Silver Case

Did a batch of cooking today. Varying levels of success.

Spinach Jam Sort of a spinach/olive tapenade with coriander, garlic, and quite a few spices.   This tasted quite nice and I ate all of what I thought would be a two-day batch.

Rice Pudding  Rice pudding made with plenty of lemon and lime zest.  I  like these horrendously heavy Eisenhower desserts.  The rest of my family is considerably les adoption.

Moroccan Flat Bread   Yes, this is certainly flat.  I eventually got a rise from it during baking.  It’s cooling off now; I’ll eat it tomorrow.  It seems to make the necessary hollow sound when I whack on the crust. Hopefully it’s ok.  I didn’t give it enough yeast.  That was a problem.

Vegetable Paella   I sort of freestyled a recipe.  But I flinched during the cooking, not giving it enough stock in the first place and then adding extras in dribs/drabs near the end. The result?  Top rice undercooked,  middle rice horrendously water-logged and gross, and the bottom charred, not browned.  The vegetables were so overcooked they seemed practically liquidfied.  Heat was too high and I didn’t start with enough stock.  Tasted dreadful.  I ordered that it be binned after dinner.

Cranberry/Orange Muffins With Strudel Topping    These look fantastic.  They’re colling downstairs. I’m looking forward to try them tomorrow morning.

Today Luke got behind the wheel of my car and took it for some parking lot rally driving.

√   Hummingbirds weave their hanging next in the bougainvilla bushes planted int the fences of neighboring houses.   Asked Luke what the nests were today.  His answer?  “Bird Hives”

√   Luke was hanging out in the attic with me this afternoon. He went back downstairs to fetch something.  I heard THUMP of him slipping on the stairs.

Then  I heard THUMP THUMP

Then a krunk

THUNK THUNK BUNK

It was a long time

Then THUNKABUMP

Then I’m thinking, “Wow!”

I looked down the steps and the little man is face down, head first, splayed superman-style down the stairs!  I picked him up and he was suitably scared and alarmed.  Fifteen minutes of goo-gooin and he was good.  I think he sprained his wrist or hand a bit, so he was delighted to have his hand wrapped in a “splint” made of some old t-shirt material in my cabinet.

He’s fine now though.  Even dragged all the visitors (Mama Kang, Aunty Nini, Ee, Ah-Ma) all to the stairs where he tried to reenact his heroic fall. He sat on the steps and then would lean face forward down.  Little drama king….

A whole bunch of us have April birthdays.  Today we celebrated at my house.  Food was good, and more importantly, from a planning aspect, it worked really well.

Mom sent me an 18″ paella pan. So last night I made a fish paella to see how it worked. Answer was it worked really well.  Five of us devoured a whole dish of it.  Additionally I prepared a dry rub for ten racks of baby back ribs.  I used twenty smoked chillies I bought last summer in USA.  We readied the mise en place for baked beans and I vinegared the potatoes for potato salad.

So this morning I woke up at 7am.  I tossed together two pounds of Great Northern Beans into a dutch oven with stocks, spices, and some really smoky anchos.  Those baked at 250F for five hours.  I wrapped up the ribs in indivdual aluminum foil boats with lots of nice braising sauce and crammed all ten in my big oven.  They braised for 2:45 at 250F.

When the guests arrived between 12:15 and 1pm everythign simultanesouly finished, the beans, a fresh paella, the potato salad, and the meat.   I wasn’t even sweating.  Then I was totally done with the kitchen, and just enjoyed the rest of the afternoon.  I think we’re only left with a rack of ribs, a pile of potato salad, and of course, a tons of beans.

By-the-way, the paella was nice.  It seems like a really easy way to make a nice vegetarian garbage plate.  It helps that I have a very wide element on my stove, so it gets even heating.

I exiled my old Intel box to the attic.  I renovated it last year, but largely put it aside once I brought Apple into the house.

Tonight I came up to the attic to putter around. One of my chores was to connect the Intel to the home network so that I could move all the Alton Brown episodes I have onto my main filesystem.

Turn on the PC and a massive pop and stink throws.  5a fuse burn out in the cord.  Apparently the power supply has a short in it; it stinks.

I’m thinking the only “renovation” this bastard is receiving is for me to tear out the hard drives, suck them off with a HD enclosure, and toss the thing in the trash. I don’t want clutter, especially clutter that’s an implicit insult.

I have a fancy oven, but I don’t know how to bake. Or moreover, I don’t understand baking science at all.  So last night I sat down with Alton Brown’s book on baking to get up to speed.  Very well written.  I at least have a grasp of how all the parts work now. (For instance:  what’s baking powder?  cream of tartar (acid) + baking soda (base) = gas = leavening. Double-acting just means two round of gas production, from two different acids that react at different heat levels). So I worked on two recipes today. One, a recipe for wheat-thin style crackers.  The other for regular bread.  The bread dough is still rising. (It called for using a starter, which I didn’t have, so I maybe don’t have as much water as I should in the dough)   The wheat thins are cooked and largely eaten.  I used high gluten bread flour and a helping of buckwheat flour. They have a hearty taste.  The recipe includes 50g of sugar, which makes the crackers taste nicer, however, I really wish I had included some salt directly into the dough.  Salt doesn’t stick on the cracker well by itself.  The only leavening was from water in the dough steaming.  Hard things?  getting it rolled 1/16″ thick.  I tried using the pasta machine, but it could not get a grip on the butter-slippery dough.  I was stuck with using a roller pin.  I found it easier to roll directly onto some aluminum foil.   Think next time I’ll add salt to the recipe as well as some herbs de provence, and maybe a bit less sugar.  

Have hardly had time for much beside work lately.  Don’t have time for many hobbies.

Sydney 18-28 Mar 08 187

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

…as Luke would say

No pictures of the house yet. We were all too busy organizing the rooms and cleaning things up.

If I had a camera today, I could have photographed:

1. The Malayan Bridle Snake (I think that is what it was) crawling among the potted plants on the patio. Luke was initially scared of it, but after a few reassurances tried to crawl close enough to touch it, before it vanished into the rain grille.
2. Walking to the playground next door stop in astonishment with everyone else as a huge black-and-white bird that looked like a toucan t nut. I thought these birds were fruit-eaters!
3. The bat fly into the family room, do a lap, and pop back out.

 I’ve moved into 41 Springleaf Height.  Matilda, Emily, Ling’s mom, and I spent the better part of Thursday through Sunday unpacking.  Thank Goodness for the women…all I did was sort my office, workshop, and attic.  I guess things are perhaps 80% done?

So far I am really enjoying the house.  The house affords a lot more privacy than previous places, both inside and outside.  The toilet met expectations, but the thing that really came through was my hot water.  My house is 100% solar hot water. No hot water tank anywhere.  I had subsequent misgivings that maybe the water would be unsatisfactory.  Truth is, it puts out extremely hot water in copious quantities. The shower is as good as the Grand Hyatt Roppongi’s.

I made Indian food yesterday in the kitchen, basically my first meal prepared there. Things worked ok. Still fine-tuning the layout of all the kitchen gear in the different drawers. Don’t have the gas oven hooked up yet — still waiting for the infrared grill.

Unfortunately I’m working full-time now.  I really am not used to an honest day’s work after the last five months of very dishonest “work”.  It’s 10pm and I’m shagged.  Perhaps that is why I’ve had a low-grade sore throat persisting for the last two weeks.

…started work already (a bit ahead of schedule) — going to be a lot more work than last place.

…movers come tomorrow to pack up 18 Robin Close; they’ll deliver it on Thursday to 41 Springleaf.

…just dropped Luke and Ling off at the airport. They’re going to Sydney for the duration of the move, lest Ling goes insane, and all of us along with her.

…don’t think I’ll have much internet access for the next couple days at least.

After what Father Malachi Martin would refer to as my poker ‘Chastisement’ in Las Vegas, I bought a couple books on low-limit-no-limit texas holdem (the game we commonly play) and looked for some online venues. I found software called Poker Academy Professional. It looked better than most of the other software I’d seen, and it had an OSX version, so I bought it. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by it.

The offline play (me versus robots) isn’t that compelling. I seemed to soon be beating the “better” bots handily. Whether that’s because they are bad or I am a bad (thus confusing) player isn’t clear. Probably both. There are supposed to be analysis features that look at how you play, or train scenarios or something, but I haven’t used them. What has please me most so far is the online play.

Playing versus other people is more fun, and more realistic. The problem with playing things like Yahoo Poker is that they are free, thus people play carelessly and frivolously. So it provides no realistic simulation of how people play when money is at stake. Thus, it’s useless.

How does Poker Academy Online manage to make free play more like money play? By putting you in Poker Purgatory first. There are lots of game tables, but until you’ve won or placed in the free tournaments and accumulated enough virtual money (called ‘Pax’), you aren’t allowed to play any ring games or serious tournaments or arrange your own games with friends. And if you blow all your dough at the Pax tables, back you go to Purgatory, which they call the ‘free roll’ tables.

These tables are not nearly as bad as, say, Yahoo Poker, but they can be extraordinarily tedious. What you find almost every tournament is the first hand (there will generally be between three and five tables of ten players each) one monkey goes ‘all in’ and three or four people follow suit. It’s a little mini-lottery for them. I loathe it. The worst is when my first hand is a reasonably strong one like today (JJ). Stupid not to join the mayhem, but then when I bust out, I have to go back and wait for the next tournament. I almost pray for a 27o for my first hand at these tournaments.

Anyway, right now that is not a concern, because I got away with about $50 PAX and then went to a cash table where I doubled that, fairly monotonically, in about an hour. Then I went away wanting more. These games are much more civil/proper, although there was one retard who ran through 600$ worth of senseless ‘bluffing’ before he was bankrupted away. I didn’t have any super stunning play myself, although I did nicely milk one guy for as much as he had, slow-playing an AA. And, as I tend to do, got broadsided by a drawn flush at some point. Moi-Doo-Doo

We been discussing the Slater hoarding gene a while back. So now, which one of us is going to invite Martin Hampton to his house for Possessed 2: The Sequel ?

Was going to win my first poker tournament ever.

Lost via a 7 drawn on the river. This guy had only three outs [7c would have given me an ace high flush]. Yet, he drew one of them. And down I went, finishing second instead of first. fuck me.

ugh

Visited Tran Manh Tuan’s ‘Sax ‘n Art’ Jazz club again tonight.  It’s a very solid Jazz club that seems to do everything right.

There was a continual cavalcade of guests coming and going from the stage, including, at one point, the former German Consul General who played guitar for a piece.   The music was all good, although I preferred when they jammed or played originals, rather than playing ‘the standards’. (Sick to death of ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Take Five’).    As far as I am capable of telling, Tuan seems like a virtuoso saxophonist, and the backbone of his band (bass, drums, piano) sounds very solid.  [Note to piano guy: play more during your solos!]

Tuan looks very much like a one-eyed Chinese triad gangster I am friend-of-a-friend with.  I couldn’t shake that vision when he was playing on stage. But it’s actually ok, as both the saxophonist and the gangster are quite gracious and humble.  Tuan runs a very efficient bar.  It’s not overcrowded, the temperature is cool enough, and the sound system is well managed — loud enough to be nice, but not punishing.  Probably my only complaint would be that the beer needs to be chilled a further 10C before it’s served. I found it regularly too warm.

Last time I was in Saigon, Ling and I enjoyed a fine meal at L’en Tete.  I made that my first dinner appointment during my second trip.

Fish Soup in a Marseille style

I love how the French make a fish soup.  In Chinese cuisine, they try to strangle the taste and smell of the fish away with ginger.  The Indians use tumeric like you’d use baking soda on bad smells.  The French, however, they reduce, reduce, reduce the stock until it is unabashedly FISH.

The croutons made a nice texture with the soup along with some cheese shavings (sort of an emmental cheese, though I don’t know the exact species).  The saffron-tainted mayonnaise I could do without.  I didn’t really get the point of it.  Its flavor can’t compete with the fish. As well, it doesn’t blend very nicely into the soup.  Perhaps I didn’t use it properly.

Tartiflette

I asked for something authentic and they suggested this unusual dish.  It’s unusual because a casserole of potato, onion, and cream is more often a meal after skiing in the Alps for a day, not in the Tropics.  However, they say it is a continually popular dish in Saigon, so they serve it.  In fact, it was quite nice, matched up with a dry white wine(*).    The kitchen’s skill was evident.  In twenty minutes they prepared the dish. Now obviously you can’t bake potatos done inside twenty minutes, so they (as I later clarified with the owner) par-boil the potatoes first, then slice and mix them in with some  onions.  They have beautifully calibrated the process.  The potatoes kept their sharp edges like glacial scree, but were entirely cooked.  The onions were  softened in butter before mixing into the tartiflette, so their taste was much more developed than if theyd simply been tossed in, raw.

Reference Dessert: A Crepe Suzette

I  enjoy a hearty Crepe Suzette when I eat at L’Angelus.  So I ordered one here (they are very comparable restaurants).  L’en Tete’s  Crepe Suzette is much more elemental.  Prepared in the kitchen (not tableside), it had barely any taste of the Grand Marnier liquor it was flambeed in.  The crepe itself wasn’t a fay, pale pancake, either. It had dark brown splotches of a assertive pan.  Even the sugar was immensely coarse, surviving in the mouth to give counterpoint to the wet crepe.  It was a nice variation to what I imagine a Crepe Suzette to be like.

Anyway, it was a very nice meal all around.  The owners have a fine kitchen and a gracious dining room.

(*)  I asked for the owner to pair a wine with the tartiflette.  What did he suggest?  The cheapest win on their list of French.  I wish I could export some of his honesty to the cut-and-thrust wine stewards of Singapore.

• Ling in Norway
• Outback Australia
• Kerala India
• Black-Coffee

I am in Ho Chi Minh city to collect the suits I ordered last time I was here.  Nothing special to do today, so I figured I could look for some ties, rather than throwing money away on them at department stores in Singapore.  Khai Silk is apparently well-regarded, so I went to their website to check out the details.  Whoo-wee bad bad bad website. Make sure to turn your speakers on when you go to it.

Looking to install fresh DSL at my new house. Looking through the plans.

The $108/month plan gives me 10/1Mbps download/upload and along with the other rubbish (a wireless plan of dubious value) it gives me a free Windows Vista laptop.

Somehow if I give them $20 LESS per month, they give me the same 10/1 service and a MacBook instead of a Vista horror. Hahahah I would have paid $20 MORE to get a Mac rather than a dreaded Vista-encumbered unit. I guess I won’t tell them that.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Singtel also seems to be pushing some sort of on-demand television delivered over ADSL, called Mio TV.   They’re giving away some sort of Tivo-like set-top box with it.  I guess I’ll try it out.  Their keeness in pushing this makes me suspicious, however.

I originally planned to get a Knoll ‘Propeller’ conference table for my attic lair. But I found out they’re ridiculously expensive. For the amount one costs I could buy lots of other stuff for the house, including some nice office chairs. Instead I decided to stick with the trusty old table I looted from ArsDigita on Christmas Day 2001 and steal the antique hexagonal marble kopitiam table from our pantry room.

Ling argued that it all wouldn’t fit up in the attic. I thought it would. To figure it out for certain I downloaded SketchUp, fought with it for a while, and eventually built a model of the room and furniture that demonstrates, yeah, it will fit.

I don’t think I grok Sketchup fully. I doubt I did things the smartest way, but at least it worked reasonably well. Maybe I’ll be able to use it for some future projects.

Bottom left edge is where the built in desk/cabinets begin.  Entrance from the 9:00 corner.

Around 1999, reading Cryptonomicon, there was a conversation in the novel about SMS (Short Message Service  aka Text Messages) use in the Phillipines.  It was vastly popular because it was cheaper than actual phone calls.  At the time we didn’t really use them in Singapore.  Within a few years, however, SMS’g in Singapore was as ubiquitous as email.  I think in Singapore’s case not because they’re cheaper (though they are) but because they’re terribly convenient. So many discussions are simple queries or statements that don’t require a phone call’s overhead.

When I was in the USA last month, handphone use there seemed about as sophisticated as it was circa 1999. Or worse.

It’s a shame, too, as Google provides Americans services like 1-800-GOOG-411.  GOOG-411 does a surprisingly good job of voice recognition in finding addresses and businesses.  I used it frequently.

One thing I tried to ask it was flight status for Lee’s Qantas trip.  Didn’t work. This was a “find business/address” only.

Sigh. Only now that I’m back did I discover Google’s SMS service, which answers a much broader spectrum of requests.  This seems like it should be great.  Totally eliminates the tedious need to use a 3G web browser to Google Mobile.

Things continue to fill in at the house.

I stopped by tody and saw the electrician installing the new service to the oven. The obese Indian guy always reminds me of Prop Joe, except he’s doing house wiring, not fiddling with toasters, but still.

May I suggest an electrical parlay?

Of note, the 450v x 3 phases x 20amperes is inaccurate. It’s actually a 32 ampere service… so I guess it’s more like a 30hp motor, not 20hp.

Toto called. My Neorest has arrived. They sent over a plumber who will install the things (most won’t, for fear of damaging the senselessly-expensive toilet). He’s on vacation next week, so he’ll do it the following week, a day before I move in.

I approved the invoice for the intercoms.

Our gardener came by to assay the front yard.  He’ll replace all the topsoil, put bamboo in the front, and make a privacy wall of some jungle plant versus our idiot neighbor.  He said grass won’t grow in the shady area under our newly-extended roof, so he’s going to install a small wooden patio/deck in that area.  Surprisingly, he’s a stickler for details and accuracy. He was making fun of the small deck built on the side of the house. He didn’t like that the slats weren’t long, were poorly nailed, and the seams didn’t match cleanly. I expect his will be better. Ling has seen other things he’s built, and says they are very nice.

Only equipment we’re waiting on is to get the Rinnai infrared grill.  The distributor didn’t call Ling back today.

Emily, Matilda’s cousin who we have hired, arrives Monday.  Ling’ll put them to work cleaning all the construction filth (dust, debris, etc)

During my trip to Death Valley I had two QRP QSOs using my Elecraft KX1 and a “long” wire antenna.

The first was 2/25/08 with n7oc (Stan), from my campsite at Warm Springs (an abandoned Talc Mine in Death Valley). It was a really sketchy contact, only succeedinig because Stan indulged me. My signal report was 339 (almost useless!). Stan was booming in on 7.046mhz with a 599 signal. To make it harder, my copying was rusty. I haven’t worked CW since August 2007. But it was my first contact ever with the KX1 in full field conditions (shitty antenna and six AA cell batteries). Thanks Stan.

The next day we hiked a few miles west, up the valley, and then south up a stream wash into the hills. We took a break on the edge of a south facing cliff, overlooking a giant playa. With no trees available, I just draped my longwire and the counterpoise into a crude dipole, running East/West. I was nervous that I’d hear nothing, being the middle of the sunny day. However, there were more than a few strong signals out there. I tried returning some calls to no avail, so I jumped over to 7.057mhz and started calling CQ myself. In only a few minutes a powerful 599 signal rolls in from Dennis W7RVR. His signal was clean and his fist was eminently copyable. We had an enjoyable 15 minute ragchew before Dennis signed. Definitely my best QRP contact thus far.

W3LMB QTH

Here is a panoramic photo from my temporary QTH. I took a bunch of 20mm photos while rotating and then stitched it together with the very nice bit of software, DoubleTake. DoubleTake is really clean and easy to use. Further, it only cost 15EUR.

For an even neater photo, download this quicktime VR photo of this scene, which allows you to rotate it 360 degrees! It’s a big file (8mb) and you may have to install QuickTime, but it’s quite neat result. What’s scarier is how easy it was to do this!

Don’t know what his problem was, but it took thirty minutes of cajoling before Luke submitted to a haircut at Barber Minami today. Innumerable candies, a gelato from Haato, and finally a bumboat ride down Clark Quay. This will not become a habit.

The woman who runs the store we bought all our industrial kitchen equipment from (chiller, oven, and gas burner) drives us nuts.  She never follows up on any promises of action, never returns calls, etc.  Yesterday, things were supposed to arrive, but she fucked it all into a cocked hat, so instead we had to wait until  today.  I wish that was the only problem we suffered.

Today the workers were unloading the oven (it’s enormous) and Frank, our architect/builder comes by. He turns colors immediately and starts talking to the workers in dialect. Clearly something is wrong.

Even though Frank and Ling asked, confirmed, and reconfirmed with this woman that the oven ran on single-phase 20amp 220v circuit, in fact, no, it doesn’t.

It doesn’t run on single phase. It runs on triple-phase.

It isn’t 220V.  It’s 450V.

The only thing she got right is 20amp service.

So now Frank needs to get the electrician to rewire into the kitchen to provide adequate service.  All the cabinetry has already been installed, so this will be a stupid, unecessary, gross work.