Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

Just found a short between the keyboard and monitor…

Published January 7, 2010 by centaur

... otherwise known as an ID10t error in the operator component.

Trying to install a new device, wasn't working, and the reason was I never applied the firmware upgrade that the instructions clearly said had to be required. Anthony's nth (7th?) law:

If you don't follow all of the instructions, you won't finish in the goal state.(*)

(*) Except through dumb luck, or just possibly deep knowledge. Did I have deep knowledge in this case? No. So if you're doing voodoo, try, perhaps, following the complete recipe before you complain your zombie isn't coming back to life as advertised.

-the Centaur

Eaaarthquake!

Published January 7, 2010 by centaur

Mild shaking in the house, like it was shoved sideways half an inch and sprung back. Apparently that's this one:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/nc71336726.php

Only my second quake in my 4 years in California. SO far, SO good...
-the Centaur

UPDATE: Sandi felt a quake earlier last year while I was at work. I believe it was this one:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/30/san-jose-earthquake-43-ma_n_180814.html

3:30am – pager duty suuuuuuuucks EOM

Published January 6, 2010 by centaur

PS: For those not in the know, EOM stands for "End of Message" - generally used for a subject-only email without a body, like sending someone an url:

Here's the presentation: http://short/url EOM

Technically I guess that means the EOM in the header is not an EOM, and also by corollary the PS is not a PostScript since it introduces the body of the message.

Well, then, in that case: Hello, Internets!

The Year of Blogging Dangerously

Published January 5, 2010 by centaur

So, last year I had an extraordinarily complicated series of New Year's Resolutions which almost completely failed. Looking back, I succeeded at my major goals for the year, but the complex plan of weekly / monthly things completely failed.

So, here's a simpler set of New Year's resolutions, goals, what have you:

Establish a weekly pattern of exercise, including some karate
Set aside some time each month to do art in addition to writing
Post to this blog on the average once a day, measured each week

The last one is the hard one, of course; I'm already 4 posts behind. But I have such a huge backlog of articles and ideas in folders that I shouldn't find this too hard ... if I can just change my habits.

In other news, Warren Ellis has already blogged 365 times since January 1st. Damn him.

-the Centaur

The Uncommon Common Cold

Published December 2, 2009 by centaur

From Wikipedia:

Common symptoms are cough, sore throat, runny nose, nasal congestion, and sneezing; sometimes accompanied by 'pink eye', muscle aches, fatigue, malaise, headaches, muscle weakness, uncontrollable shivering, loss of appetite, and rarely extreme exhaustion. Fever is more commonly a symptom of influenza ... The symptoms of a cold usually resolve after about one week; however, it is not rare that symptoms last up to three weeks.

Aw, $@%#!!!, I'm in the "not rare" it-sucks-for-a-long-time category.

For more information:

Mayo Clinic's Flu Diagnoser (I have a cold, not the flu)
Children's Hospital Flu vs Cold Chart (Again, looks like I have a cold)
H1N1 vs Cold vs Flu (Again, looks like a cold).

Still, probably time to see a doctor at T+3 weeks....

Worst. Vacation. Ever. – Till now.

Published November 30, 2009 by centaur

Ten days off to write! No trips, no vacations, no distractions. Just me and writing ... but: The "Terminator" version of the common cold. Car repairing turned car totaling and car shopping during hard raining. Cat fights and cat urine. And a desperate scramble to catch up in National Novel Writing Month turning what I love ... writing ... into a chore.

And then my wife came back Saturday night.

That was great, but things didn't get better right away. See #3 above, cat urine: our incompletely housetrained Gabby the Cat decided to urinate on a big soft squishy pillow to either

(a) reduce his insecurity by marking his protector's stuff with his scent (the official story as told by everybody's favorite cat books)
(b) show his irritation at his protector locking him in a room (what I strongly suspect based on my study of animal cognition, which might be summed up as saying "just because they can't talk doesn't mean they're completely unaware idiots")

... just as I had run a full load of laundry in the washer and thus couldn't wash it right away, just as I had to run to the airport so I had no time to dispose of it properly, and just in time for the heater to kick in and propagate the smell through the entire house by the time we got back.

Stepping through the door was ... an unpleasant moment.

But we persevered. We went out for a late dinner and talked about ... hell, everything. We crashed early, I got up at the ass-crack of dawn, fed the cats, went to church, put everything in the hands of God, and went back and slept till noon. By the time we awoke, it was clear that the pillow was the source of the smell and the tarps-plus-blankets wash-immediately-if-soiled solution was working to protect our home as we transition street cat to house-and-yard cat. We had a lovely lunch at our favorite restaurant (Aqui) and test-drove a hybrid (a Prius). Everything, once again, became OK, and it seemed like all the nastiness of that awful ten days rattling around the house mostly with myself, a virus and three irritated cats was at last over.

So: yesterday: 2094 words. Today: 2583 words. As of this moment, I am officially caught up on where I "should have been" for Nano, and I'm on track to finish by tomorrow. And we even have a plan to save our obstraperous little cat, who is mellowing out now that he has two people to entertain him (and to separate the cats from each other so they have time to mellow).

Best of all, my best friend is home.

-the Centaur
P.S. Thanks, God.

Why I’m Working From Home Tomorrow

Published November 20, 2009 by centaur

So I've been sick this week, last Friday evening up until now, with what appears to be a severe common cold. I was actually working from home, at 50% power, for Monday and Tuesday, and came in late Wednesday; so today I was actually glad to get in. But I was coughing so badly that my boss at the Search Engine that Starts With a G (who was suffering from a similar cold with a similar time course) recommended I go home early.

If only I'd taken him up on that, rather than waiting to come home in rush hour:

side impact to a nissan pathfinder rear driver side door

In case you're wondering, I'm fine, the lady who hit me and spun off 360 degrees is fine, and the guy in the other car she caromed off of is also fine. But, I feel like crap. I wonder why?

side impact airbag deployed inside a nissan pathfinder

No, that's not a pillowcase stuffed into my "B" bar: that's a "Thank God for Side Impact" Airbag, post-deployment. And Thank God for SUV's: the Pathfinder took the brunt of the impact and didn't even get knocked out of its lane. I was rattled, my Bluetooth headpiece was knocked off and bounced off the other side of the car, and my Mom on the other end nearly had a heart attack as she heard a screech and then I got cut off ... but the Pathfinder didn't even get knocked out of its lane. Didn't swerve. Didn't stop. Didn't even slow down. Hell, it took me a half a mile before I could pull over.

Oh, drat, am I doing this out of order? I was southbound on the middle lane of California 85 in a clot of rush-hour traffic, talking to my mother with my Bluetooth headpiece, when I heard a screech then a bang and felt a jolt. I said, "hey, Mom, did you hear that?" and noticed that the Bluetooth headpiece was gone, my side was in pain, and a car was spinning off behind me in my left rearview mirror. I blinked, realized, "oh, shit, I'm in a vehicle that's just been hit" and quickly started to pull over in case there was a fuel leak or other catastrophic damage to the vehicle. But I was just past the join of 87 and 85, and none of the merging traffic would let me over for near half a mile. Finally, just as twilight turned to dark, I pulled over, scrambled out of the car, and waited for it not to catch on fire.

When I was sure it was safe, I called Mom back, then began the long trudge back to the accident site, where three cars were stuck in the middle lane. I called out to make sure everyone was OK, and they called back to verify I had been in the truck. After fifteen minutes, traffic finally thinned enough for me to cross, by which time the first car (the witness) had disappeared. We discussed what happened, and as best as the three of us could determine, the lady who struck me hit her brakes too hard as traffic was knotting up, lost control, then rammed me, spun off, then hit him.

Miraculously, none of us were hurt, even after her 360 degree spin, and all three cars were drivable. A DMV truck arrived, stopped traffic so we could move their cars off to the side and take stock; after the other two cars drove off, he took me to my car and made sure I could drive off as well. The Pathfinder rode a little rough ... but she rode.

However, at 185,000 miles and four (4!) someone-rammed-into-me-for-no-good-reason accidents, the heroically-protective Nissan Pathfinder is probably going to be counted as totaled by the insurance company (call scheduled for sometime around 8-10am tomorrow, hence the "coming in late or working from home entirely" email to my boss and team at work).

Ah, Pathfinder, you did a good job, my friend...

My next car? An SUV. A hybrid, of course...

-the Centaur

Shameless Filler

Published November 20, 2009 by centaur

Yes, I'm trying to fill out those 1-blog-posts-a-day I promised at the beginning of the month. But there is a serious topic: I realized today, for reasons which will become clear shortly, that I'm just plain awful about blogging stuff that happens in my life. So that's going to change, shortly; however, it wasn't appropriate to put this message in that article. Go about your blogrolling business; nothing to see here.

It is amazing how mentally freeing it is…

Published November 15, 2009 by centaur

... to have just one more thing off your todo list. Really, I have just about as much to do now as I did before I finished the edits of _Frost Moon_. It's just that I feel much better about what I have left.

Completion. A wonderful feeling.
-the Centaur

Of course, be real…

Published November 14, 2009 by centaur

...the idea you can make something happen if you "prioritize" it works only if you have enough time with which to make the time. Editing two novels and writing a third - all on deadlines, some of them tight - while working late many nights AND taking care of a new and extremely needy cat can lead to you crashing out repeatedly before blogging, and sometimes it's only after you've crashed early several nights but have been sniffling and coughing enough that only way you can sleep is on Nyquil that you realize, maybe, just maybe, you're fighting off a bug.

Meanwhile, Warren Ellis is fighting as many deadlines as I am while also writing a seven-volume epic mashup called War and Peace of the Worlds featuring the entire cast of Archie Comics turned gritty postmodern superheroes, is doing it all one handed on his Palm Pilot while using the other to lean on his cane as he climbs Mount Everest after having coughed up a lung ... and is still blogging three times a day.

@!$%##?!
-the Centaur

An Odd Sense of Familiarity

Published September 4, 2009 by centaur

So I'm back in Atlanta for a few days to visit friends and go see my mother ... oh, come off it, I'm here for Dragon*Con. But before that started, I had a whole day to recharge my Atlanta batteries - yes, visiting with several friends and hitting old haunts, but also seeing places that appear in the Dakota Frost series like the Flying Biscuit:

But I had a few chunks of downtime and a lot of work to do, so I dropped by Georgia Tech, browsed the bookstore - I love visiting college bookstores and browsing the textbooks: I like to know what universities are recommending students should be learning - and then plopped myself down in the embedded Starbucks to answer some email and try to push things forward.

But I found myself facing an odd sense of familiarity on the Georgia Tech campus. Of course, I recognized the buildings I was seeing, and I didn't recognize anyone specific that I knew. But a lot of people looked very ... familiar. Not the students: the professors and researchers and general population of people milling around at Georgia Tech.

I lived in Atlanta for 18 years; fourteen of those were spent on the Georgia Tech campus and since then I've visited the campus regularly to see friends or browse the bookstore. So it's possible that many of those familiar people are people I've seen, but don't remember.

Or it's possible that the culture of Georgia Tech - the clothes, the styles, the mannerisms - is something that newcomers pick up by osmosis, so even if I hadn't seen them before they've become like the people who I was formerly familiar with. And that's what made the sense of familiarity so odd: it was sufficiently vague I couldn't really tell the cause.

Interesting ... I wonder what I would look like if I had spent 18 years somewhere else.

-the Centaur

15 Books

Published June 15, 2009 by centaur

Recently I got nailed with the following note on Facebook or Myspace or some other damn thing:

"Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you."

Well, neo-Luddite that I am, I don't want to encourage this whole walled-garden social networking thing, so I'm not going to post a note there until I can effortlessly crosspost with my blog and everywhere else. But I can come up with 15 books:

Godel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
Convinced me to get into Artificial Intelligence. I've probably read it half a dozen times. Has a fantastic layered structure that Hofstadter uses to great effect.
The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky
Opened my mind to new ways of thinking about thinking and AI. Also read it several times. Has a fantastic one-chapter-per-page format that really works well to communicate complicated ideas very simply.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Feynman, Leighton and Sands
Taught me more about physics than the half-dozen classes I took at Georgia Tech. I've read it now about four times, once on paper (trying to work out as many derivations as I could as I went) and three times on audiobook.
Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley
Opened my mind to new ways about both thinking and programming. The chapter on estimation blew my mind.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
A true epic, though it's probably better to start with the Virtue of Selfishness if you want to understand her philosophy. Every time I think some of Atlas Shrugged's characters are ridiculous parodies, I meet someone like them in real life.
Decision at Doona by Anne McCaffrey
I must have read this a dozen times as a child. I still remember two characters: a child who was so enamored of the catlike aliens he started wearing a tail, and a hard-nosed military type who refused to eat local food so he could not develop cravings for the foods of (or attachments to the cultures of) the worlds he visited.
The Belgariad by David Eddings
A great fantasy epic, with all of the scale but none of the bad writing and pointless digressions of The Lord of the Rings. I've heard someone dismiss Eddings as "third carbon Tolkien" but, you know what? Get over yourselves. Tolkien wasn't the first person to write in the genre, and he won't be the last.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
All of the adventure of the Lord of the Rings, but none of its flaws. The long journey through the great dark forest and the Battle of Five Armies still stick in my mind. I like this the best out of what Tolkien I've read (which includes The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion, and some other darn thing I can't remember).
The Dragon Circle by Stephen Krensky
Loved it as a child. Still have a stuffed dragon named "Shortflight" after this book.
Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini
Another true epic, this time a graphic novel. Resonates with me in a way that few other fantasy epics do. I have the first 20-issue series in a massive hardbound volume which is now apparently worth a shitload of money. Out of my cold dead fingers, pry it will you.
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig
Yes, your programming can kick ass. Let Peter show you how.
Reason in Human Affairs by Herbert Simon
Helped me understand the powers and the limits of human reason, and why we need emotion to survive in this complicated world.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
More than anything, I appreciate this book for a few key vignettes that made me realize how important it was to understand other people and where they are coming from, and not to impose my own preconceptions upon them.
The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers by Ayn Rand
Straight talk about fiction from one of its most effective writers. You don't have to agree with Ayn Rand's personal philosophy or even like her fiction books to learn from this book; half her examples are drawn from authors she personally doesn't agree with.
In the Arena by Richard Nixon
Straight talk about surviving in politics from one of its most flawed yet effective masters. A glimpse into the workings of a brilliant mind, broken down into different sections on different aspects of life. Don't bother reading this if you feel you owe a debt to your personal political leanings to say something nasty about Richard Nixon in every sentence in which you mention him simply because Nixon did some bad things. (Note: I think that Nixon's alleged crimes are the worst of any President, because they attacked his political opponents, undermining our democracy. However, his political philosophy, once divorced from his personal paranoia, is something very important people need to understand).

What did I forget? The Bible, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Das Energi by Paul Wilson, The Celestine Prophecies by James Redfield, Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, One Two Three Infinity by George Gamow, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, Unfinished Synthesis by Niles Eldredge, Neutron Star by Larry Niven, The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov, the collected works of Martin Gardner, Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai, Albedo Anthropomorphics by Steven Galacci, and of course, Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia, the Volume Library, and before that, back in the dawn of time, the World Book Encyclopedia. Read into that list what you will.

Blogosphere, consider yourselves tagged - your turn.

-the Centaur

(title)

Published June 8, 2009 by centaur

Cost of a taxi from SFO to MTV: ~$90. Cost of BART+Caltrain: $5.75. Hm ... this green thing has more advantages than just feeling good about "saving the environment". Of course, it takes way the heck longer and many of the trains aren't full, so I need to add public transit to my things to study.

This is Xeriscape

Published May 19, 2009 by centaur

My wife and I are xeriscaping our lawn - transforming it from a green sucker-of-water into a still-green landscape of native plants that require little or no water. Lawns consume a lot of water, and this is one way we can make a difference that both saves the environment and saves money.

But a xeriscaped lawn isn't always just dirt, or just brown, or even just green. Here you see the succulents we've planted in fantastic bloom, which require almost no watering during the course of the year. During the day their flowers open in a brilliant polychromatic display; at night they close up.

Xeriscaped Succulents and Path to Olive Tree

We've also used low-water plants and trees, either existing ones or new ones planted that will require little to no water. Unfortunately new trees require some water to get started, and so the grass that would not grow before has come back with a vengeance (as you can see in the upper left).

Xeriscaped Succulents, Olive Tree and Gardener

We've made the problem a little harder on ourselves by using reclaimed materials as much as possible, letting plants grow out to fill the space rather than buying more, planting from cuttings, using no artificial fertilizer, and using almost no artificial pesticides (other than slug pellets, which we could not avoid using as they love succulents). So it's taking some time ... we're in the start of the second year of our front yard landscaping.

But after that first year, it's starting to bear fruit. Already the result is a wonderful Seussical landscape that requires little to no watering. Who knows what it will look like after another year.

-the Centaur

Pictured: our front lawn, with closeups of the flowering succulents (grown into the space on their own), a medium shot of the path (made from reclaimed wood chips), and a long shot of the tree (saved from death with a little mulching), the path and the gardener.

Not enough hours in the day, redux…

Published April 25, 2009 by centaur

I easily could spend 8 hours a day blogging. There's just too much to write about; I don't know how people like Andrew Sullivan and Warren Ellis write so much. No, wait, I do: they're paid to write, dang it, where I am paid to make search engines smell better and must squeeze my writing in around the margins.

Recently I started work on redesigning the templates for the Library, and in my giant Mongo death Todo list I have an entry "blog updates to library". But I never got around to writing the article, because I kept on getting confused about what to write first.

Then I realized that's part of my problem. The point of blogging the redesign of the Library was to expose the thought process that normally goes into the redesign of any web site, rather than hiding all of the hard work behind the covers, springing it fully formed onto the world, and proclaiming: "See! Doesn't it smell better?"

So here's the thought process that was blocking me from writing articles on the Library:

Anthony looks at Todo list, sees entry "Blog Update" and tries to figure out what to do with this horribly underspecified action item with no clear next action. Somewhere out in cyberspace, David Allen kills himself, then spins in his grave.
Anthony decides "I've got a prototype for the new design of Library now! I just need to post the darn thing and get on with it!"
Anthony starts work on cleaning up his Blogger template. During this process he finds he needs to figure out precisely what his Blogger template is doing, as he no longer remembers and the code is poorly documented.
Anthony comes up with a clever way of visualizing how his Blogger template works which itself is probably worth blogging about.
Then Anthony realizes that he doesn't know whether the design works well with Internet Explorer on Windows, or Chrome, or on small screens (notwithstanding my desire to support only large screens), or on super large desktop screens with different sized fonts.
This leads to more questions: What browsers should this work well on? How should I test this? What if there are fundamental incompatibilities between IE and Firefox?
Well, shazbot. I decide, screw it, let's just fix a small page somewhere and update that. So I update the Research page, which already needed an overhaul of its research statement.
Anthony finds a system to help him test and prototype his content which is worthy of blogging about in its own right.
The textual update goes swimmingly, but updating the CSS and HTML proves more of a bear, especially comparing Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Anthony's system for updating the content starts to show failures which are worthy of blogging about in their own right.
Well, shoot, now what do I do?

At this point, I have about half a dozen things to blog here: updating the Library, updating the Library's blogger template, issues with Internet Explorer and Firefox, issues with HTML and CSS, how to update your software, how to test your software, how to rapidly prototype, and how you can visualize changes to a template. So in the process of deciding to update my blog template, I accumulated far more things to blog, which at the start of this process I'd wanted to wait until after updating my blog template. I become totally confused.

But the point of this blogging exercise is NOT to go off and hide and try to figure these things out, then come back smiling with a solution. Instead, when I get stumped, that is a serious decision point in the development process and I'm SUPPOSED to write an article which says, here's what's on my plate, and boy did I get stumped.

So this is that article. And just articulating the things going through my mind gave me a sequence of things to do: now I can blog each of the elements on that list and show how I encountered the problem, how I tackled it, and how I got to a solution.

-Anthony

I can’t read what I want right now

Published April 24, 2009 by centaur

Right now I'm working on Blood Rock, the sequel to Frost Moon, my novel about Dakota Frost, a magical tattoo artist who can create tattoos that come to life. It's an urban fantasy novel set in Atlanta, where werewolves and vampires are real, magic was hidden by its own practitioners, and the counterculture of the 1950's, 60's and 70's dragged it all into the light. Each book in this series focuses on one new monster and one new alternative culture practice made magical: Frost Moon focused on werewolves and magical tattooing, Blood Rock focuses on vampires and magical graffiti, and the upcoming Liquid Fire focuses on dragons and magical firespinning.

I recently completed the revision of Frost Moon, and am trying to get back into my groove on Blood Rock. I heard an author (I think it was Steven Barnes) recommend that you should read about ten times as much as you write, and while I don't strictly follow that I do believe you need to expose yourself to a lot of writing to prevent yourself from falling into your own linguistic ruts. (You should do a lot of living too, and observing that living, but how to do that is something you must discover for yourself).

SO I went to pick up a new novel to read. When I started Blood Rock, I had recently picked up Fool Moon by Jim Butcher. A few pages into it I saw the beginnings of a plot thread similar to one I'm exploring in Blood Rock and immediately put it down. I don't like to read things similar to what I'm working on "because stuff can sneak in even when you don't know it's happening" - a sentiment by Oliver Platt that's as true about writing as it is about acting. I wrote a story once about a man fighting a crazy computer, and later found entirely unintended similarities to an episode of the Bionic Woman that I hadn't seen in more than a decade.

So, no Fool Moon for you, not right now. I read Ayn Rand, H.P. Lovecraft, Steve Martin and many others, but finally wanted to roll around again to urban fantasy. So I picked up T.A. Pratt's Blood Engines. I didn't start it right away, and in the interim I attended a fire ballet at the Crucible out here in the Bay Area, and decided to set a scene in Liquid Fire out here in the Bay Area. So I open Blood Engines ... and finds out it opens behind City Lights Books in San Francisco.

So I put that one down. I then said, hey, let me get out my copy of Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Lieber, which people have recommended to me as a classic precursor of the urban fantasy genre. Flip it open: a reference to Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Dangit! What about this other book in my pile, the Iron Hunt by Marjorie Liu? Also features a magic tattoos. Dangit! Dangit! Dangit!

So I've given up on reading urban fantasy right now.

Instead I'm reading Severance, by Robert Butler, a series of flash fiction stories each 240 words long - the estimated number of words that someone could pass through someone's head after they've been decapitated.

After that, hopefully I'll be done with Blood Rock, and I can pick back up with the always dependable Anita Blake series by Laurell Hamilton. I love Anita Blake and think she's a great character, but Dakota Frost is my reaction against heroines that start off as uber-tough chicks before the first vampire shows up. I'm more interested in telling the story of how the uber-tough chick got that way, of showing how meeting vampires and werewolves and magical misuse would force someone to toughen up. Anita, of course, has been through that, and is more like a Dakota Frost t-plus ten years in the trenches. So it should be pretty safe to read Cerulean Sins.

Just no magical tattoos, graffiti or firespinning. Please. At least till I finish these three books.

-the Centaur

Pound Cake Reloaded

Published April 14, 2009 by centaur

So I tried making pound cake again, this time with success! I even brought it in to the Search Engine that Starts With a G to get comments from my coworkers, and none of them died (that I know of) and some of them even liked it (as reported on an anonymous form)! Even more of a success!

Here's what I did differently.

First, I changed the recipe. This time, I adapted one from "I'm Just Here for More Food" by Alton Brown, a chef well known for his excellent, scientifically-based cooking. After cross-referencing against the Joy of Cooking, I felt safe leaving out the vanilla on the suspicion that last time's funny flavor wasn't just the Splenda but my fairly old vanilla flavoring (which I found was labeled "bourbon vanilla" which made me even more suspicious.) This left the recipe:

Three cups of allpurpose flour
Three large eggs
Two cups of sugar
One cup of buttermilk
One half pound of butter
One half teaspoon of salt
One half teaspoon of baking powder

Preparation was much easier this time with a $25 handheld motorized mixer from Fry's
Electronics. I used a few tricks this time:

Allow butter to warm to room temperature by itself - no heating in the microwave
Mix the butter and sugar and blend until fluffy with no sugar grains visible in the mix
Beat egg yolks and whites together and mix with butter and sugar blend in 3 batches
Sift all the dry goods (salt, baking powder, flour) together 3 times
Alternate adding the dry goods and buttermilk to the mix

Also, I was more careful flouring the pan to prevent sticking. As before, the oven was preheated to 325, baking was 1 hour, and the cake was allowed to sit a bit before being taken out of the pan.

Results: Yum. The texture was light and flaky, on the edge of being too flaky. The flavor was good, though slightly bland - it could have used more vanilla. The crust had a good texture, but it could have been a bit darker.

This was a good cake, but I got even better feedback from my coworkers and from myself. The cake needed vanilla, a slightly better mixing, and a slightly better cooling procedure. Nevertheless, the pound cake served its desired function:

I will follow up soon with the details on how I tweaked the recipe until it was "perfect".

-the Centaur

The Great Litany at Maundy Thursday Vigil

Published April 10, 2009 by centaur

From two to three this morning I served on the Maundy Thursday Vigil today at Saint Stephens in the Field, the local Episcopal church I attend.

Maundy Thursday is the day Jesus instituted the Eucharist and was arrested, according to the Bible and tradition. Rather than a Maundy Thursday service, Saint Stephen's holds a vigil from evening to the time of the Crucifixion. Someone is in the church all hours of the night.

There's no way to know exactly when Jesus was arrested, but I've always thought the hour of darkness was pretty close to two to three AM, so that's a special time for me. Being arrested, humiliated and crucified for essentially telling the truth and trying to do the right thing would be terrible.

The first thing I read during my part of the vigil was from the Great Litany from the Book of Common Prayer; I thought it was apropos in our current time of trial:

We humbly beseech thee, O Father, mercifully to look upon
our infirmities; and, for the glory of your Name, turn from us
all those evils that we most justly have deserved; and grant
that in all our troubles we may put our whole trust and
confidence in thy mercy, and evermore serve thee in holiness
and pureness of living, to thy honor and glory; through our
only Mediator and Advocate, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Then I read from the Bible, first another apropos passage from Sirach 21:8:

8: He that buildeth his house with other men's money is like one that gathereth himself stones for the tomb of his burial.

After that, I started reading the Passion from the Gospel of John, and then went on to read the remaining readings for Maundy Thursday: first from the Gospel of John, then from Exodus, then from the Psalms, then from 1 Corinthians.

I leave you with the close of the Maundy Thursday service:

Peace is my last gift to you, my own peace I now leave with
you; peace which the world cannot give, I give to you.

I give you a new commandment: Love one another as I have
loved you.

Peace is my last gift to you, my own peace I now leave with
you; peace which the world cannot give, I give to you.

By this shall the world know that you are my disciples: That
you have love for one another.

An Age Mistaken

Published March 26, 2009 by centaur

Today, for the first time in my life, someone called me "old man".

It's not the first time someone's guessed my age wrong. When I was about sixteen, I and a friend went to a restaurant in a theme park; he was mistaken for a twenty-five year old and I was mistaken for twelve. Six and a half years ago, I was mistaken for an eighteen year old by the woman who would later become my wife. Her sister tried to warn her off on the grounds she was cradle robbing, but she persisted and found out we were close to the same age.

Today, however, was the first day that miscalculation happened in the other direction. I was at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, leaving an impromptu get-together at Firewood Cafe in the Metreon, a cascading series of dinners and discussions first with with a group of colleagues and then with some onlookers who were drawn in. On the way back to the Minna Street Garage, I passed the normal mix of badged game developers, predatory homeless people, and disinterested San Franciscans ... and then saw the kid.

My first moment of awareness of him was his demonstrative toss of a Starbucks cup, chucking it out onto a surprisingly clean street in a deliberate, almost belligerent act of littering. He hefted his wide, white skateboard, I took in his black shorts and jacket, and mentally categorized him as young, rumpled, and possibly homeless. The word "punk" popped uncharitably to my mind and I tried to quash it.

As he, I, and the woman walking ahead of us passed the glass wall of Mel's Diner, he tracked to the left, hugging the gentle inward curve of glass as if to go in the door when it was clear from his walk and attitude that he had no desire whatsoever to go inside. He had to pause briefly as the woman opened the door, and I passed him. As I did, he called out:

"Can you spare any change, old man?"

I've given forty-one dollars to panhandlers and street musicians over the past four days. I didn't give him a dime.

-the Centaur

Pound Cake: One Pound Each of Butter, Sugar, Flour and Eggs

Published March 2, 2009 by centaur

I enjoy a couple of slices of pound cake and milk as a late night dessert, but have difficulty finding pound cake that meets my standards. Forget the "loaf cakes" made by the big commercial bakeries: they're not bad, but they're not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about ring pound cakes. My neighbors made a dense, dry pound cake around Christmastime that was very good, but my favorites growing up were cakes you could get from Ingles: ring-shaped, light-textured, with a fluffy yellow center wrapped in a dark brown crust.

Usually there's only one store in any given region that makes these, the others sticking to loaf cakes. As I moved from Greenville, South Carolina, I found Kroger in Atlanta and later Safeway in San Jose had cakes that were similar, with slight variations in density and crust.

But there's something wrong in our modern commercial paradise: in the pursuit of the dollar or fashion businessmen tweak their good products until they become crappy and then discontinue them. I'm sure that's happened to all of you; and sure enough it happened to my pound cake.

First, Safeway started selling them only as half rings. Then they cut back on quantity. Then they replaced them entirely with "vanilla loafs" pre-cut entirely too thin. Whole Foods had decent-flavored loaf cakes, but they too have started pre-slicing them and cutting back on quantity.

I don't know what people have against pound cakes, but I can't find them locally baked, not even at bakeries - only icing-covered disasters, pudding cakes, and other variants, or alternatively Entenman's not-bad-but-not-good-enough butter loaves.

So, I am working on a pound cake recipe.

I made my first pound cake years ago, back in Atlanta. I was using the approximate "one pound" recipe: a pound of sugar, eggs, butter and flour. I didn't have a motorized mixer, and the hand mixing and stirring didn't cut it. It's fair to say this was a total FAIL. The flavor and crust were good, but the texture was dense as a brick and it was too hard to eat.

More recently, I tried again. I had planned to try this with sugar first, then introduce Splenda on the next cake, but dumb me forgot to buy sugar thinking we had some, which I discovered halfway through prepping the recipe. I adapted the recipe primarily from "Butter Sugar Flour Eggs" with a little help from the 1997 "Joy of Cooking":

One pound of unbleached allpurpose flour
One pound of eggs, separated
One pound of butter
Two and a half cups of Splenda baking sugar
1/4tsp vanilla flavoring
"Just a pinch" of nutmeg and cinnamon

Preparation was much easier with a $25 handheld motorized mixer from Fry's, which cost less than the ingredients of the cake itself (to be fair, I think I bought other staples the night I bought the pound cake ingredients). The "trick" recommended by "Butter Sugar Flour Eggs" was to beat the egg yolks and egg whites separately; this worked out so-so in the egg whites step. In "Just Here For More Food" Alton Brown recommends a different method, which I will try next time.

That's right, all of the shots of pound cake shown in this article were from my first try of this recipe. It was a beautiful looking cake. The texture of this cake was slightly dense, but smooth and serviceable. The crust was very slightly dry but serviceable. The flavor I have to say was poor - it was in the right ballpark, one might even say it tasted right, but it had a chemical aftertaste. And I'm sad to say I don't think it was the Splenda ... I may have simply added too much vanilla extract.

I've been consuming this cake for a while for my late night reading sessions, but I finally broke down and got the Whole Foods cake for comparison, having one slice of each. Ah, drat - the Whole Foods cake was much better, both in texture and in flavor, though it didn't rise to the level of the long lost Ingles, Kroger or Safeway ring cake.

Oh well. Better luck next time.
-the Centaur