My cousin and his wife Karen (i.e. Family) are visiting us this weekend. My cuz is an artist, an ice sculptor and he also works with sand! This is the second year he has visited us while doing work up in Niles MI, but the first time Karen has come to visit us. In fact, its the first time Karen and my wife have met :-)

Anyways, one of the means I used to entice Karen to visit us, was my incessant twittering about food, mwahahaha…

Tomorrow Natalie is working, and Stephan is exhausted, so we’ll miss church this week while I get things ready for a big lunch.

I’ll probably be getting up at around 7am to start the smoker(s) (I’ve converted my grill to a smoker too), and be occupied with that until close to 2pm when Nat gets home from work, and hopefully the food is ready. I’m making ribs! St Louis cut spare ribs and baby back ribs!

Karen was gracious enough to help me with the rib prep today. Cutting the spare ribs down to St Louis style ribs and making the rub and then getting all the racks and extra bits seasoned and in the fridge. We (well me at least) had a great time hanging out, talking about everything from their “MONUMENTAL WEDDING!” to when Natalie and I were thinking about starting a family.

Since moving to Indiana Natalie and I have become very very close, but we haven’t made too many friends, so it was really nice to talk to someone else at length, and just hang out all day, being silly, going on road trip with the dogs (four of them!) to see Stephan, and of course working on the ribs together.

Well, I’ll make sure and post tons of pics tomorrow! I’m really looking forward to this!

My uncle has been bugging me to help him with writing some software for awhile now, and this last weekend he sent me another email with a new idea, to help him in his business. I had some time available this week, so I decided to drive down to his shop and try something. My goal was to take his simple idea, boil it down to its essence, and write the whole application in a day using Rails.

To prepare myself I started working on TDD again, using shoulda and factory_girl. I also built my own version of bort from the ground up, called pudding (it has a couple flavors, including vanilla and tapioca). I tried to find the right mix of features to give myself a running start when I arrived onsite.

I arrived at 8:30am this morning and started programming at 9am. At first things were going fairly well, building my models out using TDD went fast, and I was rolling along nicely on writing my controllers using TDD when I hit a wall, aka, lack of knowledge on my part. After hitting this wall for 45 minutes I finally gave up on TDD and just went back to my old way of doing things, i.e. no testing.

I was back on a roll again, using my osx theme for the admin interface, and blueprint for the css reset, typography, and layout on the technician facing part of the application (the part that will be used the most).

Things were going along nicely until I ran into issues with the way I was doing ajax modals, via thickbox. I’d already implemented quite a bit using thickbox, when I decided I needed to start over on my modals using a different library. So far I think I’m gonna use jqModal.

So, at 4:30pm I called it quits for the day, realizing my “app in a day” dream was not gonna happen, although I believe I’m about a 1/3rd of the way there, which isn’t too bad.

Lessons learned?

• I need to work quite a bit more on testing, I need to know it like the back of my hand
• I need to have a sample controller built out in my pudding apps, so I can do a bit of copy/paste when building my controllers
• It would also be nice to include my osx theme, and blueprint theme in my pudding apps
• I need to get better at jQuery, and find the best plugins for my different needs

This article is for small business owners, and even better, for their IT guy/gal… If you are looking at upgrading your phone system, and want to upgrade inexpensively but have a clear upgrade path for the future, I’m going to outline how to build what I believe to be the most cost effective, easy to maintain, pbx based phone system available.

The pbx itself is based on PC hardware, with a special card for interfacing with the telco (ATT, Verizon, etc), and a software stack called PBX in a Flash. PBX in a Flash (PiaF) was put together by a few gentlemen looking for a solid software stack for their telephony needs. Here is what is in the stack:

• CentOS for the OS that everything lies on top of.
• Asterisk for the PBX stack.
• FreePBX helps in configuring and maintaining the Asterisk configuration.
• Prebuilt scripts, for configuring everything from dhcp to cisco phones

For phone hardware I’ve used Cisco, Linksys, and Aastra. Aastra seems to be the recommended brand of late, for features, price, and ease of configuration. I’m not a huge fan of the Cisco phones (overpriced and they seem to cripple their SIP firmware), but Cisco’s economical product line, Linksys, makes some great phones.

Well, there’s the intro for you, if you want to learn more, read on!

Read the Rest

Whiskey Glazed Pork Chops

• 1/2 cup Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey
• 1/2 apple cider
• 2 tablespoons of light brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon dijon mustard
• 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 teaspoons cider vinegar
• 4 bone-in, center-cut pork chops, about 1 inch thick
• 2 teaspoons vegetable oil
• salt and pepper
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1. Whisk together the whiskey, cider, brown sugar, mustard, cayenne, vanilla, and 2 teaspoons of vinegar. Marinate the chops in a quarter (1/4) of this liquid, set aside the rest.
2. Remove chops from the bag, pat dry with paper towels, and discard marinade. Heat up oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until its just starting to smoke. Season the chops with salt and pepper, then throw them in the pan and brown both sides, 2-3 minutes per side. Transfer chops to a plate and cover tightly with foil.
3. Add the rest of the whiskey mix into the skillet and bring to a boil, scraping up any brown bits from the meat. Cook until reduced to a thick glaze, 3 to 5 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low and drain any juices from the chops plate to the mix. Add 2 teaspoons of cider vinegar, whisk in the butter, and simmer until thick and sticky, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove pan from heat.
4. Return chops to skillet and let them rest in the pan until sauce clings to them, turning to coat both sides. Leave in there while they finish cooking, about 5 minutes.

Country Style Tomatoes

• 4 large tomatoes
• 8oz of cream cheese
• 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1/4 teaspoon of salt
• flour
• bread crumbs
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon of milk
• 3 tablespoons of butter
• 3 tablespoons of olive oil

1. Cut each tomato into four thick slices, and then place on paper towels to drain. In a small bowl beat the cream cheese, basil, garlic and salt until blended. Spread mixture onto half the tomato slices and then top with remaining slices.
2. Place flour and bread crumbs in separate pie pans, in another pan whisk egg and milk. Coat top and bottom of each tomato stack with flour, then egg mixture, and then bread crumbs.
3. In a large skillet, heat butter and oil over medium-high heat. Fry tomato sandwiches in batches for 3-4 minutes on each side or until golden brown. Drain on paper towels and serve.

If you are using a Rhino Equipment card as your pstn or digital interface to the telco, and need help setting it up on your asterisk based PBX, look no further!

This google doc has just the instructions you need. (thanks to James at Rhino for these great instructions!)

Also, as far as telco cards go, I couldn’t recommend anyone better than Rhino. Their cards are great, and their technical support is the best I’ve ever had from any company, EVER. They are, simply put, amazing at what they do.

Oh yeah, when it comes to open source PBX platforms, PBX in a Flash is the best I’ve found. I’ve tried Asterisk@Home, Trixbox, and a couple others. PiaF is easy to setup, clean, and simple.