Julie Pecenco’s Life in the Little City

I’d volunteered to make dessert for my small group ministry tonight (how odd to think I’d ever be involved in anything with the word “ministry” in it, but that’s UUism for you.  It’s fun stuff with churchy names.)  Anyway, I’d volunteered to bring dessert thinking that I might be able to make a cake, something I love to do.  I was trying to figure out what to make, and had been wanting to make a mint chocolate cake for some time now, but unable to find a recipe which suited me.  I thought about the chocolate cake I often make that is always a huge hit.  It’s a devil’s food cake with a whipped chocolate ganache filling and a chocolate ganache glaze.  It’s actually not one of my favorite cakes, since the semi-sweet chocolate used makes it too bitter for my tastes, but the chocolate lovers are in heaven when I make it.

I usually stick to recipes when I bake, but it occurred to me that this recipe was the ideal base for my mint cake, and I had the idea of making a mint white chocolate version.  Which is exactly what I did.  Like most of my cakes, it isn’t the prettiest thing out there, but oh is this going to be good.  Just based on the tastes I’ve had on the filling and glaze, it tastes heavenly.  I can’t wait to try it.  (Let’s hope I’m right.)

The hard part, other than keeping it intact on the ride there, is going to be making sure I have enough left to bring home a piece for Leah.

BTW, if anyone is interested in the recipe, I used the Devil’s Food Cake Cockainge from The All New, All Purpose Joy of Cooking with mint extract in place of vanilla, and their recommended Whipped Ganache Filling and Ganache Glaze, replacing the chocolate with white chocolate and again adding mint extract.

Tweet This Post

There’s been a new Versus commercial during today’s Tour de France coverage. Cue the obligatory video of some of the worst crashes in the Tour, and then add Jonathan Vaughters (former rider and Director Sportif of Team Garmin Chipotle) painting the following picture for us:

“Next time you’re in your car, at 50 miles per hour, strip down to your underwear and jump out. That’s what it’s like to crash in a professional bike race.”

Now that’s a mental image. Ouch.

Tweet This Post

Last night, I was thinking about trying to ride to Price Chopper, the grocery store on the other side of town, partly to go for a longer ride, and partly to pick up some veggie dogs for Leah, which they don’t sell at Hannaford, the closer grocery store.  I mapped it out and realized that it wasn’t actually that much farther than the rides I’d been doing recently.  Oneonta, however, is called “The City of the Hills” for a reason, and my rides have been relatively flat thus far.  Before I tried this ride, I wanted to get a sense of how hilly it would be.  I turned to Google, and to my surprise, found several tools designed for exactly this purpose.

Bike Route Toaster and veloroutes.org both utilize Google Maps for their tools, and provide similar interfaces to plan a ride.  After checking both sites, I chose Bike Route Toaster because it uses auto routing.  I selected my starting point and my destination, and created a route, with elevation profile.  If the route generated is not the one I wish to take, adding intermediate points is easy.

To verify the profile, I used my eTrex Summit GPS to track my ride today.  I know of no way to download the elevation profile from the eTrex, so I imported the GPS track into National Geographic TOPO! to compare.  (TOPO! uses it’s own database for the profile, rather than the GPS data, I believe.)

I also plotted the raw GPS data in a spreadsheet (I admit I’m a geek.  I worked many years as an engineer, and I love spreadsheets), and the results are similar to the TOPO! output.

The data looks fairly consistent, so I think I’ll be using Bike Route Toaster to check out my rides in the future. I love cycling, and I love maps, and this is an ideal combination of the two.

Tweet This Post

This year, I spent the Summer Solstice focused on a wedding, but the Solstice also means something else: time for another World Wide Panorama.  The theme this time around was “elevation,” so on the Thursday before the Solstice, Leah and I went up to the Franklin Mountain Hawkwatch at the Delaware Otsego Audubon Society Sanctuary.  From their, one can see a sweeping tableau looking out over Oneonta and southern Otsego County.  It was somewhat overcast that day, so the view was a bit more restricted than on some previous outings, but it was still a lovely sight to see.  I shot two panoramas, one at the Hawkwatch, and one at the picnic table and shelter about halfway up the hill.  The latter was my WWP submission, which you can see below, or in fullscreen at the WWP site.

If you haven’t experienced interactive VR before, I have written a tutorial on how to view and interact with them: FAQ: What am I supposed to do with these VR panoramas?

Tweet This Post

Le Tour de France started yesterday, so our television will be tuned mostly to Versus for the next three weeks.  For the past few years, I’ve used a couple of pieces of software on my PDA, the Garmin iQue 3600, to help me follow the race.  With the slow demise of the PalmOS, they aren’t being publicized much, so I had to track them down.  Having done so, I now share them with you.

The first is Ulrich Riepert’s Tour de France 2008, available from his web site at http://www.ulrich-riepert.de/TDF.htm The page is in German, but the software itself has an English language mode.  It lists each of the stages, as well as all of the teams, with riders listed by their number, which can be a great help when watching the race and trying to figure out which rider is which.  Even better, it has a fullscreen mode on a 480×320 screen.

Deepweb Internet Solutions has been publishing their Tour software for several years now.  Le Tour 2008 is available at http://www.deepweb.nl/deepweb.asp?taal=EN&page=palm It lacks information on the riders and teams, but shows the race profile for each stage, including the sprints and climbs, the latter labeled by category.

Between the two programs, you can have some of the most useful data when watching the Tour right on your Palm.

Enjoy the ride!

Tweet This Post