first annual 1st of november bbq

02 Nov 2005 The weather was great today. Not like yesterday and the day before when we had temperatures up to 20 degrees Celsius, but still good enough to walk around outside and enjoy the autumn.

Noone would believe we are in November already. Last week I promised that if the weather stayed as good as it was last week, we'd have a barbecue this week. And so we did.

After installing Debian Sarge on one of my old laptops I gave away (installation over PLIP, because the laptop doesn't have a networkcard... its very old :) maybe more on this later), updating the bookkeeping and cleaning up some stuff, we fired up the barbecue. Since we didn't have much charcoal left, we had to be inventive and use a combination of paper and wooden remainders to light it.
A bag we thought was charcoal that we bought yesterday, apparently didn't contain charcoal at all. It contained a combination of 60% anthracite and 40% pertroleum-coke.

Anyway, the ventilator I bought for 2 euro's at a local secondhand store was very effective at speeding up the flames.

The barbecue was nice. There was just enough meat, and the sangria was great!
(I had my doubts about this since I had been very lazy making the sangria. I bought a bag of frozen fruit-pieces, poured it into a bowl and poured a bottle of 1.5 liters of sangria over it)

After the barbecue we watched some TV... A documentary on crop circles (in french) got me thinking that all these people are paranoid. Why would aliens come to Earth to make nice patterns in some farmers crop-field ? Why not just come down and learn some language, communicate with people ?

I got to thinking on how I would create a crop-circle of my own. Apparantly some of these circles appear in minutes. Although some crop-circles are created by people trampling down parts of a crop-field, this is not possible when the crop-circle appears in a matter of minutes. So how to do it ? One way to do this is by treating the ground under the crop-circle with chemicals so that the stuff growing there would be very weak and would bend down when enough wind is there.
But that requires a lot of preparation.

How about using microwaves ? Microwaves make water-molecules resonate. This resonating makes the water boil. That's how microwave ovens work. What would happen if you would microwave a plant ? I'm guessing it won't make it stronger :)

Suppose you have a satellite or a plane/balloon with a microwave emitter. If you can emit microwaves in a pattern, you can effectively "trample" down plants in that pattern. The pattern could be emitted the same way that light patterns are used when creating computer chips: with lithography.

Anyway, the night is almost at its end.
I think I can say this 1st of november barbecue was a success, and I hope we can make it an annual event