Wine Pump and Project #2

After letting the wine bottle sit for 120 hours we took a look. While we didn't have any way to measure the exact volume of the balloon, it looked like the size before we pumped out the air. When I pressed on the air release it make some noise, but it was fairly brief. So the pump does does a decent job of removing air, but not of keeping new air from seeping in.

Even after switching the cap the battery charger still wasn't fully charging the batteries. So I put an ammeter in series with the batteries and found they were only getting 0.4 mA - about 1/1000 of what it should be. So I looked back over things for a bit and found that I had put the pnp in backwards. Doh! Well now it is in the right direction and the charge current is 430 mA. Much better - hopefully that will do the trick.

Balloon in Wine Bottle

There was a disagreement at work about how well hand vacuum pumps for wine bottles work. So I brought my wine bottle pump and a bag of balloons and someone else brought in an empty sparkling cider bottle. We put a balloon in the bottle and held the end of the balloon. A coworker used a coffee stirrer to push on the neck of the balloon to keep it from filling the neck of the wine bottle while he blew into the balloon. It took him a few tries, but he got enough air into the balloon so that it was stretching a little and then tied the end. Then he pushed the balloon so it fell to the bottom of the bottle. Then I used the wine bottle pump just as I would when trying to preserve wine. The balloon grew as I pumped out the air in the bottle. The growth was very noticeable, but very far from filling the entire bottle. We made a very rough guess that the volume of the balloon increased by 4x. I think that means I pumped out 75% of the air in the bottle. That's more than I expected and I think enough to justify using the pump.

The next part of the challenge is to see if the stopper's seal holds over several days. So the bottle with the balloon in it is sitting under the desk in an empty cube (no one wanted a bottle sitting in their cube). On Tuesday we'll check how big the balloon looks (very tough to tell much from this since no way to compare the size - I tried to take a picture, but the bottle was dark enough it didn't really work, see below). The other test will be pushing on the valve and listening for the air going into the bottle.

Well it is about as far from scientific as you can get, but I'd say the bottle pump is worthwhile.

Look for the pink blur at the bottom of the bottle:

TV, TV, TV, Rent, Eating, President, Violent Music

Seems like Scrubs has come part way back. I'm very glad to see them do some scenes outside the hospital. I claim that's the key to making the show good again. Other than maybe at the very beginning I think all the funny and key moments of the show have either been outside the hospital or set up by something outside the hospital. Although I do feel like this entire season of scrubs is that episode of arrested development where they make a last ditch effort to save the family/show. And what is with coffeebucks? They had the cafeteria which they were able to use as a large space or zoom in to a table to make it small space. But now they just have the small area that makes me feel claustrophobic.

I think Pysch as a show on its own is ok, but not quite good enough to watch. But the fact it is a constant mockery of psychics just puts it over the worth watching bar for me. Plus it is set in Santa Barbara so I get to keep going - oh, I used to live near there. Whoa - they just had a victim with an ICD that they used to identify him. The reasons to watch keep adding up.

I keep wondering when they are going to finally post tonight's episode of BSG online, but I guess I should at least wait till the episode has finished playing on TV before getting impatient. I'm increasingly thinking that the music (especially the drums during action scenes, but also other selections) does a lot to make the show. Which I guess was really brought out by the whole All Along the Watchtower thing.

I just found out if I renew my lease for a year my rent is going up less than 1%! Hopefully raises this year won't match apartment prices.

I finally got to the grocery store so no more having a spoonful of peanut butter for breakfast any more (don't worry it is not from that company with the recall).

George Bush isn't acting as president any more (I still maintain he never won to begin with)! That finally started to sink in today. Someone should keep an eye on Dick Cheney - I feel like he could be even more dangerous now that the world isn't watching him than he was before (maybe I've watched The Usual Suspects too many times). I like the theory that Cheney was in a wheel chair so he wouldn't have to stand when Obama was sworn in (ok, I don't believe it, but I like it). I know I'm not really qualified to answer this, but I feel rather confident in saying that having a black president does not mean racism is over or that we can all forget about slavery - now all those talk show hosts can stop asking.

Music needs to get more violent. I feel like when I was growing up rap and alternative rock gave old people something to worry about (ok, mostly just rap, but I like to think I was listening to something edgy). The worrying old people sounded out of it, and didn't get it, but at least you could sort of see how they would worry that violent music might cause violence. But now it seems like social networking has taken its place. It is one thing to go on the radio and talk about the evils of violent music, it is quite another to talk about how facebook/twitter/yelp are ruining society (or to quote Emerson and Walden to prove facebook is ruining universities - seriously, that was on NPR this morning). I think every conversation about it can be boiled down to - "I'm old and this is new so it must be bad. I've only used it for a little bit and have not yet figured out how to use it intelligently so everyone must be wasting their life on it." In order to save these people some dignity, music needs to get more violent so they have something semi-reasonable to worry about again. I'm not saying music isn't violent now, it is just that we have gotten used to it (almost makes you think we'll get used to facebook/twitter/yelp in a couple years and wonder what everyone was worrying about...), but it needs to quickly get a lot more violent so people take notice again.

I'm a cooking genius!

First - I noticed that flour has a "best by" date (a mere 3 years late).

Second - Put a bit of oil in a pan then some instant oatmeal and about 1/3 the water you would normally use to make oatmeal. Set stove to about 4 (out of 10). If a lid is near by then cover. Let it cook for about 5 to 10 minutes - goal is not wet, but not crispy or burnt. Put on a plate and cover with raspberry preserves. You now have the 80/20 rule version of raspberry cobbler! Way better tasting than looking - I was sure it was a mistake until I tasted it.

Above the lip

Does anyone else have a spot a little above their upper lip that is particularly sensitive to spice? For some reason this spot often ends up hurting more than the inside of my mouth. I totally get eyes being super sensitive, but that spot just seems like normal skin that shouldn't be more sensitive than say my cheek or nose. I do think it happens more when I cook, but it also sometimes happens just from eating spicy food. I assume I do something to cause the spice to touch the spot. But why is that spot so sensitive? I know there is stuff you can eat to help dull the spice, but what do you put on your skin to do it? I have found that ice or cold water helps, but only as long as the spot stays cold.

If I put seeds from hot peppers on that spot every day would it eventually stop being so sensitive? Would the change be permanent or would I have to do that all the time?

A personal first

I tried cheese pizza for what may be the first time ever! A near by pizza place has a pizza that uses soy cheese. And this is what happened:



Well, no, actually that was from the Egyptian Museum I went to on Saturday. The soy cheese pizza experiment actually went well, much better than my previous tofu cheese experiment (although I'm starting to wonder if Max and Steve tricked me into eating a slice of real cheese). Unfortunately the pizza was the Berkeley Soy Pizza which has no tomato sauce and is topped by veggies and veggie burger. I think I'd trade the soy cheese for tomato sauce and meat. Although it is nice to be full after eating only half a pizza.

PS Yes the excessive reflections may make that one of the worst pictures I've ever taken.

Flatliners Game #4 - The Win!

First a quick tip: cooking up tofu with a bag of frozen spinach on the stove using some olive oil makes for a good meal, but, here's the important part, not just before a softball game. Nothing too bad, but some definite stomach grumbling during the game.

Next, the important part - me. As catcher I didn't do anything special (although the whole paying attention thing is working out well). Picked up the ball and threw it back a bunch of times. Once tried to catch a fly ball but it hit the back fence and I missed it coming down along the fence (not actually sure if that would have counted or not). Had the ball thrown to me during one play, it was fairly far away and I missed it, but the guy had made it home long before the ball got there.

The other team did not have a strong pitcher so our team did a lot of walking. First at bat walked and eventually made it home. Second at bat had a sissy hit that landed about equidistant between the catcher, pitcher and third baseman so made it to first and eventually home. Third was a good line drive, flew between second and short stop to the outfield, and got to first but next play was forced out at second. Fourth was a line drive to about the same spot, but much softer and got forced out at first.

Finally the crazy part (well if you don't count the flatteners winning as crazy). While we were fielding (I was doing my inning on the bench) the other team had two guys standing around as first base coach. They were talking to each other fairly loud. Our first baseman asked them to quiet down so he could concentrate on the game. One of their guys said, "It's softball we can be as loud as we want. Instead of complaining about talking, why not tell your team to stop being sissies and swing at the ball." After that he made similar comments to other players on our team. It didn't get to anyone on our team due to the combination of not taking it that seriously and being so happy that we actually won.

Oh, and if you hadn't noticed - WE WON!

What I learned this weekend

Raw crab covered in garlic sauce tastes a lot like garlic.

At Korean bbq if 2 out of 3 people are asian they leave cooking the meat to you, but if it is 2 out of 4 then they get a lot more involved.

Jason Bourne is Wolverine.

If you leave a pen in a pocket and then do some laundry it will leave black stains on your clothes and drier that even bleach cannot remove. And then your hands will continue to spell like bleach no matter how many times you wash them.

Gizzards

On Saturday I went to a restaurant in West LA called Yakitoriya. It's a Japanese restaurant where all of the dishes are some part of a chicken on a stick and it seemed like you could name pretty much any part of the chicken you wanted. Since there was a 5 stick minimum I went for their 5 stick combo. The chicken breast with wasabi and chicken liver were good. A few of the dishes were alright and I discovered that I'm not a fan of chicken gizzards. The taste wasn't so bad, but the only thing I can think of to describe the texture is partially melted plastic - not that I've ate that much plastic, but I bet that's what it would be like.

That night I also saw The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie. In some sense there's not much point giving an opinion since anyone who watched the show has to see the movie and anyone who hasn't seen the show shouldn't see the movie. I guess for the people who have only seen a few episodes I'd say watch more of the show rather than going to the movie (especially since you'll want to know the characters that they use in the movie). It was very funny and had an excellent opening, but it did feel a bit stretched which isn't so surprising since the show is normally only 15 minutes long. Yes, this is what they were advertising when they shut down Boston - I still think that the city over reacted and that "wires and batteries" doesn't make something a bomb!

I also saw the apple TV in person for the first time that night. Well they definitely did a good job making the box look good. Maybe the next step will be working on the picture. I watched clips from BSG, The Office, and Scrubs - not shows that require particularly good picture (I wasn't watching nature scenes or even an action scene in BSG) and the graininess was distractingly obvious. The sales people said that the TV I was looking at isn't HD which is part of the problem (but my TV isn't HD either...), but they also had an HD TV and it didn't look a whole lot better. Sounds like they are going to have to up the resolution of the downloads before the apple TV becomes attractive. It really makes me wonder who is buying it.

Lobster Pate

Lobster pate - it's not as good as lobster or pate - discuss.