Leather and drugs

I am back! Survived a brief bout of the flu - it must have been the Parisian flu, since I first felt ill at the conference in Paris. I didn't want to miss anything of the rather excellent conference, so I showed the flu who is boss, by eating copious amounts of paracetamol, ibuprofen and aspirin. This worked, to a degree, until I came back, laid off the drugs and was struck down by the Revenge of the Flu. Ugh.

But now I am better, and yesterday I spent four hours sewing. A year ago my favourite leather jacket's zipper broke, and yesterday the stars were finally right (Gliese 581 must be in just the right place in Librae for leather work!). I purchased a new zipper, a leather needle and set to work - you can see the result on the right. It works, and turned out less ugly than I had feared - everybody wins! Well except the old zipper. I tossed that bastard faster than you can say Gliese 581g may or may not exist.

Bollocks to this...

...I am off to Paris, to the 63rd Gaseous Electronics Conference. There may be some physics-related posts in the near future.

Sous vide, pork

I made a 24 hour pork roast yesterday (despite RelaxMax's disapproval) - my thanks go to Frank who informed me on how to rise the temperature of a rice cooker: just wrap it in a towel, since the warm setting has no temperature control, depending on the thermal properties of the cooker to reach its temperature.

Wrapping the rice cooker in a towel raised the temperature to 64 degrees Celsius. I seasoned the pork roast with some rosemary and thyme, and left it in its zip-lock back to stew for a day. Then I seared its outside in my trusty cast-iron pan (a roast is a bit too large to comfortably sear with my blowtorch). Very tender.