a paean to a series of paeans
Every fourteenth of February, something arrived. […]
hr-approved
Delivered casually over the lip of a glass of pinot noir, fittingly known as the Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove. […]
brown is actually the best color skin daddy says
There was a piece on NPR about how children pattern from their parents' examples in the absence of frank, uncomfortable conversations about race, the implication being that if you perform the right values loudly enough, the kid absorbs them by osmosis. So I asked her. […]
as a father to a daughter
As a father to a daughter, I loathe the phrase "as a father to a daughter." […]
cliché as data compression
The line that stopped me was “Well, it wouldn’t, would it.” No attribution, no quotation marks, no Mandy Rice-Davies, no footnote on why it still lands sixty years after she said it in a courtroom. It just sat there doing its work. I left it, moved on, spent three days working out why […]
the 880
There's a particular shudder that comes with "The Nimitz," nothing to do with the Admiral, everything to do with knowing exactly which stretch of concrete it names and what it means to be on it at 5pm on a Friday. If you felt that shudder just now, you and I are probably from the same place. The Town. Oaktown […]
the invisible bug
AI is spectacular at fixing bugs created by humans. It was trained on that. I am seeing PRs of fifty files changed, and experience tells me there will be blood, I mean bugs. But not the kind we are used to. These bugs will be invisible to the models because […]
how helicopters work
So. Helicopters. The main rotor generates lift by spinning aerofoils through the air, creating a pressure differential between the upper and lower surfaces. The tilted rotor allows vectoring of lift for forward flight, and the tail rotor counteracts torque to prevent fuselage rotation. Collective pitch controls altitude while cyclic pitch controls attitude. ... and she […]
long road from hollister
The Hollister logo was emblazoned across the chest of a guy sitting on a rock in the middle of the end of a dirt road. It took us 4 hours by 4x4 to find the one (in)voluntary toll road. The toll gate was really his rock, in the middle of a deer […]
un-editor
White never even agreed with Strunk and White. White used passive voice. He began sentences with conjunctions. Pronouns floated. Sentences ended on a preposition if that's where they wanted to end. The proscriptions in Elements of Style are aspirational, they describe how […]
shibboleth
The Gileadites had a border problem any bouncer would recognize. The Ephraimites looked like them, dressed like them, worshipped the same God, and kept trying to slip back across the Jordan after picking the wrong side of the wrong war. Cousins, basically, indistinguishable by aspect. So the Gileadites stopped guarding the paper. […]
memento mori
My wife thinks I built a machine to text her happy birthday after I am dead. She is not wrong, which is the part she objects to. The setup is dumber than it sounds. There is a cron job on the same closet Linux box that serves this website, the one already warm from rendering bread […]
reverse september
So … why am I still mad about the internet, thirty years on? Always, needlessly, and I'm still kinda shocked when it does it again. (My wife says "thirty years of complaining about the internet" is, TBH, a joke.) […]
corpus christi
Lemme spoil the lede: I have been running a language model over years of chat logs with my wife. Not to generate fake apologies this time (that was the Markov boyfriend incident, and we do not talk about it). To see what a machine could tell us about us that we were not able to see ourselves. It started, as most of my terrible ideas do, with a question I could not […]
no look bread
4 parts flour 3 parts water 1 tsp yeast 1 tbl salt per 4 cups flour First there was no-knead bread, now for … well, not really no look. But no stress at least. I’ve used the no-knead approach, a Cusinart and a stand mixer. It doesn’t matter. Add about 4 cups of flour, maybe […]
curtido
Seems like every culture has it own spin on fermented cabbage. Sauerkraut, kimchee and, obviously, curtido? On a recent trip to Central America we were fascinated by cabbage relish served with regional pupusas. Every restaurant and food stall had a slightly different take on the recipe and all were deservedly proud of their results. The […]
make beer cheap
Now that I have your attention … time for the bait and switch. It very much depends on how much you budget for beer. Lemmee spoil the lede, I got my costs down to one dollar per 22oz beer. The end result, brewed to my taste, competed handily with the better beers on the shelf. […]
homemade vinegar
Bottle ends are a problem that plagues casual and, ahem, more serious wine drinkers alike. The remnants of that bottle of wine that, though good enough at the time, is honestly not improving with age. Rather than drain it down the sink or worse, gritting your teeth and drinking it, consider turning it into vinegar. […]
bacon popcorn
Maybe this is obvious but it was enough of a revelation that I thought I’d document it. After flirtations with curry flavored coconut oil popped popcorn (excellent), I cast around for other ways to impart a unique flavor to popcorn. My Irish immigrant father kept a jar of bacon fat in the fridge when I […]
markov boyfriend
Reading about artificially generated tweets from a certain (in)famous twit got me thinking about an idea I had for a plug-in to my chat app. There was a time, before I implemented the chat app, when I was not the most communicative husband. In my defense, I was deep in code in a state of […]
smoked pork butt
After reading through “Franklin Barbecue, a Meat Smoking Manifesto,” I was inspired to knock the dust off of my Bradley smoker. The results were impressive enough that my resident food critic/wife requested that I write down the recipe. So without further ado here it is: Get your hands on a pork butt. Mine weighed 4 […]
skinner whole house
After experimenting with house automation, I arrived at the inevitable point when I needed something to do with all this cool stuff that nearly worked. Having devoted entirely too much time to the process of raising and training a miniature human, my first instinct was to look for ways to automate the work of parenting […]
couples therapy chat
As part of a more general initiative to take ownership of my data by hosting it myself, I cobbled together a chat app. My target audience is limited to me and my wife mostly discussing logistics. A fancy way of saying we needed a better way to coordinate grocery lists and who […]
J.A.Y.N.E
Jayne was an automated yelling and nagging entity. She was my early attempt at a whole house AI before that was a thing. She was definitely artificial but not particularly intelligent. She ruled our house from my daughter’s kindergarten until third grade. What follows are a few observations about the experience. Before her retirement Jayne […]
fitness tracker chore dump
We started a family step count game. The idea is simple: whoever wins the daily step count gets bragging rights. We keep a running tally of weekly victories. The weekly winner gets to assign the weekly loser a chore of their choice. I kitted each of us out with a Xiaomi Mi Fit 2. At […]
smoked meat
So … what is the appeal of bacon? Sure, pork belly is utterly, incontrovertibly delicious. Nitrates, nitrites, salt, oh my. Maple syrup? Nah. It turns out its all about the smoke. How can you tell? Smoke something, anything really. It picks up a hint of bacony umami. Cheese, turkey, for the love of everything holy […]
after a year of home roasting …
It is not hard to roast decent coffee at home. The trick, for me at least, is to remain open to different flavors and to accept a few degrees of variation from roast to roast. That counts double if you are a less scientific in your process. I use a Gene roaster from Burman Coffee […]