butternut.

My "cellphone" is a Nokia clamshell thingie, I think you call them that. It is one feature better than the phone I had before that, which was from the 20th century and did nothing but send and receive phone calls and text messages. It had a (gasp) black and white screen.

When I say the "new" one (8 years old?) is "one feature better", I mean it's pretty much just the same phone, but! also! plus! it takes horrible, uninformative pictures. The above pic is by far the clearest picture it has ever ever taken but that's because I was one meter away from my subject. You'd never know that from the photo, it looks like she's three times that far away.

This is Micachu in Den Haag last month, where there were miraculously like 25 of us there. That's the only reason I'm even engaging in the stupid-looking practice of holding my phone up to someone who is doing something creative and important: the show was so unexpectedly underattended, it was unbelievable that I was the closest person in the room to the stage (for a number of reasons). Documentation was required.

Another cool feature of this phone is that the only way to get the pictures off it is via Bluetooth, which no new computers use at all. So I have to boot up \\tiny_a, basically three laptops ago, suck the pictures off the phone and then bathe in their wretched low-pixel vagueness that way. Science! Sci-sci-science!

+++

wednesday i'm in love.

It's because there's someone new in my life. Here's how it happened.

This past year, 2012, as you may know, Cave Cricket #2 and I applied for our "unlimited time" residence permits here in The Lovely Netherlands. At the time we applied for the permits, there was a substantial application fee, I'm talking about a substantial amount of money, proportionally speaking, like a couple months' rent.

We applied back in March or something. We got the permits (!!!!!!) in August. Fantastic, right? Two weeks ago, Mara was doing our internet banking and was like, "Uh hey there sparky, did you like buy something for (insert approximate amount of one month's rent) a couple weeks ago? Like, twice on the same day?" Of course I did no such thing, and of course Mara would never say "like" that many times if at all, but anyway: immediately panic sets in, what the fuck did we do wrong this time, cause this is the way you think when you're an immigrant.

But then my dear roommate says: "Ah, wait. Ha. Sorry, that's money coming into our account." Which never happens, I don't blame her for assuming the opposite. I say "So someone paid us twice for something?"

The conversation went on in this vein for a while, I'll spare you the details, but come to find out: this money was from the government, specifically the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization because: in-between the time of our application for residence and their processing of that application, the cost of the application fee was dramatically reduced. And they refunded us the difference between the old amount and the new amount, directly into our bank account.

Maybe I haven't traveled enough but...what other government on earth would do this? I decided to celebrate my not knowing the answer to that question by taking this aforementioned windfall money and purchasing a new love interest, yes that's right I bought a new fucking laptop that actually seems to work and compute at normal speeds. For €500 (here it is, if you're in the market).

It feels like finally getting glasses after years of not being able to see (I guess that's what three years of netbook ownership does to you, makes you appreciate normal laptops again). It does not only one thing at a time successfully, but sometimes two or three. YouTube actually works with video and sound playing at the same time. In general, clicking on something often seems to have the desired effect. ETC ETC ETC. Eeeeeeeeeyyyyyaaay.

Oh, and: Thanks, Government of The Netherlands! You're pretty fly sometimes.

+++

at last.

Just now, for the first time in my post-software-industry life, I had a feeling that normal people must have all the time: I had no idea what some geek was talking about. Listen:

"You know you’re rooted when someone asks if rooting is like jailbreaking their iPhone and you laugh in their face." 

Being rooted? Jailbreaking? No idea, and frankly without the word iPhone in there I wouldn't have known they were talking about technology at all. But here's why: they're talking about phones. And I think we know the VDuck position on phones. But still, it's a sign.

(BTW, if you're curious: rooting, jailbreaking.)

+++

Yesterday: went to see the World Press Photo exhibit at the Oude Kerk, except it wasn't there anymore (the exhibit, doh), so we just took pictures of a large organ (!, above) and 350-year-old graves in the floor.

Then we celebrated our attempt at cultural enrichment by going to La Perla for a pizza (nduja) and a bruschetta (fennel, arugula, capocollo) and of course some peoplewatching.

After which we came home to find the Valenteener just finishing a pot of handmade pasta with pesto (she's from the home of pesto, don't you know). How fortuitous. It was a pretty luscious second/third course, and got us almost all the way through the increasingly soapy pleasures of Downton Abbey's Season 2 (which, truth be told, was markedly less impressive than Season 1. But apparently there's a reason that not every series can run for 86 episodes or just be nonstop legendarily good). 

+++

basbousa.

Wow, I just had a blip of a flashback/fantasy where I wrote a piece of code that went out to the online TV Guide, looked at the three to seven Hollywood films that are on the major Dutch networks every night, then went out to Metacritic and found out their metascores and averaged them, so I could have like a daily Cultural Apocalypse Quotient just handed to me.

Tonight's is a good one: we have Demolition Man (34/100), The Saint (50/100), Night at the Museum 2 (42/100), A Cinderella Story (25/100), and Intolerable Cruelty, which gets a 71 out of 100, BUT unfortunately stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, for whom Mara and I harbor such an irrational hatred that we are unable to watch any movie featuring her except High Fidelity (79/100), so there would be some automatic adjustment code happening for special cases like this.

+++

Ummm....right. A few days ago I sent Mara an article from Serious Eats about 10 great winter desserts featuring oranges or something, oh wait here it is. I sent it to her because she really likes winter oranges and because I really like it when someone makes dessert for me.

Her choice from that list was the Orange Semolina Cake, which sounded great and was an interesting recipe (you puree two oranges whole, skins and all, for example): little did I know that it was essentially a recipe for one of my favorite desserts of, if not all time, then of the last 5 years or so: basbousa. Anyway, it turned out really really authentic-tasting, and if you want some, come by, 'cause there's lots.

Speaking of which, this recipe: it makes an imposingly dense cake that you will want to share with other people. We tripled the amount of syrup in the original recipe because that's the only way it really seemed like the basbousa that I know.

+++

orange semolina cake (aka basbousa, revani).

syrup
2 cups sugar
3 tbsp lemon juice
3 tsp orange blossom water
2 and 1/4 cup water

cake
2 almost softball-sized navel oranges, scrubbed
3/4 cup olive oil
3/4 cup sugar
5 large eggs
2 cups semolina
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup almond flour
1 cup untoasted almonds with skins, chopped

Fill a medium pot halfway with water. Add oranges and boil until softened, about 45-60 minutes, you might have to add more water. Drain and let cool. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour a 9 1/2 inch cake pan.

In a small saucepan, combine sugar, lemon juice, orange blossom water, and water. Bring heat to medium and cook, stirring constantly, until sugar dissolves. Let mixture come to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for 6 minutes. Let cool.

Quarter oranges and remove the seeds but not the skin. Place oranges in a food processor and pulse until you have a smooth pulp. In a large bowl, combine orange pulp, oil, sugar, and eggs. Beat with an electric mixer until smooth. In a small bowl, whisk together semolina, baking powder, and almond flour. Stir dry ingredients into orange mixture.

Pour batter into pan and garnish top with chopped almonds. Bake until a cake tester comes out clean, about 40 minutes, but keep an eye on the almonds on top, ours browned really fast and we had to cover the top with foil. Cool cake for ten minutes then pour syrup over the top.

+++

non-idle hands.

Now is the time on Sprockets when we assemble all of the complicated toys and gadgets that no one else has had time for all year. LEGO spaceships, Blu-Ray players, streaming NetFlix, etc.

+++

dirty ape flavour.

We saw Attila the Stockbroker downstairs last night, wouldn't have guessed that it was my kind of thing but imagine a hard old Billy Bragg/hooligan hybrid playing a giant mandolin...how could you not be swayed.

+++

Decided to get serious about a home backup strategy, bought my first 1 terabyte hard drive, an amount of data that we used to use as a futuristic example back in the 1990s, as in "well it's not like a home user is ever going to need a terabyte of data for anything anytime soon, hahahahaha."

Of course this was before any of us had any practical experience with even a gigabyte of data, when laptops had 80MB hard drives and Windows could be installed (and reinstalled, and reinstalled, and reinstalled) from 6 floppy disks. The real engineers among us (as opposed to my "sham engineer" status) talked about Moore's Law, and how it would persist into the 21st century, and people would eventually consume terabytes of data. But it all seemed like fantasy to me, further evidence of the miraculousness of my managing to be anywhere near the bleeding edge of The Internet Revolution.

So anyway, now, at home, we're kind of trying to neaten up our hard drives so as not to back up huge random piles of useless crap, and for me that means deleting lots of pictures that don't seem to be useful for anything, or posting them here and then deleting them.

Below, tasting better than it looks: this morning's huevos rancheros amidst a pile of one-room apartment debris.

+++

back up.

Above: current view from the MoopCam. And a slightly morbid one at that.

+++

I can't log in. On account of there's somethin' wrong with my Google cookies. Google's insides are a rocky place where my seed can find no purchase etc. etc. etc.

I mean, I can log in, eventually, but I have to type my password about 6 times, and as I've mentioned, my S key is stuck. Not that there are any S-es in my password, 'cause there ain't!!!

It could be Google's problem. Or it could be tiny_a continuing to foment a tiny rebellion. Or I could have devolved into one of those "end-users" who thinks their CD drive is a cupholder, and I just can't operate my own machinery anymore.

+++

What's all this tech talk about, Johnny? Well I just managed to dig up some old email from 12 years ago or so, lots of it, like 5000 messages (roughly 4300 of which are Amazon.com purchases...ah, money, how I miss you so). And the process of getting them from my one old-ass proprietary email client into my current, slightly-less old-ass proprietary email client, both clients released by the same slightly-incompetent very large company, was way way way too hard.

My point? Spend some time away from your computer. C'mon, let's all do it.

+++

cheap thoughts.

I may have mentioned the lack of greenery up in this bitch lately, it's having some interesting side effects. Not the least interesting of which is that, bulging with redundantly hopeful optimism, I actually clicked on the "Monetize" button in my Blogger Dashboard the other day to see if that was the solution to our financial distress. Alas, no.

+++

Interesting side effects. For example. Ten years ago or so, I used to be what you might call a professional computer geek, during which time I became accustomed to having (at least one of, sometimes two or three of) just about the fastest and best laptop(s) that money could buy, replaced every 9-12 months with a faster and better one or two or three (weren't my money).

Somewhat naturally I think, when I left that job to become a pro bono web developer top secret music distributor ridiculous bohemian musician non-professional geek, I still thought I needed a serious laptop. I was a "power user", right?

A synonym for "power user" is "spoiled mutha". As my personal technoweenery recedes further and further into the gaping maw of Time, my old habits are dying. Instead of buying the biggest (figuratively speaking) laptop I can buy, I'm now looking for something that

1) works when it arrives at my house
2) won't break or otherwise disintegrate like the mostly shitty Dells I've owned so far this millennium (my most recent Precision M70 excepted...you were a really good computer, M70!)
3) is cheap

So when the M70 decided to put itself out to pasture this summer, I decided to experiment with the other end of the scale and go minimalist. In the photo above you see Mara's Acer Aspire 5720Z from last year, a normal-sized PC laptop (also remarkably inexpensive), and just below that, my new Aspire One D250 BTk, which is smaller than just about any of our cookbooks and weighs about as much as How to Cook Everything.

And? It cost €300 and does just about everything the €2000 M70 did by the end of its lifetime (minus the flickering screen and overheating). It runs XP, which is great for those of us who want their audio software to work, and it doesn't have a CD or DVD drive, which is interesting, but on the other hand....it's so tiny!!!

Is very nice, I am recommend.

But: am I ruining the global economy by spending less (don't answer that, it's a trick!!!)?

+++

Last night I made enough chili to last us a week, which I never do. We both thought it was a good idea to have done so. Sorry about my sentences. Here's a brief note on proportions for Miss Mara's future reference:

500gr dried beans

enough water to cover by three inches

3 bay leaves

1 tbsp epazote

3 cloves garlic

1/2 onion

3 cans tomatoes

1 beer

3 anchos

1 chipotle

1 tbsp pimenton

2 tbsp chile molido (or double the amount of anchos)

3 tbsp cumin

4 cloves garlic

1-2 tsp roasted garlic paste

a healthy amount of black pepper

500gr beef?

2 red bell peppers

1 onion, chopped

butter for sauteeing

+++

everything is just a few hundred clicks away.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Continuing the geekery, thanks to The Onion...

+++

Also, I'm always forgetting that the BBC has a very useful vegetarian section on their site, probably because they have no RSS feed. I mean that's why I'm always forgetting about it.

+++

And let's see, what else....oh yeah: I've decided to finally go ahead and kill my estranged biological father. 

Shamelessly arresting, I know. Now I don't really mean it in the literal sense (a phrase which in my mind I can only hear screwed, having listened to Paul Wall's Chick Magnet roughly 400 times). What I mean is that, in the 15 years since we last spoke, I've considered contacting him a number of times, only to eventually decide not to, or only to eventually just "forget" about it. And of course, my inner pessimist's reasoning is that, well, as soon as I decide that I actually want to talk to him and I finally make the effort to contact him, of course he'll die. 

This is not as completely and totally irrational as it sounds, because he hasn't lived an especially healthy life. As a multiple-bypass survivor, lifelong pack-a-day smoker, intravenous drug user, and I'm sure plenty of other things I don't know about, he has easily secured a place on my own personal "Endangered" list. The last time I talked to him, back in, say...1994, he had just quit his morphine habit and was "only" smoking weed and cigarettes. I wasn't too worried about him back then, but I was 25 and in my own hermetically-sealed alcoholic pod...I wasn't worried about much. 

But now, I have his current address and a blank greeting card that says "Cowgirl Power" on the outside of it (which I bought in America for my upstairs neighbor here in Amsterdam who underwent Surprise Brain Surgery over Xmas for an aneurysm, but I never sent the card b/c I would've gotten home before it did). So Monday I shall jot some pithy lines inside and drop my Cowgirl Death Missile into the nearest postbox and hope that it's a dud. It's all part of The Year of No Regrets initiative, don't you know.

Oh, did I mention? VDuck in 2009 might be even less about food than normal. 

+++

parable of the bad programmer.

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

+++

Have you ever worked on a technical project that literally (well, literally enough) haunted your dreams? Where the client you were working for, though you got along with them well personally, had a completely different set of eyes than yours (literally, and figuratively), and it seemed that you could make no correct decision on your own?

A project from which you were so desperate to escape and get on with your life that, behind the scenes, you hacked together a borderline ridiculous and at least thoroughly inelegant solution to a sticky and terribly time-consuming problem, because: heck, you were never going to have to deal with that code ever again....this website would last them forever (hopefully literally).

And then, through some hideous alignment of circumstances, you find yourself not only working for the same person again, but having to reverse-engineer your own gross and undocumented code so you can figure out how to overextend it into an even more fragile state?

Oh...no? Huh. Uh, no...me neither.

+++

Maybe a few moments with Crayon Physics Deluxe will calm both of us right down. Here are some examples of how (not) to play.

UPDATE: OK, it is possible to become too calm as a result of Crayon Physics Deluxe. For instance, I wouldn't recommend playing it before going to the gym, because all of your testosterone evaporates into a big hostile cloud that takes off down the hall to look for beer and women.

Now in order to re-engage with my primal wrath I'm having to read about the revisionist history at work in drafting Bush's legacy. Before long I'll be like a pill-popping cliche, seesawing wildly back and forth between mania and depression, desperate for equilibrium: Crayon Physics! Bush legacy! Crayon Physics! Bush legacy! etc. etc. etc.

+++

Tonight? Sushi! Maybe. Today? Miso soup with tofu and leeks, because I forgot to eat before working out, and believe it or not, miso soup was the easiest/fastest vegetarian thing in the house to make. We didn't have any bread. It was good Emergency Food.

+++

ocean of choice.

If I'd had a TV show in the mid 90s (and exactly why didn't I?), my theme song for the opening credits would've been "Vibracobra" from Polvo's Cor-Crane Secret CD (here's an MP3).

At least that's one choice in an ocean of potential choices, but this morning it seems right. It's not the coolest thing on the planet anymore, is it (too much Mighty Boosh lately, sorry Yanks) but in 1992 it sounded like it was searching for something that I identified with, either the something or the searching. This track in particular still makes me feel like I'm driving around a deserted suburban Raleigh, North Carolina office park at 4 in the morning searching for the one damn exit with an actual living security guard at it to let me out so I can get back to my Hampton Inn and try and sleep for 45 minutes before I have to get up, iron a shirt, drink some shitty hotel room coffee, find my way back to this office park, try not to eat too many of the crappy breakfast pastries, and micromanage my coffee intake for 3 hours so that I can do a sufficiently jacked-up 30-minute demo of some pre-beta software that will probably not do any of the things I'm about to show them by the time it ships...

Brrrrgh. The point was: that the driving around a deserted office park feeling was not bad in itself, and it was complemented nicely by Polvo's mix of playful curiosity and sarcastic frustration. And no one ever really sounded like Polvo again, which is a pretty amazing statement to try and stand behind, but there's always the "Who'd Want To" defense: their CD/album sound is an unwelcoming tangle of tinny guitar (and bass!) intros burying pop songs with lyrics that you either can't hear or can't decipher.

+++

All of which is related to Vegetarian Duck exactly how?: the Wikipedia entry for Polvo linked above finally forces me to take a moment and acknowledge the inadequacy and inaccuracy of Wikipedia in general: I use Wikipedia as the reference engine for this site because a) I think it will get better b) it has entries for lots of my more esoteric and/or pretentious interests and I like the idea of having a common resource for all of these, and c) it's not like these are life and death issues, is it: it's a indie rock band from North Carolina that about 400 people care about anymore.

Which brings me to my beef with this particular Wikipedia entry: straight-facedly citing Polvo as one of the primary instigators of "math-rock", a genre name which is used as a derogatory term in this and many other households ("how was the show?" "fucking math-rock bullshit" is a conversation I believe Mara and I had only days ago). Matt Sweeney from Chavez (another one of my favorite 1990s bands credited with being a math-rock pioneer) had this to say about the term math rock:

"It was invented by a friend of ours as a derogatory term for a band me and James (Lo) played in called Wider. But his whole joke is that he'd watch the song and not react at all, and then take out his calculator to figure out how good the song was. So he'd call it math rock, and it was a total diss, as it should be."

My point is: if I were me (except that I didn't know about Polvo), and I read the Polvo Wikipedia entry, I'd definitely go out of my way to avoid listening to them for even one second because of the cited math-rock association. In fact I'd probably go step on my calculator for even being reminded about math rock.

Ah well, at least the Polvo entry is 4,302 times more accurate and objective than the entry on noise music, which almost caused me to join the Wikipedia team and rewrite it myself.

+++

















Last night I made zuppa di pesce with clams, mussels, and shrimp. This definitely isn't the accomplishment it sounds like: the evil Albert Heijn lured me in with their soy milk exclusivity program, and once they had in me in the frozen section they slapped the cuffs of convenience-oriented frozen shellfish on me. Stung.

AH has this bag of precooked frozen shellfish (known in our household as the Bag O' Death) that isn't good for much except dumping into an already-flavorful broth (after removing the tasteless squid and the inappropriate surimi from the bag), heating through, and pretending that you've made a real shellfish stew. So that's what I did.

The recipe I started with came out of an interesting little cookbook of Andy's, An Invitation to Italian Cooking by Antonio Carluccio. I say it's interesting (to me, at least) because Signore Carluccio seems to have been a celebrity chef, but this was back in 1986, before FoodTV even seemed like a good idea (assuming that it sounds like one now). And the recipes themselves are a slightly unusual selection of regional dishes, mixing the old standards with some personal family recipes that I haven't come across before. It's a nice book. Here's what I did.

+++

zuppa di pesce.

4 tbsp. olive oil
1 small red onion, chopped
3 carrots, chopped
half a glass of white wine
250g mixed shellfish (clams, mussels, shrimp for me)
2 pints or more fish stock
1 bay leaf
pinch saffron
2 cloves garlic, pressed
2 slices buttered toast

Saute onion and carrots in oil for 5-7 minutes. Add wine and cook for 2 minutes. Add stock, bay leaf, saffron, garlic, and simmer for 20 minutes or until carrots are soft.

Add toasted bread, either to soup pot itself or to individual bowls. I added it to the soup pot last night and then to my individual bowl this morning. Both worked.

Serves 2-4.

+++