Category Archives: Interesting

New Orleans, again

I went to New Orleans again this year. I had a blast! I spent days walking around the French District taking pictures. First, I walked down every street running SW-NE. Then, I walked up every street running NW-SE. This time I was fascinated with stickers. There were a bunch of cool looking stickers placed everywhere. I wonder how many people do that kind of thing: stick arty stickers as graffiti.

On Wednesday, I stopped in Lafayette at Julien’s Po-Boys Cajun Style. I had the Gator Po-Boy. I then drove to New Orleans and stayed in La Quinta. Ugh. It was horrible. The shower’s water pressure was almost unusable. I should have switched rooms. For dinner, I went to K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen and ate pan fried flounder with shrimp Marigny, and a three cheese sausage for an appetizer. It was delicious as usual and, by far my favorite restaurant in New Orleans.

On Thursday, I went to Cafe du Monde for breakfast. Man, I can eat here every morning. And I think I did when they were open (Unfortunately, they close during Christmas). For dinner, I went to The Palace Cafe on Jeff’s suggestion. I had a Lime Daiquiri, Barbecued Shrimp, Grilled Gulf Fish Panzanella (substituted tuna), and White Chocolate Bread Pudding. It was okay.

On Friday, (Christmas eve) I went to Camellia Grill for breakfast. I had the Western Omelette with cheese and orange juice. For lunch, I went to Mother’s Restaurant and had the 2/3rds Famous Ferdi. I am not a fan of these po-boys. But, when in Rome… For dinner, I went to the Gumbo House and had Seafood Gumbo. I like this restaurant. And many other people do since there always seems to be lines here.

On Saturday, I went to Oceana and had the Grilled Mahi-Mahi étouffée. It’s a shame that most everything closes down on Christmas. Stoopid holidays.

On Sunday, I went to the Cafe du Monde for breakfast. For lunch, I went to Johnny’s and had the Crab cake po-boy. For dinner, I went to NOLA Restaurant. I had the Garlic crusted Drum (sauce beurre rouge) and succotash. For desert, I had the Banana pudding layer cake.

On Monday, I went to Mr. B’s Bistro for dinner. I had the soups 1-1-1 (Gumbo Ya Ya, Seafood gumbo, sweet potato and chorizo), Shrimp & grits, and Profiteroles & chocolate sauce.

On Tuesday, I went to Irene’s Cuisine for dinner. This place was crazy busy. I lucked out and was able to walk in and get seated relatively quickly at a tiny table. I had the Winter Caprisee salad, the Soft-shell crab linguine, and the pecan praline bread pudding.

Fun rental car

My car was in the shop and I lucked out in the loaner car department! A new Z4 hard-top convertible. Woo woo! It was a fun car to drive. And, of course, nothing was going to stop me from driving with the top down. Not even the cool weather. I just blasted the seat warmers and the heater to high to compensate… It would be a fun car to own. But the only negative thing to say about it is that the trunk space is minimal to non-existent. I would need to rent a car to go on long trips to carry my luggage.

A short hike

Nick was up for a hike around Lake Georgetown. Initially, I wanted to do the entire 26 mile loop in one go. But eventually decided to try an 11 mile segment. We started at 9:30 here. We finished at 13:40 here. Well, according to the mile markers. I suspect that they lie though.

VNC/KVM/RHEL/Win

I got a new laptop for work today. A ThinkPad W510. It came preloaded with a version of Windows with customized work software on it (such as Lotus Notes and a back-level IE). I deleted it and started from scratch. I first installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6.0. Then I downloaded a bootable CD image of a lifeboat rescue installer. This will reinstall the work versioned Windows if you ever lose your hard-drive. I then created a new virtual machine with KVM. I attached the iso image as a virtual CD and created a 40 gigabyte blank file to act as a virtual hard drive. I then booted into it and waited a long while as it downloaded the necessary files and installed Windows. I did all this from home as my laptop was sitting in my office thanks to a remote desktop sharing protocol called VNC.

Isn’t technology cool now adays?

Gypsy Picnic Trailer Food Festival

Gypsy Picnic Trailer Food Festival

After disc golf, we headed to the 1st annual (I assume) Gypsy Picnic Trailer Food Festival. I had high hopes for this festival. Trailer food is a hot trend right now in Austin. You can view a map with a lot of the trailers on it here.

Unfortunately, reality turned out to be complete and utter chaos. 🙁 Word of mouth and advertising worked much better than was anticipated. I have to imagine that there were over 20K people here. Parking was a nightmare. Jon and I parked over at Whole Foods and we walked over the bridge and down to Disch field. Once we got there, the place was already packed. Lines were incredibly long! We each split up into separate lines and waited for food. The line I was in was over an hour long. And that was just to pay for the food. I had to wait another twenty minutes for the food to cook! Also, with so many people using phones here, the phone was unusable. I could not call or text anyone. Sigh. I even got sunburned waiting outside so long…

Canon HD-SLR film crew

I even saw a film crew here using a Canon DSLR as a video camera. I wonder where that video aired…

AHS Oaked Porter beer brewing

A friend of mine is getting into brewing beer at home. And I wanted to see just what was involved in the process. Luckily, he was willing to invite me over to watch (and help — but mostly watch).

Igloo cooler for
Mash-tun steeping

The first interesting thing was that he used an Igloo ice chest as a container to steep the grain in. He also used a very fine nylon mesh fabric to line the bottom. This was supposed to allow the wort to drain off easily (kinda like a reusable tea bag). Although we still had some small problems with the mass of the grain blocking the drain outlet.

Wort

Once the grains (mash-tun) steeped for 60 minutes, we drained off the liquid (wort) into a container.

Boiling the wort

We then poured the wort into a rather large aluminum stock pot and boiled the wort for 60 minutes. This is where the hops are added. And, depending on when they are added, that determines what function they serve. At the beginning of the boil, the hops are bittering hops. For the last 15 minutes, we added flavoring hops. And for the last 5 minutes, we finished off with aroma hops.

Cooling off the wort

We then had to cool off the hops down from boiling to a temperature where the yeast can ferment the sugars into alcohol. This had to be done rather quickly. Which is difficult since water is a great heat-sink. So we used two sets of large copper tubing twisted into a radiator. One copper tube sits in a large ice chest filled with ice and water. The other tube sits in the stock pot. Water is then circulated from the outside garden hose to the first tube, through to the second tube, and then draining out to the yellow bucket. The bucket is just to capture some of the water runoff to be used for cleaning.

Fermenting container

After the wort is cooled down to 70 degrees, it is then siphoned off into a large glass fermentation chamber. At the top of it will be placed an air lock which will allow the excess carbon-dioxide to vent off.

It was a pretty easy process. Perhaps someday I will get into it.