I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to do it for a living

...but I would like to know how to do it: How to be a Butcher.

Opening up the Two-Oh One-Oh.

Twenty-Ten?  The erstwhile Year of the Ox / impending Year of the Tiger?  Stardate 313000?  In any case, may it bring you and yours wealth, health, and springs in your steps.  I want to send a shout-out to my folks for the nice dinner and very enjoyable evening at the concert.  Thanks!

On a programmatic note, "interestingness" and "responsibility" will be themes for next year.  Those themes are too nebulous to serve as goals themselves, but it's easy to make specific goals from them, e.g., expand my emergency fund to 20% of my income and nail down my travel plans and so forth.

This time, the narcisism is explicit

25 Things about Mike

1. I was almost born on Mother’s Day, 1975. I’ve been just as punctual ever since.

2. I like to cook, and every once in awhile I will invite a bunch of people over as an excuse to do something big and fun. Hence Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s also a good motivator to clean up the apartment clutter.

3. I sometimes play Powerball lotteries when the prizes get over $150 million. The odds of winning are roughly 1 in 150 million, so at that point, your expected winnings (odds times the prize) is equal to the cost of the ticket. Ignore taxes. And the odds for multiple winners. And other details. THEN it’s a mathematically sound investment strategy! If the prize goes up to 200 million, you should expect to make 25 cents! [insert joke about the stock market in 2008 here! LOL]

4. I like my car, and it makes me feel good every time I get in it and zip around, but I do not want to be one of those guys who takes a picture of themselves standing next to their car, and even worse, posts it online.

5. I want to buy a Persian rug someday – one of the expensive ones. They are the most beautiful thing I think I could own. I also want to buy a Wegner chair and a Shaker side table. There's an element of status symbol here, but they are also intrinsically beautiful, and being near such things on a regular basis is a small part, and not the most important, but still, of a good life.

6. I want to build a house someday. I constantly doodle house plans on SketchUp. If it weren’t for that minor detail of having to make clients happy, I’d like to have been an architect.

7. I don’t buy orange juice any more, just oranges.

8. I have 20/10 vision, but I suspect it won’t last forever. I think I'll miss it, but then my glasses will help me look smart.  Or at least smrt.

9. I really like Belgian beer, but a cold Budweiser after a hot day outside is wonderful.

10. I’m going to see Tom Waits someday in concert. More generally, despite how much I like music, I don’t go to many concerts, and maybe I should change that.

11. I’d like to live in Austin Texas someday, but often times I’ve found I liked the idea of something more than the thing itself. That goes for things like mountain biking or stereos, or some of the things on this list, or getting my PhD, or moving here and there. The best places I’ve lived were really only so because I had a good group of friends around.

12. I have a weird fascination with hot-rod Volvo’s. It makes no sense. I’m hoping that this is just a phase.

13. I like most any BBQ or grilled food – yeah, duh.  It's funny that BBQ is one of those things that causes people to become obsessed with naming or tracking down the best.  Very good is good enough, very close to the top is close enough, and you can keep your perfectionism and OCD.  On the other hand, I'm happy those people are around to drive the pile forward.  Just don't want to be them.

14. I think graduate school is a bad idea for just about everyone (80% of those who apply). Just say no to pyramid schemes, because that’s what academia is, in a time-labor sort of way. Actually, college isn’t that great an idea for some people (25%) too.

15. I like Eric Hoffer’s aphorisms.  For instance: “We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.”

16. I want to age gracefully into a cool old guy, perhaps with a pipe. People are too obsessed with looking young. How about a little dignity instead?

17. Baseball on the radio is a good thing.

18. Last year I had a sinus infection, and it strongly affected my hearing so that guitars and pianos sounded really out of tune. It was bad enough that I couldn’t listen and enjoy any music much until it cleared up.  It was odd that I wasn’t deaf, but that everything sounded wrong. Which was bad in its own surprising way.

19. I like machine shops, and would probably make a good $3 an hour machinist. I’d probably make a good $4 an hour auto mechanic too. Okay, $3. I’m thinking of buying a Sherline mini-milling machine because I belong to the more money than ability club.

20. I want to see a shuttle launch. Also, I want to go to New Zealand (to see Bret and Jermaine’s childhood homes). I would like to drive a 911 on the autobahn, or even the ‘ring. I’d like to go to London. Possibly France.

21. I like P.G. Wodehouse’s books, and people who also like them too have excellent taste and are good eggs.

22. The “Stuff White People Like” list applies way too much to me.

23. I believe that no good comes from meetings over thirty minutes, so make up a reason to leave. If you have an assistant, arrange for them to call you 25 minutes into the meeting, and beg forgiveness when you “have to leave for this emergency that you were just told of…"

24. I think the two blinking red lights on the Washington Memorial look like snake eyes.

25. Men should not wear shorts or sandals if they are not at the beach or in the water; So I don’t.

suffering for your art, detla rocket launch style

via Gizmodo:

Photographer Ben Cooper took this photo of a Delta 4-Heavy rocket launching at Cape Canaveral using a sound-activated camera. And when your camera is that close to a launch, your lens probably won't survive.

The particular setup for this was sound activated. The lens was destroyed (worth it of course) but the camera survived this one despite being severed from its ratchet straps and thrown to the ground, and the sound device used for this one disconnected from the camera and thrown about 200 feet backwards into the pad perimeter fence (still worked!). All settings are preset manually. No one is allowed closer than several miles from a launch.

His website looks neat too. Seeing a rocket launch in person is still on the list.

Just to make it official

I will pay my sister $100 if I do not lose 5 pounds by March 23. I'm intrigued by "diet betting," where you artificially create an outward commitment to accomplish what self-discipline apparently can't. I figure my goal is eminently doable, at 1.25 lbs/week, or 640 drams per fortnight, but we shall see.

On second thought

Skip the inflatable Santa Helicopter, I want the inflatable F-16.

Things to do

I would like to see a Tom Waits concert someday. In the mean-time, here's an interview of Tom Waits by Tom Waits...

See a shuttle launch

Endeavour into the Night

Somewhere down on my lifetime to-do list is to see a shuttle (or big rocket) launch in person. I was able to drive by the Scaled Composites site in Mojave last month, which was kinda cool too.

Must See Movies

The Must See Movie List: My score = 232. Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week list is another great list. It's clear that my top 20 must see movies and my top 20 best movies aren't the same list, but I'm not sure if that's right.

Even better than the real thing

We were arguing about art and collectibles and whether Van Gogh was overrated (at a $100 million, how could he not be?), and it occurred to me that someday I will have to hire an expert art counterfeiter to make an exact duplicate of a painting - not exactly sure which - with one obvious change. You know, like have the Mona Lisa smoking a pipe, or let there be four graces. Something classy.

On a related though, I'm thinking of a trip to Falling Water, and I wondered, how many duplicate Frank Lloyd Wright houses have been built? If I won the Powerball, I think I would buy some acreage, and fill it with reproductions of Falling Water, Monticello, and the Johnson house. And I would surf the web with a Cray Y-MP set up to run OS-X in emulation. Ha! Take that Steve Jobs.

1939 Plymouth

Aprapo of nothing, I just wanted to say I like 1939 Plymouths (See above, via). The chrome every third bar grill is sweet. (eg) Boy, do I have the fill a garage full of half-completed and over-ambitious projects jonesing bad. Apparently the only prescription is more cow-bell.

Also on the list:

1. 1980 Porsche 911. Has the reliable 3.0L, but still DIY-able, mit galvanized body. No turbos, no convertables, no Targas, no fender flairs, and no whale tails. Barf.

2. 1963-1965 Buick Riviera. What a cool, cool, and under-appreciated design. The boomers can keep their Yenko's and Shelbys and Matching Numbers Cudas.

3. A DeLorean. This makes no sense, but neither does love. That's the power of love. The wiring is a typical made in the UK gremlin-fest, but I only have eyes for that shape. With a tasteful 1.5" drop.

4. 1960-1963 Cadillac Convertible. Oh Those Fins, but taken one Dr. Spock/Freudian step back down from 1959. And that has made all the difference.

I could go on (the ubiquitous Hot Rod Volvo, Jim Rockford's Pontiac (screw those restomod Bandits) et cetera), but this raises a question: At what point is excess immoral?

Over lunch last week I had an argument about whether or not being a billionaire makes one immoral - My Swiss-neutral point was that if being a billionaire automatically makes you immoral, then so did the wealth that everyone at the table already possessed. Which wasn't the agreeable thing to say, but casting the accusing finger is classic, I'm well off, but the line between rich and middle-class starts comfortably ahead of my tax-bracket. Well, no, it doesn't, and pretending it does is a cop-out. This argument will convince no one who doesn't already believe it.

Fever Dream

Well, I was up very late last night working on a new sampling theorem, and as usual when I work on a math problem, the TV was on in the background. I had TiVo replaying some car shows, first Motor Week on the new 911 GT3, and then a Dream Car Garage comparison of the original Fordt GT40, the new Ford GT, and a Superformance GT-40, and it hit me: I want to build a hot-rod, and not just any hot-rod, but a hot-rod diesel Shelby Dayton Coupe replica.


The Audi R10 diesel has dominated racing. Yes, they are wont to do so, but they proved that you can do it with diesel. And what better American response would their be than a Shelby Coupe diesel?


A Factory Five Coupe would be a great starting point, but instead of dropping in a 427 side-oiler like everyone else and their mother, this thing needs a 40PSI turbocharged inline-six cylinder.


Weight and the transmission would be an issue, but it would be nuts.

Miller Time

Buying expensive things and expecting them to make you happy is completely foolish, but still, one thing on my to-do wish list is to own a car with a Miller-Offenhauser engine. The odds of this happening are vanishingly small, but whatever. Harry Miller was a mechanical genius, and the engines he built were way ahead of their times and won races for decades; First developed in the twenties and thirties, the engine powered dozens of Indy Car winners. By the sixties, descendants of this engine were turbocharged and producing 800-1200 hp. They only really disappeared because of rule changes.

I can appreciate a little the desire of people who like flat-head Fords, but really, it's such a backwards design, and so it's much more about the retro-culture than the engine itself. Most things end up being about the process and not the end result anyway. Still, if you had the money, an Offy would be a thousand times cooler to me.

This running quarter-scale model (or this one) might be a little more in reach (although if you buy the plans and can machine the 1/4-scale version, why not larger?)(you can also buy reproduction engine blocks for ~$10k, but that's still pretty steep).

Portrait Gallery

I took a stab at health and spiritual enrichment on Sunday: In the morning oatmeal, tai-bo, and a visit to my oddly progressive church. Odd, and also charming, because of it's mixture of white-bread liberal Presbyterians and Gambian immigrants. Also, Francis Collins spoke last month. The early afternoon was spent speed-reading Remembrance of Things Past, and then I made a visit to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.



It was fun to see the art - some of which was actually very good*, but also, the gallery is full of interesting people. Like Jonas Chickering, who invented the modern piano frame. Which I suppose is why you get your portrait taken. Incidentally, mea culpa, I would like to get a portrait done by one of the stipple artists from the Wall Street Journal [e.g.] - it seems to be a flattering, or at least forgiving, technique. So, that's on the todo list.
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*This painting is luminous in person. The camera cannot reproduce the color.

Pad Thai for Beginners

I've never cooked a Pad Thai that I've really liked, and most of the places around here are so-so. I can do a passable green curry, but the noodle dish is outside of my ken. Oddly enough, my favorite Thai place was in Walla Walla Washington. It was run by a this friendly, kinda goofy farmer-looking guy and his Thai wife. He would wait tables and she would cook dishes. Very good. She would go to Seattle once every few weeks to get the special ingredients she wanted.

But I will try again with advice from this great tutorial on cooking your own - chez pin: Pad Thai for beginners. She's very specific and helpful. Perfect, and I agree with her sparkling wine or riesling pairing. If you're looking to try something you might look at Chateau St. Michelle's Eroica.

In hindsight, her tip about the super-hot wok seems obvious. My stove-top here is electric and might not get as hot as I want. I miss the gas unit I had before. Someday... Put that on my lifetime to-do list: Get the fires of Mt. Doom stove burner that can melt the pot if you're not careful...

On one family visit home I wanted to go out with my sister for dinner. She said, "Hey, I know this great Thai restaurant in the U district, so let's go there! " So we went, and along the way she told me that the last time she had gone with some friends, they couldn't find the place. Which would be fine, except they didn't remember the name. So they called information and asked if they could tell them how to get to this good Thai restaurant in the U district. The nonplussed operator pointed out that there were a lot of Thai places in the U district - and they were like, "Yeah, but this one is really good!" - "Oh, you mean Thai Tom?"

Yes!*

Thai Tom was busy. We were on the early side, so we managed to get a table, but by the time we sat down the line was out the door. Half an hour latter, people were standing in the street in the middle of winter waiting to put an order in for take out. The place was pretty small, with an open kitchen and the cook had three jet burners on full flame. He didn't even wash the pots - just wiped it out and started the next. Red hot woks with a 45 second cooking time. It was great. Somehow I've got to replicate that or my life will have no meaning.
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*I've thought about trying this trick elsewhere - just to see what they would recomend.