iTube

The old crew was back in town, with Vishal flying in from one coast and Praveen flying in from the other. We gathered in château Sharma for good food, spirits, and fun.

I got schooled in the art of flambé in general, and bananas foster in particular. Thank you, Steph!

I had tried to make it a couple of times before, but had difficulty with the sugar becomming hard, charred candy. (Solution: more butter, and put the banana liqueur in sooner.) There's a lot of subtlety in this dish, but it's fun when the flames rise. (The secret of which, I learned, is getting the bananas to wiggle in the pan: FOOF!)

Praveen grabbed my camera at just the right moment, capturing it, and thereby enabling my first-ever video post.

avoca quack-off duck races

Some days one wishes they didn't fill their calendar with other plans. Just got this from a friend at work:

Sorry for the short notice but that is no reason to miss an event such as this:

Saturday Jan 27th is the 27th annual Avoca NE Quack-Off
http://netnebraska.org/extras/nextexit/dreams/quack_03.html

It's the fundraiser for the volunteer firefighters in a small town an hour outside of Lincoln. You show up, Rent a duck (or bring your own ringer) hang out with it for the morning and around noon the racing begins. There is a bar and the town hall serve food and drinks all day and you're free to bring your own food or thermos of coffee, if you want to add something to chase the chill from your bones, feel free, the liquor laws are ignored for the day but it stays family friendly.
People get into it and come in costume and sometimes dress their ducks. It is a riot.

Make sure to pick a good name for you duck it is a hilarious hearing it announced at the races. Bring blankets, warm clothes and a kennel or cardboard box if you plan on duck sitting I didn't one year and had to keep fishing Quackulon the Destroyer out of a storm drain [he] loved.

Anyone ever been? Sounds like a riot.

Idiocracy

We don't have television in our house (let alone cable), but we do rent a DVD on occasion and watch it on the computer. Not having a television has disconnected me from the stream of movie promotions, so when I go I'm often faced with endless shelves of movies of which I have not heard. Last night's strategy for movie selection:

• here's a movie they have a bajillion copies of
• almost all of them are checked out
• the title is Idiocracy
• it's by Mike Judge
• scan the back: in the year 2505, stupid people have outbred intelligent...

I'm sold. Let's go.

As I was watching it, I was convinced that I was seeing the best film depiction of a dystopian future ever. (It was only after the movie was done that I recalled Brazil.) Fortunately the movie avoided the question of whether the decline of civilization was the result of dysgenics or memetics. The latter would be sufficient, of course, as monster-truck-rally parents tend to beget monster-truck-rally children -- unless life hands them Alex P. Keaton, that is. The two in combination would be an unthwartable combination to be sure, and five hundred years from now the over-educated and reluctant-to-procreate people have lost the war.

"We are so doomed," I thought to myself. But at the same time, I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud so much.

I couldn't find it in the credits, but I think the announcer in the arena was the voice of Strongbad. No other voice can say the phrase "guitar army" quite like that.

Interestingly, the Faux News Network didn't seem to change much in 500 years. I searched YouTube and found that clip from the movie: now I can see, upon closer inspection, that Fox News anchors are showing more skin in the year 2505.

Rent this movie now. Think of the children!

multitouch demo

My brother tossed me a URL to a really cool video of Jeff Han demonstrating the revolutionary multitouch user interface behind the iPhone (which, by the way, already has a nice wikipedia page.)

It's fun to watch. This concept will inevitably come to a laptop near you.

He also sent a link to an article over at fastcompany.com.

espresso love

If you love something, let it go. If it was meant to be, It'll come back to ya.

Or so they say. It's been as many months as I can count on a hand, each morning devoid of a reason to rise, going through the motions only because I know that not getting up would be worse. Such utter emptiness. But I have finally come to terms with the sad fact that it doesn't matter how much I miss it. It's not comming back.

So I replaced it...

[Insert audio clip of Handel's Messiah here.]
[record scratch]

...with an exact duplicate...

[Peaches and Herb's Reunited]

...plus a few minor refinements: The Gaggia Classic. No more purposeless mornings. No more long hours in front of my web browser surfing espresso porn on YouTube, where the "crotchless portafilter" seems to be a popular kink.

No more.

I'm taking the breakfast ritual back home, where the homemade granola is. Far, far away from the dangerous lifestyle I had fallen into.

[Dire Straits' Expresso Love: "...it's another one; just like the other one."]

phonegasm

I thought I got excited about announcements from Apple. You should have heard the design team cheering. They all disappeared into the small conference room to watch the news come in from the Macworld keynote, and they sounded like a bunch of Husker fans watching the team pull off a trick play to win a championship game.

What were they hollering about? Only the coolest freakin' phone yet conceived. All of that low-level imaging and animation API-work that went into OSX has now been brought down to a video-iPod-phone with a Minority Report user-interface.

That's right. It runs OSX.

I've got nothing else to say. (*) Go see the demo. Flippin' sweet.

(*) Addendum: It's still pending FCC approval, so you'll have plenty of time to stop drooling before they're actually available.

Watch the keynote.

lightbulb lament

Behold one of the best lightbulbs I've ever purchased: The Philips IQ, which is basically a standard incandescent bulb, except that it happens to contain a special application-specific integrated circuit that automatically turns the bulb off after 15 minutes of use. (There is a way to override this behaviour to keep it on constantly: toggle the switch before turning it on. Exactly how many toggle flips in toto are involved in this entire procedure? * Just flip it.)

While compact fluorescent bulbs have been getting a lot of attention among those who wish to reduce their carbon footprint, they contain mercury and therefore need extra care when it comes time to dispose of them. This incandescent "Smart Bulb", on the other hand, does not contain mercury. It may suck more juice while it's on than the compact fluorescent, but nothing consumes less electricity than something that is off. This makes it perfect for places like closets and basement stairwells where people forget to switch off the lights. (Of course you never forget to turn the lights off...but how about everyone else you live with?) But really you could use these anywhere. They even have the courtesy to give you a 2-minute warning (by flashing a couple of times) before they switch themselves off. And, like I said, an extra toggle will set it to stay on constantly.

The Smart Bulb has another advantage over compact fluorescents: they have the most amazing lifetime. Incandescent bulbs often only last for one thousand hours of operation (or less), but if you're spending that lifetime in 15-minute chunks you can stretch that out for years. The fledgling conspiracy-theorist within me suspects that this is the reason that these bulbs have disappeared from the market.

That's right: disappeared. Last year I went out to buy more, and discovered that no stores carried them anymore. I pointed my web browser at the problem, and discovered that I'm not the only one who would like to buy more of them. Forum threads like this one were easy to find back then. Note how that one mentions another product, called a "Bulb Boss", that screws into your light socket, and a regular bulb into it, that converts any bulb into an auto-off bulb.

Same technology. But it's gone too. The manufacturer's website has been taken down, and when I tried to call them last year their voicemail box was so full that I couldn't leave a message. It's hard to find out more about them. The company that did the branding campaign still touts their work, you can still find an old Wired Fetish article from 1997, and even a PDF about how the company had plans to use their special high-temperature ceramic integrated circuit technology to make better fluorescent lamps, but it all appears to be dead now.

All that appears to be left of the Beacon Lighting is the net-dot-residue left in archive.org's Wayback Machine. Reading their "about page" shows that they focused their technology on increasing the lifetime of the bulb. Did someone get paid to retire to a tropical island?

squirrels in the attic

It started with the onset of cold weather. At first it was so faint that I could not be certain of hearing it, and only at night: Was it scurrying? Scratching? Gnawing? Comming from the walls? The ceiling?

There is now no room for doubt -- something is living in my attic, and very energetically. The mind's eye pictures a sad family of squirrels, all perpetually itchy from their fiberglass environment.

I don't suppose they'd respond favorably to an eviction notice, so what are my options? Do I kill them, or is there a humane removal option? Perhaps a little squirrel-fishing?

That's assuming it's a squirrel, of course.