Clumsy Ox

Updates... mainly on beer

2012-02-04T23:56:00.000-05:00

I've been home sick for the last three days. Today's the first I've felt truly human. A couple people have had the Dreadful Lurgy at work, and I'm pretty sure I got it from them.

I posted the brewing of a stout last November, "Home-brewin'". That stout turned out pretty well, I've been drinking it since just before Christmas. I remembered to take a picture yesterday:

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

The Guinness glass isn't supposed to convey any special meaning: it's just the glass I was using.

So my first day back on my feet I ran some errands, all of which are related to home-brewing. Weird. I built a mash tun using a cooler I obtained last month, pre-ordered some hop rhizomes, and brewed a batch of beer.

I built my ghetto mash tun based on Don Osborn's design. Off-season's a good time to buy coolers, so I picked up a 48 quart cooler at Sear's last month. I was planning to build a tun using nice brass fittings and make it look classy (like this one at Bright Spot Brewing), but I have to admit I'm just too cheap. So I decided to do it on the cheap.

I bought a stainless steel braided supply line for a sink. I was going to use a braided toilet line, but the sink line was longer at 30 inches. I figured the extra length would add some surface area. The whole project took less than a half hour: I sawed the ends off the supply line and removed the inner plastic line. The inner tubing was a little fatter than the 3/8" tubing I had, so I threaded that through the drain spigot on my cooler. It sealed just fine.

From Mash Tun

On the outside of the cooler, I connected the inner tubing to some 3/8" tubing from the home brew store by way of a plastic ball valve. We tested it for leaks, and then made our first batch in the new tun.

From Mash Tun

This batch is an experiment. I wanted to try a pale ale with a Pilsner malt base, so I took a recipe that's got a good reputation online and re-worked it to use a Pilsner malt. I'm sure it'll be good; I'm positive it's going to be pale.

Brew day was a comedy of errors today: my thermometer probe died while I was trying to chill the wort, the plastic tubing popped off the wort chiller... I have no idea how this will turn out. I might need to make another batch really soon.

Kvasir

2012-01-21T19:43:00.001-05:00

I just bottled a gallon of mead I started on October 12. It spent three weeks in the primary fermenter, then went into a "secondary" on November 22.

My first batch of mead was a little disappointing--- not bad by any means, but disappointing. It was a little too dry, and there was a yeastiness that never really went away. Of course, we drank all of it before it was six months old, so it might have gotten a little less yeasty had I let it age more. I wanted this second batch to be a little sweeter, and I wanted a little more fruit flavour.

I tried a couple variations this time:

I kept the same honey-to-water ratio: three pounds of honey to one gallon of water.
I boiled neither the water nor the honey; I heated the water to 145 F, removed it from heat, and stirred in the honey.
I chopped two frozen strawberries and threw it in the must before I pitched yeast, just like last time.
This time I used ale yeast, instead of champagne yeast. I figured it would leave a sweeter mead, and it looks like I was right.
When I racked into the secondary, I put some pineapple cores I'd stored in the freezer. I suppose it was about one pineapple's worth of core.
I primed it the same way: two tablespoons sugar boiled in a little less than half a cup of water.

I ended up with a half-filled bottle when all was said and done, so that's gone into a glass I've been sipping. It's incredible. I'm thinking this one will be called "Skald's Muse".

Pocket knives

2012-01-14T14:36:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine gave me a pocket-knife several years ago: a Spyderco Endura. Very shortly after I started carrying that knife, I realized why so many of my friends carry knives around. It's just too convenient to have a sharp blade every where you go.

Of course I don't mean it's as weapon. I know a lot of silly people think that: the sorts of silly people that are afraid of guns, big dogs, and their own shadows. The fact is, a sharp knife is one of the most useful tools you can have in your pocket. I find myself needing a sharp blade several times a week.

I carried that Endura everywhere I went (excepting airports: I had to put it in my checked bags every time I flew). That finally came to an end last summer, when it fell out of my pocket at my sister's house and I was unable to find it. She found it a couple weeks after I came back here, but I've not had a chance to go home since August. Next time I'm on the Island I'll claim it.

Of course, that doesn't help me now. I've a backup knife my brother-in-law gave me just before we left the East coast. It's a Browning, but I have no idea what the model is.

From Pocket Knives

The problem is, the Browning is just not a comfortable knife. It's a little block-ish in my pocket, and the clip's a little loose, no matter how I've tried to tighten it. And the knife has a liner lock; I just don't like liner locks.

So I've never really warmed up to that knife.

I started thinking about a replacement for my Endura, and I finally settled on the Cold Steel Rajah III. It's a nice little knife: a folding version of their Kukri. The blade is curved with the sharp edge on the inside. It's only 3 1/2 inches long, but it's very broad. I've always wanted a kukri: this is the closest I was likely to get.

But when my sister found the Endura, I sort of shelved my replacement plans.

But this last Christmas, my buddy handed me a package from Cold Steel. Now that's a true friend.

From Pocket Knives

I've been carrying the Rajah for a couple weeks now, and it's been a great knife. There are some down-sides: it's a little heavy for an every day carry. Not ridiculously heavy, just heavy enough that you can't quite forget it's there. In fact, it's a little bigger than my Browning, but it does feel better.

From Pocket Knives

But aside from its weight, the Rajah is my favourite knife. I love the broad blade, the deep belly, and the drop point. Let's be honest, this is a beautiful knife. Actually, it looks like something Galadriel would give a hobbit.

Still, when I get my Endura back, I think it'll go back to its place as my primary carry knife. It's not that I like it better than the Rajah, but I think the narrower blade and the less bulky haft make it a lot more practical for every day use. But honestly, if I ever end up lost in the wilderness, I think the Rajah's what I want in my pocket.

I know he can get the job...

2012-01-04T09:30:00.000-05:00

My parents gave me a gift card to Amazon. I've always got a few items in my cart there, so it's always appreciated.

I just received a DVD I ordered, Joe versus the Volcano.I am quite convinced this is among the best films ever made, perhaps the best.

It's not that there's an incredibly complex plot: the story is remarkably simple. It's not that it's terribly humorous: there are a lot of great one-liners, but the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. This movie is great because it tells a simple story very well. And it does so effortlessly.

Most people I've known who've seen this movie didn't like it. I understand that: it's a movie that's not easy to classify, which means it's hard to know what to expect. The first time I saw it, I wasn't sure what I thought. The second time, I was convinced it was brilliant.

The story is about Joe, a hypochondriac with a dead-end job in a depressing factory. His boss is an idiot, his co-workers are lifeless, and he's miserable. Then his doctor tells him he really is sick: he'll be dead in six months. So Joe quits his job. The next day, he's approached by an insane business man who offers to pay for him to live like a king, if he'll jump into a volcano in one month. Seeing no real point to his life, Joe agrees.

The story follows Joe on his journey to a small south Pacific island with an enormous volcano, into which he's planning to jump. Joe meets several memorable characters: the limousine driver who teaches him how to dress, the salesman obsessed with luggage, and the spoiled daughter of the businessman paying Joe. The characters are brilliantly done: drawn in bold strokes, but very simply. Each feels like a real person.

Ultimately, its Joe's journey to find a purpose for his life. He quits his job, goes shopping, sails to the South Pacific, is shipwrecked, and finds the best luggage in the world.

If you've not seen the movie, I recommend you watch it. If you've only seen it once, you need to watch it a second time. It's not the sort of thing you can really grasp the first time. To me, this is one of those movies that comes out of nowhere and stuns me. It's funny, quirky, a little strange, and a little exciting. The acting is great, the story is interesting despite its simplicity, and the characters are convincing. The photography is captivating; there is a whole host of symbols and images that appear and reappear through the movie. Well worth the $5 on Amazon.

2011 Beers in Review

2012-01-03T07:30:00.000-05:00

I made my first home-brew in January 2011. So it's been almost a year. I didn't even come close to the legal limit of 200 gallons per year: maybe 2012 will be better. I learned a lot about grains and yeast this last year, and I hope for many more opportunities to apply that knowledge.

The first batch was "Cronin," made with my buddy Caleb. That was our only extract batch: we made it with 8 pounds of Pilsener extract, a pound of chocolate malt, and a pound of turbinado. It was our first batch, and it had all the adventure a first batch should have. It ended up way too sweet, and we bottled it with far too much sugar and yeast. The bottles were way too carbonated, but we didn't actually have any explode. I think I have one bottle left.

From Brew Day: Opening Cronin

After Cronin we made "Lawnmower" with the yeast we had left-over from Cronin. Lawnmower was our first all-grain beer, and it was a simple recipe of two-row barley, crystal 60, and blackberries. It turned out far dryer than we expected, and very unevenly carbonated. Some bottles were all but flat, some spewed foam all over the kitchen. We only made two-and-a-half gallons of Lawnmower, which might have been a mistake. It was just starting to mellow to a nice beer when we finished the batch.

From Lawnmower

After Lawnmower, I made a solo batch I called "Old Woolen Shirt". It was an attempt at an Irish Red, and it wasn't half bad. Again, I found my carbonation levels were uneven. I ended up giving almost none of it away, as it was too unpredictable. I did make a second batch of Woolen Shirt later in the summer, which turned out a lot better.

From Woolen Shirt

On the heels of Woolen Shirt, I took a recipe I dreamed up with my friend Greg: "Greg and Mark's Amber Wheat." It was the worst beer I've made to date, but that's really due more to the execution than the recipe. It was thin, too dry, and too hoppy. The hops and malt were totally out of balance, it lacked mouthfeel, and it just wasn't what I had wanted to make. I think that one needs another go.

After Amber Wheat came another attempt at Lawnmower (this time with raspberries instead of blackberries), and a Belgian-like wheat beer we called "Toad". Toad was our first attempt at a beer with spices in it: we used cinnamon and nutmeg. Toad was a hit with everyone who tried it, but when I opened my last bottle (a few months later), I thought the cinnamon and nutmeg really over-powered the beer.

In the fall I bought an outdoor burner and inaugurated it with my first Dry Stout: "Rainy Season Stout". I think RSS is my best beer to date, but it's honestly pretty hard to mess up a stout. That was the first five-gallon batch I made since Cronin, and I think it's an improvement. With the smaller batches it's just too easy to run out.

In November I brewed a brown ale with a couple co-workers. It went well as far as execution, but I'm reluctantly concluding I'm not a real fan of the final product. I think I dislike the taste of Carapils Dextrine malt. This is the second time I've used it, and both times the final beer had a flavour I don't like. I want to retry that recipe without the dextrine (perhaps replacing the carapils with Maris Otter?) and see how it goes. I suspect I'll like that a lot better.

My final beer of the year is still in the fermenter: I made a batch of something vaguely Belgian on my week off for Christmas. This one is ten pounds of Pilsener malt, one pound of Special B, and a pound of palm sugar. I have high hopes for this beer, although it's far too early to tell how it'll turn out. I ended up with too much volume on this one: from now on I think I'll stick to 90-minute boils.

What have I learned in my first year as a home-brewer? First, I learned that it's just too much fun making beer. It takes a lot of patience, but there's a lot of joy in opening a bottle of something you made yourself and serving it to guests.

Second, I realized that I'm making beer a lot cheaper than I can buy it. Even including the cost of "failed" batches, it's way cheaper to brew than to buy: I'm somewhere in the realm of $4 per gallon. That's just ridiculous.

Third, the challenge of brewing is much more complicated than cooking. When you cook, you can add flavours directly; but when you brew, the flavours are harder to predict. If you think a beer should taste sweeter, you need to consider that it is boiled, then fermented, then conditioned before it's tasted. In cooking, sweeter can be achieved with sugar, honey, or the like. In beer, the fermentation will remove most or all sweetness, so you need to add something you think will increase sweetness after it's been boiled, fermented, and conditioned. The correct ingredient can be counter-intuitive.

Finally, I realized this can be a terribly obsessive hobby. I honestly make a good deal more beer than I drink. I suspect I drink less now than before I brewed. I find a lot more pleasure producing than consuming, and serve most of my beer to guests. That's not to say I don't drink, but my consumption seems to have dropped with brewing. I notice a lot of people online who've invested thousands into their "home breweries". I refuse to do that, but I'm starting to appreciate why they do. Precision with temperatures. volumes, and so forth can be a tricky problem to solve: a lot of brewers solve them electronically, which entails a significant cost.

I keep budget down largely by selecting styles that arose from less controlled environments. I personally don't like lagers all that much, so that eliminates the most expensive projects. I prefer the flavours of Belgian and British ales: Belgian yeast tends to like warm ferments, so that makes it easier on the temperature controls; British ales are frequently drunk young, so there's a reduced exposure to variations.

But in the end, it's all about having fun. I enjoy brewing, and most of the beers I make are at least decent, some are even good. I'm still working on producing one that's excellent.

Back to it

2012-01-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

Working in higher ed has a lot of frustrations and aggravations that just come with the territory, but there are some definite perks. One is that my place of work basically shuts down for a little over a week every Christmas. That didn't prevent me getting called a couple times when the campus was "closed", but I still ended up with more than a week off.

It was a nice break: I made some beer, played the guitar and mandolin, cooked, read a little, and watched some movies.

I've been reading The Coming Prince by Sir Robert Anderson: it's well worth the effort.

I might try and actually finish more books this year: it seems I'm about 75% done a dozen books at any given time, and most just end up back on my bookshelf without my actually crossing the finish line.

Every year, my sister Shan sends me something cool for Christmas. Shan's what I might call a very gifted giver. She has a knack for finding that perfect thing you didn't know you wanted. She made my Bodum Cozy, she gave me the CD of Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales," and she gave me her own copy of The Grand Sophy. This year she gave me a copy of the BBC's adaptation of North and South.

Yesterday one of the kids was sick and I wasn't feeling the best, so we popped the new DVDs into the player, expecting to watch one of the four episodes. We watched them all in one sitting. Shan describes the story as "Pride and Prejudice for grown-ups." Is it my favourite 19th Century book adaptation? I don't know... I'll need to watch it a couple more times. It's definitely in the running.

I think I prefer it to BBC's famous and brilliant Pride and Prejudice adaptation, solely on the grounds that it is visually more pleasing. The P&P miniseries was really very well done, but the DVDs are awful: they're washed out and colourless. (I hear the Blu-ray version really is much better.) But I'm very fond of the 2009 version of Emma. I don't know if the melancholy brilliance of N&S can possibly overcome the much more cheerful--- but not totally insipid--- E.

Here's a question, if it's not insipid, does that mean it's "sipid"?

Finally, my neighbour bought me the Lord of the Rings, Extended Edition on Blu-ray last summer. We had said we'd watch them together, and we're still not finished. It's hard finding times when we're both free. We've made it through The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. We were supposed to watch The Return of the King on New Year's Eve, but we got pre-empted.

This is a time when the "new and improved" really is. I watched the same sequences both on the older DVD version and the Blu-ray version, and I can actually see the difference. For example, the threads in Frodo's cloak are plainly visible.

Tomorrow it's back to work. Back to Perl and Java and Unix and Lisp and Spring and Hibernate and email and Oracle and GWT. I'm not really depressed by the thought, but it's been nice to get away from it for a while.

Back to real life

2012-01-01T23:18:00.000-05:00

Well, 2011 is over and done. I was just starting to get fond of it.

Today being the first Sunday of the month, there was "eating at the meeting". We never made it all the way in: one of the kids was sick, so we turned tail and ran before we actually got to the hall. Of course I didn't know that yesterday; I finished 2011 barbecuing some chicken to take this morning. I must say the chicken looked pretty good.

From New Year's Eve 2011

On a more celebratory and seasonal note, my neighbour got hold of a rib roast and had us grill it for New Year's. I've never done a standing rib roast before, so I approached this task with some fear and trepidation, with my neighbour documenting the whole thing on my camera.

The roast was pre-seasoned, so I suppose I had it slightly easy. On the other hand, I've no idea how to reproduce the roast.

From New Year's Eve 2011

We started out by searing the roast on all sides.

From New Year's Eve 2011

Once properly seared, the roast was left on the grill with a drip pan under it. We kept the temperature between 270F and 350F. The roast was done in a little under four hours.

From New Year's Eve 2011

I took the roast off when the thermometer registered 138F. The temperature climbed to 145F over the next half-hour or so, which is a perfect medium rare.

The only real problem was, I had anticipated the roast taking a good hour or hour-and-a-half longer; so it sat out more than an hour before we carved it. But I needn't have worried. It all turned out fine.

To be perfectly honest, I've not been a huge fan of prime rib: I've always preferred either a roast (with Yorkshire pudding, of course) or a steak. But I have to say that this little adventure has piqued my interest. This is a little project I'd like to try again.

Best of all, Ames made her amazing potatoes gratin. Ah.

Home-brewin'

2011-11-05T21:01:00.000-05:00

I've had some time off, so I took the opportunity for some more home brewing. I thought I'd share some photos from the most recent endeavour, along with some comments on the process.

I recently purchased some gear for brewing: a 42 quart stock pot and a propane burner. Hitherto I've been brewing on the stove in a 21 quart pot, which had three limitations:

I couldn't boil more than about five gallons in the 21 quart pot
our poor stove couldn't really push 21 quarts to a full boil
our stove, being electric, doesn't really give the instant heat needed for timely temperature adjustments

By moving to a 42 quart pot, we've increased our maximum boil volume to between seven and eight gallons; by moving to a propane burner, we've solved the sufficient power and "instant heat" problems.

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

In general terms, brewing involves taking some combination of grain, water, yeast, and hops and creating beer. The lifecycle of beer creation more-or-less follows the grain:

grain must be malted, which means it's germinated, then the germinated grain is cooked to form malt
malt is milled in a grain mill to produce grist, which is crushed grains (not flour)
grist must be mashed so that the starches in the grist are converted to fermentable (and non-fermentable) sugars, producing sweet liquor
sweet liquor is boiled with hops, seasonings (spices, etc.), and adjuncts (non-malt fermentables like molasses, honey, or turbinado) to form wort
wort is fermented with yeast(s) to form beer

So we malt the grain, mill the malt, mash the grist, boil the sweet liquor, and ferment the wort.

Most brewers don't malt grains on their own. Almost every home brew store will carry a significant selection of malted grains, which are ready to be mashed. Some home brewers prefer not to mash the grains themselves, purchasing malt extract, which is essentially concentrated sweet liquor. Some go a step further, purchasing hopped malt extract, which is basically concentrated wort. I personally do what is called "all grain brewing": I buy malted grains, mill them in the store, and mash them at home to create the sweet liquor for my beer. My local home brew store carries an impressive selection of malts and offers free milling for malts purchased there.

There is a terrible divide in the brewing community (especially online) between those who brew with extracts and those who brew "all grain". It is true that "all grain" brewing requires more time and equipment, but it's also true that brewing with grains allows a great deal more fine-tuning of flavours than extracts. My decision to brew "all grain" is based on two factors:

where I live, it's significantly cheaper to buy malted grains than to buy extract
I think it's more fun to mash grains than to use extract.

Not everyone agrees with me, which is OK. I've had some excellent extract and partial-extract (i.e. mashing some grain and boiling with extract) beers. I've also had excellent all-grain beers. If you're having fun and you're liking the beer you make, you're doing it right.

Mashing grains is essentially the process of kicking the enzymes in the grains into action so that they digest the starches in the grains and produce sugars. Some of the sugars are fermentable, some are not. It's possible to control this process in order to produce the desire combination of fermentable and non-fermentable sugars by controlling the mash temperature. Mashing is typically done between 145 and 170 degrees Fahrenheit. In general terms, lower mash temperatures produce more fermentable sugars. So a Pilsener, which is very dry, is mashed much cooler than a fruity ale. There are other factors, but mash temperature is a great driver of the sweetness or dryness of the finished beer.

Mashing requires a vessel in which to mash, a mash tun. This is essentially a vessel large enough to hold the grist to be mashed, plus sufficient water (typically one-and-a-half quarts of water per pound of grist) for the mashing. The tun holds the mash (water + grist) at a more-or-less constant temperature for the mash schedule (usually an hour). After mashing, the mash is lautered, which means the grist is separated from the sweet liquor. Part of lautering is sparging, or rinsing the grains with fresh water to ensure all the sugars end up in the liquor, rather than stuck to the discarded grains.

A few years ago, some Australians started a new technique, "brew in a bag." This is really cool: rather than having a dedicated mash/lauter tun, you put a strainer bag right into your brew kettle, mash in the kettle, and then lauter (strain) your sweet liquor by lifting the bag out of the kettle. This saves both time and money (you don't have to buy a separate tun), but it arguably makes less clear beer.

I still don't have a mash tun, so I work more-or-less with the BIAB concept. That kind of backfired on me the last brew day, so I ended up modifying it a bit... Ames and I sewed up a pretty cool grain bag for BIAB last month. I wanted to use it with my new pot, but it just wasn't big enough. I tried putting the bag inside the steamer basket that came with the pot, but it didn't sit low enough for the grist to get a good soak.

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

Then I tried putting it directly into the pot, but it just wasn't big enough.

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

I finally gave in and mashed the grist plus four gallons of water in my older 21 quart pot

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

That was the maximum capacity of that pot.

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

We mixed the grist into the water to form a really thick porridge and let it sit at 133 Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, we raised the temperature to 156 Fahrenheit (constantly stirring so as not to scorch the grist), and let it sit for another 90 minutes. After 90 minutes we raised the temperature to 167 Fahrenheit (again stirring constantly) and let it sit another 15 minutes.

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

For the sparge, we heated another four gallons of water to 170 Fahrenheit in the larger pot. After the final 15-minute stage of the mash (the "mash out"), we pulled the grain bag out of the smaller pot and immersed it in the fresh four gallons. We stirred it around and let it set for a while to ensure all the sweet liquor was rinsed from the grains, then pulled the bag out of the larger pot, laid a grate across the pot, and let is rest on the grate to drain. After several minutes, when the bag was almost completely drained, we put it into a basin to finish draining and began the boil. The bag drained for a little while longer into the basin, and after several minutes we poured another cup or so into the boil kettle.

The boil is the simplest part of the process. The only really thing to watch for is the boil-over, which is only really a danger in the first few minutes.

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

Foam does form on the surface, when it breaks up and the liquid is visible again, it's time to put in hops.

The hop additions define the timeline. Hops vary in flavour, colour, and "alpha acid" content. Alpha acid is what makes hops bitter, but it needs to be converted by boiling. As hops boil, they lose their aroma and flavour, and become more bitter. So hops added earlier in the boil contribute more bitterness; hops added later add more flavour and aroma. I generally boil for an hour: the first hop addition is the bittering hops, which boil for the full hour.

We made a stout this time, I saved the recipe on hopville.com. I wrote the recipe, but I did a lot of looking at other recipes to figure it out. So... it's more or less my recipe, but I did certainly refer to many others. This recipe calls for two hop additions: one ounce of Northern Brewer hops at 60 minutes, one ounce of Goldings at 30 minutes.

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

So we added our Northern Brewer hops and set the timer for an hour.

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

Hops need to be stirred in, they float pretty outrageously.

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

After the boil is done, there is a flurry of activity. You need to chill the wort as quickly as possible, get it into a fermenter, and get yeast into it. The yeast doesn't like temperatures over 90 Fahrenheit, and prefers to be in the mid-seventies. But cooling five gallons of boiling hot sugar water is difficult. I use a friend's wort chiller, essentially a copper coil that runs cold water through the wort.

This is where you need to play the sanitation game. Wort is the perfect environment for nasties to grow. It's pretty hard to make something dangerous to drink: the alcohol in beer is a decent preservative. But it's possible to get infections in your beer that make it undrinkably nasty. So you use sanitizer. I use iodophor, but there are others. Essentially you need to sanitize anything that touches your wort after the boil: the fermenter, any thermometers, hydrometers, tubing, filters, strainers, or spoons. It's not as annoying as it sounds, but it does require going slowly and carefully.

So in our last batch, we used a strainer bag to filter the hops, then filled a plastic fermenter with our wort. Once the wort was cooled, we put a package of dry yeast into the wort, covered the fermenter, and put an airlock on it.

It's now beer: it's been fermenting a couple days now. A lot of home brewers use two fermenters with their beer. They'll let the beer go for a week or two in a plastic fermenter, then siphon it into a glass carboy and let it ferment another week or so. I've personally been satisfied to just leave my beer in one vessel for four weeks or so, then bottle it directly. People fight a lot about this online: I've done it both ways and I prefer the simpler approach of leaving it in a single vessel for longer.

When I go to bottle it, I'll boil a little sugar in some water, add it to the beer, and siphon it into bottles. The added sugar kicks off fermentation in the bottle, which will carbonate it in the bottle. It'll take another three weeks (or so) for it to carbonate. So... it should take a total of seven weeks to make a finished product.

Not all batches are ready to drink on schedule. Higher alcohol beers take longer to mature and really become drinkable; beers with harsh flavours can also do well with some extra time. I'm not completely sure at this point which ones take longer and which ones will be ready when they're young. I'm hoping this batch is ready for the Christmas break, but I might be disappointed. I've got plenty of bottles from earlier batches, so it's not like I'll be desperate for beer; but I think a nice stout will be pleasant for wet and rainy days. I suppose I should actually post a review when I can taste it.

So that's an overview of home brewing. I've been enjoying making my own brew. In fact, I've been making a lot more than I've been drinking. I suppose that's not a bad thing. I've been hoarding the home-brewed for the holidays, and I'm expecting I'll have to do some serious brew sessions early next year to replenish the stock. We'll see.

UPDATE 2011-11-06

I brewed this beer on Thursday. Today's Sunday, and the activity on the fermentation lock's dropped off. That doesn't mean a whole lot, but it's a hint that the bulk of the fermentation's complete. My experience with this particular yeast (Nottingham Ale Yeast by Danstar) is that it ferments pretty aggressively and finishes quickly.

Today the fermenter looks like this:

From Brew Day: Rainy Season Stout

I used a plastic fermenter for this, so you can't see a lot in detail, but the silhouette of the contents is significant. The top layer, that looks sort of foamy, is the result of krausen. Krausen is a layer of foam that's generated by vigourous fermentation, early in the fermentation process. Krausen dissipates, but it leaves this residue, which is a bitter and foul-tasting scum. This is a good sign. Below the krausen ring is the actual beer. Under the beer is trub, which is the leftovers from fermentation. The trub contains proteins from the grains and hops, spent yeast, and various other fermentation by-products. When it comes time to bottle the beer, we'll siphon it off the trub so that only the middle layer makes it into the bottles.

Yeast flocculates--- or settles to the bottom--- when it's done. I typically "wash" the yeast, rinsing it from the rest of they trub and beer so that I can use it again. I generally get three batches of beer from a yeast purchase. There's still a great deal of yeast in suspension, even after a month. That's the yeast that will carbonate the beer in the bottle.

Although we technically have beer at this stage, it's incredibly young and "green". This beer needs to age at least another couple weeks before bottling. In my experience, you can bottle just fine after only two weeks in the fermenter, but the beer will require more time in the bottle to condition. I've decided it's easier to leave it a full month in the fermenter, as it doesn't make it drinkable any faster to bottle it sooner. Even though the majority of the fermentation is done, there is a lot more "cleaning up" the yeast will do to produce a cleaner, clearer beer. This is a stout, so we're not really looking for "clear" as in "see through", but the more stuff settles out, the better it's going to taste.

Homeward Bound

2011-11-01T12:11:00.000-05:00

I've been in Texas a week. It's been a good week, but I'm ready to head home. I miss Ames.

So I'm happy my return flight is tonight, but I have to say I've had a great time in Texas. I've been three nights in Dallas/Fort Worth, a couple nights in San Antonio, and a couple nights in Kerrville. I hate to admit this, but Texas was nothing like what I expected. I had a very Hollywood concept of Texas, and I've been disabused of those notions. To be blunt, I've loved my time here, and I'd happily come back any time.

Obviously my first concern when I visit a new place is the food. This has been a great trip for food, and I'm starting to believe what a friend told me: San Antonio is one of the greatest food cities. Now I've had very kind and generous hosts, so I doubtless did better than I would have alone: I'm very grateful for their hospitality. This has largely been a restaurant trip---there's not been a lot of home-cooking this trip. On the other hand, the home-cooking I did get was incredible.

So in terms of restaurants, we've eaten at:

7 Salsas in Irving. The best salsa I've ever tasted, anywhere.
Hard Eight BBQ in Dallas. I still prefer North Carolina Q, but these guys have nothing to be ashamed of.
The Koffee Kup in Hico. Peanut-butter pie.
La Fogata in San Antonio. Wow.
George's Restaurant in Waco. Amazing chicken-fried steak.
Chef Point Cafe in Fort Worth. Fine dining in a gas station. Seriously.

Yeah, that's a little sick.

The real reason of my trip was a Bible Conference in Kerrville. It was a good time, and I was privileged to meet some really great people. I laughed way too hard, and I enjoyed the people way too much. If they let me come back, I'm sure going to try. The conference itself had its ups and downs, as these things do. I learned about Christ's three appearings (Hebrews 9:24--28). I learned about Leviticus 1--7 as seen in Luke 7. It was well worth the trip.

I didn't bring a camera, so I didn't take any pictures. Suffice it to say that fried chicken and waffles is much better than you might imagine, Texas sun is much brighter than we ever see in Washington state, the people here take their southern courtesy and hospitality very seriously, and San Antonio reminds me more of Victoria, BC than I ever would have imagined.

I've sure enjoyed being in Texas, but it's time to go home. I miss Ames the most, I miss my girls just a shade less. The sunshine here is really nice, but I'd much rather have a whole lot of cold, dark rain and not be away from the family.

A few more hours and I'm homeward bound.

Pizza and Mead

2011-10-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

Tonight we had some friends over, and served them some pizza and some home-brew: in this case a mead I made this summer. I'm afraid I didn't take and pictures tonight, but I wanted to document the recipes involved.

First the pizza. I've documented before how we make pizza, but we've made some changes and I wanted to write those down. My sourdough starter finally died, and I decided to try to make pizza without it. So the new "recipe" is something like this:

1 1/2 tsp. dry yeast
2 tsp. salt
3 C. water
flour

We still make the dough the night before. We mix the salt and yeast into the water, with a couple cups of flour. I get the dough going in our mixer with the dough hook, and gradually add flour until it forms a sticky dough. We put the dough into an oiled mixing bowl, cover it, and let it rise. The dough rises overnight; whenever it rises enough to fill the bowl, we punch it down and knead it back into ball.

About three hours before we cook it, we divide the ball into four smaller balls and put them into oiled bowls to let them rise.

All told, I'm not sure how many times the dough goes through the rise-punch down-rise cycle, but it gets punched down several times. The end result is a pizza dough that's got enough gluten development to stretch without getting brittle, but it's still relaxed and pliable enough to form a pizza without springing back into a ball.

We bake the pizzas anywhere from 500F to 550F. I've been keeping the oven about 530F recently, and it seems to work well.

The sauce is pretty much the same: 8 whole peeled tomatoes (from a can), 1/4 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp salt, oregano to taste. I've been blending the sauce more thoroughly though, it's almost a puree now. I find the smoother sauce is easier to use.

Now the mead. I've never made mead before, but I wanted to try it after having some success with beer. The mead's a whole lot easier to make than beer, so I probably should have started with mead...

This mead was made with fireweed honey and frozen strawberries. I followed advice in a small pamphlet I borrowed on making wines, ciders, and meads. The actual recipe is:

3 lbs. fireweed honey
2 frozen strawberries
1 packet champagne yeast (Red Star)
7 pints water

I brought the water to a boil, stirred in the honey, and let it boil for about 5 minutes. Were I to do it again, I would not have boiled the honey: I would have taken the water from the stove at the boil and stirred in the honey to cool it. After five minutes I took the must (i.e. the honey-water mixture) from the stove to cool it. I chopped two frozen strawberries fine and threw them into the must, thinking they'd help cool it down. Once the must was room temperature I put it into a gallon jug, pitched the yeast, and sealed it with a fermentation lock.

After five days I siphoned the mead to a secondary fermenter, taking care not to bring any trub or strawberry into the secondary. I left it in the secondary about a month.

After about a month in the secondary fermenter, I bottled the mead, priming it with a couple tablespoons of sugar first (I wanted a carbonated mead).

The mead was bottled in early August, and I've opened a couple bottles to taste it. Now, two months later, it's settled clear and is really very pleasant. It's still a little boozy, and has just a hint of yeast bite. I expect it'll be very good around Thanksgiving or Christmas.

So that's dinner tonight. Sorry I don't have any pictures, but I mainly wanted to document the recipes. Next time I open a mead, I'll try and get some photos.

Sundance First Paddle

2011-09-17T11:50:00.000-05:00

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I took a day off work to take the new canoe for a test run on Alder Lake. Alder Lake's about half-way between Tacoma and Mt. Rainier: it's a good place to go for a quick paddle without having to drive for hours.

The Sundance is 17 feet long, so we all five got in it and started paddling

It was a sunny Thursday in August, but there weren't a lot of people on the water. We did see some swimmers, but we only saw a couple close-up. This guy's the only swimmer we got on camera.

From Sundance first paddle

We were slow on the draw with the camera, so we didn't get shots of most of what we saw out there. We came around one point and apparently startled a pair of bald eagles: they took off just a few feet over the water, then flew up to the peak of a nearby hill. We saw one of them on the return trip as well, but not so close as the first time. There was also an osprey hanging around one particular channel.

We paddled out an hour and a half down the lake to a deserted beach where we stopped to eat. It wasn't much, but the view was nice.

From Sundance first paddle

Alder Lake's built up some on one side, but the majority of it's still more-or-less desolate.

The lake's man-made, so there are the typical stumps and shelves, which to me simply add ambience.

From Sundance first paddle

All in all it was a wonderful and relaxing day.

From Sundance first paddle

The "new" canoe

2011-08-21T15:42:00.014-05:00

I'm still not sure how it began, but a friend and I started talking canoes at prayer meeting one night. He was telling me he had a nice canoe, but was thinking about getting rid of it. I told him I'd be interested in buying it from him, if he'd tell me what he thought a fair price. Well, he decided a fair price would be me coming to his house to take it from his garage.

So yesterday I went up to his place and picked up the canoe and three paddles. I wasn't quite sure what I'd find: he said it was "a good canoe", but didn't recall any particulars about it. I figured it would be worth a drive to find out.

From Sundance

Turns out the canoe is a Mad River Sundance. According to the old Mad River catalogue, it's 17' 6" long and 34.5" wide at the beam. That's a whole lotta canoe.

From Sundance

When I saw the canoe, I told my friend that it's too nice a canoe to give away: he should sell it. He said, "I can't sell it, because I'm giving it away". That's very generous.

The canoe's in great shape, but a little dusty.

From Sundance

I cleaned it up a little this afternoon to get rid of the dust and touch up the dings in the wood. A little polish and it's in fine shape.

From Sundance

I did rub some Danish oil into the gunwhales: that might be a stupid thing to do, but they felt a little dry. I think it'll be fine. It definitely added some shine to the wood, which is nice cosmetically. Danish oil should handle the water just fine.

From Sundance

The hull only needed some soap and water, then we put a shine on it with a vaguely Armor-All(R) -like substance.

From Sundance

This is a little longer, but narrower than my current canoe, a We-no-nah Prospector. And the Sundance has a keel, while the Prospector is flat-bottomed.

Of course the Prospector is a gorgeous canoe

From Mohun Lake

but I've found it's pretty squirrely. It's flat-bottomed and doesn't track very well, and the high stems catch the wind like sails: it's a challenging canoe for the solo paddler or the novice. On the other hand, it turns on a dime and can handle a lot of abuse. I love my Prospector.

But I'm really excited about the new canoe. It's probably about 20 years old, but it's been well looked-after. And there's something really classy to those lines.

I'm planning on trying it out later this week, so I'll try and post an update then.

I'm really grateful for my friend' generosity. He insists he wasn't using it, but the fact is that he could've sold it: giving it away really was kind. It's a nice canoe, and it's in good shape, he didn't have to give it to me.

Not to get all political

2011-06-14T17:24:00.003-05:00

Not to get all political, but Don Boudreaux's excellent post Theatre of the Absurd over at Cafe Hayek is well worth the read.

Weekend cooking

2011-05-28T16:22:00.007-05:00

We're planning on a "cookout" for Memorial Day (Monday). Most of my team at work is going to come over and we'll throw down with some food from the grill.

So today I'm cooking one of Ames' favourites: Baptist Chicken. We take some chicken pieces (I've never tried with whole chickens) and barbecue them (~200F for several hours). Once the chicken is completely cooked we immerse it in some sweet and sticky sauce and put it back on the grill to caramelize a bit. Get it? Baptist: full immersion after it's completely cooked. We started making this when we still lived in North Carolina:

From Baptist Chicken

So I put some chicken on the grill this morning: it smells heavenly out there right now.

From Baptist Chicken

Plenty of things taste better than chicken, but nothing smells better. There's just an indefinable goodness to the smell of chicken fat burning on charcoal.

On another front, I took some time off for my birthday (I had too much vacation time accrued and needed to burn some). Since I had the time off, my kids and I made some beer. I came up with a recipe with the help of Beer Calculus, and we put it together.

From Woolen Shirt

I'm calling this one "Old Woolen Shirt". It seems an appropriate name for a beer of that colour. I followed some advice I found online and have tasted one bottle a week since bottling. We bottled it two weeks ago today, so that's two beers.

The first bottle was not quite flat, but pretty close (at one week). The flavour was really good: caramel-y and toasty with a nice roast barley undertone, but not too sweet.

From Woolen Shirt

One week later and it was a lot more carbonated (at two weeks).
The flavour was still there, but it's a little drier. It's developed a definite yeast bite, but that should fade over time. I'm not really expecting it to be ready to drink until it's conditioned at least another week and then chilled for several more days, so I'm not too worried about the yeasty flavour.

From Woolen Shirt

The colour's dead-on, but it's a little cloudy. It should clear some more with time, but I don't think this one's ever going to drop really clear.

From Woolen Shirt

I'm really happy with this beer. I realize it's still pretty young, but it's very promising. I'll definitely be making this one again soon. I managed to get a huge crop of yeast from washing the trub when I bottled this one. That always helps with the $$$.

I've got one more batch fermenting right now: this one's an amber beer with wheat. I tried to make it lower alcohol, and I'm experimenting with Irish moss and longer fermentation to see how clear I can get it. I'm making this one with yeast I harvested from the Woolen Shirt, so that's a bonus. I haven't named the current batch yet.

Admiration

2011-05-28T11:04:00.004-05:00

I'm always impressed when I hear about people who clearly understand what's important. This couple meets at the race track,
gets married there, and hasn't yet figured out their plan for what their new family looks like: they still live in different towns.

I like this kind of thing. I'm a little jaded by the standard fare of long-term dating and perpetual engagements. Ames and I had only known each other 10 months when we got married: it'll have been 16 years next month. We'd only known each other four weeks when we decided to marry: looking back it seems we should just have headed to town hall right then.

Don't get me wrong: gimmicky weddings are a blight on what little remains of Western civilization. But there's a difference between gimmick and enthusiasm.

So all the best to Greg and Linda.

First Tasting

2011-04-30T12:14:00.012-05:00

We really shouldn't have, but we broke down and opened one of the bottles of our first batch of homebrew yesterday. We weren't intending to open this until July... but we were really excited to taste it. It's been three weeks since we bottled it, so we opened the bottle we'd designated the "sample" bottle.

We re-used bottles for this batch and I couldn't get the labels off all of them: some are actually etched and/or painted on the glass. So you might recognize the bottle from a post a few years back.

From Brew Day: Opening Cronin

We were a little concerned about over-carbonating this batch; but the beers we were trying to imitate are all very effervescent so we erred on the side of enthusiasm and bottled with sugar and fresh yeast. Three weeks later it's sure foamy.

From Brew Day: Opening Cronin

Once the foam died down we actually got to taste it.

From Brew Day: Opening Cronin

It was good. In fact, it was a lot better than I'd been hoping for. Achel, Corsendonk, and Unibroue haven't anything to worry about yet; but I'm frankly pretty proud of this brew.

We put around $60 into this beer, including ingredients and sundries like corks. We borrowed almost all the gear and re-used bottles from Belgian and faux Belgian ales (Chimay, Unibroue, etc.). We got 23 bottles out of the batch, so we're at a little less than $3 per bottle. Abbey ales run $8--$12 per bottle around here, so we're at 1/4 of the price. Those beers are better than this, but not 4 times better. So it works out financially.

Of course we're not doing it just to save money: we wanted to learn how to make beer. Even if the beer had been undrinkable, it's been a lot of fun to make it.

We made this one from extract and specialty grains. We bought liquid yeast for it, but we washed the yeast from the primary fermenter and made a second batch with it (we'll bottle that this Friday). I want to make this again from grain, just to see what the difference is. Next go 'round we'll make it a lot heavier too: I think we underestimated how much fermentable we'd need. This is satisfying, but it could be a lot heavier.

This has been a lot more fun than I expected.

Unexpected arrival

2011-04-16T12:34:00.003-05:00

We made pizza last night. And it was good. Really good. Really, really good. I think we've finally figured out how to make good pizza.

From Really Good Pizza

The crust was thin but chewy, with lots of air bubbles and a definite structure; but it was soft and bready, not pastry-like.

From Really Good Pizza

The crust is certainly the single most important factor to good pizza. We started out making the dough he night before, refrigerating it immediately, and letting it rise just before using it. That worked very well, but we thought we could do better. We've tried several different things to make it better, but we've really only been able to improve a single aspect of the crust at a time; at the cost of others.

This time we made the crust the night before, let it rise and punched it down a few times overnight, and portioned it into crust-size dough balls the next day, which we refrigerated until an hour or so before we used them.

I've been told the secret to good bread is to let it rise many times. All my experiments appear to confirm this statement. Certainly this last batch of pizzas seems to do so.

From Really Good Pizza

So I guess we can stop making pizza now. We appear to be at the top of our game.

Smoky Friday

2011-04-15T17:54:00.009-05:00

I've actually accrued enough vacation time that I stopped accruing: I have to take some time off. So I had a chat with my boss and I took off yesterday and today.

So I got up early this morning and put a couple pig shoulders and a pork roast on the grill. 200 F, baby! It's been on there just over 9 hours now, and coming nicely.

I love me some BBQ.

We (re)watched Alton Brown's Feasting on Asphalt a few weeks back, and I noticed his comments on BBQ: you can't fake it, you can't hurry it up, you can't mass-produce it. With some minor caveats he's right. Barbecue is one of the simplest foods I know how to make; but it's one of the hardest to find made right. It's baffling to me the efforts people will make to produce decent Q when the genuine article is so simple. People will hunt for specialty woods, use exotic spice combinations, and buy all manner of complicated cookers (have you priced a Pitts & Spitts?) to produce what was traditionally cooked over an open pit in the ground with whatever wood was available.

So here's how to make authentic barbecue:

Choose a tough cut of meat, anything suitably low-grade will do. I prefer pig shoulders, but beef brisket, spare ribs, and whole poultry work well. I generally buy the cheapest pork I can find, which is usually the shoulder. The whole point of BBQ is to make something delectable from an inedibly tough cut of meat.

Cook over charcoal. Barbecue is cooked in wood smoke: charcoal is wood that's been burned in an oxygen-deprived environment to drive off moisture, phenols, and various other impurities. You can just cook over wood, of course, but you need to burn it down. Raw wood isn't fit for cooking over. Of course you might like to throw some bits of wood into your fire to add some interesting smoke, but don't do that too much: creosote doesn't taste good.

Keep a steady temperature. Barbecue is really all about rendering fat and tough connective tissues in the meat. If you hit the meat with a temperature that's too high you'll toughen it up, dry it out, and turn those tissues into knots. The ideal BBQ temperature is 200F, but I generally don't worry too much as long as my grill's between 190F and 250F. Temperatures spike up and down, but you want them to average in the low 200s.

Take lots of time. Barbecue takes a lot of time to cook; enjoy the downtime. I budget between 12 and 20 hours for a BBQ session.

Baste with mild flavours. I baste with a North Carolina-style baste made from apple cider vinegar, water, and spices. It's thin and vinegary, which offsets the high-fat pork. Sauces high in sugar or tomatoes can caramelize on the grill, so they really only should be used at the very end of the cook. I've had a lot of excellent Q that was cooked completely dry, but I like to baste a little now and then. It seems to make the "bark" a little more interesting.

Cook to a high internal temperature. The whole point of BBQ is to cook slowly so that the meat can actually get to a higher temperature. It's a lot like braising, but without moisture. The higher temperature is what gives the Q its beautifully soft and moist texture.

Ultimately it's easier to make good BBQ properly than it is to fake it. It's not about the wine barrel staves used for fuel or the rare pomegranate juice you put into your sauce. It's about watching your temperature and taking your time.

Which isn't to say I don't want a Pitts & Spitts, or that I don't like to try varying things now and then on my grill. And honestly, I've had excellent BBQ cooked too hot on a propane grill. But when it comes down to it, BBQ is all about the simple joys.

Bottling

2011-04-10T15:32:00.008-05:00

So we got together yesterday to bottle our first beer (we're calling it "Cronin") and brew our second.

From Homebrew

The bottling actually turned out pretty well. It was a bit of a pain, but we got it all bottled:

From Homebrew

We got 23 750 mL bottles from a 5-gallon batch. So we lost two bottles (1.5 L) to siphoning, trub, the hydrometer, and bottling waste. That's actually a little better than I thought it'd be. Now the hard part: waiting a couple months for the beer to condition in the bottles. We figure we ought to be able to sample a bottle on July 4.

This beer was an adventure. It was our first-ever batch, we tried to make something like the abbey ales we enjoy. I enjoyed the samples we took from the leftovers yesterday (the hydrometer, the bottom of the bottling bucket, etc.): it's dark, sweet, and just a little bitter. We weren't trying to, but I think we actually made a half-decent imitation of Trois Pistoles. We'll need to taste it in a couple months to know for sure. We fermented it two weeks in the primary, then racked it to a secondary. It stayed four weeks in there and we thought it was done, but when we went to bottle we realized it had a good deal left to do; so we sealed up our bottling bucket and left it a couple more weeks. It's possible we still bottled too early, but I was getting sick of looking at it. I think it'll turn out fine.

We reused empty bottles, so ours have all sorts of misleading labels on them. We cut off what we could with a razor and hot water, but several of the labels were etched. We need to cover those before we lose track of what's really in them.

When we racked this beer to the secondary we washed the yeast. So three of us decided to try a second batch, using that yeast. Yesterday we made that second batch. We made the first batch from extract and specialty grains, so we made the second all-grain using a modified brew in a bag technique I found on a forum.

From Homebrew

So we made a yeast starter from the yeast we washed on Friday night; Saturday we made our first all-grain batch with a recipe we dreamed up: an amber ale with blackberries. Seems appropriate for the North West. We'll see how that turns out. We only made a 2 1/2 gallon batch: we all agreed to make smaller batches until we really know what we're doing. We tossed it right on the yeast cake from the last batch and then tossed in the yeast starter we had made. We seriously over-pitched the yeast, and it's foaming madly right now. This is very exciting!

From Homebrew

The brew-in-a-bag method is really no harder than brewing with extract, and a whole lot cheaper. It really seems to me that grain is a lot cheaper than malt extract. This is definitely the avenue I'm going to pursue for the next few batches.

We're brewing with borrowed gear right now: a co-worker's got some kit he hasn't used in a couple years. So I've got his brew kettle, carboy, and various sundries. I'm going to have to buy my own kit soon, but I'm grateful to have had a couple chances at brewing without the commitment of buying gear.

And yes, he got the first bottle from our first batch.

Other than that, not a lot to report.

Frying... and beer

2011-03-12T15:19:00.008-05:00

So I've been pretty quiet: partly because I've been pretty busy. I've been working with a friend on an iPhone app that's just about ready to launch; we've got some testing to do, then we can release it. I don't expect it to make me rich, but it's been fun to do.

A few weeks back a friend and I brewed our first batch of beer. I've been meaning to try out homebrewing for at least ten years, but I never actually took the plunge. Today is four weeks since we brewed our first batch. It spent a fortnight in the primary fermenter and today is the fifteenth day in the secondary. It's looking pretty good to my amateur and inexperienced eye: it's slowly clarifying and the bubbling in the fermentation lock has certainly slowed down.

We decided to try making something kinda-sorta like the Belgian and faux-Belgian (felgian?) beers we enjoy, so this one was pretty high in gravity and we expected it to be a "slow" beer. I think we have at least a week or two left before we can bottle it, then we probably want to let it sit another few weeks before opening. I did quite a bit of reading on this one, including quite a bit of time in Brew Like a Monk, which was given me as a gift 5 years ago. See? Give me a how-to book and I'll get right on that...

In the meantime, we're planning another batch using the yeast we washed from the primary fermenter when we racked to the secondary (following this excellent tutorial). We'll make something lighter this time, and hopefully something we can be drinking inside six weeks. And we'll make the next one all-grain.

It seems to me we can significantly reduce our per-gallon price by moving to all-grain. Ultimately that's a big motivator for me: I want to make beer cheaply enough that I can justify drinking it. I'll be sure to share how that one works out.

From Homebrew

I took this photo 24 hours after we racked it to the secondary. The hardest part is the waiting.

I plan on documenting this batch more completely once I actually taste it, but as it is I've only stolen a sample when we pitched the yeast and another when we racked it. A lot can still go wrong, so I'll hold off until we know how it turns out.

This morning I tried home-made apple fritters for the first time. I started with Alton Brown's recipe from Feasting on Asphalt: The River Run, another gift. I've been meaning to try these since I got this book on Christmas of 2009, but they just seemed... dangerous. At any rate, I made some this morning for breakfast.

From Apple Fritters

Someone's put the recipe online. It's the same as the one in the book: I checked.

They were actually pretty good. I like mine a little chewier, but they were good. Ames seemed to like them, and the neighbours seemed to like them (there were way too many for my poor pancreas: we had to share). We'll definitely do this again.

From Apple Fritters

I only used about half the dough. The last few I did looked a lot better than the first: the recipe tells you to roll the dough into a log, slice it, and put slices in the hot fat. I found the results were a lot better when I mashed the slices into rough balls and fried them. When I use up the rest of the dough, I'll just punch it down and then scoop dough balls into the fat with a 1/3 Cup measure. I think that'll work best.

So that's what I've been up to. That, and a teen Sunday School class I've been teaching on Romans. But I don't have a recipe for that one...

True craftsman

2011-01-31T01:06:00.006-05:00

I just love this film. It runs about an hour, and it's well worth the time to watch it.

Watching this guy is simply stunning: he is clearly master both of his tools and his medium. Whether it's the axe or the paddle, he's right at home.

I only wanted a cheesbuhguh!

2011-01-22T19:13:00.014-05:00

I'm not a big fan of that quintessential American food, the burger. I'd rather have a dog with chili and jalapenos any day. But the love of my life esteems burgers roughly equivalently to how I think of pizza, so I've been trying to learn to make the perfect burger.

I started with Alton Brown's Burger of the Gods recipe, which is basically just ground meat, salt, and pepper. The advice about being careful not to over-work the meat is sound: I've learned the hard way that burgers are best when the meat is only "lightly tossed" with the salt and pepper.

From Cheeseburger

We've been cooking them on a griddle, with a flatten on the flip. I form the meat into balls and throw them on the griddle. When they're browned on the bottom, they get flipped and pressed flat with the spatula to form a patty.

From Cheeseburger

Flattening them takes some practice. I'm not an expert yet, but I've been working on it...

From Cheeseburger

Of course cheese is necessary for a cheeseburger.

From Cheeseburger

It needs to be added on the griddle so it melts properly.

From Cheeseburger

It can overcook pretty easily, so I keep an eye on it as it cooks.

From Cheeseburger

Then off to the bun.

From Cheeseburger

But I've been having trouble with getting a good hamburger bun. Last week I tried a Kaiser roll recipe I found, but they weren't quite the ticket. Don't get me wrong: the recipe worked reasonably well. But the rolls weren't quite what I was looking for. So today I tried the perfect burger bun recipe on Annie's Eats. This might be the one I've been looking for.

From Cheeseburger

I'm the first to admit that Annie's look better than mine, but these are at least respectable.

From Cheeseburger

Annie's recipe calls for bread flour: I just used the same unbleached all-purpose flour I use for everything else. I let the dough rise twice before shaping it, to try and get a little more yeast action. I figured that might make up for my flour choices.

From Cheeseburger

This might well be the bun recipe I was hoping to find. I have to say, the finished product was good.

From Cheeseburger

And ultimately, it got the results I've been hoping for.

From Cheeseburger

In every pot

2010-12-07T22:11:00.008-05:00

I've been cooking a lot of chook recently. I'm afraid the family's getting a little tired of chicken stew, but it's just not getting old for me.

From Chicken stew

Looks like we've finally figured out how to make a good chicken stew. I have to confess that I made mediocre chicken stews for years, coasting on the fact that it's hard to really ruin chicken...

So here's how we do it:

First I take down my favourite stew pot: my 5-Quart cast iron Dutch oven by Lodge Logic. I chop up a large onion (or two medium onions, or...) and a few of those "baby carrots" and a couple sticks of celery. I put a healthy thwack of butter into the pan and get it hot. Onions, carrots, and celery go into the butter along with a couple garlic cloves. They get covered in a generous dose of salt and way too much black pepper, then I cook them until the onions are translucent. Once done, I empty the pot into a bowl.

From Chicken stew

Next I brown the chicken. I generally take some leftover bacon grease and add it to the pot, which is already hot. I put in more than enough to cover the bottom: there was a good 1/8 inch of grease in there this last time. I put three or four chicken thighs (skin on) into the grease, put salt and a generous layer of pepper on them, and let them brown. Now here's the thing: when I say "brown", I mean "mahogany". I essentially fry those thighs in that bacon grease for twenty or more minutes. When one side gets brown, I turn them over and do the other side. If I want to use more chicken I brown it in batches of three or four so they all get plenty of one-on-one time with the cast iron and bacon grease.

From Chicken stew

Once the chicken is brown, I put the onions, carrots, and celery back in the pot, cover it, and cook at medium for a good 45 minutes or so.

As the chicken is stewing in the onions, I cut some red potatoes, wash them, and pan-fry them. So I put some bacon grease on the griddle and lay out the potato chunks in it to fry. When one side is brown, I roll them to brown the other. I want the potatoes to have a healthy golden-brown crust.

Once the potatoes are done it's time to pull the skin off the chicken. Chicken skin is high in fat, so you really don't want to eat it.

Then the potatoes go into the pot along with frozen green beans, I cover it, and cook at until it's all done. I like to cook this at a medium on the stove-top, or 250--300F in the oven.

From Chicken stew

Be aware this is not low-fat cooking. It's highly likely you'll have a massive coronary while eating my cooking. But my goodness it's good.

Wow

2010-12-05T12:06:00.003-05:00

I, uh, haven't had a lot to say. More probably I've been too busy to say it.

Every minute

2010-07-23T14:15:00.003-05:00

I had a problem with my jaw this week. I woke up Tuesday and it felt out of joint. It hurt Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday I was starting to wonder if there was a serious problem. So I made an appointment to go to the Chiropractor and have him pop it back in. This morning I woke up feeling great. But because I had an appointment, I figured I might as well go in.

So I went to the chiropractor with no real complaints, but feeling a sense of obligation because I'd made an appointment.

After 2 1/2 hours, I'm $270 lighter and they want me to come back Tuesday. And bear in mind the reason I went in the first place was a jaw problem that cleared itself up. So it cost me 2 1/2 hours and $270 to feel coming out exactly like I did going in.

And they want me to come back Tuesday for another $60 session. Apparently I have all sorts of spinal alignment issues.

Uh-huh.

I just called them back and canceled my follow-up without a reschedule. They say there's one born every minute, but this time his name's not going to be Ox.

Nice and cozy

2010-07-19T11:41:00.004-05:00

Every once in a while, someone gives a gift so extraordinary that it actually impacts how I live my life. Last year, Shanta gave me just such a gift... my Bodum Cozy.

From Bodum Cozy

I love my Bodum Cozy.

Thanks, Shan!

Grits ain't groceries

2010-07-11T17:54:00.002-05:00

Friday nights I make pizza. Saturday mornings Ames makes a huge breakfast.

This last weekend, it was very hot here in the Northwest. I think it was 90 F on Friday when I was biking home. Not perhaps hot by Southern standards, but people here don't generally have air conditioning. So yeah, it was hot. It was hot enough Ames decided to have a light breakfast: she sauteed some onions and peppers, scrambled some eggs, and cut some fruit.

When she called us all for breakfast, the youngest asked what was for breakfast. Ames told her, and she demanded in her most stentorian, Ghost of Christmas Present voice, ``Are there no grits? Is there no bacon?"

Sometimes I'm overcome with pride.

Tail Recursion

2010-06-26T11:55:00.022-05:00

There was a conversation at work a few weeks back on the difference between recursion and iteration. Someone made the claim "Recursion doesn't always work," and pointed out that the Fibonacci Sequence, while easy to implement in naive recursion, tends to blow up when the numbers get large.

I argued that there is an efficient solution using tail-recursion. It's faster than naive recursion, and simpler than an iterative solution.

A third person pointed out tail-recursion is a Scheme thing, and not all languages properly optimize it. This is completely true, but... it's also true that tail-recursive algorithms are in principle more efficient. Abelson and Sussman point out that doesn't always translate into actual performance, though:

most implementations of common languages (including Ada, Pascal, and C) are designed in such a way that the interpretation of any recursive procedure consumes an amount of memory that grows with the number of procedure calls, even when the process described is, in principle, iterative. As a consequence, these languages can describe iterative processes only by resorting to special-purpose ``looping constructs'' such as do, repeat, until, for, and while.

So here's a short test... I wrote a short tail-recursive Fib generator in Common Lisp. Note it takes a number (i.e. the number of terms to generate) and returns a list representing the sequence:


(defun fibonacci-sequence (num)
  "Calculate a Fibonacci sequence to a number NUM."
  (labels ((fib (n acc)
      (cond ((equalp n 0) acc)
     (T (fib (1- n)      
      (cons (+ (car acc)
        (cadr acc)) acc))))))
    (cond ((= num 0) '(1))
   ((= num 1) '(1 1))
   ((> 0 num) 'undefined)
   (T (reverse (fib (- num 2) '(1 1)))))))

We can loosely translate that to Perl. Perl doesn't have an equivalent to Common Lisp's 'labels', so I had to write two named functions to implement it. But this short script is more-or-less equivalent to the Lisp version: it takes a number on the command line and prints a list representing a sequence with that number of terms:


#!/usr/bin/perl

=head1 NAME

  fib-sequence.pl

=head1 AUTHOR

Clumsy Ox

=head1 SYNOPSIS

  fib-sequence.pl $NUMBER

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Calculates the Fibonacci Sequence to $NUMBER terms.

This is just an exercise in tail-recursion.

=cut

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;

my $number = shift;

my @sequence = fibonacci ($number);

print STDOUT join (', ', @sequence), "\n";

=head2 fibonacci

  fibonacci ($number) => @sequence
  
=cut
sub fibonacci {
  my $num = shift;

  return (1) if $num == 0;
  return (1, 1) if $num == 1;

  return reverse fibt( $num - 2, 1, 1);
} 

=head2 fibt

   fibt ($number) => @sequence

=cut
sub fibt {
  my $num = shift;
  return @_ if $num == 0;
  return fibt ( $num - 1, $_[0] + $_[1], @_);
}

Notice both solutions accumulate the sequence as a list. So there is some definite overhead in carrying that sort of data structure, but it's "fair" in the sense that both are having to do it.

Just informally checking it, the Perl solution is slower than the Lisp solution, but not by an amazing amount. I ran a quick-n-dirty test of the Perl solution, and it timed out reasonably. But I found it blew Perl's number stack very quickly and went to 'inf':


bash-3.2$ time ./fib-sequence.pl 10000 > /tmp/output
Deep recursion on subroutine "main::fibt" at ./fib-sequence.pl line 56.

real    0m1.072s
user    0m0.640s
sys     0m0.380s

Just for comparison, Lisp returned:


(time (fib-sequence 10000))
Evaluation took:
  0.019 seconds of real time
  0.018860 seconds of total run time (0.012529 user, 0.006331 system)
  [ Run times consist of 0.010 seconds GC time, and 0.009 seconds non-GC time. ]
  100.00% CPU
  47,236,537 processor cycles
  4,893,824 bytes consed

Both took longer to print the result than to actually calculate it.

I haven't tried the experiment in Java or C, but I think it might be interesting to see what would happen.

Incidentally, according to SBCL, the 10,000th element of the Fibonacci Sequence is a 2090 digit number:


(format t "~:d" (car (last (fib-sequence 10000))))
33,644,764,876,431,783,266,621,612,005,107,543,310,302,148,460,680,063,906,564,769,974,680,081,442,166,662,368,155,595,513,633,734,025,582,065,332,680,836,159,373,734,790,483,865,268,263,040,892,463,056,431,887,354,544,369,559,827,491,606,602,099,884,183,933,864,652,731,300,088,830,269,235,673,613,135,117,579,297,437,854,413,752,130,520,504,347,701,602,264,758,318,906,527,890,855,154,366,159,582,987,279,682,987,510,631,200,575,428,783,453,215,515,103,870,818,298,969,791,613,127,856,265,033,195,487,140,214,287,532,698,187,962,046,936,097,879,900,350,962,302,291,026,368,131,493,195,275,630,227,837,628,441,540,360,584,402,572,114,334,961,180,023,091,208,287,046,088,923,962,328,835,461,505,776,583,271,252,546,093,591,128,203,925,285,393,434,620,904,245,248,929,403,901,706,233,888,991,085,841,065,183,173,360,437,470,737,908,552,631,764,325,733,993,712,871,937,587,746,897,479,926,305,837,065,742,830,161,637,408,969,178,426,378,624,212,835,258,112,820,516,370,298,089,332,099,905,707,920,064,367,426,202,389,783,111,470,054,074,998,459,250,360,633,560,933,883,831,923,386,783,056,136,435,351,892,133,279,732,908,133,732,642,652,633,989,763,922,723,407,882,928,177,953,580,570,993,691,049,175,470,808,931,841,056,146,322,338,217,465,637,321,248,226,383,092,103,297,701,648,054,726,243,842,374,862,411,453,093,812,206,564,914,032,751,086,643,394,517,512,161,526,545,361,333,111,314,042,436,854,805,106,765,843,493,523,836,959,653,428,071,768,775,328,348,234,345,557,366,719,731,392,746,273,629,108,210,679,280,784,718,035,329,131,176,778,924,659,089,938,635,459,327,894,523,777,674,406,192,240,337,638,674,004,021,330,343,297,496,902,028,328,145,933,418,826,817,683,893,072,003,634,795,623,117,103,101,291,953,169,794,607,632,737,589,253,530,772,552,375,943,788,434,504,067,715,555,779,056,450,443,016,640,119,462,580,972,216,729,758,615,026,968,443,146,952,034,614,932,291,105,970,676,243,268,515,992,834,709,891,284,706,740,862,008,587,135,016,260,312,071,903,172,086,094,081,298,321,581,077,282,076,353,186,624,611,278,245,537,208,532,365,305,775,956,430,072,517,744,315,051,539,600,905,168,603,220,349,163,222,640,885,248,852,433,158,051,534,849,622,434,848,299,380,905,070,483,482,449,327,453,732,624,567,755,879,089,187,190,803,662,058,009,594,743,150,052,402,532,709,746,995,318,770,724,376,825,907,419,939,632,265,984,147,498,193,609,285,223,945,039,707,165,443,156,421,328,157,688,908,058,783,183,404,917,434,556,270,520,223,564,846,495,196,112,460,268,313,970,975,069,382,648,706,613,264,507,665,074,611,512,677,522,748,621,598,642,530,711,298,441,182,622,661,057,163,515,069,260,029,861,704,945,425,047,491,378,115,154,139,941,550,671,256,271,197,133,252,763,631,939,606,902,895,650,288,268,608,362,241,082,050,562,430,701,794,976,171,121,233,066,073,310,059,947,366,875

Update: I decided to try a quick-n-dirty Java implementation. It's rough and ugly, but it seems to work.

Here's where it gets interesting: the Java solution works just fine, but it's slow, and it runs into a StackOverflow at just over 10,000 elements. I suspect that could be increased dramatically with some better java runtime settings, but it seems to disprove my thesis that tail recursion is an appropriate solution regardless of implementation language.

I was also able to get Perl to give me better results with

use bignum;

Still, Lisp is by far the fasest solution.

Poor Navigation

2010-06-24T10:35:00.003-05:00

So I'm in Raleigh, NC this week. I head back to the Northwest tomorrow afternoon. Since I'm so close, I lined up lunch with a good friend in Charlotte. It was what they call a "wild hair": a two-to-three hour drive for lunch, but I figured it might be worth it.

I have a pretty sorry little rental car this week, so between my fear of it dying on the Interstate and a desire for a nicer drive, I decided to take 64 to Asheboro, then 49 to Charlotte:

View Larger Map

But I missed the turn from Hwy 1 to Hwy 64 in Apex. I have no idea how I missed it, but I did. I started getting nervous when I saw signs for Southern Pines, but still hadn't seen signs for Siler City.

Yep, I ended up in Moore County, "on the way" to Charlotte. I was south of Sanford.

I had to call both people I meant to meet and tell them. They both laughed, so there were no hard feelings. But I sure felt stupid.

Gah.

Grill pizza stone

2010-06-18T13:46:00.003-05:00

In an effort to make the Redneck Pizza Oven a more repeatable experiment, I've been looking for a pizza stone designed for use on the grill. Then Ames bought me this one from Weber as a gift. I gave it a whirl yesterday.

The pies made on the stone bubbled nicely and looked actually rather picturesque:

From Grill Pizza Stone

But when we cut them, we realized the bottoms were charred to almost inedible:

From Grill Pizza Stone

It appears we've been able to get the stone good and hot, but the air above it is too cool. We had this problem last time, and ended up shovelling live coals around the perimeter of the stone to get that temperature up:

From

So it seems we need to make some arrangement like that.

The stone itself appears to be exactly what I was looking for: it handled the heat just fine, although I was half-afraid it would crack. It's marketed specifically for use on a grill, and I read the directions very carefully: I used it exactly in accordance with the directions in the box.

It doesn't look nearly so picturesque now that the stone's been a little charred and the metal's been a little blued, but I have to say it's extremely promising. I think this is going to become a centerpiece of our future pizza explorations.

From Grill Pizza Stone

Happy Anniversary to us

2010-06-17T19:36:00.001-05:00

So Ames and I have been married 15 years today.

Wow.

NC Bound

2010-06-05T10:03:00.001-05:00

I'm heading out to Raleigh, North Carolina June 20--25. It's a business trip: I won't have a ton of time for hobnobbing, but I will absolutely make some time for what friends and family I can reasonably get in touch with.

The Right Recipe

2010-04-24T17:33:00.007-05:00

My daughter made up a little ditty in honour of the Atkins diet (to the tune of "Frere Jacques"):

Carbohydrates, carbohydrates,

Make you fat, make you fat!

If you want to be thin, if you want to be thin,

Then eat meat. Then eat meat.

I've been making a lot of bread. I can't shake that tune from my head.

I finally decided to try the "French Bread" recipe that came with the French Loaf Pan I got from Williams-Sonoma. You know, the one I ranted about...

I baked these on Tuesday:

From Bread

And these came out of the oven ten minutes ago:

From Bread

Compare with the recipe I developed:

From Bread

Mine aren't bad, but they're a little pale. And they were a little drier too.

Actually, the recipes aren't that different. I only realized that this week, when I looked it over to try it. I think the big difference is brushing egg white on the loaves before baking. I've been over-baking mine, trying to get them nicely browned. I'm going to retry my recipe in the next week or so and see if brushing egg on them makes the difference.

Here's to carbohydrates!

From Bread

Ribs!

2010-03-21T17:47:00.006-05:00

My mother-in-law is here for a visit. I'm one of her fans, so it's all cool. She brought me a couple bottles of barbecue sauce from North Carolina--which is, in fact, the Mecca of barbecue.

From Ribs

I had found some St. Louis-cut ribs at a restaurant supply store in Tacoma. I'd never found those before, although I've looked for them. So naturally I bought some and threw them into the freezer. My mother-in-law's visit seems a worthy occasion for breaking out those ribs.

Ribs are a serious topic. To get the real low-down, you ought to read Smoky's primer on ribs. But the short version is this: what you generally see in the store is "baby back ribs", which are actually from the pork loin. Those ribs are tender, and you can cook them almost any way you want, because they're an extremely tender cut of meat. But the price of tender, of course, is flavour. Just like with beef, the more tender cut is also the less flavourful cut. If you want flavour, you'll get the side ribs. They're higher in fat, harder to cook, and full of connective tissues.

But you can taste them.

St. Louis cut ribs are the middle of the rack of side ribs: side ribs with each end trimmed off. So they look like a rack of "baby backs", but they've got longer, flatter bones and a lot more fat. So they're like the best of both worlds.

Of course any time you have a tough hunk of meat with a lot of connective tissues and fat, you can deal with it in a couple ways. My preferred technique is to barbecue them. That means, you'll recall, cooking them in woodsmoke at around 200F for long periods of time.

From Ribs

The hardest part is temperature control. I manage that with a good thermometer, careful control of the fire, and adjusting airflow. One invaluable tool has been my 2X4 block to prop open the grill. Propping open the lid really helps keep it cool without choking the fire right down.

From Ribs

We started them slow in the morning, covered them in mustard and some spices, and threw them on the grill. We kept an eye on them all morning, basting them with our home-made basting sauce. Around noon, we broke open one of the bottles of Carolina Treet my mother-in-law brought me. It added a little colour to those bones.

From Ribs

And since it was lunch time, we made some pizza

From Ribs

We kept stoking and basting through the afternoon, until them bones were cooked and it was time to bake something sweet onto them. So we mixed up some off-the-shelf barbecue sauces, some of our own baste, and some of the Carolina Treet to make something red and sweet. That went on those racks, and we left them in the [cooling] grill for another 30 minutes or so.

Then it was time for ribs.

From Ribs

I love ribs! We made up some potato salad from the Red Hot 'n' Blue copycat recipe, Ames threw together some killer beans, and we feasted.

Ah ribs... my mother-in-law should visit more often!

From Ribs

ðē; ðə

2010-03-10T23:40:00.005-05:00

For the last year or so I've been observing a strange trend. It has to do with "the". When I was growing up, I learned to say "the" with two pronunciations. When the following noun begins with a consonant, it's pronounced with a short "e": ðə. But when the noun begins with a vowel, it's pronounced with a long "e": ðē.

But recently it seems like the second version (long "e", ðē) is dropping from usage. I hear people say things like "the island" with a short "e". "thuh island". "thuh oven". "thuh arch".

The whole world sounds like a bunch of mouth-breathing, illiterate louts.

But of course, since you can't really blend the "ə" ("uh") sound with a vowel, they insert a glottal stop between the words. That makes it sound a whole lot worse.

I mentioned this to Shan and Mum last time I was home. They both said "I KNOW!" and went on their own diatribes. Shan kept mentioning the glottal stop. I think she just likes to say "glottal stop".

Barbarians are at the gates, I'm telling you.

Redneck Pizza Oven

2010-03-07T00:32:00.011-05:00

I've been playing with pizza for several months now. Of course, to really make pizza, you need a brick oven. I've been trying to figure out how to do that for a few months. Then one day, my boss sends me this link, of a guy who turned a Weber 22" grill into a pizza oven.

"Hey," I thought, "I can do something even easier on my grill! If a Weber can make pizza, a real grill can too!"

So I decided to make a redneck pizza oven.

We're on our third pizza stone since July. I bought one by Oneida, and it worked fine until it cracked (about 4 weeks after I bought it). Oneida kindly replaced it (with no questions asked, I might add), but the replacement cracked 6 weeks later. I finally bought the good one: the Williams Sonoma version. So far no cracks.

But since we have two broken pizza stones, I decided to reassemble them, jigsaw-puzzle-style for my pizza oven floor.

From Redneck Pizza Oven

The oven itself is made by placing four landscape bricks on my grill. They prop the lid open and shield the walls to keep heat in.

From Redneck Pizza Oven

So with the landscape bricks in place and the two Oneida stones shoved back together, we have the start of a pizza oven.

From Redneck Pizza Oven

I've found my pizza peel is sticky. I thought that was just my own incompetence until I used a friend's. The thing is, I have a $5 pizza peel, and it's varnished. So I took sandpaper to it. The improvement is indescribable. This afternoon I tried putting some cornmeal on the peel under the pies, and it worked like a charm. Not one pie got folded! I might have used too much cornmeal on the first pie.

From Redneck Pizza Oven

We realized with the first pie, the lid is too high. We ended up taking too long to get the top of the pie cooked appropriately. I didn't get any pictures of it, but we solved the problem by putting a reflector atop the bricks. So you can't see it, but there is a secret lid about 6" over the pizza stones under the grill lid.

The first reflector was cardboard. It burst into flames after two pies. Ames suggested we try the vanity cover I took off the front of the grill a couple years back (she is, after all, the brains of the operation). Whaddya know? It fits perfectly, it's steel, and it doesn't sag. The pies got a lot better after that one.

We made half a dozen or so pies. They all had a nice char on them, and a hint of smoke

From Redneck Pizza Oven

I soon realized I needed more heat, so I started shoveling burning charcoal right onto the cooking grates next to the pizza stones. It made the pies a little more ashy, and the effect was fabulous

From Redneck Pizza Oven

Of course, one of the pizza stone pieces cracked again where one of the coals was touching it.

So the Redneck Pizza Oven worked like a champ.

But of course there are some improvements to be made. We need to find a better cooking surface. Reassembling the pizza stone jigsaw puzzle is going to get old pretty quick, and they're just too small. I'm open for suggestions: I've looked for unglazed tile and quarry stone, but I can't find either around here. I've thought of using a cast iron griddle too. Either way, I have a 19.5" deep grill. I want a cooking surface big enough to make at least 18" pies, if not full 19 inchers.

I'm not convinced our reflector is as good as it could be. I'd like to see if I can get something a little more draping. But Ames' version is a lot better than the cardboard ghetto-lid I had made.

And of course we need more practice.

But all in all, the experiment was a success.

From Redneck Pizza Oven

The right pan

2010-02-15T16:21:00.003-05:00

I was given one of these French Loaf Pans as a gift. I must say, the right pan helps incredibly with the finished product.

From Bread

Those loaves are my own "recipe." I'm actually kinda proud of them...

Hairy ride

2010-02-14T13:39:00.002-05:00

I spent the last week on Vancouver Island. I went up to be another pair of hands to help out Mum and Dad last week, so I did no touristy things, and only a couple "I'm back home and like to do this when I'm back" things.

We left late yesterday and got off the ferry at Tsawassen at 5:20 PM. We actually cleared the US border at 6:20, and were heading back south. We experienced no obvious Olympics-related delays, for which I am very grateful.

A couple miles from home, I came around a left turn and Ames shouted "Look out!" There was a small black dog (Shi-Tsu? I don't know, but short, furry, and black) standing in the rain in the middle of the road, in the dark, where there aren't any street lights. I slammed on the brakes and stopped just short of hitting the dog. But he panicked and jumped straight in front of the oncoming traffic.

The oncoming car hit him. I saw it briefly, but definitely heard it.

So I pulled over and ran back to check the dog. He was lying whimpering in the road. The woman in the car behind mine had stopped right there, and was already at the dog. She scooped him up, checked the tag, and told me to get a cell phone. So I ran back to my car, got the cell phone, and headed back.

"Call 911," she said.

"911?"

"Yeah, 911!"

I thought she meant for the dog, until I saw the woman lying in the ditch.

Apparently one of the people in the car that had actually hit the dog had gotten out to check on him. The ditch is very deep and there aren't any street lights there: she misstepped, fell right into the ditch and busted up her leg. She was sure it was broken, I didn't know and didn't want to poke and prod when I'm unsure what I'm doing.

So there we are: we've got a dog that's at least got a broken leg, and was apparently bleeding from the mouth. There is a woman in her 50s lying in the bottom of the ditch with a broken leg, and it's raining.

The paramedics did arrive. They got the woman in the ditch onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. She was conscious and lucid the whole time, but I'm not sure what that means.

The woman living right there called about the dog and ended up with someone from the humane society. She and her husband/boyfriend/partner were to take him to an emergency vet, who'd be able to contact the owner via the dog's tag. I assume she got there all right, they were getting ready to leave when I drove off.

The son of the woman in the ditch had been driving: he left to follow the ambulance.

So that was a pretty rotten end of a long trip home.

As my mother would say, "Well glory be!"

Happy New Year

2010-01-01T11:38:00.002-05:00

I don't usually make a big deal out of New Year's Day, but it seems like this one is significant. I keep having images of Arthur C. Clarke's famous sequel run through my head:

Let's see, we got married in '95, so this will be 15 years. That's something. We moved from Grand Rapids back to Charlotte at the end of '99, so it's been ten years since coming back to NC, and ten years since the Wayne Division that tore our Christian friends apart. Again, a significant milestone.

I stopped staying up for New Year a long time ago: between the realization that the New Year comes regardless of my approval or even my attention and my habits of staying up pretty much until midnight most of the time anyway; the whole prospect loses what appeal it had. But it's fun for the kids.

Willy-Sono

2009-12-29T18:00:00.004-05:00

I've only been writing about food recently. That seems odd, and yet unsurprising. There's a reason I look like this.

I made a trip to the nearest Williams-Sonoma recently (in Bellevue!). I had to pick up a couple specialty kitchen gadgets, so Williams-Sonoma was the obvious choice. Why is it the obvious choice? Let me share a little experience of ours...

Ames had a cookie press. It was a gift 4 or 5 years ago; the press was from Williams-Sonoma. So we took it out, and realized it wasn't working. There was a problem with the spring in it, so there was no tension on the plunger. As a result, it was totally worthless.

Ames called Willy-Sono, and they told her to bring it in. So in we go, taking a four-year-old defunct cookie press and no receipt.

"Yep, that's one of ours," the sales guy says. He looks it up in the book and tells us they don't carry it any more, but the sale price on it was $35. He gives Ames $35 store credit.

Then he shows us the model that replaced Ames' defunct press, explains why it's better and tells us it cost in the neighbourhood of $10 more. But of course, he assures us, it's a store credit so we can use it on anything.

If we had brought in a receipt, he tells us, he could have given us a refund.

That's for a four-year-old cookie press that's stopped working, with no receipt.

Where am I going to spend my kitchen budget from now on?

So I bought a pizza stone and a french bread pan this week. Are they a little spendy? Absolutely! But they both include a slip that tells me to take them back at any time if I decide I don't like them. I didn't pay extra for the quality (although they're obviously of superior quality to other offerings I've both purchased and researched). I paid extra so I can deal with people who treat me like I matter.

I'm sold.

That's Amore! (Reprise)

2009-12-26T14:28:00.012-05:00

I had previously posted a pictorial step-by-step to how we've been making pizza. The pictures Ames took were fabulous. But two things have made me decide we need a follow-up:

a couple people have asked me about the technique, and seemed to think what I posted before wasn't too clear

we've made a couple recipe and technique adjustments.

From Pizza Reprise

So here's an update of our step-by-step pizza making guide:

The Crust
The place to start is with the crust. I originally used a recipe I found online, but I've adjusted it to our taste. My recipe uses sourdough: I have a starter that took some sweat and tears to get to its current maturity. If you're in a hurry, you can make a starter that works by just throwing a tablespoon or so of dry yeast into two cups of flour and two cups of water; put them all into a jar and put it into the fridge. Feed it once a week. If you want something more authentic, you can check out some recipes on sourdough.com, Accidental Scientist, or S. John Ross. You can also buy a starter from Sourdoughs International, among other places. My own starter is an adulterated biga, as I mentioned before.

So here's the crust:

2 C. sourdough starter

4 C. water

2 tsp dry yeast

3.5 tsp salt

8--14 C. flour

Put the water, yeast, salt, and sourdough starter into your kitchen machine (or bread bowl) and let it sit for 20--30 minutes. Then start kneading. Knead it wet for 10--20 minutes, then add enough flour to make a sticky ball of dough. Turn it onto a floured board and shape it into a ball. Refrigerate this overnight.

That's enough dough for six 16-inch pizzas or 8 12-inch pizzas. Always make the biggest pizzas you can handle! the best pizzas I've ever eaten were 20-inch monsters from Luigi's Pizza in Charlotte, NC. Larger pizzas have better sauce-to-crust ratios, and more manageable slices. I make 16-inch pies, because that's all I can fit into my oven.

The Sauce
The crust is the heart of your pizza: the sauce is its soul. I made horrible pizza for years, until I learned my sauce was too complex. To make truly great pie, use the simplest possible sauce.

8 whole peeled tomatoes from a can. I find S&W is the best, but Hunt's are good too. Don't buy crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce your pie depends on getting this right!

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. white sugar. I like to use berry sugar, but granulated sugar works just fine.

a hint of oregano. I used to use 1 Tbsp., but I've come to believe that's vastly too much. I now use just enough to see.
Less is more, in this case.

Rinse your tomatoes in running water, pour off all the liquid. Put all the ingredients into a food processor or blender and pulse until it is a fine sauce. Don't puree!!! there needs to be some texture to your sauce. This is pizza sauce, not ketchup. I use a hand blender and a measuring cup. This picture is old, I use a lot less oregano now. But you get the idea.

From That's Amore

Assembling the Pie
Shaping the pie takes some practice. I can describe it to you, but you need to make a bunch and learn the feel.

First, take the dough out of the refrigerator and let it warm a couple hours.

Preheat your oven to 500F.

Put some flour on the counter, put the dough ball on it, and gently pat the ball into a disc. Turn it over several times so both sides are well floured. You don't want to dry out your dough by over-flouring, but you need to ensure it's not sticking. Once you get a fat disc, it's time to start stretching it.

From That's Amore

So lift the dough, and start to gently stretch the edges. The middle will begin to stretch to fit the edges. Once it gets loose, toss it hand to hand. The trick here is to gently tease it into a more or less uniform disc about 16 inches in diameter.

From That's Amore

If you feel adventurous, you can toss it overhead. I have had only small success actually tossing dough. Sometimes it works, more generally it doesn't. Be careful catching it, if you catch it on your fingers, you might well puncture your crust.

Once your dough is more or less the right size, place it on a well-greased pizza pan. Now's the hard part: gently shape it to the pan. Whatever you do, don't push the dough down onto the pan, lift and stretch. Using gentle lifting and teasing motion to shape the dough. If you keep upward motion, the pizza will be looser in the pan.

Once the pizza is in the pan, sauce it. Cover the crust, but don't overdo the sauce. Less is more.

Over the sauce, sprinkle some dried (ground) parmesan. This will add a hint of salt to the pie that's very subtle.

Over the parmesan, sprinkle mozzarella generously. It's easy to overdo the cheese, so use caution. But cover the pie up to the edges.

From That's Amore

Baking
I put my pizza stone on the bottom rack and but the top rack on the second-highest level.

The pizza goes on the top rack until the crust and cheese begin to brown. I used to put the pizza pan right on the stone, but I found I get better spring in the crust if I let it cook to firmness on a higher rack with more airflow.

Once the crust is starting to brown, I move the pan down to the stone. From this point, I check it every minute. When it's almost done, the pie will release from the pan. As soon as it releases, I slide the pan out from under the pizza and let the pizza finish on the stone. It only takes a minute or two, but the final couple minutes on the stone crisp up the crust and let the cheese caramelize a little.

If you do it right, you end up with a pie that's a little brown on the top, browned on the edges, and puffy on the edge, thinning in the middle.

From Pizza Reprise

So that's it. Let me know how this works for you.

Lasagna

2009-12-22T23:00:00.004-05:00

I have a sort of sehnsucht for good lasagna. On Vancouver Island, pretty much any restaurant that advertises lasagna serves a wonderful concoction of pasta, rich brown meat sauce, and toasted cheese in a small casserole dish. What people cook and serve in their homes is more like the traditional lasagna you might find anywhere: a tomatoey, tangy sauce between somewhat dry layers of cheese and pasta.

When I left the Island, I realized that those lasagnas of my youth were in fact somewhat rare. I launched on a long quest to find lasagna, and ended up eating many cubes of layered tomato and pasta. I ordered lasagna in good Italian places, and got a very tangy, creamy, cheesey pile of noodles. The best lasagna I had of that sort was at Fontanella in Charlotte, NC.

But I was longing for the lasagnas of those elder days. The greatest of those is the lasagna of Romeo's Place in Nanaimo, Duncan, and Victoria.

But the key to my search was when I discovered Julianna Pizza and House of Pizza in Charlotte, NC. It was at Juliana that I first recognized a very important correlation, "Say, everywhere I find that makes the kind of lasagna I like is owned by Greeks..." And so I added a criterion to my list of lasagnas: only order lasagna where there is at least one picture of the Parthenon on the walls. I have yet to find a Greek-owned restaurant without at least a picture of the Parthenon on one wall and an ikon of the Theotokos on another.

When we moved back west, I took the opportunity of being back on the Island to revisit my lasagna haunts. Memory hadn't exaggerated the goodness: the lasagnas and baked ravioli were every bit as good as I had remembered.

So a couple months ago, I went out on a limb and googled "Greek meat sauce recipe". I was curious what I'd find. What do you know, I found some recipes for kima. It looked interesting, and got me to thinking...

For a couple months now, I've wondered if I'd been the victim of marketing. Although all the lasagnas I'd truly enjoyed were listed as "Italian Fare" in the menus of those Greek restaurants, what if they were actually Greek fare?

So yesterday, I googled "Greek meat sauce recipe" again, and picked what looked like a winner: http://www.grouprecipes.com/3403/greek-meat-sauce.html. It looked possible, so I decided to try it.

And while I was at it, I spent some time doing some "research" online, and found some interesting articles about Greek pasta dishes (here's one: http://www.in2greece.com/english/food/greek-pasta-dishes.html). And lo and behold, they claimed that pasta with meat sauce is extremely popular in Greece: they're eaten baked and steamed... like the pasta menu items at my favourite lasagna joints.

By now I was pretty sure I had figured it out: places like Romeo's were serving Greek pasta dishes and calling them "Italian Fare."

So last night I made the kima from that recipe. It ended up looking like this:

From Lasagna

That's promising. And the smell... it smells just like Romeo's...

Tonight we assembled it into some crocks we had bought to make onion soup (a story for another time). We used a mixture of cheddar and mozzarella, as we had asked one time what Romeo's uses to top their pastas:

From Lasagna

And we baked them long enough to put a little toast on that cheese:

From Lasagna

The verdict? It's not Romeo's or San Marcos'. But it's very, very close. Like, we figured out how they make it and just need to tweak the recipe to taste.

This is a major breakthrough for me.

Great steak

2009-11-27T20:21:00.011-05:00

I'm very, very late with this review. It's been over a year since I ate at Fleming's Steakhouse in Charlotte, NC and I really ought to have written this last fall. But on the theory of better late than never, I'm going to post this now.

Someone from Fleming's contacted me when he read about my experiences at Capital Grille on my blog, and told me there was a Fleming's coming to Charlotte. Sadly, Fleming's came about the time I left; but I ended up in Charlotte a couple months later for three weeks, so two friends and I went to check out the new restaurant.

Fleming's is hitting a hard market in Charlotte: there are already several very good steak houses in a mid-size city. But I don't think they'll have trouble.

I ordered my usual: "French" onion soup, a ribeye cooked medium, scalloped potatoes, and a "Chocolate Lava Cake" for desert. There were also asparagus and their macaroni & cheese on the table, ordered by my companions.

I love onion soup. In fact, I think I might like it better than I like the steak I often eat with it. The onion soup at Fleming's was very good. Salivatingly good. Good enough to make me wonder whether I really needed the steak. You need to order the onion soup at Fleming's. It's good.

The steak deserves notice: it was the most consistently cooked steak I have ever had the pleasure of eating. I always order my steaks medium, but the fact is, I can eat meat from medium-rare to well done. I'm not that picky on steak: as long as it's cooked enough not to have that raw-meat mouth feel, I can eat it.

But a medium steak is actually fairly hard to cook right. In general, they come to the table either medium-well or medium rare. And in almost every case, the meat is medium-well near the edges and medium-rare at the bone. The steak at Fleming's was perfectly medium from the edge to the bone. It was remarkable: I stopped eating just to stare at the done-ness several times. It was literally 100% consistent.

I found the lava cake didn't thrill me too much, but that's frankly not the restaurant's fault. The cake itself was good, I've just gotten burned out on it. The first three or four times I had lava cake, I thought it wonderful. When I was at Fleming's, I suddenly thought "you know, I'm bored with lava cake." I shall probably never order it again anywhere---I've just gotten tired of it.

What really struck me about Fleming's was the remarkable atmosphere. I noticed it first in my correspondance with the person who contacted me because of my blog. Here was a guy who essentially cold-called me to invite me to a restaurant. He was neither obseqious nor condescending: he simply talked (well, emailed me) as a fellow food-enthusiast. And I had no idea he was going to send me a gift certificate to try the restaurant. The first mention was the envelope that arrived in the mail.

The restaurant itself had the same atmosphere: there's no question it's fine dining; but it felt much more relaxed than their competition. The waiters were not in any way unprofessional, but they were frankly much more friendly and enthusiastic than I've come to expect from that sort of establishment. One might almost accuse some of those steak houses of a pretentious atmosphere. Fleming's is nothing like that. The presentation is expert and professional, but there is a personable friendliness that I've just not seen in many places.

In fact, Fleming's reminded me of Bistro 100, which is sadly gone forever. It was fine dining, but with a relaxed, friendly, enthusiastic staff.

I like to eat out. I don't do it so much anymore, but it's still something I look forward to and enjoy. I like to eat in the fine-dining establishments, but a high price tag alone isn't worth it to me. Good service and good food are at least as important. And when I can find something "almost as good" for significantly less money, I tend to go to those places again and again. So the question I ask about any restaurant is, "why would I eat here?" That's not meant to be impertinent or disrespectful: it's meant to help me clarify what makes that restaurant unique.

At Fleming's, the food was very good, but it wasn't head and shoulders above Capital Grille or Morton's. They're all first-rate establishments, and the food is excellent in each of them. (In fact, for my money, the best steak in Charlotte is at Manzetti's.) What Fleming's does offer is the high-end steakhouse experience in an excellent environment. A waiter who is both knowledgeable and efficient and capable of relaxing me and my companions: that's what differentiates Fleming's in my mind. And on that score, it was second to none.

I've had some memorable evenings in steak houses. The night at Fleming's was one of them. All in all, Fleming's is a winner.

A piece of pie

2009-11-27T20:14:00.004-05:00

Today we braved the crowds to pick up a couple things we needed to buy. We decided to eat out, and went to check Pizzeria Fondi. This is one to watch.

If I were to open a restaurant, it would be a lot like Fondi. The menu is sparse: two pasta dishes, several pizzas, some salads, a couple appetizers, and some desert. Some might look at that and see a lack of selection, I look at it and see focused effort.

The pizza is good. I'm afraid nothing will replace Luigi's in my estimation, but the pizza was very good indeed. The crust was excellent: light and chewy, slightly charred and thin. The sauce was a little too sweet for my taste, but still very good. They advertise house-made mozzarella on their pies: I can't speak to whether that's true, but the flavour was certainly not lacking.

Of course I ordered a cheese pizza: that's always my first choice. They've earned a second visit with their efforts today, so next time I'll order a pizza with sausage and onions.

Fondi's restaurants are all in the Puget Sound area, but if you're ever here, you really need to check them out.

Smoky Chook

2009-11-22T15:10:00.004-05:00

My favourite smell is chicken fat burning on charcoal. The slightly sweet smoke is an aroma that always makes me breathe deeply and salivate.

There's a kinda-sorta restaurant supply store in Tacoma, not too far from where I work. A co-worker and I drove over there at lunch last week and poked around. It was actually pretty cool: this is the first place I've seen in the NW with meat that's right for BBQ. They have pig shoulders, Boston butts, and St. Louis cut ribs.

I was drooling.

Perhaps best of all, I found 40-pound bags of mesquite lump charcoal for $15. That's an incredible buy: I've paid as much as $1/lb for good lump charcoal. This is definitely the best price I've ever seen.

I'm no great fan of mesquite smoke: I don't dislike it, but I don't see why people rave over it either. But I have to say I really like cooking on it. It holds a steady temperature, burns long, and burns clean. I still like Wicked Good Charcoal the best, but lump mesquite has become quite a favourite here.

I realized Friday that we had a couple chooks in the freezer, and I thought "What a great opportunity to try out my new charcoal!" So out they came.

I thawed them out, put them in a pan, and sprinkled them generously with salt, black pepper, and garlic powder.

From Smoky Chook

I chopped up and onion and stuffed it into their little bottoms

From Smoky Chook

Then they went onto the grill

From Smoky Chook

You've heard me say it before: 90% of barbecuing is keeping a steady temperature. you want it to stay at or around 200F. The weather was windy and damp yesterday, and temperature was a slight challenge. But I gotta say, the mesquite really keeps a steady burn. Once I got it into the groove, it held a very steady temp for most of the six hours they were on the grill.

In this shot, the grill had just been open, so the thermometer's showing a little low. It caught back up quickly.

From Smoky Chook

We brought them in after dark. The one on the right was a little torn up, as I managed to tear the skin when flipping them (I cooked them partly on their backs, partly on their breasts).

From Smoky Chook

All in all, I'd call it a success.

That's Amore!

2009-10-19T20:52:00.016-05:00

There's been some interest about our pizza-making adventures. When we moved out here, we quickly realized this isn't really pizza territory. We finally decided we needed to make our own. So at least once a week we whip up some pizzes. Ames took some photos of our pizza-making session last night, and I thought I'd sort of walk through how we did it, and what came out.

First a quick note. There are many styles of pizza, and there are excellent pies in every style. My personal favourite is "New York" style: the pies are large, but thin. The crust is thin and chewy, not crispy. This is the style I've been trying to perfect in our kitchen.

Start with the dough. Pizza crust needs to ferment at least overnight before trying to use it; so I always make the dough as early as I can. This weekend I used dough Sunday that I had made on Saturday, but I prefer to let it sit longer than that.

As I documented previously, I originally started with a recipe supposedly from Peter Reinhart. That works pretty well, but we've tweaked it a bit. So here's what I used this weekend:

2 cups of sourdough starter

4 cups water

3 1/2 teaspoons salt

14 1/2 cups flour

It was raining on the weekend (in Washington? really?), so I used more flour than I normally do. Just for reference, I generally don't measure the flour. You need enough to make a sticky dough.

The dough was split into six pieces and put into plastic containers in the fridge.

From That's Amore

The next day, I had to grate cheese, make sauce, and prepare toppings before cooking. I started with the cheese. Nothing special, just whatever was cheap at the store. I grated it in my Bosch Universal.

From That's Amore

After the cheese came the sauce. Pizza sauce is best as simple as possible, at least for how we're using it. It shouldn't be cooked prior to the actual baking of the pizza, and should contain as few ingredients as possible. So here's my recipe:

4 whole peeled tomatoes from a can

1/4 teaspoon of sugar

1/4 teaspoon of salt

enough oregano to see... I typically use 1 tablespoon

This was a double batch:

From That's Amore

I put all that into a tub and frap it with a hand blender until it's all mixed, but not totally pureed. It should still have some texture.

From That's Amore

After the sauce, I prepared some simple toppings. I like cheese pizza best, but not everyone agrees with me. So last night we used pepperoni, Italian sausage, red onions, and mushrooms.

From That's Amore

Now to make the pies...

We let the dough warm an hour or so before cooking. I shape it on a floured counter.

From That's Amore

I used to cook the pizzas directly on the stone in the oven, but I've found it's very easy to mess them up, and the size of the pizza is limited to the size of the peel. So we got a couple 16-inch pans, and we've started to use this technique:

put the pie in the oven on a pan

half-way through, when the crust is cooked enough to hold its shape, we slide the pie off the pan to finish on the stone

From That's Amore

So here's a crust spread out on a 16-inch pan:

From That's Amore

Once the dough's been spread, time to build the pizza:

From That's Amore

We cook the pizza at 500F.

Having cooked the pizza thoroughly, we pull it out and slice it:

From That's Amore

This crust wasn't quite right. The colour is a little pale on the edges. But the bottom looked great:

From That's Amore

The next pie was a half-n-half: pepperoni on one side; pepperoni, sausage, onions, and mushrooms on the other. That's what Mama Lena's calls a "Coney Island":

From That's Amore

And being 16-inch pies, they can be eaten properly: folded and eaten "taco style":

From That's Amore

So that's how we do pizza here. Ames got some good pictures, didn't she?

A grip on life

2009-09-22T23:51:00.004-05:00

So my experiments with pizza have led into the wider realm of sourdough.

The offspring and I decided to get a good sourdough going after we realized that great pizza just might require sourdough. Our first attempt was to capture wild yeast on the counter. We tried to work with it, but it was a constant disappointment.

Our second attempt was a grape-based starter. The grape-based starter appears to be working. We made pizza first. This was our first no-dry-yeast pizza attempt, and it worked admirably.

(I know the first pizza picture is blurry: we had some camera issues that night, and I salvaged what I could.)

From Grip on Life

I decided to try bread after that, but my starter was sluggish. I ended up making a few loaves, but I cheated and spiked the dough with dry yeast. Still, they were decent:

From Grip on Life

I used a slight variation on the Berkeley Sourdough I found online. I found the recipe made an extremely dry dough, so I use more starter than they recommend, add the water and salt to it, and then knead in flour to form a decent consistency. The results seem pretty good.

From Grip on Life

I fed my sourdough again this weekend, and it got really foamy. So I started a new batch tonight. In fact, the sponge I made to get the bread going was foaming nicely enough that I made it into a dough much earlier than I had planned. I'm leaving the dough out on the counter overnight to rise. I'll see how it's doing in the morning.

I must admit I've been intrigued with the catalogue Sourdoughs International has online. I'm more than a little tempted to drop some cash on a starter from them. But frankly, I'm out $20 or so in flour and $5 in grapes right now, and that's produced a good deal of pizza and bread already. Part of my interest has been that this hobby is so cheap; I'm going to keep seeing what I can hack together in my kitchen before I start ordering more exotic starters online.

The First of September

2009-09-01T22:23:00.002-05:00

Wow... we're already at the Ber Months! This year is speeding past far too quickly for me to keep up with it.

But regardless of my personal ineptitude, Happy Ber Months everyone!

Well, I'm back

2009-08-13T18:34:00.002-05:00

I'm back on Vancouver Island. Again.

I never come to Canada, but I have to talk myself into going back across the border.

Pie!

2009-07-03T11:42:00.009-05:00

It's no secret I love pizza. I tend to take Jeff Varasano's view of things: "Pizza is the most sensuous of foods."

From Pizza

North Carolina is not really a pizza state, but in the last decade a number of refugees from New York have brought good pizza with them. In fact, I had the pleasure of introducing at least three New Yorkers in Charlotte to good pizza. That is, I had the priviledge of pointing out that there was pizza in Charlotte made by a fellow ex-New Yorker. It was always a pleasure to see someone's face light up when they tasted "the first real pizza since I came here."

My three favourite pizza places in Charlotte were Luigi's Pizza in Steele Creek, Tony's Pizza in the Galleria, and Brooklyn Brothers in Concord. All three made amazing pies. At one time Mama Lena's would have topped the list, but since their move to Waxhaw, the quality seems to be lacking. Perhaps I got them on an off night: I hope so, because Mama Lena's used to be a thing of rare and exquisite beauty.

But since moving to the Northwest, we've been in a pizza wilderness, in einem trocken und duerren Land, da kein Wasser ist. I hear there is excellent pizza here, but I haven't found it. In fact, I took the trouble of visiting the one place in Seattle I had heard really made perfect pies, only to find out they're closed on Sundays. That was disappointing. Like journeying to Mecca only to find they've moved it.

To exacerbate the situation, there are a few foods I cannot prepare for the life of me. I can't make pancakes or pizza, among others.

So I finally realized no one else could save me, I had to save myself (how very Council of Trent of me!). I bit the bullet, googled some pizza dough recipes, and Ames and I have been trying to learn to make a good pie.

We started with a recipe ostensibly by Peter Reinhart. This recipe is a good one, but not perfect. We've been tweaking it a bit, largely inspired by Jeff Varasano's excellent pizza-making tutorial.

We followed Varasano's lead on the pizza sauce, and we've started to produce some decent pies. We're limited by an electric oven that only gets so hot and can only hold so big a pie, but we've made some that aren't too shabby.

It took a few to start getting them the right shape, so the first few were sort of ugly:

From Pizza

But Ames started making them nice, and was kind enough to give me some tips, so they got more and more round:

From Pizza

But she definitely still holds the record:

From Pizza

Our pizzas still aren't perfect, but we're working on it. Here are some of the tricks we've learned so far, which seem to have made some real difference in the quality of the finished product:

The dough needs to ferment at least 24 hours before use. We're following the Reinhart method of fermenting it cold in the refrigerator, but I'm toying with the idea of an on-the-counter ferment.

Varasano's auto-lysing advice is good: I've taken to throwing all the dough ingredients into the bowl and walking away for 20--30 minutes while they get to know one another.

I've taken oil out of the dough: the dough is now flour, water, yeast, and salt. The oil makes the dough too brittle.

We're making the dough a little wetter every time. We don't use the cake-batter-like dough that an 800F brick oven uses, but it's a lot more like custard everytime we make a batch. We have yet to get it too wet.

We've thrown out all the fancy pizza sauce recipes and gone with Varasano's advice: we just blend some whole canned tomatoes, add some sugar, salt, and enough oregano to see, and spread it on. We never cook the sauce, and we make it as simple as we can.

We'll never be able to fake the years of experience that Luigi and Tony have, but we're making better pies than we can get through Domino's or Papa John's. That's enough to make us want to make it again, every time.

Here's to good pie!

From Pizza

Idiots to the left, morons to the right...

2009-06-29T20:35:00.004-05:00

Once again I am amazed at the stupidity of the idiots working at one of my banks.

I closed an account there a month or so ago, or so I thought. I mean, when they say "OK, we closed your account" and it disappears from your online banking interface, you really have some excuse to think it was closed.

Imagine my surprise when I received a somewhat threatening card in the mail, saying it had been overdrawn, and please deposit enough to cover $----.-- that you owe us, or we'll close the account and file it on your credit report, etc.

So I called them to straighten it out.

Those idiots had essentially re-opened the account (i.e. they put it in a "pending closing" state) so they could credit the account $0.03 for an interest payment or something (I never kept more than $100 in it, so if it was an interest payment, it sounds about right). Then, because it was not actually closed (although they had explicitly told me it was), it began to accrue fees. Of course, there was no money in it to cover the fees, because they had transferred it all out when they originally told me they had closed it. That, for the short of memory, was when I had asked them to close the account. As in, "please close this account."

So the morons stopped the closing of my account (although they had certainly said it had been closed) to credit it $0.03---three bloody cents---and then slapped me with $12 or so of fees.

Then they had the audacity to send me a threatening letter for not paying the fees.

Here's an idea: when someone closes one of several accounts in your bank and you owe them some money (say, $0.03), why wouldn't you just credit it to another of the accounts they have with you? Or why not send them a cheque? Why would you postpone the closing (the one you told them had already been completed) and slap them with fees? In what universe is this a good idea? What possible customer profile does this appeal to? In what imagined reality is this good customer service? What sort of nincompoop would establish this as the correct workflow?

I mean really, how do these people remember to breathe?

Sheople

2009-06-17T10:41:00.001-05:00

So I'm test-driving Flock: a web browser for Mac that appears to be much more like a client than a browser. I'm in minute 8 right now, and am frankly impressed by what it offers.

The basic idea is, the browser keeps you logged into things like Blogger and Facebook; and offers browser-based tools to interact with them. So rather than posting this from the little editor window in Blogger, I'm using the "Blog Editor" in Flock.

So far, an interesting idea.

In more personal news, we're moving on buying a house. Inspection is today. That's a lot of why I've been out of the loop: the house search has consumed a great deal of time and energy over the last couple months.

I've been intentionally limiting my personal computer time, trying to spend more time reading, pedalling, and paddling. I've found my laptop can be the most vicious time sink.

I owe several people phone calls and email. I'm working on it...

Finally, today is our 14th wedding anniversary.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Plural?

2009-05-28T23:01:00.002-05:00

I've long thought it was weird that in English (at least the mixture of Canadian and American dialects I speak) it's fairly common to pluralize the word "one." As in, "these ones are my favourite." Do other people do this? It just seems really odd, but I hear it at least daily.

Busy, busy

2009-04-28T15:36:00.008-05:00

I suddenly realized I hadn't posted in almost a month. Wow.

April has been busy, but not perhaps so productive. We'll see.

The kids and I have been carving out a canoe paddle for the eldest. Once we get a chance to try it out and test it, we can make paddles for the others based on how well this one works. We made it by laminating strips of cedar, poplar, and hemlock. This paddle's been made entirely by hand: we glued it with clamps; shaped it with a coping saw, chisels, a block plane, and a spokeshave; and are smoothing it with sandpaper and sanding blocks. No power tools at all. We'll see how it turns out: there have already been three mistakes, the worst of which is a split in the blade. It's a very thin split, but it's there. I think some epoxy will fix it, but we need to proceed with caution.

From April 2009

I turned 37 this month. Ames baked me a 12-layer chocolate cake. This is a traditional dessert in eastern North Carolina: it's made of very thin layers of a white cake (I like pound cake best), stacked with layers of chocolate icing. The result is a brutally sweet cake that's incredibly rich. These cakes are a lot of work, and it's traditional to count the layers before eating. The most I've ever had is 23, I think 12 or 15 is about right. There are very few things I prefer to one of these cakes.

From April 2009

I rode my bike to work 10 times in April: it was in the shop a couple days, and I had some business I had to take care of, so I drove to work more than I wanted to this month. On the other hand, Ames got me a bike computer for my birthday, so I was able to get a more-or-less accurate trip distance. So here it is: Google Maps says my trip is 11.5 miles; Map My Ride says 11.6 miles; my car's odometer figures it at 12 miles; and my bike computer says it's 12.07 miles. But my trip home is about 11.5 miles: it's easier to take a more direct route home, when it takes right turns instead of lefts across several lanes of traffic. So I'm going to figure my rides as 12 miles one-way, or 24 miles per day; on the theory that the actual clocked mileage in my car and bike is more accurate than online mapping software.

I've not been reading much recently, except my Bible.

So that's my month in review.

End of March Tallies

2009-03-31T22:05:00.003-05:00

So I've ridden my new bike to work six times since I bought it on Pi Day (3/14). That's a total of 138 miles, not counting other rides to the store, etc. And I rode my old bike once, so the total for March is actually something like 161 miles.

That's a good start, but I have to admit to being a little disappointed. I thought I had spent more miles than that on the bike.

Here's to a more bike-intense April!

Maiden Voyage

2009-03-18T15:41:00.008-05:00

So today was the first day I rode the new bike to work and back. It was everything I hoped it could be.

In particular:

I didn't time it too carefully, but I'm certain the trip took less than an hour. That's fantastic, as the bus ride takes about 1:15, and my previous bike commutes were something like 1:05 -- 1:10. So I'm going to give the new bike credit for 10 minutes. And that's with a couple red lights that seemed a little long to me.

The ride home took 1:08, rather than 1:30 (the ride home is a net climb, end-to-end). That's much better: I can justify times like that for a workout, but I have trouble justifying 1:15 each way just sitting on the bus, when I can drive it in less than half an hour.

The old bike has front shocks, and I didn't really realize how much effort that added. Without those shocks, there is a noticeable change in the effort to move the bike. But then, I discovered just how rough my bike route is this morning. My arms were a little numb from shaking over one stretch.

I love disk brakes. All the hype is deserved. They let you control the stopping so much better. I can ride down a hill at a controlled pace now: not just either ridiculously slowly are all-out fast. This might be one of those things from which there's no going back.

The handlebars need some work. I've been contemplating switching out my bars for something more ergonomic, but I might just add some bar extenders. At any rate, the short T-bars are rough. After about 6 miles, I was getting pretty numb in the hands. I like the bar extenders on my old bike, although the vertical angle is wrong: the variety of hand positions makes riding just a little more comfortable. This could take some research: extenders make me feel like I'm going to get caught on something, but bare T-bars are just too Spartan.

The trunk and built-in panniers are a nice shift of weight from my back to the bike. The weight doesn't actually change---I need to haul the same number of pounds up the hills---but it seems to be better situated than in a backpack. A friend has offered me a used messenger bag, so I'm looking forward to trying that too. I've been riding with a really heavy laptop bag, but now that I have a company-owned workstation, I'm not hauling that laptop anymore. This is a good thing. So maybe the messenger bag will be even better than the trunk, or maybe I'll find they compliment one another well enough I use them both at different times: there are advantages to both methods, and strong proponents of each.

I already moved my tail-light up from the rack to the back of the trunk bag. I might need to move my water-bottle cage too. I think I prefer it on the lower tube, rather than on the seat tube. I'll probably need to just add one, rather than moving what's already there: I might be really dry come summer time.

I don't like the grip-shifts on this bike. I like grip-shifts in general, but the ones on this bike are distracting. They have a little indicator needle that moves, and always makes me shift the wrong direction. This is difficult to describe in words, but maybe a picture helps:
From Bikes New and Old

The problem is, the needle moves with the grip, but it's in the wrong place: it looks like it should move against the grip, rather than with it. It's counter-intuitive enough I keep shifting up rather than down, etc. A little electrical tape could be the perfect solution to this problem.

I like the smoother, narrower, higher-pressure tires.

So yeah, this bike is great. I'm really excited to get back on it tomorrow morning.

New Bike

2009-03-15T16:31:00.008-05:00

So I bought a new bike yesterday. I had agonized over whether to buy a new one or keep the old one for quite some time, but there were some unexpected developments that finally convinced me to go ahead. So we headed over to REI and took a look at their offerings.

I'll be honest, I've been to their stores a couple times and totally scoured their website in the last couple weeks. I've been a little bike-obsessed.

My old bike:

From Bikes New and Old

I was actually torn between two fairly spendy bikes: the Big Buzz and the Safari. I wanted a couple "extras" that come stock on the Safari but not on the Big Buzz, so the $50 price difference was a non-issue. After the add-ons, they'd cost about the same.

But after a few questions about me and my ride, one of the sales guys suggested the Buzz. It's about $200 cheaper than the two I was looking at, and it's really a great fit for what I want. That $200 was basically enough to put some add-ons on the bike and still get me out of the store cheaper than the list price on the other bikes.

My new bike:

From Bikes New and Old

One problem I have in my ride is, it's a 12 mile commute (one way). That's a long way to go on a mountain bike, but the roads here are kinda rough, and I frequently hit significant gravel and so forth. That effectively eliminates a high-efficiency road bike.

The Buzz seems to be a good compromise: it's noticeably lighter than my mountain bike, and rides a lot easier. Just on my short test drive last night (before it started to snow) and this afternoon (between amazing intermittent wind and hail storms), I found the bike is a lot faster and a lot easier to pedal.

This is my first bike with disk brakes, and I'm really interested to see how well they measure up to the hype. My short ride around the block gave me a little taste, but not enough to really get a feel for how they work in "real life." My longer ride out of the neighbourhood today gave me a better taste, but I really want to try them on a real ride.

From Bikes New and Old

One thing about my commute: the two worst hills are within two miles. And since I live on a hill, the end of my ride home is always uphill. And although every ride from home starts out downhill, they generally include a brutal uphill struggle in the first couple miles.

The good news is, I can test the new bike on the worst hills without going more than ten minutes. And so far, this bike is wowing me on the hills. The disk brakes give great control on the downhill stretches, and the narrower tires and lighter frame make the uphills a lot more friendly. I have to admit, I was loathe to part with my mountain bike, as I relied on the low mountain bike gears to beat those hills. But now I wonder whether they were more necessary because of the heavy frame and bulky tires than because of the actual roads. Time will tell.

So the add-ons... I bought a rack for the rear and a trunk:

From Bikes New and Old

the trunk contains some light-weight fold-out panniers:

From Bikes New and Old

and I moved my lights and water-bottle from the old bike to the new

From Bikes New and Old

So I'm admittedly enamoured of this bicycle, but the initial response is that the new bike is much better in every way than what I've been riding, and I'm extremely excited to ride it to work.

Bike Commuting

2009-03-10T15:56:00.004-05:00

So I've been talking a lot about my commute to work. It's probably not interesting to anyone but me, but I'm having fun trying to crack this nut.

I've pretty much decided on biking to and from work, but there are a couple obstacles that I'm working on overcoming:

The ride is 12 miles (19 km) one way, and I'm still not in the best shape. The ride is getting a lot easier, but I'm still wiped by it. Worse, the ride home is largely uphill, and by the last 3 miles, I'm miserable. The solution to this one is to keep it up and get into shape, but that's easier said than done.

The weather hasn't been cooperating. We moved from Charlotte, NC to the Tacoma, WA area; and there are some implications to that. The wet is not as great a problem as the cold. Cold isn't only uncomfortable, icy roads are dangerous. The plan was to be biking full-time in March, but I've found March is a lot icier than I had expected. I'm trying to ride on fine days, but I still drive much more than I ride.

I bought a cheap bike to try and ease into riding, and I'm questioning now my plan to buy a better one "after six months." It's been six months, and I want a better bike, but there is more desire for bike than money to fund one. It's been my experience that better tools generally result in much better results: that is, a better bike will mean an easier ride in, and hence more frequent riding. But there's still the small detail of paying for it.

So my biking plan is coming together, but more slowly than I would have liked.

It's been interesting to note how few people bike here, compared even to Seattle or Portland. This is perhaps not the most bike-friendly place in the world, but after North Carolina, it's awfully friendly.

I've found the drivers here are really great. I've read a lot by cyclists about how aggressive and evil drivers are, but I'm also reading a lot that suggests there are two sides to that story. And noticing bikes more, I'm seeing a lot of cyclists doing things like running stop signs or red lights. In fact, at least one cyclist actually told me he doesn't stop for four-ways.

Huh?

Here's a hint for cyclists out there: if you run a stop sign and almost get hit by a SUV, it's your own fault. If you then you punch a window "to teach him a lesson"; you deserve whatever the guy gives you. Being on two wheels doesn't make you right. If you ignore the rules of the road, you're the only one to blame when you wind up road-kill.

The good news is, drivers seem to really appreciate a grin and some basic courtesy.

So I'm enjoying what little bike commuting I've managed to get in, and I'm really looking forward to doing it more frequently.

BibTeX convertor

2009-02-25T13:31:00.008-05:00

I've been thinking about using my LibraryThing account with BibTeX. The problem is, LibraryThing doesn't export to BibTeX format. So I wrote a kludgy convertor: this takes a CSV export file from LibraryThing and generates BibTeX entries from it. I'm sure it could be a zillion times better, but it seems to work pretty well under SBCL. It requires CL-PPCRE.

I apologize for the formatting, I'll fix it if I can figure it out.

;;; Attempt to actually process LibraryThing export CSV file
;;;
;;; Mark Peever
;;; 2009-02-16

;;; Requires:
;;; cl-ppcre

(defparameter library-thing-encoding :ISO-8859-1)

;; The CSV fields may contain commas
(defparameter line-pattern (concatenate 'STRING 
                    "^\"(.+?)\"," ; title
                    "\"(.+?)\","  ; author-simple
                    "\"(.+?)\","  ; author
                    "([^,]*),"    ; date
                    "([^,]*),"    ; lcc
                    "([^,]*),"    ; ddc
                    "([^,]*),"    ; isbn
                    "\"(.+?)\","  ; publication
                    "([^,]*),"    ; rating
                    "([^,]*),"    ; review
                    "\"(.+?)\","  ; entry-date
                    "([^,]*),"    ; copies
                    ))

;; Structure to hold a book entry
(defstruct book
  title
  author-simple
  author
  date
  lcc
  ddc
  isbn
  publication-data
  rating
  review
  entry-date
  copies)

(defun create-bibtex-file (export-file bibtex-file)
  "Create a BibTex file from a LibraryThing export file."
  (write-data bibtex-file 
          (mapcar #'bibtex-entry (parse-export-file export-file))))

(defun load-data (export-file)
  "Load a LibraryThing export file into a list of CSV lines. This is almost entirely a wrapper for 'fare-csv:read-csv-file."
  (read-text-file export-file :format library-thing-encoding))

(defun write-data (bibtex-file entries)
  "Write a list of BibTeX entries to a file."
  (with-open-file (out-stream bibtex-file 
                  :direction :output
                  :if-exists :append
                  :if-does-not-exist :create
                  :external-format :utf-8)
    (loop for entry in entries
    do (write-line entry out-stream)
     finally (probe-file bibtex-file))))

(defun read-text-file (filename &key (format :utf-8))
  "Read a text file into a list of lines. The EXTERNAL-FORMAT is passed as a keyword argument."
  (with-open-file (istream filename 
               :direction :input
               :external-format format)
    (loop for line = (read-line istream nil)
     while (not (null line))
     collect line)))

(defun line->book (csv-line)
  "Generate a BOOK object from a CSV line from the export file." 
  (cl-ppcre:register-groups-bind (title 
                  author-simple 
                  author 
                  date 
                  lcc 
                  ddc
                  isbn
                  publication-data
                  rating
                  review
                  entry-date
                  copies) 
      (line-pattern csv-line)
    (make-book :title title 
           :author-simple author-simple 
           :author author 
           :date date 
           :lcc lcc 
           :ddc ddc
           :isbn isbn
           :publication-data publication-data
           :rating rating
           :review review
           :entry-date (remove-if-not #'safe-char? entry-date)
           :copies copies)))

(defun parse-export-file (filename)
  "Return a list of BOOKS parsed from the output file."
  (remove-if-not #'book-p
         (mapcar #'line->book (load-data filename))))

(defun safe-char? (char)
  "Check whether CHAR is safe for use in a BibTex cite key"
  (not 
   (find
    char
    '(#\. #\, #\; #\% #\" #\' #\) #\( #\# #\Space #\Tab #\NewLine))))

(defun cite-key (book)
  "Create a cite-key for a book."
  (concatenate 'string
           (remove-if-not #'safe-char? (book-author book))
           ":"
           (remove-if-not #'safe-char? (book-title book))
           ":"
           (remove-if-not #'safe-char? (book-date book))))

(defun bibtex-entry (book)
  "Generate a BIBTEX entry from a BOOK object."
  (if (not (book-p book))
      nil
      (concatenate 'STRING 
           (format nil "@book {~A,~%" (cite-key book))
           (format nil "title={~A},~%" (book-title book))
           (format nil "author=~S,~%" (book-author book))
           (format nil "publisher=~S,~%" 
               (book-publication-data book))
           (format nil "date={~A} ~%" (book-date book))
           "}")))

emacs and vi

2009-02-24T18:09:00.008-05:00

There is an age-old debate (er, war) between Unix people who use vi and those who use emacs. I use them both daily, so it's a debate I understand. I can see both sides to this one.

I think I got a glimmer of insight into the debate this morning, and thought I'd share it. Emacs and vi represent very different software philosophies: vi is from the Unix school of thought, emacs is from the Lisp school.

The Unix school of thought is generally described by the pithy saying "Do one thing and do it well." Each utility or application on a Unix system is small and very limited in its scope. The power of Unix comes from combining and mixing these utilities to create larger single-use "applications". I am convinced that the two "commands" that most characterize Unix are ``|'' and ``tee.''

Vi is a prime example of this philosophy: it is probably the best text editor for console-based file manipulation. With a powerful regular expression engine, a script API, and a wide variety of concise commands, I am convinced vi is the best way to create or alter files on the disk. It does one thing very well.

Lisp software is different. Instead of the proverbial one thing done well, Lisp software is open-ended. It's viewed as perpetually incomplete: it can always be expanded on; it frequently involves some sort of interactive prompt at which the software itself can be changed by the end user; and meddling with it is generally expected, if not encouraged.

Emacs is Lisp software, and it shows: it's the open-ended text editor, if it can really be called a "text editor" at all. In emacs, I can write some emacs-lisp expressions in a buffer and evaluate them on the fly. Those expressions can do anything from some simple calculations to altering the behaviour of emacs itself. When several of those expressions are used together, they can be packaged as an application: an application that runs atop emacs.

For system administration work, I reach for vi. Between ubiquity (vi is on every system) and sed-compatible regular expressions, vi fits perfectly into the Unix administrator's toolkit and mode of thought.

And as a side note, let me point out that if you don't know sed and awk, you're not a complete Unix administrator. These tools are essential, and you need to learn them. Perl is great, and you need to know Perl too, but sed and awk are indispensible to Unix administration.

When I write code, I always reach for emacs. Emacs is the perfect coder's editor. Let's be honest, emacs is more IDE than editor. Emacs allows me to see my code clearly highlighted, it has sensible (and adjustable) code formatting rules, and it lets me write and run the code all in one place. I get a kick out of the discussions on Perl Monks about code formatting: I always just use emacs and let it format the code as it sees fit. It always does a good job.

And as I've been using more and more Lisp to solve my data problems, I've found emacs + SLIME + SBCL to be the only way to code.

New Workstation

2009-02-17T11:43:00.010-05:00

I'm blogging from my shiny new FreeBSD 7.1 workstation. This is probably not of general interest: I'm using my blog to document how I built this workstation, as there were some hiccups along the road, and maybe some other poor soul will find it useful to know how I worked around them.

So this workstation is a Dell Optiplex 760. It's running a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM and two 215 GB hard drives.

So I installed FreeBSD 7.1 from the DVD image via BitTorrent. I followed the instructions on ish and got it booting into a root filesystem on ZFS. Note that the instructions suggest first installing into a 1GB UFS partition, but I found 500MB more than enough room.

So now my filesystem looks like:


> df -h
Filesystem                 Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
tank/root                  213G    165M    213G     0%    /
devfs                      1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
tank/tmp                   213G    128K    213G     0%    /tmp
tank/usr                   214G    456M    213G     0%    /usr
tank/usr/home              218G    4.3G    213G     2%    /usr/home
tank/usr/local             216G    2.6G    213G     1%    /usr/local
tank/usr/ports             216G    2.4G    213G     1%    /usr/ports
tank/usr/ports/packages    215G    1.2G    213G     1%    /usr/ports/packages
tank/var                   213G     38M    213G     0%    /var
> cat /etc/fstab 
# Device  Mountpoint FStype Options  Dump Pass#
/dev/ad8s1b  none  swap sw  0 0
/dev/ad10s1b  none  swap sw  0 0
/dev/ad8s1a  /  ufs rw  1 1
/dev/acd0  /cdrom  cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0

The zpool labelled "tank" is actually mirrored across both hard drives:


> sudo zpool status
Password:
  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

 NAME         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 tank         ONLINE       0     0     0
   mirror     ONLINE       0     0     0
     ad8s1d   ONLINE       0     0     0
     ad10s1d  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

I haven't yet mirrored the boot partitions between the drives, but I do have both swap partitions enabled, which I suspect is actually too much swap.

The real difficulty was in getting my dual monitor configuration to work. Without a configuration file, Xorg started the monitors in mirrored mode. After I ran

Xorg -configure

the monitors came up with much better resolution, but were still mirrored. Thus began a rather tedious "let's configure X" session that involved a great deal of Google searches and too many false leads.

The final breakthrough came when I found a post on a message board (which I can't find now) and read through the manpage for the Radeon driver a few times. Here's what I did:

I started xfce4 with the automatically-created Xorg configuration.

I used xrandr to discover what monitors the driver saw:


> xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3200 x 1200, maximum 3200 x 1200
TV_7PIN_DIN disconnected
DVI-I_1/digital connected 1600x1200+0+0 367mm x 275mm
   1600x1200      60.0*+   59.9  
   1280x1024      75.0     59.9  
   1152x864       74.9  
   1024x768       75.1     60.0  
   800x600        75.0     60.3  
   640x480        75.0     60.0  
   720x400        70.1  
DVI-I_1/analog disconnected
DVI-I_2/digital connected 1600x1200+1600+0 367mm x 275mm
   1600x1200      60.0*+   59.9  
   1280x1024      75.0     59.9  
   1152x864       74.9  
   1024x768       75.1     60.0  
   800x600        75.0     60.3  
   640x480        75.0     60.0  
   720x400        70.1  
DVI-I_2/analog disconnected

I used xrandr to turn the monitors off and on, and to arrange them side-by-side to my liking, paying attention to the warnings it gave me.

I wrote the new configuration to the Xorg configuration file:


> cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Files"
 RgbPath      "/usr/local/share/X11/rgb"
 ModulePath   "/usr/local/lib/xorg/modules"
 FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
 FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
 FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/OTF"
 FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
 FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
 FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
 Load  "GLcore"
 Load  "extmod"
 Load  "record"
 Load  "glx"
 Load  "xtrap"
 Load  "dri"
 Load  "dbe"
 Load  "freetype"
 Load  "type1"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier  "Keyboard0"
 Driver      "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier  "Mouse0"
 Driver      "mouse"
 Option     "Protocol" "auto"
 Option     "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
 Option     "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
 Identifier   "leftMonitor"
 VendorName   "Dell"
 ModelName    "Dell 2007FP"
 Option       "DPMS" "on"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
 Identifier   "rightMonitor"
 VendorName   "Dell"
 ModelName    "Dell 2007FP"
 Option       "DPMS" "on"
 Option       "RightOf" "leftMonitor"
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier  "Card0"
 Driver      "radeonhd"
 VendorName  "ATI Technologies Inc"
 BoardName   "Unknown Board"
 BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
 Option      "Monitor-DVI-I_1/digital" "leftMonitor"
 Option      "Monitor-DVI-I_2/digital" "rightMonitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier "Screen0"
 Device     "Card0"
 Monitor    "leftMonitor"
 Monitor    "rightMonitor"
 DefaultDepth 24
 SubSection "Display"
  Viewport   0 0
  Depth     24
  Virtual  3200 1200
 EndSubSection
EndSection

Notice I don't have two video cards listed: I simply have both monitors listed as options on the one card. Notice also the names are "Monitor-DVI-I_1/digital" and "Monitor-DVI-I_2/digital" on the card. Apparently the driver probes them as "DVI-I_1/digital" and "DVI-I_2/digital", and Xorg prepends those strings with "Monitor-".

My new setup is working perfectly now.

The one problem I haven't totally resolved is the USB mouse and keyboard. The mouse wasn't working at all (a Logitech MX Laser wireless) until I plugged it into a USB port on the back of the box. Then there was contention with the keyboard, where one or the other would spontaneously stop working. I finally got them to work together, almost consistently, by plugging them both in the back, the keyboard to the right of the mouse. I'm not 100% sure this is fixed, but it's working fairly reliably now.

I did have to twiddle some things in /etc/rc.conf, and got some help from sysinstall on that too:


> sed -n -e '/^[^#]/p' /etc/rc.conf 
zfs_enable="YES"
hostname="********************"
ifconfig_em0="DHCP"
usbd_enable="YES"
sshd_enable="YES" 
fusefs_enable="YES" 
moused_port="/dev/ums0"
moused_type="auto"
moused_enable="YES"
ntpdate_flags="-b***************"
ntpdate_enable="YES"
nfs_client_enable="YES"

FreeBSD has come a long way since I started using it in the 4.0-RELEASE days. It's been a couiple years since I've messed with it, and it's not been disappointing to return. I'm looking forward to a long and productive relationship with this great operating system.

I'm not done yet: I have some Perl modules and some ASDF packages to install, as well as migrating PGP and ssh keys from my MacBook. But we're well on the way here.

And I'm having a blast.

Lying for Mother Earth

2009-02-07T14:59:00.012-05:00

For various reasons, I ride the bus and/or my bike to work most of the time. The idea is actually to phase out the bus and ride just my bike sometime this spring, but it's still a little cool and wet for that just now.

The university where I work is part of a county-wide campaign to reduce single-passenger cars on the roads (largely in the name of going green), and so we're all encouraged to log our trips to/from work with Pierce Trips Commute Calendar, apparently a county-run logger to track one's travels in non-single-driver commutes. This calendar makes some calculations of how much gas, money, and emissions you save over 'if you had driven alone.' There are incentives and prizes given out, both by the school and the county based on people's participation in the program. HR encourages the use of the calendar, which is fine by me.

I started using the calendar sometime in November.

You can actually see their calculations on a "Results" page, so every once in a while I take a look. I'm always struck by the patent dishonesty of their calculations. Here are my results as of today:

You've entered 32 trips since November 19, 2008
You eliminated 659.2 drive-alone miles.

You prevented the following from being emitted into the environment*:
535.78 pounds of carbon dioxide (contributes to global warming)
1.97 pounds of hydrocarbons (contributes to smog)
18 pounds of carbon monoxide (poisonous gas)

You saved 27.49 gallons of gasoline and $116.83 dollars*.

*Statistics based on average emissions for passenger cars and average gas price of $4.25.

So let's examine these numbers.

Not every trip has been correctly entered, as I occasionally forget to do so until after I have forgotten details. So I probably actually saved a good deal more. But that's not the calendar's fault.

The mileage is correct, according to Google Maps. Actually, my bike rides are longer than my bus and car rides (the direct route is not safe on a bike), but I log them as the same distance, because it's how many miles I saved, not how many I rode. So I've "saved" 659.2 miles.

They calculate I've saved $116.83 dollars (sic). Let's ignore the redundancy for now, and examine this number. It's "based on... average gas price of $4.25". Gas hasn't cost $4.25/gallon since long before November 2008. It hung around $1.70/gallon for several weeks, and is now somewhere less than $2.50/gallon. So they're basing the calculation on some fantasy gas price.

The "savings" in gas are based on $4.25/gal * 27.49 gal = $116.83. My calculator agrees with them, although as we've already seen, the actual average gas price is about half the number they calculate. But let's not be hasty: bus fare is $1.75/trip. So those 32 trips theoretically cost me 32 * $1.75 = $56.00. So when I subtract my bus fare, I actually "saved" only $60.83. Hmmm... not such a great savings. And if we correct for a more realistic gas price, it looks like I actually only came out ahead about $12.73.

I have a bus pass, which lists at $63 / month. That's cheaper than paying regular fare, but it still means I paid (theoritically) $189 for November--January. So I'm actually coming out $72.17 behind for those three months.

The $12.73 I saved (correcting for bus fare) aren't that impressive, given my commute time is about 25 minutes one-way in my car to work. But the bus trip takes me about 1:15 hours, so I take about 50 minutes longer one way to get to work. On 32 trips, that's 1600 minutes, or 27:40 hours. So I saved $12.73 in exchange for 27:40 hours. That means my time is valued at about $0.50/hr.

I notice the emissions calculation also ignores the emissions the city bus makes in taking me to work, which entails at least one stop and subsequent restart specifically for me each way. The bus burns a great deal more fuel than my car, and emits a great deal more nasty stuff too. I don't have any real numbers for that, but I suspect it's at least 10-25% lower than they glowingly report, once it's amortized across all the bus riders (I've frequently been one of three passengers on a bus).

So they're pretty much lying to me about my "achievement".

The situation's not quite so dim as they raw numbers indicate. I get a serious discount on a monthly bus pass as a perk of working on campus, so I pay much less than $1.75 fare. And my car's a Suburban, so I burn more gas than they think. And honestly, I've used pretty rough numbers here. Not all my "saving" rides are on the bus: some are on my bike, which has no fare. And neither the calendar nor I have amortized vehicle maintenance over those trips. Of course, we'd need to amortize bike maintenance costs too.

But the point is, they don't actually know that. This is not my employer's project, it's a county project: not everyone on it gets discounted bus passes, not everyone drives an enormous beast when they do drive. And the gas price "estimates" are blatantly dishonest.

I intend to continue to ride my bike and/or the bus to work for reasons of my own. Not because of global warming (anthropogenic global warming is a political myth), but for reasons like a general disapproval of wastefulness and the fact that every mile I bike is a little less Ox.

But I thought it interesting how disingenuous this particular [county] government project is.

Our tax dollars at work!

2009-02-05T22:30:00.002-05:00

I rode my bike to work today: it was cold and I'm still in pretty bad shape, so I succumbed to temptation and cut a corner, riding down 'A St.' in Tacoma.

Right at the corner of A St. and 171 Ave, there was a stopped school bus. The lights weren't flashing: it was pulled over on the side of the road. The house on the corner has a privacy fence, and the bus was between the street and the fence.

I was peddling slowly: there is a slight rise there, and "slight rise" was enough this morning, so I was geared down a little, and just sort of puffing up the hill.

I saw the bus driver get out of the bus, and I noticed a bunch of kids on the bus, probably a half dozen, maybe more. It's hard to tell with the tinted windows. They looked like they were six or seven years old.

As I rounded the corner, I looked back to see the bus driver standing at the rear tire, urinating. He appeared actually to be urinating on rear tire of the bus. In front of about a dozen primary schoolers.

Class, all class.

That's our tax dollars at work.

And people ask us why we home-school our kids.

Reading (reprise)

2009-01-29T19:22:00.004-05:00

Well, I decided to start reading Persuasion on the bus this morning, rather than Lilith or Phantastes.

I just have to be honest here: Persuasion is one of my favourite books. I look a bit of a girly-man sitting on the bus reading Austen, I'm sure. But I love her biting sarcasm when she describes Sir Walter and Elizabeth. Or her disdainful mentions of Mrs. Clay's sycophancy. It's word-craft at its finest.

So I am unapologetically reading a chick novel on the bus. And loving it immensely.

Hey there

2009-01-28T12:25:00.008-05:00

So I'm still here, I just haven't been posting or commenting a lot. I've been caught up in non-blogging pursuits for a while: I'll be back in a bit.

Since my last posting, by bus reading has included Descent into Hell by Charles Williams and The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks. Descent into Hell has long been among my favourite novels, written by one of my favourite authors. A few people have asked me to help them get started reading Charles Williams, I generally lend them the following titles (in this order):

All Hallow's Eve

War in Heaven

Many Dimensions

The Place of the Lion

and Descent into Hell

That's not a complete Chas. Williams anthology, but it gets the essentials across.

I always recommend Descent into Hell last, because I like it best, but I think it's also the most powerful and probably the easiest to misunderstand. I start with All Hallow's Eve because it's the most approachable, and is a great "hook" to get someone into Williams.

Descent into Hell is my one Williams book that's actually a little battered. I cherish each blemish, as they were put on by different people enjoying the book. Not abusing; enjoying. An abused book is a little sad, but a book that's taken a few hits during careful use is a testimony to its quality.

I might need to read Lilith and Phantastes next: it's been a long time.

Breaking out

2009-01-16T17:18:00.025-05:00

So like a lot of people, I've dabbled in Lisp programming. Well, "dabble" might not be the right word. I've put significant time and effort into learning both Common Lisp and Scheme; while I've not truly mastered either, I've achieved a certain level of competence.

But the problem with both languages is, how do you take a program written in a language designed to be interactive and package it to be generally useful? It's great that I can start a session with some Common Lisp implementation or another and write some cool code: but in the end, it's not something anyone else is likely to use.

I got around that in Scheme by using Gambit, which allows one to compile Scheme code into C that is then compiled to a native binary. That makes legitimate command-line applications in Scheme that can be feasibly useful to more than just one's self.

But I wanted to try another tack, and decided to try using Lisp as a web-application server. I've tried installing any number of Lisp libraries and frameworks before, with mixed success. After battling for what seemed eternities with ASDF, I'd always give up.

But in some downtime at work and my evenings this week, I finally wrote a simple proof-of-concept AJAX application. It's running on my MacBook Pro, and seems to be working just fine. So I thought it would be fun to try and explain how I got all the parts to work together, in case someone else out there is having the same issues that had almost made me resign Lisp to the "cool but useless" shelf.

It might also be a worthwhile exercise to document this, in case I ever have to start again from scratch. I did rely heavily on "Lisp for the Web" by Adam Petersen (April 2008) in addition to the documentation for each library, framework, and package.

First the application stack. I'm running my little AJAX application on the following frameworks and libraries:

Mac OS X 10.5

Postgresql 8.1

Clozure Common Lisp (used to be OpenMCL)

Hunchentoot webserver

qooxdoo

So my database is PostgreSQL, and I'm using Common Lisp to retrieve that information, package it, and send it to the web browser. qooxdoo handles the browser-end.

Inside Lisp, I'm running several libraries/frameworks/systems to make this chain work. The most prominent are:

Postmodern

CL-JSON

Hunchentoot

And of course I'm doing all this work in Emacs (Aquamacs) and SLIME.

I found one of my toughest problems was getting Lisp libraries and frameworks installed. I've had a lot of trouble with this over the last several years, and I think I finally figured out what the problem is. It's not that I have some oddball Lisp configuration (although OS X + CCL does have some problems), it's that I wasn't paying attention to dependencies. ASDF does some primitive dependency management, but I think I'd been putting a lot more confidence in it than I ought to have. And I found that Lisp libraries generally have poor documentation for their dependencies. So it took me a while to track all this down, but I got there eventually.

One note is, I latched onto CL-PPCRE quite some time ago, and it's been part of my standard Lisp configuration since. So it's possible it is actually a dependency for some of what follows, and I didn't realize it.

The first task is Postmodern. My install steps for Postmodern looked something like this:


(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :split-sequence)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :usocket)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :md5)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :closer-mop)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :ieee-floats)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :trivial-utf-8)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :bordeaux-threads)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :postmodern)

So Postmodern had 7 dependencies I had to apply. After I loaded those libraries (in that order), Postmodern started working.

I actually tried to use CLSQL, but was unable to get it to load due to some UFFI errors. I finally gave up and used Postmodern, which I think is a fine product. The main advantage of CLSQL is wider (not just PostgreSQL) support. If anyone has CLSQL running on OS X plus Clozure, I'd be interested to know how you got it working.

CL-JSON was a lot easier:


(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :cl-json)

No dependencies, it just installed lickety-split. Of course, its ease of install was offset by its non-existent documentation. I followed the manual's advice and read the unit tests to figure out how to use it.

After Postmodern and CL-JSON came Hunchentoot. Hunchentoot took some scrounging to get right, but I finally got it going.


(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :md5)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :cl-base64)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :rfc2388)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :cl-fad)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :chunga)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :url-rewrite)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :cl-who)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :babel)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :alexandria)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :trivial-features)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :cffi)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :cl+ssl)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :hunchentoot)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :hunchentoot-test)

13 dependencies! And I'm sure CL-PPCRE is another, but it didn't get listed, as it's in my standard configuration.

In the process, I learned some things about how to organize my Lisp files, and I'm going to share my discoveries with you. My Lisp code is on my MacBook under "/Applications/Lisp". This directory contains two or three Common Lisp implementations, two or three Scheme implementations, and various supporting files and directories. I gathered all the Lisp libraries and frameworks I've downloaded, unzipped them, and put them into a single directory under there called "lib". So that directory now looks something like this:


PeevTop:~ mark$ ls -lh /Applications/Lisp/ | colrm 1 46

 MzScheme v352
 PLT Scheme v4.1
 arc2
 asdf
 bigloo
 bigloo3.1a
 ccl
 clisp-2.41
 lib
 sbcl -> sbcl-1.0.19
 sbcl-1.0.19
 scmxlate
 slatex
 slime
 snow-generic
 snow-site
 tex2page

Notice there is a directory under there called "asdf". It contains a directory called "registry", which is full of symlinks to the ASD files of all the libraries under "lib":


PeevTop:~ mark$ ls -lh /Applications/Lisp/asdf/registry/ | colrm 1 45 

 alexandria-tests.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/alexandria/_darcs/pristine/alexandria-tests.asd
 alexandria.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/alexandria/_darcs/pristine/alexandria.asd
 asdf-install.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/asdf-install/asdf-install/asdf-install.asd
 babel-streams.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/babel_0.3.0/babel-streams.asd
 babel-tests.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/babel_0.3.0/babel-tests.asd
 babel.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/babel_0.3.0/babel.asd
 bordeaux-threads.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/bordeaux-threads/bordeaux-threads.asd
 cffi-examples.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cffi_0.10.3/cffi-examples.asd
 cffi-grovel.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cffi_0.10.3/cffi-grovel.asd
 cffi-tests.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cffi_0.10.3/cffi-tests.asd
 cffi-uffi-compat.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cffi_0.10.3/cffi-uffi-compat.asd
 cffi.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cffi_0.10.3/cffi.asd
 chunga.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/chunga-0.4.3/chunga.asd
 cl+ssl.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cl+ssl-2008-11-04/cl+ssl.asd
 cl-base64.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cl-base64-3.3.2/cl-base64.asd
 cl-fad.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cl-fad-0.6.2/cl-fad.asd
 cl-json.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cl-json/_darcs/pristine/cl-json.asd
 cl-postgres.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/postmodern-1.01/cl-postgres.asd
 cl-ppcre-test.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cl-ppcre-1.3.0/cl-ppcre-test.asd
 cl-ppcre.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cl-ppcre-1.3.0/cl-ppcre.asd
 cl-who.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/cl-who-0.11.1/cl-who.asd
 closer-mop.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/closer-mop_0.55/closer-mop.asd
 clsql-aodbc.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-aodbc.asd
 clsql-db2.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-db2.asd
 clsql-mysql.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-mysql.asd
 clsql-odbc.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-odbc.asd
 clsql-oracle.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-oracle.asd
 clsql-postgresql-socket.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-postgresql-socket.asd
 clsql-postgresql.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-postgresql.asd
 clsql-sqlite.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-sqlite.asd
 clsql-sqlite3.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-sqlite3.asd
 clsql-tests.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-tests.asd
 clsql-uffi.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql-uffi.asd
 clsql.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/clsql-4.0.3/clsql.asd
 dcm.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/elephant/_darcs/pristine/src/contrib/rread/dcm/dcm.asd
 flexi-streams.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/flexi-streams-1.0.5/flexi-streams.asd
 gzip-stream.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/gzip-stream/_darcs/pristine/gzip-stream.asd
 hunchentoot-test.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/hunchentoot-0.15.7/hunchentoot-test.asd
 hunchentoot.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/hunchentoot-0.15.7/hunchentoot.asd
 ieee-floats.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/ieee-floats/ieee-floats.asd
 lml-tests.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/lml-2.5.7/lml-tests.asd
 lml.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/lml-2.5.7/lml.asd
 md5.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/md5-1.8.5/md5.asd
 parenscript.asd -> /Applications/Lisp/lib/parenscript-20071104/parenscript.asd
...

So now all the ASDF packages I have on my system can be installed from "/Applications/Lisp/asdf/registry/".

Similarly, the packages I've written are in a registry under "~/Documents/Code/Lisp/asdf-registry". So my Lisp init file contains this:


#+:asdf (pushnew "/Applications/Lisp/asdf/registry/" 
   asdf:*central-registry* 
   :test #'equal)
#+:asdf (pushnew "/Users/mark/Documents/Code/Lisp/asdf-registry/" 
   asdf:*central-registry* 
   :test #'equal)

And now all the Lisp software that's either a dependency or tool I've gotten online or software I've written myself can be loaded into the Lisp environment without having to mess around and find it. This little piece of organization helped tremendously in getting this system working.

So once all this was installed, I was suddenly able to fire up Hunchentoot and serve out "pages". I used the default test pages for a while, then decided to get down to business.

The Best of Intentions

2009-01-11T20:58:00.003-05:00

We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past. (The Road to Serfdom, p. 13)

I've been working on Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (The University of Chicago Press, 1944). Hayek wrote it in the 40s, before the end of WWII. It's a book by an Austrian in the USA, an analysis of totalitarianism in a time when three totalitarian regimes more or less owned Europe.

The Road to Serfdom is too intricate a book to intelligently review on a blog. I wish I could, but it's simply too complex to tackle in this forum. It's partly political, partly economical: it's a book with a simple message, but it's not a simple book. The book's message is this: socialism is merely a return to feudalism. I'll limit this "review" to a few comments on the book and its thesis.

Hayek's arguments are largely illustrated by the three collectivist regimes in Europe in his time: Soviet Russia under Stalin, National Socialist Germany under Hitler, and Fascist Italy under Mussolini. But while they provide excellent illustrations for him, his argument is not really against them particularly. His argument is against collectivism (and particularly socialism) in principle. His argument is that socialism logically leads to the abuses of those regimes, that they were merely acting out the very same principles espoused by American and English "progressives" of his day. And if the proof of a theory lies in its ability to predict the future, Hayek's been vindicated in the 60 years since.

Hayek's analysis of Nazism and Fascism as what we would term "left-wing" phenomena is refreshing after countless inane pop-wisdom references to them as "extreme right-wing" philosophies. It's obvious that a political party that comes to power on the popular vote advocating government seizure of factories and businesses, offering socialized health care and retirement planning, and heavily taxing "unearned income" (to the tune of about 90% on capital gains and estate taxes) must be considered to have more in common with what we now call "the left" in North America than "the right." Aside from genocide (and I haven't personally met any genocidal conservatives), the Nazi political platform sounds like the NDP in Canada or the Democrats here in the USA. Mussolini's Fascism was also the " working man's party" in Italy.

It is important to note that what Hayek calls "liberalism" we call "conservativism" today. That is, he uses the term "liberal" in the sense of Jane Austen, not in the sense of Hilary Clinton. He refers to the laissez-faire capitalists as "liberal" in contrast to the socialistic "progressives".

Hayek makes the interesting claim that the only economic system that's ever been shown to increase personal freedom is capitalism, which brought an end to feudalism in Europe and led to the Magna Carta in England and constitutional democracies in America. Try as I might, I can't come up with a counter-example. His proverb that "socialism is slavery" is borne out in history, so far as I have been able to tell.

Hayek's argument might well be summarized as this: socialism is really just a return to feudlism. Feudalism was essentially a state of affairs where the Crown owned the land, and rule over it was delegated through levels of nobility that governed those living on it. Socialism offers fundamentally the same dynamic, where a totalitarian government owns (or at least controls exclusively) all property, and that control is delegated downwards in various levels of the government. The effect on the common individual is the same: nothing is his, and all decisions are made for him.

There are some differences: for example, feudalism was perpetuated by landed aristocracies, where socialist regimes generally perpetuate through political parties. But in actual practice, feudalism in mediaeval Europe might have been a significantly better system for the "common man" than the socialist regimes we've seen in the 20th Century. The mediaeval feudalism was restrained by a vague religiousness (despite flagrant hypocrisies) that at least theoretically believed in the sacred worth of the individual, where modern collectivist regimes have been virtually unrestrained. Mediaevals launched the Crusades, but they were child's play compared to the killing fields of Cambodia or the gulags of the Soviet Union. And however imperialistic the Crusades were, modern Socialists have perpetuated atrocities on their own people ("citizen" is really a euphemism) that the Mediaevals reserved for foreigners and "infidels."

Hayek's central argument is that the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union were not anomolies: totalitarianism is the expected outcome of a collectivist society. A socialist country cannot thrive without totalitarianism, and attempts to have the one without the other are unstable: either the country must abandon its collectivism, or it must abandon individual freedom.

Individual freedom must have the effect of upsetting attempts at central planning: they cannot reasonably coexist. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia were merely the logical outworkings of Socialist principles.

We must now examine the belief from which man who regard the advent of totalitarianism as inevitable derive consolation and which seriously weakens the resistance of many others who would oppose it with all their might if they fully apprehended its nature. It is the belief that the most repellent features of the totalitarian regimes are due to the historical accident that they were established by groups of blackguards and thugs. (p. 134)

The "thuggish" nature of these countries was not due to the historical accident that the thugs in them latched onto Socialism, but that Socialism cannot exist without significant coercive force from the government. A government where wealth is distributed equally is a government that treats its people unequally: since it is a plain fact that all are not capable of producing equally, any arrangement in which all have similar wealth is evidence that those most capable of producing are being unequally penalized for their abilities. A situation where the only possible employment is from a single source (whether the government or a monopoly) is by definition a state of slavery. Slavery is not unemployment, slavery is having no choice in one's vocation.

The worst of reading Hayek is the knowledge that warning was already too late in the 40s. There is really very little chance anything will change now. Here are just a few points to consider:

We condemn Hitler's eugenics, but every pregnant woman is encouraged to test for potential birth defects during pregnancy, so she can decide whether to abort. How is this not just eugenics?

It is possible to be self-employed, but government and society both view that arrangement with suspicion. And here in the USA, there are serious tax consequences for the self-employed. The system is built to restrict individual aspiration and effort, and to channel people into regulated employment.

And "privacy" is a joke in a society where I have to report to the government to the nearest dollar how much I earn yearly.

I don't see anything but acceleration towards totalitarianism in the future here. Our totalitarianism is "soft" compared to Hitler's, but it's no less real.

For all you northerners...

2009-01-11T16:29:00.003-05:00

a brief introduction to barbecue---the original Southern art form.

Dreaming

2008-12-26T18:40:00.003-05:00

So we took the kids across the border to my parents' house for Christmas, and we got to be part of the Canadian coast-to-coast white Christmas of 2008.

We drove up I-5 through Washington, and enjoyed the long snowy drive:

From Public Christmas 2008 Pics

The weather when we arrived didn't disappoint: there was a good deal more snow at home than at home, so to speak.

From Public Christmas 2008 Pics

The kids got some sledding in, which was a nice bonus

From Public Christmas 2008 Pics

And of course there was feasting and fun.

From Public Christmas 2008 Pics

All in all, a good use of time and money to drive up here.

Hope everyone else had as good a time as we.

Happy Christmas!

Smoky Snowy

2008-12-22T18:08:00.004-05:00

So it's been snowy here for a little over a week: there have been threats of melting, and in Tacoma it has already completely melted once, but here in Puyallup it's not really gone away. We've had several days of fresh powder, lots of accumulation.

The first snow was unexpected, so my grill was left uncovered in the snow. It's been snowing so much since, my grill's just been getting hammered.

I decided to light a fire in it to dry it out, and it started snowing no more than 5 minutes after I started...

From Grilling in the snow

In my zeal to dry out the grill, I put upwards of ten pounds of charcoal in there: probably closer to 15 (3/4 of a 20 lb. bag). It got hot. My eldest got some pictures of the grill when I opened it and combustion started for real:

From Grilling in the snow

The grill-mounted thermometer maxes out just around 500F (around 5 o'clock). It reads about 70F cooler than it is. I went a good sixth of a turn past that (about 7 o'clock), so it must have been in the 700F--800F range.

Ribeyes were on sale, so I cooked some steaks. They were seared on both sides in well under 5 minutes, and the bones were protruding an inch. I took them off, let them cool, and then put them back on uncovered out in the falling snow to finish them off.

They were really good, but a little overdone.

Of course I burned the seasoning off my cast-iron grates, and need to reseason them: I put some grease on there once the grill cooled a bit last night. That won't be enough, but it should stave off some rust for at least a couple weeks and get me through the holidays.

That was fun.

Weird Weather

2008-12-17T21:56:00.004-05:00

This morning I woke to a fresh blanket of snow. I crunch-crunch-crunched my way to the bus stop in the grey pre-dawn, watching the snow swirl down through the streetlights. When I got off the bus at work, there was very little snow on the ground although there was still a significant amount down-swirling.

We walked to lunch through the slush and puddles. The snow was coming down in almost-blizzardly splendour as we looked out the windows at lunch, but none was sticking to the wet ground.

I walked back through the rain to the bus stop after work. All traces of snow were gone, except damp tatters of dirty lace under the odd tree.

But when I got off the bus at home, I stepped into stiffening slush and some suspiciously thick puddles. There's still water dripping into the rain gutters, but the first few flakes fell through the streetlight about half-way up my street.

Now large flakes are swirling down again.

Weird.

Next book

2008-12-16T23:07:00.003-05:00

I checked out the next Bus Book from the library: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. I haven't even started it yet, but the Amazon reviews were intriguing, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Ames pointed out that my reading is fairly political recently: Ayn Rand, Dorothy Sayers, etc. I suppose that's true. But in my defence, I'm reading more about political theory than about politics per se. And I doubt this will last: next on the list is either The Great Evangelical Disaster by Schaeffer or Descent into Hell by Williams. I've read both several times, but I think it's time for another round of each.

A piece of Dorothy's mind

2008-12-15T22:38:00.006-05:00

Well, I finished Unpopular Opinions by Dorothy L Sayers on my ride home this evening. I highly recommend this book as an eclectic and extremely well-written view into a very interesting woman's mind.

Dorothy Sayers was a contemporary and friend to C. S. Lewis. She's celebrated as a feminist author, was a successful writer of detective novels, and was clearly seen as something of an interesting speaker: many of her "essays" are actually transcriptions of speeches she made.

She uses the word "obstreperous" in a sentence, and argues for plain English. I'm delighted!

The book is broken into three sections:

Theological

Political

Critical

The Critical section is actually interesting, in a strange way. It largely consists of applying "Higher Criticism" to the Sherlock Holmes stories. She works on timelines and chronologies; on determining Holmes' university, college, and major; and on establishing the details of Watson's personal life. I still can't decide if I enjoyed that section.

I definitely enjoyed Political the best. These were largely WWII-era speeches, and are certainly patriotic in extolling the virtues of the English. In fact, her essay "They Tried to be Good" is perhaps the best of the book. She argues that Hitler came to power not because England was incapable of stopping him, but because they'd fallen into political correctness (not that it was called by such an appalling euphemism back then) that kept them from calling a spade a spade: that made it a crime to be English and to have an empire. As someone who works in higher education, I found her analysis and subsequent morals and warnings apropos, almost frightening in their clarity and perspicuity.

In the political essays were also two or three feminist articles that would be hailed as misogynist these days. Funny how standards change. Like Ayn Rand, she warned against allowing the individual to be reduced to a representative of a group. Sadly, the collectivists have won, and individual dignity is now generally regarded with contempt. We have earned the consequences that shall certainly come on us...

But the most compelling essays were her Theological, which are clearly written from a conservative Anglican (perhaps even Tractarian) viewpoint. I shan't even attempt to sum them up: they are worth the time and effort of getting this book. They are humourous, thoughtful, and terribly important.

My favourites in this section are "Christian Morality" and "A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus".

I'd never read Sayers before, although I'm a huge fan Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis---names almost always mentioned with hers. It was a wonderful read: I really feel like I've discovered a great mind.

Snow

2008-12-14T11:38:00.005-05:00

Well, it's been snowing in Puyallup. Not snow like Gwennie or Trev gets, it's true. But snow, which makes the short days and dark afternoons so worth it.

From First Snow

It's still snowing.

My kids rang the doorbell with "a package for Ox." It was an ambush.

From First Snow

My grill's not used to having to deal with this brand of adverse weather:

From First Snow

It's nice to have some white stuff, even if it's of the particularly wet variety.

From First Snow

Finally

2008-12-13T22:44:00.001-05:00

From Stollen

The Fountainhead

2008-12-07T14:56:00.009-05:00

It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. ([Roark] p. 717)

(All quotes taken from The Fountainhead, Centennial Edition, The Penguin Group, New York, 2005.)

I'm singularly unqualified to review The Fountainhead, but since there have been some requests, I am posting this review. I have endeavoured not to read any reviews of it, so as not to skew my impressions. I did read part of the Afterword in this edition (by Leonard Peikoff), but decided against that before I finished it. The Afterword contains some of Rand's notes on the book, which are no doubt helpful.

If I weren't Christian, I'd end up either as an Objectivist or an Existentialist. Or maybe a serial killer. I suppose an Existentialist can be a serial killer too, but an Objectivist can't.

The Fountainhead is Rand's 1943 novel: it tracks five main characters from 1922 to 1936: Howard Roark, Peter Keating, Ellesworth Toohey, Gail Wynand, and Dominique Francon.

Howard Roark is the hero---Rand always has a hero---, a young architect. The book opens with Roark's expulsion from Stanton, a prestigious architecture school. That same day, Peter Keating (with whose mother Roark had been boarding for 3 years) graduates the top of the Stanton class.

Roark and Keating both move to New York: Keating takes a job with a prestigious architectural firm while Roark lands a job with a brilliant architect, Henry Cameron, who is seen as a has-been. Cameron's designs had taken New York by a storm, but he had fallen from popular favour. Roark seeks him out because he is the only architect Roark knows who designs new and different buildings.

Peter Keating rises in prominence in the firm Francon & Heyer largely through sycophancy and plotting. When he finds himself stuck in a design, he inevitably turns to Roark for help.

The most popular newspaper in New York is the Banner, owned by Gail Wynand. The Banner employs Ellesworth Toohey, a socialist who writes a daily column, and Dominique Francon, the daughter of Peter Keating's boss.

Dominique is arguably the central character in the novel. And if Roark is the hero, then Toohey is the villain.

Toohey is an idealist: a socialist who believes really only in equality. He has some other ideas, but they all stem from this one. Toohey spends the majority of the book influencing public opinion through his column in the Banner, his book Sermons in Stone, and various speeches. He also forms several clubs: one for writers, one for architects, and so on. He mentors young artists and gives them exposure through his writing. But he gravitates to the peculiar and new, not the brilliant. His desire for equality drives him to embrace the mediocre and ignore the great.

As the story develops, Keating rises to a partner in the firm, while Roark ends up unemployed. He leaves the city to work in a quarry, where he meets Dominique who's rusticating. They begin a sexual affair that lasts through the book.

Dominique's relationship with Roark occupies the middle of the book. She takes pleasure in hurting him (and he reciprocates: this is a game they play); and eventually marries Keating, and then Wynand, purportedly because she loves Roark. Her motives are mixed, and she seems not to understand them herself. But Roark permits---even encourages---her relationships with the other men, insisting she's not ready for him yet.

Dominique marries Peter, and spends that night with Roark. The biggest clue to Dominique's motivation is her speech to Roark that night: "I can't live a life torn between that which exists---and you." (p. 386). Dominique uses sex as a form of self-abasement, as a weapon against herself and the men she uses. The only man she seems to respect is Roark, which is apparently what motivates her to hurt him every way possible: condemning him in the press, marrying the men who hate him, even degrading herself.

And Roark waits for Dominique to find what she's looking for, knowing she'll eventually return to him when she does.

Wynand contracts Roark to build a house for Dominique, unaware of their history. Both Roark and Dominique find themselves loving Wynand (Roark in a platonic sense); and a strange relationship ensues where Roark and Dominique are thrown together repeatedly, but don't acknowledge their previous relationship; either to one another or to Wynand. Roark finds that he can respect Wynand: Wynand built his media empire alone. He is a rags-to-riches success story, and he understands the vanity and emptiness around him.

Eventually Roark designs a building anonymously for Keating, under the condition that it be built exactly as he designs. When it is not, he dynamites it. This culminates the stories of the characters into a climax of sharp contrasts. The building was to be a housing project for the poor, and Toohey leads the city in outrage against Roark as one who would attack them.

Roark is arrested and stands trial: Wynand attempts to defend Roark in his editorials, only to discover the paper he owns is actually controlled by Toohey. Toohey has unionized the paper, and Wynand finds out too late that the excellent pay and benefits he's been giving his employees do not shield him from a strike. Toohey leads a strike over the paper's editorial position.

Wynand eventually capitulates, at which point Dominique returns to Roark. She manufactures a scandal by filing a bogus police report from Roark's house first thing in the morning, wearing Roark's pyjamas and obviously having spent the previous night with him. This hurts Wynand (how could it not?), but also allows him a trouble-free divorce. When Wynand asks Dominique about the scandal, she finally reveals her long relationship with Roark to him.

Dominique had found what she's been looking for, and is ready to belong to Roark. Her willingness to publicly villify herself is the final test of her understanding Roark. And having come to that point, she's ready to marry him.

The Fountainhead is a brilliant book: it's well-written and kept my attention fairly well. But I didn't enjoy it. The middle third that follows Dominique's quest through self-destruction was depressing to the point of painful. I'd like to think it's just fiction, but I've known enough people to think the only fiction is that she recognizes what she's doing.

Adultery always turns my stomach. It's the most fundamental betrayal, and I always react emotionally. While Dominique technically avoids adultery until she publicly returns to Raork; the fact that she would marry one man specifically because she loves another is more than a little adulterous in spirit.

There is a lot of sex in The Fountainhead, but none is very graphic. It's not written to titilate or offend, it's written to prove a point. I didn't find it offensive as much as I found it sickening and depressing.

I probably won't read it again, but it was worth reading once.

Rand's characters like to monologue, and there are some interesting speeches in the book. Of course Howard Roark gives some speeches, but so do the others.

Rand's philosophy of selfishness (a bit of an over-simplification, but workable) is really developed in a few such speeches. I found the conversations between Wynand and Roark on Wynand's yacht to be very interesting:

[I]sn't that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison. ([Howard Roark] p. 633)

Roark delivers the negative too: not only that selfishness is good, but that altruism is evil:

I think Toohey understands that. That's what helps him spread his vicious nonsense. Just weakness and cowardice. It's so easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. ([Howard Roark] p. 634)

The negative aspect, that altruism is the root of great evil, is brought out both by Roark and (indirectly) Toohey.

Toohey's gloating speech to Keating is courageous for Rand in 1943, it would be even more so today. Toohey, the selfless socialist, sees the exceptional as problems to be eliminated as surely as poverty or disease, because the exceptional give lie to the idea of equality. His speech to Peter on the topic lasts for several pages, but this is perhaps the most telling excerpt:

Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept---and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You've destroyed architecture. Build up Lois Cook and you've destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you've destroyed the theatre. Glorify Lancelot Clokey and you've destroyed the press. Don't set out to raze all srhines---you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity---and the shrines are razed. ([Toohey] p.665)

Roark's defense in the courtroom is the crowning speech of the novel. It is here Rand makes her case most overtly: that altruism is morally equivalent to slavery. As society has taught and enforced the idea of selfelssness, of living for others, it has essentially put all under slavery. And this slavery is one of spirit, enforced by the approval of others. "We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement." ([Roark] p. 712)

Roark says the only escape is selfishness: acting out of a desire to gain one's own approval, ignoring the opinions and thoughts of others. One who is subject to their approval is their slave.

According to Roark, selfishness is the least harmful motivation, that selflessness has led to the most brutal regimes and the greatest abuses of people.

The 'common good' of a collective---a race, a class, a state---was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by the disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy on in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. They believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. ([Roark] p. 715)

It is worth remembering that Rand knew whereof she spoke: she was a refugee of the Soviet Union. She had seen first-hand the oppression meted by those motivated by a love of "the masses."

In the end, it is Rand's view of the importance and dignity of the individual that makes me like her. We live on the cusp of the world she predicted: a world where people are members of groups and very little more. Just look at the last U.S. election for an example. Barack Obama was elected President, and people still refuse to discuss his policies or his qualifications: he is an icon of an underpriviledged group, which is all the justification he needs for whatever he does. What he is as an individual and a man is irrelevant, only the status of the group he represents matters.

To the socialist mind, the oppressed are virtuous simply because they're oppressed: they are totally passive, living how and where they do with no responsibility for their own actions, behaviour, or condition. This is the fundamental flaw of all leftist thought: that people are merely machines, innocent and helpless victims of whatever their oppressors choose to give them.

The real evil of this system isn't what it proposes, but where it leads. A poor man is still a man, an underpriviledged woman is still a woman... as long as they aren't reduced to mere placeholders for abstract groups. Leftist thought removes their dignity, their humanity. It doesn't acknowledge they are people: they are merely cogs into the machine.

Interestingly, the only people afforded the dignity of their own will in leftist thought are the oppressors. As a straight white Christian male, I am acknowledged to be human and allowed to take responsibility. No "minority" is given that fundamental dignity.

As a Christian, I can't accept liberal thought for that one reason: no man or woman created in the image of God ought to be reduced to the level of an animal. God hasn't pronounced us to be mere machines, He deals with us as inidividuals. All human dignity is tied up in that one fact.

Given a choice, I'd rather live in the sort of world Rand dreamed of than the ones the collectivists have managed to create; but neither really satisfies what I believe we have been created for. Socialism is worse than Objectivism, but I'd rather not have to choose the lesser evil.

While Rand has such incredible perspicuity on the evils of collectivism, she draws wrong conclusions as an atheist. Where she sees the dignity of being an individual, she tries to push that past the dignity due to a man or woman and turn him or her into a god. Our dignity comes from our bearing God's image. If there is no God, then there really is no greatness in the indvidual. Rand proposes a Promethian theology, of man trying to become more by reaching higher. But without God, the term "higher" becomes problematic. What does it really mean? To accept Roark's answer of "progress" rather than Toohey's answer of "equality" is really arbitrary.

What Rand doesn't acknowledge is, the Creator has the right to demand our obedience, just as Roark had to the right to dynamite the Cortland House because he had created it. She is correct that doesn't give other men the right to enslave me; but I can never be absolutely egotistical in the sense she applauds, because I know I am a creature of the Creator.

And interestingly, this puts me at odds both with Rand's idealistic egotism and the collectivism she eschews. The one puts self as god, the other raises the fiction of "common good": both ignore the One who is God in fact. There is One who has right to command, to be obeyed, and to be feared.

Reading on the bus

2008-12-03T12:52:00.003-05:00

I've been riding the bus to work, which takes an hour and two busses each way. I suddenly realized after a week that I ought to spend my time on the bus productively and get some reading done. And then last week I decided it would be interesting to track what I'm reading as well.

So to start the record, last month's bus reading (in chronological order) was:

The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer

He Is There and He is Not Silent by Francis Schaeffer

Why We Act Like Canadians by Pierre Berton

Holes by Louis Sachar

The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff

I am now reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

I'm interested to see what I get read in a year, so I'll try and keep this updated.

And your point is...

2008-12-02T12:46:00.004-05:00

Someone of whom I actually think very highly told me a couple weeks ago, "No one takes Objectivism seriously".

The full irony of that didn't hit me until last night.

Toe in (Shameless Shilling)

2008-11-21T13:05:00.013-05:00

So after praising MagnaTune to the heavens the other day, I decided to look a little more closely at them. I'd already read most of their site, and had even looked into some reviews of their service; but I did a little more exploring.

They offer memberships: subscriptions to their site. There are two levels: Streaming, and Download. You don't have to be a member to purchase music from them, but members get a few interesting perks. Anyone can go to MagnaTune and listen to their entire catalogue streaming: but a membership buys you the same streams commercial-free. You also get site features like playlists. The download membership goes a little further: you can then download any album on the site, free of charge. There are three "rules" of membership:

they ask you don't give away more than a single album a month,

you must manually download the tunes: no crawlers or spiders, not LWP or wget, and

membership is not shareable/transferrable;

Memberships used to have a minimum 3-month term, but now they offer them for as little as one month. Like everything at MagnaTune, you set the price: a streaming membership starts at $5/month, downloads at $10/month; but you may pay more.

I've been intrigued by this idea, so when the minimum term dropped to a month, I decided to try it out. I purchased a month's download membership last night. So for one month, I am free to stream or download MagnaTune's entire catalog, if I so choose. And it cost me about what I'd expect to pay for a CD from Amazon or Borders (I didn't cheap out and pay the $10 minimum).

What I download is DRM-free, it's mine to keep, whether I maintain my membership or not. And I'm perfectly free to burn it to disk, put it on my iPod, or whatever. I can even give an album away to a friend every month. And I can download the music in WAV files: they're CD-quality copies.

And best of all, it's 100% legal. MagnaTune is essentially a record label, rather than a reseller: they have full rights to distribute their music.

The only real downside is, the music is necessarily all indie. If you like indie music, that's no problem. If you like to purchase what's on the radio, it might be a difficult fit. Although interestingly, some of MagnaTune's artists are now showing up for purchase at iTunes. So more mainstream people are discovering them.

So how do I like it? I found about a dozen albums right away that I listed as favourites and have been listening to as streams. My two favourites of the bunch I downloaded as WAV files, and will burn to CD this weekend: Acoustic Abstracts and Horizons, both by guitar duet Heavy Mellow, from Tennessee. (You can, of course, go and listen to both those albums in their entirety, with or without paying for a membership. Why are you still here? Go listen!) Very relaxed and relaxing guitar music. I've also got some very good cello and viola music in my playlist, as well as some more folksy stuff.

I haven't had to look too hard to find good stuff there, and I've already gotten my money's worth in about 16 hours.

Will I renew at the end of my month-long experiment? I don't know. I'll have to see how the month goes. But based on my two purchases at MagnaTune (Goode Christemas Musicke and this membership), I'm really rather impressed.

If they can stay alive (they've been going for 5+ years already), I anticipate I may well turn into a very loyal customer.

It's not February

2008-11-18T10:16:00.012-05:00

I generally buy two Christmas CDs a year. Yeah, that's a lot of Christmas music, but I like Christmas music. I also receive a fair number of Christmas CDs as gifts, because people know I like Christmas music.

I've occasionally purchased more than just two CDs, and frankly the convenience of online purchasing a la iTunes hasn't been a good thing in that respect.

Last year's purchases were A Traditional Christmas Carol Collection from The Sixteen and Christmas Carols from York Minster. The year before I purchased Christmas With The Academy and Christmas Songs by Diana Krall, both on iTunes.

This year's purchases are in, and I wanted to share them. First was The Best Carols in the World...Ever!. The title is cheesey, but the content is great. It's a collection of relatively rare (from an American perspective) carols done by a variety of reputable performers: King's College Choir and Medieval Baebes, for example. There are 52 carols in two CDs, which is a decent selection. It was definitely a deal.

The second was Goode Christemas Musicke.

This one is worthy of comment. Goode Christemas Musicke is almost the same concert as Dancing Day: the Dancing Day arrangement by John Rutter. Well, they're not the same: both start with Rutter's Dancing Day, but they follow them with different carols; but there is significant overlap. I think this album is performed slightly better, but the real improvement is in the recording. Where the Dancing Day album had some significant noise issues, this newer recording is impeccably clean.

But perhaps the most interesting thing is that the album is distributed through MagnaTune. MagnaTune is an online music distributor that handles independent musicians. They offer DRM-free recordings, and pay the artists directly. Every track is offered in full as a stream on their website, so you can listen to the entire CD before you buy it, and they let you re-download music you've purchased.

In short, MagnaTune is like an idealistic iTunes.

Perhaps most interestingly, MagnaTune asks you to give away three copies of each CD.

So I purchased Goode Christemas Musicke at MagnaTune and downloaded it in WAV format, CD-quality audio. Then I downloaded the album art and printed out a cover on photo paper. I burned a CD with the WAV files, then converted them to MP3 in iTunes and attached the album art. And now I have both DRM-free MP3 tracks from MagnaTunes and a full-quality CD copy.

All in all, an excellent deal.

Two Things

2008-11-14T22:41:00.011-05:00

So I've been neglecting this blog recently: that's more laziness than anything else. But today I wanted to break the silence to mention two things.

First, there is an interesting editorial by Paul St. Pierre, "A voice from the grave's edge", apparently published in The Vancouver Sun. It's a most accurate and succinct write-up of the direction North American culture has taken in my lifetime. Whether one considers the changes in the USA since 9/11 or the Maoist speech controls in Canada, it's obvious to anyone who thinks that the world is changing, and not for the better. Ayn Rand seems less like a novelist and more like a prescient every day.

St. Pierre writes:

Our Canada is now very close to a condition in which everything that is not compulsory is forbidden. We have become prisoners of the state. Like modern jail prisoners, all our needs for balanced diet, climate-controlled shelter, approved and tested medication, mental health counselling, higher education, suitable entertainment, grief counselling and consensual safe sex are available free. The inmate lacks only freedom itself.

This one is well worth the read.

Second, I've been greatly enjoying West Coast beer, and really have to mention the seasonal offering from Alaskan Brewing Company. I discovered Alaskan's beers when I moved out here, and I've become a real fan. Alaskan Amber Ale is not the best beer I've ever had: but it's very, very good. And at around $1 per bottle at Costco (about the same on sale in Safeway or Fred Meyer), it's a real winner. Listen, I take beer seriously, and I've been drinking this stuff almost exclusively for the last month. Smithwick's and Guinness are better, but not much. This is really good stuff, and at a price point where I can't justify not buying it.

And this last summer, I enjoyed several bottles of the incredible Alaskan Summer Ale. It's nice to have a "summer ale" that's light in colour rather than taste.

But today I bought a 12-pack of Alaskan Winter Ale, and it's amazing. Check out the colour of this nectar:

From Alaskan Winter Ale

This is an insanely good beer. This is the sort of brew the ancient Teutons dreamed they'd drink in the halls of their pagan gods after dying in gloriously in battle. If you like beer and you have access to Alaskan ales, you need to get some of this.

Next to Sarah Palin, this is best thing to come out of Alaska.

Happy Election Day!

2008-11-05T01:34:00.002-05:00

"VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country."
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Over the top... er, front

2008-10-27T14:19:00.003-05:00

So I took my first spill on my bike riding into work this morning.

I was right at the end of my 12 mile ride: I had gotten all the way to campus, and was crossing the street. I got to the curb and tried to pop my front tire onto it... and missed. I don't know whether I was tired from the ride, or whether I just timed it badly, but I went right over the handlebars.

So I hit the concrete on my elbow and rolled, then my bike landed atop me. Oof.

My elbow and my ego took the brunt of the damage: I'm having trouble bending my left arm right now, but nothing's broken (I think)---it's just a little stiff. My helmet's a little dinged up, but I don't recall hitting my head... I'm hoping that's not a symptom.

I had to pick up my water bottle and bike light, and I decided to walk the rest of the way... all 100m or so to this building.

Mother Earth better be @#$%# grateful.

Mt. Rainier

2008-10-26T16:12:00.011-05:00

If you haven't spent time in this area, you might have trouble understanding the extent to which Mt. Rainier dominates the landscape. It doesn't dominate the view so much as it defines it. Ames took this picture a couple miles from the house:

From Mt. Rainier

You can see Rainier from almost anywhere here, except the house where we live: we have some tall trees right at the east end of our yard.

Rainier is about 30 or 50 miles from our house, so we decided to head on out and take a look. We didn't actually anticipate getting there, but we figured we'd head out to explore in that direction and take a look around.

There are some interesting things between us and Rainier: Alder Dam was impressive

From Mt. Rainier

We wound through several small towns and finally got to Mt. Rainier National Forest. A day pass is $15, a 12-month pass is $30. So we bought a year pass.

We never actually got to Rainier, which wasn't really a surprise. But we did manage to go for a walk in the foothills. The landscape definitely reminds me of home:

From Mt. Rainier

The "lonely road at the base of the hill" look sure takes me back to BC.

There are a lot of mushrooms on the west coast, and I ended up tagging some in photos:

From Mt. Rainier

It was terribly refreshing to walk in the cold damp air. That's a winter-on-the-Pacific-coast thing. We might not get a lot of snow, but the winter damp cuts like a knife. I've been out in the cold (I mean real cold, not just freezing temperatures), and it has its challenges; but there is a unique coldness to the damp air on the coast. To be sure I've never wintered in Cambridge Bay, but you get the point. Most places get dry in the winter: our winter humidity presents a unique cold.

From Mt. Rainier

Anyhow, we spent some time walking on a path that followed a creek up a foothill

From Mt. Rainier

The creekbed itself is bright orange, I assume that's clay washing down from deposits upstream, but I don't know for sure.

From Mt. Rainier

There were some really interesting branches along the path: trees apparently had some unique challenges in that forest:

From Mt. Rainier

We even found a hollow tree.

It wasn't an epic journey or anything, but it was certainly a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

From Mt. Rainier

Clumsy Ox

Updates... mainly on beer

Kvasir

Pocket knives

I know he can get the job...

2011 Beers in Review

Back to it

Back to real life

Home-brewin'

Homeward Bound

Pizza and Mead

Sundance First Paddle

The "new" canoe

Not to get all political

Weekend cooking

Admiration

First Tasting

Unexpected arrival

Smoky Friday

Bottling

Frying... and beer

True craftsman

I only wanted a cheesbuhguh!

In every pot

Wow

Every minute

Nice and cozy

Grits ain't groceries

Tail Recursion

Poor Navigation

Grill pizza stone

Happy Anniversary to us

NC Bound

The Right Recipe

Ribs!

ðē; ðə

Redneck Pizza Oven

The right pan

Hairy ride

Happy New Year

Willy-Sono

That's Amore! (Reprise)

Lasagna

Great steak

A piece of pie

Smoky Chook

That's Amore!

A grip on life

The First of September

Well, I'm back

Pie!

Idiots to the left, morons to the right...

Sheople

Plural?

Busy, busy

End of March Tallies

Maiden Voyage

New Bike

Bike Commuting

BibTeX convertor

emacs and vi

New Workstation

Lying for Mother Earth

Our tax dollars at work!

Reading (reprise)

Hey there

Breaking out

The Best of Intentions

For all you northerners...

Dreaming

Smoky Snowy

Weird Weather

Next book

A piece of Dorothy's mind

Snow

Finally

More reading

The Fountainhead

Reading on the bus

And your point is...