History of The Turkey Basting Program
- Michael Iem
- Nov 11, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 22, 2024
The story dates back to the late 1980s when I was employed at a computer company in Silicon Valley (Tandem Computers). During that time, I got hold of a Mac IIsi and started exploring HyperCard. I had recently finished my engineering studies at Purdue University, where my close friend George had also graduated and was working at an Aerospace company in Los Angeles. As we had no plans to return to the Midwest, our place of origin, I came up with the idea of creating a Turkey Basting program for selecting basters during Thanksgiving to baste Turkey. Our brainstorming session led to more wild ideas such as paging someone, randomly selecting a baster, timing the oven door openings, and the list kept growing. We unveiled our project at my apartment in the bay area to our Purdue friends and even made a movie about the entire experience.
Below is a blurry image of the Main Screen of the Mac IIsi HyperCard Stack. If I manage to get my MacIIsi running again (it requires recapping), I can provide a clearer image.
We drilled several holes in the oven to insert the thermocouples. George procured some high-end A/D converters from the aerospace company he was employed with. The Macintosh connected to an exceedingly costly Tandem Mainframe NonStop Cyclone 8 Processor via a Cobol program interfacing with a SQL Database. I utilized a 2400 baud modem for linking HyperCard to the mainframe, which archived the baster and basting data. This included details such as the BTUs lost during basting, the quantity of beer consumed, the frequency of restroom visits, average basting duration, and more. Admittedly, it was overkill. The objective was to integrate as much software and hardware as possible into the Turkey Basting Solution. I was learning a great deal, sacrificing sleep but enjoying the process of acquiring new skills. In this journey, I transitioned to programming in Visual Basic for PC, working on client-server conversions for Tandem Mainframe customers, which took me around the globe.
Here is an original picture of Georges wife, Lorrie who is basting in 1991 at my apartment. Notice the basting hat which had to be worn when basting.
Thermodynamics - It's important to have a genuine rocket scientist available to handle the challenging task of modeling the Thermodynamics of cooking a Turkey.
My closest friend George studied Mechanical Engineering at Purdue, pursued a master's degree in dynamics at CalTech, and later obtained an MBA from Harvard. He may be overly intelligent, but he excels in Thermodynamics. Take a look at his presentation showcasing the model he developed, which I attempted to apply with HyperCard.
Visual Basic is my Jam Now!
Life unfolds in unexpected ways - I tied the knot in 1996, and we were blessed with two daughters. I transitioned from Tandem Computers to Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. Initially, I joined the Microsoft Consulting Service, then shifted to a Technical Product Manager role for BackOffice Server. In 1999, Microsoft sought a Technical Product Manager for a confidential project known as Project 42. This was crucial as Microsoft aimed to rival Java by engaging developers with a productive framework. Project 42 marked the debut of Visual Studio.NET, with its beta version released in early 2001. I took on the role of the global Visual Basic .NET product manager. With over 3 million developers using Visual Basic 6.0, my goal was to transition them to .NET and the .NET Framework. My role primarily involved global travel to present and demonstrate Visual Studio.NET to developers. It's worth noting that I am not a developer; my expertise lies in technical marketing, not hardcore development. Nevertheless, the capabilities of Visual Basic captivated me, and as its lead PM, I endeavored to master it thoroughly. In a spur of creativity in June of 2000, I started thinking about how to convert the Turkey Basting Stack from HyperCard to Visual Basic, thus continuing the journey. I thought about it, but I didn't act on it....
Life became hectic with raising two daughters, traveling, and taking vacations, leaving little time to pursue other interests. It wasn't until 2020 that I committed to focusing on my passion. Having started my consulting firm in 2004, I had the flexibility to engage in enjoyable activities. I meticulously archived everything, knowing that Turkey Basting was my area of interest, preserving all emails, files, code, and more. Presented here is an early iteration of the user interface from July 2020.
George ranks first, followed by his wife Lorrie, myself and my wife Jen. Jeff is one of my closest friends, and together we have two daughters, Maddie and Gabby. The last person is George's brother, John.
Keep in mind, I'm not a developer, yet I've devoted days online attempting to decipher the coding for this beast. I'm constantly on the hunt for additional tech to incorporate, soliciting feedback from Basters and anyone who will listen, and maintaining an extensive TODO list in OneNote for necessary feature enhancements and bug resolutions. It's definitely been a labor of love. It occupied my thoughts constantly—my wife can attest to that. The upcoming major unveiling involves probes in the turkey and a computer in the kitchen for manual data entry (quite the humble beginning). ThermoWorks came through with the temperature devices I needed. I can monitor progress on my iPhone, Apple Watch, and ThermoWorks Cloud Web Page.
Here is the User Interface I went with for Thanksgiving of 2020.
The UI is evolving for sure. Thinking about all the ways to predict when the Turkey will be done.
This was the setup in the living room back in 2020. I've upgraded to three monitors on my computer, complete with a large 'Next Baster' window and a 'Turkey Done' countdown windows.
Alright, it's 2024, and I'm deeply engrossed in coding. I'm managing roughly 5,000 lines of code across four intercommunicating programs. The game-changer was adopting ChatGPT; I transitioned the entire program from Excel data storage, which was problematic via COM Interop, to SQL Server on my Windows 11 PC. My custom-built PC is a powerhouse, equipped with 64GB of memory, a 12th Gen i7 processor, and an NVIDIA RTX 3060Ti GPU, complemented by SSDs and 4 monitors. Below are some of the APIs I utilize.
I use Visual Studio 2022 community edition (Free Version)
The Main VB.NET app is .NET Framework 4.8
Named Pipes for Program-to-Program messaging (this works good!)
Oven Door Shelly Sensor is BlueTooth to my Main App using RPC over UDP
ThermoWorks ThermaQ Blue devices are .NET Core 3.1 due to their old DLL I have to use
The ThermoWorks ThermaData Wi-Fi is a .NET Framework 4.8 app
The 2 ThermoWorks apps write temperatures to a file and I use a FileWatcher to get the temps
Microsoft Excel using Power Query pulling live data out of SQL works great!!
I will go over the details of the code in another Blog Post. If you have gotten this far, thanks for your support. Feel free to reach out and send me an email. mike@bastemaster.com
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