Natalie Puleo Memorial Meatballs

[pseydtonne]

We got an announcement at work that a meatball competition would be held on Tuesday. The email actually claimed a health risk was coming to our building and that "The Ptomaine Team" would be at it again. I like it where I work.

I have been wanting to figure out how to make my late gramma's meatballs for a long time. My mother may have the recipe somewhere. However I'm less interested in doing what she did step by step so much as I want to put the meatball into my repertoire. When she died, I spoke about the importance of her meatballs at her eulogy. Now I have the chance to fulfill my promise and honor her memory. This is especially important since our family will not be making the journey to Sicily this year to see her home town.

My father's mother's maiden name was Natalie Puleo. Kibo and I will be purchasing ingredients this evening and prepping the balls to set overnight in the fridge. Then we will probably head to You-Do-It Electronics in Needham on Saturday to get parts for a breadboard build of reduction of Chu Moy's headphone amplifier then sear the meatballs in my red sauce that evening.

The iPod is a small, low-wattage device meant to push tiny, tinny earbuds. When I'm out for a walk I don't mind the lack of sound quality because there is plenty of other interference. When I'm sitting at my quiet desk either at the office or at home, I notice the limits. At each desk I have a good set of headphones (Sennheiser HD560 II at home which I bought in 1997; Sennheiser HD515 at the job) which want more push to get the good movement.

Thus I was thinking about buying a headphone amplifier, but most cost $300 to $500. When I searched for "headphone amplifier" on Google, the CMoy in a tin of mints was an early hit. $20 to $50 seems like a fine deal, but I'd hate to screw up when I solder.

hakamadare and I got to talking last night about my annoyance with my iPod's sound quality. It turns out he knew about the CMoy and had wanted to work on building one with the honorable lightfixer but said honorable gentleman is still occupied by Karamazovian events. So Haka and I decided it would be a capital idea to buy the parts for four or five of these devices so that we could screw up without fear and make our dreams come true.

In turn I talked to Kibo. He gave me a lot of useful advice because he's done his share of electronics projects:

1. Start with a bradboard model before you solder anything;
   
2. Test that thoroughly, decide whether that's worth the work;
   
3. Get a matching cladboard so that your first real solder job is just a mirror of what's on the breadboard;
   
4. Buy sockets for the more expensive chips (the integrated circuits or ICs) so that you don't ruin an IC trying to fix a bad solder job;
   
5. Leave space at the bottom for future mods because it'll just happen;
   
6. Then think about making your own PCB traces and churn a few to sell.

All of this sounds fine. I could even get lazy and stick to the breadboard for a while, although that would allow parts to fly out.

That seems like a weekend I can handle.

Comments

[graciana.livejournal.com]

Is the recipie for meatballs something you'd be willing to share? I'm still looking for a good way to make them. I will be damned if I have Sean's meatballs with CURRY in tomato sauce again... :-P

Also, Sean and I are waiting for Hojo to get his notary public in before he can marry us.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

How long does that take?

[graciana.livejournal.com]

Honestly, not long. It's just a matter of waiting for FedEx Kinkos to pay for Hojo's fees.