Sunday, March 25, 2007

Bandwidth testing

Found a new bandwidth tester (well new to me anyway). The layout is nice and it's very easy to choose where you want to test to go from as they have a pretty cool graphical interface. My test to NYC is as follows:



Someone who lives around the Central Pennsylvania area please post your results if you are on Verizon FIOS as I'm considering a switch.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Margaritas

This is margaritas as they should be, which of course starts with them being on the rocks and never frozen, if you want a slurpee go to seven-eleven.

Ingredients:
  1. 1/2 cup of lime juice fresh squeezed from actual limes
  2. 1/2 cup of lemon juice fresh squeezed from actual lemons
  3. zest of 3 limes
  4. zest of 2 lemons
  5. 1/4 cup of superfine sugar (superfine matters, use a food processor to make it if you need to)
  6. 1 cup 100% agave reposado tequila (I've had good luck with Sauza which isn't too expensive)
  7. 1 cup Triple Sec (I use bols)
  8. 2 cups of crushed ice
  9. a pinch of salt (use kosher salt)
Steps:
  1. Combine the lemon & lime juices, lemon & lime zest, sugar and salt in a container and cover with plastic wrap or a lid if you had the foresight to use a container that has one. Shake or stir to dissolve the sugar and salt.
  2. Put the above mixture in the fridge for a minimum of 4 hours, ideally overnight.
  3. Put 1 cup of the ice into your serving glasses
  4. Put the other cup of ice into a pitcher or shaker, strain the juice mixture into the pitcher or shaker (you don't want the zest), add the tequila and triple sec. Shake or stir to chill, pour, consume.
If you need to make these in a hurry leave the zest out and don't bother with step 2, they won't be as good but they will still be far better than any pre-mix margarita you buy. For zesting you will use a microplane. 2-3 limes and/or lemons is around 1/2 cup of juice, buy more make a double batch more margaritas = good. I use a Presto Lemonade making device for juicing things, very convenient and good for making other citrus based beverages, it has marks for each 1/4 quart and as 1/4 quart = 1 cup it's awfully convenient for this recipe.

Decent golf score tracking site

John Daly found this nice golf score tracking site oobgolf. Seems pretty nice so far, stores course information for you so once you enter a course you don't have to do it again and also supports usage of mobile phones for uploading round information.