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Nostalgia is powerful juju. A dozen friends, caught it its diamond-plated and keen-edged grip, were forced to strap drums about their persons and march in formation around a cold asphalt parking lot at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, just a few hours after having closed down area bars the evening before. This was described to me as fun, although that was earlier, before the hangovers and back pain had set in.
Still, the juju reached me up in the stands, and I had moments of regret about my decision to participate in the marching-band reunion only in my traditional capacities, drinking, storytelling, inspiring of embarrassed laughter. (Hey, it’s a knack.)
I have fond and vivid memories of my college years (and, given the types of recreation I pursued at the time, I have a number of other memories that come entirely from secondhand accounts) and none of it seems that long ago. That’s my subjective time. This weekend I got a faceful of perspective, and I realized, deeply and truly, what an old geezer I’ve become. And I don’t believe I’m going to age gracefully. This was proved over the weekend, when instead of pursuing activities suitable for my, err, current level of maturity, e.g. sitting around a warm fireplace with a blanket over my knees waiting for the kind nurse to come collect my teeth, I went carousing, and felt pain. After two such nights, I woke up to find my knuckles raw and bleeding — not because I got into a fight, not at all. I think it’s because I’d regressed so far the night before, my hands were actually dragging on the ground.
(The true explanation is even more pitiful: I’d forgotten to pack hand lotion. Sigh.)
I realized with dismay that the enormous pile of cash recently spent by my alma mater to remodel its stadium did not include sufficient budget for bathrooms. Or perhaps the designers were attempting to match the existing architectural style, and keep with tradition, for in the men’s rooms they’ve installed troughs in lieu of urinals.
There are a number of reasons why troughs might be appropriate, or even preferable. As one friend remarked, if a stadium patron is feeling discomfort and possesses an urgent desire to use this sort of facility, a trough tends to be more accomodating, in the sense that it’s somewhat easier to crowd around it without any of the social pressure that would prohibit the alternative (sharing a urinal).
One might suppose that troughs are more space-efficient than urinals. Looking at a long wall of troughs, it’s easy enough to imagine dozens of men standing elbow to elbow. But this projection is inaccurate. Indeed, I believe that the overall throughput of a trough-equipped restroom is lower than that of a more, or in this case less-traditionally fixtured restroom.
During my long wait in line, I immediately saw two reasons why. The first is that men tend not to want to stand too close to one another in the restroom. Lines had formed at 3' intervals — urinal spacing, I realized — and it was clear that everyone acted as if privacy partitions separated each line.
The other problem is more serious. I stood in line for nearly ten minutes, which is an interminably long time for a person who’d just sucked down two liters of water. There were only a handful of guys ahead of me, but each one took minutes: a few seconds to approach the trough and arrange the necessary interfaces as it were, maybe 15 seconds to actually urinate, and 90 seconds in between to excise whatever demons had taken over the circuitboard, to allow nature to complete its call. In two words, the trough system is crippled by stage fright.
That, or everyone had prostate trouble. Maybe next time I should use the restrooms in the student section.
OK, I’m better now. Feel free to rehash this analysis at your next office lunch gathering or cocktail party.
When I travel, I resist all conscious temptations to touch anything, especially my face. I don’t mean to sound all Howard Hughes, but I do think it’s possible to contract some bad afflictions in public areas, which are basically swimming in other people’s DNA. Judging from my experience of fellow travelers, I could contract grime, body odor, halitosis, poor fashion sense, or an accent.
So I’ve been amused and, as is more frequently the case, irritated by worldwide efforts over the past few years to fully automate public restrooms. For example, many airport sinks can sense when hands are beneath the faucet. The idea of this is brilliant — because if there’s one spot of concentrated filth in a restroom, it’s the faucet handle, as that’s the last thing everyone touches when their hands are dirty. These are so coated with noxious bacteria that there’s just no point washing your hands if you’re going to turn the water back off afterwards.
(Handy travel-safety tip: don’t touch the door handle either.)
The problem with the auto-faucet idea, as you have no doubt experienced, as that is is implemented poorly in almost all cases. Or am I the only person who invariably gets a sink that turns the water on and off randomly, or not at all, no matter how much I’m waving my hands and poking at sensors? Honestly, some of the sensors I’ve encountered are triggered by only one action: moving to the next sink in line.
Besides the auto-faucet, I’ve seen the toilets that flush automatically, and at totally random times, like when I walk past a row of them and they all flush in turn. I’ve seen the hot-air hand dryers that turn on and off automatically. What I like best about these is that they’ve allowed the dryer vendors to finally move to iconographic directions, a real improvement given that every single set of English-language dryer instructions on the planet had been defaced in exactly the same way (“1. Press butt. 2. Rub hands under arm.” etc.).
I’ve seen lights connected to motion sensors (which discourages loitering in the stall, I can tell you). And I’ve seen the latest innovation, the toilet that changes its own seat cover, although I think there may really only be two seatcovers in that machine, and they just switch back and forth. You can try this yourself — trigger the switch seven or eight times. I’ll bet you each one looks exactly the same! You’ve been warned.
My Powerbook came with both OS 9.2 and 10.1 installed. I used 9.2 only long enough to reset the default OS preference… and I liked OS X immediately. Within a few hours’ work I had a complete web-development environment running on it: apache, php, mysql, and BBEdit. I was beyond pleased: I was smug.
Apple announced the new version of OS X with much fanfare. Reviews have been positive. And I was itching to reformat my disk to take OS 9.2 off, to satisfy an admittedly irrational urge to purify my system, and recover a few MB of space on the disk, as if I’d ever actually collect 30 GB worth of data useful enough to save.
So I wiped the disk, installed 10.2, and have been struggling ever since. The system feels a lot slower. Critical apps have not been ported. It’s weird, and unfortunate, and I’m not very happy.
Part of the problem is my fault… defaulting to familiar command-line tools, I made a backup of some preference files with the UNIX tar utility, which I’ve since learned is inadequate because (in its default mode) it does not copy resource forks. As a result, my backed-up preferences were useless and I had to re-configure several complicated apps, at a cost of two evenings’ time.
Fortunately I don’t rely on this machine for day-to-day work… mostly I just write journal entries on it, and you know how rarely that happens.
I was entrusted with the delivery of baguettes to a party of some friends, who without my assistance would be doomed to consuming second-rate whitebread from one of the local commercial bakers… dry, tough, and without character, and their bread is even worse.
OK, I’m exaggerating, but I did it for your sake. That’s just the sort of guy I am.
There are actually a number of great bakers (and bakeries) in the area, and only two or three that ought to be ashamed of themselves. Regardless, I planned to make my own baguettes, as it’s good exercise for when this whole dot-com thing finally dries up and blows away and I decide to make an honest living for a change.
Dough shaping is the second-hardest aspect of baking, and baguettes are perhaps the most difficult shape to master. I can say this with authority, for I have not achieved mastery. Simply rolling out dough into a long baguettelike cylinder is easy, but completely inadequate; the trick is to do so without squeezing all the air of out the dough. To be correct, the cylinder must be even in circumference for its entire length, with slight tapers at the ends. And none of this makes any difference if there is insufficient surface tension in the outer skin, for a failure in this respect results in sad, flat baguette-cakes.
Letting the dough rest at various points in this process is crucial, so the gluten does not resist the shaping effort. Of course, letting the dough rest for too long is a problem. The magic comes in finding the balance: tension without deflation, gluten development without breakdown, fermentation without yeast suicide. Hydration, temperature, timing… grasp these, and you’ll impress your friends. Master them, and you’ll rule the world. Or, at least, you’ll really impress your friends.
So I’ve been yammering on and you’re dying to know how my baguettes turned out. I think the easiest way to answer this question is for you to come by and pick one up. Really, I made that many. Quickly, now, before they get stale.
I used two recipes, and determined that the “ACME Baguette” recipe from Artisan Baking is superior. These loaves had excellent coloration, great oven spring, a nice crust, and would have had a perfect crumb if I hadn’t run out of time before the party. Still, people raved. We ate a lot of bread today.
