Flexistentialism Welcome Guest | Login or Register

Just to pass some time, I’m going to give you the recipe I use for making hummus, the delicious Middle Eastern/Mediterranean spread of goodness.

As usual with my recipes, the amounts aren’t exact, and every batch I make is a little different. This is only a starting place for you to experiment from. Learn the flavors, learn the food, and relish the fact that each batch is unique and special.

Ingredients

• Two cans of Garbanzo Beans (AKA Chick Peas).
• A good scoop of Tahini (maybe 1/8th to 1/4 cup)
• A good splash of Lemon Juice (about the same amount as the Tahini)
• Two or three cloves of Fresh Garlic
• Dash of salt
• A little dollop of Olive Oil (less than the amount of Lemon Juice)
• Something(s) for flavor
  • Chipotle peppers?
  • Paprika?
  • Chili Powder?
  • Scallions?
  • Red bell pepper?
  • Dill?
  • Curry powder?
  • Radish?
• Be creative!

• A Blender

  Procedure

  Open one can of Garbanzo Beans, but don’t drain the liquid. Put the whole can, liquid and all, in the blender. Take the other can of Garbanzo beans, open it, and drain this one. Blend the first can’s worth in the blender for a moment, until it starts to break up and get pasty. This will be way too liquidy for hummus. But thats ok, because now you add the second can, the one you drained, and blend that in. Now you have garbanzo paste.

  Add the other ingredients, stirring them in, then running the blender to get them all mixed up. You can chop up the garlic first if you don’t have a vigorous blender, but I usually just toss the cloves in whole.

  A note about Tahini. First, what the hell is it? Its a butter made from sesame seeds. Tahini is to sesame seeds what peanut butter is to peanuts. It is a very pale tan color, almost grey, and it is fairly liquidy, more so than other nut butters. It seperates easily so make sure to give it a good stir. You can get it at many grocery stores in the Mediterranean or Middle Eastern sections, if they have them. You can also get it at most international food stores, and Whole Foods stores and other ‘natural’ stores often sell it in bulk. It has a lot of nutty bite to it, and makes good sauces when mixed with some lemon juice, garlic and water. It is also essential to the flavor of hummus.

  Once you’ve added all the main ingredients, you have a basic hummus that is good all on its own. Taste it, and see if you like it. If it needs more tangyness, add some more lemon juice. If it needs some more bite, add some more tahini. If it seems too thick, add a little bit more olive oil. If it is just missing ‘something’, you can try adding a little more salt, but go easy. Its easy to add more of something, hard to take it out.

  I recommend tasting all of the individual ingredients so you can get an idea of how they come together to make the final product. That will help you decide what you like more or less of.

  Once you have your basic hummus, its time to go nuts with some flavor. I personally like to add two or three chipotle peppers (a smoked jalapeno that is incredibly good, and quite spicy), some paprika for color, and a dash of onion powder. Sometimes I just add chili powder if I’m lazy. Chopped scallions can also be quite charming, as well as fresh or dried red bell pepper. Experiment with dill too. I’ve had great curry hummus, and fresh veggies like radishes can sometimes be surprisingly good. You can take a piece of pita bread, scoop up some of the raw hummus, and sprinkle some seasoning on it. Give it a try. You can try lots of seasonings this way, and you’ll surely find something you adore.

  Once you’ve seasoned your hummus, you can either eat it right away, or store it in the fridge overnight. The next day the flavors will have blended a bit better, and the bits of garbanzo bean will have soaked up some of the excess liquid and your hummus will have a slightly better texture. This recipe makes a lot of hummus though, so I usually just eat my fill after making it, and then the rest just needs to sit in the fridge anyway, so it all works out. If you have good tasty olive oil, a nice thing to do when you serve the hummus is make a small indentation in the top of the hummus pile and pour a bit of the olive oil in. Then as the hummus is eaten, the oil will drain over the surface of the hummus and add a nice flavor to each bite.

  I like to eat hummus with pita bread, just tearing hunks off the bread and scooping the hummus, but it also goes good on bagels, in sandwiches, on crackers, as an appetizer with olives, on fresh veggies, etc.

  Enjoy!

I just realized that I performed an entire hour of science demonstrations to over two hundred people with my fly down. Now I was also wearing a tie-dye lab coat, colorful gloves, and other regalia, so there is a good chance that my unzipped fly was not always exposed, or visible to the audience. Also, these aren’t the type of pants where, when the fly is open, it pulls itself open like a great gaping mouth. Instead, it remains roughly closed, just not fully secured.

So, not a disaster, but a bit disconcerting all the same. Oh well, they still clapped at the end.

Who here played Mario Bros. 2 in the US when they were a kid? Good game huh? Sure it was creepy, and filled with weird stuff that doesn’t make any sense (not that the original Mario made much more sense), but it was charming in its own way. Well, the reason the game is a bit of a black sheep is that it was originally called Doki Doki Panic, and was released in Japan for the Famicom Disk System, which was an NES addon that included a floppy disk drive. I’ve never even seen one in person.

The game was bought by Nintendo, redesigned, and released as Super Mario Bros. 2 here in the US. All they did was tweak the graphics and music, and ended up with a final product. The original game is quite a bit weirder though, and just as amusing.

If you want to learn more about it, or get a ROM of the game so you can play it on your emulator, check out Poprocks and Coke.

The other day I took my newest PC and set it up as a media computer. The computer is not amazing, spec wise, since its a 1.7GHz Celeron w/ 512MB of RAM, but the microATX Intel mobo has onboard USB 2.0 and 100BT ethernet, which is nice. The video card is an ATI All-In-Wonder 8500DV I bought from a fellow through eBay. The video card is great, because in addition to providing good 3D, it also has nice 2D abilities, a DVI output, an MPEG decoder for DVD playback, S-Video input and outputs, SPDIF output and two IEEE1394 (Firewire) ports, and it comes with an RF remote control.

The computer has been nice so far for playing music in the living room on my nice speakers, watching videos over the network, and best of all, playing game emulators. I picked up a couple of gamepads that look very much like Playstation controllers at Best Buy that use USB (and are supported by XP’s native joystick controller drivers). These combined with emulators like zSNES for emulating the Super Nintendo, and ePSXe for emulating the Playstation.

Emulation involves replicating in code the hardware environment of a game system. Then, the data on the game cartridge, called the ROM, is downloaded onto a computer, and loaded into the emulator. The game ROM is fully tricked by the emulator software into thinking its running on a real game console, and runs happily. So with one computer, the Nintendo and Super Nintendo game worlds are open to me, as well as Playstation, N64 and literally thousands of arcade games.

Last night, armed with two controllers and an emulator equipped PC in the living room, Dennis and I played quite a rousing game of Super Mario Bros. 3. Good times… Good times… Nostalgia has never been so much fun.

And now for something completely different… A salsa recipe.

This is the basic salsa that Berg and I made the other night. It turned out delicious, so I thought I’d document it for your pleasure. Many people don’t realize how easy it is to make salsa, and I hope that maybe some people might give it a try.

Ingredients

• One 28oz can of diced tomatoes
• One small green pepper, or half of a big honkin’ one
• One small yellow or white onion
• A carrot
• A small can of green chilies
• Some pickled jalapeno slices or
• A few chipotle peppers, preferably in adobo sauce
• A few cloves of garlic
• A small handful of fresh cilantro
• Black pepper
• White pepper
• A li’l salt

• Some lime juice

  Procedure

  Its easy. Just dice everything up, and mix it together. I like to put the can of tomatoes (juice and all) in a blender, and hit it for about one second, just to chop it up a tiny bit finer, but thats it. Then I move the tomatoes into a bowl, and do the rest of the dicing by hand. Dice up the pepper, toss it in. Dice up the onion, toss it in. Grate the carrot (or dice it), and toss it in. Crack open that little can of green chilies, and toss it in. Slice up the jalepeno slices, and toss those mofos in. Then add a bit of the juice from the jar of pickled jalapenos, its vinegary and good. Then slice up the chipotle peppers and put them in. They are spicy, so watch out. I put in two medium sized peppers for medium spicyness. Put in one for mild, or three or four for more heat. Chop the cilantro up real fine, and toss it in. Same with the garlic. Add some black pepper. Then add some more. Add some white pepper too, if you’ve got it. Add a dash of salt and a squirt of lime and you are ready to rock.

  Then eat it. Actually, for maximum goodness, let it sit covered in the fridge overnight for the flavors to mix. But this is fresh salsa, you can eat it right away if you want (we do).

  Here are some notes on ingredients. First, remember that my recipes are very vague, and I like them that way. That means that if you really like something, or don’t like it, add more or less of it, thats fine. You can also leave things out if you don’t have them, but be careful that you don’t leave out too much, or you might be missing critical flavors.

  In this dish, the tomato and jalapeno or chipotle peppers are the core. If you have nothing else, you must have these two. Chipotle peppers are superior in many ways to regular jalapenos. They are jalapenos that have been deeply smoked underground, and they often come in a rich smoky sauce called adobo. There are few things in the world more flavorful than a chipotle. They are smoky, peppery, hot, and just damn hell ass delicious. If you are using fresh jalapenos, thats cool too, but you miss out on a bit of smokyness, and your salsa will be less homogenous, that is, you’ll have hot bites, and cooler bites as you hit the jalapeno bits. The smoking and pickling processes help bring out the spice and cause it to blend better with the rest of the salsa. If you are using pickled jalapenos, add some of the brine, its salty and vinegary and will add a bit of acid to your salsa that it can use.

  After you have these two basic ingredients, you need to elaborate on the flavor. I like green chilies, so I add a can. Add fresh ones too if you want. Fresh green peppers add a little bite of fresh coolness that I find delightful. Onions are important too, they add a good bite. Carrot is an odd one, people see carrot in there and they get a little question mark over their head. I don’t know why I put it in, but it belongs there. Of all the best salsa’s I’ve ever eaten, nearly all contained carrot. Why? I can’t say, but you should do it.

  For general seasoning, fresh garlic is super. Dice up a few cloves real fine and toss them in. Garlic salt will do the trick in a pinch, but fresh garlic is best, and it keeps for a long time, so don’t worry about keeping some on hand. Black pepper is good too, don’t skimp. White pepper adds a peppery flavor as well, but with less bite than black pepper. Its a good flavorful spice. A touch of salt can sometimes round things out a bit, but use your judgment, don’t add too much. A blast of lime juice is a nice flavor, and a good source of acid to help things blend flavors better.

  Cilantro is a touchy subject, but frankly I love it. Even if you don’t, you should still put some in, as it is key to this type of fresh salsa. I put a lot in usually. Consult with your other salsa eaters though, because I find cilantro is often a love/hate issue with people, and you don’t want to offend your cilantro-hating friends (as much as they may deserve it).

  So there you go, yummy salsa. Nearly all those ingredients are optional, just use as many as you have around, and you’ll end up with a tasty salsa for sure.

Tonight Dann and I got some serious work done on a project we’ve undertaken to make a set of LED poi that are cooler than any made before. Or at least, cooler than most made before.

Poi is a Maori word for a type of food, but we aren’t making food. The way poi is made is by taking a tuber, placing it in a sock-like bag, and then swinging it around in circles, banging it against a rock to soften it. This process of swinging and object around that is on the end of a flexible chain or rope, is now an art form/dance, and the apparatus used is still called ‘poi’. If you’ve been following along, you’ll notice that I use poi for fire spinning, lengths of chain with a wick on the end.

Anyway, these poi are to be LED powered, so that they can be used in places where fire is less kosher, like the living room, or small rooms, or a dry forest floor.

The basic premise for these poi is that they will have red, green and blue LEDs, and will be capable of mixing them in different brightnesses so as to make the full spectrum of colors.

The poi will also be equipped with an accelerometer so that it can detect how fast it is spinning, and change color accordingly. The current implentation uses an Analog Devices ADXL150 accelerometer which is micromachined into a 14 pin SOIC chip. It measures accelerations of +/- 50 gees along one axis. This is very convenient, because as you’ll recall from your high school physics class, a spinning object is always experiencing an acceleration perpendicular to the direction of rotation. My back of the envelope calculations suggested that poi at full tilt whirl experience about 35 gees.

Dann has some experience with AVR microcontrollers, which are to be the brain of this project. A microcontroller is basically a computer on a single chip, that can be programmed to perform whatever actions your little brain can dream up. In this case, the accelerometer outputs a voltage proportional to the acceleration it is experiencing. This voltage is sampled by the ADC (Analog to Digital Converter), and read into memory. Then, based on this value, the red, green and blue LEDs are flashed at different rates to mimic a color. If you take an LED light, and flash it on and off at a frequency too fast for your eyes to see, but vary the ratio of time it is on to the time it is off, you can change the apparent brightness. That process is called PWM (Pulse Width Modulation). In our case, a timer counts out 256 steps, and the LEDs all turn themselves on at the beginning and then turn themselves off again at their preset time, the longer they stay on, the brighter they appear.

For right now, we have basic functionality on a test board. The accelerometer works beautifully, and the chip programming is coming along at a decent pace. After several hours of work, Dann and I had a working prototype, that when spun, changed the PWM for the three LEDs, producing a shift in color from blue to red as the poi sped up. Not bad!

Further design issues involve speeding up the PWM, optimizing the code, and tweaking the values to produce the smoothest shift in color from slow to fast. Further design ideas involve changing things other than color in relation to speed, and even doing image display.

Imagine if there were a row of LEDs all the way up the chain. As the poi spin, the row of LEDs shows a different set of pixels in an image, so as the poi makes a full circle, it draws a picture in the air. Of course, the pixels would be in a polar arrangement, meaning conversion from regular images would be odd. Then there is the issue of synchronizing frame rate with spinning speed, but we think we know how that could be done. At the bottom of a poi’s circle, it is experiencing the acceleration of the spin, plus 1g due to gravity. At the top of the circle, the poi is experiencing the acceleration of the spin, minus 1g due to gravity. This results in a 2g difference between the top and bottom of the circle. This would oscillate in a neat sinusoidal pattern, and comparing high and low values could yield a frequency value, from which a frame rate could be derived. Complex, but with very cool possibilities.

A bunch of new pictures have been put into the gallery so check them out, why don’t you? There are pictures of a birthday party, Interfuse, some friends’ graduations and some fire spinning. Props to Madalene for the photography and posting the pictures.

Enjoy.

Today I was approached by a coworker with an offer I found highly intriguing. She and a group of associates have been developing a plan that she would like me to be a part of. Before I tell you what this plan is, however, I must be frank. You might find it a bit unsavory, or perhaps even downright crude, but I beg that you do not judge me to harshly for considering her proposal.

She is building a vacuum forming machine for the purposes of fabricating a number of Storm Trooper costumes. How cool is that? She makes all sorts of Star Wars costumes, and she has joined up with some friends with the goal of taking the costume making to the next level, by sculpting, molding, and forming a set of complete, realistic, Storm Trooper costumes, including requisite blasters.

She’s going to give me some more information on the project, and I might be forced to help out this summer, because how cool would it be to have a Storm Trooper costume? I mean, I’ve never been that big on Star Wars, but come on, it would be cool.

One thing I’ve not yet revealed to the world at large due to my site being down for so long, is the fact that I’ve taken up a new hobby: Fire spinning.

Here is the general idea… Take a length of kevlar webbing and fold it into a cube. Attach this cube to a length of cable or chain, about as long as your arms, with a nice set of denim or leather handles. These are called poi. Then dip the wick into White Gas, Denatured Alcohol, Kerosene, or a mixture of the above fuels. After soaking it, have your buddy light them on fire as you hold the handles. Now, unless you want to get burned, you have to spin them around. Thats when things get fun.

I’ve been meeting with a bunch of fire spinners in the area, and we are beginning to call our group Pandora’s Matchbox. We’ve done a little mild performing, but mostly we just spin for our own pleasure and amusement. We meet at a local museum called the City Museum who generously allow us use of their parking lot for practice.

As reckless as it looks, we have a pretty tight safety regime. People are always standing by with wet towels for dousing people, and fire extinguishers for dousing fuel fires. For the most part, the poi take care of themselves, and people are rarely set on fire, and 99% of the time the little spatter of fuel goes out all by itself, leaving the person just fine.

The feeling of spinning the fire is quite intense, with the bright light, the intense heat, and the incredible noise of the flames. Its possible to shut out everything but you and the poi, and the act turns into a sort of moving meditation. Its like being the nucleus of an atom.

I’ve got some interesting photos to show you, but the gallery while mostly functional, is still complaining when I upload photos, so you’ll have to wait a day or two while I fiddle with that, but rest assured, cool pictures await.

I just got home from our weekly practice, and I am very tired, a little sore, and I’m covered in soot and the stink of kerosene. I also have a few very minor burns and scrapes on my biceps from some fairly aggressive spinning that resulted in me grazing my arms. All in all, I feel very good.

If you are in St. Louis, check out the Yahoo group stlfireconclave and come join us at the City Museum on Wednesday nights. We meet around 8ish, hang out and chat at the Cabin Inn the City, the bar attached to the museum, and then move out to the parking lot for more socialization and some FIRE.

Well, I’m back.

Lots of bad things have happened to this poor website, and so much was happening to me (mostly good), that I didn’t have time to fix it. The biggest problem was a complete data loss of the entire backend of this website. You happy visitors see the shiny surface, but beneath is a deep and convoluted maze of databases, scripts, programs and industrial adhesives. When my last webhost crapped out on me (damn them to Hell), I had to rescue what little I could from cache files, and move it over. What you see now is what little I could skim off the surface, what bits of the backend I could rebuild from memory, and the blog entries from before my last database backup. Thank you to those who sent me cached data.

If your mail was affected by all this crap, let me know. I’ve lost your emails (I lost mine too), but your accounts are active, I just need to reset your passwords. Call me.

In other news, I’ll begin posting here presently, so you can resume your reading of this website, assuming you even get this post, since you’ve long since stopped reading.