road trip - spring 2014, part 9

This is the ninth installment of the series of post on a road trip during the spring of 2014.

leek soup - part 2

A bowl of good soup starts with a good broth. The quality of your broth is the foundation for your soup, be it Asian soup noodle, or western soup. I use pork bone most of the time because I can obtain relatively fresh one. Not so with cow bone. With only few exceptions I dislike chicken base broth but it is just my personal preference.

pizza my way - part 3

Very often the dishes that I chose to prepare are driven by what I have on hand. I just dislike the inefficiency of taking a trip to the store to get the needed ingredient a recipe calls for. I can always manage to improvise and substitute with ingredients that I know would work, if not enhance the dish.

Lately I have been in the groove of making pizzas. This is because I have plenty of home made andouille sausages.

splendid isolde

Isolde and I have been together now for nearly 25 years now. We first met in Portland and for me it was love at first sight. She was born in a small town called Rheda-Wiedenbrück in Germany from a marriage to a much large family in Wolfsburg. When I first saw her I was awestruck by her beauty and her down to earth personality. She does not care for fancy jewelry or makeup. She dresses plainly but with poise.

vehicle tracking for brunnhilde and isolde

I have been testing this vehicle tracking device lately. My plan is to install one in Brunnhilde and one in Isolde. While there are few rough edges so far I have been quite happy with the choice. There are a lot of things you can do with it, in addition to some optional accessories such as video camera and shock sensor. With some technical skill and think out of the box ideas, you can expand its functionality further by interfacing to your own home brewed gadgets, or interact with an existing anti thief system.

brunnhilde's bluetooth head unit firmware update - part 2

I ended up buying a third Alpine car head unit. I have been extremely with the first I bought for Brunnhilde and the third would be installed into Isolde. I seized the opportunity for an opened-box CDE-143BT which is a refresh model of the previous CDE-133BT.

Because I don't want to live without a sound system in Brunnhilde I planned to swap out the existing CDE-133BT with the newly arrive CDE-143BT. The plan would only work if the two connectors are compatible. I noted that there are difference in the interface interconnect in the previous post. I concluded that these are immaterial in how I wired in Brunnhilde. The second potential problem is if the connector dimensions are different. Owing to the substantial relationship of the two models I wager that Alpine has little reason to change the connector. It was just an educated guess on my part.