The Origin Story of a Turkey Fun Friends - Thanksgiving Basting and Thermodynamics

Turkey Basting Solution: A Thanksgiving Tradition, Decades in the Making

Welcome to the world of Turkey Basting – an adventure that began as a quirky idea in the late 1980s and has since transformed into a technical masterpiece, blending cutting-edge tech with a heaping dose of family fun. It’s a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine – unnecessarily complex, over engineered, highly entertaining, and all about making a simple task delightfully convoluted! 🦃

The Turkey Club Gang! The BasteMaster is the guy with the BackOffice Hat and Shirt (What a geek!)

The Origin Story: Engineers, Fraternity Brothers, and HyperCard Magic

It all started back in 1987 when my best friend George and I graduated from Purdue University as fresh-faced engineers. I landed in Silicon Valley, working at Tandem Computers, while George became a bona fide rocket scientist at Aerospace Corp in El Segundo, California. George was a thermodynamics wizard, and I was diving deep into programming, especially with Apple's HyperCard on my trusty Macintosh IIsi.

Thanksgiving was a time for us to reunite, but we found ourselves far from our Midwestern families. So, in true engineer style, I decided to create something unique: a program to manage the basting of the turkey with our friends. Not just any program, but a hyper-customized solution that picked who would baste next, tracked the turkey’s temperature, and even counted how many beers each baster had consumed! Think of it as a high-tech holiday ritual, complete with A-D converters, thermocouples, and 100's of hours of geeky engineering ingenuity.

From Tandem Mainframes to The David Letterman Show Dreams

Back in 1991, we even hooked up a 10-million-dollar Tandem Mainframe in Cupertino running COBOL code, chatting with my Mac IIsi via a 2400 baud modem (because, why not?). George lent his expertise in thermodynamics, borrowing equipment from work, and we ended up with a system that could have easily earned a spot on David Letterman's show. It was fun, crazy, and uniquely ours.

The VB.NET Revolution: Modernizing the Basting Stack

Fast forward a few years to 1996, and I found myself at Microsoft, working as the product manager for Visual Basic .NET. (You have to be kidding! talk about destiny!) The idea of resurrecting the Turkey Basting HyperCard Stack with VB.NET was too tempting to pass up. George and I went back to work, adding layers of complexity: random basting selection, automated texting, voice alerts and even some serious turkey temperature predictions.

The program evolved, Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving, each year adding new ideas from friends and family. Soon, we had features like Proxy Basters, energy consumption and cost, baster statistics, and multi-device integration. What started as a simple HyperCard stack had become a sophisticated .NET Framework app with a life of its own using every technology and API I could find.

2024: The Turkey Basting Solution 2.0

Today, as a semi-retired tech enthusiast, I have the time (and ChatGPT as a programming assistant) to take the Turkey Basting Stack-Solution-Service to new heights.  It all runs on SQL Server now. The latest version has around 5,000+ lines of code across four interconnected programs, pulling in weather forecasts, managing oven-door status wirelessly, and logging baster statistics. I’ve teamed up with ThermoWorks (and fell in love with the company, the products and the people, I even went out to Utah to visit them at their HQ's) to integrate a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth thermometers for precision temperature tracking, and we’re even eyeing a potential Azure cloud deployment.

With a snazzy interface (as you can see in the screenshot below!), our family Thanksgiving tool has become a quirky, interactive hub for our holiday gatherings. We track BTUs, energy costs, baste times, and even cooking conditions with all the precision of a NASA mission (thanks, George!). The Turkey Basting Solution doesn’t just make sure the turkey is done – it ensures it’s perfectly moist, with everyone in the family pitching in as a “baster.” My daughter built this website in her spare time and her boyfriend is helping with some of the programming. One of my VB.NET friends from work wrote a DLL that I use to get the temperature data. Everyone pitches in with their skills. Live graphs in Excel, PowerBI Dashboards, whatever people think about, we implement it. It runs on 4 monitors now and we probably need to add another computer to the system.

Turkey Basting Program - Stay tuned for updates during Thanksgiving week!!

A Labor of Love (and Tech) – Just for Fun!

At its core, the Turkey Basting Solution is about family, fun, and keeping our inner engineers busy during the holidays. It’s a labor of love that’s both absurdly over-engineered and incredibly effective. From its humble beginnings as a HyperCard stack to today’s multi-platform tech marvel, it has become a Thanksgiving tradition that keeps everyone involved, entertained, and well-fed. My next post will include more details and screen shots. I am always happy to entertain any questions and comments. I am also going to release a cool program anyone with a PC can run to calculate your Turkey done time, its free and anyone can use it but if you are a VB.NET programmer, you can modify it to your heart's desire because I will give you the project files for you to feed your inner geek! Code Away my friend!