Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Gre7g Luterman's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
11:46 pm	Two Random Things 1. A sign of the recession: I went to McDonalds today. In previous years, you always knew what you would find behind the counter during a summer lunch at McDonalds. You would see one guy in his 30s who had a bunch of keys on his belt, and the other dozen people flipping burgers would be between the ages of 16 and 21. Not today. Today, everyone I saw was in their 30s, 40s, or 60s. There was not a pimple to be seen, but multiple varicose veins. It was a sobering sight. 2. A surprising exception to rule #34... Where is the "smiling Bob" porn? Don't bother asking why I'm looking for it, I'm not. It's just something that surprised me to not exist. Doesn't it seem an obvious thing to make porn of? Current Mood: tired (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
12:01 am	Video Game Idea Here's a free idea for any video game developers out there: What's the ideal gaming demographic? Young guys! What do young guys like to do? Destroy stuff! So let's distill it down. Title: Destroy Everything! (yes, I think the exclamation point needs to be there) Summary: The game would work a bit like Katamari Damacy, except that instead of rolling up small things into a ball, you'd break small stuff. Break the right small things to gain access to tools. Use the tools to break bigger things. Break the right bigger things to access better destroying tools, etc. The ultimate goal would be to liberate a doomsday machine from a mad scientist and destroy the world. I foresee a lot of minigames throughout to keep it fun. Have at it, folks! Current Mood: sleepy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
10:52 am	Brewing Success! Last night Ky popped the top on beer batch #5 and declared it good. So good that she actually said she liked it more than Guinness, and that's some pretty high praise considering how much she likes Guinness. This batch is definitely going to need a name. Not sure what it will get. Ky played with "Steggo Stout" for a moment but then went on to more WoW-themed names. I think it should be named after some rogue ability, like perhaps "Fan of Grains". Dunno'. If anyone's curious, here's the ingredient list for the yet-unnamed stout. I won't bother with the step-by-step except to say "partial mash" and "extra-long ferment"... 1 lbs 2-row American grown 1 lbs 6-row American grown 1 lbs flaked oats 1 lbs flaked barley 1 lbs English roasted 1 lbs black patent 1 lbs 70-80 crystal 1 lbs English chocolate 3 lbs dark liquid malt extract 6 lbs Cooper lite liquid malt extract 3 oz of Centennial hops (9.6% alpha acid) -- triple hopped 1 tsp of Irish moss 2 packets of gold yeast about a cup of honey enough filtered water to make 5 gallons of beer I added the honey as an after-thought. We didn't have enough empty bottles to bottle this batch right away, so the beer had to sit in the carboy for an extra couple of weeks. I was worried that the yeast might run out of food and die, so I sterilized some honey and added that in to keep the little guys happy. Dang, that's a long ingredient list! Sure explains why the beer is so dark. Hell, even the head on this beer is a dark caramel brown. Anyhow, this batch was definitely a winner and will need to be repeated. I think the next batch may be a double-chocolate, but we'll have to come back to this one soon. I drank a little of it. I didn't even go rushing for something to wash the taste out of my mouth. In other news, I just finished smoking a pork shoulder. My smoker just doesn't get hot enough so I took the meat out after three days. Don't know if it's cooked all the way through yet, but I can't keep it out there any longer. I'll have to top it off in the microwave at this point if it's not ready yet. I think I'll start brewing some cream soda today and take the dogs to the lake. Should be a good day. Current Mood: content (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
11:02 pm	Church Ethics Survey sez: those who attend church more are more likely think that torturing a terrorism suspect is A-OK! Dunno' why, but that amuses me. I'm sure Jesus would totally understand. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
9:03 am	Sourdough Success! I've heard people say that you can't make sourdough outside of San Francisco, but that doesn't appear to be true. However, I do suspect it was a lot harder for me to pull off, here in the desert, than it would have been if I were living on the coast. You can even see the banding in the bread fibers from where it split. I'm tickled pink. It's taken me six months of experimentation to pull it off, so I guess I'll post the recipe. But be forewarned that this was not simple. To make the starter, I followed the instructions listed at The Fresh Loaf and they worked just fine. To keep it alive, I repeated the final step every few days. Although, even when I waited as long as a week, it seemed to do just fine. Starter appears to be more hardy than people had led me to believe. In a very clean GLASS bowl: Starter 1 1/2 cups buttermilk -- otherwise the resulting loaf was heartburn fodder Bread flour -- enough to form a biscuit dough consistency Covered with plastic wrap, and let the dough rise on the counter top, for two days. Yes, two days. Don't bother trying to get the plastic wrap tight. The wild yeasts will off-gas and that will need to escape. And yes, it needs to be a glass bowl. Scratches in plastic will hide bacteria which can grow during rising. Metal bowls are bad because the sourdough starter is extremely acidic, so you could get a lot of etching over that two days. In a stand mixer: Dough 2 tsp salt 2 Tbs sugar 2 Tbs oil Bread flour -- added slowly, enough that the dough is no longer sticky to touch Sprinkle the bottom of a cast iron pot with cornmeal. Form the dough into a ball, and set on top of the corn meal. Sprinkle more cornmeal on top of the dough. Lid the pot and let sit on the counter for another 12 hours. Yes, 12 more hours. Put in a cold oven and set to 350F. Bake for one hour. Yes, an hour. Remove the loaf (carefully!) from the pot and let cool on a rack before cutting. Do not let it sit in the pot or it will continue to cook. Also, this seems to be a little hard on the cast iron. You will need to oil it again afterwards. Current Mood: chipper (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 8th, 2009
4:45 pm	Look what's cooking! I can't explain the appeal, but I like trying to cook things that most people don't. ( Many, many photos ) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
12:39 pm	Red Beans & Rice I've been making red beans & rice lately, and DAMN IT'S GOOD! I started out with a great (but difficult) recipe from Alton Brown and then realized that almost everything in the recipe can be simplified down without changing the results. So, here's the easiest version of RB&R ever: 1/2 lbs of dry red beans 1/2 onion chopped 1/2 green pepper chopped 2 celery stalks chopped 1 qt. water 2 tsp Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning 6 oz stewing pork cubes 1/2 bottle Italian dressing Put the pork in a ziplock bag with enough dressing to completely submerge the meat. This should take about half a bottle. Press out the air and seal the bag. Store the bag in your refrigerator and allow the meat to pickle for 3 days. Then drain off and discard the excess dressing and combine the meat with the other ingredients in a crock pot. Let it cook all day. Half an hour before serving, I put rice in the rice maker and use a potato masher to mush the RB&R all up a bit. Don't turn it into a paste, but you want to break open most of the beans and turn the cubes of pork into shreds (they'll be ready to fall apart after cooking all day). While the rice is cooking, the starch from the broken beans will thicken the RB&R. Serve the red beans over the rice. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
10:04 am	Zombies Apparently there is some controversy brewing about the new Resident Evil game coming out. I find it really silly. RE is a long-running series that dumps you in a situation where the locals are becoming zombies and you have to shoot your way out. There are always really contrived layouts and happenings that keep you from just walking away. It's great & freaky fun. In a previous RE, you got dumped in some South American town and the Spanish-speaking natives made quite scary zombies. It's been my absolute favorite FPS video game to date. The next RE takes place in another poverty-stricken village, but this one is in Africa. The setting is similar (I'm sure there's more to the story, there always is), except that now the locals are black. OMG! ALARM! ALARM! You just made a video game about shooting black people! The video game playing public has scratched their collective heads and not had a clue about what is upsetting people. It's the same sort of game as always, but with slightly different models. Zombies are zombies and it's not like an oppressive past turned them into zombies. Try as you might, you can't send a black zombie to college any more than you could a white zombie. It's just not going to happen. Anyhow, I'm not going to get into that because it's all fairly silly and with luck it will blow over without stifling that which will almost certainly be an awesome game. The reason I'm making this post is that one of the commentaries about the controversy raised an interesting point in hit attempt to spark outrage. He said (I'm paraphrasing here), What if you set the game in 1940's Europe and made the zombies white, ethnic guys who are clearly starving to death? His point was interesting, but despite being descended from those people and feeling very strongly about any media that marginalizes the Nazi atrocities, I couldn't help but think, DAMN! THAT WOULD BE AN AWESOME VIDEO GAME! I realize that it would never be made because it's way too sensitive a subject, but try to imagine it if you could! The death camps were really scary, scary places and designed to trap people inside. What could possibly make it any more scary than if the war-crime experiments released a zombifying disease into the camp? Holy-freaking-crap! That would be the ultimate in horror gaming. I can feel my nerves rattling now, just thinking about it and I haven't even seen a trailer! Current Mood: spooked (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
3:40 pm	Cornbread recipe ryumaxwell asked about my cornbread recipe and I finally found it. Couldn't be much simpler: 1 cup cornmeal 1 cup all-purpose flour 4 Tbs. sugar 4 tsp. baking powder 1/2 tsp. salt 1 egg 1/4 cup melted butter 1 can of creamed corn Preheat oven to 425F. Mix ingredients together just enough to get rid of the major lumps. Do not over-mix. Spray cast-iron pot or one of those multi-mini-loaf pans with no-stick and pour it in. Bake until a clean toothpick (about 23 minutes). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
6:39 pm	Sausage Fest #3 Sausage fest #3 was a great success and now my refrigerator is packed full of meat. I won't go into details since anyone who reads this blog probably reads Ky's as well; and she has the photos and witty comments. Instead, I'm making this post to document the recipe. That way, anyone who is interested can duplicate the process and results... Andouille Sausage: 25 lbs of pork shoulder (4 pork shoulders totalling about 32 lbs before you remove the bones) 16.5 oz of green onions (3 bags) 2 cups lemon juice 1 oz Prague powder (try to be precise) 2 oz binding powder (dry milk powder should work too) 8 oz (2 small bottles) liquid smoke 1 1/2 cup crushed garlic 1 cup Tony Checherie's Creole Seasoning 50' natural hog casings (1" diameter) 1. Rinse and soak casings as per instructions on the packaging. 2. Cut meat from bone, shop into 2" cubes, and grind coarse. 3. Rinse onions and cut off roots, chop into 4" segments and blend in food processor with lemon juice. 4. Combine everything but the casings in a large tub and mix by hand until homogenous. 5. Stuff casings with meat. 6. Allow sausages to dry in refrigerator until they are dry to the touch, then they can be vacuum packed and frozen. Now that you have sausage... Any-Idiot-Could-Make-It-Gumbo 1 small chicken breast 1/3 onion, diced large 1 stalk celery, diced large 1/2 green pepper, diced large 1 andouille sausage 1/2 lbs chopped okra 1 tsp. crushed garlic 2 tsp. Tony Checherie's Creole Seasoning 1/4 cup Tony Checherie's Instant Roux Mix 3 1/2 - 4 cup water a dash of liquid smoke (optional) a handful of leftover rice (optional) 1/2 lbs large, peeled shrimp Vegetable and spice amounts are all rough guidelines. You could easily adjust any of them down by 50% or up by 100% if you like more or less. Combine all ingredients but shrimp in a crock pot and let cook for four hours. The coolest thing about this recipe is that there is no need to thaw the chicken, okra, sausage, or shrimp. You can just toss them in frozen and let them thaw in the crock pot! About fifteen minutes or half an hour before you're ready to eat, remove the chicken & sausage, chop into bite-sized bits and return them to the gumbo. Add the shrimp now. Alternatively, you can leave out the okra and sprinkle the gumbo before serving with gumbo filé. Filé has a nice tea-like flavor and is an excellent thickener. If you thicken it with filé, I recommend breading and frying a small quantity of okra. You can sprinkle this on top. It makes a lovely and tasty addition. Best served hot, over rice. Also... gumbo is really good with cornbread. Does anyone want the recipe? Current Mood: tired (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
10:25 am	Filtering Kiddie Porn is Bad! How about that for a title to get your attention? A lot of countries are trying that right now by mandating ISPs to implement content filtering, and it's a really bad idea. You might think I'm crazy for saying it, but I really do mean it. Why? Well, let's try a simple analogy: Pretend that pedophiles are mice and kiddie porn is food. Now suppose that you know your house has mice, and you want them gone, but there's no practical way to get rid of everything in the house that's edible. Should you try to seal up the cracks that the mice squeeze through to get to the food? Absolutely not! That would just make it all the harder to find the mice. What you really want to do is put a mouse trap in front of that crack so that when the mouse DOES squeeze through it to get to the food, you can catch him. Hell, I even bait my mousetraps to increase the chance of their success. My point is that making kiddie porn harder to find will not make pedophiles go away. Seriously, who is going to say, "I'm going to move to country XYZ because it's too hard to find kiddie porn here!" or "I'm going to stop being sexually attracted to children because I can't find naked photos of kids on the internet."? No, if you want to get rid of the pedophiles, then you need to catch them. Make the kiddie porn easy to find and easy to track. And while I'm up on my soapbox, let me take a moment to say our kiddie porn laws are about as broken as broken can be. Before I go further and anyone thinks of calling me a pervert, let me categorically state that I am not. I hate kids. All kids. Yes, even your kids. I hate kids with their clothes on and I certainly don't want to see them with their clothes off. Oh, I may be considered a weirdo, for one reason or another, but it certainly isn't because of my affinity for children, because I have none of that. So what is wrong with our kiddie porn laws? Now that's a long list. The lawmakers have had noble enough goals when they tried to make these laws, but boy how they have failed in the implementation. The goal should be to protect children from being exploited by adults, but consider the following scenarios, each of which involve a felony: * Teenagers playing with their cellphones who take naked pictures of themselves and send them to their boyfriends/girlfriends. Did anyone really get exploited here? * An anime comic book where a character who appears to be under 18 has sex. Exactly who got exploited here? Some pencil marks on a piece of paper? * You're surfing around on the internet and you click on a link that takes you to an illicit photo. You didn't intend to break the law, but you just did! * You buy a Girls Gone Wild sort of video and it turns out one of the 18 year olds lied about her age and she's really 17. Congratulations, you pedophile! * Two teenagers have sex and one or both of them is 17. They really shouldn't have done that, but do they deserve to be labelled sex offenders for life because of it? In our mad dash to wipe out 40 year olds who stick their penises in 6 year olds, we have created a witchhunt that is ensnaring a lot of people who haven't really hurt anyone. Sure, the teenagers shouldn't be getting themselves into these situations, but I remember being a teen, I would have gladly bent a rule or two if I knew no one was really getting hurt. Wouldn't you have? Our laws really need to take a two things and only two things into consideration: 1. How badly did this event hurt someone? 2. How intentionally did the defendent act to break a law? I'll be the first to admit that these are some really nebulous critereon and would pose no end of difficulty to legislate, but regardless of the difficulty, this should be our goal. This is what we should TRY to take into consideration when we make our laws. Felonies are our worst crimes, and as such, it should take some degree of intention to run afoul of them. I might get a little careless and give my car too much gas. I might break the speed limit accidentally, but that's not a felony. If my surfing is breaking a felony, there should be some record of me putting in a credit card number or such to indicate that I'm wanting these illicit images. You should not be able to commit a felony by accident. If you're going to face a lifetime of punishment (sex offender status will follow you to the grave), then our courts should be required to show that we either intended to commit a crime or that we have made an extremely bad decision. And in the latter case (since teenagers make bad decisions on a nearly daily basis, at least I did), the courts damned well better be able to show that this bad decision actually caused some real and lasting harm. Current Mood: annoyed (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 29th, 2008
11:36 am	40% 40% of Americans feel that Israel is unjustified in its attacks on Hamas. That amazes me. Let's pretend for a moment that Islamic militants in Mexico started firing rockets over the border into Texas... dozens of them every day. Oh sure, the rockets aren't very accurrate, so the militants would only manage to kill a couple of people a day. Big deal! Sure, the US would make a big stink about it and Mexico would promise to crack down on the militants, but let's suppose that months and months went by and the bombings continued. Then years of rockets... What do you think Americans would say then when polled? Would we just put up with it? I don't think so. If the rockets had a 10 mile range, then I think Americans would demand a 20 mile "death zone" beyond our border in which no creature was left alive. Why should it be any different for Israel? Current Mood: puzzled (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 27th, 2008
11:47 am	Shhhhh! I'm not condoning his actions, but I understand... Trying to watch the movie (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
7:44 pm	Beer in Progress Despite some *ahem* concern that I would slop up the kitchen, I started the next batch of beer. It's the same recipe as last time, except that I got a different kind of yeast and I built myself a brewery thingy out of a heating pad and a thermostat. It's going really well! Last time I was all nervous about what I had to do next and this time I knew and it all came together perfectly. I say that because last time the beer brewed with one "glug" every minute or two. (A glug indicates that CO2 is being released.) This time the vat is glugging every second or two. That's a hell of an improvement! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, December 1st, 2008
10:14 am	Wish I Was a PhD Student I woke up early with the coolest idea in my brain. It would make a damn awesome thesis, but I just can't see ever going back to school. So if you know someone who wants a PhD and can't think of a thesis topic, send them to me. I won't get into a lot of details, but I'll paint it here in very broad strokes. Suppose Alice and Bob want to play poker with each other over the internet. In the typical application, Alice and Bob would contact a game server, the server would shuffle a virtual deck, deal virtual cards to Alice & Bob, etc. This arrangement works even with open source software because the secret data (i.e. the players' hands) is hidden information known only to a (presumably) unbiased third party (the server). Presuming that there are no flaws in the server software, the only way for one player to cheat would be with help from the server operator. With current technology, Alice and Bob could play directly (i.e. without a server), but the software would need to be closed source. If it were open source, then Alice wouldn't know if Bob had modified the code so that he could see Alice's cards. After all, that information would be present in both computers, it was kept secret from the users, but the data was still there. So, could this be done with open source technology? Could you arrange it so that Alice's hand is not duplicated in the memory of Bob's computer, so that there is no way for Bob to cheat? There actually is. Alice and Bob would choose secret numbers and use their numbers to encrypt data for each other. Alice could encrypt data for Bob so that Bob could determine what card he has drawn without Alice knowing. Then at the end of the game, Alice and Bob can reveal their encryption keys and verify that the cards played are the cards drawn. Neat, huh? Current Mood: happy (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 28th, 2008
9:35 am	Cooking Success Yesterday was the typical Thanksgiving thing for Ky & myself. I cooked turkey, gravy, dressing, mashed potatoes, and pie; and we kept to ourselves except to call my family and tell them we're thinking of them. As usual, the food was a great success. I tried three things different this year: * Brined the turkey before cooking it (delicious!) * Added sausage to the dressing (yum!) * Made a pumpkin pie instead of my traditional apple (oh my) I don't know why I was craving a pumpkin pie this year. I've never made one before but there were so many on TV in the days leading up to it that I just had to try. Baking the pie took forever, so I am very glad that I did it the day before. Besides, it was a major flop. It had lots of neat flavors, the crust cooked up perfectly, but it was a little too orangy (had too much orange zest in it) and it did not set. Ky and I both ate a tiny slice, but it was clear that neither of us was going to grab seconds, so what do you with a pieshell full of sweet goo? Well, on a whim, I scooped out the goo, added water, and heated it up on the stove. Then I added salt, flour, and yeast and made bread. I was really worried because my bread did not rise. I gave it the usual time and it just sat there. I had already preheated the oven at this point, and I figured, what-the-hell. It did rise in the oven and it was actually quite tasty! Ky asked what I would do if I ever craved pumpkin pie bread again. Would I have to make another failed pie first. Didn't really have an answer for that, so I guess we'll just have to enjoy this loaf. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 14th, 2008
10:01 am	Santa Claus Ky said I should write a children's book about "Santa Under the Bed" in the style of a monster-under-the-bed type story. Could be fun. Just need to think of a plot. How many words are in a kids book anyhow, 250? I could do that standing on my head. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 27th, 2008
2:26 pm	Ideas Ideas are like fish. Most of them stink. The really good ones swim upstream, like salmon. Those pencil-necks in marketing are like bears. They catch ideas in their teeth, rip the skin off, and leave the meat to rot. Current Mood: peculiar (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 25th, 2008
10:26 am	It's a (light) beer! One month of waiting has passed and the oatmeal stout has been tasted. Ky opened three bottles to test the batch out. One had a bad seal (Naughty seal! I beat you with a club!), was flat, and was disposed of. The other two had good carbonation. I don't drink beer, of course, so this was Ky's analysis: Good color, good smell, good head, nice flavor, nutty aftertaste, mild. In a nutshell, it was a good brew except that very little alcohol formed during the fermentation, giving us a light (alcohol, not color) beer. I suspect the problem was either temperature or crappy yeast. Since we did get carbonation, I'm leaning more towards it being too cold during fermentation than blaming the yeast entirely. I think next time I'm gonna slap a heat pad on the side of the brew bucket so we can dial in a temperature and keep it there. Anyone know an ideal temperature for brewer's yeast to do their happy dance? Current Mood: satisfied (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 24th, 2008
9:37 am	Aliens Do Exist I don't know if they abduct people, but there hasn't been any poop in the cat box in ages. The dogs said something about little green men, but they can't even see color. Current Mood: silly (1 Comment |Comment on this)