For this pie I took a journey down chocolate lane. First I opted for a crumb crust. You've undoubtedly had pie with a graham cracker crust before, and that's fine, but as a wonderful chef taught me, crumb crusts can be much more interesting. We happened to have some store-bought cookies on hand (my son came home with them from school inexplicably a few days ago). Chocolate chip cookies to be precise. I ground them in my food processor and mixed them with some melted butter. The butter melted the chocolate and it turned into somewhat gooey mess. I added some graham cracker crumbs to crunch it up and make up a little volume since I was a little short with just the cookies. Baked it for 10 minutes at 375° and left it to cool for a few hours.

For the filling I set my sights on a chocolate mousse. I melted 11 ounces of dark chocolate in a double boiler and let it cool a little. In the mean time I whipped 1.5 cups of heavy cream with a tablespoon of sugar to stiff peaks. Following the standard procedure, I added 1/3 of the cream and beat it into the chocolate. There was a brief instance where the chocolate wanted to seize. I've done that before and it ain't pretty. Luckily it was on the verge and I whipped it fiercely until the chocolate recovered. Following that near miss I folded in the remaining cream and then dished it into the shell. Quickly I whisked it into the fridge to set up over night (couple of hours would have been fine).

The texture of the pie was excellent. The shell was a nice balance of sweet, salty and crumbly. It was maybe a little hard to cut through with a fork, so probably a little more graham cracker and less chocolate chip next time. The flavor of the chocolate was great but oh so rich. My tummy is still churning from eating a full slice. My wife opted for just a sliver and now I think she was on the right track. There was just too much chocolate and not enough cream. I was worried that it would be too light, too airy but those fears were very much unfounded. Probably should have gone for the egg whites as well.

Luckily the kids have stomachs of steel and have promised to polish off the remainder for us. What a surprise!

On a recent trip to Sheri's I was glancing through the pie selection and realized that a) I don't make nearly enough pie and b) all their pies seemed simple enough that I could do them on my own. I could possibly be wrong about the latter, but certainly not about the former. And so begins the Summer Of Pie, wherein I will make many pies all through the summer and document the process here. The rules are that it has to be made of good ingredients and I can't directly follow a recipe. Referencing recipes is OK, but the final creation must be my own.

First up was what I call the Triple Berry Attack. I had some canned blueberries, some frozen blackberries from last fall and I bought a pint of strawberries. Nothing else is really in season yet.

The problem with blackberries is the seeds, so I cooked them down with the blueberry syrup and strained out the pulp. I added lemon juice and sugar to taste, then thickened with tapioca flour. I was worried that it would thicken too much but it was just about right, and without any off flavors.

At the last minute I added the blueberries and diced strawberries, mixed quickly and then dumped into an uncooked pie shell. Baked for about 30 minutes at 400°. The hardest part was waiting until the next day to taste. Had I known how good it would taste, the wait would have been even harder. It was not too sweet, a problem that many sweets have these days. The flavors balanced well and the syrup was just runny enough.

A great start to what is sure to be a great summer.

I started seeing alerts today which said the following:

CableONE is excited to present the new in-browser notification system!

CableONE wants to keep you informed about critical service changes, maintenance events and important account information on a more timely, and therefore useful, basis. In order to do so, CableONE may periodically send you bulletins, like this one, which will automatically appear within your Internet browser. This process does not involve collecting any information about your activity on the Internet and, other than this initial communication to receive your preferences, will be a one-way process. To learn more about this new communication method, as well as how to change or configure your notifications, please click the “Learn More” button located above. Thank you!

I immediately opted out of the system as it frankly creeps me out that they're hijacking my HTTP traffic for whatever purposes they want. I can see the temptation. They're planning weather alerts and amber alerts. They want to alert me to network issues which may be affecting me. I get the benefits. Call me old school, but I want an ISP that just connects me to the Internet and leaves my traffic alone.

I also worry about the precedent. Maybe they start sending me notifications of really good deals from their partners. Maybe they start changing banner ads to be from companies they select. Perhaps they start blocking sites they don't like, or that don't pay them a fee. It's a trend I wouldn't like to see started.

Bottom line, if I wanted somebody mucking with my bits, I'd sign up with Comcast.

I sadly discovered today that nothing on my MythTV was recording, and even live TV was not viewable. "What gives?" I pondered as I poured through the logs.

# tail -f /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log
2010-02-21 22:06:29.747 TVRec(2): Changing from None to WatchingLiveTV
2010-02-21 22:06:29.757 TVRec(2): HW Tuner: 2->2
2010-02-21 22:06:30.768 HDHRChan(xx/1), Error: device not found
2010-02-21 22:06:31.780 HDHRChan(xx/1), Error: device not found
2010-02-21 22:06:31.782 HDHRChan(xx/1): SetChannelByString(6-1), Error: Channel object will not open, can not change channels.
2010-02-21 22:06:31.783 TVRec(2) Error: Failed to set channel to 6-1. Reverting to kState_None

Well, that didn't bode well. I sauntered into the data center (the nook under the stairs without adequate power, lighting or cooling) and found the power light on my HDHomeRun was blinking and worse, so was the light on the power supply. A quick google turned up a known failure with the power adapters on some versions of the HDHomeRun. Guess who was lucky enough to receive one of them?

So this post is just an FYI to anybody else who bought an HDHomeRun. The RMA process is dead simple, just enter your device ID, and they'll send you a replacement for free. But the question is, what are we going to do for 3-7 business days while we wait? Back to live TV again? Oh the humanity!

Saw a post at badscience.net which piqued my interest. Before you read it, first think about the odds of a mother having 3 children on the same day of the year. How likely (or unlikely, as the case may be) would you guess it is? Turns out it's a lot more likely than most people would think. OK, now you can click the link.

FWIW, thanks to my recently revived statistical knowledge, I did pick up that the correct odds wouldn't be 365*365*365, but rather just 365*365. That's because once the first kid is born, the chance of him being born on that day is exactly 1 (unless she's a Chinese gymnast in which case she'd be born 3 years later). Think of that the next time someone asks, "what are the chances of that happening again?". The answer is, the same as the chances that it happened in the first place (assuming the factors haven't changed, of course).

I also realized that the odds of same day births would probably be lower due to the dates of conception being non-independent. For instance, my wife and I planned to have our kids in the spring because she didn't want to be pregnant during the heat of the summer. So the range of possible days our kids could have been born is only a window of about 100 days. Would you believe they were all born inside that window? (Actually, one of them did sneak in a bit late, but within a decent margin of error).