The new blog is here.
I'll be leaving all this up on Blogger until whenever it gets shuffled off in to the electronic aether, but I won't be updating here anymore. All of the archives from this site have been copied over to the new one. So yeah. It's been a good run, what with Blogger being free and all. The new site is not free (as in, I pay a hosting fee; you still won't pay anything), but it's worth the money, because it is that awesome.
A brank-spanking new blog is coming soon. And by that, I mean actually the same blog, but hosted in a new location, with a new layout, and more flexibility. I'm excited.
Is the title of a song by Randy Hanzlick, who is (or perhaps was) a real live medical doctor who writes (wrote?) songs as a hobby. This particular song was printed on a 45 in 1980 in a run of about a thousand, but is now available on a larger scale as a track on Dr. Demento's 30th Anniversary Collection, which is where I'm getting my information from.
The interesting thing, and the reason that I bring it up at all, is that I just found that same quote attributed to Tom Waits, who apparently used the line in a TV show in 1977. So it would at second blush appear that this line, like all great lines, originated with Tom Waits.
But wait! There's a comment on this page which would seem to indicate that Dr. Hanzlick came up with the title of his song indepently of Fernwood 2 Night. But then again, according to that source, Dr. Hanzlick "saw it written on a bathroom wall," which is suspiciously similar to a quip Waits made about the origin of the line in the interview linked above. Will we never extricate ourselves from this labyrinth of minutiae?
Perhaps the important point is not who said it, but rather that it was said at all. Perhaps the phrase expresses a truth of such fundamental importance that both men gave voice to it completely independently. Yeah. Dig it.
The big news in my life is that I just moved to Chicago. This is how I knew I was there:
I was riding home on the el with my friends, when a man tapped me on the shoulder, and this is what he said:
“Hey, man, wassure shirt say? I would… kill everyone in this… room… for a drop… of sweat beer… Hom… Homer… J… Simpson… Yeah, man, thaz what I’m talkin bout. Thazza fine shirt. You okay.”
Our new friend sat down right next to us. He wore a small goatee, a beat up sweater, and blooshot eyes. As it turned out, he had a lot of things to say, and he said them many times. What follows is a selection of the parts that I feel are most relevant, and that I could also understand:
“White power, baby. Fuck those niggas, what the hell, what the hell they doing. I’m not wanting to offend anybody, you know, but for real, white power. High five, man.”
The man was black himself, and we were glad that the other people on the train were all wearing headphones.
Like the mantra of a devoted swami, he chanted along to the station announcements at every stop.
“This is Clark. Diversy is next. Doors open an the right at Diversy.”
“Standin passengers, please don lean gainst the doors.”
Except he usually missed that one.
“Y’all know George W. Bush? I luuuv him. I’m not tryin t’ offend y’all or anythin, but if I was a woman, I would have his babies. George W. Bush, Bush Sr, Dick Cheney, all them, I want to get down and dirty with em. If I was a woman I would fuck George W. Bush all night long, know what I’m sayin? I’m not tryin ta offend, that’s just the way I feel. They could do me in the ass, man. Course I’m jus sayin all this, I’ma married man.”
“Doors open on the left at Division.”
He noticed that a couple of people in the group were girls.
“Man, women are the best, y’all know what I’m sayin? You gonna take me there, girl? Take me there!” snap snap
His fingers were more than a bit crusty, but for all that he could snap them very loudly, and he did, many times. The sound was made louder by his fingers’ proximity to our faces.
“Take me there, girl! You gonna take me there?” snap snap
The girl he was talking to: “I don’t know where we’re going!”
“You don need to know; you jus gotta get there.” snap snap
He was going somewhere. None of us knew where, and we didn’t stay to find out.
My train has just begun a five-year layover, and I for one can’t believe it spent so long tooling around the south. Chicago is the best place ever.
“Standin passenger, please don lean gainst the doors.”
Special Thoughtful Note
That all really happened. I didn't have to make up any of it. I'm sorry if it offended you. I thought it was hilarious.
I've spent too much time talking about how awesome Macs are recently, so this post is intended to return the discourse to another subject near and dear to my heart, alcohol. Specifically, sangria.
Sangria is a drink that comes from Spain originally. It's like fruit punch, but with booze. I make it pretty often, and people seem to think it generally tastes okay, so I'm gonna go over the recipe I use. It'll be fun.
First, these are the things that go in sangria and some preliminary rambling about them: wine, fruit, sugar, orange liqueur. That's it, actually.
There's more wine than anything else in sangria, and usually it's red. Sangria made with white wine is called sangria blanco, and you need to put different things in it. Don't fiddle with that shit. Red wine is the way to go. You don't need to get amazing red wine; you're going to dump a bunch of sugar and fruit juice in with it, so if it doesn't taste perfect you'll probably never notice. You probably want to shoot for something fruity rather than dry. I've used Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Merlot, Merlot, and I think some other things to good effect. Something like Shiraz or Chianti is probably not the sangria wine you're looking for. Actually, Chianti might work pretty well. I should try that. Yellow Tail is great for sangria.
On to fruit. As with everything in life, fresh is always better. However, I have found (through countless hours, selflessly spent, of experimentation) that using bottled orange juice and lemon juice in lieu of freshly squeezed tends to not make a huge difference in the quality of the sangria. On the other hand, you absolutely should use fresh fruit to make fruit slices to put in the sangria.
Some chefs, such as Emeril Lagasse, recommend the use of a top-shelf liqueur such as Grand Marnier to flavor your sangria. Mr. Lagasse may be an outstanding chef, but he is a piss-poor drunkard, and I assure you that the subtle and delightful features of Grand Marnier or Cointreau (which presumably justify their top shelf price) will be completely drowned in a sea of wine and fruit juice if they are used in sangria. All you care about is giving the concoction a little orange-flavored kick, and for that a seven-dollar bottle of triple sec is your best option.
You also need to make sure you get a big pot or pitcher; you'll end up with about 2.5 L of sangria if you follow the instructions. And that's it for introductory rambling. Here's the recipe.
Ingredients:
Procedure:
That's all there is to making sangria. Give it a shot; don't even worry about sticking to the recipe. Sangria, like your mother, is very flexible. In the words of Cole Porter, quoted here from Box, Hunter, and Hunter,
Experiment.
Make it your motto day and night.
Experiment
And it will lead you to the light.
The apple on the top of the tree
Is never too high to achieve,
So take an example from Eve,
Experiment.
I think it is the funniest thing in the world that Box, Hunter, and Hunter use that quote to preface their textbook on statistics and experimental design.
As planned, I bought a MacBook a couple of weeks ago, and I've been using it pretty obsessively since it showed up in the mail. It's really nice, and I want to talk about why, but not for very long.
My background is Windows, and before that MS-DOS. The first computer I ever used was a Tandy 1000 SL. It had no hard drive, just two 5 1/4" floppy drives. You booted everything off of a floppy disk. It could run all kinds of awesome games, like Think Quick. These worms chased you around some castle, but you could use a plunger to distract them. It was great. Also, I wrote book reports for school with this word-processing program; I can't remember the name of it. The instruction manual for the program included this whole murder mystery story to explain how to use the cut-copy-paste functionality of the program. Instruction manuals nowadays are uninspired and banal.
The second computer we had was a CompuAdd, and it ran Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 was all right in my book; it was a thin veil you could lay on top of MS-DOS to make it prettier, and like MS-DOS, it was pretty stable. That computer ran Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, which is when I learned how to look things up in an almanac.
Since then, the family's had several computers, all running Windows. It's gotten progressively worse, as most people who use it have noticed. XP, now that it's been out for however many years, is pretty stable, and that's cool. It took them two major service packs to get it that way, though. This is what happens when I boot my Windows computer running XP (the machine has a 1.8 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM):
This is what happens when I boot my new MacBook (2.0 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM):
This is how you install a program in Windows: download the file, run the install program, which asks you about where you want to put the program, do you want a desktop icon, do you want a start menu icon, do you want to associate files with it, you need to restart your computer, BLAH!
This is how you install a program on Mac OS: download the disk image thing, double click it, and drag the program to your Applications directory. Boom.
It's silly to try to say that one operating system is "better" in some qualitative, absolute sense. But Mac OS is better for me. And also in general.
At this point, I am, in fact, completely off the Microsoft. I have a ton of Word and Excel files lying around, but there's this group called OpenOffice.org, and also NeoOffice for the Mac, which makes a suite of programs which have almost all the functionality of the Microsoft Office Suite, but are free. And that's a good price.
There's nothing else I can say about the Mac OS that hasn't already been said too many times. To me, the biggest difference between it and Windows is this: in Windows, you constantly have the feeling that you are using things that were hacked together early in the development process, and then got a fresh coat of paint quickly applied before being released. On the Mac, you constantly have the feeling that someone sat down and thought hard about the programs you're using and spent a lot of time polishing them before they ever got to you. Maybe you don't agree with their decisions all the time, but they were at least actively making design choices, and that counts for a lot. Now I'm done.
There's a very interesting discussion I ran across today regarding Mac OS X. Since this post will essentially be me doing nothing more than aping their ideas, I'll summarize it quickly. The discussion is also fairly long; it's thanks to the oversight (or lack thereof) in my government-funded internship position that I was afforded the leisure to go through it myself.
Mark Pilgrim is a computing professional and 22-year Apple user who recently wrote a post for his blog describing his decision to abandon the Mac OS in favor of Ubuntu. His reasons for switching have much to do with Apple's tendency towards the closed-box mentality; their products are some of the most polished available today, but the inner workings of those products, and specifically many of the file formats they use to store your iApp creations, are closely-guarded secrets. The end result is that you get a product that is beautiful and a pleasure to use, but one that also locks you in. Should you want to export your iMovie edits or your iPhoto library metadata at any point in the future, you will find it unpleasantly difficult. These two applications are merely examples; the problem itself is endemic to most of Apple's bundled applications, and this is what finally killed the Mac for Pilgrim.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball, a blog in which he comments on Mac news and writes longer opinion pieces, linked to Pilgrim's announcement and made a remark which some of Gruber's readers interpreted as meaning that Pilgrim dropped the Mac solely because he had some problems with data corruption. Many of those readers then went to Pilgrim's site and, without necessarily reading the article, posted comments lambasting Pilgrim/evangelizing the Mac; the statement that the Mac OS is "better" than other OSes was frequently invoked.
In a lengthy response, Gruber apologized for the undue hostility of these readers, criticized them for completely missing the point, and clarified exactly what that point was. He ended the piece by saying, essentially, that while he understood and respected Pilgrim's decision, he did not feel that data lock-in was that significant a problem for the Mac. After all, Gruber points out, the Mac OS has been around in one form or another for 22 years; if data lock-in were going to cause a catastrophe, it would have already.
Pilgrim provided a laundry list of incidents in the history of the Mac OS when proprietary file formats have caused very real and significant problems for him personally.
Since I've decided to purchase a Mac in the near future, I was considerably interested in this exchange; in fact, it made me reexamine my reasons for wanting to switch to the Mac OS from Windows. The issues that Pilgrim brought up I hadn't even considered prior to reading his complaints, yet he makes a very valid point. The beautiful interfaces, the "it just works" aspect, many of the Mac's touted features, all hinge upon very specific, very closed standards that Apple certainly isn't anxious to open up. iTunes library metadata, email archives, iPhoto library metadata, iMovie edits: all this information is stored in proprietary, undocumented formats; often the data file itself is completely hidden from the user. The threat of losing a significant part of my accumulated stuff if Apple ever stops supporting these standards or if I ever decide to move to a different platform is very real.
For people like me, and by that I mean people my age, this is something of a rude awakening. Microsoft Word has been around nearly as long as I've been using computers. There was that Tandy 1000SL back in the day, but every computer since then in my family's household has run some version of Windows. The thought that I might one day not be able to open my .doc files in Word is rather disarming. I think the immediate future is pretty safe, but Pilgrim raises a good question: What about when I'm 80? Although preserving every essay I ever had to write on "Huckleberry Finn" is pretty far from my mind, I'm willing to accept that some of the data I am producing at this point in my life will be things I want to hang on to indefinitely. Is Apple going to help me do that?
The answer to that question, based on everything I've seen regarding OS X and not just Pilgrim's indictment, is no. It's to Apple's advantage, business-wise, to keep customers tied to their products, and until a majority of customers recognize this problem and demand a change, there will undoubtedly be none. However, that's not enough of a reason for me to not buy a Mac. The rationale goes directly back to the point Gruber made: Pilgrim switched to Ubuntu because that choice made the most sense for him and for what he does. For me and what I do, however, the switch to Mac OS still has an inescapable logic.
Although I'm sure that some of the information I produce in the next five years will be worth keeping, I have to ask myself exactly how much of it, and which parts, will be things I'll want to look at years from now? Unlike Pilgrim, I am not the kind of person who is concerned about keeping email records going back a decade or more; nor do I have or plan on accumulating gigabytes of video footage, pictures, and associated metadata. The only things I produce of any consequence in the next five years will almost certainly be written in MATLAB, Mathematica, LaTex, or an open-source programming language. MATLAB and Mathematica are both proprietary, but there's nothing I can do about that, and their file formats at least are transparent. This difference in focus on what we consider important enough to archive is the greatest disparity in thinking between Pilgrim and I, and because of it, the closed-format mentality of the iApp collection is a non-issue for me.
The other significant point that helped me make this decision is that, again unlike Pilgrim, my choice is essentially binary: I'm either going to be using Windows or Mac OS. At this point in my life, if my choice is between Windows and something else, I'll pick the something else. I want an operating system that doesn't inexplicably reset the transfer rate on my IDE channels every month or so, that has a consistent user interface, that doesn't have an internet browser so inextricably linked to the OS that new security holes are discovered daily, that doesn't take 10 seconds to redraw the desktop under heavy CPU load, that has some semblance of logical design underpinning it, and Windows fails on all those points. Nothing that I've seen written about Vista has convinced that it will be different from XP in any crucial way. Linux would fit the bill, but as far as it's come, Linux is still something that I would have to "deal with" if I decided to run that on my personal computer, and I don't want to be tied down to an operating system that I have zero experience with. Besides, if I ever change my mind, I can always just run it on a MacBook.
It is my hope that in the future Apple will be forced to address the problems Pilgrim brings up, but this may be misguided optimism. After all, how many average consumers care about these issues? How many average consumers are even aware of them? For someone like Mark Pilgrim, who has years of experience and years of involvement with software, a problem like data lock-in may be glaringly obvious, but I would be surprised if many people purchasing computers today even identify it as a possible concern. I'm quite happy that I happened across this discussion, however, since it's made me aware. And knowing you have a problem is half the battle.
The following is a recipe for cantaloupe bread that I made up the other day. There was this thing I read that was talking about melon bread, and it sounded like it would be pretty good, so I checked around a found a few places online with recipes for various types of melon bread, and they all seemed to follow a pretty standard formula, so I went back to Joy of Cooking and adapted their instructions for banana bread, instead using cantaloupe. It turned out pretty well. I'll probably try to tweak it some more later.
Block 1 Ingredients
Pretty simple. The thing is not to add too much cinnamon; the flavor of the cantaloupe is easily overwhelmed.
The subject under discussion is the proper mixing of a martini. Because it needs to be discussed.
A few days ago, I was lucky enough to find myself at an event with a wide open bar, the services of which I did not hesitate to avail myself. After padding my tongue with a few of the more subdued libations, I placed the order that any gentleman of discriminating taste has to place at some point during the evening. I called for a martini.
The bartender proceeded to use the cap of the vermouth bottle to measure out a portion of that spirit, and followed it up by freehanding a rather significant fraction of a bottle of Tanqueray into the shaker. The resulting drink contained, needless to say, much too many parts gin and far too few parts vermouth.
Now, there have been many claims regarding the best way to combine the rare effervescence of vermouth gin. Some say you should pour a scant quarter ounce into the martini glass, swirl it once, and discard the rest. Others say that you should merely place the vermouth bottle in a ray of the morning sun that is subsequently incident on the martini glass. Still others say the ideal method is to concentrate very hard on the bottle of vermouth that you have left unopened in your liquor cabinet as you shake two ounces of gin. (Winston Churchill, you alcoholic.) This is all poetic bullshit.
The mystique surrounding the extra-dry martini is ridiculous. Show me a man who orders a martini extra-dry, and I'll show you a man who doesn't have the balls to order a shot of cold gin. Vermouth is absolutely essential to the perfect martini. Consider the gin and tonic: all by their lonesomes, tonic water and gin are both fairly unappetizing ingredients that few willingly drink. But mix them together, and you have one of the truly classic, and classy, concoctions of any generation. The same holds true with gin and vermouth. They complement each other; one falls flat in the absence of its partner. The quality that makes the drink is not the flavor of gin drowning out vermouth, it is the dynamic interplay between the two.
Gin tastes like Christmas; this is a fact that has been observed by so many reliable witnesses that it brooks no disputation. But like any Christmas present, gin is naked without a wrapping. You cannot simply pour a slug of Bombay Sapphire into a glass and expect to please. It requires some accoutrements, some dressing. In the case of the martini, this is the vermouth. The vermouth tempers the gin; it calms it without robbing it of any vital characteristics. This is why the martini is the truly classic cocktail: it takes the base spirit with the most complex flavor, and allows one to savor that flavor without being overwhelmed by it. The taste of vermouth should not be anemically intrusive. It should be strong but submissive, pronounced but restrained. Balance must be maintained.
The real martini is mixed with 1/2 ounce dry vermouth and 2 ounces London gin, and it is served straight up and ice cold. It is not made with apple schnapps, it is not made with orange flavored what-have-you, and it is not ever, ever goddammit, made with vodka. If you go to a bar and order a martini, and they ask you if you'd like it with gin or vodka, they are insulting your intelligence as a drunkard and connoisseur. Never drink a vodka martini. An angel dies every time you do. End of story.
Go drink. Now, dammit.
About how awesome life is right now. In theory, this is my easy, laid-back, lots-of-free-time semester, but for a variety of reasons, that hasn't quite materialized yet. Instead, the past couple of weeks have been more like, "wake up at 9, go go go go go, sleep, repeat." Making a PowerPoint presentation for this weekend's charity auction, training no less than four people to fill two of the positions I currently occupy, and remembering how to do differential equations are, it turns out, significant time drains.
So why is life awesome? I have all but officially received a summer research internship at ORNL, and a dude from Northwestern just called me to let me know that I'm probably going to be accepted with financial aid. Boo-ya.
Things have gotten to a point where I am truly and sincerely irked at many of the obligations I have. When I first began working as an A/V tech for the college, it was interesting. I got to fiddle with a bunch of crazy equipment, my boss didn't treat me like an idiot and gave me a lot of responsibility, and I got to drive the awesome old red van around campus. The fact that I did, and do, get paid peanuts for the work is rather beside the point; the job was appealing because it was flexible and on campus. I do still value it for these reasons, but in the past year the job has become rote and annoying, and I have developed a habit of shunting it to the side whenever possible. You can only set up speakers and microphones so many times before it loses its charm.
I've experienced the same problem (on a much shorter time scale) at the Flat Hat. This job was initially appealing because it required (I believed) a minimal time investment and consisted entirely of mindless work, for which I would be well-paid. This is true, but as I became better acquainted with the position, it became clear that doing a good job would require a slightly greater time investment, and would consist of work that was indescribably boring but was involved enough to demand attention. I stopped enjoying both of these jobs some time ago, but I do still enjoy receiving a paycheck, and so have continued to suffer them. But they require time, and time is the thing that I'm least inclined to give them.
The real problem with devoting time to these jobs is not the jobs themselves, but what they're keeping me from. It has reached a point where I am starting to get some (very general, non-specific, vague) ideas of what I want to spend my time on, and these ideas do not include recording a capella performances of mediocre college groups or tallying the advertising accounts at the school newspaper.
When I say "what I want to spend my time on," I'm not talking about a "Gee, I think I'd like to sit down and read this book for a while" kind of feeling. What I mean is that right now, at the beginning of this semester, I am fired up about my classes and about learning this new material. I'm cracking open my textbooks and thinking, "God damn, this looks really interesting. I want to really sit down this semester and get a good handle on this." I'm working through a problem and becoming extremely involved in writing a routine to build a B-spline approximation to a function. And I know that it's horribly, horribly dorky, and I don't care. Previously in my "college career," classes and math were things that I did because I was good at them and because there was a nagging feeling in the back of my head that it would all pay off one day; they weren't things that I was inspired to do in and of themselves. But for the past couple of semesters, math has become something that truly grips my interest; it has become something that I very much want to devote my time to. Population diffusion models? Lay that shit out. Hermitian matrices? Give me a heaping spoonful. It is to the point where I am, bless my little head, excited by all this.
The fact that I am excited is itself exciting, and also frustrating. Exciting for the obvious reasons: I've found some things that I am deeply interested in, and that I (would) happily invest my time with. It's exciting because the longer I study this subject, the more certain I become that I've found a niche that I can be happily productive in, and that applying to continue studying this subject in graduate school was the right choice. It's frustrating because the world at large is essentially ignorant of my newfound direction: random part-time jobs continue to impose themselves, professors continue to assign work, and I don't have the kind of time that I want for devoting to geekier pursuits.
This is the source of the dim view I currently have of my jobs and other responsibilities. What were initially pleasant and profitable distractions have become merely distractions that I could do without. These are temporary problems, however, and knowing that I'll be shedding many of these obligations as the semester progresses makes it easier to put up with them now. In fact, I really have so little to complain about it's laughable. In spite of everything, I fully expect this semester to be a wonderful end to a wonderful four years.
