The internet sums everything up.

This is true but I wish it weren’t.

What to Do in Ocean City, Maryland

Two weeks ago a bunch of friends and I stayed the long weekend at a family condo on the beach in Ocean City. It was a great time and I hope to do it again soon!

You can see pictures here. For example:

Kite Flying on the Beach

I’ve been going to Ocean City every year since I was a very young one and so I have some “traditional” activities that I enjoy. We did some of them but it wasn’t as long a weekend as it could have been, so I didn’t get the opportunity to introduce the group to some of the others.

So first I’m going to list a few we did partake of:

Milkshakes at Dumser’s Dairyland. The best milkshakes I have ever tasted, and you can get them right down on the boardwalk. The to-go shakes are not very big and I think that’s part of the secret: keep you wanting more. The chocolate banana is highly recommended.

Flying Kites on the Beach. I am a huge fan of kite flying but there are very few places around that you can do it in Maryland! The beach is a safe space for kite flying. It’s always windy and open and there are plenty of other people around who will enjoy the view.

Renting Jetskis. This is the first time I went ahead and did this with my brother and a friend. It is quite exhilarating and freeing. The price is a little high (we paid $80) but if you go in with a friend you can ride together!

The Outlets I didn’t go to the outlets this year, but I will probably go later this summer. I usually get a new pair of shoes and whatever else I need all at once. It’s very nice when you only have to shop once a year.

We didn’t do some of my other traditional activities:

Gummi Octopi From Candy Kitchen, the perfect compromise between gummi worms and gummi bears. You can pull the legs off one at a time or go whole hog and feel them swishing around in your mouth.

PLAYLAND on the boardwalk. Every year we used to get 10 dollars to spend in the arcade there. My favorite is Silent Scope, the sniper game. I used to spend $5 on it every year but now I’ve gotten so good that I only need $2 to beat the thing.

Parasailing Though it seems daunting, this is the most relaxing and carefree activity you can partake of. Essentially you’re floating along in a slight breeze, everything is quiet and calm and there is no one to bug you (unless you go tandem) and the view is spectacular. Everyone, even the most skittish, should try it once.

Harrison’s Harbor Watch Restaurant It’s a little expensive and there can be a wait but it’s generally worth it: great seafood and almost every table has a wonderful view of the harbor. Some nights you can watch the seagulls drift along the channel; when they get to one end, they just fly to the beginning and drift again!

Assateague Island This one is for the nature-lovers. We all know Ocean City is anything but natural, but if you just head south a little bit and cross a few bridges you’ll get to a beach that is. And of course, if you are lucky, you might get to see the famous ponies!

These are the things I like to do, but I’m sure there are plenty of things I haven’t discovered. What do you like to do in OC?

Weekend Update: “I’m Gregorus, and You’re Not”

I posted my weekend details on my plan but I thought I’d share them here too:

This has been kind of a crazy weekend, but I think that might be a good thing. I stayed late at work so as not to pay for parking and ended up playing a board game with a coworker at a fast food mexican restaurant.

Then I went straight to my brother’s house without changing out of my work clothes, didn’t get there until 9, then stayed up until 4 in the morning drinking and playing board games and card games and Smash Bros. over there. Which was a good thing!

Why it’s a good thing, I’ll get to. I crashed at his place (actually my parents’ place, they’re at the beach celebrating their 29th anniversary) and woke up at 2:30 PM. This is also part of the good thing. I went home and got cleaned up, put on my Lion’s club shirt and went to what I had signed up for: managing parking at relay for life. And yet, I wanted to go to my cousins graduation party! So I asked the King Lion if they really needed me and he said no so I went to the party (after hanging out with the pending District Governor in our tent). At family parties, we always play board games (are you sensing a trend?) and I bring a bunch so that we can do it. I bought my cousin a card on the way there and drove the hour and 15 minutes to their place in Western Maryland. Cool party!

I enjoyed that, we played games, we laughed, I walked with my two preteen cousins around town. They talked to their friends on my cell phone until my (admittedly paltry) battery died. I stayed up playing one of the more complicated games with the graduate until 11pm. We said our goodbyes and I drove the hour back to relay for life. I was assigned to walk from 1 AM to 3 AM (THE GOOD THING RETURNS). I’d only been up 11 hours so I wasn’t tired. I actually started walking at 12:30 and kept it up ’til 3:08 to be sociable with the people going before and after me.

I came home and slept. And got up at 11 and called another friend and she just called me back and we’re going to hang out at her place in Virginia with another group of friends that I’ve made. She likes board games so we’ll see if that happens. My aim is to have played Dominion with 4 different groups of people this weekend. And I still have unset board game plans with two other people. So it’s all good and it’s very busy.

The whole weekend I’ve been dealing with this tightness/pain in my chest, though. It feels like I’m having a mild heart attack, but I’m totally not. I’ve been to three doctors and they all just essentially said “whatever, you’re fine” and sent me on my way. So I’ll just give it another week or two. I think it might just be neuropathy or bruising or something from holding my phone to my shoulder with my cheek at work. Or it could be something with my arm artery, but the doctors say probably not so whatever.

I only have had one meal since Saturday morning (of potato salad, bread, and 3 brownies) so I should probably eat. But first I’m going to finish making this facebook “how well do you know me?” quiz, I think.

Wolfram Alpha: First Impressions

A friend recently told me about the recent debut of a new search engine called Wolfram Alpha. I had heard about it a while back from some coworkers and heard about how Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of the system, was either a super-genius or a little bit crazy.

I hadn’t been excited about trying a new search engine since Google, so I figured I would try running it through its paces. The claim is that one should pose it questions in natural language and receive answers to those questions rather than links. So that’s the approach I tried.

The first question I asked it (and I don’t know why) was “How many calories are there in an egg mcmuffin?” I was very impressed by the first response. It not only told me, first, how many calories were in an egg mcmuffin. It then proceeded to give me the entire nutritional information and compare it to other foods on a variety of metrics! I was very very impressed.

The next thing I did was ask “How many people live in Silver Spring, Maryland?” It seemed to understand my question and it gave me an answer, but the answer was quite succinct. The thing about Silver Spring is that it’s not incorporated; it’s a census-designated place. There’s a lot of different ways to calculate that number and I’d love to have seen more of them and more details like with the first answer.

I started asking more mundane questions at this point; things that would be useful in my daily life like:

• How much should a heat pump cost?
• Who sings the song “I’m the Boss?”
• Or, since I know it knows food: Which candy bar has the most chocolate?

None of these questions were even understood by the knowledge engine, and no answer was attempted to be given. I kind of understand this; it may not be the kind of thing it’s meant for, but Google can provide answers for questions of this type (even if the answers are only the opinions of random people on the internet.)

So, in short, I am amazed by what it can do but it doesn’t do enough for it to be my go-to search engine yet. I will keep an eye on it. Let me know if you find anything really cool it can do!

Silver Spring Lunch Calculations

Lunch Time!

If there are two things software engineers like to discuss and optimize the most during their work day, they are the commute and where to go for lunch. The latter is the topic of discussion today.

A few weeks ago I decided to put a makeshift lunch-chart on my whiteboard. I listed all the lunch places along one axis and all the people I generally go to lunch with on the other and had everyone rate their choices from 0 to 10. Later on I back-ported a meaning onto this 0-10 scale: multiply by ten to get the percentage chance I could get you to go to this place if I proposed we go there.

Eventually everyone got annoyed that we couldn’t fiddle with the numbers to generate cool statistics. One person even proposed doing an “affinity” chart to see who generally likes the same places as others. All this was too tough to do on a whiteboard, so I ported the numbers over to a Google Spreadsheet (in my spare time, of course). The image above is a slightly dated version of that Spreadsheet.

I think Google Spreadsheet is really awesome and I hope that maybe if you live or work in Silver Spring, this chart will be somewhat beneficial to you, too. And if not, maybe you can make your own chart for the places near you!

View the whole spreadsheet here!

The Final Score

This afternoon I accompanied some fine friends including my brother to prove our meddle at bar trivia. This was not just any trivia, though. Oh, no. This was a battle of wits against the fiercest competitors we had ever seen for the largest prize we had ever played for. It was our chance to grab the golden bull by the horns.

A little bit of background: for a few years I’ve been a big fan of Final Score Trivia Maryland. Most of their games are played in the Baltimore area so I don’t get out to them much, but when I heard they were doing a location a little closer by, I was up for it. To sweeten the pot, they were doing a $100 grand prize for the winner since it was the first time at the new location. I e-mailed the crew and they responded. Fiercely.

The location: Buffalo Wings & Beer off of Randolph Road in Rockville. I had never been there before but the service was very excellent and the food was good. The owner was there to greet us and to wish us farewell.

When we started at 7:30, little did we know what we were in for. We went in with the team name “Do you like fish sticks?” Question after question came at us like a starving polar bear stalking its prey, but we held our own. The half-time question: Name the top four countries by population that start with the letter “P.” We got three. Damn Portugal. At half-time we were in third place.

We swept the next two rounds and nearly swept the third. We were on fire. For the final round, you can bet up to 20 points. The scores were announced: we were in FIRST PLACE by 13! We had 69 points, the only teams that could catch us had 57, 54, and 53. YES!

The category was announced: baseball. We hooted and hollered and hung our heads dejectedly. Baseball?!!

Now, let me tell you this: if the game is played how it used to be played, there is only one sports final question per season (a season is 12 games). And this was it. Our first game and the game we have done the best ever in and this is the category we get. We had no idea and bet 0. With $100 on the line, we were so clueless we couldn’t do anything else. We counted on our substantial lead to carry us through.

It came down to the wire. They were about to announce the winner. The tension was palpable. It was either going to be us or “Mission Accomplished,” the team who had just won last seasons “trivia bowl.” They had had 54 points to our 69. Would we take it? Would our team reign supreme?

No!!!!!!!!!!!! They bet 20 and got it right! Baseball!! So frustrating!! EXCLAMATION POINTS! We got second place, ending up 69 to 74. So frustrating and sad. We left our $20 booby prize as a tip for the waitress and skulked away.

….

…but maybe, just maybe. Next week? We shall see. We. Shall. See.

Welcome to Tinkertown: Population Poob

It's got gears and pullies up the wazoo!

(as narrated by poober)

STOP! Collaborate and Listen.  Poob is back with a brand new edition.

What’s up, running crew?  It’s been a while but I’m back with a perspicacious invention (patent pending).  ROCKET CAR!  Mark 2.  Don’t ask about Mark 1.  It’s not really a rocket car, it’s a car that fires rockets.   Soviet rockets, to be specific.

And it’s got six wheels, which kind of makes it a tank, not even a car.  So scratch that.  It’s my new ICBM launcher.

The make-it-go lever was the easy part.  It’s the launch arm that gave me the most difficulty.  The counterweight has to be proportional to the Fibonacci Sequence.  When all else fails, glue a heavy iron weight to the back.

The troublesome counterweight and the rocket's fuel gauge. Plus, wires.

So, the most enjoyable part was firing the rocket.  The second most enjoyable was building the rocket so everyone should go out and buy model rockets again; it’s a dying art.  If the youth of the nation can’t work with explosive devices, what a bleak future we have.  Tell all the parents to get out there and teach their children explosives.

I’m promoting rockets.  Rocket explosions.  I’m a rocket man.

[Poob continued his patriotic speech for many days without food or drink but luckily you don't need to listen; you only need to watch this video:]

Please vote in the poll:

Variations on Crab and Wasabi

I promised to post recipes for some of the dishes from the Fel Iron Chef competition, so here they are! You may be able to tell the difference in styles of the two Chefs by looking them over.

The recipe for the most innovative dish by Chef Poob:

Creamy Wasabi Mustard (Camo Sauce)

2 tablespoon cup sour cream
1 1/2 tablespoon wasabi
2 tablespoon mayo
3 tablespoon mustard dijon
dash of onion powder
dash of sugar

Crab Poppers

1 large can Poblano peppers

Filling
1 lb crab
2 tbs fine chopped bell pepper
2 tbs fine chopped onion
1/4 cup cracker meal
1 beaten egg
1 clove garlic
1/4 cup milk
salt, pepper, and cayenne to taste

Breading
2 cups cracker meal
1 cup milk
2 eggs
salt and pepper

cut peppers in half and stuff with filling
bread and dump in boiling hot oil until kitchen bursts into flame

The recipe for the most innovative dish by Chef Orlo:

Crab and Cauliflower Soup (serves 2-4):

Key notions:
We are mixing textures as well as flavors in this dish. The broth is not poured until the very last minute in order to keep the nutty flavour of the cauliflower and the crispy, sweet crab meat distinct and separate. What brings them together is the acidity of the tomato and leek, all under the umbrella of lemongrass and wasabi.

1 head Cauliflower, flourettes chopped into small bits
Fresh Crab meat : 1/2 to 3/4 of however much cauliflower you have
1 glug Olive/Canola Oil
1 glug oil, olive or Canola
1-2 liters vegetable stock or filtered water
1 cup chopped leeks
1 tomato, very thinly sliced (alternatively, you could chop them to cubes half the size of the cauliflower chunks)
3 cloves garlic, roughly crushed
1-2 strands lemongrass, smashed
1 tbsp wasabi paste
1 whole crab (the redder the better, for color and taste. Frozen is OK)

finely chopped chives
1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Pepper

1. Preheat oven to 375

2. Begin to boil water or stock in an appropriately-sized pot

3. In a bowl, dress the cauliflower with pepper and salt, and rub in oil until all pieces are covered and salt and pepper are distributed evenly.

4. Spread cauliflower out on a thin baking sheet and place in the pre-heated oven near the top

This is the fun part:
Smash, Bash and Crush the crab and garlic and optional lemongrass into bits. We won’t be eating these directly; they’ll be flavouring our broth for our soup ( But save the crab claws to snack on while cleaning up)

5. place leeks, crab, smashed garlic, wasabi paste and lemongrass into the water/stock.

6. Let stew for as long as you can. The longer the crab stays in there, the redder (and prettier) the stock gets. Taste periodically to make sure you have the desired amount of salt and wasabi . Start with light salt… you can always add more, but you cant take any away!

7. While the soup is stewing, check on your cauliflower. After about 7-10 minutes, or when your cauliflower is just turning golden brown, spread some of the fresh crab meat onto the same pan, next to the cauliflower. By roasting the cauliflower and crab, we are allowing the more complex carbohydrates to un-tangle, making them more receptive (and sweeter) to our tastebuds. Roasting the crab will also give us some bite for when we put it in the soup.

8. While the cauliflower and crab finish, start preparing your soup bowls. Place one or two of the very thin tomato slices in the bowl and dress it with some of the chopped chives.

9. When the cauliflower and crab look ‘toasted’, pull them out and let them sit for a minute, then place them on top of the tomato in the soup bowls. Notice that we have not added any of our crab stock at this point.

10. When it comes time to eat, serve the bowls of tomato, crab and cauliflower, then gently pour in some of the broth around the edges of the bowl, making an effort not to drown our beautifully toasted crab and cauliflower. Garnish with more chives, if you wish, a stalk of lemongrass or a leftover crab claw climbing out of the bowl would look awesome too.

Possible variations:

Try adding some Thai basil or cilantro at the end, to make more of a pho-flavoured dish. Add some broiled or crispy pan-fried white fish just before you pour the broth for a more seafood-y soup.

I Have Way Too Much Leftover Crab

I’ve been meaning to do the wrap-up post for the Iron Chef-style battle we held back in February, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until today. So here it is: the results of the showdown in the Kitchen Arena:

The contenders with their game faces on.

The Weirdo Chairman

Cool Programs: thanks Mom!

The battle was not nearly as intensely fought as it is on television, the competitors were more cordial and atmosphere was a bit more relaxed. As the chairman, I wore a maroon bathrobe along with the longest formal black tie I could find. I tried to follow the program as closely as possible: The introduction, the coin toss, the biting of the pepper (actually very yummy), the unveiling of the special ingredients and the battle itself.

We had three cameras going during the battle. Mine died fairly early due to lack of battery life, but the other two stayed on. The hope is that a video will eventually be produced but that takes a lot more effort and will than a blog post, which has taken me 2 months!

Each contender prepared three dishes.  First up was Chef Poob:

	Crab Dip with Pita Wedges	A rich and creamy crab dip with cheese on top served with fried pita wedges for dipping and garnished with wasabi mustard sauce.
	Poblano Poppers	Poblano Peppers stuffed with crab and cracker meal, breaded and fried to perfection.
	Crab Quesadilla	A traditional quesadilla stuffed with cheese and crab and cut into strips served with dipping cups filled with wasabi mustard.

His dishes were very well received.

Chef Orlo responded with:

	Roasted Crab and Cauliflower Soup	Roasted cauliflower and roasted crab along with fresh herbs and vegetables with the broth poured tableside to preserve the texture and taste.
	Asian-style Crab Cakes with Soy Sauce	Lightly fried crab cakes with Asian spices served with wasabi and soy sauce.
	Open-faced Crab Quesadilla with Orange Pepper	An open face quesadilla on a half-tostada heavy on the crab and light on the cheese with fresh orange pepper and wasabi on top.

His dishes were also well received and analyzed thoroughly by the judges.

The final adjudication was really tough because I didn’t want anyone to lose!  Someone has to in a competition, I guess, though.  Both culinary masters did well but only one came out the winner and the first “Iron Chef.”

Here are the final scores:

	Poob				Orlo
Judge	Taste	Plating	Originality		Taste	Plating	Originality
Judge 1	9	4	4		8	5	4
Judge 2	7	4	5		9	4	5
Judge 3	7	3	3		8	5	4
Total	23	11	12		25	14	13
	46				52

Here’s a video of me announcing the winner:

As I said, a little too low key.  And I got the score wrong, also.

Many thanks to competitors, judges, attendees, and everyone who was involved for making it totally awesome!  On Friday I will post the recipes that the competitors sent me for their dishes.

Some lessons learned for the next battle:

• It is important to hold the tournament in a neutral location.  If one competitor has cooked or practiced in the location, they have a definitive advantage.
• Have a better plan for how to do the math.  We used clipboards and score sheets that were a little confusing and I added them up wrong.  We had two accountants at the battle but neither checked my numbers!
• Buy less ingredients.  I went kind of crazy with the ingredients but since both contenders already sort of had a plan in mind, they didn’t need many of them.  Almost none of the vegetables got used and very little of the cheese.
• Be more flamboyant.  A flamboyant chairman makes for a more exciting battle.

We already have two possible contenders lined up for the next battle. Chef Orlo is planning the next event (so as to find an adequate challenger) and has already picked a secret ingredient to challenge the competitors.  He is only biding his time before the ingredient is fully in season. You have not seen the last of this culinary tournament!

Code Jamming: Backronyms

Excuse me if I reference my first post ever on this blog but it’s right: I am very bad at following through with projects. I am, however, very good at following through with commitments and promises I have made.

Luckily I have friends with good ideas, and one of them came up with this one: every few weeks hold a “code jam” that gets all of us both excited and motivated about projects we could do. If we make it a commitment to each other to work on the projects and just feed ideas off one another, it will mean projects are more likely to get started and to get completed.

We decided to start with something easy. The organizer of the group, Kevin, recently posted about the problem of generating backronyms. There is an internet site out there does this, but it doesn’t do a very good job.

Well, let’s back up: what are backronyms? Sometimes you have a clever acronym you want to create for a project but you don’t know what the letters should stand for. So you invent the words that the letters stand for out of whole cloth! This is a backronym. This is used all the time in government: an example would be the USAPATRIOT act.

Well, the group has met three times and we have come up with three different algorithms for how to do this. I’m the first one to get my algorithm ready to run so it’s up now! On the internet! You can find it at pheared labs. It’s written in Python using django.

At first, it was only able to make sensible things out of 3 letter acronyms (try your initials). I’ve recently improved the algorithm so that it does fairly well with up to 5 letters and I hope to make it better. I also hope my friends will come up with their alternative algorithms so we can have more options.

If you live in or around Silver Spring and would be interesting in attending a Jam, let us know! Exciting!