Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

  After hacking on a Koolu today at the office I noticed the smell of something burning. Concerned we had shorted some hardware we frantically sniffed around the office looking for fire. Turns out the back of the building that is home to Kincora and Manray was on fire.

Alot of things have happened in 2007 with my company. We completely revamped our online store to start of the year, we have added a ton of new products and we moved in to a new address located on pine in Capitol Hill. June 16th marked an entire year since I left my full time job as infosec engineer in corporate America.

So I occasionally post some food related things. I think this weekend has inspired me to do some more. I was honored through a string of coincidences have my house be a stop on the 2006 West Coast FoodHacking tour.I was introduced to Marc via a good friend. After discussing the possibility of Hack Lab this weekend, discovering Marc’s recent espresso deviriginization and newfound coffee lust it was on.

Marc mentioned he had just read one of David Schomer’s books and itchin to work on some coffee hacks among other things. Luckily I was able to round up some coffee geeks friends, including Chris the roaster from Zoka and Jacob from La Marzocco. Everything said and done I think we had ten participants over the course of the day. It was a kick ass time, everyone consumed waaaay too much espresso, I learned a ton although its just the tip of the iceberg concerning Molecular Gastronomy. Mucho props to everyone involved for sharing their food, gear, humor and knowledge.

I will go lite on the details here as I imagine the diligently kept notebook of Marc and Jules will be transcribed to the wiki shortly. Here are a few highlights from memory, although this does not nearly cover everything that was done:

• Omlete Hacks:
• Instruction on preperation of an omlete Frances style
• Making omlette’s with eggs that have been soaked or rubbed with ingredients including vodka and chocolate
• Poaching an egg yolk inside a cooked omlete. When the omlete is cracked open it oozes like an egg over easy… Yum
• Rosetta Hacks:
• Cream and Sassafras mixture for pouring Rosetta
• Preparation of a tomato cream to use in place of Milk for rosetta design
• Salmon Smoking:
• Salmon smoked w/Alder wood soaked in Arak Haddad, a liquor made from grape and anise
• Salmon smoked w/Alder wood and green (unroasted) ethiopian coffee
• Salmon smoked w/Alder wood and green Sumatra beans that were vacum infused with essential oils
• Cuban shots
• A portafilter of ground espresso roast coated with ground glucose and/or sucrose and pulled as a shot
• Coffee Roasting
• Roasting of columbian, sumatran, and ethiopian coffee beans in a columbian ball roaster over open fire
• Roasting of ethiopian coffee beans with essential oils
• Education of the cupping (tasting) method employed by coffee roasters/purchasers
• Cupping of all the different coffees roasted at the hacklab

Today is “Day Against DRM” , and in celebration I project that I have been helping bootstrap went live today, DrmFree.org. DrmFree.org is a federated search engine that can help you find music to purchase or download for free that does not use DRM. The basic principle is simple, if consumers are educated and shown that they have a choice, we believe they will choose to purchase music that is free of DRM. For more info check out the about page.

So I finally got off my ass this year and joined one of the Disc Northwest ultimate leagues. Its a “hat league” which has people of varying skill levels. Some how I managed to end up the captian of the Central District team even though I probably know less about Ultimate than anyone else on the team.

The league teams are based on Seattle hoods, which is why our team is the Central District, however I am one of only two people on the team who actually live in the CD :). I am slowly but surely learning about the offensive stack, zone defense, forcing and all other sorts of good stuff.

Well we are a little over one week into the Softball Season. So far so good. Our team made a fine first showing, we beat The Garage Team both games of the double header. The Garage took the championship away from us in the final round of the playoffs last year, so this is a big win for us.

This Sunday at Dahl Field we will be playing a double header against The Comet, starting at noon.
On another note, we have the launched the Industrial League website.

Getting ready to head out from hack night but things still appear to be going strong. So far this evening:

-Some update on the status of the Node at the Ambassador building.

-Eric Butler’s friend whose name I can’t remember was dissecting an Iriver h320 and replacing the battery with a higher capacity third party Ipod gen 2 battery. 

-Discussing wireless network for MindCamp 2.0 . Myself Richard, and possibly Casey will be handling it. My thoughts are to use WifiDog for the portal page and randomly aggregate information on the portal page from all the attendees, since we will have that information ahead of time.

-We added brctl and supporting library to pyramid linux.

-I imagine Matt will post some photos to his flickr account.

I briefly mentioned Seattle Mind Camp 1.0 when I attended about 6 months ago. Seattle Mind Camp 2.0 is coming up in just over two weeks. They are seeking to expand their geek diversity , so if you can think someone that should been there last time and wasn’t let’em know.

Technorati Tags: mindcamp, mindcamp2.0

Better late than never…Some of the hacknight details. Rob discussed the release of Pyramid Linux, a replacement for the aging Pebble Linux that we have all learned to love and loath on embedded hardware. Pyramid is based on a Ubuntu and has all the lastest bits kernel and userland wise.

We also renewed the SSL certificate for the Seattlewireless and chuckled at the Geotrust authentication for aquiring a certificate.

In addition I rediscovered upon updating the cert that Courier IMAP requires that you keep your private key and cert in the same file. While its true that if someone owned my courier server they would probably have access to the private key anyways, it just seems silly and lazy to have to store them both in the same file.

Also Rob posted his account already.

The usual suspects met up at Redline for Hacknight. Alright, well not all of them.Usually Matt or Rob blog the hacknight details. Rob is in Italy at ICTP eating cake and drinking much espresso I am sure. Matt is busy hacking parenthood.

As I mentioned in a previous post we installed the asterisk server. I brought down my Zyxel Voip Phone and we attempted to register it to asterisk but were unable to get it working through nat (as we suspected), so Casey upgraded the firmware which apparently fixes some usefull things like DTMF (ah, who needs that on a phone) talked about the need for a stun server. There was some discussion of the dial plan, and getting people connected to asterisk.
There was some hacking on a new sony vaio and getting its built in wireless to work on Debian. Eric showed off XGL on his laptop. I finally opened the memory and hard drive compartments on my P1510D.

I am sure there was more, but thats all I can remember.