CJC.org

This is Alton Brown’s recipe for quickly roasting a chicken. The NYT Food section had a similar recipe, though they didn’t name the cutting technique as “butterflying”. In this case, the technique is more interesting than the ingredients.

Broiled, Butterflied Chicken

Recipe courtesy of Alton Brown

1 1/2 teaspoons black peppercorns
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 lemon, zested
Extra virgin olive oil
Onions, carrots and celery cut into 3 to 4-inch pieces
3 to 4-pound broiler/fryer chicken
1 cup red wine
8 ounces chicken stock
2 to 3 sprigs thyme
Canola oil

Position the oven rack 8 inches from the flame/coil and turn broiler to high. Crack peppercorns with a mortar and pestle until coarsely ground. Add garlic and salt and work well. Add lemon zest and work just until you can smell lemon. Add just enough oil to form a paste.

Check out your refrigerator for onions, carrots and celery that are a little past their prime. Cut vegetables into pieces and place in a deep roasting pan.

Place chicken on a plastic cutting board breast-side down. Using kitchen shears, cut ribs down one side of back bone and then the other and remove. Open chicken like a book and remove the keel bone separating the breast halves by slicing through the thin membrane covering it, then by placing two fingers underneath the bone and levering it out. Turn chicken breast-side up and spread out like a butterfly by pressing down on the breast and pulling the legs towards you. Loosen the skin at the neck and the edges of the thighs. Evenly distribute the garlic mixture under the skin, saving 2 teaspoons for the jus. Drizzle the skin with oil and rub in, being sure to cover the bird evenly. Drizzle oil on bone side of chicken as well.

Arrange bird in roasting pan, breast up, atop vegetables.

Place pan in oven being sure to leave the oven door ajar. Check bird in 10 minutes. If the skin is a dark mahogany, hold the drumstick ends with paper towels and flip bone-side up. Cook 12 to 15 minutes or until the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees. Juices must run clear. Remove and place chicken into a deep bowl and cover loosely with foil.

Tilt pan so that any fat will pool at corner. Siphon this off with a bulb baster. (This fat is great in vinaigrettes). Set pan over 2 burners set on high. Deglaze pan with a few shots of red wine and scrape brown bits from bottom using a carrot chunk held with tongs. Add chicken stock, thyme, the remaining garlic paste and reduce briefly to make a jus. Strain out vegetables and discard. Slice chicken onto plates or serve in quarters. Sauce lightly with jus and serve.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 30 minutes
Difficulty: Easy

Recipe URL

PS: Other similar recipes don’t say “broil”, but “roast”, at 500 degrees. This will be easier than in my oven, where the broiler is a separate compartment too small for a chicken.

Yesterday, I had the displeasure of installing Oracle 9i (9.2.0.whatever) on one servers in the collection of soon-to-be demo machines. Some comments about this:

1. There’s the years-outstanding issue of needing an X server to install the damn thing. In Oracle 7 days, and possibly 8.0, back before this whole silly “i” thing got rolling, Oracle was a pleasure to install: just use a text log in and go through the install in text mode. The DBA class I took years ago mentioned the GUI installer, but we used text mode for everything (instilling or reinforcing in me a long-held bias against GUI tools for DBA work). It was neat: you don’t need fancy graphics if all you’re doing is selecting a bunch of check boxes. Curses-based displays might be necessary, and was for orainst, but, hey, that’s no big deal. But for the past few years, since the dreaded “i”, we’ve had to run GUI install tools. Not just any GUI install tools, but Java-based GUI install tools, ones that would barf all over the multi-windowed Exceed X server I had running: I’m forced to kill all my X clients to set up single-window Exceed, or find a Sun box and put a head on it just to install the software. Big, slow, piggish, with little added functionality. I’m told there’s a way to script the install procedure so that a GUI isn’t always needed, but the GUI is needed the first time through to do the script, and we don’t do enough Oracle installs to make that worthwhile.

2. 500MB of /tmp free space on Solaris just to install?! Oh my god. Well, not the copying of the software from CD to $ORACLE_HOME, but the relinking that’s done to prepare Oracle binaries is what burns up all that space. This is insane. 500MB of free /tmp on a Solaris box implies at least 800MB of swap + RAM, say, a gig to be safe, since our box with 756MB swap + RAM got blown out. I remember installing an Oracle 7 on my rickety old Sparc5, with maybe 64MB of RAM and a tiny 2G hard drive, with Solaris already installed and probably only a 192MB of swap. We hadn’t run into this problem before, since we were installing Oracle on Enterprise boxes, which did have a gig or two of RAM to throw around on them, but this install was on an old Ultra 10. In this sense, Oracle doesn’t want to be bothered with installations for developers’ personal use, to, say, prototype before moving on to the enterprise boxes. Or they figure they’re all running Windows for dev work, and probably Oracle Personal edition (or whatever the 9i version of things is called) installs OK on PCs.

3. The new thinking about the init.ora parameters file confuses me. But this is less Oracle’s stupidity than my falling behind the times in the DBA world. A few months ago, my old boss asked if I could consult on an Oracle installation he was dealing with at his new job up in Westchester. I declined: the work sounded more difficult that I could reasonably claim to be able to do, since my skills were very rusty, and there would be some forensic work involved (they were firing the current DBA, and they weren’t sure what he’d done to the databases). I can set up instances of Oracle, network them in a basic way so that JDBC clients can get to them, and make sure they don’t fill up, etc. It’s basic work, but it’s all that’s required right now. We’re not running databases that have to be up 24/7/365-or-else. We’re not even running databases that have to be particularly large or fast, just good enough for developers to work on, and then take their work over to the clients installations, where real, fulltime DBAs can set up their systems optimally.

I’ve put in this category count hack, to show the number of postings for each category.

I just implemented the most excellent B2 Link Manager, so that most of the various links on the side bar can be stored in the DB, as opposed to being a static part of template.

The Wall Street Journal article on Tivo picking out weird suggestions. That, or Tivo suggestions as images of the self. Something like that.

For some reason, I got it into my head this morning to run an ego search, i.e., search for your name on Google (or, in the past, Altavista, say). My own web site doesn’t pop up until the second or third page of hits, and it’s usually four-year-old movie reviews and some technical postings for the rest (the tape backup software and CIPE have the web-ified mailing list archives).

Anyway, I found that an old movie review of mine has popped up in some UNC Charlotte Film Studies class this past spring:

http://www.uncc.edu/rcreimer/class minutes Jan 30-02.htm

It’s the last review on the page.

I’m slightly weirded by the hyperlink on my name, since it points to a local drive on the instructor’s machine.

The page leading to this seems to an archives of class minutes:

http://www.uncc.edu/rcreimer/class_minutes_for_forl_3160_spri.htm

January 30 is the page the review appears on, and February 4 is when they discussed Life is Beautiful.

Glancing through some of the other links, I see that this whole Internet thing has some part in modern pedagogy, since the professor seems to be drawing on Usenet reviews (where I posted), as well as Ebert archives, the IMDB (of course (actually, the Usenet review part might have come from IMDB, since they maintain an archive of postings to the relevant groups) and that semi-crappy Epinions site. This makes me feel a little old, actually. I remember having a typewriter freshman year, and typing out in the hallway so as not to wake my roommate up with the clickety-clack of the thing. I didn’t get a computer of my own until senior year, and it didn’t have a network connection or modem. Ah, well.

So, at the end of yesterday’s class, as I was doing back-and-forth-roundhouse with Mitsu, I threw him ippon and I heard a riiipppp. I looked down, and thought, crap: there was a rip along the inner seam running from the knee up about four inches. The hole didn’t get any larger: this pair of pants were sturdier than the other pair that was destroyed on Thursday. That, and Mitsu didn’t put his foot through it with intention of making the hole larger, unlike some people.

Sensei heard the rip, and saw me looking on my pant leg, but didn’t think there was a hole — she couldn’t see it, since it was on my left leg — because, seriously, what’s the likelihood of two gi pants being destroyed within three classes? The line sitting in seiza from around Jose up were tittering, though, since they could see the rip.

I did tell sensei that the pants had ripped after class. She suggested not using bleach when I wash the gi. That, and to get someone to change the pant length, so I don’t step on it when throwing, since that’s what’s causing the rip in the first place.

This one’s probably reparable, though I’m going to Honda today to pick up more pants anyway, since I need pants for the other gi, and since I want to go to Steve’s class this evening. I need to pick up sparring gloves and shin pads, also, for Friday classes.

The other thing was that I was up for the back-and-forth at the end of class through five partners, including being just uke for sensei. I was told after class that the point of all that was to improve my ukemi, and to start working on my cardiovascular endurance.

The current cardio goal is to be able to do technique for, say, half-an-hour continuously without dying at the end of that. I’m told this doesn’t quite compare to, say, half-an-hour on the Ellipse machine, because no one is hitting you while you’re on the Ellipse. Intensity is probably higher, also: much more stop and start, compared to my being able to read the Economist while on the machine. The idea is to get out of breath, but to be able to recover breath while on the relative stop periods. So, I guess I should use the interval training course, with a higher resistance level. This is all for a brown belt test many months from now.

Was there new technique last night? I don’t remember. There’s the variation of hand-through-face, but against roundhouse: you just have to accept that the punching arm will wrap around your head. The hand technique for seio-nage off roundhouse has also suddenly become confusing again.

Here’s a link for the MTA neighborhood maps, those really detailed street maps that show such things as subway station entrances. You can find the poster-sized maps near the token booths of subway stations. You can find the PDFs of those maps here.

Update: For some mysterious reason, the MTA has removed these files from public access. Should have archived them locally.

I looked this up because we have a combination lock that I’ve forgotten the combination for. I remembered that this brand of MasterLock was trivially cracked in Stuyvesant — a fertile ground for the lock cracking meme to spread by wildfire. So, in this age of google and personal web pages, I found this by some guy at Harvard, possibly from Stuy or Bronx Science for all I know: Master Lock Combination Cracking

I didn’t realize the combination numbers were so simply related. Basically:

Get the last number. This can be found by pulling and wiggling the dial. There are twelve points on the dial that are “stop” points. Seven of these are fake ones: they’re the ones that stop between two tick marks. Of the remaining five, four of them are equal, mod 10. The remaining one is the last number of the combination. Note that older, banged around locks are trickier to crack, because the dial may have shifted, and the true last number may now fall behind two tick marks.

The first number is equal to the last number, mod 4.

The second number is (second number%4) = (last number%4) + 2.

This leaves a hundred possible combinations which can be brute forced.

There’s an alternate method available at this geocities link.

A Columbia University professor, dumpster diving into NYC Sanitation Department records, has found a number of counterintuitive things about the amount of garbage we’ve been throwing out of the past century.

In particular, garbage collected per person peaked in 1940 at over 2000 pounds per person, compared to the current 928 pounds per person in our disposable age. New York’s garbage per person has remained more or less steady for the past twenty years, in fact. The composition of the garbage has also grown progressively more organic, i.e., compostable. Further, the heyday of recycling wasn’t the 1970s, but the 1890s Gilded Age, when mandatory garbage sorting was first set into law.

A major force behind garbage quantities is the market. In recent years, our disposable containers and wrappers have gotten progressively lighter as manufacturers have tried to save materials and shipping costs. This lightening has actually offset the increased use of containers and wrappers.