MacAlpine.org

BeerNet is now ‘live’. I’ve decided to conduct a social experiment regarding WiFi leaching. Instead of securing my wireless access point, I have left it open to share my unused bandwidth. To remind people of this fact, I have set up a transparent proxy using squid to replace internet banner ads with ads of my own design (at CNN for example). Some of these ads subtly suggest an appropriate donation for relatively unfettered internet access. Will people be morally obligated to do the right thing, or will they simply continue to leach…

Heather and I made a pilgrimage to Burlington, VT for the Vermont brewer’s association beer festival. We took quite a few nice pictures along the way. Heather wins the prize though for this picture of lake Champlain at sunset. Speaking of photos, I was contacted by the marketing coordinator for Fugro consultants, they wanted permission to use one of my high resolution photographs of Kyle field for a ‘Statement of Qualification’ since they performed geotechnical testing on the stadium before and during construction. I’m glad that they respected my image copyrights.

I stumbled on the Puritan Beef Co, a wholesale distributor of prime and choice
beef, down by Haymarket in Boston. Prime NY strip loins are 5.27/lb and prime fillet
are 8.79/lb. The catch is you have to buy a whole subprimal. (10-15 lbs).
Seventy five and change yielded 13 1.25-1.5″ NY strip steaks averaging a pound
each! The butcher trimmed some of the excess fat, but not too much (prime has
a lot a fat, surrounding the meat). I’m splitting the steaks with 2 other lab
mates, so about 4 steaks for each of us.

We decided to freeze the majority of the steaks. We flash froze the steaks
using liquid nitrogen (-196C, -321F) and stored them in the lab’s -80C freezer
(-112F). A lesson learned during the process, glad zip-loc freezer bags
shatter in liquid nitrogen, making them useless. Ended up wrapping the
frozen steaks in heavy duty aluminum foil. Will try butcher’s paper next time.

Will probably donate a steak to the lab proprietor and boss, Steve Bell, as we are
using valuable -80C storage space for the meat.

Thought I would plug Milan’s little brother Jed’s bid for the school board in Santa Barbra, California. You can watch his campaign unfold over the next few months.