Teleidoscope

Thu, Feb 28, 2008

Noise

Posted at 9:46 pm MST to Weather

Last night was very windy. As in, there were radio warnings for semis driving north and south along the front range. Between the noise, and Dinah walking on me because the wind woke her up, I didn't get a lot of sleep.

I have several paragraphs of story on Bug (the OLPC) and about 6k of background text here on Sophia, but my head feels like it is full of marshmallow.

This is frustrating.

Posting may be a bit light this weekend. The text will be going elsewhere.

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Wed, Feb 27, 2008

Vampire

Posted at 4:42 pm MST to Weather

Once again I'm very slightly feverish in the mid-afternoon.

This is going to sound weird, but I have just realized that the times during the past few days when my body temperature has gone over 98.6 (which is my hot-flash temperature, normal is more like 97.something) coincide with the times when the sun sneaks in and hits me.

I'm not talking about sun-bathing here: I'm talking about sun, through glass, hitting a couple of square inches on my face or the back of my neck. The stupid virus must have increased my sensitivity to sunlight.

No wonder so many of my story characters have non-standard relations with UV.

I think I need to get drapes that close better, and not just to keep the strip of sunlight from shining on the big TV.

When my relatives from New England visited, they asked, "Why do you have your windows covered? You have such a great view." Large window areas in the living/dining room and 320+ days of sunshine at 6000 ft is the reason: without curtains this room is an oven when the sun hits the windows, even in the winter, unless it is actually precipitating or a major cold wind is kicking up.

The rest of the house is protected by the porch/deck roof, but not the livingroom and dining room, and the sun hits all of these windows every afternoon. It's just a question of what angle the sun hits the windows at, and for how long. The house is at a 41 degree angle from north-south and one dining room window faces more or less southwest, with the other 3 in this area facing northwest. Now, at the end of February, half of the curtains on each northwest-facing window are glowing, and the sun is seriously stalking me through the cracks of the southwest facing curtains.

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Tue, Feb 26, 2008

Java Rant

Posted at 10:03 am MST to Code

When I started working as a programmer, I used assembly language. (Uphill. In the snow. Both ways.) And much of my work when I was an actual programmer, not a CM/Build geek, was in C. I've debugged C++ builds, and VB and most everything else, but not really programmed in them.

Lately I've been working on Java builds generated through an IDE tool called WSAD, and googling for solutions to some situations I'm encountering, and all I can say is, "Good God. if the future is java and java programmers, nobody needs to worry about the Singularity happening in our lifetime." The level of publicly acceptable practice in Java programming is just appalling.

And it isn't the fault of the IDE: they don't bother to use it to set things up properly even by Java and WSAD standards. They just do whatever half-assed trick will more or less make it work. And you can forget about clean builds...

Took me a couple of hours to refactor a build in a way the developers claimed wasn't possible, and I don't even claim to be a Java programmer.

Mutter. Mutter. Whippersnappers. At least I know what a pointer is. And how to use an include path or classpath.

A related article by Joel Spolsky addresses some related problems with Java. The article is from 2005, but I saw it referenced recently somewhere.

Now I need to write a polite email explaining what I've done to their configuration so far by way of proof of concept.

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Mon, Feb 25, 2008

No Multitasking

Posted at 7:52 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I got through a full workday, but I had to turn on the instrumental-only no-DJs light classical station (Dish-network has some good music channels in the mix you get with their packages) instead of the alternative rock station I usually listen to during my workday. I didn't have quite enough energy to keep my focus with voices happening in the room.

When I'm healthy I work with rock and roll, news, traffic and weather reports going on without a problem. I got into that habit in high-school: letting the radio make a wall of sound between me and the rest of the house, which had no soundproofing by any stretch of the imagination. Now I have my own house a couple of hundred feet from the nearest neighbor, but the habit of working with a radio on remains.

This evening I actually left the house. For about 10 minutes. I haven't picked up my mail in at least a week, and didn't want to let it go any longer: the iGoogle weather report keeps saying it's supposed to snow tonight and tomorrow morning.

I'm glad I got the mail -- there were an Amazon order and a new box of checks waiting -- but just driving the half mile in down to the main road and back wiped me out. I feel weak and shaky It's and early bedtime for me I think.

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Sun, Feb 24, 2008

Bug

Posted at 5:54 pm MST to Technology

The OLPC's name is 'Bug', because it has those little antennae that stick up, and it is small. Also, I've started writing a story about the Bugs on it.

I'm having a lttle trouble getting it to stay connected to my wireless network after a suspend/resume cycle, (it loses the DNS settings) but it is turning out to be pretty handy for playing with while laid up sick in bed. It's light, and stays cool, and has a long battery life (differing in all three ways from my big laptop-that-holds-my-life).

I make a few more typos than usual on the little keyboard, but when I am composing text, speed isn't that big of a deal. It's sad, but a paper notepad wouldn't work for me any more. I need a keyboard to 'write'.

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Sat, Feb 23, 2008

Twilight Rising

Posted at 9:48 pm MST to Creative Work

I have uploaded my unsold novel Twilight Rising and made it available from the Astral Trading website, all 17 chapters and 8 appendices.

It is intended for mature readers. I have posted warnings but the files are currently not locked.

This novel was originally written using Sprint, an editor sold by Borland in the 80s. The files were later imported into Ami Pro for OS/2. More recently, the Ami versions of the files were imported into KWord.

To generate the website, the KWord files were exported as XHTML, and the files have received some minimal tweaking, but the HTML source remains ugly and primitive. There may be some garbling due to the multiple generations of translation. Please let me know if you find any.

Note: the only substantial difference between the posted file versions and the version that was submitted to various publishers (unsuccessfully) is that the English translations have been removed from the poems at the chapter heads. 17 poem translations out of 100 is way more than fair use. Alternative translations of the various poems can be found here for those who are interested.

I also colored the maps.

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Movies & Music

Posted at 9:29 pm MST to Media

originally posted Feb 19, 2008

This weekend was the Boulder International Film Festival, so the Philharmonic concert was exploring relationships between classical music and the cinema.

Before the intermission, they played a violin concerto by Korngold, who was an influential composer of film scores in the 30s and 40s. He established some of the traditional relationships between movies and music that were later used by composers like John Williams.

The concert notes suggested that it isn't so much that Korngold's concert pieces sound like movie music, as that movie music sounds like Korngold.

Personally, I find that a lot of 20th century classical music sounds like movie music. The previous conductor at the Phil included a lot of 20th century pieces and I could always tell symphonies that were written after movies were invented. I don't know what it is that I'm hearing as the difference between the 20th Century symphonies and the older works. It may be something about the transitions between different thematic material within the piece.

The second half of the Phil concert was Prokofiev's Cantata of music he had written for Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky. I like choir music and the music was well performed, but the overall event was a little disappointing. They had a narrator and showed (silent) excerpts of the film between the seven sections of the Cantata, but it would have been better if they showed more of the film, and showed it while the music was being performed.

I went to the Circle Bar during intermission and did some meat-space lurking. It turns out, the drinks and hors d'oeuvres are free for donors. Instead of buying a chunk of banana bread and a bottle of water from the regular caterers, I had a comfortably small cup of 7-Up, a small piece of brownie, and a few savory little puff-pastry things. They had other sweet things, too, and crudites, but I'm not sure I'm willing to risk trying to swallow raw veggies in public. And given a choice between macaroons and artichoke-stuffed puffs I'll take artichokes every time.

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Bone Key

Posted at 9:29 pm MST to Media

originally poseted Feb 19, 2008

Last week when I was running errands, I stopped at Border's and picked up a bunch of books by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. I have only read one of the books so far because I have been spending most of my spare time in Elizabeth Bear's extensive livejournal archives, and in the Shadow Unit LiveJournals and forums.

The first Shadow Unit novella, "Breathe" by Emma Bull, is now available on their website. It's excellent.

The book, The Bone Key, by Sarah Monette, is also excellent. It is a collection of connected short stories somewhat in the mode of Lovecraft. The viewpoint character is a museum curator in the early 20th century, and Ms. Monette does an excellent job of getting inside the head of a New England geek. (I have a lot of experience being inside the head of a New England geek.)

The various supernatural hazards Booth encounters are subtly interconnected and nicely original, and the museum makes a wonderful setting for several of the adventures. As a former librarian, the description of spooky, dangerous library stacks where there are strange noises after dark and the lights are unreliable pushed a lot of my buttons.

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Burned Soup

Posted at 12:49 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Thursday evening I tried to make my family's usual soup for when you are feverish: just a couple of bullion cubes, water, and tiny acini de pepe noodles. I kept fading out, so I burned it. Twice.

I finally succeeded in making a batch by setting the stove timer every five minutes, so I wouldn't zone out for too long and burn the soup again. My microwave timer and some of the others, produce a single discreet 'ding' that can be missed unless you are right in the room. And there is really no place to sit down in my kitchen if you are, for example, feeling a bit dizzy. The stove timer is an obnoxious loud buzzer that keeps making noise until you go into the kitchen and do something about it.

Note to self: if the stove gets replaced with one that has a discreet timer, invest in an obnoxious timer as a backup.

From 10:30 Thursday evening to 10:30 this morning (Saturday) I spent all but about 3 hours flat in bed, not even ever propped up enough to read. But the total rest seems to have helped some.

I only had two tiny bouts of the cough from hell Friday. One was right before I finally got up for a while to try to eat something: Dinah Kitty was glaring at me because I was making the waterbed shake and she knows the rule is no coughing on the bed. I've coughed a couple of times since I got up today, but they weren't the cough from hell, just my normal, swallowing-muscles-not-cooperating coughs.

I had a fever again for a while yesterday afternoon (for some reason I've been feverish in afternoons more than mornings) and need to watch out for a recurrence today. But I'm very hopeful that if I don't get too tired out I will finally get over this crud.

I've lost about 5 pounds over the past few days, but that is mostly dehydration: body fat percentage is spiking. I need to sit up for a while and drink a lot of fluids while I let my back unkink from laying down too long.

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Thu, Feb 21, 2008

Not Strep 2

Posted at 11:59 am MST to Miscellaneous

Today is an official sick day. I sent emails saying I was sick and went back to bed. About 11am I got a call from my doctor's office saying that the cultures came back negative for bacteria, so this crud is, as I expected, viral.

I'm eating breakfast now -- just buttered toast -- then I'll go back to bed, maybe with a book this time. I think I'm about slept out, but I don't cough when I am fully horizontal.

I've been off St. John's Wort for the better part of a year, but it has occurred to me that some of the miserable exhaustion I've been feeling may be neurochemical, so I took a couple of capsules with my breakfast.

I remember when I first started taking St. John's Wort, on a Friday after reading a Time magazine special issue on depression. About the middle of the morning on the following Monday my boss said "Wow, you're in a good mood today." So I knew the capsules were making difference.

That's a bit like my introduction to chromium piccolinate, after reading that there was evidence it helped stave off and treat diabetes, as well as being good for low blood sugar (which I have always had problems with). I took a chromium capsule in the morning, and at my mid-morning tea break I found that putting in my usual amount of sugar made the tea disgustingly sweet. I take a 200 unit chromium along with my vitamins, on the days I take vitamins. (I really need to figure out which supplement aggravates the swallowing problem and get back to taking the others more regularly.)

Selenium, which is used by the thyroid, doesn't seem to do a thing for me. The doctors tried to deliberately shut my thyroid down before I had the hemithyroidectomy, and I suspect the half of my thyroid that remains in there is still non-functional, so there is nothing to use the selenium.

My supplements include a multivitamin, additional B, C, D, and E, the chromium, glucosamine-chondroitin, and flaxseed oil. I'm suspicious that I may be sensitive to the glucosamine-chondroitin, in addition to having trouble finding it in sizes that I can swallow, but my reaction pattern is not being very predictable.

Today I'm just taking the St. John's Wort and chromium, to try to get my energy levels up without inflicting all th eother stuff on my stomach, which isn't very interested in food or anything else. I ate breakfast at 11 because I was blood-sugar-hungry, not because my stomach was complaining about not being filled.

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Wed, Feb 20, 2008

Ashihara

Posted at 5:06 pm MST to Creative Work

I woke up at 2AM knowing that the sequel to Twilight Rising is 'about becoming human'.

Don't ask me what that means yet.

But I'm pretty sure the Prince doesn't get viewpoint in this one, which seems fair since he achieved apotheosis in volume 1. I suspect that the main viewpoint characters are Chancellor Tajima, the Dragon Princess, and one of the Bugs.

I really need to figure out actual names for some of the Bugs. 'Robert the Devil', 'William the Bastard' and 'Hrolf Gangr' are handy placeholders, but not really appropriate references in context. But first I need to figure out more about how the Bug culture(s?) works. I need to find my notes about the biker Bugs, if they still exist someplace. I think I had begun to figure out castes and naming, and how things worked in the old world.

And if/when I rewrite the Kurowa stories as an actual novel with less ... ahem ... repetition, it needs Bugs in it early on, because it is historically later in what feels like the same world. Writing two worlds with the same magic system would just get confusing.
The sensible guard in that initial search party could be a Bug. And some of Hiro's retainers need to be Bugs.

I need to figure out the post-Twilight relations between Bugs and Mages, too. Are the magical 'group-marriages' segregated by species? If so, is that part of what needs to change to fix the energetic structure of the world?

It will be interesting to see if I can write something other than the Broken Land's King plot, now that is has been 15 to 20 years since I worked on Twilight Rising and the Kurowa stories.

By the time I get Twilight Rising reformatted for the website, I should be back in that world's head-space enough to start to see where I'm going.

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Tue, Feb 19, 2008

Not Strep So Far

Posted at 11:13 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I'm getting so tired of this stupid cough/throat infection. It sort of pretends to go away, then comes back for another round. I finally gave my doctor's office a call, just in case it really is bacterial, this time, or I'd picked up a secondary infection they could do something about.

The throat swab gives preliminary results in 15 minutes. Mine came back negative for strep, which I pretty much expected. Next round of results (they see if there's anything there they can culture) in 48 hours.

I stopped at the supermarket on my way home from the lab, which was fortunate in terms of acquiring delicacies of the season. I got hot-cross buns. (I love hot cross buns.) And Girl Scout cookies -- three Thin Mints, one Trefoils, and a box to be delivered to the armed forces over seas.

But man, am I exhausted.

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Sat, Feb 16, 2008

Coughing as Exercise

Posted at 5:34 pm MST to Exercise

Strange.

I've been a slug for what seems like days and days. I expected that either my weight or my bodyfat percentage would be up. I was just getting showered and washing my hair prior to an evening at the Philharmonic and decided to check.

My weight seems to be carved in stone, but my bodyfat percentage is down almost another percent: I got readings of 39.0 and 38.8 at the same weight as the previous 39.9 reading.

During intermission at the concert, I'm going to try visiting something called the Circle Bar, which is reserved for major donors. This is going to feel very odd: it isn't the kind of thing I normally do. But, dammit, I'm a 53 year old business owner (and a major donor) and I shouldn't feel like an impostor in a formal, adult environment.

Some of the not-being-a-grownup feeling is because I have not had a grownup pattern of life (at least by my parents' standards). No kids. No spouse. Also, no parents to provide feedback, since they died when I was 27.

I suspect another part of the impostor thing is actually a class and socialization problem. My father was a watchmaker and my mother drove a school bus part-time, and they never did any formal entertaining at home. Very little entertaining at all that didn't involve relatives, actually.

Socializing among adults is something people did on TV. Or maybe something my parents did only when the kids weren't around. When I was very small, my Dad was a member of the Elks, and my Mom was in some kind of women's group at church. Later, after we moved to Montville, Dad joined the VFW and Mom eventually ended up in the VFW Auxiliary, and the vast majority of their interactions with adults from outside our household happened elsewhere.

Realistically, I suspect if any of the Circle Bar regulars notices me they will try to get me to join some committee or other.

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Fri, Feb 15, 2008

Torso RSI

Posted at 8:31 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I think the stupid cough is now finally almost gone. This is good. I have a weird form of Repetitive Strain Injury from coughing so much.

There is sore spot about the size of my hand between my lowest left rib and my waist, just at the side, above where my elbow tends to bump. I think I strained it with a spectacular sneeze while my torso was slightly twisted. And every time I have had a coughing fit for the the past few days, that strained spot has been stressed over and over again.

It's an odd little injury, finally beginning to fade as the coughing spells retreat. Maybe tomorrow I will try some cautious yoga again -- I missed yesterday and this morning because I didn't want to annoy what ever muscle it is that got tweaked.

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Thu, Feb 14, 2008

Radiation Treatments

Posted at 5:38 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I hope google picks this up. It might help someone.

In 2005 I had several weeks of radiation treatments. When I had my 6 month followup with the radiologist, he said he was amazed at how little damage my skin was showing. I think there are three factors that contributed to this.

1. I have always put my trust in the SPF value of cotton.The skin on my torso just never had much radiation exposure, even UV, to deal with previously. (I don't tan, I burn or freckle or both. My hair started out dark, but ran out of melanin around the time I graduated from college. I don't think my skin had any melanin worth mentioning to begin with.)

2. For work-schedule reasons, when given the choice between fewer, stronger radiation treatments and more, weaker treatments, I chose the accelerated schedule. This shortened the time from when the stress on the skin began to when it ended and healing could begin.

3. I used huge amounts of 99% aloe vera jelly on the whole area targeted by the radiation, every day. To the point that I developed something like diaper rash because my skin was soggy all the time and rubbing against my clothes.

I really recommend the aloe vera jelly.

And 10% higher radiation doses instead of an extra week or two of recurring damage might be worth considering.

This is not to say that I didn't have after-effects from the radiation: the skin on that side is very, very slightly more leathery compared to the other side, and I think the underlying muscles got slightly cooked (no way to get the aloe vera to them). After nearly two and a half years I'm just finally getting them stretched out so that I can do yoga again. But part of the delay was waiting for the surgical scars to fade: I find that my scars stay pink and tender and sort of puffy for about two years and then fade way out.

After my thyroid surgery in 1986, my throat looked like it needed Frankenstein bolts as accessories for about two years, then, poof, the scar faded to white and went flat and became much less noticeable. I've noticed a similar pattern with other scars over the years, so now I generally assume I need to wait two years for a scar to fade and get flexible. I don't think there is anything you can do to hurry that part of the healing.

I was reminded of the aloe vera because I burned my thumb on some steam taking my supper out of the microwave, and broke out aloe jelly.

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Wed, Feb 13, 2008

Fever

Posted at 10:07 pm MST to Miscellaneous

This is annoying. I thought I was actually getting better today. I did comparatively little coughing even when I was talking on the phone, and I found the energy (or cabin fever) to go out and run some errands. But I've eaten very little today, and nothing since I got home from my errands. And my shakiness didn't entirely feel like low blood sugar.

"I wonder if I'm running a fever," I said to myself. And was very surprised to find that I am, just barely, according to my mercury thermometer. Given that my normal body temperature reads low (or maybe the temperature in my mouth is low) except in very hot weather, I am probably running an actual fever.

Maybe it will burn out this stupid crud if I let it do its work.

It might be interesting to invest in one of those fancy thermometers that measure the infrared inside your ear, and see whether the low normal temperature is my mouth, or me in general.

I had an oral digital fever thermometer, but it died, so I'm back to the old mercury one that my Mom gave me when I went away to college or got my first apartment (I can't remember which). This thermometer was not bought in a store: one of my brothers was in the hospital, and the thermometer was sent home with him: they didn't have single use covers for thermometers in those days, so the hospital sold you a thermometer that stayed with you and went home with you.

I don't remember which brother this particular thermometer came home with. I think we accumulated a couple of them.

My younger brother had his tonsils out, I think.

And our youngest brother has a history of duodenal ulcers that put him in the hospital a couple of times when he was young. (And a few times since then, unfortunately.) That was kind of scary: one time they had to put about 8 units of blood into him before they got the bleeding stopped, and he was just a little kid at the time. By the time they were done, I'm not sure he was using any of his own blood. (We made jokes about oil changes.)

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Tue, Feb 12, 2008

Fanfiction

Posted at 11:59 pm MST to Creative Work

I've become addicted to Shadow Unit a new complex of online entertainment that includes, among other things, the ongoing LiveJournals of several fictional characters. It describes itself as fan-fiction for a TV show that does not exist.

I have also been exploring the LiveJournals and blogs of some of Shadow Unit's creators: Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, and Sarah Monette.

I have been especially engrossed in Elizabeth Bear's LiveJournal, where she writes extensivle and articulately about writing and life with impressive candor and humor. It's making me think about my own occasional forays into fiction writing, and what I want to do in the way of writing going forward.

My mind has been full of stories as long as I remember, with characters and worlds and plot fragments tangling together. Both the worlds and the casts go through major phases: for about a year, now, Tosun Bekdeli and his mule Rakkas and their associates have lived in my head. Before that it was the world of Cherani and its inhabitants, and before that there were others of varying degrees of originality.

Some of my stories have made it out of my head and onto paper over the years. I had one twopager published in a company newsletter in 1989 or 1990, and I had several stories published in StarTrek fanzines in the 70s and in an anime APA in the late 80s or early 90s. I have also completed one original novel, which was rejected for professional publication because it was basically too weird for the room.

I should note that although my stories were published in fan outlets, I have only ever written one short vignette that can be described as fanfiction. I am obsessive-compulsive about world-building details and find it impossible to write other people's worlds. So my stories that were published in the StarTrek fanzines were original fiction not involving any Star Trek settings or characters. My APA stories were inspired by anime and manga and Japanese culture and folklore, but the specific characters, settings and histories were all original.

I am trying to figure out why the stories were able to come out of my head at a few times during my life and not at others. There seem to be three factors that I can identify.

I do not seem to actually output fiction when I am producing a lot of code at work.

I do not seem to output anything without at least a nominal audience -- like the fanzines or APA group, or the hypothetical audience of the unsold novel.

And I seem to produce fiction when I am interacting frequently with other writers and artists.

In the late 70s my best friend was a writer and artist who was also publishing original work in SF and Star Trek fanzines and APAs. I still have a binder full of an improvisational collaboration we tried to write (basically, some of her characters encountering some of mine, out in space) typing pages and mailing them back and forth. But she suddenly stopped communicating with me in 1981 -- I have never quite understood why.

I wonder sometimes whether I was expected to seek her out and beg for her attention. But I was in no shape to do that.

I was busy programming for a few years after that, and taking various odd classes and getting involved with feminist Paganism, and meeting Nanette, and having at least one bout of serious depression.

In the late 80s at a MileHiCon, I met Patricia Munson-Siter. I had known of her for years: she was active as a writer, artist organizer in a number of different fandoms, including the ones where I lurked on the fringes. She got me addicted to anime and manga the first time around, and invited me to join one of her APAs. We collaborated on our APA subs for a couple of cycles, then split off into separate ones.

Pat and I started writing novels at the same time. I finished mine, but I don't know wether she finished hers. After her husband left the AirForce, they moved to New Jersey and lived with his parents for a while, and she dropped out of touch with fandom. (It seems that she is still an organizer: I googled her a while back and found she was an officer in her local chapter of the DAR).

I stayed active in the APA for a few cycles after Pat dropped out, then got busy with the job that gave me 3 years of what I refer to as clinical indignation. And the fiction writing faded out, even though my head remained as full of stories as ever.

I seem to be like one of those fruit trees that will not bear unless another different tree is nearby. I don't need physical proximity: during the years we were friends I lived in Boulder and Pat lived in South Dakota, and it wasn't until I moved to the same town that my other friend abandoned me. My writing buddies were always penpals.

Nanette is a wonderful friend, but she isn't a writer or artist at the activity level I seem to need in a writing buddy. (And it isn't sensible or fair to lean on her for everything in my live outside of work.)

These days, with email and blogs and other online resources available, having a writing buddy would be a lot cheaper (no wonder the Post Office is going broke, and there seem to be fewer Kinko's competitors around).

I think if I ever want to write fiction again I need to become less of a lurker in fandom and more of a participant again. This blog has at least gotten me back into the habit of writing stuff that isn't work related, but I don't think it is giving me the audience or feedback I need to output the stories.

I also think I'm going to put my novel up on the website, probably a chapter at a time. This may not happen immediately. The novel is intended for a mature audience, so I may need to put it behind some kind of block, so people need to claim to be over 18 to read it.

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Sat, Feb 09, 2008

More Spices

Posted at 7:07 pm MST to Technology

Today is the first time I have left the house since Tuesday, and that's probably just as well. A quick trip to Whole Foods (the ex-Wild Oats) and to pick up my mail wiped me out. I will be so glad when I get over this crud. I've mostly been spending my time working my way through the Complete Calvin and Hobbes, which was on sale for half price at Costco before Christmas.

I had some more of my buffalo-blueberry stew for supper. The gravy was less acid than I remember it, and needed salt. I added a little Girardelli's Double Chocolate hot cocoa mix, too, just to add even more richness. Buffalo and blueberries works well, but next time I need either less tomatoes or sweeter tomatoes.

The week's mail included my second shipment of spices from World Spice Merchants. I'll need to set up and label some more tins tomorrow, and order some additional tins in various sizes.

Yellow Mustard seed (to replace what spilled last time)
Coriander seed
Fenugreek seed
Celery seed
Cardamom seed
Rosemary
Porcini Mushrooms, dried
White Sesame seed
Black sesame seed
Caraway seed
Crushed Red Pepper Flakes

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Thu, Feb 07, 2008

Cough from Hell

Posted at 10:48 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I spent most of yesterday coughing every few minutes. And it was a really nasty cough.

When I went to bed, I thought that if I was still coughing that much this morning, I should probably call my doctor's office. And if things got any worse, (breathing became difficult, for example, instead of just being interrupted by the coughing) a visit to urgent care might be in order.

Today has been much better. In the first 12 hours after I got up this morning, I only had a couple of very minor coughing spells, without using any meds. I've been coughing again this evening, but I think that is because I am running out of energy even though I took it very easy today. (Naturally today, when I might have been able to talk without coughing, I did not have any conference calls. Even the one that was originally scheduled got cancelled.)

I also cleaned out all of the leftovers in my refrigerator that were even slightly iffy. I don't want to be challenging my system when it busy fighting off the crud.

I hope there will be more improvement tomorrow.

For now, I've taken some Advil to knock down the inflammation caused by the coughing. This was recommended by the doctor I used a number of years ago: when you have been doing a lot of coughing, you reach a point where some of the coughing is trying to clear the bronchial obstruction caused by the tissues that have been irritated by the earlier coughing, which doesn't hardly work. Knocking down the inflammation breaks the cycle.

I wish I'd known the Advil trick when I was a kid (it's supposed to work with aspirin, too, but not with Tylenol. which kills pain but doesn't affect inflammation as much). My Dad used to yell at me because I got stuck in cycles of coughing-because-I-had-been-coughing.

Talk about blaming the victim: as if him smoking in the house all of the years I was growing up had nothing to do with it. As if him smoking in the house when I was coughing had nothing to do with my not being able to stop coughing.

In the summer, when the windows were open it wasn't as bad, but in the winter... well, it's probably just as well no one ever brought a canary into the house after my Mom went into the hospital. She always aired the place out at least once a week, even in cold weather, on Saturday when we cleaned the house and changed the sheets. I don't know whether Dad knew that. He probably wouldn't have bothered with such a waste of heating oil even if he had known it was part of her routine.

I remember going home for a visit about this time of year, and opening the back door and being engulfed by an appalling wave of stale cigarette smoke. I went around opening every window in the house to try to get some cross-ventilation to clear things out a bit. Dad was angry and insulted, but by then it was about 8 years since I had bee a full-time winter resident (college, grad school, and a couple of years in my own first apartments) and I had gotten used to the luxury of breathing actual air.

I do not react well to environments with cigarette smoke in them. I am so glad tolerance for side smoke has receded over the years.

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Wed, Feb 06, 2008

Creeping Crud

Posted at 4:18 pm MST to Miscellaneous

This afternoon my massage therapist called. She said she had the creeping crud, and needed to cancel our appointment this evening.

Coincidentally, I had been thinking that I should call her and ask to cancel. I am past the worst of my own case of crud, I hope, but I still have the Cough from Hell.

It was embarrassing today: I had two phone calls with people in Edinburgh, and could only say a feww sentences at a time before I had a coughing fit. It's just as well they had a few thousand miles of wire separating them from the germs.

Yesterday I seriously considered attending the Democratic Caucus, but it turned out not to be at the Fire House a few blocks from the Costco. It's probably just as well I ended up not attending. A few hours in a crowded room (and according to the news reports all of the sites were very crowded) and this cough might take out the entire 19th precinct.

The radio this morning said more than 150,000 Democrats caucused yesterday in Colorado, and less than 60,000 Replicans. I find that impressive in a state that was considered a Republican stronghold not long ago.

I wish it had been a primary instead of a caucus. Voting, I can do. But I'm not good with crowds even when I am healthy.

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Mon, Feb 04, 2008

Buff Stew Followup

Posted at 6:46 pm MST to Technology

It wouldn't hurt if the potato and carrot chunks were smaller next time. They held their shape really well

Needs something in the sauce to balance it. Or maybe fewer tomatoes, or red wine instead of the mead. It's tangy rather than curry-like, which is good, and what I was aiming for. But the sauce has a sort of acid finish on its own. It will be interesting to see what it's like tomorrow.

The sauce is fine when sopped up with last night's sourdough bread. Maybe it wanted flour instead of arrowroot as thickening to take the edge off.

It might also want more fat during or after the browning stage. Buffalo is a LOT leaner than beef.

I've got enough stew for several more meals, so I'll have chances to add things to the sauce. At the moment I'm thinking a little bittersweet chocolate might be interesting.

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Buffalo stew

Posted at 5:06 pm MST to Technology

1. pound buffalo chunks, silver skin removed, dredged in flour, browned in olive oil
   deglazed with 3/4 cup mead
2. small red potatoes, halved or quartered
3. carrots, cut into large chunks
4. celery stalks sliced on the bias
5. shallots, peeled and cut into chunks
6. oz 'baby bella' mushrooms, cleaned, end of stems cut off, cut into large chunks
   1/2 cup dried blueberries
   1/2 cup sundried julienned tomatoes

1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4-1/2 tsp ground mace
1/4 tsp cumin seeds, ground
some ground nutmeg

1. allspice berries, ground
   some whole cloves, ground (maybe 1/4 to 1/2 tsp after grinding)
   just under 3/4 tsp old dead ground coriander
2. very small cinnamon stick, ground
   1/4 tsp ancho flakes, ground
3. small pinches kosher salt

The veggies need to be left fairly chunky, so they won't disappear during the cooking.
Put everything into the crockpot on low, stir to mix the layers of ingredients, pour 1 cup of organic chicken broth over the top to help hydrate the berries and tomatoes and disperse the spices.

This all pretty well fills the 5 qt crock pot before the veggies cook down. Note spice quantities were kept small because only the coriander is an old supermarket spice. The rest are fresh from the importer and in some cases freshly ground as well

I couldn't get the bottle of regular mead open, so I used some from Redstone Meadery that has cinnamon and vanilla in it. It comes in a blue bottle with a wire-clamped stopper (like an old-fashioned mason jar) instead of a cork.

Since I'm working from home today, I stirred it every hour or so, mostly so carrots and potatoes on top would get pushed down into the cooking liquid. At noon I tasted it and added a little more salt, bearing in mind that I expected the gravy to be more concentrated at the end of the cooking.

Near the end of cooking I mixed a tablespoon and a half of arrowroot with water, then drizzled the mixture into the stew to thicken the gravy a bit (the flour from dredging the buffalo bits is not quite enough thickening). This is the first time I've tried arrowroot instead of cornstarch. It made the gravy thick and shiny, but I could probably have used less: there was less liquid than I thought in the lower layers of stuff in the crock pot, and the juice thickened up instantly when I put the arrow root in.

The stew is very dark colored: blueberries will do that. The potatoes are not blue, which would look weird: they are a dark golden brown. The meat is almost black, not gray the way it sometimes in in stew even if you brown it first.

This is a good day for stew-- it has been snowing all day. Time to eat, with some fresh bread I baked yesterday.

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Sun, Feb 03, 2008

Game

Posted at 6:47 pm MST to Technology

Not that kind of game. I mean the kind of game you buy in the butcher department.

Wild Oats is now almost completely transformed into a Whole Foods. Yay. Maybe their produce will be more trustworthy. I've been buying their organic bananas for the past couple of weeks, and haven't encountered any weird badness, which is encouraging. I bought some celery and carrots and mushrooms today. We'll see how it goes.

I bought some ground venison, which is thawing now: I'll make venison burgers for supper. What I really want is venison stew chunks, but to get that, I need to encourage them to stock venison at all.

I also bought some buffalo stew chunks. I was impressed. They weren't frozen and prepacked in the specialty meat section, with the Ostrich and venison. The buffalo was just in the butcher's case: ground buffalo, stew chunks, steak and some roasts, just sitting there between the grass-fed beef and the New Zealand lamb. The celery, carrots, and mushrooms are going to be in the buffalo stew in the crock pot tomorrow -- I already have potatoes in the house, and onions and shallots and garlic.

I also have a package of sun-dried tomatoes in the house, and dried blueberries. And raisins, of course. I wonder what would be most interesting in a buffalo stew. Maybe some raisins if I use a red wine to deglaze the browning skillet, or blueberries with mead...

Since I have all those new spices in the little tins, I should do something interesting with them. I don't want to do a curry as such, I don't think. I need to check my medieval cookbooks for interesting spice combinations. (And the web, of course.)

I'll put together a preliminary mise en place tonight and grind whatever spices I decide to use. Then brown things and peel and chop vegetables in the morning, and put everything into the crockpot for the day.

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Sat, Feb 02, 2008

Classical Mystery Tour

Posted at 11:01 pm MST to Media

Quotes from this evening: "If you can remember the 60s, you weren't there." and

"If you can remember the 60s, you're probably IN your sixties."

I'm not quite in my sixties yet. I was in fourth grade when President Kennedy was killed,
and I think I was in third grade when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. So I was actually a little too young to appreciate the early Beatles. This is relevant because I just attended the "Classical Mystery Tour" concert.

Classical Mystery Tour is four guys who used to play the Beatles in 'Beatlemania' on Broadway, playing the Beatles, backed by an orchestra, in this case the Boulder Philharmonic orchestra, so the combination can perform ALL of the notes in various Beatles performances as they are heard on the albums. They mostly included songs that had orchestral backups, so the playlist

Songs like "Day in the Life" and "I am the Walrus" are very impressive live. Actually, all of the performances were excellent. I have to say the performer playing Paul McCartney was born for the role: the resemblance was a bit eerie, even allowing for the assistance of the costumes and haircuts and wigs. ('John Lennon' had 4 costume changes, the others had 3. The Sgt. Pepper uniforms were... very colorful.) And "George Harrison" played the Eric Clapton solo from "As My Guitar Gently Weeps" -- they 'apologized' because Eric couldn't be here tonight. :-)

They also said 'Here's something the Beatles never said at a concert: check out our web page."

They did "Hey Jude", "Twist and Shout" and "Money Can't Buy Me Love" as encores. People were standing up and pogoing and swaying and singing along and waving lit cell phones. (I waved my cell phone too: I was never a smoker, so I could never wave a lighter, even when I finally started going to concerts. Cell phones are more democratic: pretty much everyone has one.)

I didn't cough very much during the concert, though I'm still getting over the crud. Thank goodness for Altoids. Of course, coughing during Beatles music is not as annoying to other people as it would be at a normal Phil concert -- I could hardly hear myself coughing.

I bought a CD and a T-shirt.

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Fri, Feb 01, 2008

Papersize for OpenOffice on Linux

Posted at 10:58 am MST to Code

If OpenOffice on Linux keeps defaulting to the wrong paper size (A4 vs. letter or vice versa) check the value in /etc/papersize and make sure it is set correctly. Also check the values of any PAPERSIZE or PAPERCONF environment variables.

You need to close all OpenOffice windows after changing /etc/papersize, so that OpenOffice is shut down completely. Then reopen it to see the chnaged default.

Ubuntu seems to default it to A4. Fedora had the file, but with only a comment in it. And Centos 5 did not have the file at all (I may not have openoffice installed on that machine.

Oddly, OpenOffice on Windows XP hung opening a Windows doc file that opened fine on Linux. I should probably check for OpenOffice updates. That file was from Europe, so the A4 paper size in it was not from the default setting.

I need to remember to check the papersize settings on docs from Europe.

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