DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

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.

I signed up for Pac*Bell DSL as soon as it was available, about three years ago. I was so excited about it, I even opted for the high-end Business account, which at $300+/month was a lot cheaper than what I’d been paying previously. And even though Pac*Bell never managed to deliver the promised bandwidth, I kept paying the stiff MRC, because I needed the higher upstream bandwidth. And so I paid them thousands and thousands of dollars over the years.

After I moved out of the house, I cancelled the DSL account. This was in the middle of the billing cycle, and yet Pac*Bell billed me for the full MRC. I put the bill aside in expectation of receiving a corrected final bill, and was dismayed (although not particularly surprised) to find that the final bill also requested the full month’s amount.

I steeled myself against disappointment and called the company. This is always an adventure, if when you think “adventure” you discard all connotations of fun and instead think of something unpleasant that you will survive but regret, like slamming your hand in a car door or running out of gas near the crack house under the freeway. I was transferred — no lie — seven times. I had to explain the situation seven times. By number three I introduced my plight with a command, “Do not transfer me!” This only worked the last time, of course.

Clerk #7 was one of the handful of competent operators they sprinkle through the organization just to make sure some productive work occasionally gets done. She was able to correct my account. I immediately wrote a check for the balance and put it in the mail.

A week later, I got a phone call from a collection agency. That’s Pac*Bell service for you… It might take them six weeks to install a line, but they’re lightening-quick on the billing, even after they’ve been paid.

BTW, I am aware that SBC took over Pac*Bell’s DSL service, but I prefer the old name, because it allows me to quote Kurt Vonnegut: “The * is a picture of my asshole.”

More on “horrific” Pac*Bell DSL service: DSLreports.com’s Pac*Bell DSL Forum

If you’ve lived long at all, you know about inertia. Or maybe, if you don’t remember physics class, you think of it as momentum. Either way, the concept I’m referring to is that it’s easier to keep something moving than to start it again after it stops.

I consider this when I’m packing my gym bag. You see, I don’t very much enjoy going to the gym. I’ve been doing it three times a week for 17 months, and I readily admit exercise has changed my life. I don’t dread going, but it’s not something I particularly look forward to. It’s sort of like brushing my teeth — mostly I’m afraid of what would happen if I stopped.

Still, with all the post-move craziness around here lately, I’ve missed a few workouts. Thanks to inertia, the missing gets easier with each miss (or, more accurately, the restarting gets harder). And so lately I’ve been pushing myself to get back onto a regular gym schedule, before I end up guilty and corpulent, with a 3/4-lb burger in one hand, a greasy smear on the chin, and a thought balloon reading, “You shouldn’t have missed that first workout,” and another thought balloon reading, “Could you pass me a Soytzel?”

I was relieved to learn that my brief neglect did not have an immediate impact on my weight: I’d taken a week off, ostensibly to unpack but really to mope around the new house, lamenting my dial-up connection and sensing the entire digital world flowing by, just beyond the reach of my pitiful 28.8k analog connection… and when I went back to the gym the next week I found I’d somehow lost three pounds, leaving me at a 20-year low, at which point a stiff wind threatened to blow me off my deck and I scurried inside and quickly baked up a batch of focaccia for 40.

How did I lose weight after I stopped exercising? Perhaps I’ve reset my metabolism. Or perhaps it’s that box of Dexa-Trim I choke down at breakfast every day*.

Anyway, I’m back into a sort of transient workout schedule again, while I cope with some high-pressure work projects and a body full of toxins left by the season’s harvest parties. (I actually ingested goat, which — I checked — is not a vegan dish, I regret to say. Don’t tell my colon.)

*A note for the sarcasm-impaired: I don’t really eat speed for breakfast, unless Trader Joe’s puts in it the granola. No, fructose doesn’t count.