Checking in from New York, NY (for now)

Yep, it's been over 25 years since I've had a yard. So no BBQing, grilling or other outdoor cooking except on camping trips. Indeed, even inside my username is nearly indicative of how much access I have to cooking.

But now it's time for a change. Over the next few months I'll be leaving the city, settling in parts not yet known but where I insist on having some space. And eventually an ability to cook outside like most people did for the first 10,000 or so years of civilization and a couple of million years before that.

I'm a pretty successful home cook despite (or maybe because of) my tiny kitchen so parts of the transition will be relatively easy. I'm familiar with the various cuts of animal and how best to cook each, I make a mean marinade and a righteous rub, I've got the time management skills of cooking down, different preparations and tastes from different cultures are interesting to me and, importantly, I like gadgets. :-D

Other parts make me perhaps the newest newb on the site. Equipment (and I want to DIY at least some of it), temperature maintenance on that equipment, bulk storage of meat, keeping sides outside the bacterial danger zone during prolonged stints outside, all that stuff is why I joined the forum and what I hope to learn about.

And of course as soon as I get some stuff done on the grill/in a smoker/whatever I hope to share some of the successful results with you. I've already got recipes for some southern-style ribs, a grilled romaine salad, and a couple each of tandooris and naans that I want to share once I've translated them to a grill and a few short ribs recipes including Indian style (which is a little sacrilegious, but there you go) to share after successfully translating to a smoker or other slow cooker.

I'm also a home brewer and hope to contribute to and learn from that section. That's also an area that I hope to get more active in with my soon-to-be larger space.

And so yeah. That's me, at least from a cooking perspective, and why I'm here.

Thanks. Here are my first newbie dumb questions, all related. I gather that a DIY smoker made from a barrel and parts from the basement and maybe a short trip to the hardware store is a BDS or a UDS, depending on how big and/or ugly the drum is. Is there a similar term for a grill made from a drum? Does the search engine handle three-letter searches so that the various acronyms can be found? And is there a master list of successful DIY projects so that rather than basing plans off of whatever comes up first in a search one can find the projects that a lot of members say, "this is the one, of the dozens that have doubtless proffered over the years, that you should build?"