Orlando Vacation of 2011 - Entry 1

I had a discussion yesterday with Doug Brashear (NavigationArts) and Barney Kirby (Marriott) when detailing how there's missed opportunity in efficiently and unobtrusively leveraging the traveler's mobile devices. One of the ideas to see if there's any usage pattern based on guest type and travel purpose was to start logging our own travels. With that suggestion this is my finally making use of this dusty blog of mine. Starting tomorrow, the 10th of August, I'm officially on PTO and will be heading to Orlando, Florida. My cousin, Rosalie, and her two daughters will be meeting me there. They'll be flying in from France and landing slightly past midnight. I haven't seen them in a while and the oldest daughter, Poeme, is my god daughter. So anyway, I've been making all my reservations with my gmail account. For this trip I created a TripIt account and started to learn how to use it. As I've been making the reservations TripIt has automatically been getting imports from my gmail account. It also scans through your email for confirmations and reservations to automatically add as well. I should note that you have to allow the automatic importing feature. Now, this automatic importing isn't 100% accurate. My TripIt account pulled in Rosalie's flight information, which is fine, but it did not pull in my Residence Inn hotel reservation, my Blue Man group confirmation, nor my La Nouba confirmation. Interestingly enough when I forwarded my Residence Inn hotel reservation to plans@tripit.com my account consumed that information without error. Go figure. The Blue Man confirmation and La Nouba confirmation confused my TripIt account so I had to manually enter in that information. Now that's no biggie on the PC but a definite pain in the ass on a mobile device; I'm currently sporting an HTC Incredible. TripIt provides a mobile app so I've downloaded that but have also printed out all my confirmation emails. Having never used TripIt, my fall back is still hard copies. An interesting note is that while I'm taking my work laptop with me on this trip, I stowed it into my carry-on backpack around 8pm this evening. Unlike most people, I'm not wanting for a PC as I have 2 desktops and a Macbook that I used to check email as well as enter in the plan information into TripIt. I wonder what other users that may or may not have extra laptops or desktops do. Do they wait until the last minute to pack away their machine? A benefit of having a Droid is that it comes with Google Maps and navigation. Even though I'm packing a GPS navigation with me, I'm taking my car charger for my Incredible just in case I need to use it as back-up GPS navigation. One final disgusting note, I'm packing 2 iPods (1st gen Touch and my Nano watch) for the long drive back from Orlando to Atlanta, GA and then from Atlanta, GA to Clarksburg, MD. Until next time. - Thai

First Coconust Custard Pie!

So I made my first coconut custard pie ever. I used 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg and the pie seems to smell pretty strongly of it. Maybe next time I'll reduce the nutmeg if its taste is too strong in the pie.

From Coconut Custard Pie

From Coconut Custard Pie

Chasing the Crust

So I've been deliriously baking blueberry and cherry pies since Christmas 2008. I'm not sure what got me started but I cooked the dinners for this past Thanksgiving and Christmas so I guess I decided to try a pie out.

I think ever since then I've been churning out about a pie a week, alternating between blueberry and cherry. Going so far as to bring some in to co-workers so that I would have an excuse to keep making them. The original crust recipe that I used is an all butter crust from Simply Recipes. I'm not a cook or anything along those lines so I don't know why that exact recipe didn't work all that well for me. Some of the issues I ran into seemed to stem completely from the amount of water in the recipe.

The issues I had were:

• Needed to add an extra tablespoon or 2 of ice water to the dough
• When the pulsed mixture "stuck" together and appeared ready for kneading, it was pretty difficult to actually form the discs
• With the extra water, it seemed the bottom crust was not as flaky as I would have liked.

I've made a few minor modifications to the recipe now and it seems to have worked out pretty well. Here are the ingredients that I now use:

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling
• 8 Tbsp (1 stick) salted butter, very-cold, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 4 to 5 Tbsp ice water, very cold

My kneading technique starts out with creating a small ball and packing more dough mixture to it as I go. The mixture is really powdery and doesn't easily stay together. I periodically and often break the ball apart to reform it while mindful that I don't do this for too long or else the chilled butter will start to melt.

After I let the dough rest in the fridge for an hour and then sit outside for about 15 minutes I start to massage and roll the dough out into a roughly 12 to 13 inch circle. The dough breaks relatively easy still so I have to patch it here and there. For my pie I always have a large overhang of dough so I pack and fold the top and bottom crust together pretty tightly.

I bake the pie as directed for 20 minutes at 425 degrees on the lower rack of the oven and then at 350 degrees for 40-45 minutes

I'm still chasing that perfect crust so I'm still experimenting with it.

First One - Although with some frustrations

I tried out the two blog applications that Yahoo business includes with their website package. Both of them, suck. Actually, I should say that one of them sucks and the other's integration with Yahoo doesn't seem to be done well since I could never get into it. Yahoo allows you the option of using Movable Type or WordPress.

I was able to set up the Movable Type account through Yahoo. The admin interface for this blog application is pretty confusing. Moving around the settings and customization menu is a complicated process. Trying to set up categories and organize entries into categories took me a while to figure out and essentially is not very linear in a post's creation or editing workflow. Although it worked, it is very hard to use.

WordPress is the other option that Yahoo provides for you. Once I set this one up and tried to login I kept being told that I had an invalid username. I've deactivated and reactivated the WordPress blog each time and used various usernames and kept getting the same message. Even allowing it a few days before going back in to see if it required some extra time did not grant me access. WordPress just didn't seem to accept any of the set up information that Yahoo had taken during the blog creation.

So far this Blogger application was simple to set up, has easy labeling, and seems to be pretty user friendly. We'll see I guess as I try this out more.