A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Happy Thanksgiving everyone o/

This was going to be the follow up to last night’s post. But (ok, well technically it is, but… oh nevermind, keep reading.)

I got home tonight at about 9:30 and was not about to spend 4-5 hours screwing around with dough.
So I’ve opted for another tactic.  I’ve added the rest of the ingredients as I mentioned yesterday, but instead of letting it rise normally I’ve put the bowl in the fridge.

Doing a retarded overnight rise was going to be my next run through (and it may be yet. That’s worth doing in isolation. The difference is noteworthy.) But fatigue and an 11 hour work day with almost six additional hours of commuting has gotten the better of me.

But tomorrow I’m working from home, so I’ll be able to have some fun with it.

Skippy over here was knocked for a loop on his subway ride to GCT tonight.

So last time I went through a simple 60-3-3 bread.

What that means, I glossed over entirely to satisfy my smug sense of smugness.

Simple unenriched breads have precisely four ingredients:

• Flour
• Water
• Yeast
• Salt

When you measure by weight (as you should all be doing) you can express those basic ingredients and their proportions with percentage of weight relative to the amount of flour you’re using.

For instance:  A cup of flour is about 140 grams.  A single loaf of bread is about 3 cups, 420 grams of flour.

So the recipe from last time is a 60-3-3 because “given the amount of flour, there is 60% of that weight in water and 3% each of yeast and salt.”

We wanted to make one loaf so that’s:

• 420 grams of flour
• 252 grams of water
• 13 grams of yeast
• 13 grams of salt

I’m sure this seems like an unmitigated pain in the ass.  But think about what this affords us.  I want 2 loaves or 4.  No guesswork. No referring to formulae or recipes at all. Just “4 loaves of 60-3-3.”

Now as for this specific formula, 60-3-3 makes a pretty run of the mill bread.  Nothing wrong with it at all. It’s the kind of thing I make most of the time and it’s a spectacular base to get good at and use as a launching off point.  Plus you always know what you’re getting.  It gives you that foundation that frees you to experiment.

So today’s start was a bit different.  I’m using the same formula and quantity, but I’m changing process.  Process is, hands down, entirely more important than ingredients.  Seems ludicrous but you can take those four ingredients in exactly those proportions and produce WILDLY different breads, in taste, appearance, texture, everything.  And you can do this by changing things that seem not to matter. 

What I’m doing is building this bread over two days, making a pre-ferment as a first stage and letting the yeast grow for 24 hours or so, before adding the rest of the ingredients and then treating it like I’d just mixed it all at once right then.

So how do I do that?  In making a preferment I like to keep it simple.  The more I have to remember the more I’ll forget.

Salt, among other things, tends to make for a relatively inhospitable environment for yeast.   Not enough to do serious damage of course, otherwise bread recipes would fail just about all the time.  It certainly needs to be there (you only forget salt in bread once.)  But why make the yeast work harder than it has to.  So I leave it out of the preferment.

I’m left with flour, water, and yeast.   I want the yeast to grow, but I’m going to want to add flour to it tomorrow (along with the salt) to give it some final oompf before baking.

The preferment procedure, in special “so easy I don’t ever forget it” form is this:

1. Calculate the proportions and quantities of the finished dough (as though I were making it in one shot.)
2. Use a quantity of flour equal to the quantity of water
3. Add all the water
4. Add all the yeast.
5. mix and cover.

So we have a single loaf 60-3-3, which as we saw above is 420-252-13-13 (flour, water, yeast, salt.)

Given the above steps that means we’re going to put the following in a bowl:

• 252 grams of flour
• 252 grams of water
• 13 grams of yeast

Mix it up, cover it and let it set.

Tomorrow we’ll add:

• 168 grams of flour (420 – 252).
• 13 grams of salt.

And then take it from there.

I asked myself that question, as I try to every day.  Usually the answer is “DAMMIT!” as I get up and do something crazy in the kitchen or down in the wood/machine shop.

The kitchen aid is going now with a basic bread dough.  For some reason baking bread isn’t like riding a bike.  I’ve lost it almost entirely and I’m here to tell ya, I used to be pretty damn good.

So going back to basics I measured by weight and came up with:

420g All purpose flour (king arthur, which has the approximate protein content of other brand’s bread flours.)

252g Water (tap.  We’ll see how that goes. I suspect the water in this place is hard enough that it interferes with the baking process.  This in part tests that.)

13g Yeast

13g Salt

That’s it.  The only four things you need for bread (and if you’re making a sourdough you can legitimately say “you didn’t add any yeast” as I do.

I added the water cold and it’s 4:59 now.  We’ll see what happens.  It will probably take quite a while to rise.

Experienced bakers will recognize this as the one loaf 60-3-3 formula.

I have to go set that to rise as I can hear the kitchen aid starting to complain about the strength of that dough.

… couple hours later …

Ok, that rose nicely in a hot water bath.  I pulled it out of the bowl (came quite nicely) and folded it two ways before putting it on a greased pan.

For a final pre-bake rise I took a large bowl and filled it with hot water, then placed the pan on top of that, turned a bowl upside down on top of the dough, then put a towel over THAT. (makes more sense than it reads.)

Left it there for a half hour, preheated the oven to 375 and in it goes.

…

Ok, because of the residual water on the bottom of the pan (from the steam of the water bath) the pan popped in to shape when it got hot enough, causing the final burst rise to collapse somewhat.  NOT a big deal, it was a little more dense than I like.

I pulled it out after 45 minutes or so (lost track of time) and it ‘thumped’ very hollow.  I let it cool completely (the toughest part of bread baking, keeping your greedy little hands off of bread that’s still hot.  Seriously, let it cool to room temperature if you care about the result.  It matters quite a bit.

Finally bit in to it at about 10:00.  It’s amazing how creamy it tastes, for an unenriched bread.  Definitely a solid success.  Time to stop using volume measurements again.  This was almost too easy.

Next will probably be the same thing as 2 part assembly with a preferment.

It’s 10:52 as I type 10:52 and I’ve just gotten out of the shower and plunked my diminishing arse in to bed.  I looked at my phone, which in 6 and a half hours will serve as my alarm clock, and saw three missed calls and two voicemails from a coworker from the last 20 minutes.

This isn’t news.

I’ve been working since a little before nine this morning, scrambling to get a project release-worthy two days before release.

Now, if I were to read that on a professional developer’s blog I’d be shaking my head in disappointment.  Fret not, when I hit publish in a few minutes and go to read it myself, I’ll be doing the same thing.

My piece of this pie is about a thousand lines of perl that tie together several other scripts and transfers files all over hell’s half acre.  Why, you might quite reasonably ask, wasn’t this tested before?

It was…as far as I could.  However, there is a tremendous amount of administrivia associated with such a thing.  Filenames and directories, drop locations and credentials, database names and line endings.  Dozens of bits of minutia that can have rough place holders, but need to be in place in order for the thing to work.

The whole thing is a bundle of external operations.  I’ve mocked out what I could, but doing so assumes everybody else is right.

So for, and I assure you I am being quite literal here, four meetings a week, for approximately six weeks (might be five, but I think it’s closer to eight) I’ve been pestering people for the credentials, environment setups, the things I need in order to do a full circuit test.

All to no avail.

Last week we had an inter-team meeting that was partially a pow-wow to organize the release details for the release that’s supposed to be in two days.

Finally I said (paraphrased) “Guys look. We keep floating along like there’s not a problem. But this script hasn’t been tested all the way through yet.  I need credentals (et al) otherwise it’s just a bunch of mocked out system calls. I’ve been saying this for more than a month. Now what do you need from me to help get this stuff done, because I’m stuck without these details, both for test environments and production.  At this point I have to say, AS A MATTER OF PROFESSIONALISM, that we don’t go live next week, given the current state of affairs.”  I was getting a little warm under the collar, but I wasn’t being profane or even uncivil, nor was I calling anyone out.

I added “Does anyone NOT understand why I am concerned? I feel like it’s just me.”  Silence. Dead air.

Two instant message windows appeared on my computer screen (the meeting was a conference call) with various permutations of “GO MIKE!” and “EXCELLENT!”

My boss in a later team call said that none of this was such a big deal and we shouldn’t worry about it so much.  She specifically added that it was definitely NOT worth working late over.

So here I am, two days before release, having cut off (at 10:30) my coworker on the phone, telling him I’d try one more thing then go to bed, as it’s getting too late for this, having been at it since 8:30 in the morning.

Now what have I been doing all day?  Well, besides filling in details, I’ve been making buckets of last minute changes to accommodate the fact that other people’s scripts aren’t written to spec.  Filenames are different than what they told me to code to, datestamps don’t match.  In short there are a raft of simple normal problems that should have been caught and dealt with weeks ago.

In addition there have been two direction changes…today.  We’re not deploying in standard well-known locations, but sending the scripts to someone to run manually.  So all those sub-script locations need to change.  The algorithm for deriving a unique key was based on sensible, but incorrect assumptions. Why? Because when I asked “what’s the algorithm for determining the unique key I need?” I was met with silence.

And what’s going to happen when I go in tomorrow?

Prediction: “Mike, why are we having so much trouble with your script?  Coworker stayed up until one in the morning fixing your code.”

People, you tell me. Tell me what I should be doing differently.  This is a systemic problem at this organization. I’ve been fighting these battles since my contract began last February.  Yet I come off as a hothead.

So I found out recently that in the great NAS crash of 2010, I lost a tremendous amount of data that I was always sure existed in multiple locations. Not the least of this was most of my pictures.

I’ve been scrambling through boxes tonight looking for anything that might be useful, old cd-rom backups, old hard drives, anything. But I fear it’s really all gone.

Always keep redundant backups.

UPDATE: Well, I found a box that had four old IDE hard drives in it. I’m transferring now. God only knows what’s on them. Hopefully something. I’ll dump the entire things on to the local drive before indexing.

I remember the moving frenzy and how I threw out all those old unmarked cd roms I’d burned over the years. What a maroon.

So yesterday my brother was accepted in to full communion with the Catholic Church.

He was baptized, confirmed, received his first communion and then married; all in under two hours.

All within about two hours by two wonderful human beings, Fathers Barnabas and Bernard of the Capuchin Franciscans with whom he has a significant and deep connection.

Then doofus here had to give a toast.

I’d written it through a few times (3 1/2 really) and eventually I just tore up everything and winged it.

It seemed to be well received. But it was abundantly clear how blindly panicked I was about it, so it’s tough to sort out the genuine responses from the attempts to put me at ease about it.

I was talking with Father Barnabas who said that in his sixty years of being a priest, he had never seen anything like it.

Then we drank some mamajuana, smoked some truly incredible cigars, drank a little whiskey, ate a lot of food, talked a lot of nonsense and laughed an awful lot.

Still though, what an amazing day. I’m just glad I was witness to it.

“Throw yourself always upon the sword of life as though you were already dead.”

- Nyx Smith

From what is most likely the dumbest book I’ve ever enjoyed.  Haven’t read it in 15 years.

Ok, this is weird.

Today I’ve been getting hits for “Shuffling Squirrel” and “mucsle squirrel” which presumably is “muscle squirrel” mistyped.

People, they’re on the move and we have to be ready.

Since I don’t have a defense plan on file for a shuffling squirrel attack I’m going to default to zombie uprising contingency #4.

Battlestations people, this is not a drill.

Writing a short story is a bitch. Especially a funny one.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything this funny:

It starts with this.

Anne V - 01:01pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1318 of 1332) Okay - I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you…

Dog In Elk.

Hat tip to jedikaiti on Perlmonks.

Happy November peeps o/

I posted the link to Small Dead Animals in the previous post before having followed it, so confident I was in the awesomitude of anyone who uses the word “Ass Clamp”.

But then I clicked through and saw: Message from the Wife of an Oil Rig Worker

Brought to you of course by genius commenter Cuddle Party Boner Rampage (hey, we report, you decide) from a thread over at

Die Hipster.

Didn’t lose power.

Woke up and someone had plowed my driveway, which is now cleaner than it was before it started snowing.

Halloween or Williamsburg
Hipster Animals

Looks like it should probably be made out of… oh I don’t know, 4130 Steel.

Let’s mount it on the miter saw table with a 12″ cutoff blade.

…and start cutting.

Too bad it stopped glowing in the time it took me to get to the camera.

Ok, well not too bad for the first slice. It did take about a half hour though.

Rather amazing what a 12″ blade spinning at that rate will do to a piece of steel, to say nothing of the sacrificial plywood base.

Hmm… looks neat, but it would slice your fingers in half with the burrs all around the outside. Gotta take care of that. Let me grab that old file and a cigar and retire to the porch to smooth this out…

Well that took an awfully long time. Still though, you can run your thumb across any surface safely now, so that’s something.

Hmm… customer wanted a bevel. Not sure how to do that. perhaps a grinder? Yeah, but I can’t really freehand it. Hmm… I’ll need. Ah! Hackish but it’ll work…

Another 2 hours on the front porch with a file to smooth out the rough-grinding into a proper bevel.

There we go. Still ugly as home made sin. Can’t present it like that.

Buffing wheels and compound? nope.
Well, I’ve gotta clean it up before I do anything to it anyway. Might as well put a 40 grit disc on the orbital and take a whack at it.

Hey!

Not half bad.

Of course in my excitement I delivered it without having taken the final final picture.