Septembeard Progress Report – Week 1

Dan - Week 1 (06-Sep-2011)

Dan - Week 1 (06-Sep-2011)

Just a quick post to share what the beard is starting out as. I let it grow in over the long weekend (Labor Day here in the States) and then trimmed up before work on Monday. These posts will be regularly updated on Mondays going forward. I may throw in the occasional Friday post as well if I feel like it.

Remember, if you’d like to make a donation, you can click here: Donate Here!

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Growing A Beard To Kick Cancer In The Nuts!

Hi Folks –

I have dedicated the month of September to growing a beard in an effort to raise money for Prostate Cancer Research. Septembeard.org is running this great event.

I would appreciate it very much if you took a few minutes to click on the link below and make a donation to this great cause (any amount is very much appreciated).

Donate Here!

Gentlemen – A call to action! If you are interested in participating in this great effort, please let me know via email. I’ll add you to the team and together we can raise money to kick cancer in the nuts!

Thanks in advance for your donation.

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Grilled Elk Sausage How-To

The folks over at Ballistic BBQ have a great new YouTube video up where they show you how to grill some Elk Sausage.  I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen much Elk Sausage around me.  The techniques shown, however, are quite interesting and I’m sure can be used for many different types of sausage.

Enjoy!

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BNpFX7mmVA[/tube]

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Geeking Over Guacamole

'Guacamole with Smoked Tofu' photo (c) 2010, Janet Hudson - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/Taste buds are a funny, funny thing.  When I was young – and when I say young, I really mean up until probably three years ago – I wouldn’t eat anything that didn’t fit into the meat, potato, grain or pasta categories.  Vegetables, for the most part, were a big no-no for me and fruits were even more non-existent in my diet.  Then, out of the blue, I started trying all kinds of different foods.  Maybe it was my trip to Japan (about seven years ago) that opened my thought process or the fact that a man can eat only so many steak and potato dinners (Author’s Note: The maximum quantity of steak and potato dinners a man can in a lifetime eat is still TBD.  Research is ongoing…).  Regardless of the reason, I started exploring lots of different foods and found that I enjoyed most of them.

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Spice Up Those Supermarket Hamburgers

'frozen hamburger patties' photo (c) 2006, stu_spivack - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/We are all busy.  It’s a fact.  Most of us do not have time to make our meals from scratch.  In an ideal world, we would all shop only from the outside aisles of the supermarket and buy only the ingredients that we need to craft our meals from the basic building blocks on up.  However, in a realistic world, that just does not happen.  Work, kids, family and personal responsibilities all get in the way.  That means that we need to sometimes make do with what’s already put together for us.

Outdoor cooking is happening all over the country during this time of year.  Hamburgers make up a big part of that activity.  We’ve previously discussed how to make some great hamburgers on this site.  That article talks about how to put together a small set of ingredients to make a tasty hamburger.  But what do you do when time prohibits you from making hamburgers from a large pile of ground beef?  How about sprucing up your store bought hamburger patties?

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Excuse The Sabbatical

'Drink on the beach' photo (c) 2009, Christian Haugen - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

If only the last two months were spent sipping drinks on the beach...

I wish that my time away from this blog was spent sipping drinks on a beach like the one shown in the picture. Fortunately and unfortunately, life has been a whirlwind of ups and downs over the last two plus months.  I seem to have made it out on the other side in a better position than when I started, but it has been tough going.

I last posted here in early/mid-May. At that point, the company I was working for had just entered into an acquisition process where we would be consumed by a much larger company. There was a lot of work required to make the acquisition happen and, as you can imagine, most of my time was spent working on that project. Despite all the hard work, everything seemed to be lining up perfectly.  Then it all went south in the first few days of June. The deal fell through (for reasons that are unimportant here) and all of us employees were let go as the company I worked for went bankrupt.

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Quadrotor Robots Master Flying in Formation

Chalk this up to the fact that I just thought it was cool – both the visual and the technology.

Originally posted at HowtoGeek.com:

The GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania is doing some interesting work with UAV quadrotors–tiny four helicopter blade unmanned aerial machines that are as deft as hummingbirds. In the above video they’re demonstrating a new addition to the program, the ability of the quadcopters to fly in formation and maintain formation even when units are removed from the configuration. It’s an impressive display and more than a little unsettling (the hornet like humming of the group certainly doesn’t help matters).

Trajectory Design and Control for Aggressive Formation Flight with Quadrotors [YouTube via IEEE Spectrum]

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