Experiments in Woolgathering

How true the aphorism that is the title of this entry has been lately – and is true this weekend as well.

We’re doing a major redesign and consolidation of content from all the legacy web sites we absorbed as part of the merger over the next couple months. The planning and readying for this has been going on in one for or another for the last couple months. (We’re talking about a 1+ GB site with hundreds of pages.) Now we (coworker Charan and the various content managers) are finally implementing it.

Of course the content for one of the two managers we are doing first wasn’t ready on time (not his fault, he’s really just the conduit), and now, he, Charan and I are working some long ours to get things done for Monday. And, of course, Murphy and his damnable law are most apt to come into play in times like this – the development server went mostly belly up this morning, and I spent a few hours futzing with it before punting and standing up a new server (nothing to fully functional server, including the regenerated Subversion repositories, in 7 hours counting the time I spent burning the CentOS 4.0 ISOs to cd for the OS install).

So, tomorrow we can finish chasing down dead links and move the new site into production – the first part of which we would have done today, had the server not died. Also tomorrow, I need to do some work for one of Rachel’s clients.

Like I said, not enough hours in the day.

I haven’t had much to say about aikido lately. This is mainly because I got very busy and wasn’t going. So, after I noticed how much weight I’d gained back and that I didn’t have as much energry as usual, I finally dragged my self back to the dojo. (Note to self, keep Aikido high on priority list!)

Luckily I came back in time to be reminded of the seminar with Choate Sensei from Chicago Aikikai March 18th to 20th.

I got a few classes in before the seminar, which was good. For the most part all was okay, but it was nice to get back into the swing of things before diving into a seminar.

Choate Sensei is great. Great sense of humor, awesome aikido, patient and with a nice philosophical side. We mainly worked on blending and working the connection to take our opponent’s balance.

When we do stuff like this, it’s important to work with your partner to maintain the connection. In many cases this means you’re going to get into awkward and usually low positions – which means your legs and butt get a hell of a work out. (And Sensei was thoughtful enough to point out that we’d all have tighter butts if we kept this sort of practice up.)

Well, tighter or not, my legs and butt are definitely sore. It’s a good sore though, and I definitely learned a lot, despite being baffled at times as well. Add onto to all this that I dropped 8 pounds in a week and a half and I’m pretty damn pleased.

It’s good to be back.

I’ve been remiss in writing my review of this, it’s been a couple weeks since I finished it, and I’m about three quarters of the way through my current read, Spin State by Chris Moriarty. As a result, this review might end up being a bit shorter than normal – not that I have any idea if I have a ‘normal’ review length. Anyhow… (more…)

Yes, two great tastes that go great together!

We caught an episode of Iron Chef (Japan) the other night. The theme ingredient was peaches, and the challenger made a Peaches and Beef Cheek stew. (There have been two peach batters, this was the Sakai vs Watanabe one.)

Now, those of you that know Rachel well, know she does not mix her fruit and meat. This is too bad, because, I like the contrast of the two.

To my surprise, she was actually interested in to Peach Beef stew dish. Needless to say, I jumped on the opprotunity! Watanabe had made his stew in a pressure cooker, mostly for time reasons I’m guessing. That said, I was going to follow what he’d done as closely as I could. Aside from the use of the pressure cooker, he used the following ingredients (that they named at least):

1. Several insanely expense peaches (like $10 per) [I used 4 ‘regular’ peaches from the nearby Meijer.
2. A big chunk of beef cheek [I bought a regular beef roast]
3. Some kind of stock [I used beef stock, but I think I’ll use vegetable next time]

Not much to go on. On top of what I knew it needed I added some rum, red wine, ginger, a small amount of garlic and some fresh ground black pepper. I sealed the pressure cooker and cooked it for about 40 minutes at an unknown pressure (forgot to check, sorry).

The result was quite tasty, but not very peachy. I attribute this to using a too strong beef stock – though it’s certainly possible that Watanabe’s $10 per peaches were stronger than the random peaches from somewhere in the southern hemisphere that I got at Meijer. Next time a I’ll use lighter vegetable stock and maybe an extra peach or two.

The peaches themselves were tangy (maybe they absorbed most of the wine?) and very soft after being pressure cooked. They had obviously absorbed a great deal of beef flavor, but were still very distinct tasting from the beef (as well as obviously having a much different texture).

I’d also like to try this dish with mangos, either by themselves or in combination with the peaches. Another variation would be to try some sort of game meat, like boar or elk, which would probably require more fruit to be well balanced.

Anyhow, served with some white rice on the side this made a nice dinner as well as a couple lunches.

I’ve been trying to be optimistic about the continuing debacle (at least from a progressive point of view) that is the Bush presidency. It’s been alternately easy and difficult.

Easy because I’ve been so busy, I can sort of forget about. Also, like many things, these things go in cycles and eventually (I hope) the country will swing back around. Additionally, he’s out after this term, and hopefully he’s done enough damage that enough people will vote for some other party that we can at least get a moderate Democrat as president. (I’ve no illusions about actually getting someone progressive in; I’m optimistic, not delusional.)

Hard because everytime I turn around it seems like I’m hearing about thinly veiled religious groups trying to introduce junk-science into our science class rooms, our president claiming his God is on our side (as if God takes sides, I would assume you choose to be on his side, or not), his administration is commiting another foreign policy debacle or assault on the environment; a book is being banned from some school because it ‘promotes’ paganism/occultism/homosexuality/swearing (usually means mention, and typically in the context of how deal it). As an aside, if someone is worried about books promoting sweating in high school. they are seriously barking up the wrong tree. The swearing is there already, quite a bit of it in fact.

Anyhow, you get the idea.

Then I read this article, Welcome to Doomsday, by Bill Moyers. (Go read it, this post will still be here when you’re done.) If you didn’t google for the “Rapture Index” here’s the page to which he’s referring.

Now, granted Moyers gives us a few slivers of hope, but all-in-all that’s a pretty depressing and scary summation of the state of things in this country. Also, I’ll certainly grant that Moyers is liberal, but I think he tends to be an honest journalist. (Unlike, say Michael Moore, who, despite so much verifiably true material on the subjects of his documentaries still can’t resist overstating and misrepresenting.)

While personally I think this Rapture business is a bunch of fucking bullshit and any god that would inflict this on a world is a sadistic asshole, I will allow for possibility, however slim that the Rapture is just around the corner and what we do as far as the environment doesn’t matter for beans. But guess what? Maybe we shouldn’t bet the farm on this. ‘Cause, you know what, if you’re wrong and we have to clean this mess up, the price tag is only going up. Not to mention that in the meanwhile, we have to deal with and suffer through all the pollution driven problems that already exist.

How did we come to this delusional justification of our irresponsibility? I mean, really. 33% of the world is Christian and only a fraction of them buy into this – and really this seems to be a very tiny fraction outside of the US. It’s a very dangerous state of affairs. Because the US, which is still the most influential and polluting country in the world and because, given the currently political landscape here clearly are able influence things a great deal, here we are. The country most able to do harm or help is tipped to the side of “screw it, it won’t matter anyhow”. How depressing.

Doomsday indeed.