Full, I am...

Full, I am...  And that's after just one of the three courses we were planning to have tonight!  First up was the fried green tomatoes, something that (so far as I can remember) I've never had before.  They were great!  The flavor of the cooked green tomato was unlike anything else I can recall.  The dipping sauce was outstanding – based on an apple cider reduction and mayonnaise, with a little buttermilk, BBQ sauce, herbs and spices, and scallions.  It was a perfect pairing with the tomatoes.  We cooked up 21 tomato slices, enough for most of northern Utah – and ate them all.  Every last one.

Now I've no room for steak, nor does Debbie, so that's been put off for another meal.  Debbie made a delicious lemon cake (I sampled both the cake and the icing – oh, boy!), and I'm too full to even attempt that.  We'll wait a couple hours and see if we've developed enough room for dessert.

Some photos of the goodies in progress below.  The first three show the tomatoes frying, dredging, and ready to eat.  The last photo is that luscious cake...

Because one can't have too many projects!

Because one can't have too many projects!  A couple of weeks ago I bought one of these after reading about it on someone's web site.  Along with the (for me) geekly nostalgia of an electronic clock that has no integrated circuits, this kit offered me a couple of other things.  For starters, it would be an easy electronics project to ease back into something I haven't done for about 10 years.  It would also give me an excuse to make a nice wooden cabinet to hold the finished product.  So I bought that clock kit, and then I also had to buy a set of tools (soldering iron, pliers, nippers, etc.) because we left all my old tools in Jamul.

Today I started actually building it.  You can see the results of my efforts below:

Some observations from my experience today:

• Soldering is one of those skills that you keep even if you don't use it.  Within just a couple of solder joints, I had the technique down pat again.
• My ancient and decrepit vision makes this a lot harder.
• The tools have gotten way better.  The soldering iron I bought has electronic (digital) temperature control, and it works extremely well – far better than the crazy magnetic tips my old soldering iron did.  I can tell with a glance at the controller whether the iron is ready to use, which is surprisingly handy (surprising because I managed without something so obviously useful!).  The hand tools are also much higher quality, with perfect springs, balance, and smooth actions.  The diagonal cutters slice closer to the board than any I've ever had, and I've owned some expensive “dikes” in the past.  
• The components have gotten smaller.  No, really, they have!  The resistors in this kit are mainly 1/16th watt, which I don't remember ever seeing before.  They're tiny!  The diode packages are also smaller than I remember.  Even the terminal block (that tiny green thing in the lower left) is smaller.  One thing about the resistors and diodes really surprised me: the leads are quite flexible (because the wire is such a tiny gauge).  Bending them to position on the board is far easier than the components I worked with years ago.
• This kit is superbly constructed, with directions that even someone who didn't know any electronics at all could follow.

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  The dogs (Miki and Race) and I went for a walk this morning; first time in over a week.  It felt great to all of us!  It was a nice, crisp morning – about 35°F, fairly humid, but comfortable walking so long as I had my gloves on and didn't stop anywhere long enough for my feet to get cold :)  It looks very wintry outside now – there was frost on most of the plants, and most of the deciduous trees have lost their leaves now.  On the way home, a kit fox (photo at upper right is not mine, dang it!) crossed the road about 50' in front of us.  What a beautiful animal!  It was very perky, scampering about, no doubt searching for voles.  At one point it stopped and yipped at us.  Miki and Race never saw it, and didn't react to the yipping at all.  The photos below are mine:

In the last photo you can see the mountain (about 40 miles northwest of us) that lies to the west of the cabin we're buying in Newton.

I wrote earlier about the canning we did yesterday, and a reader emailed wanting a photo.  Here it is! Those are 12 oz. jars, jalapeno jelly on the left, green tomato pasta sauce on the right...

If you love dogs...

If you love dogs ... then just watch.  If you don't love dogs, please seek attention for your mental health issues...

Tree vector benchmark...

Tree vector benchmark...  I finally put all the pieces I've been building together (especially the red/black tree index) into a TreeVector class.  This class has the same interface as two other vector classes I built: one based on native Java arrays, the other on standard Java TreeMap.  Preliminary performance testing gives me the expected results: my TreeVector class outperforms the array-based class both in memory consumption and CPU consumption when the vector is relatively sparse and large.  For instance, with a vector of 2000 entries with 2% of them non-zero, the TreeVector instances use about 5% as much memory and are more than 10x faster (this varies by operation, with add multiple of another vector being particularly fast).  These advantages decline as the percentage of non-zero entries increases, of course.  When the non-zero entries approach 50%, the memory consumption advantage disappears.  The performance advantage is mostly gone when non-zero entries approach 80%.

The same building blocks I used for TreeVector (the red/black tree index and a key/value storage scheme for doubles) will also be used for two sparse matrix implementations.  One of them will have a tree vector for each row; the other for each row and each column.  These matrices will be convertible, one to the other, and each will have advantages in different stages of the Gaussian elimination process.  The memory and CPU consumption advantages of these building blocks should be even more dramatic when I'm using them in the matrices...  

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Debbie canned 6 pints of green tomato pasta sauce yesterday afternoon.  I have no idea what that stuff will taste like, but I can tell you that it certainly looks weird, and smells ... different.  Could be good, could be bad :)  If it turns out to be something we like, we've got plenty!

I finished off the last of Debbie's beef stew last night for my supper.  Today we're having ribeye steak (I picked up a couple of beautiful slabs of meat a few days ago).  Debbie's going to make fried green tomatoes to go with them; I'll make some rice.  I'm going to have to starve myself to get ready for that!

When it warms up this morning, probably around 10, I'm going to go for a walk with the dogs – the first one in over a week.  It's supposed to get up to 51°F today, with clear skies – it just might be my last pleasant walk before winter sets in.  I'm going to take advantage of the “heat wave” to get some outside things ready for winter.  That means turning off the hose bibs, putting away the hoses and sprinklers, dismounting the backhoe from the tractor, attaching the rear weight (and filling it with gravel), and attaching the snow plow.  If I have enough energy (and time), I may also move all the yard equipment (mower, sprayer, etc.) over to the outbuilding to free up space in our garage.  Not exactly an exciting or fun set of chores, but it will be good to have all that done before the serious cold sets in.

I have a bunch of stuff arriving next week, adding to my list of projects.  There's a set of “janitorial” cabinets coming, to add some space in the cattery for storing cleanup supplies.  These are IKEA-style, knocked-down kits – the kind where the instruction manual says 30 minutes for assembly, but it really takes 4 hours :)  There's a project!  Then I've got some tool chests coming.  Every horizontal surface in my shop is currently covered with tools, as I have zero storage for them now.  The tool chests will solve that problem, with (if I've calculated correctly) plenty of leftover space for tools I acquire in the future.  Finally, after Elray's welding lesson last week I decided to add a stick welder and a plasma cutter to my shop (both from Lincoln Electric).  They should be arriving late next week.  Once they're wired up (I'll have to pull a 220V outlet for them), I'll pick up some rods and some stock (or scrap if I can get some), and do some practice welding – especially on square tubing.  I think that's going to be my “go to” raw material for metal work; nearly everything I can think of that I'd like to have could be made out of that...