Last time I wrote about my grill I said I purchased it because I was watched Good Eats. Now I’ve never actually made anything I’ve watched on TV, so this was going to be the first time and what I was making was the Grilled Pork Tenderloin.

Yesterday I went to the local QFC and picked up the following:

• 1 whole pork tenderloin, approximately 1 pound
• 1 lime, zest finely grated
• 1/2 cup freshly squeezed lime juice
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 chipotle chili pepper in adobo sauce
• 1 teaspoon vegetable oil

One reason I have never bothered following TV show recipes is that they usually have crazy things in the list of ingredients. This was no exception, trying to find chipotle pepper in adobo sauce as a nightmare. I didn’t even know where to look in the store. After about 20 minutes of going up and down the same aisles 20 times I finally found the final ingredient. The recipe instructions are up here so I won’t bore you with any more details, other than 24 hours later I was ready to grill.

12 minutes later and the pork was ready. Put in some final marinade and cook the rest of the meal and then slice up. A pretty simple dinner.

Everything looking good. I served it up on a bed of rice with bell peppers, peas and spring onion.

All in all, it turned out great, Yum Yum. Definitely something I will be having again. Even the wife loved it! 

I say cycling is a bitch, but really it’s that I am pretty unfit at the moment. My wife the other day purchased a very nice road bike and it’s been years since I’ve been on a bike, so I decided to have a go and boy do I love it. The only problem is that I only last 10 minutes then I collapse.

The last time I bought a bike, I never used it, so this time I’m holding off before I buy one and will use my wife’s for a while. Something that we were discussing was that we could get a cycling computer and log our progress to see if we are improving and where we are improving, so we had a look around and I found this: Garmin Edge 305. Now if you think Garmin and then thing GPS you would be right. This is a GPS device for a bike. Though this device doesn’t give directions, it just mainly logs details as well as giving you a virtual training partner so you can push yourself against yourself.

One thing about that device is that it is pretty damn expensive, so that’s where the power of eBay comes in. I was able to pick up one of these well under half price refurbished. That includes the cadence sensor and heart rate monitor.

I’m a gadget freak also, so this device just blows my mind. It’s pretty sweet how you hook it up to the computer and you can see your progress, or in my case, lack of progress.

You can also hook the trail into Google Earth and while I pretty much hate all things G, the integration is pretty well done. All I need to do now is get back on that bike as often as possible and see how well I do. Wish me luck!

I have my Windows 7 Media Center setup all up and running. Got my two cable cards hooked up to HD Comcast and the PC is recording away. The great thing is I can finally remember to set some shows up to record. One of my favorite shows over here is called Good Eats on the Food Network. Good Eats is pretty much a cookery show which goes into all the science of why to do certain things. So it combines two of my favorite things, science and food :-)

So I was watching Good Eats yesterday and they had on the show a recipe for Grilled Pork Tenderloin. The tenderloins where cooked on a barbeque and I was thinking to myself how I really need to get myself one of those. So that’s what I did.

I have a few restrictions though before I could go buy one. First of all it had to be propane. In the apartments where I live, we are not allowed to use charcoal BBQs because of the smoke. Which is fair enough as it is an apartment block. Second my balcony is pretty small, so I wanted one that doesn’t take up much room. Third and last, I wanted one where I could put into the back of the car and take with me somewhere so we can have a barbeque in a park or something, (to be honest, not sure where yet).

Down to Sears I went after of course a liberal amount of internet research. You can always trust the public right? Down there I picked myself up the Weber Q 100 grill. It is a pretty small grill, big enough for about 4 steaks so that is plenty for me and a couple friends. I really wanted to make sure it was small and this really is. I picked up the collapsible cart and a propane tank and I was ready to go.

I’ve always believed in charcoal barbeques and I was a little reluctant of buying a gas one. (Now remember that I only bought the gas because I can’t use charcoal.) To be honest I think the thing rocks. It heats up fast, it has controllable heat, easy to clean. It’s pretty much perfect. I guess the only thing I miss on this is the taste of the charcoal and from the wood chips, though I hear you can actually emulate this with a gas burner, guess I got to read more about it.

All in all, the weather is good, the food is good and I look forward to the weekend of making the Grilled Pork Tenderloin. Yum yum!

A while back I wrote about issues I had with my home server, but now I have to say I am really satisfied with it and right now I’m sitting on cloud nine. So what is so good about my home server now? Well it’s a bunch of features that I love about it.

Recorded TV: With Windows Home Server Power Pack 2 (wow, what a mouthful), a feature was added that integrates with Windows Media Center. It allows you to playback your recorded TV from your Home Server on your Windows Media Center! It’s pretty sweet. This means I can have massive amount of storage on my WHS and just keep a respectable HD on my client machine. If I want to record a lot more, I just add a new drive to the home server and away it goes. Awesome stuff!

Computer Backups: This is probably my favorite feature. I don’t think I’ve ever backed up my PC, but since I bought my new PC I decided to enable the backup option. It’s all wired over a giga lan so I thought why not. What I didn’t realize was that I was going to need the feature so fast. A few days ago my Raid 0 array failed and could not be restored. Big fright, but 30 minutes later, my machine is cleanly formatted and restored in working order as if I switched on the machine from midnight the night before! I can’t believe how good this was.

Online Backups: Why do you need online backups when you have a home server?! Well first of all why not? You can’t have enough backups. First of all I use my home server as storage not as a backup device. The home server does have support for backup of data over multiple drives so that if one drive fails your data can be restored, but what happens if both you drives fail, or your house burglarized, or there is a fire? Gone in a puff of smoke! It doesn’t matter how many local backups you have, you can always loose the data. So I’ve signed up with Amazon’s S3 service for online storage and with the HP EX 48x series you can integrate Amazon S3 directly with the unit. Unfortunately I only have the HP EX 47x which doesn’t have this sweet feature. So until HP release the update later this fall, I found another solution. That solution is Jungle Disk for Home Server and right now it’s free of charge.

Source Control: So I love source control. It’s needed if you are a developer of any description. It also doesn’t have to be very difficult to setup and manage. I wrote a while back about how to setup Perforce on your home server. Perforce is good, very good, but I decided to change to the more friendly subversion. The great thing about SVN is that there are so many solutions out there, though nothing that directly integrates into your home server client… yet. So I installed VisualSVN Server Manager from VisualSVN and then installed AnhkSVN for Visual Studio. Perfect and so simple!

So there you go, 4 awesome reasons why to own a home server. I am so thankful for Microsoft to develop such awesome software and to HP for making a really sweet rig. If you don’t own one, I suggest you head out and get one asap!