Donnie’s Blog

Well, it looks like I can postpone my computer upgrades no longer. Over the weekend my computer hung, and when I came in to check it out, there were filesystem journaling errors on the screen. This is after my computer hung two weeks earlier, again with a HDD issue.

So, it looks like my five year old hard disk is on its way out. That’s a pretty good run, although usually I have to upgrade my disks before they fail. So this is a first.

Anyway, the first order of business is to get a new power supply for the computer since it’s struggling as it is; my current power supply is a bit anemic, and with the big graphics card and other components, it has always struggled a bit. That should be on its way (thank you eBay!), so it’s just a matter of ordering the remaining components. I’m going to go with a 500GB Western Digital HDD this time.

I’m also going to begin building out my RAID fileserver in the next few weeks. That will be nice to have taken care of. I am running out of disk space on my laptop, and a survey of my disk contents revealed that it’s mainly iTunes music and digital photos taking up the space. Moving all that stuff onto a fileserver will free up at least 30GB right off the bat.

Progress sure is expensive.

My mom got me a new coffee cup today:

Thanks mom.

Last weekend I did another bagel experiment. This time I made blueberry bagels. I acquired a bag of dried blueberries from Trader Joe’s and chopped up a cup of them as fine as I could with a chef’s knife. Somewhat surprisingly, this created a mash about the same consistency as the contents of Fig Newtons, which made it difficult to work with.

When it came time to make the dough, I threw in chunks of the chopped up blueberry mash, and just worked the dough until everything was uniform. Success! I was very pleased with the results.

Other changes from last time:

• I let the bagels rise a second time after forming them. Good choice.
• Instead of rolling cylinders and trying to join the ends together, I made discs and carefully poked a hole in the center to work them into the bagel shape. Also a good choice.
• I didn’t egg-wash the bagels this time. Doesn’t seem so appropriate for blueberry bagels; they don’t need a golden brown color. They’re blue!

I’m pretty pleased with the results. They taste really good.

I just wrote a post over at Infodder about journalist deaths around the world. I thought it was worth mentioning over here too, since it really is a reality that we don’t comprehend in this country.

It’s dangerous being a journalist. I had no idea.

Last week was so crazy that I just needed to take a break and make some tasty baked treats, so I tried my hand at making bagels over the weekend. It was quite an interesting process, since bagels are different from “normal” bread in two ways. First, bagel dough is much denser than regular bread dough. This makes kneading it much more physically demanding, but if you keep at it then you can produce a very nice malleable dough.

Second, bagels are actually poached in boiling water before they are baked! This is what gives that characteristic “bagel” feel to the bread. You only poach them for about a minute before you get them ready for the oven, so it’s not too crazy.

Anyway, here is a picture of the results (click for a close-up):

My biggest complaint about how they turned out is that they are way too dense. This is because the recipe I used only has you let the dough rise once, before forming it into individual bagels, and I wasn’t smart enough to realize that this would be a problem. Really, you need to let the bagels rise once more, to get that nice fluffy soft result that most people enjoy at the bagel shop.

So, I will probably try this again next weekend, because it was just so fun! My ultimate goal - blueberry bagels. One of my favorite bagels of all time is the blueberry bagel from Goldstein’s Bagel Bakery. It’s a consistent winner, but I just don’t get over there too often anymore. So, if I can only crack the bagel secret then I’ll be able to enjoy them anytime I want.

A few weeks ago we finally decided to eliminate Charter Communications from our lives. We have had cable service from them for a long time (my mom says it’s probably been two decades), and more recently we were using their cable modem services. Over the years the prices have just gone up and up and up, until we were paying a pretty ridiculous monthly price for our services.

So, I priced out DirecTV and DSLExtreme, and discovered that we would save $40-50 every single month, for exactly the same services, just by switching over. Also, we finally got our first DVR as part of the DirecTV package, and now we can watch the shows we like whenever we want. It’s pretty awesome.

I just got everything switched over last week, so we are finally back to where we were before as far as television and Internet access. It’s always a hassle to go through something like that, but it’s infrequent. Saving a bunch of money every month doesn’t hurt, too.