My guitar teacher and I regularly make fun of one another. It’s all in good fun. I should have expected his jab when I wrote a Cb instead of a Bb on some sheet music:

Tony Guitar: that’s Bb.
Mike D: Ahh, right right. that’s what I meant. I’m stupid.
Tony Guitar: You’re not stupid Mike. You’re very stupid.

Ha! Well played Tony. Well played.

I’m an uncle!

Please bioengineer a rabbit that will only eat weeds. Added bonus if you can make it defecate mulch.

Sander’s Australia trip is winding down, he has made it to Sydney and will be back in the states soon enough. We’re all wondering if he’s going to show up to work on Tuesday with an Australian drawl.

1 in 135,145,920

Those are the odds of winning the mega lottery jackpot tonight. The jackpot is roughly $376,900,000 right now*. I wanted to know how many games of roulette you’d have to win before you’d have the same odds as winning the lottery. My next obvious question: if you won every time would you have more or less money than if you’d won the lottery?
*$376M is the cash return. The payment over time is the more popularly advertised value of $600M

A few assumptions:
1. This is a no limit roulette table
2. You bet all your winnings on the next winning color every time (no green!)
3. Luck is very much your lady tonight

Playing either red or black on a roulette wheel will return a 48.6% win rate.

So 0.486^x = 1/135,145,920 should tell us how many spins!

what’s the result? twenty six spins!
Actually not exactly twenty six spins, that’d be amazingly coincidental.
26 spins is 1/140,429,063
Close enough for MikeDiDonato.com!

Let’s see which option has a better return on investment:

A lottery ticket costs $2.00.
Each roulette win gives you 2:1 odds.

26 wins in a row would return $67,108,864
Sounds like you should head to the convenience store instead of the casino tonight.

But then again… how many more spins would surpass the $376M?
Twenty nine spins (total $536,870,912)- although one more correct call would put you over a billion… it is worth it? Just one more spin? What do ya say?

Sander has reached Apollo Bay.

He sent back his first picture to me: His majestic steed.

Just over a week ago, I decided to roast a turkey. In traditional Mike D over exuberance, I refused to settle for a normal recipe and instead tried a deconstructed turkey. The problem with conventionally roasted turkeys is that you have to time the cooking to the thickest part of the bird; this results in the white meat being drier than it needs to be. By deboning the beast and homogenizing the width, you can better time the cooking so it comes out perfect! That’s the theory anyway.

Result: Complete failure. I did everything wrong.

And thus I begin my training. Since I floundered with the Turkey, I needed to start small. I picked up a chicken last weekend and got to work.

http://video.pbs.org/video/1333042208/

Watch the first 2m30s of that video to be wowed by Jacque Pepin. He debones a Chicken in about 40 seconds. For those of you who are interested, watch the rest – they do a turkey as well as all sorts of other impressive dishes.

What Jacque did in 40 seconds, easily took me 30 minutes. It was slow and painstaking. I had a hard time finding the joints and Jacque moves soooo quickly that I found myself rewinding again and again and again. I could blame my less than sharp knives, but I’m fairly certain it would have taken me just as long with a lightsaber.

Eventually: success

Once deboned, I spread out the meat into a mostly uniform layer

Jen and I then added a pad of sausage stuffing (onions, sausage, pork, bread crumbs, egg, and seasonings)

I then rolled it up, and tied it up with twine. I was a little worried because mine didn’t look as snazzy as Jacque’s. It turns out climbing knots do not help for roasting.

Despite my weak-sauce rope-work, the chicken came out great!

With the stuffing:

Overall this was an extremely rewarding experience. I’m going to try doing one chicken every two weeks like this until I can complete the deboning in less than a minute. Then I’ll upgrade to a turkey and ultimately try it with my sword for a new kung fu party trick.

Huzzah!