yummy cheese

so it's birthday time for ed, and to celebrate ronda had some excellent yummy cheeses shipped in directly from france. the vacherin in particular is one of my favorite all time cheese and you can't really buy it in the stores here. so with the surpluss of cheeses and wine that we had at home we invited a couple friends over for an evening of great food and drink. (we were doubly excited when they brought over some really good italian and spanish deli meats.)

dorking with wood

so i spent the past couple weekends designing and building a spice rack. (the design was centered around functionality and ease of manafucture... ie, i don't have too many tools or space to work with.) here's some pictures of the semi finished product. (it doesn't have handles or stain yet. also, it's an inch too wide, but without a table saw there's no way to fix that yet.) in the new year i'll start working on a second one and finish this one up. (we clearly have too many spices.)

kegged the speckled speckled hen

well, today i finally got around to kegging my speckled speckled hen experiment. the final gravity is a bit lower than i wanted, but there's nothing i can do about that. (i was shooting for a little sweet, not dry.) of course i also didn't think there was nearly enough vanillia flavor so i added in an extra one and a half beans and some powered vanilla extract into the priming sugar mixture. it was really tasty before it went into the keg, i'll probably tap it in the new year and see how it's turned out.

happy to be home

i got back today from a quick trip to toronto, canada where i was giving presentations at a Sun Tech Days conference on SMF and MT programming on solaris. now i'm glad to be home, sleeping in my own bed, and not travelling for a little while. here are some pics.

back from warsaw

well, i just got back from 12 days in poland. it's hard to believe the last time i was there was back in '96, almost 10 years ago. i'll have to make sure i manage to get back there a little more often.

i had a great time and was staying at my grandmothers place. it was cold and lightly snowy most the time there. i flew out there on the wed before thanksgiving and i was working remotely from the sun microsystems offices in poland for the week after thanksgiving. my dad was out there with me at the same time and our social schedule was packed. most days consisted of waking up early, taking a tram to work around 8am, leaving the office around 5:30pm (when it was already pitch black outside), taking a tram home, and meeting up with family or friends to eat and drink into late hours of the night. by the end of this trip i was exhausted. but it was a great time and i really enjoyed staying in warsaw. (a city i've never really enjoyed hanging out in before.) here's some pictures from the trip.

it's been confirmed

i'm a yuppy. there's no way around it. the proof is that i somehow justified going to the french laundry for lunch. it was really good, but i still have to come to grips with the price tag. i'm not sure i ever will. you can see the photos here.

wedding in costa rica

Delia (one of the old members of the polish posse) just got married in costa rica. Me and ronda made it down there the great event. we had a great time there, unfortunatly we also had much too little time there. (ri was there for less than 72 hours and ronda was there for less than 48.) well, here are some pictures.