To all of our dear friends in Scotland, in the wake of Brexit, you know what happens next:
(That’s a “YES to Scottish Independence” flag, in case you missed it.)
-D & T
Scottish Independence
Author: David T. Macknet
FauxOreos, Redux
Back in 2010 we made fauxoreos, and don’t know why we haven’t made them since. Possibly because they’re so fabulously addictive?
Well, we decided that, rather than baking a carrot cake (which seems to be the most favorite thing of all things, at D’s work), we’d try the oreos again. We have decided that they are so awesome that they need to leave the house first thing tomorrow, if they survive that long (they will – there’s no way we can eat more than a few bites and stay sensible about sugar intake).
We had set out to roll these out as we did last time, but D wasn’t happy with them being oval for some reason (he’d forgotten that last time we didn’t roll them out, but smooshed them with the bench scraper – the bench scraper that’s gotten lost somewhere along the way, and was perfect for smooshing things). So, instead, we made the best use of our sushi press/mold ever, and used it as the thickness guide for rolling these out to a perfect 1/4 inch thickness.
Of course, in addition to the more reasonably-sized oreos, D had to make one that’s about 6 inches in diameter. Just because. And then we got down to the icing things portion of the exercise, and realized that we didn’t have any icing sugar in the house … so we used granulated instead, sent for a spin through the cuisinart for long enough to at least be finely ground.
Tomorrow morning, some of these will be going to the Honda dealer in Vacaville, because they’ve been so good to us. Some others will be going to D’s work, possibly to be handed out to a few special people, ’cause there really aren’t all that many in this batch. As to the huge one … we’re not sure. That may just have to stay home.
-D & T
Marauding Squirrel
Yesterday afternoon, we were happily reading away when we heard a scritch-scritch noise. Looking out our sliding-glass door onto the deck, we saw a squirrel. This squirrel was in the process of amputating our sunflower. It then carried it off to who knows where.
Squirrels apparently like sunflowers. Not quite what we were anticipating when letting it grow.
-D & T
Automobile Woes
Around about October or November of last year, our 2012 Honda Insight started acting strangely, so we took it into the shop. Nothing. Further on in November, the check engine light came on, so I took it in and they topped up the oil, which it had apparently been burning. Rinse, repeat, add in about 8 quarts of oil added over the next 5 months and now … well.
Two weeks ago, we suddenly lost power while getting onto the freeway, all sorts of lights warning us that all manner of systems had trouble. So, we limped home, and I took it to the dealer the next morning. After waiting about for about an hour, the mechanic comes out holding a spark plug, with an odd look on his face. The spark plug is blackened and missing the little metal arm that actually makes the spark gap.
So, add a new plug and it works nicely for a few weeks, then last night on the drive home it was kind of stuttering – almost as if I were running over a series of small potholes. This morning I’d planned to take it into the dealer and have them check it, but before I was even off of our street the warning lights started, so I returned home, talked with T., and headed to the dealer to trade this thing in.
Click through to the video for the whole blurry experience.
We now have a shiny new Honda HR-V, EX model, all-wheel drive. It feels like an SUV when you’re in it, and it looks kinda like an SUV, but then it’s able to be parked in regular spaces. We’d been eyeing it for a possibility, talking over getting rid of the Insight, and today was the day for it.
Hope you’re all well out there in the internet world.
-D
Old Code Lives On
Occasionally I remember how old I am. Thinking about how I got into computer programming, I usually tell the story about how I was working doing data entry and got tired of the repetitive nature of the job, so automated a piece of it and ended up drawing the attention of the IT department as a result. (I still keep in contact with that guy, 20 years later.) Thinking about it, though, I realized that my start was a lot earlier than that. I realized this when reading an article on The Law of Accelerating Returns. Something in there struck me as being … well, wrong.
The movie Back to the Future came out in 1985, and “the past” took place in 1955. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went back to 1955, he was caught off-guard by the newness of TVs, the prices of soda, the lack of love for shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang. It was a different world, yes—but if the movie were made today and the past took place in 1985, the movie could have had much more fun with much bigger differences. The character would be in a time before personal computers, internet, or cell phones—today’s Marty McFly, a teenager born in the late 90s, would be much more out of place in 1985 than the movie’s Marty McFly was in 1955.
Now, I don’t know about you, but my first DOS-based computer resembled something like the PC3 “LunchBox” Portable Computer, and came to me in something like 1984. Of course, somewhere around the same time we were playing with the Commodore Vic-20 (came out in 1981), Commodore 64 (1982), and the Commodore 128 (1985). So, no, going back to 1985 wouldn’t be all that shocking. Yes, it’d be annoying to have to use a card catalog in order to find something, rather than asking teh interwebs. It’d also be strange not to have call waiting, or cell phones, but I can’t say that it’d be particularly troublesome overall. Nor can I really say the world was all that much different.
I got to thinking about how long I’ve been writing software (this time) because I’d been asked to pull together some screenshots and instructions for a database application I built back in 1998. This application is still running, 18 years later, and still the “system of record” for the company. This and a couple other systems I’ve written are still ticking over in some form or another (this one’s running on a virtual machine just to keep it alive, because nobody can get the software any more, and nobody really knows how to replace it – I had to install an older development tool just to convert it to what it would have been in 2003’s format so that I could convert it to the current format and have a look through things.).
In any event, I think it’s important to point out that yes, the rate of technological change is ever-increasing. On the other hand, there are these bedrock systems which keep on running that nobody is willing to replace because they aren’t broken – they still do their job just fine, and there really is no need to change them. (Have a look at this PCWorld article, for instance.) In parallel with these systems, old code keeps on ticking over, and continues to work (e.g., just about the entire Banking sector of the UK runs on COBOL, or the VA Hospital’s Electronic Medical Records system is .NET wrapped around Java wrapped around Delphi wrapped around a file-based storage system – so, your medical record is just a text file somewhere, when all’s said and done). Other, operating-system type foundations have also not shifted – there really are only 2 operating systems in use today, *NIX and Windows NT – and those have been around for decades – everything added to them is just window-dressing.
It’s only the surface of things which has really shifted – the core remains as it was 20 or even 40 years ago. Yes, computers are much faster. Yes, computers are way smaller, and in seemingly everything. But I just don’t see the level of technological change being all that huge even now, nor do I think it’s changing as rapidly as Kurzweil thinks. Or, rather, I don’t think that the entire ecosystem changes as rapidly as all that – it’s that the outliers are arriving faster, but their adoption depends upon their incorporation into the devices and technologies we already use, which is necessarily slowed by our very humanity.
So. Take the time to look back at all the computing you’ve done, and realize how much things haven’t changed, despite the new names and different packages. Ignore the window-dressing and really think about the technology and you may be surprised at how, really, things haven’t changed. Sure, if they implanted teh interwebs into your head you’d be hugely changed – and, yes, they’re working on that somewhere – but do we really see it happening in our lifetimes? I really don’t think so, because I really think that the rate of change is not solely governed by tech, but by the economics of the matter, and by our ability to incorporate that change.
-D
Journey to the Center South of the Earth.
Finding ourselves with a rare gift of a few days with no appointments or expectations, we decided to head down to Southern California to visit with D’s family. Rather than fly, we figured we’d just drive, as SoCal remains about 8 hours distant, barring traffic. Given the choice between being in airports on Christmas or sitting in our own vehicle? Not that difficult a decision, really. We caught up on chitchat and podcasts (NPR’s Latino USA has an amazing piece on Jewish Latino culture that was really worth hearing) and made surprisingly good time.
Our one concern was the roads – the changing season has brought oddly torrential rains and some floods to the lowlands, and freezing temps even to our little neck of the woods, which is at sea level, and we wondered how much it was going to snow, heading over the Grapevine. We found that for Southern California, it was snowy … meaning there were maybe 3 inches built up, in spots, and the road was a wee bit wet, in spots. (It was a bit odd finding ice on the top of the car in San Bernadino, though). It was gorgeous and we were grateful to arrive when it was already on the ground, with no issue of the road being closed.
Our time was mostly spent watching D’s sibs and their various children (7 nieces and nephews!) enjoy their various aerial toys and putting together an evil trampoline that took far longer than it should have (never underestimate the power of people not reading directions). There was plenty of interesting food (potatoes, sliced thinly, on …pizza? Surprisingly tasty, with an Alfredo sauce), many, many, many citrus and palm trees, and a trip to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, to which we hadn’t gone since …2002 or so. An old photograph shows us there in high summer, shivering as we snap a photograph. We’d forgotten that it wasn’t just the cold that had chased us down last time… it was a few other details, like the fact that it’s very high!
The last time we were in one of the trams, they had much smaller cars (you can see one in the picture above). Nowadays, the cars are round, and the floor rotates around 360° over the course of moving up nearly a vertical mile, from 2,643 feet elevation at the embarkation station to 8,516 feet at debarkation. D. thought this would be fun (T was, as she always is in trams, dubious). We found that having the windows constantly sliding to the side, while trying to brace and take pictures, wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Though it did tend to distract from the disturbing bits (going over the pylons and swinging nauseatingly baaaack and forth), overall we think that it would have been nice, for the photographers, to be stable rather than slowly rotating about. Ah, well, the kids got a kick out of it.
Though some of our party were unprepared for the realities of snow (one child discovered that Crocs and bare feet do not make for enjoyable snow play) and certainly neither T. nor D. expected Southern Cal to be cold enough to have brought scarves or ear-covering hats (T. counted herself fortunate to find an extra pair of knit gloves in the car and D. was very grateful for his flannel-lined cardigan), it was a pleasant trip up, but one we won’t be taking again soon. While it’s quite a wonderful view from the top of Mt. San Jacinto, both T. and D. were struggling with the altitude more than they remembered (which is probably why we only made a brief visit the summer of 2002 – yeah, it was snowy up there and we were in shorts, but we couldn’t breathe), and T’s lungs didn’t really enjoy the hike from the parking lot in dry 29°F/-1°C air (her ten-minute coughing jag reminded her why she’d never choose to live in a high desert). We were a bit disappointed in our performance, but high altitude fans we are not. *waves to our friends in Denver*
The air was astoundingly clear for Southern California. We could see all the way to the Salton Sea (which was just cut out of the photograph on the far right in the shot below).
This trip also gave D the excuse to break in his new camera. It was a treat to hold onto something so much smaller and lighter, and get some truly detailed and clear pictures — but focus is tricky — as he realized when T. met a friend from Iowa for lunch (the joys of others traveling to see family nearby!) and he took a picture of them which left them both blurry, but the road behind in sharp focus. We also realize we need to get an additional battery pack for the new rig – at the top of the mountain, D. ran out of power, so spent some time hanging about in the lodge with the charger plugged into a free socket. Ah, well. We’ll be better prepared next time.
And now we take stock of our lives, and tumble into the new year. Joy to you, friends — stay dry and WARM.
-D & T
Forget paleo, go mid-Victorian
“Mid-Victorians lived without modern diagnostics, drugs, surgery or contraception. Despite that, and because of the high nutrient density of their diet, their life spans were as good as ours and their health spans significantly longer.”
Read the full article at Health Spectator – it’s worth a read, particularly in conjunction with the what we eat infographic. Spoiler: eat fruits and veggies and avoid sugar.
-D
We’re still around; Fermenting things
So, it’s been a while since we’ve written here. T., of course, has been writing over at Writing YA and on her own blog, but D. has been tinkering about with twitter rather than trying to scrape up the energy to actually write anything. So, in the interest of at least letting you know that we’re still here, a brief post.
A few months back, D. got a fermentation crock. In that, we’ve made three batches of kimchi, 2 batches of sauerkraut (one traditional with green apples and caraway seeds, the other Indian inspired), a batch of root beer, and two batches of ginger beer. We’re right now fermenting some green beans and carrots with dill seeds and garlic, for Thanksgiving. They’ll have been in for a solid week, brined, so they should be mildly sour.
Because we have the crock (ginger beer was the initial motivation), D. picked up The Art of Fermentation, and we’ve been enjoying the reading of it far more than any other cookbook we’ve ever had. We’ve come to love kimchi (mix it with rice, yogurt, cheese, and bake it – you’ll be surprised). We’ve also started to look about and say, “what else can we ferment?” In a culture which doesn’t eat that many veggies (check out this infographic), we’re quite happy to be adding more veggies to our diets, packed with flavor.
Anyway, that’s enough gushing about fermenting things. May you have a happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are.
-D & T
Camera Roll
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As the heat wave continues, we find indoor things to play with… and we’ve started messing with this new feature Flickr has called Camera Roll. It basically shows you an organized view of your pictures, based upon some machine-vision thing they’ve got going on, that shows every shot with People in it, or Arches, or Trees, or Flowers, or any number of other odd ways they have of lumping things together. It’s quite fun, and if you’ve got a Flickr account, you can play along, but if not, it’s not publicly available for you to just go through anybody’s photostream and see what’s what, thus we’ve included a few of our grouped shots here. These to the left are a bunch of pictures that were lumped together under Style / Bright, I think. It really does provide a different way to look at your photos, and probably means you’ll look at more of them, and more frequently.
That’s actually one of the questions that we get frequently in the Hobbiton: “Do you guys actually look at all those pictures after you take them?” Short answer: yes. Longer answer, we have them on a slideshow on a screen playing in our living room whenever we have guests over, so if you’re lucky enough to be invited, you could look at them, too! We really do look at them a great deal, simply because they keep us connected to our travels and to our adventures, and reminds us that being home, plugging along through work and whatever other mundane thing is just what one does between trips…
For those of you who do the twitter thing, we’ve finally given in and joined — T, under deepest protest, because the entire thing makes her break out in hives. We’re at @david_t_macknet and @tanita_s_davis if you’re at all interested. Still not quite sure what the point of it is, and still find the limitation on length to be somewhat of an annoyance, but hey, when your agent throws you under the bus says it would be good marketing, you listen, and your spouse joins in sympathy for the pain you will suffer from being on social media again. True love, that.
-D
Signs of the Times
Continuing to be separated by a common language… One of the things we like to photograph when abroad are road signs, street signs, and signs in general (the sumo-baby signs indicating places to change the diapers of gigantic babies are a particular favorite). Digital warnings like ‘Soft Tyres Waste Fuel’ (Better get that pressure checked, pal) and ‘Tiredness Kills’ are amusing all on their own, but today’s sign pictures are of printed signs – fortunately encountered when we were NOT driving. Possible Queuing Traffic Ahead? OK, sure, you can figure that one out, but it’s certainly not the most straightforward way to explain things, at least not to our minds. Lots of road work on the roads between Oban and Glasgow, and lots of places where they’ve put in temporary signal lights, which causes traffic to back up until the light changes. Thus, possible queuing, as it happens. Meanwhile, ‘Oncoming Vehicles in Middle of Road’ is a sign we saw frequently, driving around the Oban area. If there’s a narrow bridge, or underpass, and the traffic is constricted down to one lane, then you’ll see these… and oncoming vehicles in the middle of the road, which, back in the hinterlands of the highlands, happens frequently anyway, especially with the dreaded White Van Man. (Apparently, people driving white vans don’t own them, are working for someone else, and drive hell-bent for leather. Or, so we are told.)
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These two (hidden dip and blind summit) were sort of perplexing to us. The blind summit sort of makes sense – there’s a hill ahead of you and you don’t know what’s on the other side of it (which … duh?). Hidden dip, though? Is that telling us that there’s going to be another vehicle in the dip, or what, exactly? In neither case where we saw these signs was there anything terribly unusual about the conditions. We’re also wondering if Captain Obvious might make up a sign telling the drivers that they can’t see what’s around bends in the road, too. Come to think of it, though, haven’t there been “Blind Corner” signs? Hmm….
And last but not least: the Yes on Independence sign. Lots of strong sentiment about independence, still, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. If anything, it’s gotten stronger since the vote.
Our Scottish Adventure is ending – we arrive back in California on Thursday afternoon. We’re looking forward to 1) washing all of our clothes, and 2) wearing some other clothes for maybe the next several months. Yes, you can get by on a week’s worth of clothing if you’ve got access to a washer in the flat … but you’ll come to hate those same clothes after wearing and rewearing them for a month!
-D & T