Soundcloud.com just launched. I have never made a myspace page, but this seems like a little more music-centric and less "hey look at my band's crappy HTML".

• 2 2/3 cup acid whey (filtered from yogurt)
• 1 cup powdered milk
  
• 4 tbs unsalted butter
• 6 tbs Really Raw Honey (that shit's good)
• 3 heaping tbs cappings
  
• 2 pkts active dry yeast
• 2 lb 5 oz bread flour
• 1 cup flax seed meal
  
• 4 tsp salt
• 1 cup roasted, salted sunflower seeds
• 1 cup 5 grain mix
  

Heat the whey, butter, cappings, and dry milk in a small saucepan until the temp is 110 or 115 using an instant read thermometer. The powdered milk will eventually curdle after being dissolved, but that's okay. With bread, since there's so few ingredients, the taste of the individual pieces really comes through. The raw honey has a great strong taste - try it! Once the butter's melted and it's all still 110 degrees, whisk in the yeast to dissolve. Most recipes call for you to "proof" the yeast, but just getting it dissolved is good enough.

Add the flour, flax meal, and salt to a mixer and mix to combine. On a low speed, add the yeast/liquid mixture only as fast as the flour will absorb it. The dough should form a ball and pull away from the sides. Continue to knead for 5 minutes. It should remain sticky. Add the sunflower seeds and 5 grain mix and continue to knead until well blended.

Place the kneaded dough in an oiled bowl and allow to rise for one hour in a warm spot until it's doubled in size. If the dough is too sticky, oil your hands and the worksurface instead of using flour.

Remove the dough, divide it in two (i use a scale to try to get the two halves as close as possible) and puch it down into a size that will fit into a 5x9 bread pan. Place it into a buttered bread pan and allow to rise for another 30-45 minutes.

Put a sheet pan or pie pan with 2-3 cups of warm water in the bottom rack of a 350 degree oven. Brush the top of the bread with olive oil and place on the second rack. Cook until the internal temperature of the bread reaches 195 degrees using an instant read thermometer. This will be 60-70 minutes. Remove from the pan and place on a wire rack to cool. Don't forget to pull out the water pan before it boils dry. Wait for the bread to cool completely before slicing.

Barb wrote a poem for me!

Banana Shoes

Bananas are difficult to transport.
They bruise and turn to mush. A shame.
Potassium is so good for sport.

In the morning, I need moral support.
I rely on bananas to tighten up my game.
But bananas are difficult to transport.

In the train my legs I must contort.
Without bananas, I’m weak. I wane.
Potassium is so good for sport.

Put the banana in your gym shoe, you exhort.
That’s where it won’t get maimed.
Bananas are difficult to transport.

Putting fruit in sneakers is gross, I snort.
It’s not appetizing. But you proclaim:
Potassium is so good for sport.

Plus the banana peel is like a fort
keeping out the smells at which you take aim.
Bananas are difficult to transport.
Potassium is so good for sport.

I used to record a lot more than I do now... I could say that I used to record. I've been trying to get back into it, but as a hobby, engineering isn't quite as portable as say guitar playing. That's really my problem. The part I enjoy is making all the bits work together and optimize for a particular workflow and sound. In the process of that work, I've pretty much stuck to the same scheme that I discovered while in school: ProTools and analog consoles with a decent set of outboard dynamics, eq, and digital efx. Back then that meant a Session 8 into a Mackie 4 bus with a Pentium computer and a 1.2GB external drive. Now that means Protools HD1 and a Speck S72 board running on a Dual CPU PowerMac. That is, if I could get the Speck running. I was considering a Speck LiLo, but ran across a locally available 90's era S72 which is similar but unbalanced, many more inputs, and includes EQ. This particular model had been modified to include balanced IO, a mix bus insert, and improced caps in the EQ. All this for 1/4 the price of the LiLo.

The channel mods were very professionally done, and each individual channel sounds great. The master section is less than wonderful. I'm busy tracking down some noise that sounds like radio static, cracking and popping. Now that I have room to work, I figured out that I could alter the sound by poking around some of the power/ground wires - including those tapped to power the master sections balanced line drivers. Esh. The picure actually shows what I found after poking around enough to follow the wires to the point in which the power supply enters the chassis. I think I have something to work on now at least.

Here's a nice 10 mile loop around Cortland and then over to Mt Airy for a little hill climbing. One of the hills is really tough, but coming back on the other side is nice. Some great curvy hills. Edit: Here's another 10 miler that avoids the horrible hill and runs past Croton Reservoir instead. Turns out the name of that hill (I am not lying) is Torment Hill.

We got a surface in the office! I can't really talk about the project I'm working on, but I will say that I'm determined to get some version of the satellite tracker on it - It offers a very interesting interaction model that could be a fun way to visualize and interact with orbits. 

One problem is that the SDK is under wraps so when you run into problems there's really not much of a community to turn to. The MS Surface developer's blog offers little in the way of hard examples, offering more of a list of cool stuff they're working on and why this thing is going to be cool when the masses get a hold of them.

I'd love to offer up some more info, but am under an NDA! Here's a little peek at our developer station until I can talk more.

What to do with the endless supply of kefir once you get your grains cranking away? No choice but to make frozen yogurt. It'll also work with any other yogurt, but if you're going to buy it, best to buy some of the strained greek yogurt to save you the trouble... Unless of course, you want to strain your own and save the whey for my bread recipe.

• 4 c strained yogurt
• 0.5 c Really Raw Honey
• 180g granulated sugar
• 2 tsp lemon zest
• 3 tbs lemon juice
• 1 tbs grated ginger

You want to strain about 8 cups of yogurt, or enough to get about 4 cups of the thick stuff. Add the sugar, honey, zest, juice, and ginger and mix well. You can add more ginger if you want a little more bite. I think the next time, I would also add a tad more lemon. Put it all in the fridge to cool nicely. Then follow the directions for whatever ice cream maker you're using.

The Nike SportBand came out. Really, it's no more than a glorified pedometer, but it stores a lot more data about your running. Now it's finally no bigger than you would expect. Previously you had to carry around an Ipod Nano.

With both versions, the only real way to get to the data is to upload it to the Nike website. With the Ipod, you could pull the files directly off. I don't really like the idea of Nike's website being the only way to really use the data, and would have come up with a way to use the Ipod data if I had one.

I was hoping that the SportBand worked similarly, but unfortunately, that's not the case. It is a USB device, but the computer sees it as a USB Human Interface Device (a keyboard or mouse, really) instead of a flash drive.

I've done a little research into accessing HIDs with the .NET framework, and though it appears possible - with thanks to Jan Axelson, I haven't yet figured out how to actually read the data off the device. If anyone knows more about this, I'd love to hear about it. Once I have the data, it should be easy enough to build a nice WPF app to display your run data.

Anyway, as a start, the initial critical data for the Nike+ USB device is:

Vendor ID: 11AC
Product ID: 4269

When I use the HID tester though I get the following message:

Device Detected: 
- Vendor ID: 11AC
- Product ID: 4269
The attempt to write an Output report has failed.
The attempt to read an Input report has failed.
The attempt to write a Feature report has failed.
The attempt to read a Feature report has failed.

Well, maybe more later if I can figure some more out.