Nuff and Stonsense

Sangria success

2009-05-04T03:02:42Z

My employer has a fairly relaxed policy about alcoholic beverages "at work." The centerpiece of the policy is that drinking must be social -- a team can have a round of champagne to celebrate a successful product release, for example, but solitary nipping from a flask at your desk is not on. The policy extends to their most-weeks "TGIF" gatherings, during which the entire company is invited to listen to the news of the week, applaud the new arrivals, and have finger food and a cup of beer or wine if they so desire.

A couple of weeks ago I learned that one of the TGIF gathering places now had a standard offering: their own sangria. I've had good and bad, and this turned out to be pretty darn good. That, in turn, got me thinking about making it at home. I didn't have much of an idea how to go about it, though, and the bad sangrias I've had made me a bit hesitant to blindly experiment with raw ingredients as pricey as wine.

Coincidence then struck, in the form of a Teresa Nielsen Hayden blog post entitled "A redacted recipe for sangria." She'd done the legwork, looking around for everyone's favorites, then distilling the commonalities and eradicating the inauthentic to arrive at a good, simple core recipe. I put it to the test, and lo, it is indeed quite good. Check out the link for the recipe.

In my case, I used a bottle of Castillo de Daroca 2007 Old Vines Grenache, $9 because this is the Bay Area and wine is expensive here. It was the nice local wine shop guy's immediate recommendation for a sangria wine. For fruit I used one regular lemon and two minneola tangelos, since they were so much better than the oranges at the market. For the spirits I used 2 TBSP of triple sec plus enough brandy to make a total of ½ cup.

Next time around I might go with just brandy; the triple sec sweet orange Kool-Aid character wasn't working for me as well as I thought it would. That particular aspect of it seems to be diminishing as the sangria blends, though, so perhaps it's just a matter of letting it age sufficiently. In pomegranate season here those would be an excellent addition; the flavor is obviously complementary. Lastly, next time I might peel one of the oranges and use just the fruit: the pith bitterness is evident, and the undertone of bitterness might not be to everyone's taste (though it's ubiquitous in European drinks making).

WTF, Honda

2009-03-10T19:18:25Z

My 2006 Civic 4-door automatic is getting up towards 70k total miles, and while in many ways I'm as happy with it as I was with the 1997 version that preceded it, I've become aware of a few problems. Worse: as far as I can tell these are not problems with my specific vehicle, but inherent design flaws with the model. Feh!

The corner uprights between the windshield and side windows are wide. Really wide. They're so wide, and raked at such an angle, that they wind up blocking a significant angle of view to the diagonals. The problem is exacerbated by the outside mirrors, and even more by having the sun visors down. The occluded angle happens to be just right to ensure that pedestrians on the left diagonal corner are literally invisible behind the bodywork. Especially at night, I find myself having to move my head around at every crosswalk or intersection to check for people on foot. This is bad.
Ah yeah, the sun visors. After a couple of years, the driver's sun visor broke. Specifically, the bit that clips into the roof bracket on the free end broke loose within the visor. Fortunately I was due for some maintenance anyway, so didn't have to make a special trip to the dealership. The mechanic there fixed it for free -- he said that they'd seen a lot of these broken visors on this Civic; it's a design problem.
Water gets into the trunk. I have no idea how this happens but it's pretty bad. I've tried to check the foam gasket around the trunk compartment and it seems to be intact and making a good seal, but after the car is driven in the rain, water collects inside some open-topped pockets built into the inside of the rear trunk face. I'm not sure how to explain that better.
The real joy of this is that it means that when I open the trunk, the tipping of the trunk lid dumps all the collected water directly over the contents of the trunk. Perfect!
Yesterday I opened the trunk and about a cup of water dumped in. It hasn't rained for three days or more here. The water's been sitting there in those "pockets" for that long.
(Yes, it's conceivable that there is something wrong with my specific car here. But it's always done this; i just hadn't been using the trunk in wet weather much until this past month or two.)
The front seats are poorly suited to anyone under about 5 foot 7. The headrests cannot be lowered enough to hit properly against the occipital bone of anyone shorter than that -- which is a safety/injury problem. Worse, they are angled forward a bit, so one can't relax back into the seat without having one's head tipped forward uncomfortably.
Finally, a couple of slightly-less-inherent problems: the CD player. Yes, it's nice to have a CD player in the car, and even better that the CD player handles data CDs with MP3 files. Unfortunately, the firmware of the player is geb0rken in some stupid ways. The first problem is that it has an arbitrary limitation on the number of tracks it will recognize on a CD (probably 99). That's fine on standard audio CDs, where the format defines a 99-track limit, but less okay on a data CD full of mp3 files that take up 1/10 the space. Second, the mp3 playback screws up when play flows from one track to the next: it winds up omitting the first half-second or so of the new track. This doesn't happen if I manually advance to the next track, only if it advances due to reaching the end of the previous track during normal play. Very irritating.

Charles Stross: A First Encounter

2008-03-09T21:36:40Z

A number of my friends seem to like Charles Stross, and a couple of his novels came into the bookstore recently, so I gave them a go. Massive spoilers below.

The Merchant Princes
(Books one and two, The Family Trade and The Hidden Family)

These are the first two books in what is apparently an epic series: four novels published to date, at least two more titles planned. Behold the power of long-running sagas! I'm not sure whom to blame for this, really. I suspect either Frank Herbert or Roger Zelazny. On the other hand, I read all of the Amber books, the Belgariad, and about nine too many Xanth books, so what do I know?

Let's get this out of the way: this series is science fiction. Yes, I know Stross says it's fantasy. It has magic! Well, one kind of magic. One extremely narrow kind of magic. And it's heritable, and its heritability is demonstrably Mendelian as a recessive genetic trait. Stop me when this sounds too scientific to be fantasy, ok? I mean, really -- Star Wars has magic, too, but nobody^† tries to position that as fantasy. Plus hey, midichlorons. They're scientific! 'Nuff said.

A reasonably common science-fiction setup is for the author to have some nifty technological or futurological idea, and play what-if. Larry Niven was footling around with Dyson spheres and bam, out came Ringworld -- that kind of thing. In the case of the "Merchant Princes" books, Stross's nifty idea isn't magic. Silly reader! The magic (about which more later) is not much more than a MacGuffin. No, the core idea about which Stross is writing this series is economics, specifically developmental economics and industrialization.

No, really.

There's a bunch of setup in the early chapters of The Family Trade that establish Our Heroine, Miriam, as a kick-ass investigative journalist on the high-tech circuit. She's just cracked a big story about how tech company stock transactions are being used to launder a whole lot of money, probably drug money, and since it's going to be big enough that the FBI and DEA and everybody will suddenly take a keen interest in her and her outfit, she goes to pitch it to her VP. She's fired on the spot on trumped-up charges, sneaks a copy of her data home, and discovers belatedly that of course her paper is owned by one of these firms acting as a laundry. Oops. She runs off to hide and regroup and go gonzo, and gets some sympathy from her wheelchair-bound adoptive mother, who finally after all these years gives her a box with her birth-mother's belongings. See, Miriam was a babe in arms, literally -- found along with her mother, who'd been killed by massive stab wounds and left. Mom wasn't carrying much, but at least there's this banged-up old locket. Inside isn't a cameo or photograph, though; it's a funny knotwork design that hurts to look at for more than a glance, and then...

Boom. Suddenly Miriam is sitting in her desk chair in the middle of the woods somewhere. Magic!

Miriam figures out pretty quickly what the magic is. There's this other world, see, and looking at the locket snaps her back and forth between that one and Earth (and gives her a massive headache). The other world seems to be exactly congruent with Earth, too: switch sides, walk ten feet, switch sides again, and she's the same ten feet from where she started over there. The other side isn't industrialized, though. It's medieval-agrarian and the inhabitants speak ... well, it isn't ever properly named (tsk tsk, Stross!), but it's what you'd get if Old Norse grew up as a major international language. See, on Earth2, the Vinland settlement survived. Whee, we're in an alternate-history novel! It turns out that Miriam is really Helge, the long-lost daughter of Priscilla, a member of the one extended family (the Clan) who possess the genetic ability to world-walk. They've known about it since the 1730s, and have been intermarrying carefully since then to retain the recessive trait while not turning into imbeciles. They've also been running drugs in our Earth, since that's extremely lucrative and totally safe: all you need to do is pick up a suitcase full of coke, cross to Earth2, and mosey on over to wherever you need to bring the junk back to Earth. Not much need to worry about bandits and so on; Earth2 is medieval and you can stock up on machine guns and the like in Earth1.

There's lots more after this, of course, but mostly it's either tactical (how do you manage building security when people can switch Earths?) or economic. Miriam explains multiple times to various Earth2 folks that back in the day people over on our side believed that all there was to commerce was moving goods from one place to another, but this chap named Adam Smith figured out that actually peoples' labor creates value, so this core dependency on trafficking in raw goods -- drugs, gold, whatever -- is not actually ideal, and then she starts talking about banking systems and so on, and... Whew! Oh, and then it turns out that a long-lost relative accidentally found a way to Earth3, which is sort of 1920s-era tech, but with airships instead of fixed-wing, and etheric vibrations instead of "radio waves," and France conquered Great Britain a couple of hundred years ago so the British royal family relocated to the New World and continued there, etc. They've got electricity and steam automobiles, so they're a much better potential sink for Earth1-inspired technological innovation, right? As long as you can get the patent situation under control; see above re economic development theory.

Okay, at this point you're either thinking "but... okay, this could be cool! Gaslight and DVD players and swordfighting all in the same book!" And you'd be right -- it could be cool. But there's enough about Stross's handling that I find myself not really inclined to read further in the series.

My gripe is that so much of the narrative is... perfunctory. It winds up having this sort of clunky potboiler feel underneath all the shiny worldbuilding. That worldbuilding is pretty slick: Stross has clearly done a lot of thinking about tech-transfer implications, finance, and so on, and also about the world-walking MacGuffin and how it affects various sorts of activities, but that should be par for the course. In human terms, though, the tumble of events and the way Miriam approaches them feels... unmotivated? Inappropriate, even? I mean, people are trying to kill her and she's on the run from Mafia who can essentially teleport into her house at will if they want, and a few pages later she's thinking some more about banking and Adam Smith? WTF? There are flashes of good material involving nasty family infighting among semi-nobility who essentially have been playing those games since birth, have been reared to play those games, but they're only flashes, and then we're off talking about asbestos brake pads again. The technical aspects of the story get all the love, leaving the personal aspects feeling patchy and incomplete. There are also multiple plot threads introduced in the first book that are conspicuously left dangling, including one major issue that goes unmentioned even in the second book. That gets old fast, IMO. It's these structural issues that are turning me off to the series. It's just too frustrating.

Update: oh yeah, I forgot to mention finding three typos in the first novel alone. "Vice" for "vise" is at least a spellcheck failure, but "Medelin" and "sollace" are inexcusable. WTF, Tor?

^† Nobody important.

Workin' for the Man

2008-02-19T06:44:24Z

It's official. I gave notice today at Openwave, and will be starting at Google on 3/31.

Recent listening

2008-01-17T19:43:38Z

Miscellaneous youtube videos for songs I've been listening to lately below the cut. I expect some of these to appall various family members, but to them I have only one thing to say: Ed McCurdy.

My Chemical Romance, "Famous Last Words"

Ladytron, "Destroy Everything You Touch"

Imogen Heap, "Just For Now," live

KT Tunstall, "Black Horse and Cherry Tree," live

Nine Inch Nails, "The Perfect Drug"

Death Cab for Cutie, "Soul Meets Body"

Degrees of separation

2007-11-30T23:06:26Z

I just learned that one of my coworkers was once in a band (Annwn) that toured with one of Emma Bull's bands (Flash Girls).

Funky.

Readers' notes for John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting

2007-09-04T00:22:36Z

A friend of mine, Andrew Plotkin, has undertaken a monumental task: annotating and cross-referencing John M. Ford's masterpiece of alternate history, The Dragon Waiting. The fruits of this labor, Draco Concordans, just went live. Here's his announcement to the Nielsen-Hayden weblog Making Light:

I know this is not the open thread, but I have an announcement, and this is the topical thread.
Every once in a while, in fandom, these words float by: "Somebody oughtta write notes for John M. Ford's _The Dragon Waiting_." This has happened a lot since Ford's death.
I've written them. In stacks.
Draco Concordans: a concordance for _The Dragon Waiting_:
http://eblong.com/draconc/
This is a big chunk of work. I started in back in February, and I've been pounding on it steadily since then. My aim has been to cover all the allusions, in-jokes, historical references, indirections, and implications in Ford's novel. I also index the appearances of all the characters and historical figures. All cross-referenced and cross-linked for your edification.
I am under no illusion that I found everything. (In general, I don't know history from a hole in the ground -- although I did a lot of digging in this particular field.) Contributions are welcome; I expect the knowledge of fandom to outrun mine by leagues. Feel free to post in this thread, or email me. I will be updating the site as information arrives.
(My secret hope (big wide eyes) that the Benevolent Masters will dedicate a Making Light thread to such discussions. I don't know whether to expect a few comments or a hundred-post cavalcade of detailed historical analysis. Surprise me, everyone...)

It's magnificient, and illuminating. After reading through it [and rereading the novel afterwards] I can't believe that this book was not shortlisted for the Nebula in 1984.

Go read it, everyone who hasn't, then hit the concordance and revel in just how much depth there is! Puns, quite subtle thematic ties across the whole book, actual versus Ford's history, sly references to contemporary SF... it's just dizzying. Mr. Plotkin has done a wonderful job.

Would the Lord Hero consider a Sea Dragon Conqueror beneath his dignity?

2007-08-20T02:41:29Z

Inspired by recent conversations on IFmud, I've been tearing through my collection of Jack Vance stories in an orgy of rereading. Vance doesn't seem to be widely read nowadays, but I've always been fond of his work. He was successful and indeed decorated in science fiction, fantasy, and mystery—one of only three writers I know of to win both a Nebula and an Edgar Allen Poe award.^†

The Cadwal Chronicles
Comprising Araminta Station; Ecce and Old Earth; and Throy

A number of Vance's science fiction stories share a setting he calls "the Gaean Reach," the far-flung collection of worlds colonized by humanity expanding from Old Earth. This trilogy, published late in his career, is widely considered the best of his SF. It follows the life of a young man named Glawen Clattuc from his sixteenth birthday through into adulthood. Set on the planet-and-nature-preserve Cadwal, the core plot involves machinations by various factions to subvert the legalities of the planet's "conservancy" status, opening it up for unlimited exploitation.

Vance's novels usually involve wide travels, and these are no exception. Glawen (and later the Conservator's daughter Wayness Tam as well) journeys to several different planets and each of the continents of Cadwal over the course of the story. Some of Vance's characteristic themes are prominent: personal identity and expression conceptionalized as a struggle against society itself; bizarre societal mores; and of course the clever competence of the hero(s) triumphing over adversity.

The plotting is as good as any of Vance's books. There are several main actors, with goals sometimes aligned and sometimes at odds. The treatment of these threads clearly draws on his experience writing in the mystery genre - they are well paced in parallel, with the reader following along as Glawen and his allies unravel their adversaries' doings bit by bit, and the climaxes are satisfying. The one criticism I'd make is of a fault Vance seems prone to making: he walks the reader gradually through a rich and varied story for nearly the whole book (or series, in this case), then suddenly finds that a great deal of open plot threads must be resolved in the last ten percent of the book. It's not quite disappointing, but it does feel a bit abrupt.

Finally, of course, there's the diction. Almost no-one who reads him finds Vance's writing to be unnoticable; it's definitely love-or-hate. Hyperbole, declamations, precise and unusual word choice... his prose is unmistakeable:

"Aha! You omit the area between the third step and the last–which is to say, the garden at Fair Winds and the Niger River, which lies across the Sahara Desert. Along the way you might be given wrong directions, or robbed, or fall into a ditch, or be attacked or married or divorced."

Planet of Adventure
Comprising City of the Chasch; Servants of the Wankh; The Dirdir; and The Pnume

This tetralogy of short science fiction novels is also one continuous story, nowadays published as a single-volume omnibus. The name is apt: the structure is a nearly classical adventure story in the Robinson Crusoe tradition. The hero, Adam Reith, is a scout on a mission investigating a radio signal that had apparently been beamed towards earth from the star Carina 4269 some two hundred years before. Just as his ship has arrived at the planet Tschai and Reith's scout craft is detached to land, a torpedo from the surface destroys the main ship, leaving Reith the sole survivor with no way back home. Over the course of the novel Reith must deal with threats from all four of the intelligent alien races found there while attempting to build or steal a spacecraft in which to depart.

The plotting here is more random and episodic than in the Cadwal series. It reads like a serial potboiler collected into a single volume, although it was never published as one. Plot threads are dealt with as they arise and are then laid aside. It's not his best, but it's still a rollicking fun ride.

Anacho gave a patronizing shrug. "They are Yao: a fervent race addicted to ritual and extravaganza, prone to excesses of temperament. You may find the intricacies of Cath society difficult to cope with."
Reith frowned. "I hope it won't be necessary. The girl has vouched for her father's gratitude, which should simplify matters."
"Formally the gratitude will exist. I am sure of this."
"'Formally'? Not actually?"
"The fact that you and the girl have formed an erotic accomodation is of course a complication."

Night Lamp

Night Lamp is a gem. It's another late Vance SF novel, written next after he'd finished the Cadwal trilogy, and it shares that work's close plotting. He indulges in a couple of his favorite formulae – one's first romantic interest coming to a bad end, and social class struggles being rigidly formalized and overt – but this sort of thing is expected. It wouldn't be Vance without it.

Again the protagonist is a young man coming of age, but this time the scope of his efforts is narrower: to determine his true history after his adopted parents are killed. This proves to be hazardous: his birth-mother's death was by no means accidental, and motives can persist for decades. The sinister tones are more prominent in this novel than in most of Vance's other works, although it never takes on an aspect of true horror fiction.

This is a delightful read. It would also make a good introduction to Vance: it's accessibly short compared to his other top-rank works.

Skirlet nodded thoughtfully, as if Jaro had corroborated one of her own deeply felt convictions. "The years go past. I used to think of them as slow tragic heartbeats." She turned her head, looked down the Prospect. "I remember a handsome boy from long ago. He was very clean and neat; he had long eyelashes and a face full of romantic dreams. One afternoon, on an impulse, I kissed him. Do you remember?"
"I remember. My head was in the clouds. I'll become that boy again, if you'll kiss me some more."

^† Jack Vance, Harlan Ellison, and Avram Davidson

SF supporting cast meme

2007-07-22T04:22:27Z

Everyone remembers which story Valentine Michael Smith is in, or Paul Atriedes, or Sarah Connor. But do you remember...?

Name the F/SF story in which these less-prominent characters appear. Only one correct guess per person per day please, to give everybody a chance to play. As usual, some are more obscure than others. More than one work by a given author may be represented. Struck-through entries have already been guessed. (I'll also be adding more characters for the tough ones as they go unguessed.)

Final update: Answers provided for the 4 that went unguessed. Thanks for playing along, everybody!

Chooka Frood; Duffy Wyg& - Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, guessed by huskyscotsman
Castel Cromartin; Cornely Welibus; Mathew Kershaul; Estaban Rolver; Haxo Angmark - Jack Vance [author guessed by od_mind], "The Moon Moth"
Ludmilla Davis-Davis; Moses Lemke Stone - Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, guessed by inkylj
Dr. Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai - Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, guessed by zrblm
Dr. Vittorio Ricci; Lorenzo de’ Medici; Dr. John Argentine; Kallian Ptolomy; Henry Tydder - John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting
Genevieve Rand; Sir George Reedy; Lieutenant Hal Donovan; Preston Sanders - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Oath of Fealty
Bodwyn Wook - Jack Vance's "Cadwal Chronicles," Araminta Station / Ecce and Old Earth / Throy, guessed by huskyscotsman
Representative Joe Erikson; Jill DeVille; Sigmund; Peter Render - Roger Zelazny's "He Who Shapes" / The Dream Master
Masaq’-Sintriersa Chomba Lassils dam Palacope; Uagen Zlepe - Iain M. Banks's Look to Windward, guessed by runehog
Heather Lelache; Mannie Ahrens; Penny Crouch; Dr. William Haber - Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, guessed by runehog
Robin Wednesbury; Olivia Presteign - Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, guessed by mef
Miser Shen - Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, guessed by inkylj
Master Frodo [I said minor characters!]; Lina Faaldom - Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Conflict of Honors and Carpe Diem, guessed by od_mind
Police Inspector Harry Bryant - Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Blade Runner, guessed by Roger.
Vea Doem Oiie; Tirin; Bedap; Chifoilisk; Dr. Saio Pae - Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, guessed by od_mind
Tomasso bar Sandre - Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, guessed by joenotcharles
Aibynn - Steven Brust's Phoenix, guessed by chadu

Iron-age technomancy

2007-06-29T23:37:58Z

This is probably old news, but oh my. A marble-based 6-bit binary ripple carry adder.

Crunch

2007-06-27T06:20:10Z

We were in a car accident today. Someone hit us as we were driving through the parking lot behind J's work. They backed out of their parking space just as we were behind them, not seeing us, and trashed the two passenger-side door panels.

Fortunately, there was a policeman present when the accident occurred. He's the one who hit us.

The policeman immediately took full responsibility for not having seen us. Actually, that wasn't quite immediate -- first he made sure J and I were unhurt, then he took responsibility. I appreciated that. We later heard him reporting to the dispatcher that it was his fault.

He had to bring in officers from a different jurisdiction to write up the accident report. I hadn't anticipated that, but it makes sense. It did meant that we sat around for 15 minutes waiting for the Atherton cops to show up. In the meantime, the guy who hit us took a ton of digicam photos: our car, his car, various angles and distances, all that good stuff.

Car insurance basically sucks. I can understand why we have to shell out our deductable to the auto body shop, and will then be reimbursed when the police insurance pays up, but it's still "a temporary liquidity crisis" as they say. At least we can get the car in almost immediately [and it could have been tomorrow morning if our logistics had worked out]. It's also lucky that he hit the door panels and not, say, a wheel well. Smashing into the front wheel and drivetrain would have been much, much worse.

The poor cop looked like he's about 22 years old. I wonder what he thought about me: a guy with a salt-and-pepper beard, long hair, and a t-shirt reading "Google is ruining everything!"

We're home, a bit shaken but apparently unharmed, and the prognosis for the car looks good. *Sniff*. It's less than a year old! It's too young to be in the wars! (Even though it does have more than 23k miles on it now....)

Unsmoked pulled-pork barbecue

2007-06-25T03:53:49Z

Intended dinner time: 6:30 pm. Food into oven: 1:30 pm. I'm making pulled pork for the first time, oven-roasted rather than smoked because of lack of equipment. We'll see how it turns out.

The project was inspired by a gift from a friend of mine. She owns Big Guy's Custom Barbecue, a highly-regarded barbecue concession at AT&T Park (where the San Francisco Giants play), and gave me a bottle of her sauce a couple of weeks ago. Hooray for tasty gifts!

The Rub

The dry-marinade rub is, by all accounts, the secret key to successful barbecue. Restaurants guard their rub recipes at least as closely as their sauces. Here's the one I used as a first try; it's loosely based on an alleged KC-style rub, tweaked for pulled pork (KC barbecue is canonically beef). One usual ingredient is cayenne pepper, but J can't eat much black or chile pepper without serious pain, so I've toned it down: I used plain ground ancho instead of cayenne, and a touch of herbs for complexity. This is pork, so sage and thyme seemed appropriate.

¼ cup packed brown sugar
¼ cup paprika
1 TBSP coarse flake salt [Diamond brand kosher, not Morton's]
1 TBSP ground ancho chile
½ tsp cumin
½ tsp oregano
1 tsp fresh ground black pepper
½ tsp garlic powder
¾ tsp onion powder
½ tsp rubbed sage
½ tsp dried thyme

For a 3.5-pound cut of pork shoulder, I put on about 3-4 TSBP of rub, put the whole thing in a Ziploc™ bag, and refrigerated overnight.

Cooking

Ostensibly one cooks the pork at around 225° F / 107° C to an internal temperature of 190° F / 88° C. This is supposed to take around 1.5 hours per pound, and my chunk o' meat was around 3.5 pounds, and somewhat flat. Unfortunately, I forgot to let the meat warm up for a couple of hours before putting it in the oven. After six hours it was up to 175-180° F internal, and we were starving, so out it came. It was only falling apart on one end, furthest from the bit of shoulderblade bone that had been left in. I couldn't really pull it, so I diced it up very roughly for sandwiches.

I knew that some people wrap the meat in foil halfway through the cooking to prevent drying out. This is probably most necessary for larger pieces that take literally all day to cook. I didn't do that, but I did reason that another way to slow the drying process might be to steam the oven a bit, so I put a small pan with an inch or so of hot water on the bottom rack.

Table sauce was Big Guy's Custom BBQ for me, and Everett & Jones Mild "Super Q" for J.

Verdict

Yum!

Despite being less-done than the optimum, it was tender clear through. The flavor was quite good, although it turned out quite a bit sweeter than I expected. That's the brown sugar, of course—and I even halved the proportion of sugar from the original rub recipe! For beef it might not matter as much, since it is not as sweet as pork, but for this it turned out to be not my ideal style. So, for next time, I'll eliminate the sugar. Also, it did need a touch more bite. Bumping the black pepper up to a tablespoon and/or throwing in a teaspoon or two of a medium chile like New Mexico is probably the way I'll go here. Obviously if you're fine with heat, go with 1 tsp of cayenne instead of New Mex. The sage and thyme turned out to work very well. They weren't really distinguishable unless you knew they were there, and the flavor worked beautifully with the pork, as intended.

The pan of water in the oven certainly didn't hurt, but also probably counts as pure superstition. That means I'll most likely do it that way forever.

J used an awful lot of her sauce, which I take to be a good sign. (We'd eaten Everett & Jones barbecue before, from their outlet in Berkeley, but hadn't yet tried their packaged sauce.) The Big Guy's sauce is indeed quite good, although it was a little thicker and less vinegary than my imaginary ideal pulled-pork sauce. In the future I might cut it with a little hot water and just a touch of cider vinegar, but it's a tough call. Being a commerical bottled sauce, it has liquid smoke as an ingredient. I'd love to try it without the added smoke. In theory the smoke flavor is on the meat, and the sauce serves to enhance that meat flavor. Bottled sauces have to try to contribute the smoke flavor themselves for home-oven cooks who expect to taste it... ah well.

I'll definitely be doing this again, although filling the house with BBQ smell all day isn't something I want to repeat too often. The aroma is a bit tenacious, and I don't want it to get into the upholstery!

Lyrics meme, revisited

2007-06-15T18:39:56Z

Another short dip into the theme meme: name the artist and title, given these snippets of lyrics. Only one correct guess per person, please, to give everybody a chance. Some of these are fairly obscure, but not all. (And remember, kids; using Google is cheating even if you work there!)

Final update: unguessed lyrics bolded and the citation provided.

if I could open my mouth wide enough for a marching band to march out - "Marching Bands of Manhattan" by Death Cab for Cutie
she is the prom queen and i'm in the marching band - "Girl Next Door" by Saving Jane
my father took me into the city to see a marching band - "Welcome to the Black Parade" by My Chemical Romance, id'd by ooshiny
even though I was a fat kid and a marching band geek - "My Hometown" by Bowling for Soup
the marching band refused to yield - "American Pie" by Don McLean, id'd by lpsmith
you paid the piper and called the tune and you marched the band away - "Slow Marching Band" by Jethro Tull, id'd by ceo
my heart is like a marching band, i'm a fan in the stands - "Morris Brown" by Outkast
the sky's a raven marching band, black blizzard blowing across the land - "Raven Marching Band" by Laura Veirs
and all the little ants are marching, red and black antennas waving - "Ants Marching" by Dave Matthews Band, id'd by paulobrian
the hums and the drums of the marching band - "Easter Parade" by Jump, Little Children

I can name that song in ONE LETTER

2007-06-09T05:20:02Z

Following nothings's lead, paulobrian gave me the letter V and memed me to name my favorite ten songs beginning with that letter. And, uh, well, here are my current favorite ten songs that start with V. Well, four, actually - that is all that I could think of that I know and like. (Curse you, Paul!) [* More! storme reminded me of some; thanks!] [* and edited because i'm silly and hadn't yet ripped an album, so didn't see a current favorite 'M' in iTunes.]

Vincent, Don McLean. Starry, starry night / Paint your palette blue and grey / Look out on a summer's day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Vow, Garbage. I came to cut you up / I came to knock you down / I came around to tear your little world apart
Vienna, Billy Joel. Slow down you crazy child / Take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while
Virginia Woolf, Indigo Girls. They published your diary and that's how I got to know you / Key to the room of your own and a mind without end
Video Killed the Radio Star, The Buggles. They took the credit for your second symphony / Rewritten by machine and new technology
Violently Happy, Bjork. Violently happy / 'Cause I love you

Some notes on the 'V' songs.

Vincent: Everyone knows the title song from American Pie, of course, but nearly as many know this wistful ode to van Gogh, and with good reason. Most of the rest of the album is good, too.
Vow: Garbage was one of any number of mid-90s grunge-influenced electronic-pop bands, but producer-drummer Butch Vig was a cut above, and their debut album had a catchy polish that most of the field lacked. Garbage is one of my favorite bands, despite a certain (raucous) fluff.
Vienna: A laid-back, quietly exceptional song from Joel's mega-standout album. I was startled the other day to learn that for quite a while, this track was one of the top iTunes Music Store purchases -- who knew that it was so popular? I suppose this might say something about the iTunes purchasing demographic.
Virginia Woolf: The better songwriter (ahem :) of the top folk duo around, doing a song about the influence of Virginia Woolf's diary on a young girl learning to cope with the world she's growing up in. What's not to like?
Video Killed the Radio Star: The very first video shown on MTV, this one is the entirely-too-prescient New Wave classic.
Violently Happy: I don't much like Bjork's later material, but her Debut album is quite solid. Lots of people find that her voice makes their ears bleed, but I also listened to a lot of Kate Bush and Rush back in the day, so mine are pretty inured.

Addendum: ten 'M' songs, to make up for 'V' being so sparse. Like the 'V' songs these aren't in any particular order.

Mysterons, Portishead. still holding on / this ocean will not be grasped
The Mary Ellen Carter, Stan Rogers. And with every jar that hit the bar / we swore we would remain / and make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again
Mary, Mary, Chumbawamba. And now I'm growing old disgracefully / Whatever happened to Mary?
Mercy Street, Peter Gabriel. Wear your inside out / dreaming of mercy
Modern Love, David Bowie. Modern love walks beside me / Modern love walks on by / Modern love gets me to the church on time
Mr. Brightside, The Killers. Destiny is calling me / open up my eager eyes / 'cos I'm Mister Brightside
Mr. Freeze, K's Choice. I am wondering today in the sun on a boat to Dover / could you freeze me in and defrost me when it's over?
Mrs. Robinson, Simon & Garfunkel. And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson / Jesus loves you more than you will know
Mr. Jones, Counting Crows. Standing in the spotlight / I bought myself a grey guitar / When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely
Marching Bands of Manhattan, Death Cab for Cutie. If I could open my mouth / wide enough for a marching band to march out

And now for some notes on the 'M' songs. You can tell I'm a sucker for "alt pop," can't you?

Mysterons: Although Tricky and Massive Attack might have scouted the territory first, it was Portishead who first put "trip-hop" on the charts in a big way. "Mysterons" is the lead track of their debut album Dummy; the thick, languid instrumentals with Beth Gibbons's smoky vocals are unmistakeable. I love this little subgenre, and am sad that it's mostly died out. Hooray for 8mm carrying the torch....
The Mary Ellen Carter: The late Stan Rogers was one of the last great classic folk singers, a Canadian who drew often on his country's maritime experiences. This track is a lynchpin of Rogers's Between the Breaks... Live! concert recording: a triumphant story of loss and recovery spun around the namesake ship's sinking and salvage. Rogers's arrangements and voice show perfectly here.
Mary, Mary: How unlikely is it? An anarchist punk band in England floats around for a decade, then signs with a major label and winds up with a Top Ten dance single? Although that track -- "Tubthumping" -- got all the air play, the rest of the album is surprisingly good, particularly to folks who think "punk" = "three chords and shouting." There's shouting, it's true, but the music is tight and far more sophisticated than one would expect. "Mary, Mary" brings punk energy into pop structure, with careful attention to the arrangements and production. Good stuff.
Mercy Street: Not punk, not at all. "Mercy Street" is Gabriel's gentle, faintly disturbing tribute to poet Anne Sexton, heartbreakingly melancholy. Part of his So album, and far from the weakest track.
Modern Love: Bowie was pigeonholed as "that weirdo" for a long time, and the image distracted from his enormous talent as a musician. "Modern Love" is a classic high-energy New Wave pop song, the lead track of his enormously influential Let's Dance album: archetypal Bowie and ridiculously danceable.
Mr. Brightside: Okay, so The Killers are a pretty silly example of the current crop of alternative-pop bands. So what? I'm a sucker for a driving beat underneath a slower vocal line, and who cares that the song is about voyeurism? This track makes me want to drive 95 miles an hour, and that's not a bad thing in a song.
Mr. Freeze: K's Choice is a Belgian post-grunge duo who had a brief moment of popularity in the US with the song "Not A Habit." This is another track from that album, with competent musical writing and a backhanded take on emotional overload that happens to work for me.
Mrs. Robinson: Not much to say about this one, eh? S&G were so damn good....
Mr. Jones: It's fashionable these days to hate Counting Crows, but I still think their debut album was excellent. This track is plain good songwriting; a memorable, singable tune and a lyric throwing highlights on the singer's slightly desperate yearning for happiness down a clichéd path he doesn't really understand.
Marching Bands of Manhattan: I'm a latecomer to Death Cab, a deliciously melodic alt-pop quartet who finally signed with a major label in 2005 after a long successful run on the indie circuit. Death Cab's lyrics are considerably more thoughtful than the pop norm, circling around love and death with an off-kilter take on both that I find endearing. Add in the clean, singable music and I'm seriously hooked.

If you want me to pick a letter for you, comment here. I promise I won't pick 'V'.

Dinner. Yum.

2007-02-18T04:15:27Z

Chicken-tomato pasta
Serves two

Ingredients:

one half boneless, skinless chicken breast
one ripe beefsteak tomato (or two ripe Romas)
½ to 1 cup dry vermouth
¼ tsp demi-glace [I used More Than Gourmet roasted chicken demi-glace]
1 tsp tomato paste
seasonings: thyme, sage, salt, pepper
¼ cup heavy cream
1 TBSP butter, 1 tsp olive oil
angel-hair pasta
grated manchego or similar cheese
minced fresh parsley for garnish

Set a pot of water going on the stove to use (eventually) for cooking the pasta.

Seed and dice the tomato. Slice the chicken breast in half "the stupid way," i.e. flat, and cut each half into three roughly equal strips.

Put the butter and olive oil in a skillet and heat on medium-high until the butter has stopped foaming. Add the chicken strips and cook, turning once, until barely done. Remove to a plate and set aside.

Gently pour the oil out of the skillet, set it back on the stove, and deglaze with the vermouth. Add demi-glace, tomato paste, and seasonings to taste, lower heat to medium, and simmer until reduced to 4-6 tablespoons (4 TBSP is ¼ cup), depending on the amount and consistency of sauce you want. Add cream and diced tomato. Bring to a boil and simmer a minute or two to thicken.

While the sauce is thickening, cook the angel hair (fresh angel hair pasta cooks in around 45 seconds). Drain, then portion into two wide flat bowls. Return the chicken to the sauce briefly, just to reheat, then place on the pasta. Pour the sauce over all, sprinkle with cheese, then decorate with a little parsley. Serve.

Comments: The demi-glace is optional, but provides a little more body and depth of flavor. The tomato paste is the same idea: just a little to vary the sauce, and it's fine without. The herbs are optional; I've made and enjoyed this with just vermouth, cream, salt, and pepper. This time around I used 1/4 tsp of dried thyme and a pinch of rubbed sage. The salt is mandatory, however, and the pepper highly recommended.

Real-world software engineering

2007-01-24T07:38:45Z

My friend Dan is an instructor this semester for a sophomore-level software engineering course, expected to be the students' first encounter with sizeable programming projects. One of the lectures, according to the syllabus, is explicitly supposed to be a sort of exposé of the realities of a career in the field. He solicited contributions from former orkers, but alas I didn't get back to him until after the lecture in question.

But that's what LJ is for! Plus, I know quite a few software professionals, and I think it's an interesting topic. University students in CS certainly didn't get any sort of realistic view of the industry when I was in school; I got all my reality checks by working summers writing lab-automation and data-analysis software at NIST. So, all you software-industry or nearby people: any ideas what to tell the young'uns to prepare them for the real world?

Dan's phrasing:

What would you tell college students about real-world software engineering that they might find (a) interesting and (b) helpful in their future careers? The lecture notes left over from previous years aren't particularly useful, so this weekend I set about the task of writing a new lecture from scratch: a 30,000 foot flyover of what you might be in for if you end up working in the software industry. Release cycles, autobuilds, requirements docs and technical specs, sleeping at the office, the whole bit.

My thoughts:

Real-world software engineers spend an enormous fraction of their time not writing new code, but debugging existing code. Almost nobody teaches debugging as an engineering practice, but they should. It's vitally important.

QA/QC are not the enemy. BUGS are the enemy; QA should be your friend and ally in fighting them. Ideally someone from QA is involved directly in your project, sitting in on your engineering meetings, understanding what the product is supposed to do and planning how to test it. If QA is not involved in your engineering product except as an anonymous consumer of the final product, your engineering organization has a problem that needs to be fixed -- that kind of testing is important, but far from sufficient.

Revision control is insanely important. If you can't accurately reconstruct the state of the code last week, you will find yourself trying to guess how to un-break some crucial functionality at a most inopportune time. Perforce's $600/user license fee sounds exhorbitant to students. It isn't: it will more than pay for itself the first time anybody needs to figure out what broke Feature X.

You are not the only one who will read your code. It may well be that you are not even the person who most desperately needs to understand it. Code without explanatory comments is less valuable, inherently, than code with annotations describing what it's trying to do and why. The folks who come along a year after you leave for another job will bless you heartily if you have bothered to explain that bizarre hash function or finicky parallel-tree data structure that your application depends on. (I learned this one early: at NIST I was writing software that I knew, from Day One, would be used and maintained and updated by polymer chemists, probably for years after I had left the position.)

It's common for software people to work much more than the benchmark 40 hours a week when a deadline looms. If it's happening all the time, either you're using your job as your hobby, or your engineering management (and possibly corporate management) aren't doing their jobs right. Either way, reconsider. Don't sacrifice your personal life to your job.

If you don't trust your management, leave. It isn't worth it, and ours is an industry blessed with easy job mobility.

That's a start. Your turn.

Regret, by definition, comes too late

2006-09-27T20:42:52Z

Noted SF author and poet John M. Ford died a few days ago. Teresa Nielsen Hayden's weblog Making Light is hosting a memorial thread and a long bibliography of occasional works, but I wanted to call out one piece of Ford's I hadn't seen before, the finest memorial of 9/11/2001 that I've encountered:

"110 Stories"

(His poem "Against Entropy" begins the Making Light memorial thread, and is all too appropriate.)

So perish law-breakers

2006-08-30T22:45:42Z

An old home, a bear home, remote from human-haunts,
Wall-girt and weather-warded, where ones wise in woodcraft
Lick into new life, a baby, a bear cub,
Safe among saplings, far in the forest.

Till one comes slyly, girlchild, goldilocks....

Three Bears Norse. Tee hee!

Via natecull

Nor any a drop to drink

2006-08-25T01:20:33Z

Nature Magazine: Severe water scarcity arrives decades earlier than predicted.

Hat tip: yhlee

Veritas

2006-08-21T03:25:16Z

Tonight we opened a bottle of wine that prominently features a grape I was totally unfamiliar with: carignan. The wine is from Fitou, Cuvée des Ardoises Château des Erles, 2002, made with equal parts grenache, syrah, and carignan. Unusual, but good stuff! Intense blackberry fruit, but with a lot of musty/musky/flinty stuff going on behind that. A little tannic but welcoming, quite drinkable. Yum.

The King is dead; long live the King!

2006-08-19T04:14:52Z

1997 Honda Civic LX sedan: 220581 miles
2006 Honda Civic LX sedan: 600 miles

Although the '97 was starting to hiccup just slightly shifting from 2nd to 3rd, it was still -- despite all those miles -- on its original automatic transmission. That is about the best recommendation I can imagine. We got rid of it because of that hiccup: it meant that a major repair was somewhere on the horizon, and would cost more than the car was worth. 220k miles just kill the trade/sale value.

Heat

2006-07-27T23:06:20Z

January 1 was the hottest New Year's Day on record in Sydney, Australia. July 19 was the hottest day on record in England. The first six months of 2006 were, on average, the hottest recorded in the US since recordkeeping began in the 1890s. And in the Netherlands, July is shaping up to be the hottest month since their recordkeeping began 300 years ago.

The ten hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990. June of this year globally was the second warmest on record for land and sea temperatures. Despite what some pundits and threatened industries' mouthpieces pretend, scientists agree that human agency is inducing global warming. Get used to it.

More than ~~eighty~~ 140 people have died in the recent heat waves in California, particularly in the Central Valley, and it's only July. The hottest months here are usually August and September. Stay cool, and know how to recognize heat-related health risks and what to do about them.

Please.

Edit: added cite for June 2006 being the second warmest June on record, globally.

What kind of American English do you speak?

2006-07-27T21:53:06Z

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

20% Yankee

10% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

This makes me wonder about what they consider "Midwestern" -- much of my early language influence was pure central-Illinois midwestern.

Babelfish lyrics

2006-07-25T01:30:53Z

Google Translate: English -> German -> French -> English

I am a poor boy and my history which I am seldom declared have to want to say to resistance wasted for Pocketful Mumbles, thus satisfy promises all the lies and joke, still the man hears, which he would like to hear and neglects the remainder, mmmm.

When I left my house and my family, I had frightened more foreign one No more as a boy in the company that in the rest of the station, operation to put slightly that worse quarters choosing, where the people zackigen go, after the places to only seek it, would know.

Around the wages of the worker to ask only more, I, come seeking after an employment, but I do not receive offers has just kommen-auf of Dirnen on 7. Alley. I declare, were times, me there that I was so alone took comfort there.

And gone, my extending and wishing winter clothings, went me and at the house, where New York the city the winters do not purge me and acted to go to the house.

In cleaning, a Boxer and a combatant by his trade and it are door the advertisements of each glove which put it to the bottom or cut him, until it cries outside in his anger and its dishonour, „me leaves, me leaves, “however combatants still Remains.

Fun with layouts

2006-07-14T05:24:22Z

So, I've been playing with LJ layouts; there are some bits of design that I've seen elsewhere and wanted in LJ, but couldn't find a public layout that quite did what I wanted. So, time to flex some CSS muscles and have a little fun...

It's pretty ragged right now but I'm having fun, and the basics are more or less what I had in mind. The main and friends pages are all there, though single-entry pages are still not "in the style" — first things first and all that. Comments will be warmly received....