Dave Schumaker

Today is Pi Day! March 14th, 3/14 and all that. Kerry and and I decided to celebrate by baking this recipe for an awesome Apple Pie.

Ingredients

• 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 6 Golden Delicious apples - peeled, cored and sliced
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons whiskey (!)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (225 degrees C). Fit bottom crust into a 9 inch pie plate.
2. In a small bowl, mix together sugar, flour, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Place sliced apples in a large bowl and sprinkle with sugar mixture. Toss until apples are thoroughly coated. Spoon apples into pan.
3. Dot apples with butter or margarine, then sprinkle with whiskey. Cover with top crust. Seal edges and cut steam vents in top.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 10 minutes. Lower temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) and bake an additional 40 minutes. Serve warm.

The verdict? Holy awesome! Pi Day is great. :)

Via: http://grist.org/article/high-gas-prices-whatevs-my-phone-gets-me-where-i-want-to-go/

“The iPhone is the Ford Mustang of today,” Thilo Koslowski, Gartner’s lead automotive analyst, recently told the New York Times. What’s caused the change? For starters, driving has lost its cool with young Americans, who frankly have better things to do than sit behind the wheel of a tin can lodged in gridlock. And then there are gas prices that are expected to top $4.25 a gallon by April.

Via: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/02/im-being-followed-how-google-and-104-other-companies-are-tracking-me-on-the-web/253758/

This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging sites, and other, smaller ad firms. Nearly instantaneously, these companies can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add to the ever-growing online file about you.

I've been trying to cook a bit more lately and tried out this recipe for tofu and veggies in peanut sauce tonight. It was pretty awesome! The peanut sauce was especially tasty.

And of course, it went perfect with copious amounts of Sriracha.

We slightly modified the ingredients though and added garlic and and replaced the molasses with honey. The new recipe?

Ingredients 1 tablespoon peanut oil 1 small head broccoli, chopped 1 small red bell pepper, chopped 5 fresh mushrooms, sliced 1 pound firm tofu, cubed 1/2 cup peanut butter 1/2 cup hot water 2 tablespoons vinegar 2 tablespoons soy sauce 1 1/2 tablespoons honey 1 tablespoon of garlic Directions 1. Heat oil in a large skillet or wok over medium-high heat. Saute broccoli, red bell pepper, mushrooms, garlic, and tofu for 5 minutes. 2. In a small bowl combine peanut butter, hot water, vinegar, soy sauce, and honey. Pour over vegetables and tofu. Simmer for 3 to 5 minutes, or until vegetables are tender crisp.

This image from over a year ago at Dolores Park in San Francisco is especially relevant today. Blue skies, mid 60's, an otherwise perfect day!

Last summer, Kerry and I moved into the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland. For one reason or another, life has been pretty busy over the past 6 months, leaving us little time to explore our "new" city.

Well, that ended today! We set out to Jack London Square and the Warehouse District for some good eats at Chop Bar. It was pretty good! According to various tips on Foursquare, they serve the "best hamburgers in all of the East Bay." It's definitely on my todo list for next time.

Walking around Jack London Square, we discovered some tall ships docked in the harbor.

Then there was this awesome statue of Cheemah, Mother of the Spirit-Fire -- it's part of a worldwide project to celebrate " cultural diversity, world unity and care for the earth." Awesome!

After that, we walked around Old Oakland. The buildings have this beautiful old architecture about them and the whole neighborhood was just awesome. So, obviously, the only thing I took a picture of was a sign. D'oh! Time to go back.

From there, we walked back to our neighborhood in North Oakland. Interestingly enough, the Oakland North blog is running a series on the history of the Temescal District today.

Speaking of Temescal history, earlier this weekend, some friends and I explored the Kingfish Pub, an old dingy dive bar in the neighborhood. Some commenters on Yelp have claimed that it's the "second oldest bar in Oakland," but I've yet to find an official verification of this source.

The SF Gate wrote about it last year:

It's a mystery what, exactly, keeps the Kingfish from collapsing. The roof sags, the beams lean, the floors slope more than some East Bay hills. "The whole place is twisted. There's nothing square in it," said owner Emil Peinert. "One of the windows just popped out."

The Kingfish Pub in its natural environment:

All in all, it was a pretty fun weekend in the East Bay and I've found myself loving it more and more. Others have mentioned that Oakland is San Francisco's own Brooklyn. I believe it!

It's fun. Does this mean I'm about to start saying "hella" though? Maybe not quite yet. ;)

Via: http://techland.time.com/2012/01/26/can-we-stop-talking-about-the-apple-cult-now/

Thirty-seven million iPhones. Fifteen million iPads. Fifteen million iPods. Five million Macs. A million Apple TVs. No matter how you do the math, that’s a boatload of gadgets–and it’s how many Apple sold in the final three months of 2011. The company’s profits–$13.06 billion–were the second-highest in the history of American business, after ExxonMobil’s last quarter of 2008. But I don’t care about Apple’s bottom line. What I find fascinating about these big numbers is what they say about the size of Apple’s customer base. It’s enormous, and still growing. And the larger it becomes, the weirder it gets that some people reflexively dismiss Apple owners as empty-headed, style-obsessed cult members.

Via: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/i-am-lousy-copywriter.html

British-born David Ogilvy was one of the original, and greatest, "ad men." In 1948, he started what would eventually be known as Ogilvy & Mather, the Manhattan-based advertising agency that has since been responsible for some of the world's most iconic ad campaigns, and in 1963 he even wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man, the best-selling book that is still to this day considered essential reading for all who enter the industry. Time magazine called him "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry" in the early-'60s; his name, and that of his agency, have been mentioned more than once in Mad Men for good reason.

Via: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/space-station-concepts/

The history of space station design is littered with concepts -- some elegant, some strange, and some remarkably cute -- that were passed over for one reason or another. Here, we look at some space station ideas that didn’t quite make it off the drawing board.

Via: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/ron-paul-stars-astros-rainbow-uniform-76-congressional-135224691.html

Almost nobody likes Congress. The polls say so. But I'll say this for the federal legislature: Republicans and Democrats play each other in a baseball game every year, and that partly makes up for whatever it is they do the rest of the time. Back in December, Summer Anne Burton of NotGraphs published a wonderful post called "GOP Presidential Candidates and Baseball" that explored how each of the hopefuls has been affiliated with the national pastime.