Ploafmaster General

Last night I cooked up a package of Sausage Craft's delicious San Miniato links. This way I could cut up some slices for my kid's lunches and also have some ready to eat (only needing to warm through) for other meals. This time, I decided to brown the sausage in a little olive oil on relatively high heat before finishing in the oven, more or less braising in about 3 cups of San Marzano tomatoes. Why? Not really sure.

When the sausages were cooked through, I was left with a sauté pan full of roasted tomatoes, juice, and salty, flavorful sausage grease. I wasn't going to cook up a pot of noodles after I'd already eaten dinner, so I decided to experiment. I cooked the contents of the pan to reduce a bit of the liquid and further break down the solids, but how do I keep all that meaty flavor without an oil slick where a sauce should be?

I let the tomato mixture cool enough to drop in to my blender, and added an egg. The yolk has an emulsifying agent that should keep it all together, but we'll see how it fares tonight when I warm it up for dinner.

Every job has its doldrums. But it's another matter entirely to have work - something to pass the time - that's so monumentally boring that you feel like you’re falling asleep with eyes wide open. This insidious class of work actually manages to feel slower than nothing at all.

Happy Wednesday, Internet.

One of the simple pleasures of my child growing up is that I can cook for her now. No more Gerber mush from a jar. I've always enjoyed cooking for myself, but cooking for others is a special joy; it's not just selfish indulgence, it's sharing nourishment.

I'm going out to a nice dinner for my birthay tonight, but I needed to cook food for my little 1 year old so she would have dinner before the babysitter arrived. So while I stood over the stovetop, frying an egg, I felt unadulterated happiness knowing that I was so directly providing for my daughter.

"I know just enough to be dangerous."

What a peculiar phrase. I most often hear this colloquialism used in a self-deprecating manor for folks that know enough to talk about a topic at a party, but not enough to make a career out of it. But the meat of the idea comes from people who know a little about a subject and use that tidbit to plunge recklessly into a situation that requires deeper understanding. Maybe you just learned how to build a doghouse and now you think it's time to build a deck. But you don't understand building code, so it's not structurally sound.

I use the phrase about my own understanding of Responsive Web Design or other technical topics, but I try not to charge in to project meetings swinging three or four facts over my head. Alexander Pope wrote that "a little learning is a dangerous thing", but I don't think he meant always. In the business and IT worlds, too many folks try to pass off their cursory Google research as expertise. But if you're willing to accept correction and have an open mind, you can at least use a little learning to be part of the right conversations. And that's not so dangerous, is it?

Ah, November! Here comes the tail end of the year. So much to anticipate, so much to celebrate, so much! My birthday (and birthday dinner). Then Valerie's birthday a mere 12 days later. Then thanksgiving 2.5 weeks after that! Family! Gluttony! Time off! But WAIT! THERE'S MORE! There's December!

Thanksgiving is late enough that returning to work after the break is a jump right into the Christmas season. Carols, holiday specials on TV, buying a tree, work winding down, and a nice big vacation to wrap up 2014.

I know the skies are gray and there's a chill in the air, but gimmie dat end of year awesome sauce at firehose pressure, 'cause I'm enthusiastic!

I was cleaning out my armoire when I ran across the key for the first car I ever loved. It wasn't my first car, mind you. I parked that '85 Buick Electra wagon in a cedar tree not one month after passing my driving test.

The car that made me love to drive was a 1985 Honda Prelude. I was the third owner and it already had over 200,000 miles on the odometer. I added many thousand more before it died on Hancock Street just as I finished parking one vernal afternoon in 2002. The '85s used some one-off dual carburetor jobbie, so there was no fixing it.

Even though it was nearly as old as me, that Prelude had tight suspension and steering that made me aware of the road. It wasn't a supercar, but it was quick. Putting my friends in the back seats was pretty close to abuse, but the driver's seat was comfortable on long trips with all important controls in easy reach.

And it was the first car to don the proud PLOAF license plates. Those plates were strange enough around campus that I even overheard a classmate talking about them. I had a very Seinfeld-esque “You’re the Ploaf guy!” moment when I revealed it was my car.

For a brief time after graduation I considered getting another one but practicality won. I still miss the ol' beast, but PLOAF has graced both ends of my Jetta for ten years.

We should be more careful how we frame discussions about opting-out of/abandoning technology. Leaving social networks or avoiding certain consumer goods is not always Luddism, but it sure sounds that way when we're constantly referencing "the days before [x]". We should point to examples that don't make us sound like hermits-in-the-making, hiding from the inexorable march of technology under foil blankets.

I didn't go to school to be a software developer. In fact, I started my undergrad degree as a mechanical engineering major with grand plans to work on the fuselages of tomorrow's aircraft. When I fell out of love with the major, I was two years deep into school and didn't want another four. I'd grown up around computers and loved using them, so I figured I'd work with computers in some capacity. My (mis)conception of computer science was having my ankle chained to a desk while I wrote lines of code for long hours and never saw another person during daylight. So I chose "information systems" for my plan B.

Somehow, because of one semester's database class, I landed an internship as a PL/SQL developer at a state agency during my last year of school. The internship led to my first job as, again, a PL/SQL developer. Now this was hardly real software development. Writing and fixing a few stored procedures and performing a schload of ad hoc queries doesn't really count, in my book. I learned a lot, and worked with a bunch of good folks, and I even tried to see if software was something I could get in to recreationally. After the 3rd try at Ruby on Rails, I was done. Zero motivation.

A few years ago I switched jobs because I realized that I couldn't take being even a watered-down software developer. It's not because I couldn't handle the work. But my apathy for that side of software certainly affected the quality of my work. I changed gears and took a job as a "business analyst" - a vague, super-business-y term that means "I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS".

You see, I still love software. I love finding and learning to use new programs. I don't have automatic updates enabled on any of my platforms because I like to read the release notes and manually manage the installation process. I always RTFM because I like to know what an app can do. Even working for a software consultancy, I often find my self helping my coworkers with keyboard shortcuts and obscure menu items.

I don't want to assemble the software, but because I love it and use it all the time, I sure do want to help make it better, and help make it easier for everybody else to use.

Years ago I wrote a pissy little blog post about my disappointment with the movie Little Miss Sunshine. I still feel the same way about the movie today, but there's a peripheral target of my ire.

Two years before Little Miss Sunshine hit theaters I saw the trailer for Everything Is Illuminated. The last minute of the trailer includes a clip from a song I now know as DeVotchKa's "How it Ends". It's about 7 minutes long, but please - listen to the whole thing:

How it Ends by DeVotchKa

The song is beautiful; lyrics of trial and fulfillment sung with anguish over melancholy instrumentation that still manages to convey a sense of loss and emptiness. I was pretty bitter that the song wasn't actually in the film. I didn't yet know the name of the song in the trailer and, lacking my current Google-fu, didn't find out for a while.

Back to Little Miss Sunshine. The movie opens with what I thought - back then - to be a cover of "How it Ends". I was appalled. It felt a bit sappy, lacked the lovely/sad vocals, and played over a tonally inconsistent introductory prelude. Of course, it turns out DeVotchKa was responsible for much of the soundtrack, which means "The Winner Is" represents the band's own retooling of an existing song.

Thanks to the magic of subscription-based streaming audio services and their assorted discovery algorithms, I eventually re-encountered "How it Ends". The problem, however, is that because of the huge musical overlap between versions and their common composer, you always end up hearing both. So that helped me figure out why the soundtrack tune rubs me the wrong way. Aside from the aforementioned lack of vocals, the extended intro is axed in favor of a quick arrival of the cutesy accordion. But really, there are two things that bug me the most.

First, there's the jaunty pizzicato strings, completely absent from "How it Ends":

And then we get the glockenspiel which, while probably attempting to connect with the childish element of the film, robs the original of its gravity:

I understand this is exceedingly nitpicky, but when you love a piece of art, it can really stink when it's altered, even by the artist. I'm sure it doesn't help to have "The Winner Is" at the start of what I found to be a predictably and disappointing movie.

I've had a photo series idea for quite some time now wherein I photograph a bunch of poeple wearing, and reacting to, a huge dog cone collar. The problem is finding subjects who don't mind being silly on camera with the potential for these goofy shots to be shared in public.

So - do you live in RVA (or will be around sometime in the next few months) and want to be part of this? I realize (and expect) that most folks who'd be willing to do this already know me and wouldn't have a problem being photographed in my house. I need to be able to set up my backdrop and lighting to do this the way I want, so I can't exactly "take this show on the road".

Get in touch if you think this would be fun. If you don't know how, use the contact form. I'll schedule some stuff, we'll take pictures, and we'll laugh about how ridiculous this is.

So I'm lying in bed during the last week of October and I'm already planning for my Thanksgiving turkey. Over the past decade I’ve done a fairly standard whole bird roast, typically following Alton Brown’s brined method. But this year, for both expediency and more even cooking, I'm gonna spatchcock that mutha. What's that mean? I'll leave the explanation to Martha Stewart. Though I'll still probably brine the bird. Juicy is as juicy does.

Now that I've picked apples and procured some fresh cider, it's the right time of year to trot out my own cocktail recipe that I call the Orchard Warmer.

Get this stuff:

• 2 oz bourbon
• 1 oz fresh cider
• 0.75 oz fresh lemon juice (seriously, must be fresh)
• 0.5 oz grade B maple syrup (grade B is darker, more viscous, more complexly flavored)
• 1 dash/dropper of Angostura or similar bitters
• Put all of that in a shaker, add ice, shake the everliving crap out of it until the sides of the shaker start to frost, and then double strain into a cocktail glass. We don't want any ice chips floating around in this thing.

If you wanna get REALLY fancy, take a slicing tool like a mandoline or one of those incredible Japanese jobbies and make a paper-thin circular slice of fresh apple to float in the drink as a garnish.

Be careful, these are dangerous.

Yesterday we visited Carter Mountain Orchard for some autumnal fun. I've enjoyed apple picking since I was a kid, and I'll take my pommes over your "pumpkin spice" as a seasonal signifier any day. Well, cliché alert: I enjoyed it so much more now that I could bring a kid of my own. Maddie loved playing with the fallen, rotting apples, and (with occasional frustration) figured out how to walk along the steep, uneven grounds of the hilly orchard. Totally a tradition in the making.

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Last night was my church's third annual harvest party, and it was a blast. Perfect weather to be outside with a great community, tasty beer brewed by a few friends, and delicious smoked meats.

I'm one of those whiney dorks that laments Weezer's change in musical direction after the release of Pinkerton. There have been a handful of tracks that caught my attention since then, and tons of great non-album experiments from the years leading up to The Green Album. But by and large, this band is off my radar and I've said my piece about them multiple times.

Then Everything Will Be Alright In The End released. People whose opinions I trust about music started to say weird things, like, "hey, it's not horrible"or "some of these tracks are as good as the old stuff". I have an Rdio account, so it was trivial to give it a listen. And you know what? It's not horrible, and some of the tracks really are as good as the old stuff. But as I listened I was struck not by how much it sounded like "classic" Weezer, but by how much I was thinking of Ozma.

Ozma was always a band heavily influenced by Weezer's sound, but they managed to transcend their origin through ever maturing power-pop over subsequent albums. It's almost as if Ozma beat Weezer to their own future sound. Years ago.

It feels like every time I go outside over the past month, I'm struck by the gorgeous, autumnal weather. My Yankee family turned south in 1994, and while we love our adopted home state, we've always missed what seems like clearer seasonal changes above the Mason-Dixon line. So it is that, following what seemed to be a mild summer, I've really appreciated a rare, proper autumn in Richmond, Virginia.

But is it really that rare or different? What is it about this weather that brings me back to cool autumn days walking through Delicious Orchards in New Jersey, picking apples? I decided to waste some time number-hunting to see whether data backed up my subjectivity (all of which came from Wolfram Alpha). And I made a chart:

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Why October? That's the month where we really start to feel the transition out of summer into milder weather. I was able to pull the average high and low temperatures in Richmond for each October since my family moved to Virginia. Rather than the overall average, I went with the high and low so I could include the range. Basically, could I wear a hoodie in the morning? Was it t-shirt-and-shorts weather later in the day? Then I started thinking about how, in these temperature ranges, humidity starts to behave differently, contributing to a perceived chill in those cool mornings where it might have felt stifling on warm afternoons. I stuck with the average low humidity because I figured that would give a sense of how dry the month felt.

As I collected and examined these data points, two problems came into focus. First, my memory must be pretty bad and more subjective than I already suspected because, really, look at the chart. October hasn't changed dramatically in Richmond over two decades, at least for these metrics. And that leads me to the biggest problem - trying to fit my subjective experience of fall to collection of metrics.

The more I thought about these numbers, the more I wondered what other factors might explain how I felt about the weather. Did I need to look at the preceding few months for each year to see whether there was a dramatic relative difference? What about cloud cover? Wind? Precipitation (and storms vs. drizzle)? How much time did I spend outside, and did those days happen to be when the weather was pleasant?

I suppose what I'm really saying here is that I should be outside enjoying the autumn sunshine instead of staring at a screen researching tenuously connected data points :-)

I don't remember who said it. Maybe Alton Brown? Somebody suggested that a great (albeit slow) way to clean excess junk out of the kitchen. Take every kitchen utensil and put them in a box (or boxes). Label appropriately, and place in a separate room apart from the kitchen. Somewhere inconvenient. If you really need something in that box, you'll walk out of the kitchen, find it, and use it - after which, keep it in the kitchen. After six months, take whatever's left to Goodwill.

I'm kind of miserly with following people on Twitter (or most any social network, for that matter). I'm a Twitter completionist (yes, I really try to read everything), but even while keeping my Following list to around 100 people, I noticed a substantial amount of noise over the past year in my Twitter stream. I use Twitterrific (my fave), which allows me to "muffle" accounts, hashtags, and such, so that helped a bit. But some users just tweet too high a ratio of irrelevant stuff for my taste. Fear of missing out kept me from unfollowing these folks for a long time, but I eventually thought of a solution. This has been working well for me, but your mileage may vary.

Rather than completely stop paying attention to certain accounts, I created a couple of Twitter lists. One for entertainers that I admired but tweeted/retweeted way. Too. Much. Another to keep track of what's going on in the Richmond food scene. I unfollowed every account in these lists knowing that I could simply add the lists to Twitterrific or view on the web.

What I've found was that, over a period of several months, I went from checking those lists multiple times a day to barely at all. The "box of utensils" is aaaaaaaaall the way over on another tab. So I may only check my Richmond food list, for example, when I want to see the buzz around a new restaurant. Ultimately, I spend less time catching up on Twitter because I've shifted most of the noise to a place that feels more comfortably optional.

I was introduced to Tony Zhou's excellent "Every Frame a Painting" series when Jason Kottke posted about his Edgar Wright/visual comedy video. Since then I've watched every part of the series multiple times. If you want a fun, approachable intro to some filmmaking concepts, this is your guy.

Hay ride driver taking a break at Chesterfield Berry Farm.

Just read a pretty great story from a woman who travelled from Athens to Hong Kong as a guest on a container ship. I've known this was possible for quite some time, but it was nice to get a sense of the details. Maybe when Valerie and I are empty nesters... (via Peter Dumont)

I stopped by the Angel Oak on a recent visit to Charleston, South Carolina. It was fairly well trafficked with tourists despite the off-season date, but it's well worth the stop. The scale is difficult to comprehend, even in person.

My friend Sam linked to a great piece on Medium about "douchebag" as a slur. Professor Cohen, the author, made an interesting aside that I can't fully reconcile, however. I don't often include larger quotes, but in case you don't read the entire (excellent) essay, this paragraph is what I'm talking about:

A common critique of the hipsters — indeed a confusion of the hipster and douchebag — is that they, the hipsters, serve as the thin edge of the wedge of gentrification. But this is, to my mind, unfair. Broke-ass twenty-somethings crushed under the weight of student loan payments and low earning potential in a crap economy have to live somewhere cheap. And given that the hipster is totally ok with living in racially diverse neighborhoods, they often find themselves cast into the role of pioneers of whiteness in Washington Heights or West Oakland. However, it takes a douchebag to see the financial profit to be gained in pushing poor people of color out of their homes. The hipster brings art, coffee and cocktails to a neighborhood, the douchebag brings reconstruction contractors, private security and real estate agents. The hipster seeks community, the douchebag seeks urban rental profits. The hipster might start a coffee shop in a poor, black neighborhood, but the douchebag wants to call the cops on the black men on the corner right after he turns your indy coffee shop into a Starbucks.

Setting aside my distaste for the term "hipster", I think the author misses the fact that many of the folks to which he ascribes the label are latent douchebags. Plenty of the "pioneers of whiteness" (outstanding turn of phrase) are urban explorers living out their twenties with the assistance of (or plan-B-return to) upper middle class parents. How many of the douchebags seeking rental profits started out as "hipsters" seeking community? When the patience and/or money of their parents run out, many of the pioneers complete Growing Up Phase 2 and start to take advantage of their surroundings.

Okay, part of that sneering reductivism could be my own preconceived notion that some folks, as Jarvis Cocker would sing), "...think that poor is cool." I don't mean to take the shine off an otherwise great piece. I just found that little hipster/gentrification section to be a bit...incomplete.

Yeah, so my recently mentioned image experiment? Ready to move to the next phase. More news as soon as I have it, but let's just say something tangible may be coming soon.

If you pay attention to the culture of photography, you'll have noticed the sustained, steep decline in sales/usage of digital point-and-shoot cameras. Flickr's Camera Finder reveals that the top 5 cameras for its users over the past year are found in smartphones, not stand-alone devices. The top 3 are various iPhones stretching back to the 4S. Apple didn't just disrupt the mobile phone market; they made waves in the camera industry as well.

The quality of Apple's iPhone cameras seems to come from three major pieces: great physical components (many of which are custom), powerful image processing chips, and excellent software to make the most of the previous two. But the iPhone 6 highlighted some limitations: the camera can only shrink so much while maintaining image quality, so we get a wart on the back of a device that's too thin to accommodate the camera and all its pieces. Physics wins again.

We've seen Apple address challenges like this in other areas, however. They developed a new method for milling aluminum for their device cases. Apple even claims to have created a new alloy of 18k gold with increased hardness for their new watch. I'm sure that Apple (and every other device maker with half a brain) is throwing a lot of hardware engineers at battery technology, but my great hope is that we hear about some breakthrough in optical engineering out of Cupertino in the next few years. I don't see a lot of incentive for Nikon or Canon to figure out how to cram a higher quality camera into a shallower depth. Couple Apple's recent work in materials science with their excellent software and we may be a few short years away from something truly incredible.

At least I'm hopin'.

Apropos of...maybe something (maybe something I posted yesterday, in fact), I've been screwing around with Adobe Illustrator - an unwieldy monster of software that can be intimidating to the folks who are paid to use it. I am not so paid, nor do I have any training in this area, but having heard about the "image tracing" process, I decided to jump in and see what I could do. I'm probably wasting loads of time, and it's frequently frustrating, but there's enough motivation to keep me going. When I get truly stuck, a little Google search typically helps out.

The whole thing makes me wish that more jobs allowed for this type of noodling around. Sure, you've probably heard about 3M and other companies that allow for personal project time. Do many of those personal projects involve butting your head up against a new tool or process, whether not there's a potential product on the other side?