Nick Pegg

I don’t cook/bake all that often, but when I do I like to have some fun with it. I came up with a ham recipe that turned out well, so I figured I’d share it with everyone.

First, put your ham in a baking pan and cut the diamond pattern into it. Trust Alton Brown when he says that utility knives work well for this. Then, mix the following in a bowl

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground mustard
• 4 ounces of fine bourbon. My preference is Maker’s Mark.

Once you have that all mixed up, pack it gently onto the ham. Uniformity is nice, but not required. Then cook the ham at 325 degrees Fahrenheit until the inside meat temperature reaches 150 degrees (about 3 hours with a 20 pound ham). I guarantee that it’ll be tasty when it’s done.

I figured I’d post the latest graph magic from my work at Nucor-Yamato Steel. This is a graph of the entire network, switches AND hosts!

(click for full-sized version, warning: LARGE image)

Here, the yellow boxes are center switches/routers, the green boxes are switches, and the peach-colored nodes are hosts. Also, red lines are switch-to-switch connections and blue lines are switch-to-host connections.

Another somewhat off-topic thing about these graphs is that the manager of IT at Nucor-Yamato is interested in open-sourcing the code that manages all of the data and generates these graphs, AND let me use company time to work on and manage the project. If anyone knows of any open-source project (or software that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg) that already does network discovery, data collection, and automated mapping then please let me know! If I’m not going to be re-inventing the wheel, then I’ll probably be kicking the project off shortly after I start working full-time in June 2010.

I’m glad to announce that my recent pet project, Beertraq, is now in a (somewhat closed) beta stage! The basic idea is there and functioning, but the extra functionality isn’t done and it’s far from polished. Nonetheless, it’s time to take her for a test drive!

So what is Beertraq, you ask? It’s a way for you to keep track of which beers you’ve tasted, compare those with others, read beer reviews, and most importantly discover new beers to try. I originally got the idea from The Flying Saucer’s UFO Club, where members work toward a goal of drinking 200 different beers. Once they complete the task, they get their name on a plate which gets put on the wall of the bar. The cool part about the UFO Club is that it’s all computerized, using a magstripe card to login at a kiosk in the bar. You can also log in to their website to check your progress and read reviews on there. I figured that if The Flying Saucer can have that system for their bar, I could do the same for the world.

If you’re interested in becoming a BeerTraq beta user, send an email to beertraq (at) beertraq (dot) com with the email address you want to use for your account. All I ask is that you give feedback by filling out issue requests with bugs you find or suggestions you might have.