to rise a little more. In the meantime I dug out my vegetable steamer and put some water in a pot to get ready to steam them. I put some cheesecloth between the lid of the pot and the pot itself to keep water from dripping on the manjuu too much while it cooked. This turned out to burn the cheesecloth that was hanging out of the pot, which was a tad worrisome but not problematic.

It turns out that cooking the manjuu upside down (i.e., folded side down) works best in the steamer; otherwise the bottom tends to stick to it. I should try using the wax paper I had the manjuu sitting on in the steamer to save myself some cleaning problems.

All in all they turned out pretty tasty; I only cooked two or three the first night, and a quick attempt the following day indicated that they should last a little bit refrigerated. This will give me a nice, albeit sweet, breakfast for the next day or two. I'd like to try some variants in a later version of this post, perhaps something like nikuman.

Forever in debt to your priceless advice

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:02:00 +0000

It's the time of New Years resolutions. I've got a few things on my own little list of resolutions, but one I figure I'd bring up here is that I'd like to actually try and use the guitar I've got this year.

I've been pretty good about picking it up and playing a bunch of the old things I used to try and play back in college. In fact, I find myself remembering other songs Lyle used to play while we were living together and have been trying to learn some of those too. I'm certainly not any good, but can play the beginnings of a few new things. I'm also trying to round out some of the older intros I knew for some songs by learning the rest.

I'd also like to travel a bit more this year. The way things are turning out I may do okay on that one.

Got to keep the loonies on the path

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:17:00 +0000

It's been forever since I've written something here, but reading other people's blogs has me feeling like I should try to write something here more often. A lot of things have happened since I last wrote something here in January, and I don't think I'll try to recap too much of it. One thing worth mentioning though is that in the middle of the year, I moved teams within Microsoft to work on the team responsible for Xbox Live Community Games.

In more recent events, Seattle has once again been crippled by a winter storm. This year seems far worse than anything I remember seeing before; we had about 7 inches of snow today, which probably seems like nothing to folks in areas that regularly get snow, but for a region typically sees no more than that much in Winter it's a lot for a day.

Today was a bit of an adventure too; I ended up heading into work with a co-worker despite the horrible weather. Making it there wasn't bad at all (which I suppose is easy for me to say since I didn't drive), but it was interesting to watch as emails flew in from folks working from home, or watching the department of transportation giving updates via twitter, all the time chilling out at my desk at work.

After a lot of fretting (and me thinking it might be easiest to try and walk back to my place), we ended up trying to take the freeway back anyway and made it back fine. While the thought of being stranded got a bit frightening, I'm glad I left the house instead of staying cooped up at home. That said, I think I'm fine being a shut-in tomorrow if we get more snow or if it's still really icy out.

Welcome Home

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 03:47:00 +0000

When I got back from Japan, the first question a lot of co-workers and friends asked was "so what do you miss most about Japan." My usual response was to chuckle and say "the vending machines." Now, there's some truth to that statement, but really, I miss a whole lot. Many of those things are things I miss about living in Germany as well, but one unique thing seems interesting to write about right now.

First though, I feel like clarifying the vending machine remark; vending machines are ubiquitous throughout Japan. A gaijin Lyle and I hung out with at one point mentioned a rumor that Tokyo has more vending machines than all of the US. This is a number I doubt, but from what I saw it wasn't that far-fetched. It seemed like one couldn't go more than 5 feet without running into a set of vending machines. It took smaller towns like Kurabuchi to get down to the frequency of vending machines I'd see in larger US cities.

So why would I miss this? Two reasons. First, the smallest bill in Yen is 1000, which is roughly $10. That means that 100 and 500 Yen ($1-$5) come in coin form. This makes Japanese vending machines a million times easier to use than US ones, where I rarely have the right combination of bills and change to get a $1.25 soda. The second reason is selection; the vast majority of vending machines were for drinks (the rest were cigarettes and a few had beer; I never saw any of the more... creative ones people claim exist), but unlike the US those weren't limited to bottled water and soda. There was often tea, vitamin drinks, and coffee, not to mention an assortment of soft drinks that were more varied than anything in the US (how I miss CC Lemon). Many of the machines had milk tea and cafe au lait, both of which often had both cold and warm versions. The latter was very nice in the cold weather.

What is it I miss right now? Kotatsu. While they aren't nearly as necessary in American homes as they were in Japanese homes, I really wish I had one in my apartment. Why? My apartment's heating is probably one of my biggest complaints about it. It has two small electric heating elements in the living room/kitchen space, which is two stories high thanks to a loft above the kitchen, and thus not kept warm very well by the two lame heaters. Lyle's kerosine heater did a better job than these do. |f I need a lame electric heater, I think I'd be much happier and better served by one in a table with a thick blanket than by what I have now.

I think there might be a little more to it than that though; most of the kotatsu I saw were fairly small (which makes sense given the size of most Japanese homes), so when eating dinner with a group of people, it felt a lot more social than a dinner at someone else's house here in the States (though I suppose the fact that we ate sukiyaki when we ate at one of Lyle's co-worker's house didn't hurt that either). I think I'd almost go so far as to say I prefer the smaller houses I saw; if it weren't for the poor heating, I'd love to find a house like Lyle's around here. Well, I would if housing prices here weren't lame.

Mystery Hunt

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:04:00 +0000

Two weeks ago I went to Boston to participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt. I've been relatively active in a lot of the Microsoft-run puzzle events (between helping run the intern events and playing in the last two Puzzle Hunts), so when someone I knew from various puzzle-related stuff at work asked if I wanted to join, I jumped at the chance.

All in all, I'm glad I went, but I think I prefer the local hunts. Truthfully, I probably could have worked with the remote team (i.e., folks who didn't fly out to Boston) and noticed very little difference. There were some aspects of the hunt that made the event feel a little amateur; answers were phoned in to a human with no leeway on answers, some of which could be very vague (e.g., one had us translate Chinese to English, which proved to be very ambiguous and frustrating). While this isn't necessarily dissimilar to how things are done in other events, I like to think that if a team called the people running the event and could explain the puzzle, they'd get the answer if there was a translation error.

I probably could complain more, but on reflection, there's always a lot to complain about after a Hunt; some puzzles simply don't sync with everyone, and even after hearing the answer it can be natural to think "that person is crazy."

As I said though, I'm glad I went. I've been thinking more and more that I'd like to travel more, so while I spent most of the time in either a hotel room or a classroom, I'm glad I got out of the state. I suppose I rode the subway as well, which only serves to remind me how much I hate the lack of decent public transit around Puget Sound.

And all of this reminds me that I need to book another weekend flight here pretty soon.

Traveling Home

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:23:00 +0000

I plan on coming back and posting pictures and stories about my trip to visit Lyle in Japan, but as I'm really tired from the fight back, I though I'd post a few anecdotes worth remembering:

My original itinerary involved flying to SFO, chilling out in San Francisco for an our, and then flying to Seattle. Thankfully, when I got to Narita Airport, the first thing they asked when I checked in was "we overbooked the SFO flight; is a direct flight OK?"

The answer is an obvious "absolutely." While this would potentially cause issues for my ride (since I was coming in two hours early, now at the wee hours of 8am), I appreciate any opportunity to skip connections.

When I finally did board the plane, they upped me to business class. This was incredibly awesome, as it meant I had tons of leg room (too much, actually), awesome food, and an otherwise comfortable 8 hour flight across the pacific. The flight included an awesome view of the sunset over Mt. Fuji, which is great, because the weather in Tokyo was always so bad that I could never see the thing.

As comfortable as the flight was, I still couldn't sleep. So now I have to relive Saturday as though I never slept Friday night. I've got some errands to run (no food left) and some other things I'd like to do, but I really don't think I should drive. Oh well.

I'll try to get photos up quickly (or at least start getting some up) and posting impressions. I have the feeling that Lyle is the only one who reads this though so maybe I can take my time since he experienced pretty much everything I did first hand.

Traveling

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 02:04:00 +0000

I'm spending this Christmas/New Years in Japan visiting Lyle. Once again I've managed to visit a country without the prep I ought to have done, leaving me to marvel how well (relatively speaking) one can get by without actually talking to the people around you. I should have packed lighter though.

There will probably be lots of stuff I ought to write about, but what seems really interesting to me right now is jet lag; I really, really thought it wouldn't be an issue since I was traveling westward, and the time difference really meant that everything was about six hours later than normal. Staying up can be a little hard, but I'm honestly surprised by the fact that I keep waking up at 4am and what's worse, feeling refreshed.

I'm probably just happy to be on vacation; I figured I'd have no problem sleeping in, but I'm getting less sleep than I'm used to and generally feeling better during the day than I usually do. I suppose actually being exposed to sunlight for most of the day isn't hurting the situation though.

I'm making an effort to take pictures; ideally I'll upload them sometime after I get back.

Never Again

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:45:00 +0000

Since Lyle has harassed me for not posting often, I recon this might be something worth posting: I finally went through the excruciating experience that is buying a new car. I don't think having a new car is particularly interesting, but the experience of dealing with car salesmen is something I'd like to avoid for as long as I can.

I'd like to say I largely tried to follow this advice, though I strayed in some areas; most local dealers don't seem very interested in giving quotes over the phone (or online, much to my dissatisfaction). I think the smartest thing I did was bring a friend, who turned out to be much better at confronting the typical salesman bull that I was cognizant of, but not silver-tongued enough to counter.

I'm particularly shocked at how haggling turned out to work. I had been led to believe that haggling would involve us lowballing them while they argued for an insanely high price. This was sort of true (on their end), but our demands stayed still throughout the whole negotiations, and in truth all that happened is was that we sat in the dealership for several hours until they agreed to the price I wanted.

The day after was fairly amusing too; there were a few dealerships I stopped by to try similar makes. Suffice to say, one place (a Mazda dealership in Renton; never go there if you can avoid it), was populated by the slimiest of salesmen, who wouldn't take no for an answer after I test drove a single car of theirs. They called me back the following day, and when I told them I had purchased a car, their response was "*lowered voice* Oh. Well, congratulations. *click*". I burst into laughter.

Other's Vices

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:25:00 +0000

I've come to the sad realization that I've taken on a number of a former roomate's 'vices.' Which is to say, I now drink lots of coffee and beer. Of course, I've taken the latter to a bit of an extreme given that I've been homebrewing for about a year, which means I pretty much always have an ample supply of some sort of beer sitting around.

I've actually backed off on the former a bit, and while I suppose I can thank Sean for getting me to start drinking beer, Europe is entirely to blame for my coffee drinking. Thanks to work getting their free coffee (which isn't great, but I drink it anyway) act together late last year, I was drinking several cups a day for a while. Nowadays I'll have a cup or two in the morning, and spend the rest of the day drinking tea (typically caffeine-free red 'tea', before anyone claims I'm a caffeine addict).

I do miss the weekly dinner-and-beer nights we had in Livermore. It'd be nice to find folks around here interested in doing that sort of thing regularly. I also ought to plan for some brewery trips in the future; now that Sean lives in Colorado I have an excuse to head there, Oregon isn't too far away, and visiting Stone in Escondido would be nice sometime.

End of Line

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 03:41:00 +0000

This weekend was the eleventh (and my second) Puzzle Hunt. Despite some near-drama when getting teams together earlier in the year, I ended up on a team that was a whole lot of fun and did surprisingly well. We spent most of the hunt in the top 5 and finished in fifth. Things started to drag towards the end, due to the rather normal situation of not being very clever at 4am and only having a handful of puzzles left, but we managed to drag ourselves out of that and finished around 10:30am, meaning I got to get some much-needed sleep prior to the wrap-up.

Despite the nap, I'm still really beat. I did a much better job of staying awake this time around, though around 9am I found myself nearly dosing off and don't think I was very helpful at that point. I sort of wish this was a three-day weekend so I could have a day to recover.

Hopefully we'll be able to keep the same team together for the next hunt; I bet we can do pretty well.

Refactoring

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 05:14:00 +0000

I've finally decided to try updating this thing again. I don't know if anyone even looks for updates here anymore, but what the heck.

Pet Projects

In an effort to do something with my idle time, I've been working on implementing a more complete version of one of Jamie's Crap-u-Hack mini-games from the 2006 Intern Game. Specifically, I'm trying to make a 'full' implementation of Fourtris (which feels a little silly since this just came out on XBLA).

Lately I've been noticing that I'm falling into the same trap I encountered in my last game development project; which is, I keep working on it at somewhat random intervals and never really keep track of a grand design in my head. As such, things seem to reach a critical mass where I can no longer stand to look at the code and feel too frustrated to work on it.

Thankfully, as of late I've come to enjoy this. I don't think that I've got things quite where I want them, but work as of late has been building up one or two little things I want, and then tearing down a lot of code that was just temporary crap to get things working. It's not perfect (since I'm terrified of deleting a lot of things and instead just comment it out; I really should get source control set up, but I'm very lazy), but I like to think I'm learning from the experience.

Anyhow, a screenshot of how things look right now can be found here. It still needs a lot of polish, but the core mechanics are there. I think at this point I just need to get a bunch of friends over so that I don't have to try and control two players with a controller in each hand. Maybe I should brew another batch of beer to help out with that...

Too Much to Do

Despite my best efforts, I seem to be very good at developing a huge pile of things to do and not actually getting around to any of them. On the one hand, I'm looking into buying a new camera (a DSLR), but I fear that it's far too big an investment when it'll probably collect dust like so many other things. The big motivating factor for wanting a camera upgrade is my plan to visit Lyle around New Years and wanting to get decent pictures of Japan.

Of course, I still have a handful of Germany pictures I haven't really sorted through. I've also really got to get off my rear and start working on my Japanese again; I haven't really looked at the language since Freshman year of college, though recently I've been listening to podcasts from JapanesePod101.com, which seem decent, all things considered. To really make them worthwhile though, I need to be spending more time than I've been looking through their kanji lessons.

I've got a handful of other pet projects to deal with plus a messy apartment. On the bright side, the latter situation is still way better than it ever was in college.

Game Development

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 05:16:00 +0000

I've finally started writing a game in XNA after all this time; a co-worker posed a challenge and I followed through. I've added some screenshots in the gallery and I've got a few fixes to make before I'd put the executable here for downloading (if anyone is interested).

My idea was to basically create a sort of hybrid between Metroid/Castlevania and E.V.O. How well I met that goal is up for debate; Kevin pointed out a lot of small tweaks I can make to the current demo-level design, and naturally in my haste to finish this by the deadline I wanted to finish by I forgot to tweak a lot of things (e.g. there's hardly any enemies, one enemy one-shots you, the boss doesn't respawn when you start a new game).

There's some annoying bugs and quirks I plan on fixing but given the silence this blog has had I felt it couldn't hurt to at least point out that I was working on this. I've already started cleaning up the code base.

I'm pretty thrilled to have a pet project to work on now; I've received some positive feedback from various folks and I hope to turn this into something a whole lot cooler. I've got a whole lot of ideas for things to do with it and I hope that I can keep making time for working on it.

I should be sleeping

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 06:17:00 +0000

PuzzleHunt is tomorrow, and yet here I am awake. I hope it turns out fun. I'm comforted by the fact that our team did eventually fill up.

I'm impatiently awaiting Crackdown. Leigh and I have been playing it from time to time on co-op, and I think it'll be a lot more fun when the game doesn't time out half an hour after getting really fun.

I'm still not doing all those things I'm supposed to do this year. But hey, if I realize that after a month, maybe I'll actually do things right for the remaining 10 months and such. I've been pretty busy lately, but things ought to be dying down pretty soon.

Blizzard

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 06:09:00 +0000

Winter in Seattle is very white this year. I recall snow when I lived here before, but I can feel the Seattle groupthink telling me to deny that the weather is ever like this. Alas, the snow means that roads are icy which means no driving for me. I finally got a dining room-like table, only to have it trapped in my car thanks to no one wanting to drive over here and help me move it.

Thankfully I'm set on food and can walk to work. I wish I lived closer to a market like I did when I was in Germany, but I think I'll manage. I just hope things melt for this weekend. After that it can snow again.

I've been dragging my feet on XNA development but I finally just tried deploying something on my 360. It's pretty cool to see my code running on the unit, and I think I really need to push myself this month to get more of the core engine I'm writing working. I'll post images once I get a bit more working. I'm re-writing an old project from school, but plan on making the engine work a bit smoother as well as do a better job of keeping the game cross-platform. Though I suppose that takes on a completely different meaning this time.

The dead have risen

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 06:58:00 +0000

It appears that I hit a stroke of luck starting my vacation a day earlier than I had originally planned. This allowed me to escape the state of Washington before it was hit by a second debilitating storm and instead get to spend my time playing Dead Rising with friends in San Luis Obispo.

There's been a lot of great food, but not so much great beer.

XNA is out!

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 04:46:00 +0000

Now that XNA is out, I'd better get to work.

I have two ideas for things I want to get done in the near future. Hopefully I'll get one of them by February!

First snow of the season!

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 03:53:00 +0000

Yesterday it snowed here, and today it picked up even more. I'm pretty thankful that I can walk into work, since traffic around the campus looked pretty awful. That being said, I think the snow is totally awesome and was truly beautiful to watch on the walk home.

I picked up a 360 recently and decided to add my gamertag to this blog, so that something gets updated. Perhaps someday I'll find a Wii, though the odds aren't looking great right now.

Not much to say

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 05:06:00 +0000

Lyle told me to update, so I feel obligated now.

I've been falling behind, but really want to keep working on my 1up blog where I'm working on XNA samples. I've just run into a bit of writers block with piecing together the text for updates, as well as a lot of ideas but not a lot of will to actually work on them. I think my schedule is just really busy and I don't like spending all of my free time working on them.

Hopefully I'll start pushing things out faster though, since I've got two possible samples that I've made some progress on when not working on the next one.

Meanwhile, in an effort to keep my up-your-ish attitude, I figured out a nice way to hack around sites that give you some lame javascript "download firefox" page when you try to view them with IE. If you add them to your "restricted" sites it'll disable the javascript that does that effect. It'll probably break other things in the page, but when it's a blog I'd just as soon have a slightly less optimal browsing experience instead of a political soapbox.

I don't think I have a lot else to say. I have a lot of things to do and not a lot of free time. However, Okami is an awesome game. It has really eaten way too much time. But it's been so long since I've played a really good game.

And then some more

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 00:03:00 +0000

I've got most of my junk unpacked and put up another rasterbation downstairs:

It's not a great photo (the railing reflected too much of the flash), but you get the idea. You can also see a small pile of junk I still need to take care of.

I found out from the one I did upstairs that wall putty is a bad idea. Some of it was a bit think, and it shows that the wind has been blowing on the paper. I've replaced some of it with tape, and the escher one was completely put on the wall with tape. I ran out of ink when it got to the top 6 pages or so and it's noticably lighter. Oh well.

Hopefully I'll finish unpacking enough to start a new project. I've got a few ideas.

Rasterbating

noreply@blogger.com (Shane) — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 19:09:00 +0000

I finally got around to setting up my desk and PC after deciding it will be a Sisyphean task to install my printer on my Apple laptop.

The goal of all of this, was to test out a quick rasterbation. I had seen a ton of these at the SomethingAwful forums and wanted to try one out for myself.

Here's how it looks:

I'm really surprsied how well it came together. At first the printouts looked like it'd be terrible. I think I need to go back and cut off the extra edges.

Unfortunetly, the bottom half nearly killed my fresh black ink cartrage. I have an idea for another poster to put up downstairs, but I might have to see if it has any really dark spots.