Thanksgiving

We did Thanksgiving this weekend with my parents. I’m a big fan of doing holiday gatherings not on holidays, whenever possible, because traveling and planning is so much easier. Some menu notes from this year:

• I spatchcocked the turkey, coated it in mayonnaise and bird herbs and cooked at 450° for about 80 minutes (it was a 12.something pound bird). Came out fantastic. Only tough part is going full Predator and pulling the backbone out.
• If you’re going to make sweet potato casserole and attempt to cook it with the turkey at 450°, do not put it under the turkey pan unless you want the marshmallows to immediately caramelize.
• I made the easy self-rising biscuits with King Arthur Self Rising Flour. Easy, like it says, came out great.
• Homemade cranberry sauce is the big winner (for me). I did it this year with 1/4 cup of red wine we had open and orange zest.
• Stuffing and gravy we’ve outsourced to store bought. Both take too long to make for the end result (and you won’t have any drippings cooking the turkey the way I did).
• Maple-Honey Pecan Pie for dessert. A++++, would eat again.

I don’t have any pictures because this isn’t Instagram. I made the food, I ate the food.

Speaker of the House

I ordered new speakers / tried out switching around the ones we had. I picked up the two base, not ad-revenue-driven “smart speakers” on the market, the Apple Homepod Mini and the Ikea Symfonisk shelfspeaker. Both are around $100. They’re both… ok. They work for what I wanted them for, the Homepod (mini) is in an office, and the Symfonisk is in the basement literally being used as a shelf. If I didn’t also want a shelf I think a stereo pair of dumb speakers would have blown it away. I also tried the mini as the output for the TV (haha - no!), and tried the Homepod in place of the lower-end soundbar we have. I think a stereo pair of Homepods would sound great. I’d think a stereo pair up front and stereo minis as satellites should work really great. I expect that will be a thing Apple sells and supports just before the heat-death of the universe.

etc

• Why SOLID principles are still the foundation for modern software architecture. I liked this article from one of the Stack Overflow emails this week. Good examples of SOLID were always from class based languages, which made it hard to get in my head which had (until recently) only had working knowledge of languages that didn’t have classical inheritance at all.
• The secret of the macOS Monterey network quality tool never hit fast.com again!
• I haven’t finished a book since early September. Maybe because I tend to read for a few hours on weekend mornings when I am reading a lot, and those hours have been replaced with mountain biking. Or I got stuck on a boring book and found myself overly distracted reading digital ones. Either way, I got some more dead-tree books today. Winter is coming, and all.