DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The current issue of Nature reports a fantastic breakthrough in LCD manufacturing, which IBM will have in production by the end of the year, dropping prices on flat-screen LCD displays as well as improving their quality. The full article is here: Atomic-beam alignment of inorganic material for liquid-crystal displays.

This has huge implications for energy savings, too: LCD displays weigh less, and therefore cost less to ship. More importantly, they consume significantly less power to operate.

LCD displays are visually clearer (and don’t flicker) and do not emit radiation, so there are benefits to users’ health and eyesight too.

Within a few years everybody will be using these, without question. We’ll look at trinitron displays the way we currently regard black-and-white televisions or old ASCII terminals, like relics from the distant technological past.

(And a few years after that we’ll all be wearing personal display systems… and after that I guess we’ll all be fitted at birth with a video jack at the base of the skull, neurologically soldered directly to the visual cortex, as predicted by the early William Gibson novels.)

Microsoft has declared war on open-source software. I have to laugh.

I give away my software for free, so I guess I am now at war with Microsoft. Excuse me while I climb onto my roof to fire up that cauldron of oil.

According to Craig Mundie, senior VP at Microsoft, open-source software creates greater dangers of security risks. Mundie’s timing is poor… just yesterday, a major security flaw was discovered in Microsoft’s IIS webserver. In case you missed it, here’s a telling quote from CERT: “A vulnerability exists in Microsoft IIS 5.0 running on Windows 2000 that allows a remote intruder to run arbitrary code on the victim machine, allowing them to gain complete administrative control of the machine.”

In contrast, the last time anyone found a security bug in open-source webserver Apache (the most popular webserver software in the world) that was so severe that it allowed a third party “complete administrative control” of the machine was… actually, hmm, I don’t think that’s ever happened.

Last Fall I tossed my sourdough starter in favor of a fresh culture, made from scratch without raisins, in hopes that the new culture would create more-sour breads. I’ve now made dozens of loaves with the new culture, and I have to conclude that the experiment failed. My current breads are no more sour than last year’s, and no amount of adjustment of flour type, hydration, proofing and rising times, retarding, or malting makes any difference.

This is not to say my sourdough breads aren’t any good; they’re actually better than they’ve ever been, with great crunchy crusts and creamy interiors, thanks to a slow elaboration process, a brotform, oven steam, and my own special technique, a twist on autolyse that I’ll write about another time. But as good as the texture is, the flavor just isn’t sour.

The untested variable is the starter itself. I’m not sure whether the wild yeasts I’ve been using came from the local environment, or if they were introduced to the culture from the wholegrain flours I made it with… the experts tend to disagree on how an initial culture gets going. But it wasn’t working for me in any case, so I sent away for a culture that is guaranteed to be different, and guaranteed to be sour: the “original” San Francisco sourdough, as bred by Ed Wood of sourdo.com.

A packet of powdered, dried starter arrived in the mail last week, and I quickly rehydrated it and set it out to ferment. Mr. Wood provides a clever idea for building a proof box on the cheap, so I was able to easily establish a reliable 85 degree environment for the activation phase.

It was immediately apparent that this culture is A Lot Different than my ‘local’ starter. Whereas my starter is nearly odorless, this frothing slop exudes a staggering odor, capable of detection across the room. As my wife put it, “that stinks like cheese!” This is partly due to keeping the goo at 85 degrees, of course.

The first loaf goes into the oven tomorrow. I’m trying not to get my hopes too high, because everything I know about bread-baking indicates that the first batch is unlikely to be as strongly flavored as subsequent batches. Also, I suffered a brain-fart during the elaboration process and mixed in too much water, diluting the starter. But still… it’s exciting.

This is a deceptively difficult pattern, at least for me. I discovered that catching the bounced kick on the +a of 3 is difficult when I’m playing offbeats on the high-hat with my other foot, because the two feet (apparently) have to lift at different times even though they play simultaneously on the + of 3. Learning to time this, I felt like my right foot was squishing around in a big tub of pudding. Hence the name.

    1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 
RC  o o o o o o o o 
TT         o o      
SD   o  O       O  o
KD  o  o  o   oo
HH    o   o   o   o 

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3

Picture the opulence of Las Vegas… flying over the carnival of the Strip, riding the airport train from the gate to the terminal, and seeing the stack of limousines at the airport… and then arriving at the only reasonably priced hotel near the Strip, the Howard Johnson’s, which hasn’t been remodeled — no, strike that — hasn’t had its carpets cleaned since the mid-1970s.

The room was typical of bargain-priced hotels. This doesn’t address the fact that we weren’t paying bargain prices; this room actually cost us more than a corner suite at the Westin Cincinnati, with a view of Fountain Square (recognizeable by all WKRP in Cincinnati fans) last summer. I suspect the later scenes in Leaving Las Vegas were filmed here; certainly some of the stains on the carpets looked familiar.

We didn’t plan to spend much time in the room, so we ignored the obvious defects such as the bathroom fan that sounded like it was about to throw a rod. But then, as we got dressed for the evening, we saw a mouse dart across the floor.

Gad. I’m not afraid of mice, but the image of this rodent crawling around our luggage and pooping in our shoes while we slept was enough to make me throw a rod. I called the front desk, and after explaining our predicament I was assured that Housekeeping would be up presently to deal with the vermin.

Twenty minutes later, with no word from Housekeeping, I rang back and asked for the manager on call. Mysteriously, they routed me to a voice mail box, apparently not understanding the term “on call.” With decreasing patience I called again and expressed irritation until they offered to move us to another room. So we half-heartedly moved to the only remaining room in the hotel, two floors higher, with a dead television set and a view of the other highway.

The next morning, we checked out in a rush, and I didn’t examine the bill until we were on the way to the airport… when I realized that our upgrade to the not-infested room cost an extra $75. I wondered if their marketing collateral lists those distinctions: “Nonsmoking rooms available! Nonrodent rooms available! (Additional charges may apply.)” I called the hotel from the airport but was met with resistance that only cluelessness can bring. The woman understood that I was upset but didn’t grok that I was upset about being overcharged. She thought I was upset that I’d been moved to another room, and said that they’d have been happy to move us back into our original room except that they’d rented it to someone else.

It took another phone call from home, but I finally reached a manager, and after telling the story again, succeeded in getting a refund for the amount we were overcharged.