Silver Case

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.

Workshop is nearly done. The floor is painted red. I am assuming it’s going to be epoxied-over, as the paint itself doesn’t seem to have a very hard coat on the floor.

Workshop

Sure miss the ubiquitous excellent coffee available in Seattle. No shop in Singapore can produce anything even near as nice. My own hasty efforts yesterday were horrendous too. I made Ling and I  lattes. The extraction was sour and bitter to the point that I refused to drink it and went without.

I figured it was time to reassess my process, so I bought an extra 500g of Spinelli’s Mrs. D yesterday (a blend of Central American high-grown [not typically my favorite] and some New Guinea) with plans to run it all through. This morning I went started from first principles again, carefully dosing, tamping, extracting, and cupping. I dialed it in reasonably well. Would grade myself a 85-90 right now. This time I took photos of the raw coffee mound, the tamped mound, and the pour on most of the shots so that I would have better reference than my memory. When I get motivated again, I am going to set up a procedure to systematize it a bit more, recording all the relevant telemetry:

• grind
• raw mound
• tamped mound
• rim height
• pour photos at intervals
• volume produced
• post-pour rim height
• post-pour ‘cookie’ firmness
• cupping results

Speaking of coffee, I should bring over my roaster to the new house so that it can be tapped into the ventilation system. I guess I’ll do that this afternoon when I go over.  The drape/blind people are coming to measure windows and ostensibly some other kitchen equipment should be arriving, however, the supplier is an idiot, so perhaps it won’t.

Apparently Time Capsule is still pending some sort of FCC-like approval in Singapore. Presumably from the IDA.

Looking forward to getting one of them to supplement (replace?) my Infant.

Anyone have opinions on Apple TV?

Luke having a dance.

Got this charming wanted poster in the form of an MMS Text Message on my handphone today

FROM: Singapore Police Force
SUBJECT: Police Message

Please call 999 immediately if you see Mas Selamat bin Kastari. He is short (1.58m tall) and limps on his left leg. Thank you.

The only thing I like about Las Vegas is playing poker. The rest of it sucks.

Everything is expensive and almost all of it is mediocre. The only thing that wasn’t inconvenient was to waste money gambling in the casino of your hotel.

I only enjoyed the poker because it is a fun game that is complicated and involves fighting other people. When I arrived in Las Vegas I had only a skeletal knowledge of Poker (Texas Hold’em [no limit]) but no real experience playing it. My first tuition was running through a $300 cash game in under an hour at a junky poker room in the Excalibur. Adam and Matt were aghast and it looked like we all wouldn’t be playing as much poker as we’d anticipated.

Then we discovered you can play tournaments instead. Tournaments are clearly the best way for a new player to practice his game. For a fixed fee (in our case, $65) you enter a tournament of twenty to fifty people. They play until the last guy is eliminated. The winner (and maybe some of the runner-ups if there were enough participants) receives some percentage of all the entrance fees. The rest get nothing. But it’s small and entirely limited downside, which is perfect when you don’t know what you’re doing. At least some money needs to be at stake, or else no one will play like they care.

Matt had the same bona fides I did. That is, none. Despite that, in his first tournament he managed to place fifth out of approximately fifty players. (In retrospect, this is even more amazing given how exceptionally tight we started out trying to play) Matt enjoyed a golden hand throughout his stay. He won money from a variety of ridiculous games (some stupid wheel straight from Price-Is-Right and, of all things, slot machines.)

We all played in a few tournaments. In my first two games, I accidentally played too loose — playing junk cards but with no confidence. In the next several games (including a 2am yawner) I played too tight and conservatively. Although it stretches out your time at the table, it dooms you — you’ll never have enough chips to kill others, which is, ultimately, the point of the game.

Resolving for the final tournament to play more than just good hands, I started off wretchedly, blew up in short order, but bought back in, where I played considerably better. Of course the flip side of mild pleasure from a good hand is lingering, brooding disgust with myself over a misplayed hand. I’d taken three largeish pots in row, quintupling my money. In the fourth hand I held A8o. I played it strong and everyone folded except one guy who I had a particular loathing of. He was the table’s resident big-mouth, There was junk on the flop. We called and raised each other a few times and the pot was decent sized. Then he raised again, out-of-proportion to the pot size. I considered if for a long time. There didn’t seem to be much potential in the flop. No obvious straights or flushes available. I felt like he was likely not holding anything useful, but I had just enough worry about a flush plus I had just come off a good run, so I folded. He’s a tosser, right, so of course he crows about having bluffed me out with a junk hand (J2o I think). The acting-out is more important to him than actually winning. If he was smart, he should have fucking kept it to himself and left me always wondering. I was and still am totally disgusted with myself. I could and should have broken that guy’s back decisively. I should have called, gone for the draw, where I would have won. The best lesson out of all this was to be fearless and try to destroy people, not last as long as I can on the table.

Before leaving, we visited Gambler’s Bookstore, ‘The World’s Largest Gambling Bookstore’. I picked up two Texas Hold’Em books and met the colorful owner, Howard Schwarzt. He entertained us (me? Adam found him tedious I think) with Las Vegas anecdotes for twenty minutes until it was closing time then Howard was ready to slide down the brontosaurus’s neck.

My self-assessment? I’m ready to read real texts on poker. I need to get games in. I’d prefer to play physical games, not electronically. I’ll have to dig around and see what I can organize or join. I’m not ready for cash games yet, I need tournaments. Hopefully I won’t need to go back to Las Vegas, as the Singapore casinos are coming online in a few years.

It’s 4:00pm in Tokyo. Just landed from Seattle. Sick to my gills of American/Western food, so even the skankiest noodle diner in the Narita airport sounds good*. Rapidly passed by the airport’s McDonald’s, but on my dash I noticed what looked to be a western girl manning one of the cash registers. She was as brashly and energetically calling for the next customer as any of the others, except she wasn’t Japanese. Sure I’ve seen lots of Japanese-speaking Westerners working in Japan, but generally in skilled, professional jobs. Never in Japanese service industry. I can’t even begin to imagine what a culture shock that would be. Japanese service culture is about as far removed from any service I’ve received in any country, anywhere. Kudos to her. Might not be much salary, but the anecdotes must be amazing.

*Ended up having a Japanese vegetable curry that had outstanding sauce