Somewhat

On the job market again

2009-11-07T17:14:54Z

Well, Current Employer has finally gone well and truly crazy, and it's time for me to restart the old job hunt.

Basically, they ran out of money without warning anybody, and decided to furlough the entire Cambridge office over the next couple of months, starting next week. Surprise!

But wait, there's more!

The CEO has seemingly decided that it was more fun when the company was just him and half a dozen close friends doing contract R&D gigs, and has decided to "spin off" the remaining 80% of the company including me* as a "Rural GSM, Inc." sort of company. That means that (if he finds more money) I would be in a company with all of the built up organizational crud, stripped of its useful assets, most experienced engineers, and token decisive manager, and with no actually novel software projects for the foreseeable future. Oh, and with all management decisions taking a round-trip through India, for extra time-shifted fun.

If the organizational side is bad, but the business case is frankly bizarre. If these two partial companies were independently viable businesses then there was no reason to split the company in the first place. If the contract R&D shop is viable and and the spinoff is not then this furlough is a layoff by another name. If he thought the spinoff were viable and the contract R&D shop not, the CEO wouldn't have chosen this path in the first place.

So I think this furlough is in effect a layoff with no severance plus the promise of a particularly unappealing job offer in a couple of months. Since I don't much care for "Rural GSM Inc." or whatever the spinoff is going to be (if it even really exists) it's time to open up the job search again.

That means that if you know a company that needs a nonnihil, I would love to know about it. Particularly if it isn't in telecoms!

(* From a purely conservation-of-angular-momentum perpective, I question whether one can be said to "spin off" a larger and more massive object -- surely it is oneself that is offspun!)

nngh

2009-05-21T18:39:16Z

They say that survivor's guilt means that you survived.

The layoff hammer missed me by a hair today, but it's going to be pretty quiet around here.

Dear Fidelity

2009-01-03T00:52:55Z

Dear Fidelity:

First of all, let's get the simple stuff out of the way. I do not hate you for losing a lot of my money. Everybody loses money now and then, and I wouldn't have entrusted you with it if I weren't willing to take a risk. Times are hard, and I appreciate that. So I don't hate you for losing lots of my money.

I do, however, hate you for absolutely everything else.

Your customer service is crap. Your databases are crap. Your website is warmed-over crap. Your internal policies are crap, your account management is crap, and the absolute nicest and most generous thing I can say about your phone system is that your hold music is crap.

Let us get a few things clear. First, my social security number. You know it. You've had it for, oh, eight years now. It has been correctly entered into your system at least four times by authoritative sources, plus of course all of the eight billion times I had to enter it back when it was the only username you allowed. So while I'm sure there is a good reason that you decided inexplicably and in one place to switch one digit of it, it escapes me. I'm willing to bet, though that your excuses -- blaming the computer, blaming our payroll provider (which is also, coincidentally, Fidelity), blaming me -- are wrong. I'm guessing that your recent layoffs somehow neglected to get rid of fumble-fingered fuckwits who think that manually mucking in your mountainous account database is a magnificent occupation.

Speaking of accounts -- I have one. Not zero, unless you are considering stealing the meager remaining contents of my retirement accounts, or two, unless the alternate-social-security-number version of me (who is probably is probably recognizable by his evil-twin goatee) is gainfully employed somewhere. Given that you restrict people to one account per SSN, probably telling me to create a new account with you was not a wise or sensible answer. (Of course, I imagine it worked better for you, given that you did it with the wrong number.) Now, I know that counting to one is a problem for you guys -- you inexplicably duplicated my IRA, too, and were unable to delete the extra, leaving me permanently with a $0 IRA listed on your pages. But I would suggest that any of a variety of local preschools would be willing to teach you the trick. It helps if you have one finger to count; I can volunteer a particular one of mine for the task.

Now, I understand that you are fond of the past -- after all, your company's glory days occurred in it. But I have not been employed by the felonious halfwits and backstabbing careerists at Comverse for six -- six wonderful -- years. That they apparently set some "gasp in surprise and tell the customer that he is fucked" bit on my account is, regrettably, unsurprising. That such a bit should be visible to each and every one of your customer support people but not to your actual customer is only natural. That you should have no ability or authority to change it is to be expected. What is less clear to me is why your system would have such a bit in the first place. Maybe this is just my autodidact DBM self speaking, but I would in general prefer to leave out the "your previous employer can screw up all of your future 401k's" feature, or at least deactivate it for companies like Comverse that were publicly and visibly run by SATAN. Given that it is you who want my money, rather than vice versa, I would assert that some confusing information that you have mysterious gleaned about me from a previous employer is your rather than my problem.

Of course, none of these things should be a problem. A quick call to customer support should fix these things right up. Well... if there were customer support to call. But I can't help but notice that you neglected to put that phone number on your website. There's the number for new enrollees, and a number for companies to call, but no number for people who are already your damned (and oh are we damned) customers! Well, hm, I'll just complain on your little complaints form... oh. That doesn't work. "Illegal characters in your message" even when I leave the message blank. I guess that any characters that might constitute a complaint have too much character for you melon-farming email form.

So, imagine for a moment that I've tracked down the phone number for your "401k Helpdesk." It is only natural, then, that they should never have heard of my employer. "Well, I'm going to have to use the advanced search" is possibly the least reassuring thing one can hear a helpdesk person say. And of course having failed to find (or even advanced find) my company, even with its group number in hand, of course you should ask the customer if perhaps his account is at a different Fidelity. You know, maybe Fidelity Of Russia or something. Of course the customer had to enter his username and password to even get this far, but that must be a coincidence. The right answer is to tell him that he needs to talk to the "retail desk" and transfer him to ten minutes of static-afflicted hold music followed by a loud screeching noise and an automated hang-up.

Now were said customer, with the aid of two expert bureaumancers and most of a day of pounding on your phone system, to finally keep your helpdesk people on the phone, here are some things that he might not appreciate hearing:

That Fidelity Payroll Services cannot talk to him but only to his Benefits Manager ('cause of security)...

That Fidelity 401k Helpdesk can talk to him but not his Benefits Manager (privacy, of course)...

...and under no circumstances can Payroll and Helpdesk talk to each other, lest (I presume) the universe explode...

...and so he and his Benefits Manager must now play an elaborate game of telephone between these two groups, each of which will naturally blame the other, for five hours.

[Edit] (just remembered -- and, just for laughs, you have my postal address wrong every database you can find, but not all of them, as you definitely have the right address for sending me infinite numbers of spurious complaints about me email address...)

[Edit] (...which would be no problem except that zip code is one of your security questions, and each part of your company seems to have picked randomly from the available set)

Now I know that it is an awful inconvenience on you to have to lose a lot of my money. Naturally you would like to help me out by refusing to take any more of it. But I would remind you that it is your job to take my money. It is the purpose of your business. It is, dare I say it, a goal toward which we expect you to show some fidelity. So your aggrieved disinterest in getting more thousands of dollars of my money is really a bit of a surprise. That your people, having created a problem that prevents me giving you money, should show utter disinterest in correcting it is rather confusing. Is it possible that you have accidentally reversed the lists of which half of your company to lay off, and have retained only the apathetic, incompetent, and confused?

...and speaking of confused, let's talk about email statements. I want them. I opted in to them, a fact which concerning corporate emails is nearly unique in the world. I gave you an email address that has been happily used by the entire remainder of the known universe for ten years. And yet every month -- twice! -- you send me a paper letter explaining that my email is bouncing. I am reasonably sure that I would have noticed if I had stopped getting ads for herbal supplements with punctuation and digits in their names. You seem to be the only people on the planet not capable of emailing me.

Anyway, thanks for all your support. Should instant karma cause the entire population of your 401k "Helpdesk" to fall down a well, don't hesitate to call: I am sure I can find some quick-set concrete to throw down after them.

Many thanks,
--nonnihil

The Dark and Obscure Art of the Phone Interview

2008-09-12T17:41:23Z

Being in the midst of a job hunt, I am doing a lot of phone interviews. Because I hate phone interviews with the burning fury of a thousand suns, I would very much prefer that the phone interviews that must be conducted yield a maximum amount of useful information in a minimum of time, so that I don't have to do, eg, four or more phone interviews with the same company.

So let me offer some helpful advice. I have redacted the names of the companies involved to A, E, I, and O.

A good phone interview starts with actually calling. Company O, the same company that thinks it sensible to schedule four or more phone interviews, finds itself unable under the circumstances to actually call at the times it schedules, or indeed at all. When it does call, it calls the wrong person (sorry, unknown person with my same first name, that Company O keeps calling you at unusual times!)

Now typically there are some technical questions -- attempts by the company to determine whether I actually know anything. (Well, company A saw fit to completely omit this step, which sort of makes me wonder why they called me at all, but all the rest wanted me to answer some questions). I am a connoisseur of technical interview questions, and am always eager to hear new ones, but I have come to some conclusions about these questions from which a budding technical interviewer might benefit.

For instance: You will not have your Software Engineer job title revoked if you do not ask a question about Quicksort. I don't know where this rumor came from, that everyone is obligated to ask a questing about quicksort. Perhaps it is the only algorithm that anyone can remember after college? Let me tell you a few things about quicksort:

Note to Company E: "Dictate a quicksort implementation in C, over the phone, right now" is not a good technical challenge unless you are attempting to hire techno-autists or undergraduates. I am appalled at myself that I could answer this, and doubly appalled that an interviewer would consider that a good thing.

Quicksort is provided in the standard library of virtually every modern programming language. While an algorithms geek might be able to provide you with a nifty implementation, in real life everyone -- EVERYONE -- worth paying a salary to will implement it with the language-appropriate equivalent of "#include <stdlib.h>". That is why they are engineers, rather than professors.

Also, even that is usually silly. I have checked my company's 100K+ lines of code, and found exactly two array sorts, both of which ought to have been avoided, and neither of which is done on an array large enough for algorithmic performance to matter. I suspect that this is generally true: Most arrays that will ever be wanted sorted can be better generated by sorted insertions, spreading the latency over inserts is better in general, and the exceptions will mostly want to preserve the original array and so prefer a nondestructive sort (copy-the-array-and-then-quicksort will be much slower than mergesort or heapsort. Trust me on this).

So, dudes, why the obsession with whether an experienced and battle-scarred software engineer can spit out facts about quicksort? You're embarrassing yourselves (particularly you, Company O. I know for a fact that you have some good technical questions in your files, so you can't claim inexperience).

Some technical questions come tantalizingly close to not sucking, before returning to the mire of awfulness. Here's an example of a bad technical question, taken from Company O. Company O requested confidentiality (doubtless out of embarrassment), so let me cut out the crucial detail and give you the essence: "When you [do obscure thing X] to a running Java process, what happens?"

There are a number of interesting questions that this might mean. "In what order does it affect your threads," for instance, or "are finalizers called, and if so on which thread," or "could this condition be detected from running code?" In fact answering those questions requires a deep insight into the inner workings of the java interpreter.

There are also some silly and superficial questions here, eg, "what is printed to standard error?" This is a silly question because (1) it pretty much requires that the interviewee have at some point done X to a java interpreter, which isn't a terribly interesting job qualification, and (2) in a phone screen, it pretty much invites the interviewee to do X to a java interpreter and tell you what happens, which also isn't an interesting job qualification.

But hey, you know what would be even sillier than meaning the latter of those? Meaning the latter of those, but only mentioning it after you let the interviewee puzzle through the answer to the former, a priori, for five minutes and then tell him that no, he's wrong, because you meant the latter.

Particularly if the interviewee has previously mentioned that the j2me interpreters he works with generally don't actually have standard error, and so he logically would be very, very unlikely to have known or cared what was printed there.

I note at this point that I haven't said anything nasty about the phone interviewing prowess of Company I. This is because Company I's phone interview was effective, concise, challenging, and informative (well, it could have been done in one call rather than two, but that seems too much to ask these days). So take heed, all of you: It can be done right, you just aren't doing it that way.

"...but time and chance happen to them all."

2008-09-05T13:23:02Z

I've just found out that my company will turn back into a pumpkin ("suspend active operations") on the 30th. Three and a half weeks to take down the sites, shut down the networks, stick the demos on autopilot, raid the phone buckets for spare parts, and so forth.

We've had a good run of it, mind you. Five years is well over par in this business, especially if you're silly enough to get involved in mobile and music at the same time, ie, the two technology businesses most appallingly dominated by soul-blightingly evil wannabe-monopolists. We came very close to success at least twice and we're going out largely intact, which is a testament to our CEO's skills (not that he'd see it that way -- he's utterly devastated at the moment, taking it harder than any of the rest of us).

Anyway, this also means that I'm back on the job market. My resumé can be found here if you happen to be in the market for a Senior Software Engineer or something similar.

To the Editor

2008-07-07T13:34:04Z

Dear Sirs:

I appreciate that it is technologically possible, as well as terribly modern and Web 2.0 fashionable, to put RSS feeds on everything. However, putting an RSS feed on the collected works of Epictetus is perhaps excessive. He has very few new posts per day.

Foodblogging: Quick Hits

2008-03-29T18:18:28Z

Well, two weeks of ukelele spring break has been great for my sleep, sanity, and productivity at work. For cooking, not so much: Getting home at a sane time means that I've only got 45 minutes to throw something together (later than that means that V gets tired and loses patience before I get dinner on the table).

So there's not been anything particularly worthy to blog. Fajitas, a reprise of last month's chicken stew recipe (this time over herbed polenta -- way excellent!), burgers, that sort of thing. Nothing liable to be novel to any of you or particularly illustrative.

We did do a recurring salad of mine, which might be worth a note:

1c yellow pepper as 1/4" dice
1c jicama as 1/4" dice
1c pineapple as 1/4" dice
Adequate juice from the pineapple to make everything wet
1t chili powder
Toss together, serve cold.

Today I'm doing Irish Stew, again not particularly novel, but a good spring dish.

Also: these pecans, since I had pecans left over from a couple of weeks ago.

Reprise

2008-03-16T19:40:23Z

Parents in town, so I revisited a success of the past. The flaming step definitely alters the consistency of the sauce -- it gets more viscous and I think less dense (perhaps combustion products act as emulsifiers?). I overcooked the steaks a bit (juggling food for five is much harder than for two, and alters all my timings) but not fatally.

My mother threw together a salad -- arugula, baby lettuces, toasted pecans, raspberry vinaigrette, sliced apple -- that was a perfect complement to the steaks.

This recipe may have to move from the special-occasions category to being a more regular feature -- I could definitely stand to make this once a month, particularly now that I have salad insight for it.

The price of hubris

2008-03-09T23:35:35Z

Yesterday I noted the absence of my usual drumbeat of failed recipes. Naturally, then, today's dinner was overcooked steelhead under a balsemic reduction, served with the wrong salad and some pesto pasta.

Yeah, I overcooked the fish. Fish and I have serious differences vís-a-vís broiling times. Broiling fish is my personal kryptonite.

And the wrong salad! I had meant to do arugula and roasted pecans with a raspberry vinaigrette. But I get home from shopping only to discover that the raspberry vinegar in the pantry is so old and so off as to be utterly useless. I ended up tossing some store-brand Italian dressing on the arugula.

The saving grace, to the extent there was one, was some Cresti di Gallo pasta with pesto. There's a local specialty foods store, Capone's, whose pasta Whole Foods is now selling. Their Cresti are big floppy oddly shaped pasta half-torus-with-a-wattle things. They are a perfect canvas for thick, flavorful sauces like pesto because their weird shape guarantees that the sauce won't be uniformly distributed, giving a good contrast of sauce and not-sauce that serves to draw attention to flavors.

Overall Rating: Poor

Lessons Learned:
+ Still can't broil fish reliably, just like the last like nine flillion times
+ When brainstorming dinner at the store, do not rely on ingredients that you dimly remember having in the pantry somewhere: Even if you remember correctly that they exist, they're probably bad by now.

Fun Facts: Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker married in 1886 and were imprisoned in 1887 for the crime of... well, it's not quite clear. In the words of anarchist historian Roderick Long: "Judge Valentine...raised the question whether the couple's crime was a) living together as a married couple without actually being married, or b) getting married but in an illegal fashion." Harman and Walker, you see, had used irregular wedding vows in which Harman did not cede all of her rights to Walker, and Walker repudiated any legal but immoral rights the law might grant him over Harman (such as spousal rape).

At the time any couple eligible to marry in Kansas who lived together were automatically married in the eyes of the law. Only those who professed equality and denounced rape, it seems, were criminals thereby. Walker naturally received five times the sentence of his bride.

Stuffed Pork Chops

2008-03-09T00:26:59Z

Recipe here. I used equal parts chicken stock and cider vinegar for the liquid, as I was embarrassingly caught short of the others.

I omitted the raisins because mixing sweet into savory is a crime.

Overall Rating: Very Good

Lessons Learned:
+ The Alton Brown technique for cutting pork chops for stuffing really works. You don't actually need the plunger, though; a spoon will do.
+ The butter flavor of the outside was a bit intense, and the meat a touch dry (the stuffing may have wicked out the juices?). Both might be addressed by brining.

Fun Fact: I haven't had a totally failed recipe since starting this foodblogging. Y'all are good luck!

Roast beef

2008-03-04T23:55:48Z

My new guru, Cook's Illustrated, had wisdom concerning roasts. I've always been terrible at roasts, so I was intrigued.

The whole point of a roast is that does magic with cheaptastic cuts, so I grabbed an eye round roast from McKinnon's at $2.50/lb. Salted it heavily and mummified it in plastic in the fridge for a day to start. Then oiled, peppered, and seared the outside. Transferred to a 225-degree oven for an hour and a half until the temp reached 120, then turned off the oven but left it closed for another 40 minutes until the temp reached a nice medium-rare 130. Let it sit half an hour until dinner.

(CI argues in essence that what you would like is to cook at the roast's destination temperature for about a day until it comes up to temp. This recipe is their attempt to approximate that for those of us whose ovens don't go down to 130 and who don't want to leave the gas on for twelve hours. Hence finishing in a cooling oven. dolohov might like this notion.)

Served with a horseradish cream sauce (whip cream to soft peaks, fold in equal quantity of horseradish, salt and pepper to taste), plus a salad of mixed bitter greens.

Overall Rating: Excellent. Perfectly uniform pink medium rare, nice salty-beefy yumminess.

Lessons Learned:
+ Total drippings were less than two teaspoons -- the long salting really locks in those juices.
+ My oven is not as heat-tight as CI's. Not really surprising when you think about it.
+ Whipping cream by hand is much easier if you have angry shouty music turned up too loud on your iPod while you do it. Thanks, Corporate Avenger!
+ Verity loves horseradish cream sauce. Buh-wha??
+ With good time-management, this would actually be a very easy recipe. Good weekend food.

Fun Facts: I'm pretty sure that McKinnon's store scale is off. There's no way that roast was only 3 lbs -- I'd say it was closer to 4.5.

Cheap eats

2008-03-03T00:37:00Z

McKinnon's had hanger steak for $3/lb. Mmmm, cheap eats.

Salted for an hour, then marinated (balsemic vinegar, worcestershire, dried anaheim chilies). Broiled, served under onions, peppers, and mushrooms.

Overall Rating: Very good

Lessons Learned: None. I flipped the coin on hanger steak, and it came up heads this time. Good luck teaches no lessons.

Fun Facts: Voltairine de Cleyre became an atheist as a result of her being forced into a Catholic convent as a teen. Her first escape attempt from the convent -- which involved swimming a mile across a freezing river and then hiking, waterlogged and hypothermic, for seventeen miles -- resulted only in her being captured and sent back by friends of her family. Her second attempt succeeded, however. Later in life she would have her son stolen from her by the state because of her political views opposing marriage. Unlike many of her anarchist contemporaries, however, the only assassination attempt against her was by an insane friend of hers, whom she forgave.

Garlic shrimpies!

2008-02-29T02:24:45Z

I cannot easily describe this recipe, which I got from the incomparable Cook's Illustrated, nor is it on their website. Suffice it to say: Shrimp, plus sixteen cloves of garlic prepared three different ways. Tasty tasty tasty!

Served over wilted spinach in garlic olive oil because, hey, I had this garlic olive oil left over from the shrimp...

Overall Rating: Very good

Lessons Learned: Heed Cook's Illustrated. Revere Cook's Illustrated. Follow Cook's Illustrated.

Fun Facts: I meant to serve this with dinner rolls. They are still sitting on the counter where I forgot them.

Chicken Stew

2008-02-24T00:44:39Z

The January Cook's Illustrated had a page on stew theory. The things it had to say -- mostly about the order in which stew components should be added -- was something of a revelation to me. I'm an avid stewer, so it gets harder and harder to learn anything new even as I still suffer the alarmingly regular failures of any regular amateur stewer.

I make stew in a deep steel-plated aluminum pot. Real stewers, I am assured, use Dutch ovens, but frankly I never make enough stew at once to make that work.

Trimmed four chicken thighs of excess fat. Browned them in a bit of oil over high heat, aggressively scraping up anything sticking to the pot -- nothing to be allowed to blacken. Removed chicken, added the trimmed fat and rendered it out into the oil, then discarded the drained fat tissue.

Added a large chopped onion, sauteed until golden, added 2 tbsp of flour and built a dark roux around the onions. Tossed in three crushed garlic cloves as an afterthought.

Added chicken stock to cover, 2 tbsp tomato paste, then the chicken back in. Covered, tossed in the oven at 300.

In a shallow covered pan, simmered five dried chanterelles in chicken stock for 30 minutes. Removed mushrooms, chopped finely, and reserved the simmer liquid. Sauteed the mushrooms with a chopped shallot in a good oil. Re-added the liquid.

Checked the chicken. It wasn't done. Remembered that I'd forgotten to add any salt. Added a generous teaspoon, tossed it back in the oven.

Added parsely, sage, and a tiny bit of of cayenne to the mushroom mixture, left it to sit (argh!) while the chicken caught up.

20 minutes later, took the chicken out, added the mushroom mixture, served.

Overall Rating:
+ Excellent.
+ With a sourdought baguette: Profound.

Lessons Learned:
+ Building a roux around the savories in stew prep is an excellent substitute for the rather unpredictable buisness of thickening it by boiling it down
+ Adding herbs at the end of cooking is rather nerve wracking -- it's hard to tell if the stew is balanced while you're making it -- but really pays off in taste. The delicate flavors really shone through.
+ The long thin sour baguettes that Whole Foods sells are absolutely excellent.

Fun Fact: Taking the stew out of the oven, I was sure it was a total failure. Some of the roux had gotten stuck to the side of the pot above the stew and burnt, so although the stew looked beautiful, it smelt burnt burnt burnt. Fortunately, a false alarm.

Lame-out

2008-02-20T23:49:17Z

Too tired to do proper meal-planning, so I picked up some boneless chicken thighs on the theory that I've always got something lying around to do with them.

Unrolled them flat, seasoned each side generously with salt and spanish paprika, rolled them back up, let them sit. Then roasted them over carrots, onions, and garlic (400 degrees, 15 minutes just the veg, then 45 minutes chicken and veg). Sliced the chicken, served plus the veg over warmed, oiled pita.

Overall rating: Good, might have been better with rosemary and sage, perhaps a lemon slice wrapped up in the thighs.

Lessons Learned: None -- this was a lame-out meal of boring ingredients interacting in known ways.

Fun fact: Individualist agitator Ezra Heywood was imprisoned five times and died at hard labor in prison for publishing articles critical of marriage laws. As soon as his judicial murder was complete, the same Attorneys General attempted the same against his intellectual successor Moses Harman, who however managed to survive years of hard labor sentences despite being in his seventies.

Kheema Paratha

2008-02-19T00:01:50Z

So I have this chapati flour, and I'm still having fun, let's turn things up a notch on the difficulty scale and see if I can't get a horrible recipe failure...

(Lest anyone ask -- this particular self-destructive streak may be a product of self-paced elementary math: My 2nd and 3rd grade teacher took the view that if you can ace the test, you stayed in that unit too long. Failure means you're keeping the pace; success means you're falling behind.)

If you watch Manjula make aloo paratha, or read a recipe for kheema paratha, you will see a Sidney Harris "then a miracle occurs" step. A 6" diameter dough round is wrapped around half a cup of filling, the result is then rolled out with a rolling pin, and mysteriously it doesn't fall apart into pieces. Huh?

Overall Rating:
+ Enh.
+ With a chutney, perhaps, very good

Lessons Learned:
+ On paratha #1, we conclude: No, it really is ridiculously impossible. What we need here is a theory.
+ Whole wheat is slow to form a gluten. Perhaps if we let it sit for a while? ...
+ (But only after we form the ball -- if the gluten forms before we roll it around the stuffing, we'll never pinch it airtight and the stuffing will blort out the side!)
+ On paratha #2, we conclude: Good. Rolling it out forces the filling through the top layer of dough, but not the bottom, so it doesn't stick to the prep surface. Improvement!
+ On paratha #3, a clever idea: If rolling it out forces the filling through the top, roll it twice as big and fold it over on itself!
+ Paratha #4 is actually beautiful.
+ Oh yeah, flavor. Bland -- the paratha swamps the flavor of the meat. Needs a topping! Maybe I need to make onion chutney soon...

Fun fact: Verity believes that masala kheema is the Bestest Thing Evar. Useful to know!

Manjula's Kitchen HOWTO

2008-02-17T22:04:45Z

Things to keep in mind when cooking breads from Manjula's Kitchen recipes:

+ If you live in NE, do not mistake her "whole wheat flour" for your whole wheat flour. Hers is much lighter, finer-ground, and lower-protein than what we get up here. The recipes will fail. Go to your local Asian grocery and find chapati flour. You will be happier.

+ Manjula's hands are very, very small. If you use them as visual guides, you will roll all of the breads too thin and they will behave badly.

+ Manjula's quoted measurements are often wrong. Use the measurements (transcribed by her son, I think) in the youtube video descriptions instead. Or use common sense. 1:1 flour to water is soup; 2:1 flour to water is dough.

Let Us Now Praise Famous rhean

2008-02-17T22:04:39Z

Red lentil pancakes. That is all.

I made them with green chilies, served them with some marinated shrimp.

Overall rating: Very Good

Lessons learned:
+ These can -- and should -- be spread very very thin. Thinner than I did, for sure. But the oil needs to be pretty shallow for that to work.
+ Food processor not required; blender works just fine.
+ Decent leftovers, if reheated in a skillet -- but not a microwave, they tend to sog.

Fun fact: This is similar enough to the Manjula's Kitchen recipe for dosa that you can use that as a rough visual guide.

Steak poivre

2008-02-17T22:03:53Z

dolohov says that I should use this LJ for foodblogging. Enh, we'll give it a try. The major notable food occurrence around here is recipe failure, of course, but that can be interesting in its own right.

My most successful recent recipe was steak poivre. No two recipes for this are ever even slightly the same, but this did not dissuade me. Got a truly beautiful 2" strip steak from Whole Foods, cut it into two 1" steaks, covered it in a paste of garlic, cracked pepper, cracked brown mustardseed, salt, and bacon grease. Let sit for a few hours. Then pan-fried it, removed steak, added cognac, set on fire. PILLAR OF FLAME! That's a good thing in this case. Tossed in some shallots, a touch of sherry vinegar, some heavy cream; whisked vigorously. Miraculously, the sauce mounted perfectly, something which never ever happens for me. Poured it on the steaks.

Served with a salad -- blanched bok choy sliced thin, grated carrots, and chopped peanuts, splashed with a champagne vinegar. I had meant to do bok choy mignonette, but I forgot.

Overall rating:
+ Steak: Excellent
+ Salad: Okay

Lessons learned:
+ Our stove hood is not powerful enough for dramatic flames to appear reassuringly safe.
+ Something made this sauce mount perfectly. Burnination?
+ Grated carrots are too sweet to take a very sweet vinegar with good grace.

Fun Fact: Because I don't drink, I don't know cognac from Gatorade, so I asked my mother for a recommendation. On hearing my plans for the rest of the recipe, she recommended that I wait a little while and maybe she could make it up to Boston in time for dinner. Alas, she was joking, but perhaps I shall repeat this recipe when my parents next visit.

Basic legal precautions

2007-03-14T13:23:19Z

Quick, LJ'ers! Make sure that none of these people are on your friends list!

Remember, if you have not checked your friends list against this list, you might already be a terrorist.

UPDATE: Better check this one too. It seems that I'm already a terrorist. Oh well.

Conversation at work today

2006-11-14T19:51:30Z

(Co-worker A starts rummaging through stuff in office of co-worker B)
B: Looking for anything in particular?
A: Yep. (continues rummaging)
B: Well, you've come to the right place: We've got lots of things in particular here.

North Korea

2006-10-09T15:13:09Z

Dolohov wonders what is up in North Korea. This response being long, I've put it in my journal rather than in a pile of comments. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to assume that there actually was a nuclear test today, and that this isn't just a normal earthquake accompanied by opportunistic PR.

First up: batshit crazy versus careful planning. Is North Korea crazy, or does this meticulous planning indicate deep cunning? Well, both. I mean, evaluated as a person, there is some metric by which every country is crazy. The term doesn't really apply. I'm not really sure what human terms would apply -- North Korea is whimsical, perhaps (That always-readable bloodthirsty racist Gary Brecher puts it best: Kim Jong Il is impulsive, but the people who work for him are psychotically dedicated and talented. I think that adds up to something like whimsy). In a centralized country, meticulous people can be dispatched on crazy and whimsical errands -- no matter how strange or changeable the leadership is, long-term projects can and do still happen. Doesn't Mr. Kim's new opera open sometime soon?

Here is Central Question #1: Did North Korea have more to fear from internal or external enemies? As with all questions in foreign relations, no objective answers please -- it's the subjective that matters.

From a certain perspective the nuclear test is rational. If you assume that Mr. Kim is more scared of the US than of his own people, in fact, trading sanctions for nukes makes perfect sense. He has just guaranteed that he will never again need to worry about invasion, and the only cost was a bit more mass starvation and cannibalism in the provinces. It's a confident move, but not by any means a bad one.

Now for China. China's number one worry in every respect is anything bad happening to North Korea. This is not because they like North Korea -- even when they were setting up Kim Il Sung, the record is pretty clear that they hated and distrusted him (Gaddis' recent history, We Now Know, has some great declassified info on how the various big Communist leaders got along back in the 50s and 60s. You can call this revisionist history, but since Gaddis wrote the history he's revising, I think he's entitled.). Rather, this is because China is in the middle a very ugly economic puzzle of managing urbanization and controlling labor flows; a million refugees flowing in from Korea are really the last thing they need. So a political, economic, or military collapse in North Korea is to be avoided at all cost, they figure. Their nigh-hysterical diplomatic response to this nuclear test, combined with no meaningful action, means that China answers CQ1 the opposite way that North Korea does. Of course, they've also got some related concerns about nuclear ubiquity, but I'll get to those later.

South Korea is in exactly the same boat as China. Not every day that that happens. South Korea generally seems to believe that the most dangerous thing the North could do, worse than an outright war in fact, would be to collapse. They're probably right: North Korea would lose a war in a matter of days (though possibly destroy Seoul in the process), but a million refugees shambling through the DMZ would wipe out the South Korean economy and possibly political system overnight. As Morocco's "Green March" proved, a few hundred thousand civilians are at least as dangerous as an army against a civilized enemy.

Why now for the test? North Korea may have been trying for some time. They dug the test chamber more than a year ago, and held some sort of public event there then (or so the satellite photos say). It may be that it's just taken them this long to get the damned thing to go off. I don't think it's related to South Korea's recent UN victory -- SK is practically an ally to the North, because since they answer CQ1 "internal" they will do whatever is necessary to prop up the Kim regime.

What all of this adds up to is that basically only the US really cares much about the North Korean nuke as such. Everyone else is more concerned that the response to it -- sanctions, even military action -- might destabilize North Korea. There are, though, a few regional stability implications that China and the US cannot ignore. A North Korean nuke, particularly if it doesn't draw down serious consequences, could embolden a lot of the other local players who would like nuclear weapons. Many local states are "screwdriver powers" -- countries that have exercised their NNPT rights to get to "one screwdriver-twist away" from nuclear weapons. Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia come to mind; there are probably others. It is easy to imagine, say, Taiwan deciding to go nuclear, and everyone else going nuclear because they don't want to be the last one in the club still defenseless if things go to hell. This sort of nuclear-ubiquity scenario is inevitable in the long term, but in the short term is still scary as hell to status-quo powers (diplomacy's word for "countries with nicer stuff than their neighbors"). Countries concerned with this sort of thing will be extra-nasty to North Korea (to warn others) and extra-nice to, eg, Taiwan (to reassure them that there's no need to do anything hasty). This is very bad news for China, as that is the polar opposite of the strategy it would choose otherwise. This is why the entire executive leadership of China is currently skipping the annual Communist Party Conference to chat with the entire Japanese executive branch, which prior to this month would have been beyond unthinkable.

The crowded nature of the area means that nearly every local power has a territorial, sovereignty, or maritime dispute with every other country in the area. There is one possibly oil-rich set of islands claimed by no fewer than six different countries. While the notion of a war breaking out may seem remote to us, it is definitely not remote to the locals. Asia's Cold War is on the horizon, and it just got worse. Perhaps Taiwan will play the role of Berlin; Indonesia may star in the local remake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Absent serious diplomatic talent, the next half-century could see a dozen shooting wars between nuclear powers. That is enough to put this all in longer-term perspective. The US really ought to be propping up and encouraging China (and India and Russia) to exercise some goddamn adult supervision on the diplomatic side, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Asia needs its Kennan, its Kissinger, its Acheson, and its Stevenson rolled into one right now. And speaking of jobs no sane person would want... how about that new Secretary General? If I were he, I'd be pondering having a good disqualifying sex scandal right about now.

Finally a brief polemic of a political nature. Given that the US is unable or unwilling to do anything actually, you know, helpful in East Asia, perhaps it should bloody well get the hell out? Just maybe? Let Taiwan and South Korea internalize their own security costs for a while (if they can even be troubled to; they can bloody well kiss and make up with Japan if they can't). The long-term US interest in sitting nearly two hundred thousand troops in the middle of a multipolar nuclear security funhouse, generating ten times as much resentment as actual security, is pretty damned thin and getting thinner. The simple Cold War truth is they're not there to defend themselves or others -- they're too few. They're there to get killed and force the US into a wider war if things go to hell. Is that really desirable now?

Traffic mysteries

2006-09-12T16:31:53Z

(I also mailed this to the Globe's "Starts and Stops" column. As a cyclist, this is the closest I have to the bizarre signalling puzzles that train geeks like dzm have.)

A little traffic mystery for you.

As a cyclist, I generally find Mass Ave in Cambridge to be a fascinating collection of bizarre, misconcieved, and awful bicycle "accomodations," from the "please balance on this white line" markings westbound near Dover street (a sobriety test, perhaps?) to the suicidal bike lane of Central Square to the perennial "where exactly does the bike path cross at Cameron Ave?" question. But by far the strangest is the new signal at Porter. I simply cannot figure out what it is meant to do, and am filled with a constant worry that I'm breaking the law by being baffled.

The device in question is a traffic light at the intersection of Mass Ave and Somerville Ave. Unlike all the other lights, it faces west, almost along the direction of the commuter rail tracks, and a sign on it
says, "Bicycle Signal."

But what on earth could a bicycle be doing to end up facing that sign?

Nobody westbound on Somerville or northbound on Mass Ave would ever even see it, so it must be intended for cyclists eastbound on Mass Ave. Those proceeding directly through on Mass Ave, though, already have a perfectly good traffic light. And to make the turn onto Somerville Ave, you have to have moved into a left-turn lane quite some distance before the intersection, and so when you reach the stop-line the signal would be well to your right (which cannot possibly be a safe place to be looking in traffic) when there's a perfectly good conventional signal directly in front of you.

My best guess is that perhaps the light has been knocked into facing the wrong direction, although I have been unable to figure out which other direction it could reasonably have pointed.

Milestones in computer history

2006-08-17T13:33:33Z

Today I received both legitimate email and spam with the same subject line. I guess all that "pick words randomly from the dictionary" thing actually worked for once: The monkeys have typed one word of Shakespeare.

Coolest thing ever

2006-06-04T17:41:25Z

In the unlikely event that you do not already read the lovely ukelele's journal, read this post.

And yes, we are thrilled.