Starry Wisdom

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so first the good news - which is the update on my previous post. Yeah, it was the wireless router, and the new one works perfectly. Yay!

Bad news - I’m falling apart. My ankle had been bothering me since mid December, and I finally managed to get in to see the specialist this Thursday. He said it’s tendinopathy, probably aggravated by some extra bone - remnants of me breaking my ankle nearly twenty years ago. I’m on Aleve for 10 days and I have a pretty fancy ankle brace that I’m to wear for 6 weeks. Hopefully I’ll be better by the time of the followup.

Of course, it doesn’t end there. Yesterday morning, as I got up from lacing and buckling up the brace my back decided to spasm. So I’ve been laid up, unable to stand straight and barely able to walk since then. My weekend plans are pretty much ruined. I tried to go to the urgent care place near my apartment today (to maybe get muscle relaxer or the such), but alas, they are closed on weekends.

Oh well, at least my ankle is feeling pretty well.

I’m not sure if I posted about this, in fact I’m quite positive I didn’t, but back in September my Windows computer died. It was nearly five years old so this wasn’t completely unexpected. It wasn’t the end of the world either, as I mostly use my laptop. But still, it served a function as my media server, so it needed to be replaced.

Out of laziness, instead of building my own, I ordered a mid tier Dell system, which came with WIndows Vista, but also a free upgrade to Windows 7, which was due to be released within a couple of months. I was loathe to run Vista, but the free upgrade cheered me up somewhat.

I finally got my upgrade DVD in December, but I dragged my feet in installing it. In hindsight, I really should have done it last week while I was off of work, but alas. Instead I just killed two weeknights dealing with the ‘upgrade’ and its fallout.

First of all, because I’m crazy, I decided I might as well see if the actual upgrade functionality would work, as opposed to doing a fresh install of Windows 7. I didn’t really have anything of value on the OS drive, so I could deal with a clean wipe, but I guess I wanted to see how elegant Microsoft could be. The answer is not at all, and I was forced to do a fresh install after wasting 2 hours doing the upgrade process. Pretty sad, since the install only took about 45 minutes. And now things were OK. Except they weren’t.

I alluded above to the fact that I had more than one drive in the computer. The second drive was the hard drive from my old, dead machine, which was filled with various media files (video and audio). Was is the key term here, since that drive perished in the upgrade. Actually, I’m pretty sure I know what happened to it, and it seems it’s half my fault for not keeping my drive’s firmware up to date (hah, clearly everyone needs to do that!). There is a bug on particular Seagate Barracudas, of which my drive is one, where upon bootup the drive can basically become a spinning brick. All your data is there, but since you cannot talk to the disk, you cannot retrieve it. The only solace to me in this is that I am 99% sure I have all the music on my old Ipod, which I can pull back off it. Oh, and that I can get a warranty replacement.

And now we come to the third woe: my wireless router is a piece of crap. I always knew that the Linksys WRT54G that I had was a less desirable version (v6 if you must know) but because it worked pretty well, I didn’t care. But now my new printer (bought to replace my more than nine year old deskjet that barely worked with Vista, and based on an experience at Erin’s with Windows 7, I figured I was best served with spending $100 to enter the modern age. Oh and I would be getting a scanner and a copier at the same time), which is fully wireless, taught me why that router might not be so great.

You see, I configured the printer to use my wireless network, and it seemed to be happy. But when I tried to find it on my laptop, no luck. And please remember, on this first night, I wasn’t done futzing around with the desktop, so I had no other way to test the printer. It just seemed like it wasn’t working. But on the second night, I found I was able to connect to the printer if I plugged it onto the router via wired ethernet. And on the third night, I learned that my wired windows computer could connect to the printer when it was connected wirelessly to the router. A bit more fooling around with devices and I determined:

So everything works except two wireless devices which try to talk to each other. I am mostly certain, but cannot be positive that this used to work. I decided to see what I could do to debug this, but the router’s web interface doesn’t really give you much to see. Then I looked up custom firmware to see if that would help me debug, and it turns out it probably would, but the dd-wrt website told me I should just sell the old router and get a better one. I don’t think I’ll be selling my neutered router, although I might see if someone at work wants it for free, but I did order a WRT54GL. The L stands for linux, and it’s basically Linksys admitting it was evil with the later revisions of the router. The first thing I’ll do is get the custom firmware on the new router, and after I get that working, I’ll unleash the old one on someone at work.

Anyway, there was a lot of rambling here, but I think you can see how this defends my thesis, I HATE COMPUTERS. At least some of the time, when I don’t really like them.

2009 was a pretty poor year for me and reading. Only 23 books finished (one additional book is still being read, and as such will get counted as 2010, or perhaps not at all).

Here they are in all their glory:

I’m not going to make excuses, I just didn’t read a lot. I will point out a couple of personal highlights in the list, and we’ll just leave it at that:

• Boss – Richard J. Daley of Chicago: this was a fantastic book, but I really wanted to punch the guy (Daley, not Royko!)
• Infinite Jest: This was my second read, which I did for “Infinite Summer” and probably helps account to my less than one book per two weeks total. Upon a second reading I noticed a lot of things I missed the first time, although I still ended up with a lot of questions

Well, it’s actually fruitcake, but that word has some bad connotations, thanks to the radioactive studded substance we find at the grocery store this time of year. For the past 6 or so years, I’ve been baking fruitcake annually around Thanksgiving. Around Thanksgiving because it takes several weeks for the cake to mellow and age (with many spritzes of brandy) before it is ready to be eaten. This way it is ready just on time for Christmas gifting or parties.

This is basically Alton Brown’s recipe from I’m Just Here For More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking, which is subtly different from the Good Eats recipe from the episode “It’s a Wonderful Cake” (although I do recommend watching that episode, you can find it pretty easily on Youtube).

Fruitcake
(Makes one 9″x5″ or two 6″x3¾” loaf pans)

Note: The original recipe calls for the single larger loaf. But I had come across a pair of smaller loaf pans, and it turns out the smaller size is perfect for gifting, and doubles your unit yield. Instead of doubling the recipe, prepare multiple batches of the dried fruit mix, as it is hard to split into proper portions.

1. Mix together dried fruits, ginger, zests, cloves, allspice and rum - you can do this in the pot you will be using the next day (see step 2). Soak overnight.



2. The next day, stir in the apple juice, cider, butter and sugar. Bring to a boil, stirring every few minutes. Reduce heat to low and simmer 10 minutes



3. Remove from heat and cool ½ hour until it is room temperature. Stir in the eggs.
4. Put oven rack to lower middle position and preheat to 325°F. Either butter and flour your loaf pan(s) or spray with “Pam for Baking”.
5. Whisk together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Stir in the pecans.
6. Pour the spiced fruit mixture into the bowl and fold in until it is just combined. Do not overmix.
7. Put the batter into the prepared pan(s). Bake for 1 hour. Check for doneness by poking a skewer into the middle of the loaf. If it comes out clean, it is done baking, otherwise let it go a few minutes more before testing again.



8. Set pan(s) on cooling rack and spritz top with brandy. Cool completely before turning out onto wrack and spritzing with more brandy.
9. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and then foil.
10. To age, unwrap and spritz with brandy and re-wrap every 2 or 3 days for 2 weeks, and then once a week for the next two weeks. After one month of aging and spritzing the cake is ready to be eaten.

Serving suggestion: toast lightly and spread with marscapone cheese.

Contrary to what you might think after the last post, this is not a product review blog (well it’s not much of anything, as I am super lazy). However, I wanted to talk about this toothbrush I bought yesterday - the Colgate Max Fresh.

I was spending the night in Sunnyvale, since I had to take my friend Erin to get some surgery done at 6:30 AM this morning, and driving down to Sunnyvale, then up to Palo Alto from San Francisco would have mean leaving home at 5AM. However, I left my tooth brush sitting on my couch at home, so I bought a new one.

I can’t find a good picture of it online and don’t have a good camera ready and available to take a picture, so I’ll just point you to the official site. This is one of the fancy modern toothbrushes, with a rubber contoured handle and bristles that point off at various acute angles. The site lists some fantastic additional features, including a minty fresh handle to invigorate your brushing experience. I am not sure how much this adds to the experience when you already are most likely using mint scented dentifrice, but at least it has some humor value when you hear about it.

The other feature, the tongue freshener, is what I really want to talk about. I guess it’s a not uncommon feature to have these days - a bit of rubber on the back of the head which supposedly cleans off the tongue, but there is more than just a bit on this toothbrush. The rubber ’stubble’ is also on the sides of the head, so when you brush you are constantly rubbing it against your cheeks. This is not what I call an enjoyable experience, and even a minty fresh handle can’t change it.

To sum it up, as far as fancy new toothbrushes go, the Max Fresh is a dud. I much prefer my current Oral B CrossAction Pro-Health Toothbrush.

The makers of POM pomegranate juice (oh, wow, I just recall I have a POM branded pomegranate in my fridge, I should rip it apart and get the tasty arils) have decided to create an iced coffee beverage.

I saw this while at the grocery store this morning, and I decided I would try one out, just for kicks. I bought the chocolate one, as the only cafe au lait at the store was in a very battered looking bottle.

Anyway, the beverage’s ingredients are: nonfat milk, organic cane sugar, POMx (pomegranate extract), coffee, erythitrol (why another sweetener?), cocoa, natural flavors, caffeine and carageenan. From these ingredients, I expected it to be a sweeth, thick, chocolately beverage, like the iced Starbucks beverages in the bottles, and indeed that’s what it was. A bit too sweet, actually - I think they were tying to mask the tart pomegranate flavoring, which comes across as an aftertaste more than a taste. It’s not an unpleasant concoction, but not something I would choose to drink very often.

I suppose you could be more unhealthy in a beverage pretty easily, but I’m not sure that this stuff is particularly healthy. Given a choice, I’d rather have one of their juice blends, or even their tea (which I liked a lot more when it came in the wide mouthed glasses).

I’m trying to decide if I should do NANOWRIMO this year or not. For the record, I’ve attempted it every year since 2003, not getting too far that first year, due to job searching, but completing it in 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2008 (in 2006 I only got to about 45,000 words, due to moving in November).

I’m trying to fathom if I have the desire to go through with it again, knowing that if I want to I can complete it (most of the stuff I’ve done has been incredibly stupid, but hey, it’s easier to write stupid than smart). It’s a lot of hours of time blocked off, when I could just as well be doing something else, either more or less useful. I have a seed of an idea, but I would have to spend some time prethinking of it before I could actually write on it, which means even more time spent.

Should I or shouldn’t I? I have 26 days left to decide!

I’ve been neglecting the blog this month. I don’t have any good reason besides a lack of much to say. However, now I do have a few things.

1. Rock Band: After naysaying for a year and a half, I bought an Xbox 360 last fall. This turns out to be one of the best electronic purchases I’ve ever made, considering the use I’ve gotten out of it (mostly from watching video on it - either via playon , netflix or hosted on my windows machine (which died and had to be replaced recently, which caused me much angst, but…). However I’ve played a few arcade games, and two games I’ve purchased - Bioshock and Fallout 3. The latter I played the crap out of, but its time had come to get a new game. After spending a weekend playing Rock Band in Lake Tahoe (the first time I’ve played it in a year) I decided it was time to take the plunge. So I’ve been rocking out on Rock Band 2, and will likely get the Beatles version later this year.
2. Where the Wild Things Are: I saw the second public showing of this evar last night - a benefit show for 826 Valencia, where I’ve been volunteering for the past few weeks. I won’t lie - the tickets were not cheap, but it was for a good cause, and for a movie I’d been wanting to see since I first saw a trailer. Spike Jonze, who directed and co-wrote the move with Dave Eggers (founder of 826), decided long ago that he wanted to do benefit shows at all the chapters before the movie was released (in fact the Chicago chapter had the first public showing the night before). The movie is out on 10/16 and I do recommend you see it, especially if you have children or enjoyed the book as a child. Also, I got a cool crown:
   
3. Halloween: It’s coming in a few weeks. I don’t really have any plans yet, but I do have a costume in the making. It’s a costume not quite as obscure as my Zenmai Samurai costume from 2007, but not main stream either. Most of the implementation of it is complete, but I need to buy one more piece of clothing for it to be complete. Here is a hint - if you can figure it out from it, you will get a lot of credit:
   

I wrote a piece about washing bananas. Please note, it is in jest, although there is some truth hidden in my rant..

How to clean a banana

Two weeks ago, on August 22, I had people over for dinner. I made this recipe for the Zuni Cafe roasted chicken with bread salad. The recipe/dinner itself would almost be worthy for a post in and of itself, but as you can see, Deb has already well explained the recipe, and I have something more important to talk about - Pine Mouth. I know, you are probably thinking “what the heck is pine mouth?” I would be saying the exact same thing in your shoes, if I didn’t have the unfortunate experience myself.

I suppose it makes the most sense for me to explain this by way of a timeline, and fill in the information as I learned of it.

Tuesday August 25, 2009 - I woke up for work (I work from home Tuesday mornings), and while I was brewing the coffee, I grabbed a gum drop from a plastic bin as a snack. It tasted a bit strange to me, extra bitter, but I thought maybe it was just a bad gum drop, and didn’t think much of it. The coffee, prepared in a Moka pot, also tasted a bit bitter, but I thought I had burned it some, and just kind of powered through. Neither of these tastes really made me think anything was wrong, but after I got to the office around 11, I noticed that there was a persistent foul taste in my mouth - a acrid, sour taste. I thought maybe I was having some reflux, not completely unheard of for me, so I had a Tums, which also tasted completely awful. When 30 minutes later the taste didn’t go away - in fact it was hanging there like a bitter blanket on the back of my tongue, I started to get concerned. So I did what any sane person would do, and I googled “bitter taste on back of tongue”, and found a bunch of very concerning articles - was my liver failing? Did I actually have a brain tumor? However, thankfully, I noticed, far down on the page, a reference to pine nuts causing a bitter taste. “I had pine nuts Sunday in the bread salad, in fact I had a bunch while cooking dinner too…” was in my mind.

I did some more googling around, and found that wikipedia contains a reference to this outcome, as well as a link to a paper in the European Journal of Emergency Medicine describing this affliction. Interestingly enough, the paper is from 2001, but most of the 13,000 hits for “Pine Mouth” seem to be from the past 9 months or so. So what’s going on here? Well, no one knows, but I will talk about what’s known:

1. Around two days after eating certain pine nuts, certain people develop a lingering, unpleasant taste sensation
2. The pine nuts that have caused the issue appear to be mostly sourced from China, or other places in the East. European and American pine nuts appear to be precluded from causing this, for now
3. The exact methodology of this affliction is not known (but I will discuss a hypothesis of mine shortly
4. The affliction lasts for about one to two weeks for more people

Seeing this all relieved me greatly, and also caused me to realize that the bitter taste was reminiscent of the bitter component to pine nuts’ flavor. I made it through the rest of the day eating food that tasted poorly, and just suffered.

Wednesday August 26, 2009 - This mostly probably the worst day of the experience taste wise, because everything I put in my mouth, save for water, tasted like it was coated in dish soap. I was also a bit concerned by getting affected now (and note that none of the other 3 people at dinner got hit by this, so perhaps my extra snacking before dinner helped this along), since I had plans to go wine tasting in Napa the coming weekend with Mackenzie, and what’s the point in wine tasting if all the wine tastes like soap!?

Thursday August 27, 2009 - The soap taste had receded a bit. It was now more of an aftertaste (and a most foul one at that), and I found that some foods had strong after tastes than others. In particular high carb/high sugar foods were the soapiest, and spicy and savory items were markedly less so. I had some hope that by the coming Saturday I would be “better”.

Saturday August 29, 2009 - Sadly, I wasn’t all the way better by Saturday. The soapy aftertaste was certainly less strong, and it lingered far less, but my taste was still not up to par. I couldn’t trust any aftertaste in any of the wines I tasted (and, alas, port in particular was fouled by the soapy aftertaste, which made my otherwise fun visit to Prager Port imperfect.

Wednesday September 2, 2009 - After brushing my teeth in the morning I thought to myself “hey, was this baking soda tooth paste”, because it had that sort of aftertaste. It was not, just normal minty stuff, but this also the last little whisper of the Pine Mouth distastefulness. I was, after this, free at last!

So it lasted a bit more than 8 days for me, which seems to be right around the average, but the big questions remain - what the heck is this, how does it work? Of course, I can’t answer everything, but I can say that scraping your tongue, eating things like parsley, etc have no impact on this. It’s something inside (or chemically bonded) to your taste buds which causes this. And, I think this is the key to the one to two week duration - the life span to a taste bud is about two weeks. So, I, hypothesize that some chemical in these pine nuts from China or Korea or etc, binds with the taste receptors in some taste buds, and then over the course of 36 or 48 hours, metabolizes into some other chemical that blocks all taste except bitter, and perhaps even generates this taste. Now, as these afflicted taste buds die off over the next two weeks, your taste gradually returns to normal.

That’s my story with Pine Mouth. I’m going to be hesitant to eat pine nuts sourced from Asia again, but I’m not going to completely avoid them. It’s entirely possible I will never face this again (and I hope so), but at least I’ll know what it is next time. Have you ever had pine mouth? What was your experience like? Let me know!