Dusted, but unbroken

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This week, I made a pecan pie for The Baker Down The Street. I’m not sure why, but my pecan pie makes her toes curl. I don’t think my recipe is terribly exotic or convoluted; maybe it’s just the allure of food made by other people. 🙂

So, I spent a fair bit of the morning in the kitchen, doing battle with my dreaded nemesis, pie crust. I struggle with it, I do. Someday, I will get around to requesting lessons from one of my more pie-talented associates. Until then, I struggle on in a sisyphean fashion, flour dusted across my hands, arms and chest. My problems come in rolling the dough. No matter what I do, it seems like the crust wants to split and crack as I roll it out. I trim bits of dough from the edge and use it to fill and spackle the fissures, but that works poorly at best. And then, when the pie crust is rolled suitably thin and patched repeatedly, the canonical process instructs the baker to place a rolling pin on the edge of the dough and roll it up on the pin, so you can try to unroll it on top of your pie pan. Typically, this is the stage where my pie dough crumbles and fractures into multiple pieces, causing many tears and/or much cursing.

Today, I had just gotten to that stage when I had a flash of inspiration. As I stood at the floured board, I saw it across the kitchen, the proper tool for the job, leaning against the wall like Excaliber waiting for her knight. A bread peel, forsooth! I dusted it with flour, and delicately slid it under my pie dough, picking it up in one, flat, intact piece. Success! And just as important, I managed to gracefully slide the dough off the peel and centered on the pie pan!

I’m a far cry from considering my pie crust woes to be a thing of the past, but I feel as though I’ve taken a significant step forward.

Mmm, pah!

Flour, by any measure

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I made a batch of cookies last week, from a recipe I have used several times before with great success. But these cookies were the fail. They were thin, almost runny when they came out of the oven, and cooled to be hardened little slivers of sugar. Grump.

I played with several different theories about what might have gone wrong. The Baker Down The Street patiently explained to me that baking powder and baking soda lose their efficacy over time, and she recommended buying new boxes of both each year, just before the Christmas baking extravaganza begins. Okay, good advice, but it didn’t feel like the sole culprit for the cookie debacle.

As I thought about it more, it felt like the amount of flour might have been too light. About a year ago, I developed a preference for measuring out my flour by weight. I have a great little kitchen scale, and I use the conversion factor printed on the bag of flour (usually 30g to ¼ cup), but I was beginning to believe that was leading me astray.

So, I’ve started a spreadsheet. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to measure out flour twice, noting how much a cup of flour should weigh according to the bag, and how much it actually weighs for me. I’m also tracking the daily humidity, as I’m guessing that’s affecting the weight.

Here’s the spreadsheet.

Only two data points so far, but there seems to be something to my suspicion. I’m looking forward to getting over a dozen entries and then trying to best-fit it to a formula. Linear, exponential, power function… any guesses? Yeah, yeah, I’m a geek. Don’t look so surprised.

Math Anxiety, update

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The school year is moving swiftly for me. We’re already a third of the way through Fall Quarter, and I thought I would give an update on my previous blog post titled “Math Anxiety”.

I’m taking two math classes this term, Calculus 4 and Number Theory. The former, I was not especially worried about. I like Calculus, and feel reasonably comfortable in it. This particular course is all about Calculus in three dimensions, taking derivatives with respect to some vector pointing in an arbitrary direction, gradients, that sort of thing. But Number Theory, that’s a whole new realm.

Number Theory is my first “proofs-based” math class. If you’re a math major, you know what I’m talking about, and you’re already nodding with some sympathy. For anyone else, suffice it to say this is a different area of mathematics than I’ve ever tried before, with its own weird symbology and nomenclature, much more abstract than previous math courses. My first week was rough. The homework was making no sense, the textbook read like no math text I’d ever seen before, it provided a relative dearth of example problems worked out, and the back of the book provides almost no answers to any of the problems at the end of each section. Panic! I emailed the prof about my worries, and all he could say was words to the effect of “Yep. Up till now, you’ve been doing using math as a customer. Now you’re working as an active participant. It’s a hell of a transition.” Great. Not exactly reassuring. Nor did it offer much in the way of steps I could take to get out of trouble.

I briefly considered dropping the class. But… well, I have to take the class eventually. And everyone I talked to told me this prof was the absolute best person in the department to take it from. And I’m told the upper-division classes look way more like Number Theory and less like Calculus. Much more theoretical, abstract. So, I girded my loins and soldiered on. I bought the solutions manual for the textbook (almost as useless as the text itself) and a general book on proof writing (meh). I got very active on the online forum for the class, answering what very few questions I could, and asking more of my own. I became diligent about making it to the prof’s office hours, where he would do sample problems for the small group that showed up. And things got a little better. The homework made a little more sense, even if it was still a big effort. Often, I would write down a problem and then I’d have to stall for ten or fifteen minutes to let my brain percolate before I had a clue where to start. Which meant homework was taking me forever to complete. And I seemed to average about one problem per sheet of paper. Regardless, it was progress. Over time, I was able to answer more of the questions posted to the class’s online forum.

This week, I had the first (of two) midterms in both classes! I was especially nervous about the Number Theory test; my knowledge of the material still felt a little shaky and I was worried about the pressure of having to crank out answers quickly, without time for intervening breaks to make tea. Test day came, and it was rocky. For the first time in a long while, I had at least one problem that caused me to seize up completely. Deer-in-the-headlights, total panic, no clue where to even start, nothing seemed to make sense. Skip it and move on. Another problem I thought I understood, but the final answer wouldn’t check, despite how hard I looked for a mistake in my work. Sigh. Skip it and move on. I finally finished the rest of the test and circled back to the skipped problems. After minutes of flop sweat, I found my stupid mistake on the one problem; transposed digits in one line of an equation threw everything off. I fixed that, and it checked correctly. Whew! Then I went back to the proof that stumped me. After wrestling with it for a while, inspiration struck me and I saw a path forward. A few minutes of grinding and I nailed the proof. A quick glance over the paper and then I turned it in and ran away in a cold sweat.

Today we got the test back. The prof admitted that the test ran much longer than he intended, so on everyone’s test he dropped the one problem they did the worst on. Thanks to that bit of grace, I am happy to say I nailed the only 100% in the entire class (of ~40 people)! My relief is so profound, I hardly know how to express it. Suddenly, I’ve moved from wondering if I can pass this class to wondering if I can pull an A in it.

Not quite so dramatic, but the Calc 4 midterm was today, and I think I did well on it. Should get that one back next Monday.

The first time I quit

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Several years ago, I reached a breaking point and decided to quit my job at Apple. I’d been there too long and various aspects of my upper management were driving me a little batty. And, frankly, I was just exhausted. The idea of gearing up to do yet another OS cycle was more than I could bear at the time. So I gave notice. No other job lined up, no real plans to speak of. I just knew I wasn’t going to be doing that for a while.

The final couple of weeks flew by. My management made some efforts to get me to stay, and when it was clear that was futile, they tried to talk me into making it just a leave of absence. But their definition of “leave of absence” just barely stretched as far as six months, and I knew that was the minimum amount of time I wanted to be away. And besides, there’s something very satisfying about cutting all the cords and drifting free for a while. So, I was resolved to just be quit and done with it.

On my last day, I was in the cafeteria having lunch with my team. Someone asked how much packing I had left to do. “Not much. I’ve got another box of miscellaneous stuff to gather, I have to take down my straitjacket from the wall, and then I guess all that’s left is my exit interview with HR.”

The guy laughed and casually said, “You should wear the strait jacket to the exit interview.”

My eyes lit up! “Yeah! I totally should!” The rest of the folks got that nervous look, like when they realize I’m completely serious about some crazy scheme. But they knew better than to argue with me. Besides, what was the worst that could happen? I’d get fired?

So, I trotted back to the office, filled the last box and put it in my car. I pulled down the straitjacket and asked one of my team to “strap me in”. They got the buckles cinched tight, I said my goodbyes, and then started across campus towards Human Resources.

On the way out of my building, across the quad and into another building, I was stopped no fewer than three times. Someone wanted to know the status of some feature in development, and I pointed them towards the relevant engineer on my (former) team. A couple of people just said hi in passing. Another asked if I could send them notes from a recent meeting. Not a single person said even a peep about the straitjacket. Not one word. I’m not sure if that says something about what people were used to at Apple, or just that it wasn’t especially surprising, coming from me.

So, I made my way to the proper building, waggling my pocketed badge at the various security readers and hip checking handicapped door openers to get into the building. I took the stairs up to the proper floor and started wandering, looking for my HR rep’s office. “You’re in a maze of twisty passages, all alike”. I eventually head butted on a conference room door and asked the people inside for directions to the given office number. Finally I found my destination.

The door was closed. My HR rep was on the phone, facing away from me when I knocked on the door with my forehead. She turned in her chair and her eyes got very large. She stared for a moment, and quickly hung up the phone. She opened the door and immediately started laughing. “Ohmigohd, hang on, I have to find a camera!” (This was long prior to iPhones.) She failed to find a neighbor with a camera and quickly came back to her office.

She unstrapped me (and how many people get to say that about their HR rep?!), I tossed the jacket in the corner, and we sat down to chat for a while. I got to very diplomatically vent for while and we had a pleasant discussion. We talked about why I was leaving, the state of the department, team politics, that sort of thing. It was all very convivial.

In the midst of the talk, I happened to see a security person walking down the hallway very slowly, scanning the halls carefully, peeking in the offices as he passed. I’ll never know for sure, but I like to believe someone had phoned security about some madman running around in a straitjacket and he was looking for the culprit.

As it turns out, that wasn’t the only time I quit Apple. But it was definitely my favorite.

Rough Rider

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Here are some photos from the weekend of riding on the McKenzie River Trail. I don’t think I could have planned out a better trip for breaking in the new bike. A wonderful mixture of intro trails and some more challenging stuff, extraordinary scenery, fabulous weather, and a great riding partner to encourage me to new levels of craziness. If this was the last hurrah of Summer, we did it justice.

Blue Pool, bluer than blue

Math Anxiety

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Recently, I was talking with a friend about math anxiety.

I’ve always been a bit of a math geek. I was one of those kids who always took the “advanced” or “accelerated” math classes in junior high, I took AP Calculus in twelfth grade. Hell, I was in the math honor society in high school. (Mu Alpha Theta. ’cause that kinda spells “MATH”. Weak sauce, right?) I was an engineering major in college (the first time) and in my old age I’ve decided to go back to school for a math degree.

And yet, I’ve also had some level of math anxiety, as far back as second grade. I can still remember when it started. I was sitting in the back seat of the station wagon with my second cousin (or was she a first cousin once removed; I always get those confused), while my mom drove us to the zoo. Nancy, my second cousin, is about a year and a half older than me (See that right there? That’s foreshadowing!) and my mom was trying to make conversation by asking what Nancy was studying in school. She said she really liked math, and they were studying fractions. I perked up; hey, I like math too! “What are fractions?”, I asked, oh so innocently.

Nancy said something about how it was numbers less than one, like ½ or ¾, and how two thirds was more than one half but less than three quarters. My mind spun like a top. I had a quarter in my pocket, and I could imagine having three of them, but how is that more than a half. Half of a what? As much as I enjoyed math, that was my first moment of math anxiety. I knew I liked the math I had already done, and was even good at it, but I was filled with dread about the math that was coming next.

And that pattern continued. I enjoyed math in fifth and sixth grades, but was intimidated by the prospect of algebra in junior high. And then I loved algebra, but was scared of trig. Trig wasn’t bad, but Calculus loomed on the horizon like a dark storm cloud. And here we are today. Calculus is a joy, but I’m about to delve into number theory and group theory and formal math proofs, and I can feel that level of anxiety creeping in. “What if I’m not smart enough?”

Mountain Bike Meditations

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For the past two years, I’ve been using my Kona hybrid to ride single-track trails. I like the Kona. Granted, it weighs about 100 kilos, and it has no suspension. But, I’ve put cyclocross tires on it, and it’s definitely geared to climb. So I’ve managed to have some fun riding trails with it.

But the prior two trails rides I’ve done, I’ve been acutely aware of the hills I couldn’t climb because of my relatively hard, skinny tires, and the amount of vibration I was absorbing into my wrist, arms, shoulders and neck. So, I found myself considering buying a “real” mountain bike. As luck would have it, I stumbled across an ad on craigslist that looked to be a good fit. The price was reasonable, the size was about right, and it had low miles on it. I decided to check it out.

Test riding the bike was weird. There were all sorts of small issues that made it tough for me to get a feel for the bike. The front fork was dialed to be very soft. The saddle was tilted so far back, it was bruising my perineum. But more than anything else, the geometry just felt really weird to me; very different from what I was used to. I decided to put off the decision for a day, and went to my local bike shop to test ride a few mountain bikes. I quickly decided the geometry differences weren’t unique to the specific used bike I was considering; mountain bikes are just that different from the hybrid I’ve been riding. And the prices tags on new mountain bikes will suck the air right out of your lungs; you can get into four digits without trying hard.

So, I went back to the guy with the used bike and bought it. And I immediately set about tweaking the bike to my tastes. I put new grips on it (I’m a big fan of Ergon GC2 shaped grips). I raised the seat a few inches, and raked it forward considerably. Even with those changes, I still had some doubts. Just tooling around in my moderately steep driveway, it still felt like my Kona climbed way more easily than the new mountain bike. Okay, I know the Kona is geared to climb, but still, a real mountain bike should be able to huff up my driveway without having to stand up in the pedals. And despite the seller’s claims of a recent tuneup, the derailleurs rattled and dragged a lot.

I spent some time online trying to understand bicycle gear ratios (whew, there are more variables to consider than you might think), comparing the gearing of my Kona and the mtb, trying to figure out the difference. After a bunch of obsessing over it, I finally decided to ignore the issue until I got a chance to try the bike on a real trail.

Which brings me to this weekend. Bobo and I headed to the McKenzie River Trail over Labor Day weekend for some riding. We started on the southern end (the easy end) and started making our way up the trail. Almost immediately, I figured out everything.

The mountain bike’s thumb shifters for the rear derailleur are cabled opposite from every other bike I’ve ridden! The index-finger lever shifts down (towards granny gear) and the thumb level shifts up (for flats and downhill). No wonder I thought the mountain bike didn’t want to climb! When I thought I was in granny gear, I was actually in the highest gear on the rear cassette! And no wonder the derailleur was rattling and grinding; I had the chain torqued sideways, in a gear combination you would never use in real life. Once I got my head turned around and started shifting correctly, everything got much, much better.

After roughly 17 miles the first day, I’m pretty happy with the decision I made. I stopped a couple of times to adjust the angles on the grips and the saddle, and I’m sure I’ll want to change the shifters so the Kona and the mtb are consistent. But overall, the mountain bike performed well.

And I’m surprised by how different the riding experience is! The front suspension on the mountain bike really makes life easier on my arms and shoulders! I stiffened the fork a ton and it rode really smoothly. The fat, knobby tires let me grab traction and climb even in fairly soft, loose soil. I’m not doing crazy jumps yet, but for nice green and blue difficulty trails, this bike does the job.

House update

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The great housing adventure of 2010 continues unabated.

The property I mentioned a few blog posts ago is still there, still available. I’ve been inside the place, with Contractor Dan. And yes, as you might have guessed, there are “Issues”.

Must be fixed before anyone could move in:

  • The place needs a new roof
  • There has been some small amount of water damage inside

Needs to be fixed to be safe:

  • Replace rotted back deck
  • Repair places where fence has rotted

Would want to address within first year:

  • Repair places where front porch railing has rotted
  • Bedroom remodel
  • Kitchen remodel
  • Bathroom remodel
  • Major tree pruning on a massive willow (way too big for me to do)
  • Refinish hardwood floors

And there’s the matter of a crummy “finished” basement that looks like the worst of the 70s, and has lots of exposed pipes and ductwork.

On top of which, consider much higher property taxes, higher crime rates and a higher price tag in general than I had hoped for. Of course, those items aren’t a black mark against this property per se, it’s just part of the baggage of leaving my current home and moving much closer into the city.

Still, if I’m going to move at all, this place continues to hold my imagination like no other property I’ve seen. It has more space, more land, more possibilities. Taken care of, it could be a real showplace. It would be a fabulous home for parties. It is centrally located for most anywhere I would want to bike. The basement level with its separate entrance could be a fabulous office space for a chiropractor, someday.

So, no decisions yet, but I’m a little further down the road. I’m talking with bank people about financing; that all looks positive and is progressing nicely. I’ve talked with a pair of buyers’ agents about worrisome issues to investigate.
And I’m continuing to look at other properties, but none I’ve seen have come close to luring me away from this place.

Lots to think about. I wish I was better at making rilly big decisions like this.

This Credit Union is SO Fired

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I’ve been shopping for a credit union lately, and my experience with one particular CU has escalated my teeth grinding to a level that is worthy of being documented.

Inexplicable item number 1: This credit union offers an online bill pay system and like all such systems, there’s a login/authentication experience the customer has to go through. Now, you’d think such a system would want to be built on the most secure, reliable technologies possible. So what does this credit union use for authentication? A Flash app. Rilly? Flash? Flash has a reputation for being so insecure and crashy, pretty much the first extension I install in a web browser is something that disables Flash. Scarcely a day goes by that I don’t read about a new security vulnerability found in Flash. And this is what the credit union chooses to use as the gatekeeper for their online banking? Sheesh. I’d sooner trust Visual Basic.

Inexplicable item number 2: To belong to the credit union at all, each member must have a basic Savings account. Huh. That’s a little weird, but okay, whatever. As it turns out, I carry a moderate balance in my accounts, and the CU has an “Instant Access” savings account that pays interest on my balance. Sweet, that’s what I want! Okay, that’s easy enough. But I am still required to maintain the Basic Savings as well. Wha? You’re telling me, even if I was to carry a balance of several thousand in a different savings account, I still have to maintain $5 in the Basic Savings account? Whatever.

Inexplicable item number 3: Frankly, the one feature of a bank I use the most is the online bill pay. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a check, stuffed it in an envelope, stamped it and mailed it to pay a bill. Okay, so I have two (grumble, grumble) accounts at this bank and it’s time to start using the online bill pay, right? Nope. This credit union doesn’t let you do online bill pay from any of their savings accounts (even an account optimistically titled “Instant Access”). Nope, I have to open yet a third account, a checking account, which holds the money I would use to pay monthly bills. Really, a third account? And I have to manually manage periodically sliding money from my “Instant Access” account to my Checking account to make sure I always have enough to pay bills? Sheesh!

A sidebar on bank accounts: The whole division between checking accounts and savings accounts feels positively antebellum to me. From the customer’s perspective, who cares? Let me explain the ideal, from a customer’s perspective. Just give me one account where I can park my money, and let the rules of the account dynamically change based on how I do my banking. If I carry a very low balance (below some fixed threshold), maybe there’s a monthly service fee for the account. And if I carry a balance above that threshold, perhaps my account is free and has no monthly fee. And if I carry an even higher monthly balance, pay me some interest. The higher my monthly balance is, perhaps I get even higher rates of interest. But why on earth do I need separate accounts for all this?

Okay, so I’ve gotten annoyed enough at this stage, that I’ve decided to investigate other options. No hard feelings guys, but I’m gonna move on. Time to close my account(s). Oh but wait, there is one final indignity to endure, trumping all of the preceding.

Inexplicable item number 4: I call the bank to close my membership and have a check sent to me for any funds I have in my three (grumble) accounts. I provide the customer service rep with my account number, and then for security she has me provide my name, address, social security number and date of birth. Okay, fine. Then she proceeds to tell me that because my balances are so large (What? I don’t have that much on account with them!), she has to ask me a series of other questions, “drawn from public records”. Weird. Okay, fire away. First she asks me “Which of the following addresses have you lived at in San Diego County?” Really? I lived in southern Cal for all of 18 months, about 18 years ago, and you want me to remember my street address from back then. Hrm, okay, I’ll try. Then she asks me, “In what city does David Caruso live?” Uhh, the teevee actor, David Caruso? No, apparently I’m supposed to be friends with someone named David Caruso. Nope, sorry, I guess I fail that question. Okay, so then I’m asked “Which of the following addresses have you lived at in Knoxville, Tennessee?” OMFG, you must be kidding. You’re asking me about addresses from over 20 years ago? I actually looked up all of the addresses she listed in Google Maps; no I definitely didn’t live at on any of the streets she cited. Great, another question failed. So then she asks me about what city some other person lives. Hey, at least this person has the same last name as me! But it’s still no one I know. Another question I’ve “failed”. And so, because I couldn’t answer enough of these “public records” questions correctly, she can’t close my accounts over the phone. I actually have to go to the bank in person to close my three (one last grumble) accounts.

If I had any lingering hesitation about closing my accounts, this sealed the deal. First Tech Credit Union, you are so fired!

Thoughts about Digital Books

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Having already learned some painful lessons from the dawning of digital music, I have firm requirements that must be met before I will ever buy a digital book.

Any digital book I acquire has to come in a format that is an open standard, readable on multiple platforms. As an opening bid, it seems like PDF would be acceptable. And there are several open formats that would fill the bill nicely. But I’m a man of simple tastes; I’d probably be fine with raw text, rtf or html. If you’re interested, here’s a wikipedia page that offers a comparison of e-book formats.

Further, I absolutely will not put up with any digital book that has DRM. I fell for that trick once already with music. Whatever new digital media I purchase, I want to be damn sure I can read it on my laptop, my phone, my tablet, and my combination espresso maker/ear-wax remover. And if I ever move from an iPhone to an Android (or whatever), you better believe those books are coming with me. I refuse to deal with any vendor that attempts to nail me down to their own hardware or restrictions on copying the media I’ve purchased.

Those two requirements are nob-negotiable. It’s not even worth having the conversation until those two are handled. But if those are met…

I’m more than a little grumpy about the pricing I’ve seen on electronic books thus far. Can you explain to me why any digital book should cost more than a paperback? Given that publishers are spared any expense of paper, printing, binding and distribution costs and never have to worry about second/third/etc printings, it seems like any book in digital format should come at a pretty great price savings. Amazon’s $9.99 for an eBook seems ridiculous.

And lastly, “eBooks”? Eww. Someone couldn’t come up with a better name than that? I don’t go around talking about eMusic! Next thing you know, Apple will start talking about “iBooks”. *snort* Oh, wait…