Vegas Without the Poker

 I dropped Amy off at the airport on the 20th, she was headed cross-country for a big long six-month Appalachian Trail thru-hike, so I was going to be emulating a bachelor for a while. 

What do bachelors do? A guys' weekend in Vegas!

Austin turns fifty this year, and his brother-in-law was going to be at a conference in Las Vegas anyhow, so a gang of us went out to join 'em. 

The novelty of this trip started closer to home for me-- I'd wound up with a fairly inexpensive fare on JSX, bolstered further by a rebate from my credit card, so I would be getting in a day late and miss the hike out to Red Rocks and some supercar track laps, but I'd get to try semi-chartered jet service. 

There were many things I liked about this. One, the cabin layout means I can arrange to have nobody sitting next to my wide shoulders. On the way out, the layout was one person on either side of the aisle, with a table next to the person on the starboard side of the aisle. 

Another was where the terminals are. On the Denver side, JSX flies out of APA/Centennial Airport, which is a lot closer to home than DEN/Denver International Airport. A Lyft rideshare each way was a lot cheaper than parking out at DEN, too. On the Las Vegas end, they fly into McCarran just like everyone else, but their terminal is on the other side of the airport from where the commercial service terminal is-- so instead of an expensive taxi ride to the Strip, you're already there, down by Mandalay Bay. 

The terminals also worked (mostly) a lot better than mainline commercial service. Since the TSA wasn't being paid at the time, many agents were quite under the weather and calling in sick. Must have been poor nutrition from not being able to eat well or something. Security lines at DEN were well over an hour long. Since the JSX terminals handle their own security and do it a single plane at the time, they said don't bother showing up more than 30 minutes early. Since I can't help being early, I was there 45 minutes early and they weren't yet ready to check my bag. They weren't kidding. 

Some other side benefits-- the way they're set up, they work well for traveling with pets, so I shared the terminal with a whole lot of dogs. Flying out of the small airport on the home end also meant I got to see interesting airplanes as we taxied out to the runway.

I said mostly, and there were two drawbacks. One is that even with the nice cabin layout, the Embraer 145 is still a Really Small Airplane. The layout meant that I was able to sit in the seat without turning sideways half the flight, but my brother simply wouldn't have fit because the ceiling would have been too low for him. The other was that even though Vegas is their hub, their terminal is still quite small. If things get backed up or delayed, the terminal gets crowded in a hurry. 

After a short flight, I landed in Las Vegas around noon. I was willing to catch a rideshare out to Speed Vegas, where Mark and Austin had been driving a Porsche GT3 and a McLaren 570 around their track and all of us were going to race go-karts, but the gang was ready for lunch so they picked me up on the way to a barbecue joint that had been recommended to Austin at a poker table.

The barbecue was pretty good, but nothing to write home about, so I won't. 

We swung by the Pinball Museum for a bit before our go-kart track time. They added some new historical exhibits to what had mostly just been an arcade full of ancient machines, most of which you can play. I appreciated them, though most folks preferred the living history.

I didn't get any decent pictures at the go-kart track because I was go-karting rather than taking pictures, but they did email us results. The results were surprising. At 300 lbs, I outweighed the next heaviest of us by around a hundred pounds. Karts don't have to be powerful because they don't weigh anything-- but I sure do. Rental go-karts are usually on the order of 300 lbs, I'm another 300, so the total weight is around 600 lbs. Everyone else is closer to 500. High school physics class tells us that F=ma. 

Racing is all about 'a', or acceleration-- and not just getting up to speed. From a physics perspective, cornering is also acceleration, as we're changing the direction of our travel vector. If we assume F is constant because the go-karts are identical (this isn't completely true, because my extra weight does get me a little more traction-- but not enough to offset how much my weight wants me to keep going straight while I'm cornering, so it's still a reasonable approximation), then to maximize 'a', you want to minimize 'm'.  My extra 20% of mass means everyone else has 20% more acceleration than I do. 

Here's the results of each heat:

SpeedVegas ranked by fastest lap, and every time Mark had us all covered both for fastest lap and average lap-- though only just barely in the second heat. He was less than a thousandth of a second faster than I was in heat 2-- those lap times are identical to the precision shown here. (It's also possible that that's as precise as the measurements are and the tiebreaker was average lap time?)

Somehow I was second in every heat-- it seems I remember a little something about car control from a lot of years as a mediocre autocrosser. 

Curtis had waved off the third heat because thrashing karts after barbecue wasn't necessarily our best idea ever (and the other kinda heat probably didn't help), and after heat 3 I wasn't champing at the bit to buy more track time, either-- my stomach was starting to get queasy as well. We packed up and headed on back to the ranch-- and what a ranch it was. Turns out that when you're splitting it five ways during the off-season, you can get a penthouse suite for about what the local Hampton Inn would have cost.

The suite had a hot tub at the edge of the balcony. It had a multi-arcade machine, a pool table, and just in case you didn't get enough downstairs, a blackjack table without a complete deck of cards. (None of us are playing with a full deck anyhow, so...) It also had an Elvis pinball machine, but one of the flippers was broken. As it turns out, one of the showers couldn't maintain a temperature-- turns out one of the factors getting the price down was some deferred maintenance. Still, not a bad setup.

Angelo took us to dinner at Raku, which is a Japanese small-plates joint that focuses on chicken. I didn't know that chicken was the focus at the time, so I went off-script by ordering "Raku's Tofu" as one of mine, figuring if they name the dish after the joint there must be a reason. It was excellent. I also had the Saboro Don, which was just billed as "Seasoned ground chicken" in the Rice Dishes section, which strangely put me in mind of laab gai when I read it, so I had to try it. As expected, nothing at all like laab gai, but really excellent. 

We wrapped up the night by heading to a Cirque du Soleil show, this one the Michael Jackson themed one. It felt less Cirque du Soleil than the other few that I've seen-- in part because I could sort of make heads or tails of some of the plot. My favorite bit was tumblers who were choreographed well with "Smooth Criminal", and was a bit disappointed that they hadn't managed to shoehorn "Thriller" in there, even if zombies would have been out of place. 

I was up earlier than everyone else and tried to make coffee, but was not sufficiently awake to realize that the coffee that housekeeping had left us was for a single-serve machine but I was trying to use it in a 12-cup rig. That went... poorly. After some of the rest of the gang got up, a few of us headed to the Starbucks next door, which worked a lot better.  Mark then made migas for breakfast in the suite's kitchen, which were excellent. 

With the rest of the gang, I finally made it to the Atomic Testing Museum on this trip (I've been meaning to for ages, but I keep being a degenerate playing 4-8 out at The Orleans.) They were running a special exhibit on Fallout, and had shoehorned some Fallout artifacts among their usual exhibits-- a Vault-Tec bobblehead up on a rocky area, a Grognak comic in with other books and pamphlets pertaining to the 1950s and 1960s' views of the Atomic Age. I enjoyed both parts of the museum, both the reality and the shoehorned-in fantasy. 

Lunch was at one of my favorite joints, a tiki-themed dive bar called Red Dwarf. Our timing was good, as they had live music-- good live music-- delivered by a surf band called Thee Swank Bastards. The reason I like the place is they've got the best Detroit-style pizza you'll find outside of the Motor City. There weren't very many people in the place when we got there, so the lead guitarist, freed from his amp by modern wireless technology, came over and played there at our table for a bit. That was fun to watch-- I really like electric guitars from a science and engineering perspective, even though I have zero musical talent.  It seemed to be particularly fun for Curtis, who actually is a guitarist. 

We took Mark over to where he was staying for the conference, and the rest of us went shopping because there was a particular required chocolate that can be found in few places, Vegas being one of them. I didn't get a picture, so I can't remember the details (aside from we were in the malls attached to the Venetian). It was good chocolate, but as you've probably noticed from the rest of this paragraph, I am not a chocolate guy. :)

Austin split off to get in some blackjack, and the rest of us headed back to the ranch to chill. The sun had gotten to the other side of the building again, so the hot tub was pleasant and not blinding. Angelo and I also found that we're both not particularly good at pool, but I might be worse. Dinner was at the korean joint next door, and it was right up my alley. As much as I enjoyed Raku, I was glad we'd hit this place. It'll need to go into the rotation for future Vegas trips. 

The next morning was mostly chill, as Curtis, Angelo, and I had to head to the airport at various times-- Austin was hanging around to play a WSOP Seniors poker tournament, where you had to be 50 to sign up and it started on his birthday, so he was the youngest person in the field, but the rest of us were headed back to reality. 

My plane was delayed by a few hours, and I think I may have wound up on different hardware, because this plane was two seats on one side, one on the other. Flying solo, I still wound up on the one-person side, which is good, because regional jet seats aren't any bigger than long-haul planes. When I eventually got back to APA, I requested a Lyft, which got directed to the wrong place. I'm not entirely certain how I managed to sort that out since the driver spoke no English and my Spanish is horrendous, but we narrowly avoided me getting declared a no-show. 

2026 trip-a-month: February

A couple of pieces of administrivia before I get into the aforementioned travelogue: 

• One of my original conceits was that each of the five categories my thoughts tended to go into would get a lead-in icon. Half of those images are on a web server that's down, and the system administrator who runs it (me) is a lazy sack. I may or may not pick that back up. I may or may not restart the swerver. This is the first time in three years I've missed it. 
• I probably won't write much about the January trip. It was a trip to visit family. I still felt reasonably familiar with Atlanta. I wound up renting a BMW 5-series for cheap. We got more snow there than Colorado did. Everything went pretty much to plan. That's pretty much it. So, skipping January, then. 

February!

As February began, I figured I'd push the February trip outside of February and double up some other month-- a lot of stuff was going on. Austin came into town, so one weekend we did the local science museum (the bears to the left were part of a special exhibit they had going on) and Casa Bonita. Another weekend I went to Genghis Con, the local game convention. The last weekend, I figured I couldn't avoid going out for my birthday. That left only one free weekend, and the laundry must be done. 

 Shows what I know. Somewhere in the middle of the month I grumbled about the birthday coming up, and Amy said she figured I was headed out of town, so there were no family plans. Hot dog! The weather looked fine for a road trip west. I started making my checklists. I started finding my tent and mattress and all the other things I use to pretend my Grand Cherokee is an RV. 

Then I realized: like I noted in the previous post, we currently have no pets. That was sort of intentional-- the plan, yes, the timing, well, we'd hoped it'd be a few more years. No animals makes travel easier for both of us, and it's not like Amy's gotta take time off of work or anything. And sure enough, it did turn out that she was interested in seeing Dinosaur National Monument and whatever else we found around there. 

So I stopped hunting for the tent, and figured we'd find hotels in the area. Should be fun! 

Then Amy screwed up her knee and told me to head out alone. I'd stopped preparing for Plan A, because Plan B. So, on to Plan C: Like Plan A, but with hotels rather than sleeping in the Jeep. I wasn't sure what I'd wind up inadvertently leaving behind if I tried to sort and load camping gear at the last minute. 

I still got a fairly late start, and between that and traffic, it was lunchtime when I got to Indian Springs. which was convenient: That's where Beau Jo's is. I demolished a whole small pie (which means only one pound of toppings). 

I got off the highway not long after that and took US-40 through ski country. It was beautiful and snowy-- though there was no snow actively falling, so the roads and skies were clear. This was a nice change, because down on the Front Range we kept forgetting to have winter this year. 

I enjoyed small-roads Colorado, and it was just as nice to get into Utah. By the time I got to the hotel in Vernal, though, I still wasn't done digesting a pound of meat pie. I picked up an apple and a large snack pack of pepperoni, cheese and crackers when I filled up at the local Maverik, picked at it a bit, but didn't really bother to have a real dinner. 

One problem with working an early schedule is that it means I have a hard time sleeping in, and the first night in a hotel bed means I probably wasn't sleeping anyhow. I gave up and got up around 0600 (which is kinda sleeping in by my standards!) and went down for hotel breakfast, figuring I'd take my time because there was no way the National Monument would open before 0900, which was right about when I pulled up to the front gate.

I was right about not opening before 0900. They didn't open 'til 1000. 

You could drive on in, though, if you got a day pass from recreation.gov. I had just enough signal there that the app mostly worked... until I tried to order a day pass. 

Eventually, I gave up. There was another facility about an hour back down the highway just over on the Colorado side of the border. I'd go check that out first, then come back here when they're open. The Canyon Visitor Center. Pictured to the right. 

Yeah. 

And that sign didn't even have hours. Just "CLOSED". 

So, back to the main visitor center! I stopped off at the scenic overlook on the way through this time. It's not a bad drive. Wasn't exactly my plan, though.

The National Monument is worth checking out if you're in the area. There's a spot where they've partially excavated a lot of fossils. They didn't all die there, a flooded river carried the bones down to a spot where they clogged up so there were a huge bunch of bones all in the same place from all over the watershed. The bad news is that means that there's not any decent way to be sure which bones went to which animal, and it's unlikely that there's a complete set of any given dinosaur, anyhow. Still, very cool. 

After the visitor center and the Wall O' Dinosaur, I continued into the park. History fast-forwarded a few million years after that. Sure, the geology was old as time, but the stuff on it was signficantly more recent-- but still prehistoric. A major theme of the next few days was going to be petroglyphs. Since no river picked them all up and deposited them in one place like it did with the dinosaur bones, they were scattered, but probably just as many of them in this area, if not more. 

Amy had sent a birthday present along with me (a widget to make carbonated water and a Flyin' Miata keychain) so I opened that while I sat along a river to eat lunch (which was the rest of that pack of pepperoni, cheese and crackers). 

The road turned to dirt, though nothing I really needed the Jeep for, and ended at an ancient cabin where a woman lived alone from 1913 to 1964. Progress marched on, but it was apparently not for her. 

After visiting the cabin, I got back on the road and followed more of the Dinosaur Diamond. The stretch out of Vernal, UT wasn't particularly scenic, not what one expects out of a Scenic Byway, but once US 191 splits off toward Price, it starts to get excellent. I had driven part of this stretch a few years ago in the old BMW, and had to turn back not far past Price as we climbed up into snowy mountains, the BMW was on summer tires and it got sketchy. That wasn't a problem this trip, as the weather was dry and it takes a lot more to be sketchy in the Jeep.

I ended the day at a stop that was another echo of road trips past. In 2015, after I'd picked up the blue Miata from Flyin' Miata for its elective surgery (turbocharger), I continued on west, eventually getting to California before turning east. That night I stopped at a campground in Green River, UT, and the next morning, I found joined called La Pasadita, which was a food trailer that was parked at a disused service station. It had a few old cafeteria booths set up under the awning, and sold a spectacular breakfast burrito. 

Eleven years later on this trip, I also overnighted in Green River (this time at the Holiday Inn Express rather than the KOA) and I saw they were still open so I stopped off for dinner. I am pleased to report that their chile relleno burrito is just as good. They've also cleaned up the interior of the gas station and have set up some more seating inside. 

The hazard to this sort of road trip is you wind up finding stuff that looks interesting to explore, but it's inconvenient to do it then, but there's not necessarily anywhere to stop for the night nearby, either. The next morning, I backtracked about an hour to get to a turnoff to go explore a forty-mile-long canyon named Nine Mile Canyon. (It was nine miles from something in a survey.) 

I did find some remnants of some more recent civilization, similar to the cabin in the National Monument, but the best bits were once again prehistoric-- more petroglyphs! Sometimes they were a little difficult to find-- I walked 3/4 mile or so back into a box canyon and didn't find the "owl panel" I was looking for, but on the way back out I found a bit of signpost sticking up that I couldn't see from the other direction, which pointed me a few dozen yards off to the right. One of my favorites is one that more modern folks have called "Coyote Placing the Stars". I'd have never found those, either, without viewing tubes to point out where to look. Of course, if Coyote is placing stars, he's going to be way up at the top of the hill. I should have guessed. 

The road turned to dirt a good ways before the end, but still, nothing I needed a 4x4 for. Eventually I got to the other end of the canyon, which was up near where I'd been the previous day, not far from Vernal. 

Dinosaur Diamond makes something of a diamond shape. The northern apex is in Vernal, and I'd driven the northwest and southwest edges of the diamond to get down to Green River-- so this worked reasonably well. I wasn't far from taking the northeast and southeast edges down though Colorado back to I-70.  I haven't done the whole thing-- there's a loop that heads south from I-70 down to Moab, which I have not done yet. I expect to visit Arches and Moab in the not too distant future, so that won't be any trouble.

As I crossed into Colorado, I entered Rio Blanco county. Soon, I crossed the White River. I thought, "I suppose some things didn't get translated."

I was wrong. Later I found a plaque about the Escalante expedition, who discovered the White River, but they called it the San Clemente. So who knows how the county got named...

The Colorado sections of the Dinosaur Diamond are just as good as the stretch of of US 191 in Utah. Lots of good scenery, a few good spots to pull off for (once again!) petroglyphs and other ancient native sites. This time I intentionally got off the road on a BLM trail through what claimed to be Cow Canyon. Now, I get I'm a city boy, but I'm pretty sure them ain't cows. 

When the track started getting a bit muddy, I figured I'd turn around and head back. I don't need to tear up a muddy trail and have to dig myself out. I had a shovel and traction boards with me, but I'd just as soon not use them. 

From there, it was mostly just getting home. I took I-70 home, which one might think wouldn't be as good as US-40 on the way out, but I-70's an exception. I-70 through Glenwood Canyon is excellent. Heck, from Cove Fort all the way to Morrison, it's good stuff. Five stars, would drive again. 

Twelve years, huh?

I started ignoring  this thing after migrating over to 'social media'. The media quit being social, and after a while, the inertia there became less "keep using it" and more "keep forgetting it exists, too." I wanted a place to keep track of what had been going on in my life, though. 

Right. I have a blog. Had a blog? Nope. Turns out I can still log in. I have a blog. How early-2000s. 

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So... what am I trying to keep track of? Travel. (Oh, right. The conceit of this blog calls those 'expeditions'. What was I thinking?)  There is one thing that has not changed in twelve years: I am long-winded. So, some setup of how I got here. 

Back in the summer of '24, my job switched to supporting a different customer. This shop has a 4x10 schedule, and I figured that's a lot of three-day weekends. I was gonna get out and do things more. 

To be fair, I did get out occasionally. It just wasn't much more than I had before. That was also the year that Amy retired, so she was out doing things a lot more often-- big hike on the Arizona trail, a month on the Appalachian trail. I wound up holding down the fort, keeping up with the animals. 

October of last year (2025) sucked. We lost both Dulce and Dozer, leaving us with no animals at the house. Somewhere in my funk, I decided I was damned well going to find a silver lining: I don't need to tag off with Amy any more for travel.  I set myself a goal: I was going to do some kind of travel once a month in 2026. 

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So far so good.  In January, Amy and I went out to visit her family in Marietta, GA:

In February, I took the ZJ out to explore the 'Dinosaur Diamond' scenic highway (this is not said highway):

And last week, I met up with Austin, Mark, Curtis, and Angelo in Vegas for Austin's birthday festivities: 

The intent here is I'll write up some more about each of these, and maybe keep this place up to date so I can remind myself what I've been up to. 

Assuming I don't forget this thing exists again... 

Just a few miles down the road...

The plan was to go home today, but the weather put the kibosh on that. So, since finding silver linings has been something I've had a lot of practice with lately, I thought, "Hey, that'll give me a chance to try that barbecue shack I drove past the other day!”

Smokin’ Joe’s serves out of a trailer, and has a covered patio with some picnic tables as their dining room. They’re on the same lot as (and affiliated with?) Rick’s Custom Meats, so I figured they might know something about meat. 

Even as frigid as it was by Florida standards (I did not have any fear that they’d be turning the fryer off early to keep temperatures down in the trailer, even if my neighbors back home would probably kill for 60 degrees and windy), there was a line five people deep when I got there. Most places near my Mom’s house, that’s not too surprising— Bloomingdale has gotten huge and is almost twice as densely settled as when I moved out in 1990. However, I was down in Pinecrest, FL, across the street from an orange grove. This isn’t the brass-and-wood restaurants and electronics stores section of the county. This is strawberry patches and feed stores. I took a line like that on a day like today in this area as a good omen.

The three people directly in front of me ordered the “Starr Special”, which was chopped pork served over french fries, and you could opt for cheese and peppers as well. When I got in line, I was thinking pork sandwich, but I’ve learned over the years that one should never try to shoehorn a barbecue shack into his own vision: If the locals like the Starr Special, chances are, that’s what this place does well. So that’s what I ordered. Besides, I was probably going to order fries with my pork anyhow.

Now, the purist might note that I said “chopped” instead of “pulled” pork. If that purist had looked into their smokehouse (which, being Florida, was more of a smoke-screen-porch), he’d have seen that they were using a propane-fired smoker, which may have sent him running away in horror. He might have shuddered at his smoked meat being served over a pile of fries. I’m not a purist. If it’s tasty barbecue, I don’t mind chopped instead of pulled. If I can only taste the hickory they smoked it with, I don’t care if they used propane to keep the smoker box at the right temperature.

This was good barbecue. I’d picked their traditional and their sweet sauce and put some in the corners of the to-go container, but I never once wound up dredging my tasty, moist pork through it, that sauce wound up being solely for the fries. When Stephen and I get back into town in a week or so, we'll come back down here. It's definitely worth going back.

The story doesn’t end there, though. As I was polishing off my fries, I heard, “I saw your hat and your ring. What year did you get out?” I looked up and there’s a guy in a black Georgia Tech jacket. We chatted a bit, and then he said, “If you haven’t been in the store yet, you should take a look. They sell all sorts of old-time sodas there.”

Which they did— but that wasn’t the real score. The meat market had a deli counter, and that deli counter’s soup of the day was venison chili. Honestly, even though I hadn’t had breakfast, I really didn’t need anything else after the huge pile of fries and pork and cheese and peppers, but I couldn’t resist; I took a small chili back to the truck.

It was every bit as good as the stuff from the trailer next door. I have a vague recollection of a chocolate-cherry soda I had with it, but the chili was so good that anything that went with it is very hazy in my mind.

I'll be back next time I'm down here. And I'll poke my head into the butcher shop to see what the soup of the day is at the deli counter before I order my pork outside...

At least my phone is newer?

Like many of us computer nerds, my mom's generally used hand-me-down computers. Her "desktop" machine-- which I put in quotes because my mom's "office" (most of us would say it looks a good bit like a "living room" or a "den") has never had a desk in it-- anyhow, her "desktop" is my seven year old Macbook Pro. When she saw my Macbook Air a few years back, though, she realized that it would be so much nicer for travel (which is why I have it) and would work quite well for taking on a cruise-- so she didn't wait for me to have one to hand down and bought herself a brand new machine. (Which is good, because she'd still be waiting.) 

But even though it's a much newer machine, it's a bit small for every-day use-- oddly enough, I think it's a "laptop" that wants to be used on a desk so you can get your eyeballs closer to it. So even though my old Macbook Pro is starting to develop some overheating issues, it won't make a good stand-in for the desktop. So now she's looking at buying a new 15" laptop for the house.

This means that my mom, who up 'til recently used almost entirely hand-me-downs for computing, will have both a newer "desktop" and a newer travel machine than I have. 

That in itself is strange to me, but that's only what lead me to the weird part. Sure, part of the reason for this is that her use cases no longer look like mine-- I've no use in my life for a full-sized laptop, so the machine on my desk in my office is an actual desktop, and she's got nowhere to put an actual desktop (or I'd've shipped her a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to attach to the Air already).

But most of it-- and the strange part-- is that I've had no real reasons to upgrade, so I've got nothing to hand down anyhow.

My desktop machine is a "Late 2009" model iMac that I bought in early 2010, which means I've owned the machine for three and a half years now and the design is pushing four years old. I've never owned a computer this long. I'm a technology enthusiast-- I always seem to want better and faster. Sure, I've made a few upgrades along the way, some of which aren't exactly what Apple intended-- she's got more RAM than Apple would have sold her with brand new and she's got a Fusion drive setup even though those only came out last year-- but it's still a four year old machine that keeps up with everything I want to do-- handily. In fact, for the bulk of what I do, the machine's overkill. Every so often I throw bigger problems at it-- crunch a video, spin up a virtual machine, maybe both at once, but it keeps up just fine.

It wasn't all that long ago that a nerd like me couldn't even contemplate sitting in front of a four-year-old machine and not be itching to upgrade. Software designers keep coming up with new ideas, and those ideas need more processor power. They take more memory. A machine from a few years ago may not have been able to handle more than 4 gigabytes of memory. They didn't have multi-core processors with virtualization extensions to make virtual machines run smoothly. 

...and maybe some cookies while we're at it...

Now, part of that is that I'm not interested in speed for speed's sake. I don't care what the benchmark says. I tend to group computational problems into four categories: "finishes pretty much instantly", "get coffee", "go out for lunch", and "runs overnight." It's rare-- even back when I was upgrading computers every year or two-- that a hardware upgrade pushes a problem from one category to the next faster one. What pushes me to upgrade is when things that were in the "finishes pretty much instantly" category start to get into a realm between finishing instantly and wandering upstairs to pour another mug of joe. 

Sure, I've upgraded a few parts along the way-- and they're pretty hefty upgrades, but it wasn't long ago that the CPU simply wouldn't have been able to keep up. I had usually replaced every component in a computer, with the possible exception of the chassis and power supply, by the time two years had come around. Twice that, and I still feel no need to upgrade.

I can only assume that software engineers aren't holding up their end of the arrangement. 

It's twenty years ago, all over again.

Well, it's not yet twenty years ago, but soon it will be. 

I loved computer games back then. I wasn't necessarily any good at them, but I sure did love a good computer game, particularly a good computer-based role playing game. I'm not sure where I found time to play them (honestly, mostly, I didn't... I missed a lot of the really good ones of the era), but technology had come along to where games were well beyond anything we'd ever seen before. Sound cards allowed real voices, VGA graphics finally allowed us PC folks to enjoy the sorts of visuals that Amiga owners had been enjoying all along-- and graphics accelerators made 'em even better, renderable in real-time. Possibly most importantly, the CD-ROM allowed more detail to be placed in larger worlds without having to ship a paper crate full of floppy disks. And the games were great fun. 

About ten years ago, games changed again: Consoles caught up with what a decent gaming computer could do. The relatively low resolution of a television screen meant they could build a console that could push around enough polygons to keep up with a mid-range PC for the same price as just the PC's graphics card. CPUs had advanced to where even the cheapest CPU could handle just about any game if the heavy lifting was handed off to the graphics processor. Computer game manufacturers saw a new market for their wares, and soon, most PC games were designed to be ported to consoles. Many of the biggest titles were cross-platform, available both on your desk at the computer and in your living room on the console.

Consoles had a huge benefit: Since the whole console cost about what just a decent graphics card on the PC might run you, they're much, much more common. They're cheap and ubiquitous, and they made the market for these titles much, much bigger, easily justifying the expense of making a game portable to them. They brought gaming to a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have spent the money on a computer. They kept the computer gaming world afloat; the rising budgets involved with making huge detailed worlds was offset by the much, much larger number of units that you can sell. 

[Warning: Digression begins here.]

A three-headed PC with dedicated racing hardware

Consoles, however, have a few major differences compared to a gaming PC.  I've already mentioned one-- they're relatively low-resolution compared to what you can do with a dedicated gaming PC. Most modern televisions top out at 1920x1080. Common computer monitors are in that neighborhood, but they're available in 2560x1440 and larger. What's more, you can plug more than one of those monitors into a PC, where consoles stick you with just one. Consoles also are generally viewed from across the room, instead of a few feet away on the desk, so what resolution you have isn't as useful.

An example of how this is important is the relatively recent game Dragon Age: Origins. Text displayed on the screen was in a nice, calligraphy looking font. It looked like something you might find a scribe illuminating in a medieval text, which fit in quite well with the swords-and-sorcery setting. This was a problem on a console: Gamers couldn't read the font with all its serifs from across the room-- and there was a lot of it. The game world had a large amount of historical detail presented as if you were reading about it in a book or on a scroll. In the sequel, all text was in Helvetica, and there was much less of it. Don't get me wrong-- I like Helvetica. It's fine for my blog, for example. It doesn't, however, fit so well with the game world. The inability to easily read text also removed much of the history from the game world, which left the game feeling much less epic and sweeping and world-changing than the original.

Consoles are also generally controlled by a game pad. Some other peripherals are available, like racing wheels and flight joysticks, but not nearly to the same extent as custom hardware can be found for PCs. Due to the programmable nature of a PC, you're not limited to the hardware drivers that ship with the console or on your game disc. You can get a little attitude indicator display-- or go nuts and get a full control panel, including the same parts they use in a throttle quadrant in a real 737. You can go even more nuts than that. Even if you're not going nuts, though, every computer out there has a keyboard and a mouse. A keyboard is an awful lot of switches that can control an awful lot of things.

Now, I don't want this to sound like an anti-console rant. Consoles brought huge money to computer games-- and probably kept them alive. Without the ability to sell games to hordes of gamers who couldn't (or simply didn't want to!) buy a gaming PC, only a select few companies would have survived-- and even with that ability, many didn't.  Consoles are important, and there's a reason they've relegated PC-only gaming to something of a niche market.

[End digression. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post, already in progress.]

It turns out that many game developers missed the PC model of development, but any time they pitched a PC game that couldn't be done on a console for whatever reason, the idea was shot down-- it costs millions of dollars to make an A-list title, and if you can't sell it on consoles, it's a lot tougher to feel like that multi-million dollar bet is a reasonable investment. 

And then along came crowd-sourced funding mechanisms like Kickstarter. The idea is to go to the community and basically ask for money to complete the game in advance. They also have higher levels of funding for more perks-- perhaps you'll get a digital copy of the basic game for $30, but $45 would get you a soundtrack CD, $100 might get you the sorts of trinkets that would come in the "Collector's Edition" of the game. 

With this sort of mechanism, they can go further-- they can set up things like if you want to spend $1000, you can get your name in the game or perhaps your face in the game as a character. Sometimes they go nuts with five-figure backing levels that might get the backer a chance to meet the development team. 

The most fascinating thing about it to me, though, is the view into the game development process. Periodically, all the backers get an email with what's going on-- how the art is created, how level design happens, how characters are created. You see over time how concept art from early stages gets modified into what's closer to what will be in the game. From my perspective, this stuff is really, really cool.

I'm pretty geeked about what those developers are planning. 

The first one I ran across was Brian Fargo's project to make a sequel to Wasteland, a game his team originally released in 1988 (okay, so perhaps it's 25 years ago all over again.) I'm looking forward to going back to this version of the world after a nuclear apocalypse, and looking forward to the modern visuals that modern computing allows us. The story they told in the original was great, and I expect as good from the follow-on. They crowdsourced almost 3 million dollars to start work on the game, which they expect to release next month.

The same group has already started on the next thing in the pipeline, a follow-on to Planescape: Torment called Torment: Tides of Numenara. The original game is, unfortunately, one of the ones I managed to miss back in the day, but it consistently got good reviews, so I'm looking forward to the follow-on. I'm even kind of hoping I get around to playing the original one day-- I believe it's one of the ones Good Old Games has recently released.  Numenara  raised $4 million in crowd-sourced funding, and inXile expects to ship it in December of 2014. 

Many of the folks from Black Isle (the game studio that did Baldur's Gate and the original Planescape: Torment) have reformed at Obsidian Entertainment. After releasing a number of excellent games (including Fallout: New Vegas, a follow-on to the Fallout games they did at Black Isle), their crowdsourced project is currently called Project Eternity. This one will be a swords-and-sorcery sort of game, and their plans look huge. They crowdsourced just shy of $4 million in funding, and intend to release Project Eternity (though I don't know if that's the name they're going with) in April of 2014.

In 1990, the game most of my dormitory floor was playing was Wing Commander, which was a space dogfight simulation game that included a story that changed based on how you did in the missions you flew-- beat up on the Kilrathi on this mission, and you're that much closer to winning the war, but when they rout your in another mission, your war just got that much harder.  Wing Commander spawned a number of sequels, but then the guy who created it, Chris Roberts, decided he needed a break. When he decided to return, crowdsourced funding gave him a way to build the game he wanted to build. This project is Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. Both will use the same engine and art assets and backstory. Squadron 42 is a single-player game like the Wing Commander series, which then follows on into Star Citizen, which is a massively multiplayer online game in the same universe. It's generated a whopping $18 million in funding, and intends to ship in November of 2014.

I recently downloaded the first technology demo of Star Citizen, and I was surprised: They didn't just render the outside of the ship. The inside is also designed such that instead of clicking on something and poof, you're magically now inside the ship, in the demo you click something and the hatch opens, and you move into and about the ship as if you'd move into and about any other environment-- no cut-scene, no loading screen to transport you to a new zone within the game. It seems like such a small thing, to be able to step inside your starship that you're about to fly, to walk up to the cockpit, and sit down, but I don't think anybody's ever managed to do it before. 

The good news is that there's not that many people wanting to make the sorts of games I loved 20-25 years ago. I'm already so far behind on games I want to play I'll probably not actually get around to playing these four before the decade is out...

Barbecue is not necessarily a spectator sport

I don't just mean "cooking stuff on the grill", no matter what my food icon over to the left would imply.  The word "barbecue" seems to have extended its meaning over the years to include grilling, but the older "meat slow cooked in smoke" doesn't necessarily require a full smokehouse to do. 

Barbecue does seem to break all the rules when it comes to cooking meat. You often use a cut that's not exactly "high on the hog"-- there's little point to smoking a good ribeye steak, for example. And you cook it well beyond what most folks would consider "well done". But there's one rule that applies to all forms of cooking meat: Start with the right meat. 

It's a rule I often break out of convenience when I do brisket-- it's very easy to find a nice cryovac'd brisket flat at the supermarket or at Costco. But it always comes out a little disappointing. If I wrap it in foil halfway through to keep it from drying out, which destroys any bark I might have gotten. If I don't, I get bark, but the meat is usually a bit dry.

12.5 pounds of brisket, pre-trim.

So yesterday on the way home from the office, I swung by the Laurel Meat Market. The problem with my brisket above wasn't the cryovac-- unless you're buying meat by the half-cow, it's been cryovac'd at some point, and this one came out of the fridge that way, though the butcher behind the counter removed that for me and rewrapped it in butcher paper. The problem with my usual brisket is I'm just cooking the flat. 

There are two problems here. The first is that the point of the brisket helps keep the part of the flat it's attached to nice and moist-- and so does the five tons of fat in between them. The other problem is that many barbecue snobs prefer the point. It's a fattier cut of meat, and comes out moister. My guess is the true snob prefers it because there's less of it in a given brisket.

8:1-- er, 7:1 salt and pepper

I decided to try a new plan in terms of brisket rub. I'd read recently that powdery spices tend to interfere with the formation of a good bark around the outside of the brisket, so I decided to simplify. This article recommended a mixture of salt and cracked black pepper, 8:1 by weight. I decided I'd give it a shot, but I'm not sure I remembered to reset the scale after pouring an ounce of pepper into the bowl, so I think I wound up with 7:1. I used a relatively coarse pepper and salt that I'd hoped would be coarser when I bought it.

I trimmed about 1.5 pounds of fat off the brisket. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not afraid of a little fat on my barbecue-- but there's such a thing as too much. 1/8", maybe 3/16" of fat, seasoned and nicely rendered on the edges of my meat is tasty. Anything beyond that doesn't render well. There will be another trimming when I'm done, as well-- fat's part of the dish, sure, but what I'm really after is the meat. After a few minutes of reminding myself that I need to get some of my knives to a sharpener, I was ready to season.

11 lbs of trimmed brisket, salt, and pepper.

My usual approach to a rub is to go pretty thick with it. I've got a lot of meat to work with, and only get to season the outside, and most of that is fat-- even after the first trim, a lot of that's going away. 

I considered at this point trimming off the end of the flat that sticks out beyond the point-- my smoker's only 18.5" in diameter, and I was probably going to be scrunching this thing up on the grate for it to fit. I decided against it mostly because it would've involved dirtying up a cutting board, which I'd not done yet. All my work had been thus far on a wire rack.

I generally pull whatever I'm working with out of the fridge and prepare it before I start working with the smoker. It'll take me a good hour, hour and a half to get it lit and get the temperature stabilized, and that time allows the meat to come up to a temperature closer to room temperature. It's usually around halfway there by the time I get the thermometer into it and am ready to put it on the grate, which means I'm no longer putting a forty degree chunk of meat in my 225 degree smoker, it's a 60 degree chunk of meat. In real terms, this probably makes zero difference-- yes, the meat has a higher specific heat than the smoke around it and more cool means a higher temperature drop when I put it in, but that's why I've got hot glowing coals in the bottom of the thing, right?

I use a Weber Smoky Mountain bullet smoker. It has a big reservoir in the bottom just above the coals that's designed to hold a few gallons of water. Now, we don't need the water to run the smoker because of its moisture-- it's handy because it's effectively a huge thermal capacitor, and it helps keep temperatures stable. It also means there's something in between the fire and the meat so that my cooking isn't direct or high-heat.

I decided I was sick of cleaning up the fatty water, especially since I always seem to get around to doing it a week later, so I instead loaded it with playground sand  to hold the heat and covered the sand with foil for easy cleanup.

I load the smoker using what's called the "Minion Method." While I do like that this conjures up images of little yellow bullet-shaped guys in blue overalls scampering around and making all manner of a mess of things, it turns out that it's simply named after Jim Minion, the guy who created it. He's apparently not knee-high nor yellow. And he's got both of his eyes. The idea is you load most of the coals and the wood into the smoker unlit, and make a divot in the center. You then load an upside-down chimney starter full of coals (or, in my case, I use a small but right-side-up chimney starter), and light them. Once the coals are hot, you put them in the divot and then assemble your smoker.

 

Here's where we use our secret ingredient for the first time: patience. 

It'll take a while for the smoker to come up to a temperature, and a good bit of adjusting before it will actually be stable at that temperature. Kick back, relax, crack open a cold one. (I don't do this part correctly.) I usually aim for a temperature around 225-235 degrees.

I figured that since this would be an overnight smoke, the temperature outside the smoker would drop about ten degrees, so I wouldn't mind hitting a little higher than that. This turned out to be a mistake, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it at the time. I had the bottom vents open each less than 1/4 of the way, and the smoker settled in around 250. Which is still pretty low-temperature for cooking and would be nice and long.

It would have to do. 

Around 0330, The Schnork woke me up. Apparently she'd gotten into something when she was outside that day, and it upset her little tummy. I cleaned up Amy's side of the bed (note to self: swap out sheets before she gets home) and pulled on some clothes to check the smoker.

The smoker was up to almost 260 degrees. So much for cooler temperatures producing a cooler smoker. I didn't figure the coals I had would get it through the night, so I tossed a few more in, adjusted the vents to barely a sliver open, and went back to bed.

I was glad this brisket was just for my consumption-- with the high temperatures, it'd probably be ready for breakfast, not lunch. If I'd've had folks coming over, I'd be trying to figure out how to keep the thing warm without drying it.

Sure enough, when the alarm dog went off around 0700, I went down to check the brisket, and my remote temperature probe said I was a skosh over 200-- I'd been aiming for the 190-195 range. And that was after adjusting for the fact that I knew the probe read about 15 degrees high! I pulled on some clothes, grabbed a cutting board, and bolted out to the smoker. That brisket needed to come off the grate, stat!

I was pretty sure that the fact I had a hard time getting it out of the smoker in one piece was a good sign; all the stuff in the meat that makes it tough had been breaking down nicely. It sure looked like a tasty brisket. The fat looked to have rendered quite well. 

Turns out, it was pretty much what I was aiming for. The part of the flat that doesn't have the point over it was a bit overdone, but the rest of the thing was perfect. There was a nice bark over the whole brisket. The flavor was pretty good as well-- some of the "burnt ends" are a bit salty, and I could go for more pepper, so perhaps next time I'll adjust that 7:1 down to 4:1 or so. 

Aside from that chunk of mediocre flat, the rest of the brisket came out nice and moist, tender, and tasty. It'll make an excellent lunches at the office this week. Once again, though, I get the feeling I'm going to be craving vegetables by the time the weekend's over. Good thing it's veggie time of year...