Flash-based online games are cool. I have zero eye-hand coordination (putting the milk successfully back into the refrigerator is kin of a challenge) so I’m not so good at the running-jumping-swinging-from-ropes kill-the-monsters-with-big-guns games. I like slower-paced stuff that requires more strategy and thought. Fortunately there are a bunch of these online, mostly small and often free. Yay internets!

Two I recently spent far too much time with:

In Gateway you move the robot to one side of the room to the other. You’ll need to pick up objects and solve simple puzzles along the way. Simple but well done.

Unfolding: move the nodes so that none of the lines intersect. Addictive.

If you know more games these please post in the comments because I have a bunch of free time and I am in danger of filling it up with actual meaningful activities.

(I got both of these from Digg.)

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!”

(I got it from Wired 15.01: The Perfect Human.)

Vorführeffekt [vor-fyur-ef-ekt]

a German word, literally ‘presentation effect’ which describes a problem, usually with a computer, that doesn’t happen when other people try to replicate it (such as, say, the Help Desk guy).

(I got it from Erin’s Weird and Wonderful Word of the Day)

Last week, our furnace stopped working. Or, or be more precise, it stopped actually producing any heat. It came on just fine. The blower worked. The pilot light went on. It just didn’t actually fire up. There are few things more horrifying than a furnace furiously blowing cold air on you in the middle of December.

Contrary to the various stories of electrical and plumbing disasters I often post, I am actually really good at DIY home repair. I only tell the bad stories because, well, those are the funny ones. (digression: I heard a theory recently that there are people who tell stories about themselves in which they are the triumphant hero who can do no wrong, and people who tell stories in which they are the bumbling idiot who is the butt of all the jokes. I tend to tell the latter kind of stories. I don’t know what that says about me, philosophically, nor do I have an actual point here.)

This is a story about appliance repair and appliance repair people.

For most people when something goes wrong with a major appliance in their house they call a repair person, write a big check, and the problem (sometimes) gets solved. As with many service professionals we have had bad luck with repair persons in the past. They never call us back; they don’t show up for appointments; they get lost on the way to our house; when they finally do show up weeks later the repair suddenly costs way more than the initial estimate, often for various dubious reasons (“well, you have unusual joists…”) It is for these reasons and because I am, frankly, stubborn, that I started doing appliance repair myself. It’s just a machine. I’m a smart person. How hard can it be? Most of the time, its not. I only sometimes blow something up or injure myself.

With google and a big box of tools I can usually figure out what’s wrong with an appliance and narrow it down to a specific part that’s gone wrong. RepairClininc.com has a great set of troubleshooting guides (and will sell you the parts). Repair people hang out on web forums these days, and web forums are indexed. It usually only takes me an hour or so to narrow down the problem. And then I go down to my local applicance parts guy.

The appliance parts guy is in a strip mall in San Jose. It’s in a completely anonymous, boring part of town, and the strip mall is like any other strip mall in the area, just off the freeway exit. I occasionally forget which exit on the freeway it is off of, take the wrong one, and end up in the wrong strip mall. What the….. oh right.

In this particular strip mall there is a lamp store, a laundromat, and a taqueria that advertises !!menudo on saturdays!! The applicance parts store is in the corner, with a sign in the window that says Appliance Parts. That is the only name of the store. The store itself is poorly lit, with oven heating elements hung on the walls like trophies, black antlers from steel deer. An advertisement for Westinghouse refrigerators hangs on the wall, browned with age and curling at the edges. There are cobwebs.

My applicance guy is not as old as his store would indicate; he is a second-generation applicance guy, perhaps, in his forties, or fifties, with greying hair that always needs a cut. He wears jeans that have been worn grey on the thighs from a dirty hands being wiped on them over and over, and faded button-down shirts with a pack of marlboros in the pocket. When I come into the store he is usually on the phone and I usually have to wait for him to finish his conversation. The conversation is never about appliance parts, or appliance repair. Usually it is about handling relationships with women. My appliance guy apparently has a side job doling out lonelyhearts advice. My appliance guy is a pocketful of mysteries.

Nonetheless, every time I bring my bad part into the store my appliance guy knows exactly what it is, where it came from, and what was wrong with it. My dishwasher water regulator has plugged up with sediment. Bad water. My oven heating element blew up. They do that. My furnace power supply (three years ago, the furnace has issues) — those go bad on that model, you must have dirty power. And my appliance guy always has a new part for me in stock, in the old cardboard boxes on the dusty shelves that line the store behind the counter. Always. My appliance guy does think it its kind of funny that I am there fixing my oven, or my furnace, or my washing machine, but he is never mean or condescending. He’s kind of a flirt, actually.

And so this time when I found out through google troubleshooting that the problem with the furnace was a bad ignition module. An ignition module is a bit of circuit board and wiring that tells the furnace to spark the pilot light then to actually turn on the gas. Apparently the ignition module in my furnace was known to fail (“piece of crap,” opined an HVAC engineer in a forum I read), and what I needed was just to replace the entire thing with a newer model ignition module. I got in the car and trooped down to my appliance parts guy.

Only he wasn’t there.

The lamp store was there, as was !!menudo on saturdays!!. I was in the right strip mall off of the right exit. But in the place of the appliance parts store and the laundromat next to it was a new liquor store.

My appliance guy was gone. I can only assume that there just isn’t a big enough market for appliance parts and advice to the lovelorn in San Jose these days.

I sat in my car for a while, unsure of what I was supposed to do. All of my skill in appliance repair relied on this store, and on the helpful appliance guy.

I ended up first at Sears, with a vague memory from an ad in a magazine that they sold appliance parts. Sears sent me to their service center downtown behind the hockey stadium, where the service center people did not seem to comprehend anything I was saying.

“This is a lawn mower?”

“No, its a furnace.”

“What’s the model number?”

“Its a Lennox G16, but the part number of the thing I need is right there on the paper I gave you.”

(typing) “G…16….Its not in the computer. This is a lawn mower?”

“No. Its a furnace.”

“You mean, like…heat?”

“Yeah. Um. Heat.”

“Oh. We don’t sell parts for that.”

“Oh. OK.”

Two other appliance repair places told me they didn’t do furnaces. Another one cheerfully told me they could give me the number of the Lennox regional sales office in Sacramento, who might be able to order my part for delivery sometime in the next few weeks. I declined, drove sadly back home and ordered the part online.

Two day shipping and a featureless cardboard box didn’t make up for the loss of my appliance guy. For one thing, I didn’t have the reassurance that this was, indeed, the right part; that my google troubleshooting was accurate and that after three dead furnace days we would once again have heat. If the furnace didn’t work after this we would be forced to actually (ugh) call an actual repair person.

The part required some retrofitting to go into the furnace; since this was an electrical job, and I’m not so great with electricity (I blow stuff up), Eric did most of the work this time.

We flipped the switch. The igniter clicked. Nothing happened. It was even worse than before — no pilot light, no blower. Eric got nervous and thought that maybe something bad was happening and unplugged the furnace again.

I felt anxious and sick. Was it the wrong part? Had I messed up? Was it all wrong? We reread the directions, rechecked the connections, and everything seemed to be right. We plugged in the furnace again. Click. Click.

Pause.

Pause.

Whoosh! Ignition! Liftoff!

The new module had different circuitry; it behaved differently. It just took longer to light up the furnace. My appliance troubleshooting skills vindicated, we set the thermostat to “Charbroil” and settled down with some hot chocolate and a good book in front of the heater vent. All is right with the world once again.

Online appllicance parts are OK, but I will miss my appliance guy. I like to imagine that my appliance guy sold his store in San Jose, retired to some small town in the mountains, and is now spending his time fixing stoves and washing machines for pretty young women. I think that would suit him.

“Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds.” – Saying Yes to Mess – the New York Times

One of those memes going around. Ha ha! I am so cool.

Update: OMG! Horrible HTML!

You are Spider-Man

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

(I got it from My Confined Space. Click thru for the good version.)

2006 was a dark, muddled, lousy year. I spit on 2006 as it drags its nasty-smelling carcass out the back door. Ptui.

Bring on 2007. May it suck a whole lot less.

My last post was a long while ago and full of mayhem and I probably should not have just left it hanging there because it gives the impression that Things Are Bad. On the contrary, things have been quite good, there’s just been a bunch of stuff going on. You know, holidays and all.

Thanks to everyone who called, sent email, IM’ed, etc.

Eric is healing up from his crash really well. In fact from looking at him you probably would not even know he had crashed at all. Given that when I crash I have giant itchy scabs for months, I spit gravel and bits of glass for the next year and my scars are pink and ugly for, basically, ever, I find it kind of unfair that Eric’s road rash was completely and entirely unscarred within the space of a few weeks. So unfair.

Onto the teeth. The three front teeth all needed root canals. They’re really good at root canals these days; when I had mine ten years ago it only took half an hour but I still felt like I had been trampled by a rhino. All three of Eric’s only took an hour and he walked out of there feeling fine. At this rate in a few years they’ll be able to do your root canals in ten minutes flat over the Internet and you’ll feel better after you’re done than when you started. People will look forward to them. They’ll do them recreationally (“hey dude, wanna do a root canal tonight?” “Yeah!”)

Left on the post-accident task list are braces, caps, and figure out what’s wrong with the knee. The braces are to put the teeth back where they belong; they’re still kind of bent out of shape. The caps are needed to fix the broken teeth. Despite the remaining teeth issues Eric can mostly eat just fine now. During the liquid food time period we discovered two important facts:

• Canned liquid meal replacement drinks are completely disgusting. They taste like gritty neopolitan-flavored sludge and they leave a slimy coating in your mouth like the aftermath of a bad night with a number of cigarettes and long island iced teas. Avoid, avoid, avoid. Unfortunately I bought a whole pile of these while Eric couldn’t eat because they were cheap. hey! maybe they were cheap for a reason! ugh.
• The really cheap shelf-stable packaged vegetarian indian food dubiously called Tasty Bite? Fabulous. Really great stuff. I get it at whole foods or you can order it in bulk from Amazon.

The only health issue left is his right knee. Eric didn’t notice that he had hurt his knees before because the knees were kind of overshadowed by the face and the teeth. Now that everything else has healed up the knees are crying out for attention. It seems that when he crashed he landed on his face AND his knees. He had some road rash on his knees and the right one has a really big painful lump on it that isn’t going away. He’s going to go to the doctor about that soon.

Me? I feel fine. I think I have a little dry skin on my elbow. woe, woe, woe.

Saturday morning Eric crashed his bicycle on a large group ride. He says the pack was going fairly fast downhill but then someone up front braked and then the riders just ahead of him braked hard. He couldn’t stop in time and went down on the pavement. On his face.

When the phone rang on Saturday I almost didn’t answer it. I’m not great with phones and there are many times when I just let the machine pick up. But Eric was due home for his ride around that time, and I thought: maybe I should answer that in case Eric’s had a problem and needs to be picked up somewhere.

Instead I got the phone call no spouse wants to hear: “I’ve crashed my bike and I’m in the emergency room.” Bad sick feeling. On the other hand: if it’s your spouse actually calling, you know that they’re at least alive and conscious enough to talk on the phone.

Eric reassured me that he wasn’t dead, but then told me that his face was a mess and his teeth were all smashed in. Oh. Well. That’s just peachy.

I had a 45 minute drive to Stanford Hospital emergency room to imagine the worst and get all worked up about it. I have a pretty vivid imagination. Unfortunately my imagination was pretty accurate. Poor Eric looked like he had been beaten with a stick. A really big stick. With nails in it. Good thing I married him for his money. (I kid.)

Despite the terrifying appearance, however, Eric didn’t seem to be doing that badly. He wasn’t in that much pain and once they got around to cleaning him up the damage seemed to be contained to a lot of really nasty road rash and the teeth. There were still a whole lot of tests to be done, however, and since things move slowly in an emergency room if you’re not sobbing, screaming, or vomiting all over the floor, Eric just cooled his heels and I got busy making phone calls. Calls for emergency dental; calls to arrange to get Eric’s car picked up; calls to find out what happened to his bicycle. I also went and dealt with the insurance. Eric had been riding without ID and had been admitted as “Eightyfour Echo,” which will be his official Spy Name from now on. I had brought his insurance card with me and got him properly registered. I am somewhat pleased to find out that I am not one of those people who goes completely to pieces in a crisis; although I have anxious moments mostly I get shit done. And I know from my own experiences in the emergency room that you so need someone there to get shit done for you.

Eric is home now and is in recovery mode. Since I know his family reads this blog I will be reassuring: every day he looks much better than the day before (he would not let me post pictures). The road rash is ugly but is scabbing (he is keeping bacitracin on it). He has three stitches in a cut over one eyebrow and a lot of bruises. There’s some other small road rash on his knees and hands. Everything hurts. But every day is better.

The teeth are a problem; he mashed in the two front ones and broke off another one. The emergency dentist sealed the broken one but couldn’t do much about the front two; they can be bent back into place but they want to return to their smashed-in position. This morning we made the round of many local dental professionals and it looks like he’ll lose those teeth; there are a number of root canals in Eric’s future and then braces to put them back into place. In the meantime the position of the teeth makes it difficult for him to eat so we are becoming well acquainted with packaged soup and creative uses for oatmeal and applesauce.

It could have been so much worse. I am so, so very thankful for that.

The bright spot of news is that Eric’s uber-fancy bicycle, a carbon fiber Cervelo R3 he just bought this year, is completely intact. One of the brake hoods is bent in and there’s a small scratch on it. One of the pedals has some scratches. That’s it. The bike is fine; all the damage is to Eric.

I have two lectures I want to give based on this incident.

One: If you ride, or run, or hike, or do anything out by yourself, take ID. It doesn’t have to be a driver’s license, just something with your name on it. Eric never rode with any ID.

This was Eric’s first time on this particular group ride and no one knew who he was. When he crashed he was unconscious for twenty minutes. I joke about Eightyfour Echo but if he hadn’t woken up and been able to identify himself, I would have had a hard time finding out where he had gone to.

We had talked about making up simple ID cards, getting a road ID, or even walking into a Petco and using the DIY machines to make a dog tag with name and emergency phone numbers on it. But we never got around to it. I’m feeling pretty dumb about that now.

Two. Put ICE in your damn phone. ICE is short for “In Case of Emergency.” This meme was spread around the net last year as the number you program into your cell phone for emergency personnel to call if they find you unconscious n the road. Eric thought this was an urban legend. Soon after Eric called me on Saturday I got a call from the group ride leader who had picked up Eric’s cell phone and started noting down numbers to try to find someone to notify. The random number method eventually works, sure, but ICE is much more direct. I’ve got ICE in my phone, and as of this morning Eric has it in his. My phone also lets me add longer notes to the address book entries so my ICE also has my name and blood type. Put it in.

OK, one more lecture: hug your family today.

“Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up on rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”

– Meg Chittenden

(I got it from James Barrow on the tech writer’s mailing list.)

Still more to-be-blogged list cleanout. I used linked images here rather than YouTube embeds because embeds don’t work right in feeds.

Battle of the Bands

This ultraviolent but insanely brilliant vid by Ugly Pictures and Man vs. Magnet went around a few months ago. If you didn’t see it then you should go see it now. I particularly like the Dead Kennedys/Van Halen logo battle.

Laptop Battery Fire

PC Pitstop intentionally sets up conditions where a laptop battery overheats and blows up. This is one of these videos which is mostly fun to watch because of all the manic giggling in the background.

Women – Know your limits!

Originally a comedy sketch from a BBC show called Harry Enfield and Chums. Just realistic enough to be scary. I got the original link from Shelley Powers (although her video link was on this site).

Microsoft WSYP Program

“We believe that if our customers are experiencing pain, Microsoft employees should share the pain with them. This is where We Share Your Pain or WE-SYP comes in.” Starts slow. Gets better. This was an actual Microsoft video from a MS TechNet event in Europe.

The Perfect Car for Women

I would buy that.

Zefrank: How to hire a Web Developer

I am late on the Zefrank bandwagon. It’ll take me a while to catch up on the ENTIRE YEAR of video postings from The Show but this bit on hiring web developers is really funny (warning, slightly adult content). See also the Thanksgiving episode which is brill.

Mythbusters Outtakes

I could watch this over and over and over again and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Various Cat Videos

The point of the internet, of course, is to enable cute cat video.

• Marcus vs the HP Deskjet
  . Printer loses. Spawned an entire genre on YouTube of “cat attacks printer” video.
• Sleepy Kitten. I practically died of cuteness watching this.
• Kitten iPod Nano Commercial. “1 song. Impossibly Small.” Cute.
• Kitty Cat Dance: This is really bent. I first saw this video like six months ago and thought “wow, that’s kind of dumb.” And then it would NOT GET OUT OF MY HEAD. I pass it on here so that I do not have to suffer alone.

A few weeks ago the Mark Bittman published an article in the New York Times extolling the virtues of what he called no-knead bread. He got the technique from baker Jim Lahey, and described the bread as completely revolutionary — the sort of bread that was so easy and so good that it would enable a four-year old to make bread better than the vast majority of artisanal bakeries in the country. The article itself (with accompanying video) is now behind the NYT select pay wall but here you can find the actual recipe here.

The Internet went completely bonkers over this recipe. On the Well, the ancient BBS where I often hang out, practically everyone in foodie conferences tried it and with reasonably good results.

I was hugely skeptical and was all set to rant about the recipe without even having the benefit of trying it. My long no-knead bread story in the extended part of this post.

There are three concepts behind the supposed radical wonderfulness of the no-knead bread: a long slow rise with very little yeast, which produces a great taste in the dough; a very wet dough, which can’t be kneaded but produces a artisanal-like crumb with lots of big holes in it, and baking the dough in a heavy preheated pot, which gives you a really great crust.

None of these concepts is new in breadbaking. Anyone who has worked with sourdough knows the value of the long slow rise in producing great taste. Wet doughs such as those in ciabatta will produce a great rustic holey bread without any kneading (you often can’t knead them, they’re too wet). And since we home bakers do not have the benefit of steam-injected ovens there have always been all kinds of tricks for producing crusty breads — with clay baking cloches one of the more expensive techniques and pans of hot water in the oven one of the easier.

That said I figured before I wrote my rant I should actually try the recipe. I cheerfully admit I was trying it to disprove it. I wanted it to turn out bad so I could make lots of sarcastic comments and pish-toshedness.

Except then the bread wasn’t bad. It turned out great. Darn it.

I did have a few problems with the recipe — the measurements and temperatures in the recipe were different from those in the video, which was kind of confusing. When I mixed up my dough it was really dry so I added more water than was called for, and then the resulting bread was kind of wet and sticky. Good, but could be better. When friends had tried it some people had ended up with results that were too wet, or too dry, or too gummy, or just hard to work with. Results seemed to be just all over the map. I think a lot of the problem was with the imprecision in the recipe, and it seemed to me as if this bread was very particular in terms of measurements and how long it was cooked. Hardly the sort of thing that was supposed to be so easy a four year old could make. I wanted to try the recipe again and this time to get all geeky and obsessive on it to see if it could be made more consistent and thus improved. I got my chance yesterday on Thanksgiving.

First step was to standardize the ingredients. American recipes use volume for dry measurements (eg, two cups of flour), which is just plain dumb. I played around in the flour for a bit last week and discovered that you can get from 140 to 160 grams of flour in a cup depending on how much you fluff it up or pack it down. That’s a big difference. For this recipe I split the difference and went with 150g per cup which is 450g total. I use bread flour but the recipe says all-purpose will work fine or you can experiment with rye or whole wheat.

The recipe calls for 1 5/8s cup water, 1 1/2 cup in the video. That was roughly 400g of water but I erred on the light side and went with 380g.

Yeast and salt stayed the same — 1/4 teaspoon yeast, 1 1/4 teaspoons salt. (it could have used a little more salt).

All the ingredients are mixed just enough to come together. There’s no kneading (hence the name). You cover the bowl and let it rise 12-18 hours in a warm spot. Then it’ll be wet and sticky and difficult to work with.

Fold it over a few times (I use a floured bench scraper) and let it rise some more. Then heat up the oven with a big heavy pot inside it for half an hour, drop the dough into the pot, cover it, and bake.

The first time I made this bread it was kind of wet inside which I attributed to either the dough being too wet or the temperature being too high. But I wanted to rule out just not baking it long enough. So I stuck an instant thermometer into the bread and baked it until 210 degrees F — a good fifteen minutes longer than I had cooked it the first time — and the bread came out significantly darker than before but MUCH better inside, with big holes and a good texture. The crust was INSANELY good, thick and crusty, and shattered to bits when I bit into it.

In short: 450g flour, 380g water and baked to 210 F internal temperature works for me as modifications to the original recipe. There’s little I’d improve from here (perhaps a little more salt). I so didn’t want to be but I’m really, really impressed with this recipe. Its super-easy and really great once you get it right. Two thumbs up.

Update: This post has turned out to be by far the most popular on my site, and has brought in a variety of folks who are not my normal readers. Welcome, new readers! I apologize for not replying to comments individually until now. I’ll try to keep up better in the future.

In case you’re bored or too stuffed to move off of the couch today, I’ve been taking pictures of cooking too much food for dinner today and posting them over on flickr, accompanied by the usual sardonic banter.

Flickr Set – Liveblogging Thanksgiving 2006

Update: I have requests for recipes.

The tart is adapted from this Golden Delicious Tart from epicurious (I used applesauce in the pastry cream, and granny smith apples instead of goldens). BTW although I didn’t think this tart came out all that well Eric has pronounced it Fabulous.

The bread is the famous New York Times No-Knead bread (I have a long post about this coming up).

The stuffed mushrooms I made up, but there’s goat cheese, garlic, and thyme in the stuffing, as well as the mushroom stems. Plus crunchy bread crumbs made from whole wheat croutons.

The spinach salad with tangerines, red onion and citrus dressing is from the Field of Greens cookbook and I can’t find it online. This is a great cookbook but the recipes are really involved. I should have rememebered this when I set out to section the damn tangerine half an hour before the food was ready.

Brussel sprouts are steamed until done and then doused with butter and sage.

The baked pasta with chicken sausage is from somewhere within the Martha Stewart empire (it is just as good with vegetarian faux sausage). I subscribe to both MSL and Everyday Food and enjoy both magazines but they actually spammed me with this recipe. I was initially indignant; spam! gawd! but then the recipe was so darn good that I forgave them. Spam is in the eye of the beholder. Unfortunately they have sent me no good recipes since.

From a post on Eric Rescorla’s Educated Guesswork I found out The Truth About Cars blog, an auto blog that is written by completely insane people who are nuts for cars. Eric points specifically to this review of the Audi RS4 (a super-hot sedan), and I’m going to quote the same parts he did because it’s JUST AWESOME.

Audi used every trick in the playbook to get the RS4 — with 58% of its weight over the front wheels — to handle near-on perfectly. Credit the DRC (Dynamic Ride Control) which hydraulically links the diagonal suspension bits to each other. As the front wheels read the road, the rear shocks preemptively (and correctly) react. This setup works so well the WRC just banned it. The engineers also made sure every body panel in front of the doors is composed of kilogram saving aluminum. And the 19′ Pirellis are fantastic. While the initial turn in isn’t as effortless and eager as say an EVO, this two-ton all-wheel driver can safely carry more speed through a corner than you can handle. After the apex, the RS4 can blast sideways with
such force that you will swear you are piloting violence.

And that’s before you push the innocuous little button marked ‘S.’ Normally, the RS4 is faster than whatever car you are driving next to, sounds bonkers and has a devastatingly punishing ride. Push the button though, and three things happen. First, the throttle control is
remapped so that the rev-happy mill will crank faster with less input. Second, valves open in the mufflers changing the sound from Howard Dean’s scream to Gunnery Sgt. Hartman showing Joker his war face. Lastly, the shocks get firmer and the ride goes from mercilessly
painful to f-you. I absolutely love it. Forget violence, you are now driving war.

Wow. Just. Wow.