Jon

I've decided, based on the recent politics and and business over here, to do more (most? all?) of my personal blogging over at Two Ideas. I just posted over there about buying scuba tanks and planning to dive tomorrow.

I didn't write about the one dive that ironheadjane and I took last Sunday, at Redondo. Twenty-five minutes or so underwater, and I really felt that I'm getting back in the groove regarding buoyancy control and general underwater comfort. So tomorrow's not a bad time to start pushing my boundaries: it's the first dive of our Advanced class, a night dive at Redondo.

Unlike my previous night dive in Bonaire, I'll have a really decent light, and I've dived the site before. That should help, a lot. My previous night dive was a bit confusing, and a little stressful, but very exciting: everything underwater looks different at night. I can hardly stand to wait another twenty-four hours.

I also didn't write about Easter dinner: neutrinoj and zetreehugger came over for lamb (which I braised in red wine using the crock pot while Laura and I dove), gravy, and roast veggies (which zetreehugger made). We played a round of some card/word game whose name I forget, which was entertaining. It was nice and low-key, and tasty, too. Monday I took much of the lamb leftovers and made lamb jalfreze again, which was yummy.

It's been a crappy week for food since then, for the most part: I've been training on the Eastside for work (ITIL v3 Foundation certification), which has meant junk food at lunch (burritos, McDonald's, pizza) and exhaustion at dinner (plus a non-dive Scuba class last night too). Right now, though, I've got ham in the oven, greens on the stove, and I'm prepping for ham-and-bean soup for tomorrow night before diving.

Tonight I'll have to put my dive bag together, so that we can eat, grab bags, and go tomorrow. I can't wait.

Finally, today would have been Michael Jackson's 66th birthday. Raise a glass to the Beer Hunter, if you don't mind, in honor of his memory.

My first (and second) Puget Sound dives today, my first dives in cold water, and my first dives in three and a half years (not counting the pool session last night to review skills). More importantly, my first dive with ironheadjane as my dive buddy.

It's definitely frustrating to be stuck again on the technical bits -- weight, buoyancy, equipment familiarity, and so on. But I'm still comfortable with most of the core skills, and the rest seem to be coming back already. Part of the challenge was new equipment -- 7 millimeter wetsuit with hood, gloves, new boots, new fins, new mask. (Same snorkel, regulator, computer, and BCD.) Part of the challenge was the cold water -- it took me a long time to warm up again, though it didn't feel too cold in the water itself, even if it was 46 degrees at the bottom and only fifty or so out of the water. Really, most of the challenge was too long out of the water.

Cindy, our very awesome dive instructor, noted that it was rather sterile out there today, due perhaps to large classes out on the beach today, and dive activities yesterday. We did see a number of fish, tons of starfish, a bunch of pretty large crabs. (And one tiny, translucent crab scuttling along the bottom that I first mistook for just a small piece of debris someone had stirred up.) Saw what I think were lingcod eggs, a starfish with egg sacs, and a beautiful sea cucumber.

Dives #29 and 30 overall, with 19 hours and 51 minutes of total bottom time. It's great to be back in the water -- I look forward to our Advanced Open Water classes in two weeks, by which time I'll have a new, warmer, wetsuit of my own, and Laura will have her own gear. I'm looking forward to the night dive, which will be only my second night dive. New lights, new dive knives, rash guards, and more, and more. Laura's serious about this: we're buying weights, wetsuits both for here and Hawaii. We're thinking about tanks -- it'll be pretty much the only gear we lack. All we'll need are air fills, and we'll be able to dive together all year long. I'm very much looking forward to that.

My favorite spam of the morning begins as follows:

Good time of day. You are disturbed by the charitable company Redd Cross of Slovenia.

That's funny, I am disturbed! And the notion of a charitable company named Redd Cross is even more disturbing. (I think it would be a more fitting name for a comedian than a charity...) And it is, I suppose, a good time of day.

[Followup 2008-03-16: Bruce Sterling blogged this same spam, and while he may have done so a few hours before me, I hadn't read his post yet. Anyway, it's good to find myself on the same page as the Viridian Pope-Emperor once in a while. ]

Yesterday morning, I was walking to Vivace for a coffee before getting on the bus. I do this every morning, at six twenty-five, plus or minus five minutes.

The sky was that deep blue it reaches just at dawn, bringing color to the morning. I heard some birds chirping, and a garbage truck groaning in the alley, several blocks away. Some cars passed by on a nearby road. But still, for the city, it was quiet. Peaceful. I was alone, content for a block and a half to be absorbed by my thoughts.

Which were, and I quote, "You know... I think this is my favorite time of the day."

Which brought me to a full stop, quite suddenly. After all, this is morning we're talking about. Early morning, before it's really light outside. Before the dry cleaners is open. When respectable people have been in bed for ninety minutes or so, and have five or six hours of sleep ahead of them.

Sometime, without noticing it, I passed the day when I became an old man. "I'm too young for this," I thought, but that didn't make it any less true.

I've made my peace with it: dawn may be my favorite time of the day, but I like twilight nearly as much. And it's totally okay to sleep 'til noon, too. Just because the dawn is my favorite doesn't mean I have to see it all the time. It's more like a favorite movie that I pull out and watch once in a while, right?

Right?

Well, as of about two hours ago, I'm shipping out tomorrow to Arizona. I'll return on Thursday, theoretically early enough for a V-day dinner with the spousal unit, and then we'll be flying out at oh-dark-thirty on Friday morning to go visit her mother in Kentucky. We'll fly back late on Sunday, though hopefully not too late, and I'll be back at work a week from tomorrow.

Gah.

On the other hand, it's nice that the people from the customer site like me and want me back.

I wish I was feeling better. Dinner tonight was spectacularly good.

We had ham and bean soup, made with alder-smoked ham from Sea Breeze Farm, my favorite local purveyor of pork, duck eggs, chicken liver pate, and more, and with cranberry beans from Stoney Plains Organic Farm. I finished it up with water, carrots, onions, celery, salt, pepper, and lemon thyme, and it was spectacularly good.

Preparation was simple: cut the ham and veggies up, toss them and the beans in the crockpot with the salt, pepper, and thyme, and cover with water, then simmer all day long. Not bad for 15 minutes of prep work last night and fewer than five minutes this morning. Extremely filling, and I'd estimate the cost at about $2.50 or $2.75 a bowl, because it made about eleven servings. (The ham isn't cheap, nor the beans, but they're the best-tasting I can buy -- I can't say enough good things about Sea Breeze Farm's bacon or ham!) The only trick I missed was that I'd forgotten to put in a bay leaf or three, which I'd intended to do. Still, it was quite nearly perfect.

On the side, we had mustard greens I'd cooked on Sunday night for just this occasion. Two big bunches (about eight cups chopped, raw), one slice of the half-pound of ham for the soup, a couple of dried red peppers, half a head of garlic, salt, pepper, white vinegar, and some veggie stock I'd made from scraps. The stock isn't as useful as I'd like, because I was ignorant and had a bunch of carrot greens in there, which made it rather astringent (though not really bitter), but that perfectly complimented the greens, which were sharp and smokey and quite good.

Laura, a good Kentucky girl, gave the meal her seal of approval -- not bad for a northern boy improvising without a net.

Last night I'd cooked a leg of lamb, also from Sea Breeze farms. I'd de-fatted it the night before, and yesterday morning I rubbed it with salt and pepper, and tossed it into the crock pot with a head's worth of garlic cloves, a medium onion, sliced, and about a bottle of red wine. (I'd meant to put the thyme in that, but I forgot.) At the end of the day, I took it out, dried it off, and browned it nicely, then reduced the wine in that pan to make a gravy, adding two tablespoons of butter.

For veggies, we had carrots and parsnips braised in home-made chicken stock, cooked with salt and pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Laura tossed in a tablespoon or two of apple juice, which made it lovely and pie-like, and at the end I tossed in another tablespoon of butter to turn the leftover stock and spices into a lovely glaze. Except for the apple juice, the carrots and parsnips are my mother's recipe.

Later that night, I snacked on some beets I pickled on Sunday according to Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, which I do several times a winter. The beets (Chiogga Beets), as well as the carrots and Parsnips, were from Nash's Organic Produce.

The lamb was pricey, but excellent. And we're getting eight to twelve person-meals out of it, about six portions of lamb with veggies on the side, plus probably four portions of Lamb jhal fraizi I'll be making tomorrow with a portion of the lamb I set aside last night when alloquating the leftovers.

Way back on Sunday night, I made pasta puttanesca, which is always different, since I make it by ear and it depends on what I've got on hand. This time, we were a little light on the olives, and I wanted to tone the garlic down from the usual, so I used some extra anchovy paste. Laura approved of that as well.

Thursday, the plan is to make a hot soba soup, making the dashi myself (mmmm... bonito flakes!). I might toss a raw egg in my portion and let that cook, depending on how I feel about it. I'll have beets on the side, most definitely.

Friday's going to be leftovers. Saturday probably leftovers too, if I haven't eaten 'em all by then. (I also have two hamburgers in the fridge still, from Saturday, which I'll be focusing on at lunchtime tomorrow and the next day.) Sunday, maybe, I'll use the pork butt I got at the market to make lime and chili slow-cooked pork tacos, with red onion escabeche, via Kathy Casey's cookbook. But I don't know yet, since that's something I can do any day of the week (due to the slow cooker), and I'll probably be hitting the farmer's market on Saturday this week.

Mmmm... food!

So let me get this straight:

I'm working on a system...
... connected by a serial console to another computer...
... which I'm accessing via Remote Desktop...
... from another Windows system...
... which I'm connected to via WebEx...
... from another Windows system...
... which is a virtual computer hosted on a different system...
... that I'm accessing via VMWare Console...
... from a Windows computer...
... that's itself a VMWare system...
... running on my Mac...
... accessing the keyboard and mouse via Synergy...
... from my Linux box...
... which is, actually, a real computer, with a keyboard and mouse attached to it.

11:00 am, at the Utopia Cafe, 3308 SE Belmont St.

Several of us will be showing up at 10:45 to secure seats.

Please RSVP here, or via e-mail, or forever hold your peace.

If you read my site at LiveJournal, you probably don't care, but I've updated my back-end managing my Blogroll. I'm now using Google Reader and a blogroll tag. Hopefully, this means that I'll do a better job of maintaining the blogroll.

I do have to say that it was annoying not to have a trivial way to see what HTML Google was generating, to simplify my CSS writing. Turns out it was easy enough, but still, that I should have to work at all to turn some javascript into a notion of what I'm going to see is sort of annoying.

Laura and I are heading to Portland for a weekend getaway next weekend, and we're looking for the following:

• A nice place for dinner on Saturday night. Something cozy and maybe a little romantic, but most importantly awesome food.
• A fun place for brunch on Sunday with a moderate-sized group
• People who want to have brunch with me and ironheadjane next Sunday, in Portland

(You can RSVP here or via e-mail.)

I don't write much negative about books here anymore, following a certain incident.

But sometimes I just can't help myself.

I'm glad I'm nearly done reading Kim Harrison's For a Few Demons More. ironheadjane bought it for me to read while I was sick this weekend, and I must say that I hadn't imagined bisexual polyamorous vampires could be so excruciatingly dull.

In truth, I'm much more bothered by the lack of imagination in the worldbuilding. Since I haven't read the earlier books in the series, I 'm not sure which parts of it are radically inconsistent with the premise, but I've identified ways that, no matter when the tomato virus occurred or what year it is in the story, things should darned well have been different.

I was also amused by the blurb from the New York Times atop the back cover, which described something as "A Smoldering Combination of Alice Waters and Ozzy Osbourne." I thought, "Alice Waters the chef? Huh? Well, there must be another Alice Waters, a writer, who I don't know about." Nope, the New York Times was talking about that Alice Waters, and it wasn't too complimentary, I don't think. (Also, the burning bunnies annoy me.)

The deviled eggs (with homemade mayo) are ready. (Not as pretty as I'd like, but darned tasty. Pretty will come with repeated applications.)

The hummus is made. The carrots, and celery, and broccoli are chopped. The tzatziki is made. (Laura did that.) We've got simple syrup and mint for drinks, to say nothing of champagne, beer, and soda.

We've got two kinds of pate, three kinds of cheese, and three kinds of crackers.

The serving dishes are washed. The lights are set.

At about seven-fifteen I'll start plating the food. At about seven twenty-five I'll put on some music. Until then, I'm not sure that there's anything to do but wait.

In case anyone's still looking for something to do tonight, ironheadjane and I are having a party, and you're invited.

If you'd like to come but don't know where we live, e-mail, IM, or comment for instructions.

Oscar Peterson's dead, bummer.

I'm sitting at home, eating leftover pasta puttanesca, waiting for UPS to come with my new toy.

Duck is defrosting in the sink, soon maybe I'll make the pickled cabbage salad, since that can be done in advance. Sometime after ironheadjane comes home, I'll pull the suitcase out of the closet and pack for tomorrow, and get to the post office, if it's still open, for some stamps. After that, I'll crisp-braise the duck, roast the potatoes, and make the port-wine pan sauce.

After that, dinner, and maybe a movie.

Tomorrow, Chinese food and A Christmas Story in hi-def at a friend's.

Given that we're on the top floor of a building with a roof deck, Laura and I presume that our obnoxious neighbors will keep us up until the wee hours on New Year's. Therefore, we might as well have a party ourselves.

You can show up anytime after 7, but I doubt many people will be there until 8 or 9.

Please RSVP, so you can get directions (if you need 'em), and so that we know how much champagne and snacks to buy.

Work is sending me to Westminster, Maryland, from the day after Christmas to Saturday the 29th. (Well, I'll be arriving late on the 26th and leaving early on the 29th, so I'm really there the 27th and the 28th.)

I don't know whether I'll have much free time — I don't know how hard they're wanting to work, I don't know whether anything will go wrong, and I don't know whether they're the kinds of people that would rather go out with friends and have a good time or have a vendor ply them with free food and drink.

I'm hoping to see Rob for dinner on Friday the 28th in Baltimore, and while I can't drink too heavily (gotta drive back to Westminster) or stay up too late (gotta drive to the airport at 6am), it might be fun to see people if folks are around and schedules permit.

I'm not excited to be traveling at this time of year, but it could be worse: one possibility was to fly out on the 28th (probably a huge holiday travel day) and back on the 31st.

In other news, I bought a Blu-Ray player to go with the new projector. What with the need for an upsampling DVD player, and the price drop for Blu-Ray, I figured I'd go for it.

Basically, the pricing was $200 for the upsampling DVD player I'd want, $250 for an HD-DVD player, and $300 for the Blu-Ray.

I hated doing it, but I hated not doing it too: there's still a lot of things to play out in the marketplace, but I had trouble with the idea of buying a new non-HD DVD player: the technology's on its way out, and I can't stand our low-end Toshiba DVD player.

I agonized for about two days, and came to the conclusion that there's not a definite right answer at the moment. The Blu-Ray players are either a bit slow and anemic, or expensive and overkill. In the latter category falls the PS3, which amuses me as a concept, but I doubt I'd play enough to justify it. (Even though Assassin's Creed looked awful cool at my friend Jer's house on his XBox 360...)

As a nerd, I hate making decisions when there's no right answer. Even decisions that I'll be able to fix for $200 or less in a year. It's agonizing to read about this stuff online: the partisan bickering is so loud, it overwhelms any reasonable discussion. And it makes it hard to figure out if a particular player is adequate, since partisans of the other format will go out of their way to trash each player. I've never seen Amazon customer reviews as useless as for hi-def video players.

I called the local video store, where I rent just about everything, and they said that as of the end of January, they'd be carrying both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, so that didn't help the decision between players, but did cement my decision to go hi-def now.

Ultimately, I picked Blu-Ray. I think that, technically, it's a better standard, it appears to have more studio support, and it has more upcoming releases in the next couple of months. Plus, counting the Playstation 3 units out there, there are substantially more Blu-Ray players out there already. By buying now, I vote, and add to whatever momentum it has.

Now I just have to get enough time to spend at home so that I can enjoy it...

So work is sending me onsite, to Fort Huachuca. Tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning. This decision was made at about 10:30 this morning.

I'll be there overnight, and if all goes well I'll be home by 9pm on Thursday.

But sheesh! Last minute, and probably with some holiday-related airport business, too.

Three of the four places that I really truly think of as home now belong to someone else. My house in Baltimore; My grandparents' house in New York; and my mother's house in New York. Only my dad's house remains.

All of the houses were sold for perfectly good reasons: the need to move, and to reduce expenses, for me. The need to get rid of stairs for my grandparents and my mother's husband. But still, it's weird and vaguely unsettling. Or maybe that's just the long Seattle winter talking. (Really, I feel fine, for the most part.)

I woke up this morning, remembering that my dreams were strange and amusing, but since I had fallen back asleep, I remember only the last image from the last dream: pressing down on the springiest, least crumbly yellow sponge cake you can imagine (with a slice cut out so you could see cross section, and not frosted), and watching it spring up again, over and over.

This morning, I went live on the new SASAG site, after presenting it at the SASAG meeting, and having worked on and off on it since the end of November. It took some fumbling to deal with mod-rewrite issues involving permalinks, as it always seems to when I use WordPress, but in the end it worked out.

Yesterday, I was trying to justify the high cost of movie tickets by showing how expensive it was to watch movies at home. Somehow, the numbers just didn't work out, and I ended up ordering a Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 720: at one movie a week for three years, for two people, it's far less than matinee price. Since I've been grumbling about the current projector (three and a half years old), it seems entirely justified.

It turned out to be tricky to find a projector that wasn't a zillion dollars where I could put it as far away as I'd like and not have the picture be too big. We're going to have about 60 inches on the diagonal -- and we'll be sitting only about 60 inches from the picture. That's about what we have now, of course, but going bigger just didn't make much sense.

The question now is what to do about the DVD player. Our current DVD player is the object of my frequent hate. It's a low-end Toshiba, and I was hoping to hold onto it until there was a winner in the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD battle. But there isn't, yet, and the only dual-format player worth buying is about $800. So do I buy a good upsampling DVD player, or suck it up and buy an HD-DVD player, as the price difference is less than $100 -- and some HD-DVD players that do upsampling are less expensive than some of the upsampling players I was looking at?

Speaking of which, my brother says that today is the 2nd Annual Forget Your Family, Love Your Television Day. So maybe I can't go home again, but some things will stay the same.

Today, out the window at work, I saw a rat.

This rat was on the outside part of a roof -- it seems to me if he was on the main part of the roof, he could have come to the railing at the ledge, and then gone down to the part he's on -- but he'd have trouble getting back up. This lip of roof runs around almost, but not quite, all of the building -- all but one corner of one side.

He's scary-icky in that Big City Rat kind of way, and I say that as someone who more or less likes rats. And he's big -- so big that I spotted him just glancing out across the street at the building, wondering what that squirrel-sized animal running along the roof was.

In any normal building, you could call the manager, maybe, and ask the manager to do something about it. But this building is a construction site, still, and it's tough to figure out who you can talk to, when everyone is working inside or on top. I didn't see a phone number prominently displayed, at least not on the side of the building that I can see from my office. Besides, if I call, they'll probably kill it without a second thought; it's not like they'd make it a pet.

There's a big rat, trapped on a ledge with no way off but a six-story drop, during a huge rainstorm and windstorm. There doesn't seem to be much of anything I can do to help, but I admit that I'm not fond of it, which makes it harder to go out of my way, especially as it would probably just be killed, and not particularly humanely.

Still, that must be one awfully unhappy rat. And I don't feel good about leaving it there on the roof.

I'm afraid that I'll see him up there again tomorrow, and that I won't have a better idea of what to do.