graemebunton.com

I’d tried pulled chicken and pulled pork with my Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker, but as the weather was warming up I wanted to try something a bit more ambitious. We were having our friends James and Dwayne over so it seemed like a good time to try out the cadillac of smoked dishes: the Brisket.

I essentially followed the recipe from the best of all smoker resources, the Virtual Weber Bullet. I tried to document the process nicely with my new 50mm 1.8 prime lens, so the shots are perhaps unnecessarily arty. I think i learned a lot from this first try, mostly in two categories: meat selection and temperature.

I ended up buying two briskets from Cumbrae’s as they were quite small, about 3 and 3.5 lbs each. The brisket in the above VWB recipe was 12 lbs, so I knew i would be dealing with shorter times. They were pre-trimmed of fat however and i think this worked against me. The smaller one had virtually no fat layer and a tiny ‘point’ (as opposed to the ‘flat’, the two main parts of the brisket), so it ended up being quite dry. As for temperature, i need a wired thermometer so that i can tell whats going on inside the smoker. I think the smaller brisket should have come out earlier, though the larger one was almost perfect, I do think the 205deg that VWB recommends is too high.

And now, the pics:

The sealed Briskets:

Side view of the small brisket, you can see how thin the layer of fat is and how small the point is:

Filling the smoker using the “Minion Method”

Firing the charcoal in the chimney:

Smoking away…

It started raining, so i taped an umbrella to a stick to keep it dry

After five hours:

Done and sliced:

You can see some more pictures at the full flickr set.

Graeme BBQ BBQ, beef, brisket, Cooking, smoker

As a guy who spends a lot of time on, in, and around computers and computer related activities, I come across the geek and nerd honourifics/pejoratives a fair amount. Most people use these two terms interchangeably, and I’m not sure if i am being overly pedantic but its my hope that I can explain the differences between them so that they might be used to demean or uplift more appropriately.

Now, i should probably offer up some sort of disclosure here, so that my bias is apparent. I would consider my self a staunch member of the nerd camp, and while I’m not on the corner of Dundas and Yonge shouting at passers-by about the impending return of Nerd, I do find myself correcting people when i am mislabeled, and, you know, blogging about it….

Geek, it seems, is the older of the two words. If one is to rely on Wikipedia (which one must, god forbid i actually go to a library..) it finds its origins in the odd and twisted world of the old-timey carnival. Geekdom at that point had a darker tone than it does today – indeed, geeks could often be found biting the heads off of chickens. That dark tone however has persisted as a sub-text to the term, I would argue it can be used to define the more obsessive members of the nerd-geek cadre. In this way you often find the word hyphenated, simpsons-geek or physics-geek. It’s word born of the strange and freaky,

Nerd, on the other hand has a much shorter history (and perhaps, more ambiguous). It grew in popularity between the 50s and 70s and always indicated someone who was bookish or had an overly intellectual air about them. “Nerd” typically denotes one who spends more time learning and investigating rather than being cool or hanging out. While nerd does share some of the anti-social characteristics of geek, it doesn’t have the freaky background and is thus in my mind, more benign.

Now, I’m not suggesting there isn’t considerable overlap between the two terms. Because there is, lots of it. Heaps even. However, at the ends of the spectrum they are quite distinct, and man, those geeks are effing weird man. Stay away.

Srsly.

Graeme Everyday Errata

Ethereal Aunt, originally uploaded by Bunton & Peel.

I really love this photo i took of my pseudo-aunt. The lighting was just doing lovely things.

Also, i picked up my new 50mm 1.8 prime lens this evening. So expect to be punished with thousands of shots from it.

Graeme Photos aunt, bolton, photo

I want you to genuinely compliment 3 people today 1, originally uploaded by Bunton & Peel.

Enjoyable grafitti on the TTC.

Graeme Everyday Errata, Photos grafitti, photo, Photograph, picture

I’ve been awfully busy over the past few months (sheesh! almost a year) helping out nModal Solutions get it’s Datamartist product up and onto the ‘net. I am very pleased to announce that the public beta is now open, and anyone can download and try the app out (which I would totally encourage you to do).

Datamartist (named by yours truly) is application for cleaning, manipulating and transforming data sets in ways that used to require SQL query knowledge or days and days of effort in excel. It uses a graphical interface of connected blocks to do some absolutely wicked things to your data. As well, it also exports nicely into excel, so you can still analyze it in ways you are used to.

You can watch the tutorial i built for the product here: http://www.datamartist.com/video-and-screenshots which should give you a good idea of how it works.

We’ve done some testing with super large data sets too. And I mean crazy, stupid, nutty large. 100 Million rows of data large. I think excel gets a bit barfy on anything more than 1,000,000 rows.

You can learn more here: http://www.datamartist.com/learn-more if you are interested. So if you do any sort of manipulation of large data sets (data marts or data warehouses if you will) please check it out, and don’t hesitate to crush me with feedback on either the app or the website.

Graeme Everyday Errata beta, data, Datamartist, mart, warehouse

I was using a theme for a while on this blog called Scruffy. It’s a well designed and fun theme, and i highly recommend it. While upgrading to wordpress 2.7 however, i smoked my wp-content directory, including my themes and plugins. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what scruffy was called, so i just browsed through the myriad of free wordpress theme sites until i found it again.

I then noticed something strange, my google analytics was returning no results. I’ve run into this before with other themes, if your theme doesn’t call the wordpress footer function before the end body tag, your analytics won’t work. So, i opened up my footer.php in the editor to drop that in there and blammo: the footer was scrambled.

I found this really strange, as it wasn’t previously. as well, the footer has this message:

WARNING: This file is protected by copyright law. To reverse engineer or decode this file is strictly prohibited.

And all that does, is desperately make me want to decode that file. Before i went and did that, I googled scruffy to find the original designer and to download it from the original source. Sure enough, the footer from FRESH01 is not scrambled. You could edit it all you wanted. What this means is that the free theme site i had download it from had altered the theme to include a link back to themselves for a theme they did not create. They’re making money off someone elses creation and preventing you from ensuring that all your plugins and features work.

So, before we go on, you absolutely, totally need to acknowledge the person who created your theme. Ideally this helps them generate some sort of income so they can continue making nifty themes.

Moving on…

The footer has this code, followed by a bunch of junk:

eval(base64_decode(“

Which would mean the following text had been encoded to base 64 and they are just using PHP to un-encode it on the fly. A quick google search will find you a number of sites which will decode base 64. I used this site for no particular reason. So, grab all the gobbeldygook between the quotes in your wordpress footer and drop it into a site like the one linked above (making sure to select decode). You should find returned the correct php/html for your footer, allowing you to edit it freely. Just copy it back into your footer.php, replacing all that junk and the php code that scrambles it and you should be good to go.

Checking back on the footer.php from the files directly from FRESH01, i can see that they have since updates their footer to include the missing tag. So, that free theme site is trying to bully you into using a broken, older version of a theme which they are re-distributing for their own profit. The lesson here is, if you find a theme you like, see if you can find its original creator before grabbing it from some third party.

Anywho, I hope that helps someone else out there.

Graeme Wordpress decode, footer, theme, Wordpress

You have to list your top ten favourite lists that are floating around every goddamned blog and facebook profile. I’ve broken them into categories, but you can feel free to add your own.

1. Music List: 25 Favourite Albums
2. Conceptual Restriction List: One Word Only!! List
3. Personal Discovery List: 7 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Me List
4. Random List: 25 Random Things!
5. Movie Tie-in List: My Bucket List
6. Name Related: Using only first letter of first name list
7. Racist List: Top 33 Ethnicities List
8. Meta List: This One
9. Alienation list: Friends that are actually Fucktards List
10. Worst List: Favourite Numbers Between 22 and 68 List

I am now going to tag everyone I’ve ever met on this. Suckers!

Graeme Everyday Errata facebook, lists, meta

I’ve stumbled across a couple medical curiosities lately that I thought I’d share.

Transplanted hearts never feel like your own.
You can read one lady’s account of living with with a transplanted heart here. What got to me about this story (aside from a life time of anti-rejection meds and other complications), and is something that had never occurred to me before is that when you transplant a heart you have to sever all of the nerves that connect to the rest of the body, and, of course, these don’t grow back. Because the nerves aren’t connected, the new heart never feels like your own. It beats like a stranger inside your chest.

One of the other curious bits referenced in the piece linked above, is that because your heart is not connected to your nervous system, it can only respond to chemical changes. Meaning when you get scared or for some reason flood your system with adrenalin, your heart starts to freak out – but this only happens after a relatively significant lag. In essence, your heart’s reactions can be behind your brains’ by minutes.

The other odd duck I stumbled across was Ondine’s Curse. Ondine’s curse is usually a birth defect, or the result of serious brain injury and is almost always fatal – because you have to remain conscious or you stop breathing. It’s caused by damage to your brainstem, where all the controls for your autonomic systems reside, including breathing. So if you fall asleep, fall unconscious or you know, just forget to fucking breathe than you pass out and die. The idea of having to purposefully draw each and every breath OR YOU DIE is some scary, scary shit.

Graeme Everyday Errata heart transplant, medicine, oddities, Ondine's Curse

I’ve been working a lot lately on building marketing videos and tutorials for Datamartist, and one of the things i would like to do with them, is to know how many people have watched them and at what point they are dropping off.

I’ve been using the Camtasia Studio 6 product to build these videos and its pretty nifty software, but its call out functionality is not as robust as Adobe Captivate’s.  Now, according to this tutorial (found here originally) from Paul Betty at Regis University it is indeed possible to use a call out with the GA javascript function.  I have not however been able to get it to work thus far.  The call appears to be setup correctly and the google analytics code is in the page and functioning, but I’m not seeing the results in my reports.

Googling has proved relatively fruitless in this endeavor, as there are not a lot of resources in this area.   In fact, the video by Paul linked above is really the only one.  I’ll keep working on it, but it would be really nice if someone figured it out and posted something, you know,  for the good of human kind.

—-

Update!

As we have a license for this product we thought we’d hit up their support to see what we’re doing wrong.  It turns out that for Camtasia Studio 6 they are automatically adding “http://” to the beginning of any custom call out to a URL, breaking the javascript functionality seen in Paul’s video above, which was done in version 5.  There was some indication that this might be changed in a future release, but for the moment if you want to track video usage, either stay with Camtasia 5 or switch to captivate.

Graeme Everyday Errata Camtasia, Datamartist, google analytics

(Ha)penis

Originally uploaded by Bunton & Peel

This has been making me laugh all day long.

Graeme Everyday Errata, Photos grafitti, photo, Photograph, picture