Colette said something smart, as is her general inclination.
Paraphrased it went about as follows:
“If you want a tattoo, come up with the exact design. Then, once it’s settled wait a year. If you change it at all, reset the clock. If you still want it by then, get it.”
So I’ve got an idea and I really like it. Need to do the design, a relatively simple font.
A long time ago I had really amazing money problems. I made and spent money so fast that my wallet was actually hot from the friction. I tried all kinds of things; “no book month”, leave the card home and take cash, leave the cash home and take the card, only buy what was written on the list, category allowances.
Hogwash. None of it helped. I was always trying to game myself. $50/week on entertainment almost instantly became “well, $100 this week and I’ll go in for half on the next two”, a deal which was promptly forgotten the next week.
But one thing DID help, worked with my bizarre ability to circumvent my own rules, this one simple trick. (snort)
Write it down.
That’s it. Write it down. With money I had a major category, a minor category (i.e. food:lunch or food:groceries, car:gas, car:repair, etc.) a plain description and an amount. After a little while I got fancy and had an account field. But that’s all craziness and didn’t contribute to the success.
The important part was to just have a list of every penny I spent.
It wasn’t long at all before I watched my spending drop like a stone.
The strangest thing of it is that it had nothing to do with the original reason I started keeping track. I was just keeping track to keep track. But that wonderful aspect of human psychology started working with me for a change. Because I was forced to write everything down, I had to examine what it was that I was spending money on. Frequently I’d reach for an instant gratification purchase, usually a candy bar, pack of gum or something similar; and I’d have a positively audible thought “I really don’t want to add that to the list.”
Because I didn’t want the thing to be in the final accounting, I went without it.
There was nothing for me to game or get around because it wasn’t an overt attempt to strong arm myself into spending less money.
Mid to late last year I was thinking about all that and decided to try an experiment. So for the last… oh it looks like 3 months or so, I’ve had a nightly ritual. Every night before bed, the last thing I do is get on the scale. I write a line on a 3×5 card (1 card per week) with the date and my weight. New cards start on Monday night (I have no idea why, probably “start of the work week.”) and I don’t do anything with them other than just toss them in a box on Sunday night after I’ve filled out the last line for the week.
And, as before, I’ve made no other overt adjustment.
25 pounds. I weigh less than I’ve weighed in 20 years.
I’ve got lots more I’d like to go, probably 25-30 more. But I’m bloody tickled at this point.
So I’ve built the outer box for the passive solar thing. I’ll put pictures someplace, gotta take ‘em first.
I learned a few things.
Power tools, while fun, are more destructive than constructive. I suppose if I had a well tuned table saw and such I might not feel that way. But once you commit to the power tool, you’re pretty much stuck. If a cut is going awry then sure, you can abort it in the middle. But there’s really not much reason. By the time you notice there’s a problem, it’s far too late to do anything about it.
Yet another area in which pulling the trigger is the easy part.
All the work is in the setup.
I feel obliged to start anything like this out with the following:
I am not an enviro-weenie. I am not one of those low grade morons who believes in global warming. I’m not a member of greenpeace, a whalesaver, an oil hater or any of those liberal jackasses who believe that civilization is bad and we’d all be better off if we’d never invented the wheel.
However! Wasting is stupid. Oil is expensive, and I am insane, motivated and poor(ish).
When you’re standing in the cold and you put your hand in the sun, it’s warmer and the effect is dramatic.
If you go over to youtube and search for “passive solar” you’ll get at least dozens of videos of people who’ve built black boxes, about 3 by 4 feet, full of black painted soda cans, a hole on the bottom, a hole on the top and a piece of plastic in front. Usually there’s a thermometer inside that reads something insane like “190 degrees.”
I’ve probably watched ten of these build videos and I’m convinced of a couple things:
They’re brain dead easy to make.
They can be improved upon.
These guys are remarkably inefficient in their collection and use of sunlight. Now, I don’t know a damn thing about it. But I do know there’s a better way. I just have to find it.
I’m not going to keep posting every incremental step I make. I figure I’ll probably waste a lot of materials trying to get it right. But I have figured out how to make it such that I can try out several ideas within the same framework and, once I work out the particulars, I will definitely share them here.
Hell, I may even start making my own youtube videos. (There’s a special kind of horror.)
Anyway stay tuned.
I wrote that previous post while listening to this:
So, my buddy’s got a brace of hounds and his wife has a fucking rat thing. The less said about the fucking rat thing the better.
The real dogs aren’t so much hounds as, well, dogs. A German Shepard named Princess and a Golden Lab named Lady.
The astute among you will discern from this that he also has two young daughters.
Anyway they’re my two favorite creatures currently walking the earth. And they, like a preponderance of domesticated beasts and small children seem to be quite taken with yours truly.
Never being one to let well enough alone I’ve bought a 2 pound bag of beggin strips which I keep in my passenger seat so I have treats when I head over. (They liked me before the yumminess.)
I put a few in my jacket pocket before I get out of the car. They each get one and Princess gets the third a couple minutes later because she’s my favorite. The fucking rat thing isn’t a dog. It doesn’t get treats. It’s treat is that I don’t kick it.
Anyway I tend to have one or two of these things in a jacket pocket as a result.
I have an awful lot of pockets.
So I was cleaning out my jacket pockets as I got home from the cigar lounge tonight, looking for my cell phone, which I haven’t seen since before I left to go there, and sitting on my desk next to me is a beggin strip.
It looks like fake bacon. Tofu bacon. Turkey bacon. It looks ALmost like bacon.
In fact, it looks JUST enough like bacon that it’s triggering my bacon center.
And it’s sitting there.
On my desk.
Staring.
At me.
Now… I’m not gonna.
But it calls.
It calls.
I’ve known about this for a dog’s age. But I’ve always assumed that everybody else knew too. Just in case, here are two awesome “German guy doesn’t understand” videos.
I mentioned at some point, probably towards the beginning of last week, that I’m working at coming to sourdough from “the other direction.”
I’ve been working with a “no knead” technique of keeping dough retarding in the fridge, and letting the initial rise in the oven take responsibility for it’s final rising action. It’s been working very well in general.
But I’m really unhappy with the crumb. The crust is delightful. The crumb is just too tight for my liking. It’s fine. Nothing normal people would complain about. But I need more.
So I’ve been experimenting a little bit with final rising, oven temperature and such and I’m just not getting far. A couple things seem to be working a little, but not enough that I can say what they are.
However.
The flavor of the bread I’m coming out with is improving markedly with every single loaf. I’m really quite surprised.
The general procedure that leads to this almost looks accidental, but that it’s exactly what I’m driving for.
Take a double batch. Mix it (just mix it. Don’t worry about kneading it.) Let it rise in a bowl for a while and then put it in the fridge. Wait a couple/few days. The longer the better up to at least a week, though I assume you could get away with more.
Take the bowl out, and split the dough in half. Bake half of it as described elsewhere.
The other half goes in a mixing bowl in which you put another single-batch of ingredients, thereby replenishing the dough.
Then repeat the same way you started. (let it rise, back in fridge, etc.)
That all is well documented. No rocket surgery there.
So then what’s all this crap about sourdough?
A sourdough bread is a bread made with “naturally occurring” rather than commercial yeast. If you mix flour and water together and let it sit, it will start getting bubbles after a couple days. Split it and replenish it every day and soon you’ll have sourdough starter. Where’d the yeast come from? Ah… therein lies the magic.
Then you use a portion of that starter in your bread recipe, and don’t add any yeast.
I’ve never really been able to make that work. The proportions and procedures have always been just a tad elusive. I wondered to myself, I wondered… “Self? What if you just made the whole damn thing sourdough from the get go?” I just couldn’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work.
So in addition to the procedure I described above, I’ve been making one additional modification.
With every iteration I’ve dropped the yeast I’ve added by one gram. So a 60-3-3 with 420g flour ends up with 13 grams of yeast. I’m now down to 9.
I believe that what this is doing is transitioning to naturally occurring yeast, rather than having the dough start over from scratch every time. Though it is possible that once I started with commercial yeast, that it’s simply the same strain from thereon out. I don’t know that much about the biology of yeast.
But what is undoubtedly happening is the flavor of this dough is maturing and strengthening. It doesn’t taste like a sourdough by a long shot and indeed I think it will be a couple weeks beyond the point where I’ve completed weaning it off of commercial yeast before it does. But there’s a flavor there that just can’t be achieved in a single baking cycle.
It’s really quite something.
Now I just have to figure out how to get an open crumb. I’m thinking I’ve got some more playing around to do with the oven temperature, baking surfaces, hydration levels and protein content of the flour I’m using. I’m very happy with everything else about my bread so far.
epic.
I’m taking all advice on gotchas and the dark occult corners of C++ as they show up in interview tech outs.
My C++ skills are solid. I’m very confident. But I also have a history of choking on tech outs, then spending days screaming at brick walls because “I knew that.”
I’m working on a nice happy pure c++ threaded and networked app to keep my chops up. Not much of a challenge. But I’m not sure it’s going to be enough.
So what’s the nastiest, gnarliest C++ question you’ve given or received in a tech out? Come on. Let’s make a list of these.
Ms Powell inspired me, as is her largely unwitting wont, during a brief conversation we had on Twitter yesterday to put to pen a couple threaded topics that have been on my mind.
I lend my hand every year to preparations for a Christmas Eve party. We pull out the stops and, for a crowd upwards of twenty adults (and attending cherubim) we pump out dish after dish after dish until people are begging us to stop; tearing up as they stuff more elegance into their gaping maws. Among the attendees for the last couple years is a romantic interest of an extended family member. He’s six foot one, thin (gaunt really), wears Elvis Costello glasses, pops his collar, and is completely translucent.
He may be the single dullest person I’ve ever been in a room with. But he may be the most interesting. Nobody knows. Nobody knows because despite the seriousness with which every one of the adult males in attendance has taken it upon themselves to try and engage this fellow in conversation, we have all failed utterly.
Nobody knows what he does for a living, what he’s interested in, what he listens to or reads, if he CAN read or where he lives. He evades polite conversation like a mime.
We started out being interested. Anyone who shows up is met with a roudy hurrah, a smile and a raised glass as they walk in the door. People contribute color by their presence, so more the merrier. But now I fear we’ve given up on this fellow. He spends hours keeping the children company, refusing all invitations to come sit with the guys for a cigar, scotch, egg nog, beer, ginger ale or fucking wine cooler. It is now obviously active disinterest.
I now regard this fellow with nearly open disdain.
I was in a conversation with one of my best friends. It was late in the evening, sitting on the porch with a fire going, deep in our cups.
We were talking about dating; more specifically about what Eddie Murphy refers to as “salad eating bitches.” You know them (even if you haven’t dated them.) People who are demure to a fault.
These are those people, like our buddy above, with whom you can have a conversation and learn nothing about them.
And I said “I don’t get it. You have to be excited about your life.” And I watched it hit him in the head like the proverbial diamond bullet, not doing more than giving voice to something that had been kicking around in his head, to be sure. But doing no less than that either.
Now, it’s one thing to be shy; to be pathologically terrified of what someone might think if you accidentally say the wrong thing. It’s sad to be shy and I spent years that way. I get it. But at some point even the shy become comfortable enough to talk. So it’s that point where all this comes in to play.
People. You have to be excited about your life. I, for one, have ZERO time in my life for people who aren’t taking a big bite out of this world and coming away with something they’re interested in. Before I get a lot of “well, not everybody is like you” (and I should bloody well hope not. This world would be in flames.) know that I don’t mean you have to be massively successful or great at what you or exceptionally worldly. But be who you are and embrace your identity.
The second internet date I ever went on was with this fabulous woman whose name I probably forgot 10 years ago. We only went out once, but I’ll never forget the evening as long as I live (the irony of “I’ll never forget whatsername” is not lost on me.) We met at Cowgirl’s, drank ourselves stupid and could. not. shut. up. We were wide-eyed and thrilled about everything that came up. We talked buddhism, astronomy, computers, all kinds of madness. It was a wonderful time.
I suppose some people are just dull. I also don’t mean “everybody’s a unique beautiful snowflake.” Well, I suppose it is true. But if you haven’t excavated that wonder within yourself then you’re just another ham sandwich with extra mayo and a lot of work to do in the mirror.
Ya know, you don’t have to be happy. But you have to take what is yours and embrace it. You’ve got to decide and discover who you are in this world, even if it’s only in your own head, and own it.
I fear people are being taught all too well, that they should be humiliated at their achievements rather than humble about their place in the world.
This brings us tangentally back to the twitter conversation.
She had just said she was a great photographer and baker, which I applauded and added:
We’ve all got plenty of stuff to be humble about. But we fucking rock where we fucking rock. False modesty is for cowards.
Never let it be said by someone that they “don’t remember much” about you.
Back when I though a gaming blog was a good idea, I posted this. It’s just… well, watch.
If you’ve been following along my bread baking posts you’ll be interested to see this.
Below is a picture of two (well, one and a half *urp*) loaves of bread. I want you to look at them for a bit.
So what do we have here? The one on the right is a notably dark, relatively flat loaf, without much to say in the way of character. You can see the scoring expansion going across it. Generally the crust is pretty, but nothing to write home about. The rise is low and it’s not particularly interesting as a whole.
Now, what about the other one? It’s nearly exploded out of it’s scoring (which was done in a cross at the top and a few more short scores around the side as well) like something from Aliens. In fact it looks an awful lot like an Irish Soda Bread. There’s a lot of interesting variation in color and texture. It’s light and rose high.
So… why bother showing this odd couple together?
Because my chillins, they are the exact same loaf of bread. There’s nothing in them but flour, water, yeast and salt (65-3-3 for those paying attention.) The proportions are precisely equal, they were both baked in a 450 degree oven for about 45 minutes with a roasting pan containing 6-7 cups of water, on a non-stick cookie sheet.
Well that’s all well and good. But what about the inside?
So WHAT THE CRAP!?!
This is the difference a subtle tweak in baking process can make.
Both of these loaves are from a rotating batch of retarding dough in the “artisan bread in 5 minutes a day” theme (though with a tweaked procedure.)
The crappy looking (but perfectly fine eating, aside from being awfully dense) loaf I let come all the way up to room temperature before baking. The one on the left (the fluffy goodness) I did not.
In fact the rough (correct) procedure (once you have dough in the fridge and all) is:
The difference. The ONLY difference between those two loaves of bread is this:
Step 4 I let go for 40 minutes, and in a traditional “bread rising warmth” environment (read: 85-90 degrees.)
That’s how sensitive this can be.
So why did that happen?
Here’s my hypothesis: 65-3-3 is a little wetter than the 60-3-3 I’m usually aiming for. This means it’s tough to get it to rise “up” and instead it just sorta spills out. Combine that with the fact that the dough has a dry ’skin’ on the outside, resisting it’s impulse to expand (with this method, expansion from yeast activity is mostly done in the oven.) My guess is that those few extra minutes allowed it to soften as it got up to room temperature and it rose by spreading (since it couldn’t lift.) And, by the time it go to the oven, it just didn’t have enough rise left in it.
I could be wrong. But that all makes sense to me. I keep repeatably tight watch on my procedure and ingredients.
This has been a perfect object lesson for me in the importance of keeping track of everything you do. If I didn’t remember (read: if I hadn’t written down) that I had let Sunday’s loaf go the extra time (it was an intentional experiment) I’d have NO idea what happened and would be frustrated beyond all reason.
Success doesn’t mean shit if it’s accidental.
But making what might be the best unenriched loaf of bread I’ve ever produced? Yeah. I busted my ass for that.
Delicious.
This, even fewer…
I suppose I should have some recapitulative blurt, seeing as how time has ticked over and all. But I’m not really sure where to take it. The last month has seen me thinking a lot about the past, as we look to our successes to validate our present.
You can learn a tremendous amount about people by watching where they get their stories about themselves from. How far back do they go before they are lit up about their own achievements? Where are their glory days?
Fortunately different aspects of my life lead me to go varying distances in to the past.
As for work, well aside from the romance of having worked at IBM (which is 75% geek romance and 25% regret that I didn’t pursue what seemed to be negotiations for a full time position), I really only look back as far as 5 weeks to my work at JP. It was insane in that I wanted to do so much more there. I was obscenely underutilized, but the project was a waning “sunsetted” system so there was really nowhere to go.
Regarding “my personal life” (ahem), well… the less said about that the better. Two starchy dinner dates in almost twice as many years. And THAT’S gotta change.
Most of my friends up here are married with the better part of a decade on me. There’s just no cross-pollination of social circles going on.
But I’ve got to figure out where to go out here and what to do. It’s not like I can plunk my ass down in a bar and make small talk. I DRINK when I’m sitting at a bar and there’s no subway that leads a couple blocks from my front door.
I did join a bunch of “singles stuck in bumblefuck” meetup groups and watched their emails go for a while before an ill-fated movie trip (which I may or may not have blogged six months ago or so. If not, I’ll get to it. It was a scream.) So finally I got sick of watching this stuff go by and signed up to go on a “beginners hike” next week.
This is not to say that I’m a beginner. I spent a lot of time and energy trudging around the woods a while ago. But I don’t have any reasonable hiking gear, boots or such. So if I’m going to go in long underwear and jeans, I’m gonna have to settle for something easy.
So there’s that.
But, BUT! From an artistic perspective? I’ve now got a rudimentary machine shop and woodworking shop. I’ve been baking like a fiend and spending an awful lot of my evenings and weekends covering myself in sawdust.
Once more gifts are made I’ll be posting pictures and details here and over on the respective sites I’ve joined for those crafts (Lumberjocks and bbs.homeshopmachinist.net). I’m teaching myself slowly but surely and I’m making some truly godawful messes.
It never bothers me much though, being wrong on the way to learning something new. Weeks of failed bread baking were just signposts on the way to remembering how to do it. The buckets of sawdust I have and the really crappy jointing is teaching me more than “getting it right the first time” possibly could.
So in short?
Job search is a righteous bitch.
It’s WAY too cold to be sleeping alone.
But I’m making some really neat shit and it’s only going to get better.
Happy 2012 peeps o/
Here’s what came out of the oven today. It was a simple 65-3-3, half of a double batch mixed yesterday and retarded in the fridge: 
As a part of my experimentation what I’ve decided to do is keep a double-batch in the fridge at all times. Then, when I take half out to bake, I mix in another single-batch to the remainder and put it back.
For the first few iterations (which I expect will be a couple/few days apart each) I don’t expect any difference in flavor at all. But it’s going to start to creep in there.
My thought is that I may then be able to wean out the commercial yeast, leaving a pure sourdough in it’s place. But we’ll see.
