Holy Smokes

Rural South in the US displays vast diversity of quality of food on offer. On the one hand the cheapest, most horrid, engineered, factory-extruded not-really-food food is available in abundance. On the other hand, I found a really nice unpasteurised organic cheddar at a regular grocery store. On the third hand, some of the finest fresh produce, fish, game, etc. can be easily and cheaply gotten. Had some freshly caught bluegill the other night. Loads of homegrown tomatoes. And a fantastic hickory-smoked chicken that was organically raised by our relatives here.

Speaking of hickory smoke, we also just finished a successful canadian bacon experiment, using a huge (and cheap, this was not a high-quality piece of meat) pork loin that we brine-cured (with, among other things, bunches of fresh sage and thyme from the garden) and then smoked. Turned out great. Disappeared quickly. Next up: a maple cured and hot-smoked bacon. Procuring the pork belly was harder than I expected, doesn't seem to be a common cut here for some reason, but we got one and it's curing now.

Amsterdam Travel Report

Thanks (again) to seat61.com, had a successful mission to Amsterdam in which getting there was part of the fun instead of something to dread. Took the train from London to Harwich -- relatively fast train from liverpool street station to manningtree, then an easy switch to Harwich International. We arrived a few minutes before boarding opened for the Stena Line ferry. A bit after 20:30 we were onboard, for a 23:15 sailing. The cabin was great. Comfy beds with nice bedding -- better than many hotels I've stayed at. Good sized window plus an en suite with a good shower. Another hit: TV with satellite channels plus some onboard cams -- fore & aft along with a puppy cam on the pet kennel. Cute.

We had a late dinner in the a la carte restaurant. The food wasn't all that good but miles better than airplane food and a lot more pleasant. Might've been better in one of the other restaurants on board. Had a really good sleep and then a buffet breakfast, which was much better far then the dinner. It's an early breakfast. Next time we'll eat dinner before boarding and get to sleep earlier, still going for the breakfast.

Exiting into the Netherlands was really easy, and moments later we were on a short train towards Rotterdam. Switched to a train into Amsterdam, walked to the hotel but it was quite early in the day still. Stayed at the Ambassade Hotel. The staff were friendly and welcoming, the room spacious and comfortable, and the breakfast the next morning was great. Lovely place.

Had a really nice time in Amsterdam. Sunday went home by ICE train from Amsterdam to Brussels, and eurostar from there. The ICE train was great -- good a/c, roomy, comfortable seats. Eurostar was annoying as always. The only good thing about the eurostar is the journey time. Checking in as if it were an airplane is pointless and infuriating. You end up stuck in a shitty waiting area with overpriced crappy choices for food. Train travel should be about walking up to the thing moments before it leaves, having wandered around a hopping train station or local neighbourhood to dine or amuse yourself prior to your departure time. Instead you get a little waiting room hell experience. Then the train itself is unfailingly stuffy and cramped. Bleh. It's a lot better than flying still, but we decided we'd much rather spend a few more hours on the return trip and go back by the boat again (the day boat, even).

Shabby HVAC

The British seem oddly incompetent when it comes to getting air the right temperature. My office building, not even 30 years old, is routinely too hot or too cold. This despite an external temperature range that is not excessively broad over the course of a year. Tubes are notoriously stuffy. There are brand new buses on the route I take to work and they come with ventilation in the upper deck. Not air conditioning, just powered ventilation. It seems to make no difference whatsoever, except to be really loud. 78 decibels! For no benefit. This would be unacceptable in Germany, but maybe somebody here is proud of this great advancement in bus riding discomfort (there's also a curved rail on the stairs, which makes no sense, but I might save that rant for another post).

Fireplaces are done well here, but anything involving forced air ends up a bit of a crapshoot.

Apps Update: Evernote, Omnifocus

I'm still really liking Evernote. Well worth the price for the premium edition. Glad to see they are doing well and raising more money. Maybe with that warchest they can buy Omni Group, if for no other reason than to integrate (the excellent on iPad) Omni Focus with Evernote. That seems to be a much-requested feature that's more down to Evernote's not providing easy (e.g. URI) access to notes than to any shortcoming of Omni Focus.

Virtual Planespotting

My new favorite app: planefinder/planefinder HD. Immensely gratifying geek credibility enhancement moment: displaying type, heading, speed, altitude, route, airline, recent path, and, if available, some snapped photos of the actual plane that's just interrupted your conversation by flying overhead.

Book Reviewing

I am well calibrated to some movie reviewers, e.g. Roger Ebert, to the extent that I can usually predict my rating of a movie based on the review. I've not found the same with book reviewers. In fact I seem to be get a bum steer every time I buy something on the back of keen reviews.

The most recent example is Robopocalypse (robocalypse?) by Daniel Wilson, which we bought after a gushing pre-publication nod from Corey Doctorow (usually spot-on, will give him a pass on this one). Got that sinking feeling not long into it. As someone who loved Max Brooks' World War Z, I expected to enjoy it, but it seems way more contrived (yes, I know, more contrived than zombiegeddon) and excessively derivative. Not only did he follow the pattern by first publishing an analog of The Zombie Survival Guide in the form of How To Survive A Robot Uprising, but he goes on to seemingly replicate some of the World War Z characters as well (e.g. old Japanese social outcast who defends solitary kingdom, selfish teen who discovers bravery). The recurring characters seem crafted to sell movie rights (well, should have known, but at least this has potential to be quite an entertaining film). There is way too much "telling" and not enough "showing" -- that is, too much of the narrator telling me that something was really important or influential or that someone was a great leader, rather than letting the story show me someone demonstring leadersheip, or show me the impact of events or actions. (Even the overrated but not bad Philip Pullman "Northern Lights" trilogy suffers from this, with almost every character randomly ejaculating love and praise for the awesomeness of that "little girl".)

Another problem is the premise. Here's where I kick myself for listening to recommendations. Thirty years ago I remember the publications that would accept sci-fi stories practically begging for no more "computer-gone-crazy" stories. And appliances turning on people was an old gag even then. And, seriously, robots suck. I recently watched a demonstration of some robots making breakfast. It was sped up to keep people from falling asleep watching it, and the robots were crap at every skill. Industrial assembly robots are awesome, sure, but compared to advances in computing, robotics is young and stilted. The computer on my phone is powerful enough to kick my ass at chess, but the world's most sophisticated robots can get an egg out of the fridge and fry it about as well as a trained dog. So when Doctorow calls the book "gripping, utterly plausible, often terrifying" I'm left baffled in disagreement on all counts. Premise aside, even the dumbest premise can make for a good read, but this book just didn't work for me.

Justin Cronin's The Passage was a widely gushed-over book that I got upon reading reviews. The prose was solid, definitely good craftsmanship on display in the writing. But, again, there was a big outtrade between the recommendations and my reading. It was... ok. It badly needed editing (real editing, I'm not talking about proofreading). And much of it that seemed to be building up to really big plot points or big moments for characters that either never really happened or turned out to be disappointing or kind of nonsensical. Lots of comparisons to Stephen King. Maybe that should have been a tipoff. If you want an imagined Stephen King experience without reading Stephen King, I'd try The Unquiet by John Connolly.

So either I find a book reviewer I can calibrate to or just ignore book reviews in general and solely taking recommendations from people I know. In that vein, the book I just finished that I'd recommend (although it's almost written like a play): Explorers Of The New Century by Magnus Mills.

English History for Americans

In 1066, Norman invaded England and forced King Arthur to sign the Magna Carta, which is latin for "molten card". Three generations later came Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth. The Shakespearian Age lasted until King George and the American Revolution, which to this day is the single most important event in all of English history and is still widely discussed and even mined for rhetoric in political speeches. Immediately after the abject failure of the Revolution, the Victorians came into power and ruled for 150 years, until Winston Churchill and WWII happened. After the war, England invented soccer, Churchill retired to be replaced by Margaret Thatcher, and Princess Di sat on the throne. More recently, England was admitted as 9th State of the European Union.



Fun Facts:
London comes from the Roman word "Londinium", their name for the element Lithium [Li] which was abundant in the brackish silt of the Thames marshes around the area now known as "Limehouse".


Although Victorians invented the stick-frame house, this was only ever widely constructed in America, as resource constraints meant English builders had to use bricks.

England's chief exports are sonnets, actors, and sarcasm.

The Bulge In My Trousers

I need a new wallet. Probably a new walleting model. It's way too thick. It's uncomfortable to sit on and not particularly flattering. I probably put too much stuff in it to boot. The contents of my wallet, with money folded and all the cards aligned into a single stack, are 14mm thick. Selecting only the things I have a 50-50 chance of using in any given week, this shrinks to 9mm. Not piling the cards in a single stack would reduce this further. My wallet, fully loaded, is 24mm thick. Nearly an inch! That's 10mm empty. That's thicker than my naked iphone (the slipcase for which regrettably adds another 4mm).

I should separate daily-carry items from mission-specific items and go with a more modular wallet approach, starting with something a lot thinner and more sensible than leather for the wallet. Let's see what mr. google suggests....

Spitjack's: New Restaurant Victoria Park

Went to Spitjack's the other day, a small and welcoming place in the village above vicky park, on Lauriston up near the roundabout, on the way to the delightful Deli Downstairs and the excellent fishmonger (Jonathan Norris) . Really liked it -- very relaxing early dinner for the four of us. Service was friendly, menu was what I consider the right size -- properly focused rather than endless choice. They offer a few things grilled on the spit -- chickens, leg of lamb, beef rib, sometimes some smaller birds, plus a well-selected assortment of tapas. We got a hamburger (massive!), a quarter chicken, and 4 or 5 small plates, some chips. Everyone was happy, even our youngest (9), who never eats anything. The charcuterie and cheese selections were spot-on, while the empanadas had a lovely homemade savoriness to them. Churros w/ chocolate (I had a taste, very good) and coffee for dessert. Reasonably priced. Nice to have a dinner place in the village all four of us can enjoy. If the weather cooperates, it should do really well over the summer as it gets discovered.

Don't Forget To Wind It

Something I've wanted for years and finally got: a mechanical watch. It is less accurate than my plastic timex and a couple orders of magnitude more expensive. It is a NOMOS, a brand that is crying out for a '!' suffix. I've concluded that the sapphire crystal instead of glass makes a huge difference. I'm spoiled now. Swatches just won't be the same.

NOMOS! makes their own movements. Many watchmakers use factory movements from ETA, which are good, but there's something appealing about a watch company with its own mechanicals.

the "movement"

Iceland, Sweden, Ireland, States

Couple items in the news caught my eye recently: Iceland issuing sovereign debt for the first time since Global Financial Meltdown, and Sweden's moving "to the right" politically.

Iceland's response to their financial institutions was effectively to let them fail, defaulting on their debts, and making whole only domestic savings. There's a nice article summing it up in the wsj. Since then, Iceland's been doing really well. Economy is good, they've maintained social services and a decent standard of living. A success story. And kind of the way it should work. Why should Icelandic taxpayers have had to make good on investments sold by private-sector Icelandic banks and bought by punters in the UK and elsewhere? The US approach to bailing out banks and anyone who owed sufficiently large sums to Goldman Sachs protected shareholders and executives but royally screwed over the US public by socializing the losses.

Ireland is totally screwed since they took the polar opposite approach. They are also shackled to EUR. If Ireland's immediate response had been to wipe out shareholders, abandon the Euro, and take a more Icelandic approach, maybe we'd be seeing positive stories there, too. (And Greece should simply have defaults long ago.)

Sweden's response in the early 90s to a similar banking crisis was to bailout the banks but only in exchange for ownership. So the shareholders got hurt and the public benefited. This was suggested as a course of action for the US during GFM but it did not mesh with the paradigm of private profits, public losses, so was not even seriously considered. How's Sweden been doing? Been doing really well!

I'm curious to see if the recent "right turn" of Sweden is going to get more play in the US. It would make a good sound bite for right-wing talking heads. Be sure to leave out the part that a Sweden run by a "conservative" coalition is still the Tea Party's second-worst nightmare of social safety nets and public services. (Ranking just behind a worst nightmare of a global Caliphate that sells your guns to fund mandatory gay marriage.)

Small Government Update: Wisconsin

Where the apparent agenda is to obey corporate masters as blatantly as possible. Why bother with pretense at this point? Making conservatives nationwide puff out their chests with pride, I'm sure, Wisconsin government is going after small brewers and non-profit supplier of internet to public education. When the current crop of republicans were campaigning, I assume they announced, "we're going to fuck with your beer and your internet," right?