Entries in Life

Via the inimitable Leonnard and the Random Recipe Generato that he found, I give you this recipe for Battered Vinigar:

Battered Vinegar
Serves 4
You will need:

* 50g mince
* 20ml vinegar
* 120g soft cheese
* 60ml cod liver oil
* 60ml soy sauce

Instructions:

1. whisk the mince
2. saute the mince
3. microwave the vinegar
4. stir the vinegar
5. defrost the soy sauce
6. saute the soy sauce
7. microwave the soy sauce
8. stir the mince
9. blend with the vinegar
10. heat the soy sauce
11. heat the vinegar
12. add one tablespoon of the soy sauce
13. grind the mince
14. flip the vinegar
15. rinse the soft cheese
16. whisk the cod liver oil
17. throw it all away

Nikki » Blog Archive » taika:

How about charging a cent per kcal for ready-made food? A 300kcal item would be three dollars. Two cents maybe?

That way, I wouldn’t accidentally consume 2000 kcal from a milkshake.

Obama is now president-elect.  He won, in large part, because of the economic crisis that we're now seeing world-wide.  The timing was almost perfect, but McCain's economic ignorance and his identification with the party in power cemented the deal.  All Obama had to do was maintain his cool, something he seems to have no problem with, and talk about change.

Now, though, as the Onion put it, a Black man has been given the nation's worst job.  Assuming we begin recovering from this crisis in three years, though, he should be a shoe-in for re-election.  The president has some influence over the economy, but e we usually give him more credit than he deserves when things go wrong.


No, the thing Obama will have more control over is the deficit.  The question is, what will he do?  Can he do what Clinton did after Bush Sr's excesses?

Will he be a borrow and spend conservative or a tax and spend liberal?

Additionally, he starts out with a clear majority of Democrats in Congress.  Will they live up to the worst fiscal fears propagated by Republicans -- that they won't be able to resist pigging out at the taxpayer trough?

Or will they show Clintonian fiscal restraint?

We'll know shortly.  I can't wait!

Yesterday, I jumped on my bike at 7:00AM (after fixing a flat), planning to do 30 miles.  I got in five miles before I realized I had a dentist appointment.  I rushed home, brushed my teeth and verified that I had time to bike to the dentist.  45 minutes, plenty of time.

After the teeth cleaning (No Cavities!  Whoopee!), I dropped by Panera to work. At lunch, I biked home, bringing my total for the day to 40 miles.

I realized it, as I rode home in the 45 degree weather.  "I feel great!" I told dvfmama, "I just finished 40 miles in the almost-freezing cold and I feel great!"  There are other signs, too.  Like the work I've been doing to replace the bathroom sink and finish painting the trim.  That's stuff that usually annoys me (even though it annoys me that it sits there, undone), but now I was finally doing it — even finding places where each of my children, including the 3 year old, could help out.

I feel great.

So, last night dvfmama was asking me why I haven't written anything on my weblog lately.  "I don't have anything to write"

"Sure you do," she said. "You feel great."

And now you know.

A Christian perspective on what’s wrong with the G.O.P.:

The reality is that voting Conservative does not guarantee that your values will be applied to your country. It guarantees that the candidate who claims to share those values will get to leverage his claimed moral high ground to back his decisions in the press, and on the world stage…

i knew I wasn't the only one who thought this way.

I'm not fond of his pragmatist approach ("Isn’t it better, then, to vote for someone who will put into place a process which will result in your values being applied?") because I don't think the application of values is the goal. This is a possible side-effect of the goal (unity with God), but it is not the goal.

Just spotted another example of Christian pragmatism in what he wrote: "God gave us His Word because it contains the best plan for His kids. Everything He asks of us makes sense."

Ok, so I think he's coming from the wrong place, but I like this point of view.

I've never been in the military, but this quote sums up my feelings several conversations I have going on.

"We won the war, therefore we must have deserved to win."

My crucial memory, and the memory that really starts all of my other memories about the war is waking up in this pine forest my first morning in the war.  It was still dark, but just barely getting light and as it got light, I was astonished to see within 3 or 4 feet of me, several bodies, dead bodies, of German boys who had been killed, I think, the day before by the unit we were relieving.

These boys were just exactly like me. And they were killed, their eyes were open, and their faces were as white as marble, greenish-white.

And at that moment, when I saw what I was involved in, actually, for the first time -- my training had never told me this -- many of my adolescent illusions about reason, the governance of the world by reason, and common sense, and the idea of progress fell away all at once.

And I realized, in that one moment, that I would never be again in that world of childhood innocence, where the world is run by reason and events contain a certain amount of justice.  I knew now that I was enmeshed in a world of injustice and unreason.  That I would have to learn how to survive in that world, or how to make sense of it, later on.

Paul Fussell
Infantryman in US Army
1944-1945

I just got back from a 30 mile ride -- which makes 110 miles so far for my first (hopefully) 200+ mile week.  As you can imagine, spending time alone on the bike gives me quite a bit of time to think.  I use the time to pray, plan my day or just think.  This past week, politics have been on my mind quite a bit.

It all started at my grandfather's funeral.  His death was not unexpected.  He had suffered a stroke the weekend before and died peacefully in his sleep during the week.  Still, as an impromptu reunion of my (fairly conservative) extended family during the final days leading up to a presidential election, we had some interesting conversations.

Since they all know I worked on a campaign for a Democratic nominee for president when Bush was up for re-election, one of the first questions I'm asked is: "Who are you voting for?"  I've stepped out of the Protestant, Republican straight jacket, so I'm not quite as predictable politically.  (I get the feeling that I experienced a smidgen of what William F. Buckley's son went through.)

Just to be clear: back in 2000, I was rooting for McCain.  He was (is?) a man who stood up for what he believed in.  I was no fan of Gore and thought McCain was the best of the Republican lot.  But no matter.  That was during my "I don't vote" phase.

However, in the past eight years, I got to know McCain better.  And it seemed like McCain changed.  A former victim of torture, he went soft on torture.  In the debates, he specifically listed veteran's benefits and war spending as one of the programs exempt from his idiotic "spending freeze".  If we're going to freeze spending, why exempt those?  It seems like blatant pandering to vets.  His ambition to be president is consuming him.

And, in the past couple of weeks, it looked like his campaign ran away from him.  When he had previously said he would run a clean campaign, his running mate started accusing Obama of "pallin' around with terrorists".  And that's another thing: while I think Palin was a smart choice to shore up the "base" of voters and make McCain 50 times more appealing to Evangelicals (my bother admitted McCain didn't interest him until Palin was selected because she seems to be a devout member of the Assemblies of God church), I don't think she is qualified.  She does look, as one person reported, "shockingly amateurish".

So those are reasons to vote against McCain.  I'm sure that if I wanted to (because, to be frank, I knew I was going to vote for Obama before many of these reasons came out) I could find just as many damning statements to make against Obama.  But that is part of what I don't like about the campaign against Obama.  Much of it ("Nobama", "Barack Hussain Obama") seems childish and stupid.  Sure, that sort of stuff works for some people. But it isn't attractive to me.  And just to be clear, if I was going to let someone's associates scare me away (Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, ACORN), I wouldn't have anyone to vote for (Keating Five, ACORN, William Timmons).

What about the issues?  There was one consistent reason my family gave for voting against Obama: Abortion.  Make no mistake: I do not like Obama's position.  But, suppose I thought I had to vote my concience on this issue alone.  Suppose I thought that I must vote for a pro-life candidate.

Neither party, the Republicans nor the Democrats, has given me that choice.  McCain is not pro-life. But he'll appoint conservative judges!  Doubtful.  McCain isn't that conservative.  And trying to get a clearly pro-life judge through a Democratically controlled senate just isn't going to happen, even if that was what McCain wanted to do.

From my point of view, there isn't much else to consider.  The economy? McCain is flailing around on the economy and doesn't seem to have any ideas.  He admitted long ago that he doesn't know anything about the economy.  Not that Obama is much better here.  Since the economy tanked under the Republicans, the Democratic nominee gets all the political benefit without any work.

In the end, it does come down to personality.  Obama has more control over his temper.  He can inspire people.  He can think big while still being aware of budgetary constraints.  I doubt he'll be able to cut taxes as much as he says on those making less than $250,000, but at least he is honest about saying that we do have to pay for programs by raising money somewhere.

Other people can push their candidate better than I can.  I'm not looking for a savior in the political arena.  I'm not even looking for the person who best represents what I believe.  I'm not keeping track of promises, since, from a politician who has to push most of his ideas through two houses of congress, they're meaningless.

I'm looking for someone who can lead.  Someone who can inspire people.  Someone who can deal with people respectfully.  Someone with an actual chance of being elected.

For now, that person appears to be Obama.

Out There: People Who Live Without TV:

"I interviewed one guy who was 31, single, an artist living in Boston, who saw himself as countercultural," Krcmar told LiveScience. "The next day I had an interview with a religious woman with ten children who lived in the Midwest. These people seem like they would disagree about almost everything, but if you ask them about television the things that came out of their mouths were almost identical."
[...]
"It's sort of counter-intuitive, because people think their kids would drive them nuts without TV," Krcmar said. "But parents found that kids became very good at entertaining themselves and didn't need to be entertained all the time by something that was lively and active. They didn’t complain about being bored.

Oh how I wish I didn't have one (sometimes).

(Just realized: I got this from Dan Lyke.)

Bikes to Rwanda « je vais où?:

These people are doing good things… if you like coffee you should definitely give this video a look.

I love a good cup of coffee.  And I love bikes.  Bikes to Rwanda combines this with my personal interest in the welfare of Rwanda to help support coffee growers there with inexpensive utility bikes.  That's a charity that I can really get behind.

Renewed fighting threatens Congo gorillas:

"The army had also stationed a tank on the main road that borders Rwanda, with the gun pointing at the Rwandan hills."

That explains the armed escort we had.  Though, I wouldn't expect the escort to help much against a tank.

“Next time, we won’t leave”:

But if the enduring image of Gustav is a U.S. soldier with an M-16 denying a citizen the right to return to his home, then you can pretty much write off the next “mandatory” evacuation.

Looks like, as is typical of New Orleans and the feds, they're mishandling the situation.

I'm very glad that Gustav didn't hurt people like Katrina did.  The authorities need to recognize this and let people get back to normal as soon as possible.

If you're looking for some first-hand accounts of Gustav, I would point you to a few Twitterers GambitWeekly, NOLAnotes, and MarkMayhew. You should also check out Mark's photostream on flickr especially Cafe du Monde as you've never seen her: empty.

Twitter has a lot of problems, but the one thing it is really good at it getting people's thoughts and impressions published as quickly and easily as possible.  In a situation like Gustav where people don't have time to compose blog entries or even full sentances, the stream-of-conciousness that Twitter enables really gives you a feeling for what is happening on the ground.

While I did check out a couple of news sites, most of my information about Gustav came from Twitter via TwitterBerry.

winterspeak.com:

Traffic accidents are predominantly caused by people being inattentive. Increase the feeling of risk, and you increase the attention.

(emphasis mine)

Do you know any programmers that exhibit these personality traits…?:

Do you know any programmers that exhibit these personality traits…?

I’ve been observing an unusual programmer friend of mine for some time now. (Yeah… a “friend”, that’s it….) He has such a strange combination of potential and incompetence that its hard to tell if he is just lazy or [...]

When I first came across _why's tweet on PerlBuzz, I thought it was so profound (by which I mean, anti-consumeristic), that I told dvfmama right away.

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

This is why I would rather listen to my three-year-old belt out show tunes than watching American Idol.
This is why I would much rather see my daughter practice standing on her head than watching America's Got Talent.
This is why I can only zone for so long while I idle away hour after hour in solitary web surfing or late night TV watching.
This is why I was so happy to give the Ugandan Ministry of Health something that they would use.

I hate being a consumer. I fall into the "entertain me" trap more often than I want to confess, but I hate seeing myself there. I hate the thought that my children will be passive participants in culture rather than creative, engaged people.

This doesn't mean that I want them to go out and get a degree in the Humanities. (dvfmama wouldn't allow it anyway.) So I'm probably already diverging somewhat from what _why originally meant. But who cares? Do not wait for other people. Get out there, do things, be engaged, and tell others about it. (By the way, my co-worker-at-a-distance, Shannon picked up on the Why Create? theme.)

But that last bit ("tell others about it") is a key I've been missing for some time. And, for someone who spends 90% of his time working 400 miles away from his co-workers, this is a real shame and, worse, a real impediment to good work.

I'm good communicator when I need to be, but till recently, I haven't been in the habit of communicating regularly with other people that I'm working with. Sure, a lot of this was the physical distance, the lack of face-to-face time — the fact that I abhor teleconferences. But a lot of the problem (and the problem shows up even when I'm working down the hall from people) can be fixed by just sending out a regular email, making sure that everyone who might be concerned knows what I'm doing. Sure, a lot of times it'll get filed in the bit-bucket, but (and I've begun to realize this and put it into practice more since my trip to Uganda) communication isn't optional, it isn't overhead; it's a necessary habit.

Of course, it was really helpful that I had this epiphany about communication and started putting it into practice in the past couple of weeks. Today, I met with some IT auditors here in Chapel Hill and told them what my role was in the organization. Before this, I probably would have been much more resentful of the very idea. But for now, at least, I'm feel like I'm on top of the world and I'm happy to tell them what it is I do.

Where have all the real men gone? - Times Online:

As long as men feel marginalised by the women whose favours and approval they seek; as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts; as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honour; and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.

It has been a while since I had any kind of injury from cycling.  Today I made up for some of that lost time.

Excited to have my bike back, I went out this morning for the first time to ride.  And I learned an important lesson: after you've been off it for a while, it is best to check your gear before expecting to ride like you were before.

It rained some last night and the roads were still wet.  On the first good downhill run, I tried to put on the brakes and they didn't respond the way I expected them to.  Down I went, sliding along the road for a good 10 feet.

Apart from a bruised and swollen leg and road rash on various parts of my body, I'm alive.  The same can't be said for my shorts which were shredded.  I took a few minutes to lay on the side of the road and recover a bit from the shock.  Then I limped back home.

I'm just disappointed that I won't be putting in any miles for a few days.

This week I start working on a project to help gather medical information in villages throughout Rwanda, so the project I've been working on for the past couple of months is officially over.  I've written my postmortem and had a chance to recuperate from the travel (including the airline losing my baggage in London and a screaming three year old on an eight hour flight — horror stories best only hinted at).

But this last project looks as if it was about as successful as I could hope for, so indulge me a few moments while I tell you what we did.

While medical information is gathered throughout Uganda, reports are regularly written, and analysis is frequently done, sharing information between health care workers and officials is problematic. Until now, there was only one small central library at the Ministry of Health which held only a single stand-alone PC for accessing and reading electronic documents.

To make matters worse, the proprietary software for storing and accessing the electronic documents only accepted PDFs, so anything a doctor wrote in, say, Microsoft Word had to be converted before it could be used in the system.

With the help of the Knowledge Management (KM) team at IntraHealth, a few of us on the Informatics team put together a Joomla+KnowledgeTree combination that would allow health care workers and officials to upload any Office document, collaborate around them, and easily access them from any networked computer.

My work centered on the integration and initial set up of the software — putting it all together in a way that made the KM people happy. And, frankly, much of that work isn't any different than what I could be doing in almost any Tech Shop or corporate environment.  And for a while, it was like any software project, full of frustrations and delays.  While KnowledgeTree was an obviously mature piece of software, I found some of its idiosyncrasies irritating and some of its capabilities anemic.

The real difference — the real satisfaction — came when I was finally able to sit down with the librarian at the Ministry of Health in Uganda and I heard him say “This is great, it is so much better and easier to than our current system!  And we don't have convert all our files to PDF first!”

It was a relief to hear those words.  Until then, doubt still lingered.  But after that meeting, while there was still a lot of work to be done and a lot of work that I wouldn't be able to complete, now I knew that we had a successful, even worthwhile, product.

Even better, the technical people I worked with and trained as well as the Ministry workers all understood the usefulness and had the same goal in mind: fostering adoption of the new “electronic library” throughout Uganda.

Now, back to the work.  Hopefully I'll have another success story in a few months.

As you walk around many African cities, you'll hear one word popping up over and over: Mzungu.

It means "White Person" and comes from a contraction that means "Person who moves around."

Earlier this week, I bought myself a T-Shirt with "Mzungu" emblazoned on it.  It seems pretty obvious that people don't realize you understand that when they say the word they're talking about you.  Wearing the T-Shirt gives them a clue.

Tonight, I wore the shirt down to dinner.  Several of the wait staff and the manager of the restaurant made comments about my shirt.

"Interesting shirt"

"Like it?"

"Yeah"

One man asked me if I knew what the word meant and how I knew.  We had a lengthy conversation where we talked about culture, movies, and the way people act.  During this, one of other men came up and said "How are you, Mzungu?"  "Fine, thank you."

That was all he wanted to say, but we both got a kick out of it.

  Yesterday, I almost died.  It was well worth the $75.

Friday, I took one of the local people we work with up on his offer. When I mentioned I wanted to go raft the Nile, he said he would be happy to take me down there.  I called him to confirm and we arraged to meet at 10 on Saturday morning.

When Saturday rolled around, something came up and he couldn't make it.  Determined not to miss another chance, I found a rafting operator who was willing to pick me up at the hotel, take me rafting, feed me 3 meals and drive me back home.  We were to leave Sunday morning.

I woke up and met them bright and early.  We drove around Kampala picking up other people who wanted to go rafting: a couple from Holland, an Italian and his Ugandan girlfriend, and half the crew of a Chinese telecommunications firm.  I started talking to the sales manager for the group.  He told me that China is funding over a billion dollars worth of telecommunications projects in Uganda.  The company he works with is one of the construction firms that bids on projects to build cell towers.

As we drove the 80km (50mi) or so from Kampala to Jinja, I was struck by how different the area was than what I saw of Rwanda.  The area I saw looked more developed, more exploited.  In the middle of fields, hulking factories sat belching smoke from their stacks.  Rwanda, by way of contrast, seemed to be filled with only terraced farms.

Before we even started down the river, a bad omen popped up.  A chinese woman stepped on a nail and it went straight through her foot.  She hobbled away, but her determination brought her back at lunchtime.

So, anyway, we hopped in the raft and sat through 20 or 30 minutes of introduction to how to ride a raft.  The guide made sure we knew how to respond when he told us “Forward”, “Back”, “GET DOWN!” and “HARD FORWARD!”  We all needed it.  It was the first experience riding rapids for all of us — even more amazing was that two people on our raft couldn't swim!  The guide didn't seem to have a problem bringing them along even after we practiced what would happen if the raft flipped and they both freaked out.
We started just before our first bit of rapids.  Only a Class 3 or so, it was plentwy of fun.  After that We drifted and paddled downstream to where we came upon some rapids that our guide called “Class 5 and half”.  The other side of the Nile at that point was being damned up for a power station and the volume of water over the already-Class 5 rapids was increased.  He gave us a warning and a few pointers and then we went into it.

On the first bump, almost everyone went over.  On the second bump, idiot that I was, I thought “I want to go in the water!” and didn't hang on.  Into the water I went.

It was here that I learned why it is important to hold onto the rope that runs around the edge of the raft.

I was under the water but knew I was coming up soon, so I didn't worry too much.  When I came up, I took a breath…

But not a deep one.  The water didn't let me.  I moved into the 2m (6ft) pile of water at that point.  I didn't have enough air and I was struggling to breath and I was scared.  I saw the light, but air was suddenly very far away and the river was pushing me along.  The river ignored my life jacket's desire to surface and pushed me along under water forever.

When I finally surfaced I tried to get the attention of the crew with Kayaks.  Still struggling to get any air into my lungs I began to panic more and felt very weak.

When a kayaker finally came with distance, I grabbed on for dear life.

After this experience, when everyone was back in the boat, our guide made a point of telling us to grab the rope with both hands and, more importantly, DON'T LET GO when we he told us “GET DOWN”.  Even when we hit more Class 5 rapids, we had no trouble staying in the boat from then on.

We hit more rapids that morning but spent some of the time just drifting in the water, sometimes jumping into the Nile and swimming or floating along side the raft.

When we reached our lunch spot, the food hadn't shown up, so I got to spend some time just floating on my back watching eagles high in the sky or diving beneath the water, all the terror from earlier almost totally forgotten in the beatific surroundings.
(Not all was total bliss, though.  I missed the spot to get out of the river and walked through what I thought was some mud.  Turns out that was the spot the local cowherds brought their charges to drink.  And the cows did a bit more than drink in that water.  The local people laughed when they saw a Mzungu with dung from their cows all over his legs.  I found the right place in the water and rinsed off.)

After lunch, we hit the water again for more rowing and riding.

We saw many a pastoral scene where women and children were washing clothes by the river … a few were even bare-chested, National Geographic style.

The wildlife was amazing.  This was the first time I saw a kingfisher in action.  I've never seen a bird hover quite so effortlessly.

We saw fish eagles, monkeys, egrets and men punting their bike across the river.  Unfortunatly, I wans't able to capture any of these since my camera isn't waterproof.

The trip over 27km (17mi) of the Nile was amazing (though I'm sure I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much had I died).  It was about the best $75 I've ever spent.

(Pictures when I get a chance.)

A couple of days ago, I insinuated that someone at the TSA had stolen my camera.  I hereby apologize for disparaging the character of such a fine American institution.

Today, I put on my boots for the first time and found my camera.  I had forgotten that I tossed it in my boots when I was hurriedly rearranging my stuff just before going into the airport.