Category: Fun

Deep Fried Philly Steak

In a stroke of pure genius this weekend, my brother created the Deep Fried Philly Steak. For the benefit of mankind, I shall hereby document the process:

Use a frying pan with a touch of olive oil to sautee some vegetables. We used onion, green pepper, mushrooms, and minced garlic, like these:

They might not look so great raw, but fry these bad boys up...

When the vegetables are sauteed to perfection, add sliced beef. We used steak-ums, but I imagine this would be better with something fresher. Fry ’til the beef is done, then add some cheese blend. It’ll look something like this, but more:

Delicious meat... and fat

Next, roll out some roll-up pizza dough, we used the Pillsbury Classic Pizza Crust for ours. Place six slices of provolone on the rolled-out pizza crust and cut in to six squares. Place a ball of your fried treat on each of the slices of provolone:

This is what you're looking for.

Finally, you can top with some mayo if you truly hate your vascular system:

It's a heart attack in the making.

Pull the four corners up to meet in the center so you have four points sticking out, then grab these and fold them up as well. Make sure there aren’t any gaps through which you can see steak, you should have a ball of stretched dough with no holes. Drop this in to the deep fryer, which you should have pre-heated to 375 degrees Farenheit filled with vegetable oil (or lard I guess, but I wanted to be alive to write this).

You can tell it's done when it floats, but I let it go 'til it's good and brown

When it’s done (golden brown and floating, you may need to turn them to get an even fry) pull them out and place them on some paper towels to soak up some of the liquid death in which they sit. You now have the most amazing treat ever created. Enjoy.

Philly steak, in convenient ball form.

Gravity part deux.

So I’ve been playing around in Python lately, primarily because I’ve been teaching it to a kid I’ve been tutoring. I decided to take the opportunity to port my old C# based gravity simulation to see how hard it would be to implement. I chose to use pygame because it provides the screen update engine and drawing routines out of the box with an easy way to tell how many milliseconds have passed since the last frame update (required for accurate physics). I haven’t really made any tweaks to the physics engine since the mono version, but it’s still pretty cool to watch. One thing I did add to this is a 2×2 box with alpha 10 that simulates a pencil running over paper wherever a ball passes. I liked the visualization so much, I left it turned on in the version I hereby bequeath to you, dear internet. Below are two of the generated images, the lighter the color of the line, the faster the ball was moving at the time.

First image from my gravity simulator
First image from my gravity simulator
Second image from my gravity simulator
Second image from my gravity simulator

Oh, I suppose you’d like to download the current version. It’s sloppy, but you’re welcome to it! Some code borrowed from the python/pygame tutorials, but the physics are all mine.

Download it here.

Update: Almost forgot!!! Left click adds an additional ball, right click saves a screenshot and clears the background.

Update 2:

This one was after about 30 minutes with 6 balls
This one was after about 30 minutes with 6 balls

Just another image, click to enlarge.

Update 4: Put a video up on YouTube showing what it looks like while running: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOBBPtsu5MM

Wheeeeeeeee Gravity!1!!eleven!

Sooooo…. a few days ago I felt like simulating a bit of gravity. Turns out that was the easy part… Basically I wrote a gravity simulator with accurate(?) collision detection all based on force vectors applied over time. I did all the physics and trig work from the top of my head, and the last time I had a physics or trig class was eight years ago, so I might have forgotten something important. Collisions look right to me right now, but the code driving them relies on some pretty loose interpretations of gravity/time, so any frameskips could cause some rather interesting reflections. Tarball (with source) and Ubuntu deb package (binary only) at their respective links.

I made a half-assed attempt at commenting the source, because I’m a nice guy. You should be able to get an idea of what I was thinking from there.

Update [20081002003930EDT]: Almost forgot, uses Cairo for drawing. XOrg process maxes the cpu at the resolution I’m using for this thing… NO idea why. Any programmers wanna help?

The fight is finished

Well, I finally finished the fight and beat Halo 3 on Legendary. It took much longer than I expected, but was worth every second. I also found all but 1 skull (the last one has yet to be found by anyone) and tomorrow I’ll activate all 7 terminals. I feel so accomplished… and so tired. Hail to the Master Chief.

Juno

So, I just saw a preview for the film “Juno” and I can’t wait. It looks fantastic, and has some awesome one-liners in the trailer alone. Same director as “Thank You for Smoking”, which you should also see.