According to the article and other Internet wisdom, making cheese at home can be pretty tricky–but Mozzarella seems within reach. I purchased the liquid vegetable rennet and some calcium chloride at Rainbow Grocery, and Rob acquired the requisite high quality fresh milk. Bi-Rite has a kit which includes everything needed except for the milk, but it cost more than twice as much as the separate ingredients, and we already had a thermometer. The list of ingredients was not long, but the process did require a commitment to stirring. Rob got the recipe and milk, I got the weird cheese making stuff.

So we poured in the milk and calcium chloride and nothing much happened. We stirred and heated for a while before it was time to add the rennet. A little bit of that stuff, and a few seconds of stirring and something weird happened. It was as if we were making cheese! The milk turned to curd, and we had made some real progress.

Despite the fact that the recipe seemed to call for breaking up the solid pieces whenever we thought we were finally making progress, we persevered. We stirred and stirred and eventually we had cooked it enough. We hung the cheese to dry. When it had fully drained, we cut the mass of curds into slices. The questionable recipe now indicated we should microwave it until it just starts to melt, then quickly stretch it and work it into a ball. Gloves are recommended, because the cheese is hot at this point, but having no gloves, nor interest in wearing gloves, an alternate technique was needed. Adapting a trick I heard about this summer, I ran my hands under cold water for a few seconds, then picked up the cheese and pulled it. As soon as I started to feel the burning again, I set it down and ran my hands under cold water. After a few stretch and fold cycles it had clearly become something new; real fresh mozzarella. After a cold saltwater bath it was ready to marinade and eat!

I think next time we’ll stretch it less, because it was a bit tough, but delicious other than that. Overall, it was a success.

More Photos

Cocoa Beach • Santa Cruz

(2463.6 miles apart)

Alas, I’ve had a busy month or two. May 11th I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a BS in Computer Science. An excellent time, but time to get a job now.

May 28th through June 2nd I was in Naples, Italy at AVI 2008. I had a great time presenting our well received poster on the ideas behind VCode & VData, and had the chance to visit to Pompeii. Incidentally, a new release of VCode is pretty much ready to go, so watch for it in the coming days.

June 7th I boarded an American Airlines flight to SJC with a one-way ticket! After attending a most exciting WWDC 2008, I finally moved in to my new apartment in Santa Clara with my roommate Erik.

We do great things here in California. I enjoy going to work every day, and there are lots of cool places to go like WeirdStuff and untold numbers of unfound places. Erik and I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival this weekend, and Mo even came out for a visit a couple of weeks ago. Charlie is here now too.

[I had intended to put lots of photos in this post, but I've delayed it long enough already. Perhaps I'll update it with photos one day?]

I’m headed to Advanced Visual Interfaces ‘08 this summer in Naples, Italy to present the work Josh and I did on VCode + VData regarding video coding tools. I’m really proud, as it’s my first first-author!

You can download VCode and get more info about it on the Social website.

Enjoy!

After finals is when the fun really began though.

Coffee on a snowy night with Erik

An icy wall and adorable snowmen outside the Siebel Center

The snowy and icy days were a fun cap to the end of the semester and signaled a start to winter.

Then iPhone came and changed my life

But getting my iPhone was simply fantastic. I can’t wait to start writing apps.

It was not original, but compulsory to create some [citation needed] signs–just like the Wikipedian Protester displays. I used the CS Department Plotter, some scrap Foamcor, and spray adhesive to build them.

I got mine signed

But the signs were just for starters. Mo thought it would be a good idea to drop several thousand spiders from the ceiling of 1404, ideally more impressive than the meager number of playpen balls dropped from the ceiling at MIT. So she bought them, and several of us spray painted them red. Unfortunately at this point we did not know how to drop them. A Thursday night investigation of 1404 Siebel informed us that there was no way to access the ceiling. Blueprints didn’t help find any service catwalks, there wasn’t any way we could get a ladder up there. Let me give you the play by play from here on out:

• Thursday – Start painting Spiders red.
• 
• 12:00 AM Friday – Discover there isn’t a good way to reach the ceiling.
  Consider attaching something to the projector screen. Infeasible.
• 2:00 AM - Build the whole crazy remote controlled box thing. Extract some magnets from a hard disk, find and get a Futaba R/C Radio working. Apply duct tape liberally.
• ~Insert some sleep, things get fuzzy around this point. I think I took an exam in the interim as well.~
• 2:00 PM – Purchase balloons, fishing line, batteries
  
  • Add twice as many hard disk magnets to hold box to ceiling.
  • Rebuild latch mechanism, as we found it didn’t work with the weight of the spiders.
  • Head to ACM Conference Room and build crazy balloon rig to get a wire over the rafters in 1404.
  • Get very worried while trying to eat dinner, afraid there won’t be enough time.
• 6:15 PM Yahoo Hack Day Competition finally clears out. We begin hanging box in front of a few people still left in the lecture hall. Everything goes to plan, except the cable that we pulled it up with doesn’t descend as planned. Nobody notices.
• 7:00 PM finish hanging up box
• 
• 7:15 PM Yahoo Awards begin
• 7:45 PM Talk starts
• 7:56 PM Randall mentions something about what would be interesting to drop from the sky on unsuspecting people (in the context of a kite flown 2km high with a dangling string from the line).
• 
• 7:57 PM 2000 red spiders fall from the sky controlled by radio.
• 
  

More Pictures

I think it was a success. We all had fun, and the crazy contraption held up all right. Perhaps the most interesting part of it was getting the wire over the beam in the lecture hall. I’m not quite sure how to illustrate it, perhaps a cartoon is appropriate? I’ll get sketching.

My Lotus

While I’m very happy, with any purchase of a 25 year old item there is some trouble to be expected. I bought a new seat on eBay; it came with a yucky one. The new one is a pretty blue suede Mundialitta seat. I’ve discovered the non-original front wheel is the wrong size; a 27″ instead of a 700c; and the brake shoes prevented the quick-releases on the brake calipers from appropriately closing. You can see some of these items in earlier pictures in the photo gallery. Fortunately I was able to locate a matching front wheel and after some work acquired it. Brake pads were quickly swapped too. Finally, I noticed the “shimano one key release” cap on my crank bolt is missing–I think it just fell off. Either way, it will be tricky hunting that down. New Continental Grand Prix tires and tubes finished off the restoration; I’m really happy with the result.

The e36 325i doesn’t seem to be designed around serviceability of seat heater elements. Non-working heated seats are all too common on this car, and I couldn’t bear the defect any longer.

Notice the burnt area.

This time I decided I was ready to fix them for real. It time to remove the seat again, pull off the seat cushion (snapping 4 breakaway pins), separate the leather from the foam by removing a number of demonic little metal rings–to get to the heater element. For the first time I figured out how to get the back of the seat open for this process too. The leather is essentially tucked in around the edge with a plastic spline. The spline is removed by simply pulling from around the edge. It turns out the shell of the seat back is made out of some sort of fiberglass that made it quite light and rigid. Hrm, fiberglass. I always forget to document these projects with more photos.

A helpful how-to detailed some of the steps required, but is focused on retrofit installation of elements rather than replacement.

I arrived home with the parts around 3:30 pm and by 8:00 pm I had reinstalled the repaired seat. Driving home last evening with the windows open I experienced that fleeting summer feeling of a cool breeze and a warm seat. Today was much less eventful; I just changed the oil, flushed the brake fluid, and installed new rear rotors and brake pads. After completing the remainder of service at the dealership I should be back to premium condition. The hours of intricate finger work for that seat repair was most certainly worth it, the new elements seem to keep the seat warmer than ever.

Many mathematicians will be familiar with the Erdős number, a measure of “collaborative distance.” Those outside of the math world might be more familiar with the Bacon number, from the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, measuring the number of co-appearances an actor is from Kevin Bacon. An Erdős number is pretty much the same thing but for writing papers with mathematician Paul Erdős.

While I am not quite a mathematician, being a student of Computer Science, I have the opportunity to associate with those skilled in Mathematics. I took it upon myself to determine if I had a finite Erdős number. It turns out I do.

According to the instructions at the Erdős Number Project, I used the AMS MathSciNet Collaboration Distance search to find the answer.

I have documented my findings below; the last three lines of the table were determined via MathSciNet, the first two by personal knowledge. I was pleased to find my number is so low and am proud to declare my finding.

As promised, I’m continuing to post previously abandoned entries as time permits.

Vint Cerf visited my university the week of April 9 to talk about issues and challenges that will face the internet in 2007 and beyond. The talks were quite interesting–just my sort of chat. Of course understanding net neutrality was on the list of topics, but I really appreciated hearing that even an important fellow like Vint really wants a fast, symmetrical net connection at home, and can still talk about the finer points of IPv6. Many thanks to Dan Peterson for helping arrange all of this. I had the additional privilege of meeting Dr. Cerf and demoing LaserLine 2.0 with Chad. He was exceptionally nice, and would instantly grasp whatever concept was being discussed. It was really a lot of fun.

Speaking of LaserLine 2.0… Leopard isn’t out yet, so there is still all of this stuff under NDA to WWDC attendees… And if there were Leopard specific features, they couldn’t be added to a public branch of LaserLine available on the Trac site… I’m not saying anything here, I’m just encouraging readers to think about Leopard, and how it is going to have cool new features like Quick Look… that’s all.

• T-Mobile – #
• Cingular – #
• Sprint – 1
• Verizon – 1

I have yet to try all these out. Additionally, “*” may work if these fail. If I would much appreciate comments if anyone has first hand experience of other numbers working with other carriers in the Chicagoland area, or corrections in order to make this the canonical reference for the midwest.

Hopefully this will save everyone lots of time in life.

But none of the preceding information has anything to do with San Francisco. I very much enjoyed my trip there for WWDC and am anxious to release some of the code I’ve been working on which utilizes Leopard technologies. It’ll have to wait until October. The trip was great for reasons beyond just the conference though, I had fun seeing Helvetica with Chad. I also bought a new Freitag wallet.

Though there were some low points to the trip. I was trying to play Taboo, but upon opening up the box I found the AA batteries had leaked, and I got some acid on my hand, leaving me with an unsightly acid burn. I also chipped my tooth.

Finally, while I was out there I had the opportunity to work on the Justin.tv widget a bit more. Look for a new version, supporting all the new channels soon.

March twenty-fifth marked the end of spring break and the beginning of a culinary adventure. Defrosting was an unknown; I hadn’t time to move my prospective main course to the refrigerator in time for it to become anything other than a rock of ice. After some work I managed to produce this:

I let the roast defrost in warm water in the sink, against health recommendations, and stuck it in the oven for the recommended time, according to my Betty Crocker Cookbook. Some simple seasonings and Bragg Liquid Aminos was all it took to produce the roast, then some mashed potatoes out of a box and I had a fine meal, which I shared with my friend Chad. I’m sorry my vegetarian friends.