Rants from the Burgh

Snow photos

2008-12-30T09:11:00.001-08:00

I finally made it in to work! Go public transit!

Here are my snowy seattle photos:

I'll have a White Christmas

2008-12-24T07:21:00.001-08:00

So, I want to blog about something. Something incredible, improbable, and, simply crazy. In fact, I want to blog about something that has created such a visible spectacle that (almost) needs to be seen to believed.

Yet I cannot.

I cannot blog. Why? Because I have many photos of this amazing spectacle on my camera, but I cannot upload those photos anywhere, because my camera cable is at work, and I have not been able to get to work for 6 days now. 6 days.

Seattle has been shut down for 6 days. Due to snow. Snow is never supposed to arrive in Seattle. Let alone something like 6 inches of snowfall that does not let up for over 6 days. Seattle and Seattleites are completely unprepared for such an event. By 3 days into the storm, most streets were barely plowed, salted, or sanded, and the city was in complete lockdown. By now, most main streets are mostly clear, but most side streets are still impassable. Of course, I live on a slightly hilly side street, so my streets are basically sheets of ice. So I cannot get my car into or out of my apartment (I tried a few times, but will not be doing so again until the snow has cleared). Even though almost all the main streets are clear, the buses around my house that go to work haven't been running for 6 days.

This snow would have been a non-event in almost any other city in the country. Seattle, however, has been shut down, because it's been like 11 years since it's gotten any snow.

The ramifications are sort of cute:

1) Stores are closing, businesses are closing, etc. Pizza places have even stopped delivering to many locations! Buses have stopped running, or, at the best, have been significantly rerouted away from any vaguely hilly route.

2) Even with a dusting of snow, everybody in Seattle puts chains on their tires. I didn't need chains even when I was driving over Donner pass in the middle of a massive snowstorm, with winding, mountainous roads, freezing rain, 2-3 inches of wet slush on the roads, and 2-3 feet of snow on the side of the road. In fact, the "Do not drive this road without chains" signs weren't even turned on. I saw it as daintily cute. I even laughed out loud the first couple of chains I saw. As I've learned, however, chains seem to be essential in Seattle when it snows.

2) Any vaguely hilly side street has been closed off. Little signs are out, suggesting that people do not drive them. Instead, people are going sledding down the streets!

3) Snowmen abound. Strange, and bizzare snowmen, with lipstick and god knows what else. Terrifying, really. But I forgive the makers, since they are clearly inexperienced. It is the effort that counts.

4) Everything is pretty. The snow is amazingly beautiful. I am so grateful to have gotten so much snow after I moved here. It reminds me of Pittsburgh :)

The snow is a huge inconvenience --- It has kept me from being productive for like a week, canceled scores of events, closed stores, and so forth --- But its prettiness is a reward of its own. Hopefully I'll post some photos when I finally get into work.

PittStop 8

2008-11-25T08:59:00.000-08:00

PittStop Lindy Exchange 8 was this past weekend. It was a fascinating trip back to Pittsburgh for a number of reasons.

First, it was quite fun to visit Google Pittsburgh, and work there on Thursday and Friday and some of Monday. I think I like the fact that my employer has many offices throughout the world, and will hopefully take advantage of that more in the future. Google Pittsburgh's culture has brought them to fill the office with nerf weaponry. I felt like such an action hero with my gun sitting at my ready during builds that I have decided to buy a nerf pistol to import the idea into Google Seattle.

Second, it was nice seeing everybody who I've been missing from Pittsburgh --- all sorts of friendly faces and good times. Thoroughly enjoyable. I also got to visit a lot of my favorite restaurants and coffee shops, which was also enjoyable.

Third, PittStop itself --- was pretty fun, with great dances all around. It was a struggle to dance again in Pittsburgh, as clearly my dancing has changed to adapt to the Seattleites, or Pittsburgh's dancers have forgotten all of my wackiness :)

The only really painful part of the trip was the travel. Airports are starting to suck from my estimation. I cannot think of a flight that I've had in the past 6 months that hasn't had a delay which caused a missed connection, resulting in countless extra hours en-transit. This time, USAir kept our plane on the tarmac for an hour, before flying us to Pittsburgh just in time to miss my connection to Seattle. Then, the best USAir could do was leave me to wait 8 hours in the Philadelphia airport for the next flight to Seattle. Meanwhile, I am still tired from PittStop, and had to get up especially early just to make the (delayed by an hour) flight out of Pittsburgh. Grr.

Another year older

2008-11-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

Well, I am another year older. And it is still charming that I still get carded. And as this new year begins, so does my DJ career in Seattle (hopefully it can be called a career and not a spectacular failure).

Random status update

2008-10-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

3 weeks later, and my thumb is still healing, and it is still painful, but it is doing much better. Cuts are best to be avoided --- they are terribly inconvenient.

Fortunately, I am back to many of my routinely shenanigans, going swing and blues dancing, cooking, exercising, and some new shenanigans, like improv. Healing has gotten to the point that I no longer have to pay too much attention to the thumb, but some care still needs to be taken.

I am currently amazed and mystified by the spectacular engineering feat that is the Intel Xeon microprocessor. Oh the things it does! You give it a sequence of hundreds of instructions, and it divines from those instructions your intent, and Makes It Go Fast. It almost seems like it doesn't matter what sequence of instructions you use to accomplish a task, or what extra instructions you may add, it simply figures out the best way to do it. It is truly the Magics.

Meanwhile, my birthday is coming up, and luck would have it that my sofa is being delivered on the very day --- months ahead of schedule. No longer will I have to sit awkwardly on the floor of my apartment! Life is difficult, at best, when one does not have a place to sit.

Cookies with love...er...fingers

2008-10-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

It amazes me that my cheap $4 knife cannot manage to cut through chocolate, but manages to cut through my flesh with the greatest of ease.

I spent all night in the emergency room. I got to test out my medical insurance for the first time. Shots, stitches, and several bloody bandages later, I am back home. Fortunately, I am in no pain, because I cannot feel anything on my left hand.

UPDATE: I spent the very early morning in the emergency room too! Apparently, as I slept, one of my stitches came out. So, after calling the advice nurse, I found myself chatting with all of the very same people I chatted with 6 hours earlier. At least the people at the hospital are friendly. Still, now 8 hours later, my hand is still numbed all the get out.

So, my next investment is in a chocolate pick.

And these had better be the better chocolate chip cookies ever.

Thieves and Visitors

2008-09-30T16:22:00.001-07:00

I've been walking around everywhere I can the past day or two, looking for native plants that I might want to steal...er...collect cuttings from to grow on my balcony. I found some berries that look like they could be raspberries or blackberries, but I am not quite sure. What if they're poisonous? Could I start growing what appear to be lovely "blackberries" and then make some "blackberry" jam, give it to my coworkers, and see if they survive (before trying some myself)? Would that be immoral?

What I really need are some plants that will be all thrivey and growy and flowery in the winter time here in Seattle. I'm pretty sure the berries will soon be dying back or something, as will my clematis. Perhaps I'll be able to spot some natural thrivers as the weeks progress and the season actually turns.

Meanwhile, I am getting my very first visitor from back in Pittsburgh in the next day or two. I am looking forward to it, especially since it will force me to look at Seattle and the area around my house from a different point of view, and force me to try some more of the restaurants and bakeries around me.

More and more stuff

2008-09-28T19:01:00.001-07:00

The shopping spree continues, to my dismay. This weekend, I acquired all sorts of good stuff, ranging from a coffee table to a bookshelf, to some plants.

The plants are my first purely decorational and recreational purchases for my apartment. I went to Sky Nursery, which has an apparently good reputation round these here parts, and will sell me hops when March arrives. I bought a clematis, chives, violets, rosemary, ficus, and thyme. I'm also scheming to add a plant, which I only know by its Romanian name: cherchelushi (spelling is, of course, all wrong). I *think* that it may be a kind of fuschia, but it is unclear to me. I have spotted a bush of the good stuff growing near to my apartment, and I am going to attempt to make a cutting of it, and use that to spawn my own. If successful, it may be an entertaining means of adding to my plant collection.

The furniture has turned out reasonably. It is clearly not the most expensive stuff on the block, and it took *forever* to put together. It was not helped by the fact that some of the pieces came without any instructions, but many many little screws. So, it was a bit of an adventure to put together. I only have two ziplock baggies full of parts left over. I *think* I know what they're supposed to be used for, but I wasn't sure, so I didn't use them. Not having instructions wasn't awful, since there is apparently an algebra for how to put together Ikea furniture, which I have apparently mastered. So, all in all, it took something like 4 hours for assembly for 3 pieces of furniture.

I've been making better use of the Pike Place Market and bakeries near my house this weekend. Dinner tonight was some roasted red pepper and tomato soup with garlic chive parpadelle and broccoli, all culled from the Pike Place Market for a steal. Lunch was a tasty Rocket Muffin from Macrina bakery.

With that said, again, this weekend, I proclaim that my apartment is finished. Interspersed are some photos of the finished product.

And bread...

2008-09-24T09:41:00.001-07:00

Today, I made some of that nice-n-easy no-knead-bread stuff. I gave it a good 29 hour rise time, and added rosemary, olives, and a dash of olive oil. Aside from setting off my smoke detector at 7am to the chagrin, I am sure, of my neighbors, it all went smooth as buttah. The result was super-amazingly-breadily-tasty, if just a wee bit too salty (i was heavy handed with the salt). The crust is unprecedented --- way better than I encountered on any of my previous bread baking attempts.

Surely, it is too much bread for me to eat before it starts to get stale, so I reserved some for breakfast and some for dinner, and put the rest out for my coworkers to enjoy. Hopefully this will make them more pliable when I ask them for performance data :)

Evolutionary games

2008-09-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

I am not a video game review guy. I am also not a video game guy. I do, however, like to hear my friends' commentaries on gaming systems, and video games. I especially love hearing them complain about not being able to run their games because of software, hardware, or other incompatibilities and failures. While I do sometimes wonder if that makes me a bad person, I am occasionally rewarded with sheerly brilliant performance art, such as this review of Spore, which comes to me from tleaves:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/218-Spore

I should mention that it contains liberal usage of curse words but only in a funny, British way.

Oktoberfest shopping

2008-09-21T19:23:00.000-07:00

We organized a little outing today for the Seattle Googlers to Fremont Oktoberfest. First, we formed a group of Nooglers (New gOOGLERS) to run in the scavenger hunt around the Fremont area. Then, we got together with some of the older Googlers to sample some of the Oktoberfest beers, where I got schooled in some of the finer points of beer snobbery. Hales had a few good offerings, a Kolsch and an Autumn Ale, both of which were extremely tasty. The Hales rep even taught me all about the art of growing hops on my balcony, for which, I suspect, I will one day be grateful.

Besides the Hales brews, I thought that Deschutes had a pretty tasty "Whit" and a Porter, which were well worth revisiting. Someday, I will have to do so, when I'm less beered out.

Meanwhile, I have made many many purchases for my apartment. For the first time in my life, I am the proud owner of a very sharp knife, and a fancy (and thankfully, inexpensive) saucepan. In addition, I bought a shelf that sits over top of my toilet to hold bathroom supplies and towels. This shelf has already brought me an unimaginable amount of joy to my life. Now, when I sit in my toilet, I am strangely warmed by a comforting knowledge that there are towels just above and behind my head. I am certain that this sensation is not normal, and I wonder whether it signals the presence of a brain tumor or aneurysm pressing on something important in my frontal lobes.

Honestly, shopping for my apartment is growing tiring. I hope, however, I am at a point at which I can live relatively comfortably without buying anything more. In the meantime, I can sit comfortably in my apartment, watching the ships roll in over the sound...

Chocolate makes everything better

2008-09-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

So I've finally moved into my apartment. The landlord wouldn't let me move in on Sep 7, like we arranged, because the builders hadn't yet finished fixing a bunch of things in my apartment. Eventually, the landlord let me move in on Sep 13. Despite the week's delay, every single thing that appeared broken on the 7th was still broken on the 13th. RAGE.

Having an actual apartment, however, is a much more relaxing feeling. On my inaugural night, I cooked some dinner, drank some wine, and watched the ships in the harbor while the sun set. Very pretty. Very relaxing. Then, I baked some chocolate-coffee cupcakes with buttercream icing. My icing failed a bit, but they were tasty nonetheless.

The best part, was that I took my surplus cupcakes to a BBQ thrown by our site director. The little kids loved the cupcakes, despite the fact that the icing was melting by the time I got to the party. Many of the kids ate more than one cupcake, and more than one of their tiny little faces were completely covered in chocolate. The icing on the cake was that the kids were extraordinarily hyper for the rest of the party. My rough estimate is that hyperness is a quadratic function in the number of cupcakes eaten, and inversely related to the size of the child. Watching the children terrorize each other, the dogs, and the adults made me feel that my job was well done.

Homeless in Seattle

2008-09-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

I'm still homeless in Seattle. Until the 13th. Ugh. I haven't slept in my own bed for 2.5 months, and haven't had a place to call my own for a month and a half now. Hotels aren't bad, but they're starting to get to me. Especially, since I have to keep changing hotels every few days due to availability issues.

Meanwhile, Google is treating me well. The food is good, and there are more ideas and projects here than I could really ever have imagined there would be. Very exciting stuff. The people are friendly too, with a strong family atmosphere, which is pretty nice.

I'm also finding friends in the dance community. There is a *lot* of dancing --- there are at least 4 "big" dance nights a week, and 2 more smaller nights. I've gotten a few instances of followers claiming to really love dancing with me, which always makes me melt. I'll have to figure out how to keep that going :)

I can break ANYTHING

2008-09-08T14:58:00.001-07:00

My biggest accomplishment after my first week of working for Google is to break my laptop 3 separate times. I really missed my calling in the fine industry laptop quality control.

On the home front, my apartment still isn't ready. I was supposed to move in on Sep 7, but it looks like the earliest it will be ready is Sep 11, and the latest it will be ready is Sep 13th. Meanwhile, I have to live in hotels, which are getting increasingly hard to find --- there must be something going on in Seattle this weekend. I've got some place to stay until Sep 11, and then I worry it'll get pretty dodgy whether I'll find someplace with vacancies.

Furthermore, on the home front, I have learned that Ikea has inexpensive, but super-uncomfortable sofas. Sofas designed, I think, to discourage lounging and relaxation, to encourage one to instead emulate that characteristic Swedish productivity. Thanks to a coworker, I have discovered at least some comfortable sofas at Crate and Barrel, even if they're a bit pricier. I'll have to also check out the Goodwills around here to see if they sell furniture.

Weighty matters

2008-09-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

Today I got a little back into my exercise routine. I was surprised, however, that in the past month of traveling and eating, I have still managed to lose like 6 pounds. Perhaps it's because it's been an especially stressful month. Either way, it's not a great situation.

Meanwhile, I just heard this song, and it made me strangely sad. But it's a good song, so I will post it:

A You're adorable
B You're so beautiful
C you're a cutey full of charms.
D you're a darling and
E you're exciting and
F you're a feather in my arms.
G you look good to me
H you're so heavenly
I you're the one I idolize
J we're like Jack and Jill
K you're so kissable
L you're the lovelight in my eyes.

M,N,O,P, I could go on all day
Q,R,S,T, alphabetically speaking, You're OK!

U make my life complete
V means you're very sweet
W,W,Y,Z

Oh, I love to wander through
The alphabet with you
To tell you what you mean to me!

Sweet Home San Francisco

2008-09-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back in San Jose for training. I went to dinner to Greens, a fancy little vegetarian restaurant up in San Francisco. The driving is soul-sucking, but it's nice to be back in the San Francisco area. San Francisco itself is pretty and comfortable, and makes me feel like I've come back to someplace homey. I think I missed it more than I think I did.

Chase, my credit card company, has been causing me all sorts of grief. They shut my credit card off again today. This is the 3rd time in two days. Every time I've called and tried to get it straightened out. And, so far, every time, they've shut it off after I change locations. I presume it has to do with all my moving around raising some red flags for them. Who knows.

No real observations here, except that you should go to Greens. Very tasty, and very pretty, and everything.

Bumbershoot

2008-08-31T00:31:00.000-07:00

My first day of adventures in Seattle is now complete.

First, I went to the mattress store --- Cloud 9 Mattresses, to get a mattress. It was the only result for googling "mattresses near seattle" which didn't have "these people are awful" reviews. The woman who worked there was pretty odd, very new-agey, and she talked a lot about what's hot in "mattress research" which, if real, freaks me out. Eventually I settled on something which pleased me, and fortunately wasn't very expensive for a mattress. I'll have it in about two weeks.

Second, I went to my apartment, and got my parking space. I'm fortunate that I got there early and got to snag a spot of maximal convenience.

Third, I went to Bumbershoot. Bumbershoot is a huge musical festival in Seattle, and happens to be about 1 block from my apartment. Making it even better, I possibly have one of the best parking spaces to go to Bumbershoot. Bumbershoot was quite nice. I saw the Asylum Street Spankers and a few other awesome musicians. The ASS were quite entertaining, moreso than I thought they'd be.

One of the primary things I focused on at Bumbershoot were the people around me in love. I managed to be enough of a stalker to covertly get photos of a number of couples in tender moments. It gave me hope that Seattle, or at least Bumbershoot, was a good place to find love to which the pictures bear witness. Until then, at least I have these photos:

I also took numerous kid photos. Kids tend to often provide a glimpse of that innocent love of life and existence that I tend to enjoy finding. Each of the pictures, I think, is cute in their own little ways.

Finally, I took a bunch of cute people photos. I am particularly intrigued by the cubes of french fries that they served at the concession stands. I had thought Pittsburgh was crazy over fried foods. Now, I learn that Seattle is just as bad. I find it somewhat surprising.

The move is done

2008-08-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

Well. The move is done. From Spokane to Seattle, the drive is pretty uneventful. Like Montana, the Western side is far more interesting than the Eastern side. The east was largely flat --- not just a little flat --- but totally you-can-see-the-curvature-of-the-earth sort of flat. Cool, and eerie, but a little boring. The west, in contrast, was all full of excitement.

One of the most interesting things of the drive were swarms of insects. Along the side of the road, every 30 feet or so, I kept seeing little tufts of smoke. The thing is that it wasn't smoke. Each tuft of smoke was a cloud of insects, buzzing in tight cylindical formation above the ground. It was the spookiest thing I've ever seen insects do. I wish I knew what they were, but I was too spooked to even stop to take a closer look at them.

The coolest part of Washington is the rolling hills/mountains of Snoqualmie Pass. With low-hanging clouds and trees, and rock, it's truly quite beautiful. Just East of Snoqualmie, there are all sorts lakes, surrounded by remnants of petrified wood forests, which is also pretty fascinating.

So now, I'm checked into my Seattle hotel. I've caught up on some of my email. I've unpacked some of my car, which is getting pretty nasty by this point. Now I have to figure out what to do with my first evening in town.

Goog-411 and me

2008-08-29T07:34:00.000-07:00

As I've been apartment hunting, and driving cross country, without an iPhone or any other cool gadgetry (like a GPS), I've been generally lost. I don't know where anything is, or the nature of any of these cities that I drive through.

When I see the signs for cities (Missoula 97 miles!), and I want to decide where to stop, I've found Goog-411 to be pretty helpful. Issuing queries for Starbucks in those cities tells you if the city is a member of Civilization, or if it is Not. The only problem is that sometimes, Google cannot figure out the name of a city. When I asked for "Forsyth, Montana" Google managed an incredible misparse.

Besides the occasional misparses, I have found one other tragic failure of the Goog-411 system. When I was in Seattle, looking for apartments, I needed the address of Google's Seattle office. I figured that I could just call the office, and ask for that information. But I didn't know their phone number off hand. Enter Goog-411. "Seattle, Washington" I said. "Seattle, Washington" Goog-411 said. Check. "Google." "Top Listing: Google on 6th Ave." Check. However, the entry was actually for a modem or a fax machine, and completely unhelpful for me (or anybody else calling Goog-411, I suspect). It seems that Google should better know its own phone numbers :) Apparently, part of my problem was not remembering Google Seattle was not located on 6th Ave.

The final stretch

2008-08-29T07:10:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I finished driving through North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, and into Spokane Washington.

The Western side of Montana was way cooler than the Eastern side. There were more varied and interesting things to look at, and civilization was a bit denser. Particularly, driving over the Rockies is particularly interesting from a visual perspective.

Also particularly interesting is the Wheat Mountain Bakery & Deli. This is basically a farm, which apparently grows lots of wheat, which decided to capitalize and market this fact. They made this bakery, which extols the benefits of wheat in the form of cookies, pastries, and even sandwiches. After driving for countless hours, finding this foodie stop in the middle of nowhere, with super-friendly clientele and a slightly hipster feel really freaked me out, but made me feel comfortable at the same time. They were so hipster, in fact, that they were selling 10$ bouquets of wheat, which is probably the highest profit margin on wheat possible. I bought a half a sandwich for dinner and a cookie as big as my head. The sandwich was OK, while the cookie was super. I recommend that everybody make at least one trip to this place in their life. It's located at the intersection of I-90 and Hwy 287.

Yes. Western Montana is not just punctuated with beautiful views, it is chock full of them. I found a little stream in a rest stop on the highway. The bathroom was somewhat disgusting, and the water fountains didn't work, but the view was particularly gorgeous. The view was also behind a fence, and hidden from view from the rest stop. I had to go for a bit of a jog and trample around through the weeds before I could get a close look at the stream.

Missoula, Montana was particularly beautiful. It's a hipster college town, with some fancy architecture, and neat bridges, some neat coffee shops, and some really trendy people. I spent a good bit of time driving around there, finding a grocery store, and getting some mint tea.

Movin movin movin

2008-08-28T12:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday: I drove through Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and half of North Dakota. Today, so far (at noon), I have finished North Dakota, and half of Montana.

I was eerily intrigued by St. Paul, which seemed to have really neat shopping centers, at the very least.

Wisconsin and Minnesota are a bit quirky and amusing, in that they have these cheese stores, with huge CHEESE signs. These cheese stores, as best as I could tell, were not the meccas of stinky fromage you would find in Paris, but rather, temples at which one could buy vivid orange and white gels with low-melting points. I could not bring myself to stop at one.

North Dakota wasn't very exciting. No flax, and very few sunflowers, both of which I had been promised lots and lots of. Perhaps it was too dark when I was driving through, and I missed some of the more amazing vistas. What it is filled with, however, is John Deere stores --- almost at every exit. I tried to grab a picture, but mostly got blur.

Montana is amazingly empty. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Even Texas had little wineries and pecan factories to watch. Despite the vast nothingness, however, there is an occasional punctuation of beauty and intrigue. Trains, the lengths of which you have never seen (I saw one with 8 locomotives attached). Scenic bluffs, with views of Yellowstone River, and occasional flowers on the side of the road.

I am finding that I chose the absolutely worst time to drive cross country. All the hotels are all filled up! Every city! Some are overflowing with Harley Davidsons, and others are overflowing with Labor Day vacationers. I'm a bit concerned I'll get to Seattle, and have no place to sleep.

Meanwhile, I am holding in. My ears are constantly ringing, due to the loud driving noise (the car-top carrier reduces the effectiveness of the door seals). My lower back is getting sorer and sorer. My diet is increasingly comprised of peanut butter and jelly and mochas. Speaking of mochas, I have to call out North Dakota and Montana for having almost no Starbucks. I had to use Goog-411 to remotely scout-ahead for potential caffeination sources --- Thank god for Billings, Montana and their coffee-loving population.

Moving to Seattle

2008-08-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

I've begun my move to Seattle. I had a house-hunting trip last week, and found what looks like an awesome apartment in Belltown. It's right next to the science center, and nicely located, and has a fantastic kitchen and a spectacular view. I'm quite content.

I flew back Delta on Monday and both missed my connection and spent the night in Atlanta. I had to get up at 5am to catch my new flight back to Pittsburgh. When I got back, I ran around like a madman, packing, and getting my car an oil change, and going to the bank. Around 5pm, I started leaving Pittsburgh (I had intended to leave before noon).

The drive was full of all sorts of headaches, as the car-carrier that I mounted to the roof was moving around, and tearing. Every rest stop or two, I had to stop and adjust the straps. Finally, around 10pm, I found a packing and strapping arrangement that made the boxes secure, and my worries were over...mostly...

Around 1am, I hit Chicago, and kept on through. Eventually, low on gas, low on wakeness, but full of urine, I struggled to find a gas station or a hotel. By 2am, all my needs were met, and I collapsed into bed.

One of the best things about the trip so far is the sky. There are more stars, brighter than you can imagine, when you're driving through Indiana and Illinois between Cleveland and Chicago. Now I'm also looking forward to the skies of South Dakota, and not just the sunflower and flax fields.

One of the worst things about the trip was the loneliness --- it inspires a strange feeling and collection of thoughts to be driving across the heartland, with all your possessions in your car, leaving everything behind you, moving to a strange new home. Since I'm an innate complainer, I should also mention that my car's seats are definitely not meant for long trips, thus the second worst thing is the lower back pain.

Man v Thesis: the underdog is victorious

2008-08-07T11:32:00.000-07:00

Well, I defended my thesis last Friday. I baked cookies. I bought cupcakes. I brought milk.

When the committee brought me back into the room, they greeted me as Doctor David, which I took in complete shock. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop. There had to be more to this process. I don't feel like a different person than I did before I defended, but now I'm a Doctor. I suppose I knew this, but I never really internalized it until it actually happened to me.

About 1 hour after my defense, my girlfriend and friends whisked me away to a West Coast Swing festival in DC (Swing Fling), where I stayed up dancing till the break of dawn. Finally, on Monday, I recovered and did laundry and all that jazz. The rest of the week so far has been dealing with all the "service" jobs that I've accumulated, for which I've let work build up while thesisizing.

Now, I focus on the thesis again, to incorporate the comments and changes the committee suggested. It shouldn't be too bad. Hoorah!

Crumbling under the pressure

2008-07-31T06:37:00.000-07:00

The thesis is bearing down behind me, hurtling through space at incredible rates of speed. I defend around 30 hours from now, and I'm working working working. Meanwhile, the life around me is crumbling, due to a coincidence of increased external pressures! When I defend...if I succeed...I will surely re-emerge from my ashes like a phoenix. If I don't, I'd ike my guitar to go to my dad, and my cuisinart to go to K. It'd be nice if somebody said some nice things at my wake.

Perhaps for my tombstone:

Man versus Thesis
Thesis won
Thesis always wins

Reflections on Moving

2008-07-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

Sorry I dropped the ball on more of the job-search stories. I'll do what I can to retell them.

Meanwhile, I wanted to take a second out of thesis-writing to mention that I have been struck by two of the classic problems of moving:

1) You never really know what you'll miss from a place until it's time to move away.

2) You will always find something new to totally make you want to stay, just as it's time to move away.

Just a little "Life, you filthy cur!" for the blogs...

Interviewing and Paradox

2008-05-15T06:24:00.000-07:00

I am in the process of interviewing for and deciding on a job. What I have learned is that while it can be a fun and exciting process, it is also time-consuming, and sometimes stressful.

I am now in the process of choosing between two mighty fine offers, between two mighty fine companies (Microsoft and Google Seattle). I am still torn, and making up my mind...But since the process is coming to the end, I can now look back and reflect on the more interesting stories. I will try to share a few here.

One way I've been thinking about MS and Goog is on their ability to implement and dominate web search. It seems that MS has been trying to compete and catch up with Goog for years now, and for all intents and purposes, hasn't managed to do it, and after talking with many people, I have gotten a dozen reasons why.

So I decided to take the issue to both MSN and Google.

First, I queried Google for "MSN Search Quality." Google gave up a slew of links about MSN's search quality, and the progress they're making (or not). Unfortunately, many of those hits weren't very "fresh" with opinions written a few years ago, from 2005, 2006, etc.

Next, I took the same query to MSN. The results had some issues. Hits 1-3 and 5 were completely irrelevant, apparently containing most/all of the search terms, but having nothing to do with MSN Search Quality. Hits 4 and 6 were opinion pieces suggesting that MSN Search Quality wasn't very good.

The punchline is that MSN's results yield a paradox. Either:

MSN search quality is high, and the results are true, and MSN search quality is poor!

MSN search quality is poor, and the results are false, and MSN search quality is high!

-david

PLCB versus the LCBO

2007-10-24T06:01:00.000-07:00

Recently, when the US and Canadian dollars reached parity, and 1 USD = 1 CAD, I took my first trip to Toronto.

While I was there, I decided to visit a wine store, to search for a couple of Canadian wines, which I rarely see in the US (at least in PA). Like Pennsylvania, Ontario has a liquor control board, known as the LCBO, through which all wine has to be purchased. According to Wikipedia, the LCBO is the largest and the PLCB is the second largest wine and liquor purchasers in the world. It seemed essential that I compare the two.

The first thing I noticed entering a LCBO store is that they're very pretty. They
make you comfortable with a decor of soothing yellows and greens. LCBO apparently puts a little more effort into decorating their stores than the PLCB. Like the PLCB, the LCBO features several different kinds of stores, ranging from cramped stores with small selection downtown, to larger stores with more to offer outside of the city center (where retail space appears cheaper).

I have to mention it: the employees I encountered a the two Toronto LCBO stores I visited were amazing. First and foremost, they were almost all friendly and outgoing, even though both stores were SWAMPED with customers. Second, they were unbelievably fast at their jobs --- especially the cashiers. Once we got to the cash register, it took about 30 seconds to ring up, pay for, and bag our 3 bottles of wine. I've never seen a cashier move as fast as I did that day. I have never been to a PLCB store and had the same experience.

The LCBO selection is clearly biased towards favoring Canadian wines wherever possible (although this could have been due to close proximity to Canadian
wine producing regions). At least 15 percent of their retail space (and perhaps
more) was devoted to VQA Canadian wines. I have never looked very hard for Canadian wines at the PLCB, but I have only seen a single lonely offering mixed into the "Other Red Wines" section.

According to Wikipedia, the LCBO has a reputation for high prices. I used the online web sites for both the PLCB and the LCBO to generate this small sampling of comparison prices. It was particularly difficult finding the exact same version of popular wines in both stores. I suspect this is due to bulk purchasing done by both organizations --- in 2003 PLCB negotiates the best deal and gets most of Kim Crawfords Selection X, and in 2004 the LCBO gets it.

Wine	PLCB	LCBO
Twin Fin Cab Sauvignon	6.99	14.30
Fish Eye Pinot Grigio 2006	7.99	10.15
Louis Jadot Beaujolais Villages 2006	10.99	16.95
Chateau Cardonne Medoc	23.09	26.95
Two Hands Gnarly Dudes Shiraz 2002	29.99	24.95
Alkoomi Blackbutt 2002	35.99	27.00
Leeuwin Shiraz Art Series 2003	32.99	35.15
Grant Burge Holy Trinity GSM 2002	37.95	35.39
Two Hands Lily' Garden Shiraz 2004	43.99	65.00
Corino Barolo Arborina	52.99	66.00
Clarendon Hills Sandown Cab Sauv 2004	64.00	68.00
Silver Oak Cab Sauv 2002	99.99	82.95
Opus One 2003	164.00	143.95
Opus One 2004	175.89	269.95
Chateau Margaux 1998	347.00	395.00

Even when you factor in sales taxes --- 18 percent for the PLCB and 12 percent for the LCBO, almost all of these wines are generally more expensive in Toronto (and sometimes a lot more expensive) than they are in Pittsburgh. Only four cases in the above selections do the LCBO prices beat PLCB prices. Interestingly, it seems that the LCBO charges more than the PLCB even for many super expensive wines for which I doubt either purchaser is getting much of a volume discount. It would be interesting to see how much profit each organization makes off of each wine.

I have to observe that it's possible that the LCBO prices above may seem high because of the recent shifts in the value of the canadian dollar relative to the US dollar. If we were comparing these prices a year ago, we would have to knock at least 15 percent off the values of the LCBO wines. That makes many of the LCBO offerings look as good as or better than the PLCB offerings. It will be interesting to observe how the LCBO wine prices and PLCB wine prices adjust over the next year or so. My suspicion is that PLCB will have a much more difficult time of procuring foreign wines with such a weak US dollar, but it is hard to say.

While searching online for PLCB and LCBO offerings, I found that the PLCB almost always offers a greater selection than the LCBO. For example, the PLCB offers
59 St Emilions to LCBO's 10, 126 Amarones to LCBO's 66, etc. This, of course, includes wines that have to be special-ordered from the PLCB. If you remove the special-orders from the PLCB listings, you approach numbers much closer to LCBO's. The LCBO, also seems to be a little more liberal about letting you ship wines in yourself, so this may or may not be a significant issue.

While searching the PLCB and LCBO pages for wines to price compare, I found that the PLCB seems to almost always offer a wider selection than the PLCB. This, of course, includes wines that are only offered by the PLCB under special orders

As I mentioned above, I used both the PLCB and the LCBO web pages for a wee bit to research this article. Like their stores, the LCBO web page is about 100 times prettier than the PLCB offering. The functionality, however, is more or less similar. It seems as if the LCBO suffers from the same braindead "show me the wines in my local store" functionality as the PLCB --- You can do it, but it is a pain, taking much more effort than needed. Finally, the LCBO has found a unique way of sucking my soul through my ears, by breaking my search every time that I accidentally hit my "Return" key to submit a form instead of clicking on the "Search" button (It manages to return 0 matches for whatever I search for in that case).

In general, I've found the LCBO experience to be generally similar to the PLCB experience. The prices are possibly a bit higher than the PLCB's, but in exchange you get a cheerier atmosphere, and what appears to be faster service. Still, neither one can really compare to the customer service experiences I've gotten at independently-run wine stores in Ohio and New Jersey. I still don't understand fully why those success stories cannot be recreated inside Pittsburgh and Toronto.

Searching the PLCB

2007-08-17T05:23:00.001-07:00

Most people I know tend to think that the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) provides nothing but disservice to Pennsylvania wine drinkers, and that neighboring states like Ohio and New Jersey have it better with privately-run wine stores.

While I think there's a great deal of truth to that claim, I there is one way the PLCB gives us a clear benefit: The Product Search Page. Well, at least, it helps us in principle.

The idea is simple. Since all of your wine and spirits purchases have to be made through one company, it is feasible to search all the wine stores in the state for a product you want. If it's there, you can run out to the store and grab what you want.

Sounds like a great idea. Those states with hundreds of independent private retailers have no way to even begin address the technical and political complexities in hooking up all their inventories at a one stop shop. You'd need to search dozens of websites, or worse, visit actual stores to find a product you want.

Sadly, The Product Search Page has been clinically shown to cause users to purchase firearms, and shoot themselves in the head, repeatedly, in order to relieve the pain it causes.

I believe the central problem is that the developers had no idea, or didn't care what people want to do with that web page.

Historically, this used to be a huge problem in computer science. Early on, computer programmers wrote programs for themselves to use. They solved the programmers' problems, but were arcane and impossible for anybody else to use. Eventually, computer programmers were hired to write programs for other people to use. Since computer programmers (like me) are geeks who cannot interact with anybody else, and nobody knew better, they wrote programs that only computer programmers would understand, and then taught the users how to use them. "Want to copy some text? Sure. Just hit Control-F1-c! See how intuitive it is?!" Even worse, sometimes those programs didn't even solve the actual problems that users had. Eventually Apple came around and started designing their programs so they're actually intuitive and easier to use for normal people. It was the dawn of a new era.

To be clear, The Product Search Page is from before that era.

What went wrong with The Product Search Page is that the PLCB developed a program without understanding at all what people would use it for. It appears as if they knew they had a database of inventory, and decided "We should put this on the web! We'll be so kewl!" So they created a couple of database queries, put it on the web, and they were done. Instant profit!

In comparison, what should happen in the new era is this: Study (potential) users to understand what they need to do. Develop a user interface to meet users' needs. Go back and study how users use your system and their needs change. Repeat. All of these steps are clearly missing from or deficient in The Product Search Page development process.

The Product Search Page gives you two search queries. First, "Is a wine in any PLCB store or the PLCB special-order system?" Only after I have submitted this query, I can click on a wine and submit a second query, "Is this wine in a given store, or any store in my city?"

I believe that all users of The Product Search Page want to know exactly one thing: If a particular product is available in a local wine store, or a particular wine store. Fortunately, I believe out of sheer luck, I can answer my query using the arcane queries I am given:

Type the product name

Click Search

Find the product in a big list

Click on the product

Type in "Pittsburgh"

Click Submit

Find that there are no bottles anywhere near me.

Things get even worse if I am just interested in "What Merlot are located at my store?" Then I have this contorted sequence of steps:

Type in Merlot

Click Search

Find the product in a big list

Click on the product

Type in "Pittsburgh"

Click Submit

Find that there are no bottles anywhere near me.

Click Back TWICE

Repeat steps 4-8 ad infinitum

Sadly, I cannot even begin to imagine what questions the designers of the system thought users wanted to answer. Once I've done a search, and see that a wine is available somewhere in Pennsylvania, I cannot figure out where --- I can only search for my city and pray that I've guessed correctly. Furthermore, if I see that a wine can be special-ordered, there is absolutely no way to do so via the web.

For those of you who have been using computers anytime after 1984 knows that The Right Solution looks more like:

Type in the product name/keyword

Type in my store city or number

Click Search

See the wine available in my local store!

The most frustrating thing is that it would take 5 minutes of programming to make The Product Search Page do what I (the users) want. The second most frustrating thing is that although it takes a mind-numbing amount of effort for the users, the website can do what I want; Thanks to the PLCB monopoly there is no reason or incentive for the PLCB to even think about fixing this.

Bona Terra

2007-07-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

While searching for new restaurants in Pittsburgh, I happened across Bona Terra, in Sharpsburg. Being vegetarian, I am always leery of new places, so I called to see if they had anything for me to eat. They said that as long as we called a day ahead, they could make sure to have something delicious. I was reassured, and vowed to get there soon. I recently found the opportunity to go while I was moving apartments. I made a reservation (which is, apparently, necessary, if you expect to eat there) for 8pm on a Saturday night.

The restaurant itself is impressively difficult to find, but we called the restaurant from the road, and they helped us find it. From the outside, it looks unassuming but charming.

From a vegetarian's perspective, my first time here was unsettling. Nothing on the menu was vegetarian-friendly (for a non-fish vegetarian), but the wait staff kept reassuring me that anything on the menu could be made vegetarian. I didn't, however, understand how a "Sirloin" or "Filet of Sole" could be made vegetarian. When it came time to order, the waiter recommended that I just ask for the chef to "do his vegetarian thing," and I went with it. I was asked about my preferences for sauces and items on the menu, and was left without a clue as to what was coming.

My girlfriend and her mom had a much easier time, ordering a filet of sole and a sirloin steak, respectively.

For appetizers, we ordered a communal gnocchi (without crab to please me), and a soup and salad. When they came, I got to the gnocchi first. I cannot say this any more simply, but this dish was sublime. One of the most amazing things to pass my lips in a long time. The sauce was fresh and sweet and piquant, and the gnocchi was soft, velvety and luscious. I don't know what Faustian bargain the chef has made to cook this stuff, but I am glad he did.

Subsequently, we were served an amuse and some bread. The amuse was a little peach slice with raspberry coulis, mint, and some blue cheese. It was quite refreshing, but nothing spectacular. The bread was a rosemary-infused challah, I believe, which was tasty, but a bit weak on the rosemary. During this period, we suffered a pregnant pause in the arrival of food, which may have been unintended, but we did not mind, as we were tired from moving, and enjoying the discussion.

Eventually, the entrees arrived. The chef decided to make me some polenta triangles, covered in an olive-relish, and drizzled with a basil oil. Alongside, it came with an assortment of sauteed veggies, including some beans and baby bok choy. The baby bok choy was a bit oily for my taste, but the rest of the dish was, once again, sublime. The polenta was light and creamy and unlike any polenta I've made before (perhaps a high cream content is the secret?). The beans and the olive-relish were beyond-heavenly, and again, unlike anything I've ever cooked. I have something new to strive for. Although I did not partake, my girlfriend and her mom thoroughly enjoyed their meals as well.

In gustatory Elysia, we decided to continue with dessert. We ordered two desserts --- I believe they were a chocolate torte with hazelnut ice cream, and a strawberry parfait with peach ice cream. Unlike my companions, I had prepared myself for this moment throughout the evening, by pacing myself and not stuffing myself on bread. Thus, I was prepared to eat quite a bit of both desserts. The parfait was quite refreshing, although when I go for dessert, I want it rich and decadent. The torte, rich and decadent, was more my style. Sadly, I thought that the torte and the ice cream did not complement each other well --- both were too dark and chocolatey to accentuate each other. I thought that the peach ice cream from the parfait would have been a much better foil for the torte, and ended up spooning from both dishes.

The waitstaff at Bona Terra are pretty much exceptional. They were warm, friendly, and welcoming throughout the entire meal. The service is a little formal --- our waiter continually refilled our wine and water glasses throughout the meal, and presented us with tiny silverware just before they were necessary. For a special occasion, however, it makes one feel quite rich.

It is fortunate that the service makes one feel rich, since the prices at Bona Terra are not cheap. Our dinner for 3 ended up costing somewhere around 150$, which is definitely no bargain. I daresay, however, that I do not regret spending a dollar of that tab: the service, and more importantly, the food was well-worth it. I can't wait to go back for my next special occasion, if only for the gnocchi.

The Light in the PLCB

2007-07-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I found myself in the PLCB store in Robinson Towne Center. It takes me about 30 minutes to drive there, and I pass by no fewer than 10 PLCB stores to get there.

I stopped by since I was in the area anyway, and I needed some Wine Preserver. Wine Preserver is an ingenious little bottle of nitrogen and noble gases that one sprays into opened wine bottles to keep them from oxidizing and going bad. It works a lot better than those vacuum stoppers.

This trip was particularly notable since it gave me my very first pleasant experience at a PLCB store. The staff were extraordinarily helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable. Even though the store didn't have any Wine Preserver in stock, the store manager (I believe) chatted with me for about 10 minutes as he helped me figure out where to get some. He answered a number of my questions about the SLO wine ordering process, and convinced me to try the (archaic) system again. I am tempted to make this my one and only PLCB store, despite the 30+ minute drive, if only to be nearer to its staff.

Eventually, the manager gave me a stock printout for the Wine Preserver, and told me that I could just take that to my local (East Liberty/Penn Circle) store, I could give it to them, and they would order some from the manufacturer, or from another PLCB store, and I could pick it up at my convenience.

Happy, I went back home. On my way home, I stopped off at the East Liberty PLCB store, and gave the printout to the cashier, and told him what the Robinson Towne Center manager had told me. The E. Liberty cashier looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language, and had me explain it again. He looked at the printout, and saw that a store located 15-20 minutes away had some in stock, and he asked me "why don't you drive out there to pick some up?" After explaining that I wasn't keen on driving out to the THIRD PLCB store of the day, he told me that I could pay 5-10$ to get it shipped to the local store. I agreed to it.

He had me write down my credit card information on the back of a piece of paper. I couldn't believe it was possible, but it was true: the PLCB really does still live in the early 1960's, long before credit card fraud, credit card swipers, and even computers had become common knowledge. Ahhh. Those simpler times. I left without even knowing the total that the PLCB was going to charge to my credit card, and without knowing when I could expect to hear anything from them. Whoever thought that this was a reasonable business practice in the freaking 21st century needs to be drawn and quartered.

Even worse, I learned yesterday that the PLCB was going to stop selling all of its wine-related accessories, including Wine Preserver. Why? Apparently something to do with a "bunch of suits" in Harrisburg thinking that "they weren't making money fast enough." Apparently, individual store managers are even forbidden to carry wine-accessories even if they think it will be profitable or beneficial for their customers. This is a prime example of the near-negligent bureaucratic failures typical of the PLCB.

This story illustrates a few major beefs I have with the PLCB system. First, is that while some employees are surely quite spectacular, somehow, the system apparently lacks any quality control to get rid of or retrain employees that give PLCB a bad name. Second is that the PLCB exhibits the classical monopolistic drawback of detached disservice to its consumers. Why bother improving service if customers cannot go anywhere else, and more importantly, if there is no quality control to ensure that stellar employees are rewarded accordingly?

Standard Deviations of the Mean

2007-05-22T07:57:00.000-07:00

In my day-to-day life, I run experiments on Database Management Systems, trying to understand their performance characteristics.

Recently, I've been trying to create graphs of average query response times with "standard deviations" --- to ascribe some level of confidence to my data. Unfortunately, I've been doing it all wrong. Fortunately, I have ample company, many people don't quite get it, even in the medical community.

This is the situation: You run an experiment, with thousands of data points (x[i]'s). You want to average them together, and ascribe a confidence to your average.

My first (and incorrect) idea was to compute the mean and the standard deviation from my data points. In other words:


   mu := sum(x[i])/N 
   var := sum( (x[i]-mu)^2 )/N
   stdev := sqrt(var)

The problem here is that the stdev is an estimate for the variation within the population, and does not have anything to do with the accuracy of your estimate of the mean (mu). In other words, while you expect that your estimate of the mean should get better as you increase the number of data-points, your standard deviations will never get smaller, no matter how many samples you take.

What you really want is Standard Error of the Mean (aka SE or SEM). This is simply the sample standard deviation (above) divided by the square root of the number of samples:


   sem := stdev/sqrt(N)

Now you may use the SEM to provide the confidence interval for the mean of your x[i]'s. That is, a 68% likelihood that the true mean is within 1 SEM away from mu, a 95% likelihood that it is within 2 SEM's of mu, and so forth.

So in summary, there are two things of importance to you --- The Standard Deviation of your sample, and the Standard Error of the Mean --- these are very different beasts and should never be confused, no matter how tempted you are to do so.

Welcome to my Châteauneufs

2007-02-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

Eric Asimov, wine writer for the New York Times, has done several recent stories revolving thematically around Chateauneuf-du-Pape wines.

Most interestingly, the "Best Value" Eric's tasting group, the Domaine de Monpertuis 2004, is miraculously available within the PLCB system, and also, at a store near me. The wine is expensive, the PLCB offers it for $30.49, although Eric bought it in NYC for $32. Score one for the bulk-purchasing power of the PLCB. Oh. But wait. You can buy it for $27.99 in Marlton, NJ.

I wouldn't normally want to buy a $30 bottle of wine, but it's a rare occasion that a wine I read about is available to me, and it just so happened that Corina just got a new job. So it was both cause for celebration and cause for wine exploration. When I got to the wine store, I found the wine not on the standard shelves, but on the racks in the special, temperature-controlled back room of the store. I give rare praise --- this climate controlled wine transport and storage is one way that the PLCB does not suck. We have the work of former chairman Jonathan H Newman to thank for that.

So with wine in hand, Corina and I went in for an evening of roasted beets and risotto cakes, and some Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Eric (et al) describe the wine as "earthy," "old-fashioned," and with a balance between "raspberry and tart herbal aromas." Corina and I agreed that the wine was quite good, which makes me proud, since Eric says the wine is "a wine lovers' wine." Our tasting notes give it a dark and earthy raspberry nose and flavor, with an attack that starts sharp, but then lingers mellowly for quite some time. There was something that eluded me in the tasting and the aroma that I could not place. My best guess was mint, but I am doubtful. With all that said, I know how pompously this all reads, and I commiserate. I would buy this again if it cost less than $15, but I'm an explorer, and it's rare I would ever buy any wine again (The exception being the wonderful Kim Crawford Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, which I have to get).

Liquor Control Bites

2007-02-21T09:50:00.002-08:00

Until I went to Paris in 2004, I spent my entire life dry. On my 2004 trip to Paris, the heart of the oenophilic, I decided to try as hard as I could to enjoy wine. Every night, I suffered, buying a glass of wine with dinner, and forcing it down, despite my shocking distaste for the swill. I even suffered one awkward night, getting tipsy after just one glass, trying to get back to my hotel without falling in the street. Then it happened: at the end of my 10-day trip, I had a wine that wasn't completely awful. I didn't like it, but it wasn't as bad as the others. I could understand that somebody could like the stuff.

It took about 2-3 more years before I really tried wine again. When I lived in California, I bought cheap wine at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods Sadly, I disliked every wine I bought, but at least I was making an effort (In hindsight perhaps I was just buying too much of the cheap swill). Now that I'm back in Pennsylvania, I help to consume about 2-3 wines per week. Maybe it's just because I'm buying more expensive bottles, but I even like the stuff now.

One of the things I don't like about wine, however, is buying it. More importantly, I hate buying at the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) stores. By law, they're the only places to buy wine in Pennsylvania. And surprise of surprises, even though it's a government-run monopoly, the PLCB sucks.

Going to a PLCB store is a singular experience, much like going to a concert performed entirely by the deaf. Most of the employees I've encountered have no understanding of the product which they sell. Since there is no competition, it doesn't matter if the employees know anything at all, they just need some alcohol for sale. The best wine information I've ever gotten from a PLCB employee is "This is on sale for under 8$! It must be great!" and "I don't know what it tastes like, but it always sells out, so it must be good!"

Also due to the lack of competition, consumer choice is entirely at the mercy of the PLCB. The poor selection is what infuriates me most as a consumer --- when you want something particular, you're screwed. After reading a wine magazine, newspaper article, or blog, and I want to try a "hot new wine," inevitably I cannot buy it. Most of the time, say around 80%, the PLCB simply hasn't even heard of the wines or vintners. About 15% of the time, the PLCB has heard of it, but either has never purchased any, or has no more left. Of course, they cannot order these for you (except in very special circumstances, and when you want to buy a few cases). 5% of the time, they have some in stock, but not at any store within 200 miles. Of course, they cannot ship some stock to a store near me. The remaining 1% of the time, I can get my wine. ("Fortunately," the PLCB web site allows you to search for product availability. I should warn you, however, that that it will be far easier to pound an 8 inch nail through your skull than to use that site for any length of time).

Thus, I have believed the PLCB was The Devil, existing only to hurt Pennsylvanians, and that the only way to Happiness and Morality was the demise of the PLCB. This model of the world, however, was shattered on a recent trip to Cleveland. I was buying a wine, and found the bottle was 3-4$ more expensive than in the PLCB. I couldn't believe it: it was better to buy that wine in Pennsylvania than in Cleveland.

I figured that the Pennsylvania and adjacent non-control wine markets must have been extensively compared online, and I could learn whether this was a trend or not. All I found online, however, was a testimonial from Vice Carocci discussing historical changes to the PLCB. Vince argues that the PLCB has gotten much better, and today helps Pennsylvanians get better prices. I wanted to examine this hypothesis more carefully.

The PLCB is the second-largest single buyer of wine and liquor in the world (after Ontario's liquor control board). As such, it may indeed have the power to negotiate unbelievably low prices. In fact, PLCB stores have drunk of Vince's Kool-Aid, and have signs touting these extremely low prices. Sadly, all the PLCB's information is misinformation. They compare their retail price to vintners' "suggested prices," which are far higher than anybody pays for the wine. What they should do is compare the price Pennsylvanians pay for wine to the price Ohians and Jersyites pay for the same wine.

That is the comparison I hoped to make. Using the online wine store WineZap and the PLCB Web Site, I did a quick survey of wine prices, and came up with the following sample data:

Wine	Internet $$	PLCB $$	Ratio
Brundlmayer Riesling Steinmassel 2004	25.99-30.00	21.49	0.82
P Jaboulet Aine Cotes-du-Rhone	17.99	18.79	1.04
Belle Glos Pinot Noir Taylor.Ln 2004	46.40	49.99	1.07
Annies Lane Riesling 2005	12.00	12.99	1.08
Carretta Barbaresco Bordino 2000	35.99	39.49	1.09
Chateau Mont Redon Cotes-du-Rhone 2003	14.35-15.99	16.59	1.15
Kim Crawford Marl. Sauv Blanc	12.99-24.99	14.99	1.15
Ch Doisy Vedrines Sauternes 2001	36.99-69.00	42.99	1.16
Ch Piada Sauternes 2001	62.99-69.99	74.59	1.18
Ch St Michelle Eroica Riesling 2004	17.99-26.29	21.99	1.22

I chose the wines more or less haphazardly from some wine varieties that I would like to try, and in several different price brackets.

The quick summary is as follows: Only in one case did the PLCB have the best price available. In about half the wines, the PLCB was competitive --- within 10% of the best price available, but the other half, the prices were significantly higher. If you have to buy your wine, buy it when you're not in Pennsylvania. You'll get a better selection and (if you look for it) a better price. Of course, almost NONE of the wines listed above could actually be purchased at a PLCB store near me, even though I could buy those wines online if I lived in Ohio.

More detailed analysis, however, will indicate that the PLCB really does a good job of securing good prices for its wines. The problem is Pennsylvania alcohol taxes. The Johnstown Flood Tax imposes an 18% tax on all wine (contained in the PLCB prices above). If you remove that 18% tax from the PLCB prices above, the PLCB has the best price for all but one of the wines above.

This is already a long post, and there is much to say, so I will return to these subjects in future posts. In the meantime, I want to tell you that the PLCB is probably still your enemy, but at least it could give you good prices, if it weren't for state taxes.

Jam Cellar

2006-11-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I did something crazy. Again.

About 5 weeks ago, Jeffy, Corina, and I decided one Tuesday that we should go dancing at the Jam Cellar. We drove 4.5 hours from Pittsburgh to Washington DC, arriving around 9PM, just in time for the dance. After dancing and having a good time for 2.5 hours, we stayed the night at Alan's house, and drove back to Pittsburgh early on Wednesday morning.

There's something a little bit scary to realize that you're one of "those people" who will drive more than 8 hours to go dancing for less than 3 hours. What's even scarier is to hear that the "rockstars" at the Jam Cellar, who dance (semi-)professionally think that you're crazy.

On the other hand, there's something immensely satisfying to realize that you're one of "those other people" who do really crazy, irrational things every once in a while. Unless you are clinically dead, these crazy things should fill you with a prickly excitement that reassures you that you're not letting your life just slip away in dull monotone. Even better, afterwards, you have a story to tell your friends, family, your children, your grandchildren, and anybody else who will listen. And you have a better story than the people who do other crazy things, like climbing Mount Everest. Because you did something that anybody can do --- something completely ordinary --- and made it extraordinary by circumstance, which means that everybody can (at least partly) relate.

Which brings me back to my story. 5 weeks ago, we thought the Jam Cellar was "OK," but a dance has to be darned better than "OK" to justify over 8 hours of driving. I thought I had made that trip for the last time. Recently, Jason and Nicole have been rumbling about going down themselves, and they convinced me to come along. Stupidity in its essence, I thought. But you only live once, so...

Jason got to my house to pick me up. As we pulled away, his car was making an odd thumping noise, and it turned out that he just got a flat tire. I offered, against all my better instincts, to drive my car down. The reason? How can you beat a story that starts out by getting a flat tire?

So we transfered everything to my car, and we began the drive. Nicole taught us the back way to the highway, which involves driving through Swisshelm Park pockets of Pittsburgh never before seen by human eyes. We made good time, and in about 4 hours, we're in DC, and we stopped for a bite to eat at a little diner.

At that moment, I realized that DC is some third-world boonie country in backwater America, because all the Starbucks apparently close at 8PM, and I can't get a decent cup of coffee. Even in Pittsburgh, the coffee shops are open until 11PM or midnight. Thankfully, I got some oatmeal and some coffee at the diner, enabling me to survive the cold, dark DC wilderness.

At the dance, I quickly became quite glad we came again, for several reasons. First, the Jam Cellar crew remembered me from the last trip, which reassured me that I had a good story. Second, the dance was much more lively and had more energy than it did the last time. Finally, many friends from Columbus, California, Austin, and Carlisle were visiting, and the people from DC were also great to see again.

After the dance, with a lovely little dance buzz, we drove back to Pittsburgh. Nicole slept while Jason and I kibitzed about dancing, evolution, rabies, and who knows what else. We got in around 4:30AM, rounding the trip out to a 12 hour excursion. It was so worth it.

A Twin Fin Turbocharged Merlot

2006-03-23T12:07:00.000-08:00

My name is David, and I have a problem. Corina is a borderline alcoholic. At every opportunity, she demands wine with dinner, with dessert, with breakfast, and for snacktime inbetween.

On the plus side, I get to experience wine like never before. On the minus side, I often have to buy wine like never before. Last week, she demanded we go to the local Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board retail store to get a bottle of wine. I share the opinion of many folks that the PLCB couldn't suck more even if it really tried...but I shall rant about that at some other time.

We asked the manager of the local PLCB about wines, and the only thing he could really recommend was Big House Red. I've tried Big House Red before, and I wasn't much of a fan, so we asked for something else. Since PA law forces us to shop in the PLCB, there's no compelling reason for him to know anything about what he sells, except for its name, its cost, and that it contains alcohol...Thus we were on our own.

Eventually, I saw it. The wine we needed to buy. The bottle just oozed with pure unadulterated sex appeal. Behind the label was a 2003 Twin Fin Merlot from California, my adoptive home-away-from-home state. The only downside was that it had an unpretentious screw-top, which meant that I couldn't pretend that I was some fancy wine snob (Let's ignore , for a moment, the fact that I think that screw-tops and boxed-wine technology are only a billion times more effective than that cork crap).

Corina, however, was less than impressed. She read the back of the bottle, which claimed "dark cherry fruit, mocha, and smoky oak." Corina refused to believe that any of those flavors went together, and the wine must surely be an abomination to all that is holy.

Fortunately, I was adamant, and we eventually got the Twin Fin. We cracked the wine and drank it with some avocado and Ewephoria sheep milk gouda we got from DiBruno Brothers' in Philadelphia. Both Corina and I rather enjoyed it. It was a bit strange, probably due to some of that mocha/smoky-oak thing going on, but it was pretty good. I don't know what makes "Merlot" "Merlot," but this was the best Merlot I've yet experienced. Checking around online reveals that many other folks quite enjoy the wine as well. For 11$, it's not bad at all.

Vitalismists

2006-03-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

So. 1828. It's a special year. I've mentioned it before in this blog. Cocoa powder was first dutched. Andrew Jackson was voted into office. It's encoded in the transendental number e. It's just special.

It turns out to be the year that Friedrich Woehler discovered that urea can be made out of potassium cyanate and ammonium sulfate. This accidental discovery essentially created an entirely new branch of chemistry. Unfortunately, nearly a full 200 years later, people haven't caught on.

Before Woehler, people believed that living things were special: Life could not be reproduced by mechanism alone. If you needed an organic chemical, like sugar, you couldn't just synthesize it. You needed to have some living being infuse the basic chemical building blocks with its living energy before you could get the sugar. This belief has a name : Vitalism.

Woehler's great contribution was to show that an organic chemical --- urea --- could be synthesized completely from two very inorganic chemicals --- without the use of anybody's life energy. In essence, he showed that vitalism was, for all intents and purposes, completely wrong.

So, fast-forward 200 years. Organic chemistry has come quite a long way. We're synthesizing all sorts of "organic" chemicals, and using them in all our major foodstuffs. The problem? Most people will tell you that those chemicals aren't nearly as healthy for you as natural "organic" chemicals that come from crops and animals grown on farms without any hormones and pesticides and whatnot. These people are our modern-day vitalists, caught forever in 1828.

Let's look at sugar. In particular, let's look at "high-fructose corn syrup." It's an ingredient in countless prepackaged foods. Sadly, if you talk with our modern-vitalists, they'll tell you that high-fructose corn syrup is bad for you. Countless people will tell you it is the reason America is obese. Countless people will tell you that it causes who knows what sort of health problems.

Let's see how rational folk look at what high-fructose corn syrup is. It all starts with corn syrup. As you may have noticed, even sweet corn isn't terribly sweet. Corn is, however, very starchy. Organic chemistry teaches us that starches are simply strings of sugar molecules that are chained together. Food scientists have discovered, that they can take those starches, and break them down into sugars using enzymes. Two types of sugars are created in this process --- fructose and glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is corn syrup that has more fructose than glucose. You could, presumably, call other forms "high-glucose corn syrup."

What causes our modern day vitalists to view high-fructose corn syrup as some freakish abomination?

Maybe it's fear of this enzymatic breakdown of starch into sugar? Even though the human body does the same enzymatic breakdown in the process of digestion? Even though cooking (e.g. caramelization) will do the same thing?

Maybe it's the fact that it's fructose instead of sucrose, our "natural sweetener" that we find in cane sugar? What is this fructose thing? It turns out that it is a simple sugar, just like sucrose. It's found in high concentrations in honey, tree fruits (e.g. apples or peaches), berries, melons, beets, sweet potatoes, parsnips, and onions. Why don't vitalists get their panties in an uproar when we send our kids to school eating high-fructose apples and high-fructose oranges? The world may never know. In fact, fructose tends to taste sweeter than sucrose, and tends to be better for diabetics because it has a lower glycemic index than sucrose.

Maybe someday, the scientists of the world will unite, and make the soda bars seem to be safe for our kids again. But I suppose, I shouldn't hold my breath. After all, it's been 200 years and still no progress has been made...

USPS sucks rocks.

2006-02-28T07:56:00.000-08:00

What can I say? The US Postal Service has to be the most inept "business" I've ever encountered.

I moved to California last year, for 5 months. I knew I was coming back to Pittsburgh, so I ordered a Temporary Change Of Address of mail from Pittsburgh to California, set to expire on December 31, 2005. Simple, eh?

Fast forward, 5 months. I'm beginning to move back to Pittsburgh, and I want to make sure that mail goes smoothly. So I talk to the post office. They say to submit a new change-of-address form, just to be safe. The Temporary Change Of Address should expire just fine, but there's no harm in being safe, they told me.

When I get home, it is clear that I'm not getting mail. So I submit a new change-of-address form, and submit it. This time, online. I have to pay a dollar. But I'm not getting mail. It's worth it, I think.

A week or two later, it's clear I'm still not getting mail. I have friends and family telling me that their letters and postcards are bouncing. I go to the Squirrel Hill post office. They tell me, that even though I live in Squirrel Hill, they don't deliver my mail. I have to call the East Liberty office. They give me their number, and I call and complain. The next day, I have a letter in my mailbox. Relief.

A week or two later, it's a little clear that I'm still not getting mail. Nothing has come since that solitary letter. A credit card company tells me that their mail isn't getting through. I send myself a letter. Four or five days later, my letter bounces. Now, I enter a world of hurt...

I go online, trying to find the phone number of the Squirrel Hill post office. The USPS.gov site has a fancy "Post Office Locator" tool, but the phone number it gives? Some automated 1-800-beastie that has no connection to my local post office. It takes 30 to 60 minutes to settle on the 800-number, and navigate to find my post office's number. Don't forget, that I'm trying to get the phone number of my post office, which doesn't even handle my mail. I call them, just to get the second number I need to call. I then complain. They promise that it will be fixed. The next day...A letter in my mailbox.

A week or two later, and again, nothing more is in my mailbox except for that one solitary letter. What on earth could be going on? Stupid me, I lost the phone number of my post office since I called them last time. I have to go through the automated-800-number-of-death to find the phone number again. This time, I tell my story to three people. Eventually, I get reconnected to somebody who says that they are my actual mail carrier...

The story that I am told is that despite my Change-Of-Address forms, and the fact that my first Change-Of-Address was temporary, the carrier was given no notice that I was back in town.
That's right. Even though he knew to deliver mail to me two or three days in the past two months when I complained, he still thought I was in California. He said that most people just move away from Pittsburgh, and don't ever come back. He figured I was just like them. I am pretty much speechless. He goes on for 5 minutes telling me and retelling his story, like I will, if he says it enough times, maybe even believe him.

Well, it seems that now I am finally getting mail again. It's a little bit convenient, I must admit. I still haven't gotten anything interesting...and I still expect it to stop again at any moment....but it's otherwise convenient. The entire process took 1 month and 27 days. Nearly two months to get my mail delivery working again, after 5 calls and 3 Change Of Address forms were submitted. How inept can the system be?

And I notice that, through all this, the USPS has decided to up their rates once more. Yep. Their service was so good that it simply had to be worth more than it was before. *sigh*

Putting my mouthpiece where my mouth is...

2006-02-28T07:25:00.001-08:00

Just before I left California, I encountered some Saxophone Trauma. I dropped my mouthpiece on the ground, and a chunk flew off of the front. The chunk was never to be seen again, leaving me with a severely sick-looking mouthpiece.

Looking around online, at sites such as wwbw.com, mouthpieces will run somewhere in the neighborhood of 80$. For a piece of plastic. Well, a piece of hard rubber. I disbelieve that the consumer isn't being reamed on this purchase. I found a cheaper 20$ mouthpiece at the local music store, but I was concerned it would be what they know as "crap."

So, I put off my mouthpiece purchase for a while, and moved back to Pittsburgh. Then I got an idea (I figured you'd notice by now, but I'm slow.): I can repair my mouthpiece with epoxy! So I bought myself a tube of Loctite epoxy at Target for about 5$.

I got home, mixed it together, and applied a huge gob to the front of the mouthpiece. At the end of the week, the epoxy still wasn't hard. I couldn't understand. But I had a suspicion that the two epoxy fluids didn't mix in the right proportion, so I tried again. This time: SUCCESS. The epoxy got hard within 24 hours. I applied about two coats of epoxy, which was able to fill in the hole.

The next step was to sand down the epoxy to make it look like a mouthpiece again. It was a little bit tricky, and it still might not be perfect, but I'm pretty astounded at how much it looks like a mouthpiece again. The front corner is clear and a bit scratched up (from the sandpaper), but the form is just about right.

I'm so happy and proud of my little repairwork! There may be some issues with hitting some really high notes, but I might be able to work through them, at least for now. Now I just have to learn how to play the saxophone!

Dance on that foot, boy. Dance!

2006-02-28T07:17:00.000-08:00

Since I am procrastinating for a few minutes instead of working on a paper I'm writing, I figured now is a good time for a blog update.

I should mention that our little blues dance weekend was a Stellar Success. It was a blast, and I can't wait for the next one :)

I should also mention that when you hurt your foot, like I hurt mine, you probably shouldn't go dancing on it all weekend long a week later. And if you do do that, against my advice, it's probably best not to go dancing on it again the next weekend. And if you are some kind of sick sado-masochist, and you have ignored both of my warnings, you will learn that your foot will continue to be hurting 3-4 weeks after the original injury. I'm just sayin.

Last week, I went to the school's health clinic to get my foot checked out, since it was still hurting. They confirmed my internet-diagnosis that the foot/toe was probably broken, or, at least, really badly bruised up. Apparently, it doesn't really matter which, since the treatment is basically the same --- just tape or wrap the foot, and then baby it until it feels better. Many people get x-rays to confirm the break. Apparently, this is just because they are rich and doctors think that giving them a picture of their shattered toes will ease their mental anguish.

Dance Weekend

2006-02-08T16:26:00.000-08:00

This weekend, we're having a weekend full of Blues dance workshops here in Pittsburgh. Since I've only recently returned from California, I wasn't much involved in the planning of this weekend, so I'll just be going as a patron, rather than an organizer.

As these weekends get closer, they always fill me with a sort of odd combination of excitement and dread. Lots of people are going to be coming in to dance from out of town, we'll get to dance with one another all weekend long, and we'll all learn to be better dancers. But still, there are always potential down-sides to these weekends, since they're always so busy. You have to put the rest of your life on hold, which is often a good thing, but has its drawbacks.

One of my drawbacks this weekend is that I will apparently be nursing an injured foot. Over the past weekend, I stupidly stubbed the entire left side of my foot into a doorjam. It still hurts a wee bit to walk on it. And yet, my plan is to dance all weekend long, as long as the pain does not overwhelm me. I think I just like to worry.

Hershey's Special Dark Cocoa

2006-02-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

Hershey's. They don't often get good reviews in the world of fancy chocolate. Lots of Europeans taste Hershey's chocolate, and say "God, that's sour and tastes like puke!" --- This "sourness" is due to Hershey's process of making milk chocolate, which involves evaporating skim milk under heat, allowing the milk to slightly ferment and produce acids. It is unclear to me whether the average American (e.g. me) can really pick out this sour-flavor in a blind taste test. And there are countless other food snobs that think that Hershey's is too mass-produced, or too cheap to be good chocolate. I don't particularly share in those pretenses. I think that Hershey's can produce good chocolate. (As a disclaimer, I also suspect that some of their chocolate products may indeed be low-quality mass-produced crap --- they probably need all kinds in their lineup).

Which brings us to Hershey's Special Dark Dutch-Processed Cocoa Powder. It's available at the Giant Eagle next to their regular cocoa powder, for a 3.99 rather than 3.75 per 8 ounce canister. Thus, its price-class is "inexpensive." I had to pick some up.

Looking at the nutritional information on the side of the box, it seems that it is, for all intensive purposes, nutritionally identical to their regular cocoa powder. The same fat content. The same sugar content. The same number of calories per serving. Etc. The only difference is the ingredients. The regular cocoa powder reads "Cocoa." The Special Dark reads "Cocoa processed with Alkali." This makes me think that their manufacturing process for both is identical, except for the alkalinization step in the dutched version.

Following my cocoa powder ritual, I made some hot cocoa with this stuff. The first surprise was how black the resulting hot cocoa was. Black as tar. Not the lovely brown shade of the Van Houten cocoa, for instance. It's hard to look at this stuff and think "this is cocoa." But, being the adventuresome lad I am, I was able to ignore, and perhaps, even savor the color. My first tasting notes would say that the flavor is much harsher than that of the Van Houten. Not the lovely, round mouthfeel, but more of an "ashy" bite. Overall, the flavor wasn't really bad, and could, in fact, be desirous, but it was a little unexpected. I will have to try further experimentation with this powder, and I will provide updates here as I do so.

Update. I have thought about this for a while, and I have made a second batch of hot cocoa. It has occured to me that Special Dark's flavor is remeniscent of the chocolate in an Oreo cookie. The Great InterWeb confirms that the Oreo flavor comes from cocoa which has been "dutched to death." After some tinkering and experimentation, I've decided that I like the Special Dark in a hot cocoa which has less cocoa and more milk than I'm normally accustomed to. It still, however, is not as good as my precious Van Houten for hot cocoa. If you're making Oreo cookies, however, go with the Special Dark.

Cocoa Powder

2006-02-02T07:05:00.000-08:00

I like Cocoa Powder. I use it to make hot cocoas and mochas and other chocolatey baked goods at home. I'm also one of those wannabe chocolate snobs, so I like to get new brands of cocoa powder to compare and contrast against one another. My goal is to find The Best Cocoa Powder Ever.

I am posting this now because I have just tried a new cocoa powder: Van Houten dutched cocoa. I got a box on a whim at Pittsburgh's The Chocolate Mousse chocolate boutique.

My cocoa/mocha recipe looks much like this: Put 1-2 tablespoons of cocoa into a cup. Add a tablespoon or two of sugar. Add from half to a whole teaspoon of corn starch. Add a tablespoon or so of milk. Stir that up until it's fairly smooth, and then microwave it until it's a little warm, and then stir it again until it's very smooth. Then add (a cup?) more milk, stir, and microwave until it's piping hot.

After having the cocoa base, you can doctor it as you desire --- add a teaspoon to a tablespoon of a mild mexican chili powder, add a cup of coffee, add vanilla, add cinnamon, etc.

Back to my main point. This Van Houten cocoa is simply AMAZING. It's the cleanest, most pleasant cocoa powder I've injested yet --- much better than Hershey's, Droste, Lake Champlain, etc. I have yet to try some brands, such as Callebaut and Valrhona, and Hershey's new Special Dark cocoa, but this Van Houten is in the middle price-range, and simply amazing. There is no reason not to have a box of it at home.

On a historical side note, apparently Van Houten is the founder of the cocoa Dutching process, which he originated back in 1828 or so. It's the same year that Andrew Jackson was elected to the presidency, a year which I remember due to my impressive high-school social studies teacher. That, and the fact that the year is encoded twice in the irrational base of the natural logarithm, 2.718281828459...I have to respect a universe that gives homage to the creation of Dutched cocoa in its fundamental, underlying mathematical constants.

Homecoming

2006-01-30T10:48:00.000-08:00

So, a little birdie yesterday guilted me into posting more on this thing :) So here's a small tangent to the road-trip home, which will keep coming, I promise.

It's been about 2 weeks since I've been home. The first week or so, I spent sick as a dog. I can't remember the last time I was so incapacitated by an illness. I was feverish, and everything in my body hurt. I'm largely better now, and so I'm finally out dancing again in Pittsburgh.

I had forgotten how much fun it is to dance in Pittsburgh. As I went dancing across the country, I must admit that Pittsburgh has one of the most enjoyable dance scenes out there. Austin came close, but it still wasn't quite Pittsburgh :) It's really neat to dance with all my old friends, and to meet all the new, incredible dancers that have come into the scene. Mmmm...

Day 1

2006-01-24T16:44:00.000-08:00

Day one of my cross-country adventure begins in sunny California. San Jose, in particular. At 5:30pm, Thursday, December, 29th, I am officially unemployed by IBM, and I am picked up at work by my partner in crime, Corina (pictured), who will be driving with me across the country.

As plans to cross the country go, mine was in pretty sorry shape. I knew I was West. I knew I needed to get East. I also knew I wanted to be in Denver, Colorado on New Years' Eve, to dance the night away. Why? For consistency. In 2005, I ushered in the new year swing dancing in Montreal, and in 2004, I spent it swing dancing in Paris. I wanted to continue the trend. The price for this objective, however, will be a grueling driving schedule from here until Denver.

Our first adventure starts brewing during the exit interview at IBM. My boss, Jacques told me a storm front was coming through that very night. To avoid getting caught in a raging blizzard in the Rocky Mountains, Jacques told us to get to Reno, Nevada by the time the brunt of the storm hit in about 8 hours.

You'd think that a man betting his future on a cross-country road trip over the Rocky Mountains' Donner Pass in the dead of winter would check the weather before the trip. In contrast, when I played the classic game The Oregon Trail, I learned that I'm the kind of man that has to sell his wife and typhoid-stricken children to Indians halfway along the trip in order to buy wagon wheels and ammunition. To my credit, however, I did think enough in advance to buy a set of tire chains for my car.

8 hours. We do one final idiot-run of the house to make sure that I hadn't forgotten anything, and we get underway.

5 1/2 hours. We are in Berkeley California, and we get gasoline, and decide to also stop for one last meal in California. We opt for the slowest restaurant possible --- the vegan sushi restaurant, Cha Ya. This place stands along Shattuck Ave, a little eatery which holds about 20 people at once. Outside, is a line of about 10 people waiting to get in. In the rain. It's vegan sushi. It's that good. Close to an hour later, we get in, and start to eat. Corina got a vegan sushi roll, and I got a bowl of "tofu custard." The tofu custard was the hilight of the meal for me --- it was vaguely like a creme brulee studded with vegetables, wherein the creme is replaced with tofu. The dish was savory and warm, and satisfying in a way I could not describe. The most fascinating thing was that it came with Ginkgo nuts on top, which were also amazing. Go to Cha Ya, and order the tofu custard. You will thank me later.

4 hours. We are in agreement. Vegan sushi is worth getting caught in a blizzard on Donner Pass. Besides. We've got tire chains.

3 hours. We drive through Sacramento! I really regret never making it up here to dance when I was interning in San Jose. Evidentally, the weather front that threatens us with snow has begun covering Sacramento with rain. We press onward.

As we make our way up the mountains, we stop at a gas station for more petrol, and to get info about the remainder of our drive. The woman working the counter tells us that the blizzard is coming, and that on a good day, the drive is about an hour to the summit, but in "this weather," "who knows how long it'll take you." The gas station is in the middle of nowhere, and we must be the only people who come in and chat, and she starts telling us about how she lived in New Jersey and that drivers out there can't deal with snow the way they do in the Rockies. As much as I want to stay and chat, I was mostly terrified by her "Oh yeah, the blizzard's coming right behind you. You are DOOMED" that it made idle chitchat afterwards impossible for me. I got us out and back on the road as soon as I caught a break in the conversation.

One thing we learned is that the roads have flashing signs and AM radio beacons that will tell you when you need to put on tire-chains, and so far, we were in the clear. I am a little disappointed I can't yet play with my new automotive toys.

With the rising elevation and dropping temperatures, the rain that followed us from Sacramento turned to freezing rain and snow. Driving was tedious, but I tend to be fearless in the face of snow-driving. The tires kept slipping, and applying the brakes was a good way to lose traction real quick. Even the road signs advised not to use your brakes.

In the long winding drive through the Rockies, there was only one moment where I thought we would bite the big one. Up ahead in the distance was a truck with flashing lights driving slowly. I figured it might be a salt or sand truck. Eventually, as we approached it, we saw about 6 cars pulled off to the side of the road. Then, a man standing in the middle road started gesturing "slow down" to us. The car just ahead of us quickly started slowing down and pulling to the side of the road. Ignoring all the signs, I applied the brakes. After a little skidding, I managed to ease the car off to the side of the road.

It was unclear to me what had just happened. Could this be some sort of road-closing? Are chain restrictions being put in place? I just sat in the car, waiting to see what would happen.
After a minute, somebody ran by from behind my car, and shouted "they're ok" and then went into their car ahead of ours. As best as I could figure, somebody got in a wreck, and everybody had stopped to see if they were alright. We proceed to Reno.

One of the highlights of the night for me is reliving my Oregon Trail days of youth. Yes. I'm travelling the wrong direction. And yes, I'm travelling in a white 1997 Honda Civic instead of a brown 1841 Conestoga Wagon. But the nostalgia comes rushing back nonetheless. While planning the trip, the standard joke is that only one of us is going to make it past Donner Pass --- the other suffering a horrible death. Perhaps it is still too early in our trip, but we both opted not to kill the other off as we left Donner Pass behind us.

Somewhere between 1:30 and 2am, we made it to Reno, Nevada. All we can see at night are the casinos. We drive around downtown for a few minutes, gawking at the casinos' lights and getting a sense of the city. We found only a few shady looking hotels there, so we backtracked, and stayed at a motel on the western city limits. The first leg of our grueling trek to Denver has been completed.

Bon Voyage

2006-01-16T10:34:00.000-08:00

I have just moved back to Pittsburgh from Sunny California. In the process, I drove cross country, hitting gobs and gobs of states in the process. Immediate updates to this blog will include the story, best as I can recollect it, of that journey...

Why people suck

2005-09-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

I have temporarily lost faith in humanity. Why? On Friday night, I was at a benefit blues dance for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The dance was brilliant, and it raised something near 2000$ which was subsequently matched by corporate donors, for Katrina victims.

The dance let out around 2am. So I went to my car, parked just in front of the dance, on 8th and Folsom in San Francisco. It seems that some punk(s) smashed through my passenger window, tossed the contents of my trash bag over the car, stole my electric razor, and stole my car radio.

Could it have possibly been worth it to them? My electric razor was getting pretty nasty, with blades dulling and whatnot. The radio can be replaced for 40$ brand new, and who knows how little it's worth after it's been used. So, the thieves spent 10-15 minutes breaking and entering, and now have to find buyers for a ratty electric razor and a cheap car radio. Hopefully it was worth it to them, I suppose.

It certainly was NOT worth it to me. I had to buy a new razor, which, admittedly, is a bit expensive. I spent about 100$ on a new one, but this one is much better reviewed than my previous one. It may even cut better. I spent about 2$ cleaning out the broken glass from all over the interior of the car. On Thursday, I will probably be spending 200-350$ on replacing the window. I have no idea if or when I will end up replacing the radio.

What's worse about the whole situation is the effect that it has on your personality. Being victim of a crime like this tends to get me down. The day or two after the breakin, I completely lost my appetite, and I am still suffering from a general malaise three days afterwards. I presume that eventually the depression will pass, but it's particularly unfortunate.

To the crack-addled thief(ves) that did this damage --- I'd like to give a hearty Thank You for causing me so much loss of money and grief. Hopefully the 20$ to 50$ you might be able to make on the job will pay off for you.

Chickens and Chocolate

2005-08-09T05:25:00.000-07:00

Somewhere around August 2004, I started a swing dance in Pittsburgh, PA. The entire venture has been sometimes tiring, often spectacular fun, and always a unique experience. If you want to add spice to your life, there's little you can do that's more interesting than start running a dance.

Believe it or not, one of the most difficult things you will encounter when starting your dance is deciding upon a name for the dance. The name is critical. It is the first impression that dancers will have of your dance, and it will guide the atmosphere and expectations of dances to come. Screw up the name, and you doom yourself to failure. Of course, being me, on my name quest, I thrust deeply into the recesses of my weirdness, and pulled out a plump, juicy Chicken Swing. "Chicken Swing" was the inevitable culmination of a long sequence of reasoning and logic, the story of which I will now reveal.

In the month or so leading up to the dance, it was clear that we needed a name. I made the observation that in the field of swing jazz, the names of dead, ancient candy bars have made great namesakes. It is an unwritten rule --- Name your band, event, or dog after a candy bar, and it shall go forth across the land and thrive.

My first piece of evidence for the rule is the Squirrel Nut Zippers. The hot jazz band from New Orleans is named after the Squirrel Nut Zipper, first made in Boston in 1905. The Squirrel Nut Zipper was discontinued in the 1980's (In 2004, Necco bought the license to make it again). While their music is fantastic, I attribute part of the band's success to the capitalization on reusing the name of the candy bar.

My second piece of evidence turned out to be apocryphal, but at the time, undeniably proved the rule for me. In 2003, I went to Cleveland for their Lindy Exchange. The first night's dance was located in a venue called the Sky Bar. Amazingly (to me), this was also the name of a candy bar, also made by Necco, starting in 1938. While this bar is apparently "not dead yet," it seems to be in its final throes. To me, Cleveland's Sky Bar was a thriving swing dance venue because it shared its name with the candy bar. A year later, however, I learned that Cleveland's bar was really named the Spy Bar, which was never a candy bar. When I learned this, however, the Spy Bar has stopped holding swing dances. As far as I'm concerned, this just goes to further prove my point: When their name was the Sky Bar, they thrived; As the Spy Bar, they failed.

With this evidence in hand, I knew I must name my dance after a candy bar. I searched long and hard. I found dozens of names. I found the Abba Zabba. I found the Curly Wurly. And I found the Chicken Dinner. These were my three finalists. I decided that I liked the last one the best, so"The Chicken Dinner Swing Dance" might be a fine name. The other names sounded too futuristic, or too random for me. The Chicken Dinner even sounded tasty, a chocolate-covered peanut roll of some sort. Nearly everything was perfect. The only problem was its length. It failed to roll off the tongue. My plan was doomed.

I struggled with the name for a while longer. Then, magic happened. We piled into a car to drive to Ann Arbor Michigan, for their first Lindy Exchange, EAT ME 2004. During the 6 hour car ride, we got to talking about the name. Sitting in the back seat with Laura and Sarah, I told my story, and my proposed name. Sarah had an idea. Why not just call it "Chicken Swing?" The idea was brilliant. Somehow, I was able to perform the mental gymnastics to contort the world around me until it brought me to "The Chicken Dinner Swing Dance," but I failed to see the obvious transformation to "Chicken Swing." I suspect that this is a sign of some deep-rooted psychological disorder, but I digress.

Thus, the name Chicken Swing was born. As if to prove my theory, after a year, the dance appears to be successful. People come. People dance. People make friends. People ask me why on earth I would name it "Chicken Swing."

More Resources:

Chicken Swing
Pittsburgh Dancing
Steve Almond's Candy Freak -- This could have been useful if it was published before my search began. I was amused to find all the candy bars (and more) I already discovered within its pages.
The Ghost of Candy Bars Past

I'm not a virgin anymore

2005-07-22T20:53:00.000-07:00

Recently, I found myself in Washington DC, and it was there that finally, after a plump 27 years on this mortal coil, I lost my virginity. I was deflowered, as it were, in a coffee shop, called Murky Coffee, located near DC's precious little Eastern Market. There, I became an man, not with the assistance from a member of the opposite sex, or even the same sex, but from an unbelievably good cup of coffee.

My decadent mistress on that fateful afternoon was a decaf mocha latte. On first appearance, she was something other-worldly and unlike any drink I had ever seen. She was topped with a sexy bit of "latte art," resulting from skillful mixing of the espresso oils with the steamed milk. She was not just sexy; She was luxurious and smooth, thick and heady, and tasted of an amazing decaf Peruvian espresso blend. The texture of the milk, and the quality of the espresso shot was unspeakably decadent. I have never tasted anything that approached such a pure, unadulterated essence of pleasure.

Sadly, all chain coffee shops, like Starbucks, and even most independent coffee shops are designed never to produce beverages like this one. There are two reasons why. First, the milk has to be frothed and steamed quite precisely, producing, in the lingua-franca of espresso freaks, a "micro-foam." The micro-foam is characterized by its thick texture, similar to that of a light whipped cream, the result of infintesimal bubbles of air embedded in milk proteins. Interestingly, I have gotten this type of milk in my mochas 3 or 4 times at various Starbucks, apparently due to an accidental fluke. When I explicitly ask for it, the baristas never know how to reproduce it.

The second reason regular coffee shops fail to produce these lovely drinks, they pour a cup of steamed milk and then dump the espresso shot(s) into the cup in one, uncaring stroke. To get the beautiful rosetta (and other lovely patterns), the milk apparently must be poured in layers into a cup containing the espresso. The alternating light/dark effects are the result of the slow and controlled mixing of espresso oils (the "crema") floating on the surface of the shot with the milk. Surely, since Starbucks and friends are driven primarily to reduce customer wait times, they will never purposely produce such a beverage.

Anyone who has, until now, suffered with only Starbucks-caliber drinks must seek out and experience one of these amazing drinks. Unfortunately, as best as I can tell, there are, only a few hundred coffee shops, and at most, several hundred coffee shops in the United States that can make beverages like these. I fear that unless you are in a large city, you will never find such a coffee shop. Even worse, several large cities, such as Philadelphia, seem to have no such shops. Your best bet is to google for "latte art *your city*," and hope to find a reference to a local coffee shop. While latte art is just a decoration on a mighty fine, high quality coffee, most places that really care seem to add the finishing touch.

Since that fateful day in DC, I have moved to California. There, in San Francisco, I have found two coffee shops that serve these high-caliber coffee drinks. The first is Ritual Coffee Roasters, and the second is Cafe Organica, which has been voted (by somebody) the best coffee shop in San Fran. Of the two, I must recommend Ritual Coffee Roasters over Organica, primarily because the latter is much more expensive, and the former has a much more interesting communistic atmosphere, more central location, and better pastries. As far as I can tell, if you're in the area, you would be a fool to get coffee at any other place in the city. In comparison to Murky Coffee, these San Fran offerings produce better foamed milk, although I am disappointed that their espresso does not touch my heart as Murky's Peruvian decaf has.

Borked

2005-07-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

Etymology. It's a cool thing. Linguistics and the study of the evolution of languages is something that has fascinated me for quite some time now.

In the interest of "full-disclosure," I am an anti-perscriptionist when it comes to language. I believe that it is "stupid" on many levels to say things like "that isn't a word" or "you can't have sentences that end with prepositions" or whatever. If a speaker's intent is conveyed through their utterance, then language has done its job and the utterance was "correct." The only time that language is used "incorrectly" is when the listener does not understand what the speaker meant.

Given my worldposition, the construction of new words always entertains me. This weekend, I was fortunate enough to learn about an American word that I have been using since my time at Drexel University.

The word in question is "borked." I first encountered the word from a man named Jonathan Sevy. He worked in my lab, and sat right next to me. We spoke often about the things that tickled our fancy throughout the day. Technology, sociology, history, religion, etc. We were a good match. One day, John uttered the word "borked." I thought he meant "broke" but somehow, he simply misconjugated the word. I was amused, but I let it pass. He said it again shortly thereafter. I had to bring it to his attention, and tell him that I liked his word!

Either I assumed, or he told me, that the word was a corruption of the word "broke." It was poetic to me. The word represented the concept in its entirety. "Broke." To destroy. Its speaker stops not only at telling us that something has been destroyed --- the speaker actually breaks the verb itself to emphasize just how broken it is. It is a primordial example of meta-language: a meaning embedded in how well the speaker is effecting the "correct" language. It is beatiful and poetic. It is borked.

If you search online, you will find that many dictionaries simply list the definition of the word bork as being broken. Some list the etymology as being from our favorite muppet, the Swedish Chef, who throws "borks" into all his utterances. Over the weekend, I learned a new, deeper etymology for my lovely linguistic candy. My unlikely source was NPR, which was discussing the battle for supreme court nominations that our country is now suffering through.

The story starts, as many good stories do start, with Watergate. Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox requested Nixon's Oval Office Tapes, and Nixon ordered the Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Elliot resigned, rather than carry out the order, leaving Bork as the acting Attorney General. Bork was then ordered to fire Cox. Bork wanted to resign as well, but Elliot told him not to (Odd, I know. Presumably, it was for fear of ensuing chaos).

During this time, "borked" became known as firing somebody (like Archibald Cox) for doing what they were hired to do (like investigate Nixon's criminal activities).

Then, in 1987, Ronald Reagan nominated a man named Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately for Mr. Bork, he was fairly conservative in his views, and it was believed that he would reverse critical Supreme Court decisions, such as Roe v. Wade. The pro-choice groups ate him for breakfast, and eventually the Senate rejected Bork.

During this time, "borked" became known as having one's presidential appointment defeated by the US Senate.

This story is fantabulous. I am amazed that Mr. Robert Bork has had such influence on the American linguistic playing field so that his name would become verbized twice, and no less, and with two completely different meanings.

I should note that much of the facts for this story come from en.wikipedia.org, which is one of the most profound sites on the web, not to mention a source for the nouveau verb "to wiki."

Coffee

2005-06-21T18:54:00.000-07:00

I've made two recent incremental coffee discoveries.

The first is that a recent study proves that my coffee shop addiction isn't costing me too much money. The economics study indicates that if you saved your daily cappucino money and invested it over 30 years, you will end up with $55,000 to your name.

I will grant that $55,000 is a large amount of money. You could probably open your own coffee shop with that money. But the timeframe is just wrong. Over 30 years? $55,000 is simply piddlywinks. I go into a coffee shop, and I talk with the baristas, and I hang out and talk with my friends, and I read the newspapers (which would cost me over $5 to purchase myself), and I get some work done. Going to a coffee shop for your coffee is a combination of entertainment and convenience. I rarely go to a coffee shop expecting the nirvana of a coffee tasting experience. I just want a pretty-good beverage to keep me awake, or a decaf to sip over as I relax. Given that it costs $10 to go to the movies these days, I think my coffee shop money is well spent.

The second development is in mocha-science. Every once in a blue moon, I will order a skim milk cafe mocha, and the texture of the milk will be thick and foamy and luscious. The texture and consistency will melt away any care in your body. As far as I can tell, the only reason I get that result is pure accident. The barista has done something "wrong," yielding my beverage of choice.

Every once in a while, I order a mocha, and ask for the foam to be delivered in some special way. I use terms like "extra thick foam" or "extra foamy." I have had the hunch that maybe the milk has simply been overheated, and the proteins in the milk have changed ever so slightly to produce my luscious foam. So I ask for the drink to also be "extra hot." No matter how I describe the foam, it fails to be the result I'm looking for.

Until the other day. Mikey, at the Coffee Tree Roasters in Squirrel Hill, told me that he thought he knew what I meant. So, he gave me a wet cappucino-like mocha. The texture was not perfect, but it was closer to my ideal beverage than I've ever gotten before. Mikey is now my official, personal coffee savior. I am now convinced that with a little more work, I will be able to order my favorite drink with some reliability. Of course, even then, I'm sure it will still be a rare occurance that I actually get the drink I order, unless it's my hero Mikey serving.

Carless in California

2005-06-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

I'm going to San Jose, California from August to December this year, and I need to get a car to commute to work and dances and such. In recent days, I've been trying to work out exactly how to solve this problem. I figure that one day, somebody may be in a similar position, and this will be able to save them some time and effort.

If you need a car for 5 months, the everybody in the automobile market hates you. I can't figure out why. As far as I can tell, you have no good solutions. You have several options --- You can buy, you can finance, or you can rent.

Buying. One option is to go to California, and buy a car. If you want to keep the car, this is a great option, although you will have to drive or transport it back to your own state when you're finished with your internship. If you want to sell it at the end of your internship, you run two risks: (1) You need to sell it privately, in which case you might not find a buyer before you have to go home, or (2) You need to sell it to a dealer, and take a several-thousand dollar loss (according to Kelly Blue Book rates). Another option is to buy a clunker. If you can find a decent enough car for 3000-4000$, you may be in better financial shape than if you, say, rented a car...But you may lose if the car ceases to function immediately after you buy it.

Financing. No dealer will loan or lease a car to you for 5 months, apparently, so you have to finance for the traditional 24, 36, or 60 months. If you want to keep the car, you need to choose a term that will keep the payments reasonable for you. Otherwise, your best bet is to do a "lease transfer," essentially selling the car/financing-agreement to somebody else. There are websites that provide online lease transfer markets, but none of them is very large. The odds of not finding a buyer for your lease seems fairly high.

Another option is to look for somebody trying to transfer their lease, that has only a few months left on their lease. This would be a really good idea if you can find such a deal, but there are two drawbacks. The first is the small size of the transfer markets. The second is the fact that there's little incentive for somebody with a few months remaining on their lease to go through the hassle to transfer the lease.

Renting. Apparently, all major car rental agencies have long-term rental programs. The rates are much more reasonable than their normal daily rental charges, which is a good sign. You can go with the standard rental agencies (Hertz, Budget, Avis), which will be about 600$ per month for an economy car. Alternatively, you can go with a company like Rent-a-Wreck, which will be about 350$ per month.

The major complication with renting is insurance. If you get the rental company's collision or liability insurance, it will surely cost you a huge amount of money, at least 9$ per day, or about 300$ per month. If you have your own insurance, you have to make sure that it covers a rental car for such a long time period. My carrier (geico) only provides liability for rental cars, and no collision protection. Making matters worse, insurance agencies will typically refuse to insure a car that you do not explicitly own, so you cannot simply add the rental car to your insurance for a few months. This fills me with deep hatred and loathing for insurance companies.

The only insurance option that I found that seems reasonable is to rent the car with a credit card that provides collision insurance. My Chase VISA card provides such insurance, but will only cover rentals for up to 15 days. My Discover card, however, will cover rentals for up to 31 days. The solution, apparently, is to return to the rental agency every month, and re-rent a car.

I pray to the greater dieties that perhaps, one day, this story will become defunct, because short-term car rentals or financing will become doable. Until then, hopefully, this will save somebody the pain and suffering I had to deal with.

Beers

2005-05-31T14:36:00.001-07:00

I'm not a drinker. Never have been. That is, until I went to Paris back in 2004. Even though I had never had a drink up until that point, I decided that when I was in France, I would try to learn to like wine. Red wine, in particular. I figured that white stuff was for wussies, and I had to go whole hog.

So, nearly every day of my 11 day trip, I bought a glass of wine with dinner. Every day, I forced it down. It wasn't until the very last day or two, that I started to think "Hey, this stuff isn't the worst ingestible substance known to man." I began to suspect, even, that wine had some redeeming tasty qualities.

So, every once in a while, I try a wine or two, to try to learn and understand the tastes. My mind has also started entertaining the notion of trying to like beer.

About 9 months ago, at a school party (A "TG"), I tried a fancy clear German wheat beer, which was mostly tasteless, but extraordinarily fizzy. I had a few sips, and never looked back. About 6 months ago, I was in Frederick, MD, and I had half of a glass of Blue Moon beer, which is also a clear wheat beer. It was also fairly tasteless, and extremely fizzy. The Blue Moon, however, provided an extremely pleasant aftertaste whenever I burped. I would try it again.

I went beerless, and mostly wineless, for the next 6 months, until last week, when I went to Pittsburgh's Church Brew Works for dinner. We decided that both of us need to expand our beer-horizons, so we ordered their beer sampler tray, which gives you about one glass's worth total of 5 different beers.

I've always loved the Church Brew Works' food and ambiance, and in Pittsburgh, it's the place I end up taking people who I want to impress. The food is some sort of fusion of Asian, Greek, Pizzaria, and Polish Pierogie cuisine, which ends up being pretty tasty, and moderately priced. The atmosphere is mind-boggling. The restaurant is an old Catholic church, which has had its altar gutted and replaced with beer brewing equipment, and has had tables put between its pews. The men's bathroom is located up near the front of the restaurant, forcing you to walk in front of the altar. Every time that I pass it, the Good Catholic in me tells me I have to genuflect to the beer brewing equipment. It's a wonderful feeling.

I love the place so much, I tried to convince the owner to rent the place to run the PittStop Lindy Exchange last year, although they declined.

This was the first time I've ever had their beer. What I've learned is this:

Celebration de Mayo: A "special" this week. It had this lovely peanutty/creamy atertaste, which was to die for. After much discussion with the floor manager and the waiter, we came to believe that this was due to the presence of "Caramel Malt" in the beer.

Celestial Gold: A lightly-colored beer. It finishes with the same peanutty/creamy aftertaste of the Celebration de Mayo. It is also regularly on the menu. As a result, I highly recommend it.

Pipe Organ Pale Ale: This beer wasn't bad, but it did not sing to me, so I'd recommend passing it for the other offerings.

Pious Monk Dunkel: This beer seems to appear in a sauce used to garnish many of their desserts. It was better than the Pipe Organ Pale Ale, but it also did not sing to me.

Blast Furnace Stout: My friend tasted this beer, and she immediately declared it unfit for human consumption. References to "mud" and "sludge" came falling from her mouth. It was very impressive. My reaction, however, was quite different. I found this extremely dark beer, apparently made with oats, to have quite a complex set of flavors, remeniscent of coffee. I would order this beer by itself, as its strength completely overpowered and clashed with the food. Eventually, I convinced my friend to retaste this one after tasting all the others, and she found it much less offensive the second time around, but I suspect that she still did not like it very much. This Blast Furnace Stout won a Gold Medal in the Oatmeal Stout Category of the 1999 Great American Beer Festival, and although I do not have enough understanding to judge by, I think I can fathom why.

I ended up drinking probably 3/4 a glass of beer in total, and my friend 1/4. At the end of the meal, both my friend and I had a bit of a headache, and I wonder if it was related to the alcohol consumption (especially since it was a low dosage), or if it was just a random occurance. I'll have to go back and experiment again sometime in the future. Perhaps I'll build up a tolerance.

By the way, if you find yourself near Pittsburgh, do yourself a favor and visit Church Brew Works: http://www.churchbrew.com/

Why Starbucks Will Win

2005-05-30T15:13:00.000-07:00

There is a part of my moral fibre that tells me --- no, make that screams to me --- that their business model is wrong, and I must not patronize them. There are so many reasons never to go to Starbucks...But there are two things that they manage to get right, that so few other coffee shops get right. I'd like to discuss them here:

1) Customer Satisfaction
No matter what happens, they give you what you want. The last two coffee shops I went to, Crazy Mocha Coffee and Caribou Coffee in the South Side Works, managed to fail on so many levels. NEITHER shop managed to get my order right. Both asked if I wanted whipped cream with my mocha, and I declined in both circumstances, but they both put a huge pile on top. If the beverage tasted good, I could even live with that. My drink from Crazy Mocha, however, was lukewarm, and bordered on the undrinkable. How on earth do they expect to compete with a tight well-oiled Starbucks down the street?
Even the creme-de-la-creme of Pittsburgh's independent coffee shops have to pull their heads out of the sand. I went to La Prima Espresso a week or two ago. La Prima lives by their Saturday morning rush hours, and I went on a slow Wednesday, and we were the only people in the shop. My friend and I stood at the counter for 5 minutes, as the single "barista" chatted on the phone. The "barista" continued her conversation with her friend, even after seeing us waiting there to order. I have a revolutionary idea for La Prima: When you have a customer in your store, TAKE THEIR ORDER.

2) Employee Satisfaction
I believe the problems I list above are intricately intertwined with this problem --- Starbucks almost always seems to manage to treat their employees with some basic level of respect, paying them fairly well, offering benefits, and all that jazz. At all the independent coffee shops in the area, however, all the employees complain about:
a) Poor wages
b) No benefits
c) Long, and/or irregular work hours
d) Bossy micromanagers and owners

What makes it so difficult for independent coffee shops to get Customer and Employee Satisfaction working for them? Is it tighter profit margins? Is it ignorance? Is it that they simply don't care?

Patience, Dancing Grasshopper

2005-05-30T11:05:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, I visited Cleveland to dance again. I really tend to enjoy these trips, and the people that I hang out when I go out there. This time, I went with a local Pittsburgh friend, Kyle, who made the ride there and back much better with chatting and such.

Yesterday, I had to leave early, to make it back to set up my Chicken Swing dance. In fact, leaving made me particularly sad, especially since I was expecting this week's Chicken Swing to be a flop. CMU declared we had to change the time at the last minute, because the venue was closing 2 hours earlier this week, and furthermore, we had a dance this week only because CMU cancelled our event for commencement a few weeks earlier. On top of all that, it was Memorial Day weekend, and I couldn't even find a teacher to teach with. Everything was against us.

So, I got back to Pittsburgh with 30 minutes to spare, got my equipment, a muffin for dinner, and went to set up the dance. I had to park a block or two away, which made carrying my big-as-a-whale speaker and additional equipment by my lonesome very difficult. When I got there, I was a few minutes late, and nobody was there for the lesson. I didn't even set up the dance --- I just sat in a corner and caught up on my email. The dance was obviously going to be a flop.

Before long, though, a few people showed up. Soon, I was involved in nice conversation, and still had no energy to set up the dance. Eventually, there were 3 other people there, and so I set up the equipment in case they wanted to dance some. I figured soon the energy would die, and we would all sit around chatting, or everyone would go home.

Within the first hour, though, something like 15-20 people showed up. And they were all brilliant dancers, and lots of people who don't even normally come out to ChickenSwing, or haven't been out in a long time. I was happily amazed! The night was wonderful, and I was struck with a nice dance high for the entire dance.

My DJ'ing even seemed to score some props. Every time I went to put on another song, there was a crowd of 2 or 3 people around my computer, writing down the name and artist of the song. I swear, there are two people now who have the complete playlist written down on scrap paper with them now. It was quite ego-boosting :)

So. The Moral of the story. Even when your chips are down, things can really work out so much better than you think they ever will. Just be patient, do your job, and hope for the best.

Dancing Philosophy I

2005-05-23T04:24:00.000-07:00

It's taken me quite some time to figure out what my first nontrivial blog entry would be about. I thought: "Maybe StarWars III," but making one's debut blog entry about StarWars seemed way too lame for me. So, I came up with something more substantial.

I went swing dancing last night at Edgewood club (Shameless plug: pghdance.com). Possibly due to a mild caffeine overdose, my dancing was on some extra special crack. Not a single dance was what anybody would consider "normal."

That's the way it should be. I sometimes get stuck in "the box" while dancing, and don't reach out enough and run for the creativity stick thrown out in front of me. That's a fairly depressing condition, which results in at best mediocre dances, and less fun on the dance floor. Naturally, one can extend this metaphor to creativity in life in general. Let me codify my rules for reaching your creative potential:

The Rules for Breaking the Rules

1) Fall on the floor at least once a night. If you don't, you're not trying hard enough.
2) Create a pattern you have never been taught. If you need to, stop, take a patient moment, and seek divine inspiration for it.
3) Repeat that pattern. This helps to prevent arbitrary flailing, and makes it look like you mean what you're doing.

Follow those rules, padawan learner, and you will transcend to new planes of dance existence. It really works. At the end of last night's dance, a guy came up to me, just to say (in effect) "You're fun to watch. You're so good at improvising." And this happens to me more often than I feel comfortable with. If people only knew how much of a hack I am! I am saved only by the fact that so few people (in dance, or in life) follow the rules outlined above.

This post is getting longer than I originally intended it to be, so I will forbode future posts on aspects of my dance and life philosophy as all good blogs do. And what's best is that in the classical blogospherical character, I do not even have to deliver!

Initialization

2005-05-19T04:57:00.000-07:00

Behold! Today I am reborn on the blogosphere.

I feel dirty.