Cooking

Haphazard Pulled Pork of Deliciousness

Kelly

Yesterday I made pulled pork in our crock pot. Since it was pouring outside, I wasn’t willing to walk to the big grocery store. As such, any ingredients I needed had to be available at our local corner store (minus the pork itself, which had been hanging out in our freezer for months).

It was delicious, and while I don’t have an exact recipe, I’ll describe the process so you can throw whatever’s in your house in and have something equally delicious. I didn’t take photos because it just looked like shredded meat.

You will need:

  • 4 – 6 pound pork butt. Which actually comes from the shoulder. It’s cheap. You should be able to get it for around $1.25 per pound. Less if it’s approaching the sell-by date.
  • Crock pot. It needs to be big enough to fit the pork butt.
  • An onion
  • A clove of garlic or two
  • A bottle of BBQ sauce
  • Various spices. Whatever you have around is probably fine.

Step 1:

Thaw the pork butt in the microwave, or overnight in the fridge if you’re better at planning than I am.

Step 1.5:

While the pork is thawing, coarsely chop up the onion and garlic. Throw them in the crock pot haphazardly.

In a medium sized bowl, mix together equal parts of the following various spices, making substitutions for anything you have / don’t have / like / don’t like.

  • Salt
  • Ground black pepper
  • Sugar
  • Brown sugar
  • Cumin
  • Tumeric
  • Chili Powder
  • Garlic Powder
  • Paprika

I used 2 tablespoons of each for an 8.5 lb chunk of meat, though I added some extra paprika because it smelled so nice. I also used curry powder instead of chilli powder/tumeric because I didn’t have either of those.

Alternately, you can used a pre-made BBQ rub, but they didn’t sell that at my corner store.

Step 2:

Take your thawed pork butt and rub the spice mix all over it. Place the pork butt in the crock pot on top of the onions/garlic, and go ahead and dump the rest of the rub in there.

Step 3:

Fill the crock pot about 2/3 with water, or stock if that’s how you roll.

Step 4:

Cook 6+ hours on high or 10+ hours on low. If you have a temperature probe, make sure the interior of the meat gets up to at least 145 degrees F. The longer it cooks, the easier the next step will be.

Step 5:

Once you’re tired of waiting, turn off the crock pot. If you’re lucky, the meat will be so tender it will slide off the bone and you can pull the bone out easily, and then use tongs to move the chunks of meat into a bowl. If you’re like me, the meat will hang onto the bone for dear life and you’ll have to figure out how the hell to lift an 8.5 pound roast out of a vat of boiling water and fat.

I ended up using a measuring cup to scoop off some of the liquid, cut some of the bigger chunks off the bone, and then move the whole thing into another bowl where I could hack at it for a little while.

Step 6: After liberating the bone and meat, get rid of all the inedible bits like the skin, bone, and fat. Discard them along with the onions and garlic, who valiantly gave up their lives for your pork. Pour off most of the water/fat broth, leaving about half an inch in the bottom of the crock pot.

Step 7: Return the meat to the crock pot and shred it using two forks. By the time you’re done, it should suck up the remaining broth and be deliciously juicy.

Step 8: Dump the bottle of BBQ sauce in there. Mix it up.

Tada! You now have pulled pork! Eat on a sandwich, or just straight up.

New Construction Townhome

OMG HURRICANE

Kelly

There’s a lot of spazzing about hurricane Irene in the mid-atlantic and New England. And while a hurricane is something to take seriously, they’re also highly unpredictable. Yes, you should prepare yourself, and yes the worst week of my life was going without power for a week after a hurricane, but where I am (just outside of Washington, DC) it’s not even raining yet. So chill out. No, you do not need to cancel your entire weekend plans yet.

Here’s what you should do:

  • Locate a working flashlight and some fresh batteries. Put them somewhere you can find them in the dark.
  • Grab a few extra boxes of crackers/jerkey/other foods that don’t require refridgeration. If the power goes out for a few hours, you’ll want to leave your fridge and freezer closed to keep the cold in.
  • If it looks like things are getting serious, turn your fridge/freezer down to pre-chill things in case of power outage.
  • Charge your phone, laptop, and anything else that can be charged
  • Do your laundry
  • Locate some pots/pans/buckets you can use if you spring a leak
  • Locate some old towels you can use to clean up said leaks
  • If your basement tends to flood, move the stuff you care about away from the walls if it starts raning. Prop up your couch with things you don’t care about. I hear webOS devices are cheap now.
  • If you require beer, get it now.
  • Find a battery operated radio (hint: many iPods fit this bill) and figure out what station weather reports come in on.

Also remember that land-lines generally continue to work without power, but the cordless phones won’t. Go to the thrift store and get an old school phone if you don’t have one. If the hurricane is a no-show, you can use the parts for hacking later.

Other emergency-preparedness tasks, such as the following, can generally wait until later. Say, when there is actually a hurricane within 12-24 hours of you:

  • Fill the bathtub with water (to flush the toilet, wash your hands, etc)
  • Cancelling any and all plans that don’t involve getting the hell away from a hurricane
  • Buying up a month’s worth of toilet paper (why do people do this?)
  • Compulsively refreshing The Weather Channel home page

Personally, I prefer NOAA to The Weather Channel. It’s a lot less sensationalist, but considerably lower-fi. Their graphics are bringing you the latest in 1999 technology.

Keep your heads on, folks.

Wedding

Kellbot’s Guide to Wedding Planning

Kelly

There’s a point in everyone’s life where all of a sudden, everyone you know is getting married. It happens at different ages depending on who you hang out with, but for me it was this year. Not only did I get married, but nearly every weekend since March someone I know has gotten married. I’m told that this marriage flood lasts a few years until it gives way to a flood of babies.

 

Having survived the wedding process, I have some tips to pass along to my recently engaged friends:

Avoid [most] wedding websites at all costs

I’m not even going to mention them by name, because you might be tempted to visit them. Wedding websites are these monstrosities of consumerism created by the wedding industry. They exist soely to get you to buy more stuff for your wedding. Also, the people on them tend to be just awful.

“But wait!” you say, “I need them for a checklist. How else will I know when to mail my save the dates? How will I make sure I’ve done everything I need to?”

Bridal magazines. Every bridal magazine I have ever seen contains a checklist/schedule with guidelines for when to do the big stuff (mailing invitations, dress fittings). Buy one, or better yet take one from a recently married friend. I saw a look of genuine joy on my father-in-law’s face when he handed over the stack of bridal magazines they’d accumulated during his daughter’s engagement.

There is one notable exception, I really like offbeat bride. It’s basically a wedding porn site, full of fun photos of weddings that range from unusual to downright silly.

The only thing you have to do is get married.

The wedding industry has amassed an amazing list of things you’re supposed to do at or before a wedding/reception. Engagement photos, bridal showers, special bridesmaid’s dresses,veils, bouquets, receiving lines, first dances, drunken toasts, the list goes on. It turns out, all of these things are entirely optional. Skip any of the parts you aren’t into, though you should keep in any of your family’s wacky traditions in the interest of keeping the peace.

Guest lists are hard. When in doubt, invite.

At first I wanted our wedding to be on the smaller side, because I tend to have anxiety in big groups, but by the time we added our close friends to our Irish Catholic families we were already a medium-sized wedding.  There were a handful of friends  who weren’t quite “close” friends, but still people we talk to regularly, who we ended up not inviting largely because I was still holding onto this idea that we were having a “small” wedding. This was despite the guest list being twice as long as originally planned. In retrospect, an extra table of friends wouldn’t have been any more stressful, and I wish I’d invited them.

Also, making a wedding guest list is stressful no matter what. Even if your wedding is huge, at some point you have to draw lines across your group of friends and it sucks.

Spend your wedding budget on the things you actually care about

For most couples, the wedding itself is pretty inexpensive. The reception on the other hand can get expensive fast, even if you’re doing things DIY. You can absolutely get away with spending less on the stuff you don’t care about to free up cash for the things you do.

We addressed the invitations ourselves, despite warnings from wedding websites that this would be a horrible process (it wasn’t), I bought my dress online for $100, and I wore a felt flower in my hair instead of a veil.

Not dropping thousands of dollars on a dress I don’t care about freed up cash for an awesome venue, and the money we saved on the calligrapher went straight into an all-you-can-eat ice cream bar. Because if there’s one thing a wedding needs, it’s ice cream.

I’m sure it’s fine.

I did a lot of stressing about little details. Whether the caterer would get everyone’s meal order right. What if it rains. What if it snows. What if I trip and fall during the ceremony. About a week before the wedding I was crying to my friend about how the seams of my dress wouldn’t lay flat and it was too late to fix. All of these things turned out fine.

Things did go wrong: I forgot how to do the sign of the cross (despite coming from a Catholic family I was raised Episcopalian), and thus just flailed my hands in front of me during the ceremony. Chris and I forgot to kiss at the end. One of our groomsmen was missing entirely (due to illness), leaving one lucky guy to lead two ladies down the aisle. None of these things bothered our friends/family, because they were there to celebrate with us, not critique us.

During the reception, one thing did go very wrong: the projector for Rock Band broke. There was a loud pop, and then the distinct smell of burning plastic, and that was that. And just as my Bridal Panic set in, some of our friends hopped in their car, drove to Staples, and picked up a new projector. Everything worked out fine.

So try to enjoy the wedding planning process; it’s actually pretty fun if you can manage not to freak out (I couldn’t). At the end of the day, you’re celebrating your marriage with people who care about you, and you’ll probably have a good time no matter what.

Wedding

Kellbot’s Guide to Wedding Planning

Kelly

There’s a point in everyone’s life where all of a sudden, everyone you know is getting married. It happens at different ages depending on who you hang out with, but for me it was this year. Not only did I get married, but nearly every weekend since March someone I know has gotten married. I’m told that this marriage flood lasts a few years until it gives way to a flood of babies.

Having survived the wedding process, I have some tips to pass along to my recently engaged friends:

Avoid [most] wedding websites at all costs

I’m not even going to mention them by name, because you might be tempted to visit them. Wedding websites are these monstrosities of consumerism created by the wedding industry. They exist soely to get you to buy more stuff for your wedding. Also, the people on them tend to be just awful.

“But wait!” you say, “I need them for a checklist. How else will I know when to mail my save the dates? How will I make sure I’ve done everything I need to?”

Bridal magazines. Every bridal magazine I have ever seen contains a checklist/schedule with guidelines for when to do the big stuff (mailing invitations, dress fittings). Buy one, or better yet take one from a recently married friend. I saw a look of genuine joy on my father-in-law’s face when he handed over the stack of bridal magazines they’d accumulated during his daughter’s engagement.

There is one notable exception, I really like offbeat bride. It’s basically a wedding porn site, full of fun photos of weddings that range from unusual to downright silly.

The only thing you have to do is get married.

The wedding industry has amassed an amazing list of things you’re supposed to do at or before a wedding/reception. Engagement photos, bridal showers, special bridesmaid’s dresses,veils, bouquets, receiving lines, first dances, drunken toasts, the list goes on. It turns out, all of these things are entirely optional. Skip any of the parts you aren’t into, though you should keep in any of your family’s wacky traditions in the interest of keeping the peace.

Guest lists are hard. When in doubt, invite.

At first I wanted our wedding to be on the smaller side, because I tend to have anxiety in big groups, but by the time we added our close friends to our Irish Catholic families we were already a medium-sized wedding. There were a handful of friends who weren’t quite “close” friends, but still people we talk to regularly, who we ended up not inviting largely because I was still holding onto this idea that we were having a “small” wedding. This was despite the guest list being twice as long as originally planned. In retrospect, an extra table of friends wouldn’t have been any more stressful, and I wish I’d invited them.

Also, making a wedding guest list is stressful no matter what. Even if your wedding is huge, at some point you have to draw lines across your group of friends and it sucks.

Spend your wedding budget on the things you actually care about

For most couples, the wedding itself is pretty inexpensive. The reception on the other hand can get expensive fast, even if you’re doing things DIY. You can absolutely get away with spending less on the stuff you don’t care about to free up cash for the things you do.

We addressed the invitations ourselves, despite warnings from wedding websites that this would be a horrible process (it wasn’t), I bought my dress online for $100, and I wore a felt flower in my hair instead of a veil.

Not dropping thousands of dollars on a dress I don’t care about freed up cash for an awesome venue, and the money we saved on the calligrapher went straight into an all-you-can-eat ice cream bar. Because if there’s one thing a wedding needs, it’s ice cream.

I’m sure it’s fine.

I did a lot of stressing about little details. Whether the caterer would get everyone’s meal order right. What if it rains. What if it snows. What if I trip and fall during the ceremony. About a week before the wedding I was crying to my friend about how the seams of my dress wouldn’t lay flat and it was too late to fix. All of these things turned out fine.

Things did go wrong: I forgot how to do the sign of the cross (despite coming from a Catholic family I was raised Episcopalian), and thus just flailed my hands in front of me during the ceremony. Chris and I forgot to kiss at the end. One of our groomsmen was missing entirely (due to illness), leaving one lucky guy to lead two ladies down the aisle. None of these things bothered our friends/family, because they were there to celebrate with us, not critique us.

During the reception, one thing did go very wrong: the projector for Rock Band broke. There was a loud pop, and then the distinct smell of burning plastic, and that was that. And just as my Bridal Panic set in, some of our friends hopped in their car, drove to Staples, and picked up a new projector. Everything worked out fine.

So try to enjoy the wedding planning process; it’s actually pretty fun if you can manage not to freak out (I couldn’t). At the end of the day, you’re celebrating your marriage with people who care about you, and you’ll probably have a good time no matter what.

Gaming

Writing Reviews Isn't All Fun and Games

Kelly

Actually, it is all games, but it’s not all fun. I’ve been playing and reviewing games for Sparkle Gamer for about a week and a half now. There are 5 full reviews up now, and I’ve even been lucky enough to have a publisher send me some promo copies of new games. If there’s one thing I’ve gained working on this project it’s a new respect for professional reviewers.

Being a professional video game reviewer sounds like a pretty great job, you get paid to play games and write about them. And I still think it’s a great job. But for every review copy you get of a game like Child of Eden, you get a Bratz: Forever Diamondz. I’m playing through Rabbids Travel in Time now, which is pretty good, but after the Petz Fantasy 3D review I needed a palate cleanser. If you play too many similar games they all start running together. If you play too many bad games, you start to feel your standards slipping. And suddenly you understand why so many horrible, horrible games have so many positive reviews on Amazon: because it can get so much worse.

I’ve been playing a lot more Starcraft II since I started order levitra Sparkle Gamer, as well as Box Life on the DS. Because all of the titles I’ve reviewed so far have been DS games, I’ve been able to play them while commuting to/from the office. I judge a title by how much slower or faster it makes my commute go.

You’re supposed to play each game all the way through, which I do when I can tolerate it. The worst thing about most of the girl game titles is that they’re incredibly repetitive; most of them have nothing new to offer after the first hour or so of playing. And I do mean nothing: many of them don’t even bother ratcheting up the difficulty level of the minigames.

So I have a new respect for people who do this for a living.  Sure, it beats a lot of other things, but it’s still hard work.

Hacking

Livescribe Gives Developers Huge F-You

Kelly

I got an email today from Livescribe announcing the closing of their developer program:

As of July 29th, Livescribe will close its third-party developer program.

With cloud technology and mobile information access becoming increasingly important to our customers, Livescribe is realigning its focus and resources on cloud access, storage and services. Our recent introduction of Livescribe Connect, which enables customers to easily send notes and audio, as a pencast PDF, to people or destinations of their choice like Google Docs, Evernote, email, and Facebook, is an important step in this direction.

Applications in our online store will remain available for download and purchase pending compatibility with future Livescribe software updates.

We will continue to accept applications submitted for publishing in our online store, as well as pattern credit requests through July 22nd. At this time, the SDKs and developer website will no longer be available.

Effective immediately, their forums are read-only and will be taken offline completely in a little over a week. They’re removing the ability for developers to create custom applications and taking away the SDK. Particularly disappointing is the loss of the custom paper penlets, which allow developers to create and print their own custom printed paper and forms.

It’s upsetting to see a technology company close its doors to creative developers. It’s insulting to see them to do so overnight, not only shuttering the program but silencing the forums immediately. It’s clear the company doesn’t value its developer community at all, and that’s a damned shame.

As a consumer and developer, I feel duped. Part of why I purchased the Livescribe was specifically because of the ability to extend it. Developer communities bring niche functionality to products – they add features that are too esoteric for the company to bother with. Killing off your developer community sends a clear message that your product is for mainstream users and mainstream users only: everyone else can go home.

So, well done Livescribe. In the span of just a few hours you’ve turned me from one of the biggest evangelizers of Livescribe to someone who wishes  she still had the receipt and packaging for her Echo so she could return it.

Gaming

Sparkle Gamer: Reviewing Games for Girls

Kelly

I need another project like I need a hole in the head, but this one was just too ridiculous to pass up.

I’ve started a review site for games for girls. Specifically I mean games marketed towards girls.

It’s a little tough to explain why I’m doing this. It kills me a little that there even are “games for girls,” because I believe a good game is for everybody. You can get the full spiel at “Why Review Games for Girls”, but it came up in a conversation with Chris the other day that most of the games marketed to young girls aren’t reviewed by the major review sites, if anyone at all.

Parents who buy these games, most of which are junk, don’t really have anything to go on but the Amazon reviews. Unfortunately the Amazon reviews skew heavily towards “my daughter liked this because she loves [insert character here].” So for the discerning parent who’s concerned about the quality and content of the games their daughter plays, there aren’t a lot of resources.

Personally I’d love it if parents would drop the pink-is-for-girls thing and just buy games that were good, regardless of gender marketing. But some girls get the princess bug despite the protests of their parents.
I hope to arm parents with information so they can buy high quality games for their kids, navigating the murky world of games for girls and highlighting some gender neutral games which might appeal to even the biggest Disney princess fan.

Check out Sparkle Gamer, and if you’d like to review some games, let me know!

Business

My New Office

data

It’s finally nice weather out, so I decided to make use of my cell phone’s wifi tethering feature and take my office outside. Being a member of a coworking space is great, but sometimes you just want to get away from everyone and hammer out some code.

I recently picked up a Eagles Nest Outfitters DoubleNest Hammock for camping, and this seemed like a good time to test it out and practice hanging it.

The hardest part was finding two trees close enough together and an appropriate diameter for my straps. The trees in nearby Liberty State Park are all pretty far apart, and tend to be either too small or absolutely huge. But at last, I found two trees about 10′ apart and each about 8 inches in diameter. As a bonus, my spot has a nice view of both Ellis Island and the Statue of LIberty.

I did make one critical error: I forgot to bring snacks and now I’m starving. So soon I’ll have to abandon my hammock to go search for food, but until then it’s a pretty great place to write code.

Business, Hacking

Where are the women in tech?

Kelly

Where are the women in tech? Oh, apparently we’re all out shoe shopping.

Google sent out invites to Gilt Groupe*’s early bird sale of Chromebook laptops. I found it difficult to get excited about a $500 laptop boasting nearly the same specs as a netbook I bought for the same price 2 years ago, but I’m also not the target market for a “fashion laptop.”

What is curious though is Gilt Groupe’s decision on how to categorize the laptop, which I only noticed when copy/pasting the URL to a friend:
http://www.gilt.com/sale/men/google-chromebook

Oh, right, it’s a men’s item. Never mind the fact that they have a perfectly serviceable Home category, for items which are presumably neither worn nor gendered.

This is, on the scale of sexist things I’ve witnessed, pretty trivial. Minor. Unimportant. But come on people. Is this really where we are still? Girls like shoes and boys like computers?

Come on folks, we can do better than this.

* Don’t even get me started on the superfluous E