A Day In The Life…

Brennan: I need to ask you some things.

Booth: Are you going to ask me about God and the Devil?

Brennan: [beat] Yes.

Booth: You’re going to ask me about how God can place such a burden on good people.

Brennan: No, I’m going to ask you how you still believe in a kind god after a case like this.

Booth: Is my faith shaken? Yeah. Mmm-hmm, it is.

Brennan: It- is?

Booth: Yeah. I’ll go home tonight, I’ll lie in bed and I’ll toss and I’ll turn and I’ll beat myself up. And, uh, I’ll question everything.

Brennan: Will you get your faith back?

Booth: Always have in the past.

Brennan: So you have faith that you’ll retain your faith?

[Booth smiles]

Brennan: Why?

Booth: Because Bones, it’s.. the sun will come up and tomorrow’s a new day.

Brennan: [exhales] I know that feeling, heh.

Booth: Really?

Brennan: Mmm-hmm.

Booth: You know… what it feels like to get your faith back?

Brennan: When I see effects and I’m unable to discern the cause, my faith in reason and consequences is shaken!

Booth: Then what happens?

Brennan: Two plus two equals four. I put sugar in my coffee and it tastes sweet. The sun comes up because… the world turns. These things are beautiful to me. There are mysteries I will never understand. But… everywhere I look, I see proof that for every effect there is a corresponding cause – even if I can’t see it. I find that reassuring.

Booth: Life is good again

Brennan: [laughs] Life is very good.

Booth: Yes, it is… amen.

[both laugh]

These things are beautiful to me.

Lots of good wine recently:

2005 Freemark Abbey Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon – Had this wine for Thanksgiving with the family in LA. Grabbed it off the shelf at the grocery store for about $30. I love being in California again and not having to go to state liquor stores. I grabbed this because I remembered that Freemark Abbey was one of the wineries that represented California and the United States at the Judgment of Paris, the event in 1976 which showed that California wines were just as good, if not better than French wines. Lots of fruit, very easy to drink. Bright. Not overly tannic. ‘05 was a great year in Napa. My parents liked it quite a bit. The fruitiness made is a great pairing with the turkey. Would drink again, especially at at this price point.

2007 Scott Harvey Amador County Reserve Barbera – This is the first of four wines I had over Christmas. I picked this up as a part of a Wine.Woot trio – a single bottle is about $30. I was drawn to this because I’ve never had a wine made from barbera grapes, which is a varietal mostly used in Italian wine. Also, these grapes were grown in Amador County, just south of my family’s plot of land in Gold Country. This was a great wine – unfortunately that’s all I recall. Mark liked it too. Would definitely drink again – this was the best of the wines I had at Christmas.

2005 Andrew Murray Roasted Slope Syrah – This was the second wine we had at Christmas. Another Wine.Woot offer, I picked this up because Andrew Murray is known to be an up and coming winemaker specializing in Syrahs. He graduated from UC Davis viticulture program and his wines have been give 90+ points by Robert Parker, Jr. The vineyard is in the Santa Barbara area in Los Olivos. I don’t drink Syrahs much so I figured this would be a good opportunity to try one out. Plus I knew that my Aunt Jo likes Syrahs. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good at all with some weird-bad flavors. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t corked as it didn’t seem as overwhelmingly musty as people have described corked wines. Not to mention this bottle didn’t have a cork – it was a screwtop, which is supposed to be completely airtight. Possibly it was “cooked” and exposed to high temperatures somewhere in the handling chain. Probably not in the shipment to me as that was in early December. I have two other Syrahs, maybe those will vindicate their brother. $34 list.

2004 Markham Napa Valley Merlot – This is a wine that Rebecca brought to the party. Quite good for a $24 bottle, easy to drink.

1999 Dom Perignon Brut Champagne – This was a gift from my Aunt Kitty – we decided to open it at my Grandmother’s birthday. Runs about $150 on the market. It was good, but I’m afraid I’m not a great connoisseur of champagne. I appreciate a glass, but oftentimes I think I prefer sparkling apple cider. Reminded me of some videos I’d seen on sabrage, a method of opening champagne bottles with a saber. Seems like a neat trick, if a bit showy. And dangerous. I popped the cork manually, holding it so it didn’t fly off and hit someone.

2007 Caymus Napa Valley Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon – Moving into the New Year, I went to a celebratory dinner at the House of Prime Rib with Mark and Hideki to congratulate Hideki on completing his master’s degree in design. This was an an excellent wine, on par with, if not better than the standard Groth cabernet. Bright, somewhat fruity, but not as fruity as the Freemark Abbey. Good acidity, but not overly tannic. Went well with the steak, cleansing the palate nicely. I thought it would be a bit young as it was an ‘07, but it wasn’t at all. It runs about $100 a bottle on the market right now, and surprisingly the restaurant charged about $110. Typically restaurants mark up wine prices by 50-100%, so perhaps the restaurant got a really good real on this. This is the best wine here – I might grab a few bottles for my collection.

I apologize for the terrible writing in this post, but I’m too tired to do anything about it.

Earlier this week, I ran across this recipe for Chicken in Parchment (poulet en papillote). This techniques involves wrapping chicken and some seasonings in individual parchment pouches and popping it in the oven. It looked pretty good, and simple enough for a weekday meal, so I wandered down to the market on Tuesday to pickup the ingredients. Inadvertently, I picked up double the amount of chicken I needed. And that was after I’d considered making it two days this week. So it looked like I was going to be eating a lot of chicken this week.

Anyhow, that Chicken in Parchment recipe is really quite simple. Effectively, the chicken steams in the parchment, leaving a nice jus inside. Timing, however, is a problem – I’m not sure you can shove a temperature probe in the chicken as I would think that would allow steam to escape. I just let the chicken go the 25 minute on the recipe and the results were a bit dry. I admit I didn’t let the meat rest, and the second piece I had seemed a bit moister. Plus, the chicken is sitting in it’s own juices, so that helps. My other complaint is that skinless chicken breasts are boring. There was no browning and minimal fat. I also recommend reducing the amount of lemon in the recipe. That said, it’s a nice change of pace and fairly healthy. Went well with some rice and peas. A nice glass of something white would have been nice too.

The next day, I experimented with brining the chicken in advance. That made for moister chicken, but it still wasn’t where I wanted it to be. I might try moving to chicken thighs next time. I think leaving the skin on would make it a bit rubbery.

This evening, I grabbed a recipe for Chicken Parmesan off the Cook’s Illustrated website. It turned out fairly well and pretty quickly/easily, but it dirtied a skillet, a pot, a saucepan, a baking pan, and a wire rack. I’d either have to really want Chicken Parm or have someone over to do the cleaning up. Pounding the chicken flat was nicely theraputic, though.

In the future, I would probably try to add some additional seasoning to the crust – the straight salt and pepper was a bit too one-dimensional for me. I’m also not entirely sure about the sauce – I substituted a can of diced tomatoes for the fresh tomato the recipe calls for, considering the season, and I couldn’t get the tomatoes to breakdown and combine with the olive oil. The result was I had to hunt for bits of tomato in my pasta otherwise it lacked the bit of acid and sugar needed to balance the chicken.

For reasons best not analyzed, I was skimming the typewriter listings at eBay again the other day. You probably know where this is going.

Yep, I picked up a 1949 Royal Quiet De Luxe from a man in Missouri. It’s in great shape aside from a pretty good build up of dust. Nothing a little cleaning can’t fix. Isn’t she pretty?

The bell didn’t work when she arrived, but with the help of the folks over at the Portable Typewriter Forum and a pair of pliers, that was fixed pretty easily. Historically, the Royal QDL was Royal’s top-of-the-line portable typewriter. Mine came with the original manual and price tag – $89.50. That translates to about $800 in today’s dollars. Many more features than my Hermes Rocket, including tab stops, touch control, bi-color ribbon support, stencil cutting (for making mimeographs), glass keys, and more. Of course, it also weighs about twice as much as the Hermes.

I did some free writing on her:

As you can see, she needs a new ribbon – the image above has greatly boosted contrast. I’ll also note that Cormac McCarthy’s Olivetti ended up going for $250,000.

For the last 3-4 months, my desktop machine at work has been cranky, slow, and prone to crashing. Bringing up Windows Explorer took ages. Changing directories in MATLAB took seconds. I couldn’t have PowerPoint open at the same time as, say, Acrobat or Firefox, because it wouldn’t redraw the slides if the PowerPoint window was maximized – I would have to shrink the window before it would redraw. Accessing a network share occasionally wouldn’t work and I would get a cryptic out of resources message.

Initially, I blamed this on Firefox, which does suffer from memory leak problems. But closing it didn’t always fix the problem. I thought the PowerPoint issue was some interaction with Acrobat and some weird GDI leak issue. I did have a GDI leak, which was in Logitech’s terrible SetPoint utility. But, again, disabling SetPoint seemed to makes things better, but not definitively.

I could login remotely with RDP, but only once. The second time the connection would be rejected. And I would get back to work to find that after the first RDP session, my desktop had switched to 640×480 at 4-bit color and refused to switch back without a reboot. Sometimes I wouldn’t even be able to login/unlock the session and would be forced to power the machine down hard. I thought perhaps this was due to a desktop heap problem, and I found ways of increasing the interactive heap size and diagnosing the problem. But heap levels seemed OK, and increasing the heap size didn’t seem to help.

And so I was reduced to running a few applications at a time, closing and opening apps as needed in a aggravating juggling act from hell.

This all came to a head yesterday when I got back from Thanksgiving weekend. My machine had locked up and I had to do a hard power down. After rebooting, even running Chrome and MATLAB simultaneously was problematic. At first I thought it was due to the fact that I’d recently switched from using Thunderbird as my email client to Gmail and that perhaps the web interface was not as efficient. But then I discovered that Symantec Antivirus was taking up a good amount of resources so I stopped the service. That helped a little, but I was still having problems having multiple instances of Windows Explorer, Chrome and MATLAB going and this was impacting my productivity.

Today, after more digging around the internet, I got a tip to check the System error logs. Lo and behold, I had a litany of messages like:

The server was unable to allocate from the system paged pool because the pool was empty

Googling this message led to info about kernel memory management and finally how to diagnose depleted pools. This required enabling pool tagging and installing PoolMon. This told me that Symantec Antivirus was hogging up most of the pool by itself. More research told me this was a problem with the version of SAV I was running (Corporate Edition 10.1). So I downloaded the newest version from the University’s software site (they’d discontinued SAV CE and moved to Symantec Endpoint Protection) and attempted to install that. But of course, when I ran the installer, the stupid thing would run the install program for a Windows CE WLAN driver I had been tinkering with some months earlier. This led to more digging and while I never found a good solution online, my fix was to uninstall the WLAN driver. The new AV software used half the amount of paged pool resources than previously. But still quite a bit – 50MB, which was 4-5 times the amount of the next driver.

In the meantime, I had also installed Process Explorer and setup debugging symbols. This informed me that unlike most XP installs, I had a maximum paged pool size of 155M as opposed to the standard 350MB. More digging on the internet showed that this was because I had the /3GB flag set in my Boot.ini file. I had set this flag some months ago in order to give MATLAB access to more memory as I was running out on some large computation I was running. What I didn’t know was that what Windows does is to change from a 50/50 split of kernel and user memory to a 25/75 split. Which means that Windows cuts the pool size in half. Sure, MATLAB had more memory to play with, but I effectively eliminated my ability to multitask. Especially with SAV installed. I removed the flag, rebooted, and it was like I had a new machine! Things worked snappily! I could run multiple apps!

The lesson? Only set the /3GB flag if and when you really need it. And switch to a 64-bit version of Windows ASAP!

My typewriter arrived today! And in one piece!

Some of the keys are a bit sticky, but all in all, she’s in pretty good shape. Judging by the serial number, she was built around 1955. Appears to need a new ribbon – I can see impressions of previous typing on the current one. It must have been respooled after it ran out initially.

I think I’ve figured out most of the functions, including the margin setting and switching between single and double space, but there are two levers I don’t understand. One is by the ribbon spools and switches between two modes that don’t seem to change anything. The other moves a flap behind the platen where the paper is fed.

Typing is certainly harder on the old machine. Some of it is lubrication, but typing certainly requires much more force. I have to use my ring or even my middle fingers for A’s and L’s – otherwise I don’t get a good impression on the paper. I’ve managed to jam two typebars together at least once so far, so I guess I’m making decent speed. The inability to make changes to anything I’ve typed certainly makes things difficult and highlights the numerous errors in my typing. I have to focus more on spelling as I type in order to avoid screwing things up.

I don’t know what it is, but I really have thing for mechanical things. Especially those that don’t require power, which seems at odds to my background as an roboticist/electrical engineer. Perhaps it’s just that I’m so used to having computers and motors that it just seems miraculous that people ever managed to get along without them.

Over the last decade or so, I’ve collected mechanical cipher machines, slide rules, and now I’m looking into mechanical typewriters. I recently picked up a Hermes Rocket off eBay. This is a Swiss-made machine from 50-75 years ago and is considered a portable machine. I’d guess it weighs about 10 pounds – as typewriters go, it’s on the small side. The intricacy just amazes me, especially when you consider that the entire thing is completely unpowered. All energy comes from the typist hitting the keys and moving the carriage into position. It boggles my mind that when you hit Shift, the entire carriage tilts back so a different part of the typebars hit it. In order to save a few keys, there is no numeral 1 or exclaimation mark – you’re supposed to use the lower case L for the former and a combination of an apostrophe and a period for the latter.

Sadly, the machine I recently purchased took a big hit in the mail and isn’t working correctly. Hit a single key and the carriage goes flying toward the left until it hits the end stop. Plus a few keys are depressed all the way in and won’t return. I’m going to have to figure out of to disassemble this little guy and fix him. Fortunately the seller recognized that the poor packaging was their fault and was willing to refund me the purchase price, and I managed to snag another one. This one’s newer, with more squarish keys, as opposed to the round ones my first one has. Hopefully it’ll arrive in one piece – I’ve asked this seller to be extra careful with it.

Though this is the typewriter of John Steinbeck and Matt Groening, I highly doubt I’ll ever seriously use it to write anything. I’m just happy with the clack, clack, clack, DING!, and the zip of the carriage.

I haven’t had much time for movies lately, so it was nice to finally settle down with the Blu-Ray release of Pixar’s Up.

What can I say? Another Pixar release, another hit out of the ballpark. In the opening, they have you pretty much completely invested in this old man, Carl Fredriksen, in 5 minutes flat. And of course, you can’t have an old man without an annoying young kid, so enter stage left – Russell, who, of course, is missing a father figure. I loved the sense of wonder and freedom that the release of the balloons and the launch of the house gave, even though I totally expected it. Where things somewhat bog down, in my opinion, is the anatagonist, exiled adventurer Charles Muntz and his dogs. Somehow he didn’t quite feel evil or crafty enough. Or maybe it was his one-dimensionality. I don’t know. I just didn’t appreciate him as the villian. And it’s also strange that he seems younger than Fredriksen, when he should be a generation older.

Totally predictable plot and ending, but I still loved it, as did my parents. The zeppelin scenes reminded me of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Oh yeah, and I’ve been to Fenton’s.

South America. It’s like America, but south!
-Ellie

My mother’s birthday was this weekend and so I made dinner for her – braised short ribs, roasted asparagus, and mashed potatoes. The short ribs were from the Mark Bittman’s recipe in the New York Times which braises them in red wine, coffee, and chilies. It sounds strange, but the results were awesome. It takes about 3-4 hours to make, but really, most of the time is in letting the ribs slowly simmer and become literally fall-off-the-bone tender. As recipes go, this is really not much work at all. They are amazingly rich, luscious, and smoky. I recommend a good Cabernet or another fairly bold red to match.

The asparagus was a tested recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. Basically you just toss in olive oil, salt, and pepper, then roast under a broiler for 8-10 minutes, shaking midway through. The browning generates a lovely nutty flavor that I love.

I apologize for the weird composition of this photo – poor lighting forced me to use a flash, which in turn blew out the whites in the mashed potatoes. Rotation, cropping, and judicious use of the burn tool (which seems inverted to me in Photoshop. I want less exposure/burn-out – isn’t that dodging?)

If you’ve got 5 minutes, the video of Bittman making these ribs is great.

A sample of my awesome artistic skills

I got myself a tablet recently for occasional photo-retouching work and a logo design I’ve been working on. I picked up a 6″ x 8″ off Monoprice for the amazingly cheap price of $36. Sure, it’s not a Wacom, but I’m happy with it and considering a Wacom of the same size goes for around $200, I’ll take the $36 one, thank you. At any rate, after getting it installed I fired up Photoshop, gave it a whirl, and the above it the result. My drawing teacher would not be impressed.

Other techie things – finally moved my kua.fm to Gmail via Google Apps, which somehow is free. Still tweaking my filters, but I’m definitely loving the speedy searches and faster server performance in both the webmail and IMAP settings.

I’m also trying out Dropbox, which is a free iDisk sort of affair where your files are stored on a server cluster somewhere and you can access your files from anywhere. They do pretty nice automatic synchronization between multiple machines and they even have an iPhone client. They even do version tracking so you can recover old versions of files or deleted files. I was going to ask for referral credit if any of you want to check it out (I get more disk space), but I’m getting a “Reported Attack Site” warning from Firefox when I go to their site. This has been fixed – see my comment below for more detail – so go try it out!

In other news, it’s November, which means it’s graduate school applications time again. Sigh. This is round 3 – hopefully this is it. Applying to CMU (Robotics) and UC Berkeley (EECS). Wish me luck.