I've been really productive lately... Witness the complete success of my pulled pork experiment, fixing the sinlaws DirectTivo (I think I fixed it, at least), sprinting towards deadlines at work with reckless abandon, and traveling all over the place to be with family and friends.

I made a mad dash to get my project to Alpha release by the end of June, and managed to demo it at our weekly development meeting on the 30th. I think I impressed everyone in on the demo, I'm pretty sure several of the people who were doubting whether or not I could deliver on my performance and compatibility claims were put in their place. And really, while I referred to this as an Alpha release, imho it is Alpha-in-name-only. While it's the first release to grace the hands of the testers, it's feature complete and has been pretty well beat-upon by me and my fellow developer. Hopefully they will beat the hell out of it and track down anything I missed, but I feel great about the quality as it stands now (not quite shippable, but definitely branchable).

The pulled pork has been going over like gangbusters (with everyone besides coco_b , that is, who isn't a fan)... I brought some coworkers home for lunch and each had a few sandwiches... For my entire life I thought Barbeque was some kind of voodoo art which required tons of specialized equipment, but it turns out you can make the real deal with stuff most people have access to.

The pulled pork turned out great, although not exactly as I expected.  I estimated it would be done in about 14 hours, which should have been ~8pm.  I figured it might go until 10pm, but I figured that was definitely the outer bound.  The internal temperature seemed to park itself at ~160F, and I really needed it to get up to 190-205F.  It stayed around 150-160 for the final several hours I left it on the grill.  Finally, around 10pm without any temperature movement I moved it to the oven.  As soon as I moved it to the oven the temperature slowly started to move up.

I suspect that the grill was too cold, even though I had a probe thermometer telling me the temperature of the grill.  My current thinking is that the probe was reading wrong; perhaps the probe needs more density (than air) to get an accurate reading.  Which might have meant that my temperature was off all night.  The thermometer on the grill lid read just under 200F the whole time while the probe was reading around 250, so it's very possible that the lid was right and the probe was wrong.

Regardless, after I moved it into the oven I set up the remote probe to beep when the pork got to 203F.  This happened at 4am, and the remote woke me up to attend to the pork.  I let it rest for about 30 minutes then started to pull it.  And it was like heaven.   It just fell off the bone and pulled apart like nobody's business.  It tastes delicious, although at 4am I only had a bite.  I'm very-much looking forward to lunch today. :)

Sitting on the deck, screwing around on the computer, keeping an eye on my smoke and temperature levels, and all around having a very relaxing Saturday.

It's time to stop being a sissy and start trying to barbeque.

Good night, sweet prince... See you in 12-14 hours.