IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

One of these windows is not like the other.....

So.. Since I recently bought a 130 year old house and we are having a super cold winter,  I’ve been looking for cheap cost effective ways to improve the insulating qualities of my house.

Guy Marsden Sustainable living  to the Rescue!

I followed (with slight modifications) his plans for DIY, inexpensive indoor storm windows. or INTERIOR WINDOW INSULATION PANELS as he calls them..

The pic above shows the results. (taken with awesome FLIR thermal camera)  I’ll post some Pics of my actual built windows in a little bit.

Disclaimer: I’ve got no relation to FLIR or Guy Marsden, they havn’t sent me a thermal imaging camera or a truck load of spare solar collectors. But as far as I’m concerned they both Rock.. Except that FLIR used to mean Forward Looking Infra Red.. so using that is like calling your company LASER..am I nit picking?   but still.. awesome product.

So, I love my crockpot.  They are so great.  Efficient, slow cooking, set it and forget it (wait, did Ron Popeil trademark that phrase?)!  I love chicken.  Its fewer calories for the protein than beef.  Its usually cheaper.  So, I wanted to cook it in my crockpot.  A lot of recipes out there say to use boneless, skinless chicken to cut on fat.  Well, ok – but you also can cut a lot of flavor that way.  And end up with tough, though wet, chicken.  Also, in order to save money I bought some whole chickens.

Now the dilemma: how do I cook a whole chicken in the crockpot without getting it super greasy?  Vegetable steamer – stainless steel and some of them have removable center posts (like the one I bought).  Take the center post out (if you can’t, just spear the chicken – I’ve done this too).  Do your normal roast chicken prep, like dry rub or something.  Keep the cavity empty for this one, though I suppose since you’re cooking 8 hours you could technically stuff the bird.  I put some seasonings on the skin, then cut up some veggies (specifically this time red peppers, onions and carrots) and placed all of this on the steamer in the crock pot.

I cooked it on low overnight.  Basically had it in there by 9 pm, stopped it about 7:30 am.  All that grease drops to the bottom.  There’s still some fat in the chicken, but the meat isn’t sitting in rendered fat.  Its tender, fall off the bone kind of chicken.  Easy to separate bones from meat (use the bones later for stock).  And you have the stock at the bottom for use later (maybe in making rice…  i usually cool it off in the fridge first and scoop off the congealed fat before using).  So…  rice, chicken and vegetables – so good.  Take the skin off or your personal trainer will yell at you!

My co-worker just put me on to a cool new hardware/software solution coming out in Jan.
She saw it on an episode of  This Old House.
I just contacted PowerHouse Dynamics to ask them for a demo unit for their Total Home energy management solution.

The cool part is that it has current clamps for all the circuits in your breaker box and software that looks pretty slick to monitor everything.

Will update when I hear back from them.

Travis.

I just moved to New Haven, CT.  Sunday, November 1 was the day I moved my bed in, so I consider that my first day in permanent residence.  I’d only needed help with a couple pieces of furniture, so my friend Abe helped me out.  After, I decided to treat him to some amazing pizza, because truly amazing pizza can be found here in New Haven.  You think NY has good pizza?  You’ve never been here.

So, we begin our trek for food (I gave him Doritos to calm the burning pain in his stomach – Abe eats a lot but is thin as a rail) and I decide to have him taste Modern Apizza on State St.  Its a place a client and friend recommended to me – she suggested the bacon and onion and wow was it good!  However, they were closed on Sunday afternoon.  How sad, we were put out a little, but hungry and I remembered that Tony and Lucille’s on Wooster St served it ready by the slice (I found out the weekend before when I was moving things into the new apartment)!

So, we ventured over there.  There was, as usual, this very long line of people outside Frank Pepe’s (my first New Haven pizza, it is world renowned).  I shook my head, thinking the fools don’t even know they can get good pizza just about anywhere on Wooster St.  So we go into the takeout side of Tony and Lucille’s across the street.  We order a few pizzas by the slice and decide to eat them while we wait for a pizza to be made for us to go (for Abe to bring home to his little family in Vernon).  They are pretty amusing there, they treat you like family because they expect you to know exactly how things work in their shop.  Apparently, you’re not supposed to order whole pizzas from the takeout side, nor can you call ahead (I asked) to have them make one for you to pick up.  If you want a whole pie, you go next door to the restaurant.  I thought it was strange, but after being told this they gave me one of the pies they already had made for slices.

Starving, we headed outside to eat our slices at the nice tables they put out.  An older man, a bit portly with white hair and a gruff voice comes out as we’re tearing into our second piece.  “Where did you get that pizza!?”  We told him we got it from his place and he put a smile on and had a great conversation with us.  That was how I met Tony of Tony and Lucille’s on 150 Wooster St (they don’t have a website).  He asked us who’s pizza we thought was best, we told him the one we were eating was better than one we had to wait for.  haha.  But no, seriously, his pizza is nice.  It has a light, crispy, thin crust and is well put together.  Tony is a great guy, and when I told him I was a local business owner and had just moved in a couple miles down the road, he chatted with us for awhile.  His daughter (I didn’t catch her name) also joined in.

So far, I’ve been loving New Haven.  You just don’t get this kind of attention up near Hartford unless you twist a couple arms.  So far, all the shop owners and managers have been very forthcoming and friendly.  Especially when I tell them I just moved in, they all have some nice advice on where to go and what to do.  Oh, and Archie Moore’s is about a 3 minute walk.  They have awesome wings!  I would have had more tonight if I could have, but I made myself a promise that I’d only be going there as long as the World Series was going on and I guess that’s over now.  Not that I won’t ever go back, it will just take me a month or so.

I absolutely love this new EeePC I bought from Asus.  My laptop at work died, and seeing as it was over 6 years old I decided I didn’t need to replace it with anything too powerful.  Most of my heavy lifting is done by other computers.  The computer I use most often I use for Microsoft Office, web browsing, and controlling other computers.  So, my needs were simple.  I didn’t need the latest 3D graphics for gaming.  I thought – well what about these little netbooks that run Windows on them?

I’d been using something similar for a month or so at the office (a self-built nettop, uses the same kind of processor) and was pleased with the results.  So I thought, what they hey and took the plunge.  $360 (I added RAM) later, I have this awesome little netbook as my most-used computer.  I’m not worried about its small size, because usually when I’m using it its hooked up to a large LCD flat panel, keyboard and mouse.  When I’m on the road with it, in meetings etc, the keyboard on this model is large enough to type effectively.  It has WiFi, wired NIC, 3 USB ports, 160GB of hard drive space, 2GB of RAM…  sweet little machine.

One thing that was starting to bug me was the number of things I had to plug into the machine when I sat down at my desk.  I’ve been able to reduce it to 4: network, monitor, power, USB hub (for headphones, keyboard, mouse).  I could, if I really wanted to, move the network and monitor over to a USB replicator and only have to plug in two devices – but I’ll wait on that.  Another thing that was bothering me was the monitor setup.  Whenever I was in the office I was reconfiguring video settings every time – that was before I found the scheme settings in my graphics adapter (Intel) that allowed me to save many preferences.  And I can even have a program run when I choose a scheme – like mapping all of my drives (since its Windows XP Home, its not added to the domain – but I can still access the devices if I put in the right username/password).

I specifically didn’t buy this unit from a cell phone provider because doing so signs you up for a 2-year contract for $40 (or more) a month to get Internet service from them for it.  Almost everywhere I go I have access to WiFi, so I didn’t think this was necessary.  Also, having the Internet built into the netbook would have been limiting for me. I can always get one of their new MiFi devices or get the USB wireless adapters for more portability between devices.  This way I can just buy 1 of these for the company and hand it out to whomever needs it the most at any given time.  Or tether my phone (Verizon lets you do that for a fee….  AT&T doesn’t with their iPhone – another reason for me not to switch).

Anyway, I vote yes to netbooks.  But I have a lot of other computers, too.  So, for gaming I have my home PC set up to game on.  This will still play some good games ,but not the new intensive 3d graphics ones.