January 2008 Archives

To Medieval alchemists all maladies were caused by an imbalance of something. Fever? too hot. Chill? Too cold. Cough? Too wet. Aches and pains? Too dry. Their solution was to remove the offending element from your blood, usually with leeches (those ideas are still with us--any Mormons ever wonder why the prohibition is against "hot drinks" instead of just saying "coffee and tea" outright?). This methodology applied to psychological problems as well. Too happy? Too much heat. Too sad? Too much wet.

Dürer did a series of etchings capturing these psychological maladies and their supposed causes. The only one to survive is the engraving "Melencolia". The thought was that if you spent too much time obsessing over philosophical matters, you developed an excess of black wet stuff (melas = black cholas = bile) and came to be possessed by a little imp.

For all their wild ideas and ridiculous theories, the alchemists sure had a sense of poetry. 

I remember as a student in Israel gravitating to the best looking girl in the program. She wasn't the Barbie type (we had some of those, they were so incredibly stupid as to make their looks irrelevant), more of a dark sardonic sort. We hit it off until I found out her dark secret: daddy had been convicted of embezzlement and was shunned by the Mormon community back home (sure he was embezzling, the rest just didn't get caught which means God loves them more). In my melancholy way I wanted to talk about it. She, of course, had run away to Israel to forget it all. Pretty soon I got the hint and we  stopped hanging out.

I was a bit sad (and jealous) when I saw her laughing with the idiot 18-year old playboy on the program. He was just what she wanted: someone stupid to laugh with her. She was just what he wanted: someone good looking that he hadn't conquered yet.

Last I saw her she was going on a Mormon mission. Hope she found fulfillment as a frumpy Mormon housewife.

But I learned something from that experience: Melancholy doesn't win you any friends.   

Its been a good week for me as a tech geek. For three years now I've been pondering how to get our extensive DVD collection transferred to a format that we can watch on our couch without all that inconvenient "standing up" and "putting a DVD in the player." And without having to fiddle with all those DVD menus and previews and copyright notices (I bought the damn thing, stop telling me not to steal it).

Last summer I settled on a plan: a Mac mini with an external HD and audio/video into our TV. Basically use the TV as the computer monitor (an homage to the 80's when we used TVs as computer monitors). The AppleTV at the time had some limitations, Windows Media Center had all sorts of DRM crap on it (plus it crashed a lot and had a terrible interface), the Linux offerings required substantial work and hardware to set up. On the other hand, the mini has a remote that launches a program called FrontRow that gives you all your movies in a list for easy watching, requires almost no effort to setup, takes an external HD, and is just so damn cute.

I've spent the last 4 months ripping all 200+ DVDs to MPEG-4, loading them into the iTunes on the mini (only a terabyte of space needed!), sorting them, making them look pretty, and having MLEIV do QA on the ripped versions by sitting on the couch and watching movies (it was a hard job, I had to pay her extra). Today I officially ripped X-Men 3, the last of my DVDs and its time to think about the next steps:

1. Fix the interface for watching them (FrontRow on the Mac is kinda clumsy and you can't customize it at all)
   
2. How to move my VHS's over

To kindly oblige me on the first, Mr. Jobs announced an upgrade to the AppleTV that eliminates all the reasons I didn't buy it initially (mostly it now has a usable USB port for an external HD!). As an added bonus, he eased the pain of having bought the wrong thing the first time around by dropping the price.

For issue number 2, I've been looking at VHS-to-MPEG4 converters for a while and none of them were quite what I wanted. But in the NYTimes there was a review of this device which was built just for me! Mostly our VHSs consist of episodes of the short-lived remake of Fantasy Island (circa 1998) and Cupid (same time) and other odds and ends. Not something I want to spend a huge amount on, but things that need to be preserved.

Now all that's left is to pop some popcorn (with the awesome new popcorn maker Trevor gave me for xmas--thank you Trevor!!! You know how I love quality popped corn), fill up that growler with Mac and Jack's, and re-watch that first season of MI-5.

I can feel my gut expanding just thinking about it...

We have Reverend Lovejoy's wife to thank for that defining line of late-90's paranoia. 10 years later and nothing has changed. I think what gets me most about this woman is that she went from the mindset "if its not happening to my child, then its not happening to any child" to "if its happening to my child it must be happening to *every* child!"

Its one of the banes of the Internet: we are able to form closed groups across such large segments of society and geography that we become even more insular in our thinking because we have validation from someone in another part of the world. We are scared of our next-door neighbors but trust the new friend from Peoria.

I think the biggest of this type of paranoia is the autism-MMR vaccine "link." Sites like this one reflect a collection of tens of thousands of people who think this is real. In spite of straightforward scientific proof like was reported here. Not only are they chasing the wrong cause, they are ignoring all the other possible causes of a statistically significant event!

"Something else must be at play and we need to know what that is if we're really serious about preventing autism," said Geschwind, who had no connection with the study.

And we can all, for some reason, dismiss those liars at the CDC

Yet for all this evidence, easy to find, easy to understand, the little Internet clubs grow. I think, in the end, it comes down to a circle of trust and mutual validation:

"All that scientific data is just getting in the way of how I feel, please validate me."

Maybe (and this is no comfort to the poor parents who have lost children to food allergies) there is no increase in allergic reactions, only a delay in exposure. Those kids wouldn't have made it two days 100 years ago (before non-organic food). Or maybe the wouldn't have been allergic. I can get behind funding research on the issue, but not behind hysteria based on an Internet support group and void of anything scientific.

My fetish for all things cooking goes back to the late 70's when I was a little kid, home all summer with nothing to do but watch daytime TV (or play in the 110 degree Arizona heat). It was either watch PBS or Soap Operas. Julia Child won.

In the 90's, when I was on my own and finally got basic cable, I quickly became a food network junkie. The channel has had many shows that should have never been born (Martha Stewart always made my skin crawl, Emeril is a lousy cook); most were just informational, very few were actually good. But still I watched, learned, and dreamed of a day when I could get decent kitchen supplies, a useful kitchen, and access to good ingredients.

I also read. A lot. I had just finished "On Food and Cooking" (hmm, I need that new edition...) when Alton's show, Good Eats, debuted. At first it was a revelation! Basically it was the TV version of that book. I watched it religiously and learned much. When we moved to Seattle my cooking languished, still I read and watched and learned. In the last few years I've finally been able to cook again and experiment and put all my learning into practice. That's when I discovered that I hated Alton.

It was during the contest show "America's Next Food Network Star" when it happened. The contestants had a challenge to participate in an Iron Chef contest where they were first the chefs, then the announcers. If you've seen the Iron Chef format, you know that there's one master announcer (Alton in the American version) and then two runners who work the floor while the chefs do their thing. Well, during this competition Alton was being a complete ass, asking the floor announcers really obscure questions, trying to rattle them. One of the contestants, in the heat of the moment, shot back some little insult to Alton. He had a fit. A childish pout about how she was the bitch and he was the master and she should not talk back to him that way (well, that was the post-production version with voice-overs, so maybe it didn't go down that way).

That's when it hit me: Alton is a nerd and a lousy cook to boot.

First, the nerd part.

There he sits, imperiously looking down on others while they compete. Commenting, criticizing, and being a basic know-it-all. He can tell you the physics behind why something sticks to a grill or why that hollandaise is a buttery mess. He'll do his show with cheesy stories and lousy acting. And its always him who plays each part.

I bet he was always the Dungeon Master when he played D&D as a kid.

Then, there's his food.

I've tried his recipes in the past and they have not turned out well. The brownies were like dense, dry cakes. The macaroni and cheese was gooey with a terrible texture. But I attributed that to my own failings as a cook (and my lousy ovens). But it was watching him on his new show where he drives around the country and eats what the locals eat... that convinced me that it wasn't just me: he really has no taste in food.

He was at some LA grease pit where the cops go for burgers, getting advice on what's good. They recommended some heart-attack inducing monstrosity that had more than a pound of meat with various other fried things on it. Alton loved it. It was basically a vehicle for fat and carbs. It will give you gall stones, cholesterol will go through the roof, insulin will spike, and it will be exploding out of you later in a brown, gassy, noxious mess. But mmmmm so tasty! Where's the subtlety? The nuance? The delicate flavors? Any idiot can slap together a mess of grease and meat, slide it on a bun and call it food.

This past weekend, the final nail went into the Alton Brown coffin. I was watching part of a special where several Food Network chefs each cooked a summer dish in South Beach, FL. Tyler Florence was the glue holding all the different segments together. As he helped Alton with some grilled fish thing, Tyler made the mistake of saying something helpful for us viewers at home. Alton had to cut him off and explain, in his know-it-all way, why what Tyler said was obvious and how much more about it Alton knew. His was the most boring dish at the table, but he was the most pompous.

You were just grilling fish. Get over yourself!!!!

Time to TiVo Giada's shows. Even when her shows are bad she at least has a nice body and an infectious smile.

With the new year comes the evaluate-everything-and-assess-life. In the news world, this means lists of "best" and "worst" from the previous year. Now, I'm the first one to step up and criticize my own industry/company/social group/career path/color choices and I certainly don't begrudge others doing the same. But if you are going to be bitchy, at least be accurate. PCMag posts its top 15 disappointments for the year and my company/industry are #14. But then you read the fine print:

"Then public and private WiMax ventures started dropping like flies. Sprint and Clearwire called off their plans to build a nationwide WiMax network, after Sprint CEO Gary "bet the company on WiMax" Forsee got canned last October. Earlier this year EarthLink bailed on its offer to foot the bill for a Wi-Fi network in San Francisco."

Um, WiMAX isn't Muni-WiFi. Sure, they both have "wi" in their name and are, in fact, wireless, but the similarity ends there. My RAN friends and colleagues tell me that the radio link differences are immense. And I can say, as the guy trying to design the authentication for a WiMAX Core Network, the differences on my end are substantial.

Maybe PCMag felt like "10" wasn't enough of a list, but they were definitely stretched thin at 15.

Happy New Year!