Last night Shannon, Sarah, and I went out to do some field work for the girls company.  I was tasked to come along cause they had heard that there was possibly some squatters on the land and they wanted to have someone big along to look scary.  I’m not really sure that I it the scary part of that but I am big.  I brought the camera along since they were going to be doing the work around sunset I figured I could get some good “Magic Hour” light to shoot.  Since I’ve been wanting to try out my old GPS as a track logger for Geo Tagging my pictures I made sure it was charged up and ready to go.  The shooting went well and this morning I took to the task of importing and trying to get the shots geo-tagged.

I followed my normal routine of importing the pictures into Aperture, the next step was to get the track log off the GPS and into the standard GPX format.  The Magellan eXplorist 500 that I was using, has it’s own track format that is luckily enough just a standard text file.  I could have written a program to do the conversion but being the lazy bastard I am instead of engaging my brain I used the Google brain instead and found a nice free app for Mac/Windows/Linux called GPS Babel that supports conversion to & from a metric fuck ton of formats for GPS data.

After the conversion step was handled it was as simple as pulling the file into the software I found to do the tagging.  It’s called GPS Photo Linker a free piece of software from a company called Early Innovations. It’s totally free and seems to work really good.

The only gotcha I found is because we weren’t always moving around some of the GPS track log points were more then 2 minutes apart and this caused the default settings of the program to miss some of the tags on the first pass.  I just upped the limit to 5 minutes and everything worked perfectly.

All the gooders from last night are in this flickr set: Sunset Owl Survey to checkout the location you can hit the view map button on the right hand menu in each picture.

Categories: Photography
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It’s my fiancée’s birthday today so last night I made her birthday cake.  It’s a traditional southern coconut cake, I used Alton Brown’s recipe from his Coconut Cake Revival episode of Good Eats.  It turned out pretty awesome, it was a lot of work though so I wouldn’t suggest making this for an everyday thing but a birthday or some other special occasion this would be a good choice for a coconut lover.

One note, buying coconuts at the grocery store is full of dragons, I got 1 completely rotten one, and a couple that had some black sections but were mostly fine.  So be careful.

Full Set of images are on Flickr

Categories: Culinary Experiments
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One night last week I decided to make burgers for dinner, since I didn’t feel like making plain old burgers I decided to make blue cheese stuffed bison burgers.

• .5 kg ground bison
• 1 large egg
• 2 tbs sweet chili sauce
• 1 tbs dijon mustard
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 onion (diced small & caramelized)
• 1/2 package cream cheese (4 ounces)
• 4 ounces blue cheese
• 1-2 ounces panko bread crumbs

The process is simple enough I started by dicing and caramelizing 1/2 a sweet onion

Once the onions were caramelized I moved them to a bowl to cool so that they wouldn’t start cooking the meat once I started mixing the burgers.  Next I mixed the cream and blue cheeses together into a paste, at first I tried doing this with them at room temperature but to make it easier I heated it a bit in the microwave for about 15 seconds to loosen it up a bit.

Setting aside the cheese mixture it was time to make the burger mix

After mixing this with a wooden spoon I added the bread crumbs a bit at a time until I had the consistency I wanted.

I then formed thin patties out of the burger mixture, I made the patties extra thin since we will be sandwiching 2 together around the filling to make the final burger.

I ended up with enough meat to make 3 of the filled patties and one non filled patty that was a bit on the small side.  Next I put about a tablespoon and a half (give or take) of the cheese filling on half the patties.

After getting each patty filled to about a centimeter from the edge Take the other patty half and place it on top lightly pinching to seal the outside edge.

  All ready to go on the grill

I threw the burgers on the grill for about 6 minutes a side until they looked done to me.

My bun all ready for consumption after a light buttering and toasting

The final dinner with kernel corn as a side

Over all they turned out really good, except for the mouth burning of the hot cheese when biting into the burgers.  All the photos are available in this flickr set.

Categories: Culinary Experiments
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