Tomor­row I’ll spend all day at RIT help­ing the OPL pre­pare for Imagine:RIT. The fes­ti­val is shap­ing up to be a LOT bigger than last year. Some folks are pre­dict­ing as many as 25,000 people to visit RIT that day. The OPL will be run­ning the Social Net­work­ing Game again and also the Inno­va­tion News (http://​opl.​rit.​edu/​inews & follow on twit­ter at RITiNews). And if all goes well tomor­row we’ll also be doing custom Rochester guide­books with con­tent from the RocWiki.

So we still don’t have a kitchen..

It’s been two+ weeks. Eating out is get­ting old fast for Dre (and for me too as I often brought food back to Ithaca). This isn’t our con­trac­tors fault. We’ve  had prob­lems with coor­di­nat­ing things like the arrival of the right appli­ances at the right time, get­ting the gran­ite carv­ing fin­ished, etc. Plus we had to switch some appli­ances due to space lim­i­ta­tions (our first fridge was too big).

For some reason kitchens don’t seem to go in as easy as they come out. And speak­ing of coming out, here’s a funny little story. So our con­trac­tors remove the cabinets:

And what do they find? Trash from the people who built the house:

Seriously… empty Sty­ro­foam cups, beer bottle caps, crum­pled cig­a­rette car­tons (do they even make Viceroy cig­a­rettes any more) and the topper: a donut. Ok, so the house was built in 1970. So that is (for all intents an pur­poses) a 40 YEAR OLD DONUT! A 40 year old, pet­ri­fied (really) donut. That’s giving a twinkie a run for it’s money in the “staying power” depart­ment as far as we’re con­cerned. Even Rita Mae knew enough to go no where near that thing.*

As for the cats reac­tion to this…

Lewis the Cat: “This is a total Diaper Show….”

* – BTW note the grease stain on the bag. My only mes­sage to the people who built my house is “Stay Classy Guys… Stay Classy!”

• Slog­ging through derrida’s archive fever … #
• RT @RITOPL: @rit­meetu Check out tmeetü – OPL’s Social Net­work­ing Game 2.0 – pre­mier­ing next week­end at Imag­ineRIT: http://​digg.​com/​u​11YJf #
• Col­lege­town “Brooklyn Bagel” Sand­wich + my stom­ach = happy matt #
• @laerm actu­ally it umlaute wasn’t my idea but I love it like an 80’s hair metal band in reply to laerm #
• Wait­ing to talk about Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty issues. #
• @RITOPL: Pleasd to @MEETU can you guess my name? Bet what’s puz­zlin you is the nature of my social net­work­ing game. http://​twit​pic.​com/​3w3ga #
• RT @kodakCB: RT @GSNC: What’s your favorite Girl Scout Cookie? -> Samoas, with any­thing w/peanut butter as close second… #
• !@#$!!! – #
• !@#$!!! – The State Depart­ment has appar­ently lost my pass­port forms. And I’m speak­ing in Rot­ter­dam in two weeks!!! #
• @oline73 The @RITOPL is going to talk about the future of pub­lish­ing. I’m also on a panel about news­pa­pers in the dig­i­tal age. in reply to oline73 #
• #fol­lowfri­day @tostina @ritopl @meetu @dig­i­tal­hu­man­ist @imagine_rit @ivan­mironchuk @ljc @cee­jayoz @robertjwhit­ney @laerm @Jes­sicaLovesMe #
• Woot! My pass­port has been found and is in the mail! #
• http://​twit​pic.​com/​41fm5 – Male yellow war­bler at the RIT band­ing sta­tion #
• http://​twit​pic.​com/​41gge – Male red-​winged black­bird at the RIT band­ing. #
• http://​twit​pic.​com/​41k8f – Myrtle (yellow rumped war­bler) at RIT band­ing sta­tion #

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• Ugg, been sick for the last two days. Feel­ing better today, but still not 100%. Still, I’m good enough to haul my butt to class. #
• won­der­ing why all mobile twit­ter­ing clients don’t have twit­ter­pic built in…. #
• http://​twit​pic.​com/​3ejir – danny says eat a rain­bow! #
• @scott_ish sec­onded! in reply to scott_ish #
• Work­ing on descrip­tion of the course I’ll be teach­ing at Cor­nell next year #
• It shouldn’t effect your google sync set­tings at all (though you will have to set that up again if you don’t have an on phone backup pro­gram #
• @mikeru­bits then my work is done. in reply to mikeru­bits #
• I just realaized that the single page tem­plate on my blog doesn’t con­tain a com­ments form! Blarg! To Dreamweaver… away! #
• PHP: 5, Matt: 2 #
• Ok… single post tem­plate is not *as* broken. Will try to really fix it over the week­end. #
• Single post tem­plate fixed. Final score Matt: 10, Php/Wordpress: 8… #

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RIT is count­ing down the days to the Inno­va­tion Fes­ti­val. At Cor­nell we’re count­ing down days until the end of term. And at 15 Hamp­ton Way, we’re count­ing down the days until we have a new kitchen.

It began with get­ting a new floor. And then we real­ized that the new floor would make the cab­i­nets look worse. So we decided to upgrade the cab­i­nets. Then the con­trac­tors sug­gested a number of great ideas. Sud­denly clos­ets were being knocked out, new doors are being planned, gran­ite is being bought, etc. And with that, we crossed the final thresh­old: new appliances.

Quoth the God­fa­ther: “Every time we try to get out, they keep pulling us back in.”

And as this post would be use­less with­out pic­tures, behold the kitchen as it cur­rently stands:

The old linoleum floor has already been torn out, the closet that used to be to the left of the pic­ture has been removed. The cab­i­nets will be torn out this week­end. On Wednes­day, our new cab­i­nets arrived:

So cur­rently our garage is filled with a bunch of new Hick­ory cab­i­nets, which as it turns out are “eco-friendly” — not sure what that means:

and, with­out fur­ther adieu,  behold the new cabinets:

• pet peeve #643 — *Tech* Mag­a­zine web­sites that don’t use the right meta-​data to directly import into zotero (I’m talk­ing to you Wired!) #
• This morn­ing is offi­cially “punk cover” morn­ing at 512 Wyck­off Rd! –> Down by law “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” #
• Just listed myself in the http://​localtweeps.com local Twit­ter direc­tory in ZIP 14526 #
• Check out this inter­na­tional “Stand by me” (the song) pro­duced by (red)wire mag­a­zine (http://​www.​red​wire.com) — http://​vimeo.​com/​2​8​97417 #
• Ballz! Didn’t get an NSF grant… looks like I’m teach­ing at Cor­nell next year… #

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The anthro department’s per­spec­tive stu­dent week­end just wrapped up. A number of the stu­dents who were accepted into the pro­gram were vis­it­ing to learn a bit more about the pro­gram and see if this is a place they’d like to be. So there were a number of events and par­ties — and sice the depart­ment is full of food­ies, also a lot of good eats. Friday night was a pot-​luck dinner, and I made a double batch of these brown­ies. And, due to pop­u­lar request (at the pot-​luck), I made another batch for the grad stu­dent party the next night.

This recipe is a Dre orig­i­nal, that she’s been devel­op­ing for a number of years. Make ‘em and enjoy!

Dre’s Super-Awesome-Quadruple-Chocolate-Salty-Brownies Recipe

Pre­heat oven to 350°

Step 1: The fudge base

• 15 Tbl salted butter
• 1 sq. unsweet­ened chocolate
• 6 Tbl Dutch-​processed cocoa
• 3 Tbl nat­ural “regular” cocoa
• 1 1/2 c. gran­u­lated sugar
• 3/4 tsp fine sea salt

Melt above over low to medium-​low heat until choco­late is fully melted. Longer is better here. You want to make sure the sugar has fully melted, as this is what will give it the “brownie” top (thanks to Cooks Illus­trated for that finding)

Step 2: Bind­ing agent
Remove from heat. Add:

• 1/2 Tbl vanilla extract
• 3 large eggs

Beat well, adding the eggs one at a time — it helps them inte­grate faster. Make sure that the fudge isn’t too hot or you’ll cook the eggs.

Step 3: Flour, more choco­late, pour, & top
Mix in small bowl:

• 1 c. flour
• 1/2 tsp. baking POWDER

Add the flour powder mix­ture to batter in pan and blend well. If you want to add choco­late chips and nuts, I’d use 1/2 c. to 1 cup of choco­late chips (we sug­gest a dark/semisweet chip like Hershey’s Dark) and 1/2 to 3/4 c. chopped pecans (or just top with the pecans in the next step). Dump these in and mix it up.

Pour batter into parchment-​lined 13″x9″ pan. If you want a slightly more salty-​burst brown­ies, sprin­kle some coarse sea salt on top (note: if you do this, ice cream really is a must have to bal­ance the salt. Also: DO NOT sub­sti­tute koshser salt for the coarse salt, it won’t work).

Step 4: Bake, cool, & enjoy
Bake at 350 degrees just until done — so, they should still have moist crumbs when you test them. Start check­ing at 20 min­utes. DO NOT OVER­BAKE! Or else, the heart­break of dry brown­ies! Cool on wire-​rack. Enjoy with your favorite ice cream.  They taste really good refrigerated.