DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I nearly always bring bread when I’m invited to dinner. I figure it’s sort of a prepayment for whatever idiotic thing I’ll say during the meal. If I get in the hosts’ good graces in advance, perhaps they’ll be less offended later when I inadvertently mention something inflammatory about politics or religion or fashion or education or (hold on!) SUVs.

I think friends don’t have to agree on all these issues. I don’t want all my friends to think just like me. I’d be happy if they’d vote like me, but otherwise I’m content to let them keep their irrational fantasies about, say, politics or religion or fashion or education or (hold on!) SUVs, so long as I still get to come over for dinner.

Anyway, two consecutive nights of dinner invitations meant four consecutive days of baking.

Wednesday I began feeding one of my sourdoughs, a levain made with the technique described in Artisan Baking. Next I made a batch of pâte fermentée, which is a simple French bread recipe intended not as a bread itself but to bring some maturity and complexity of flavor to a younger dough.

Thursday I warmed up the pâte fermentée, which had overnighted in the cooler, and mixed it into a large recipe of pane siciliano, an Italian semolina bread dough, using a recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. Pictured is the dough after its bulk rise, ready for shaping.

I’ve made this bread numerous times before, although not from this recipe. My usual recipe is the pre-publication version of this one, provided by Peter Reinhart in a baking class several years ago. I was surprised to see the book’s version call for more yeast and less salt. I guess the test-kitchen folks had some undersized loaves. The stink of yeast was overpowering. Next time I’ll revert to the original recipe, unperverted by media-conglomerate recipe testers who don’t know how to make bread. Phew!

To shape these loaves, roll out to baguette length, then form into S shapes. The shaped loaves go back into the cooler, slowing down the yeast to make time for enzymes to break down the starch molecules in the flour. (Time is the most important ingredient in good bread.)

Finally, I mixed up a “soaker” of assorted whole grains for the sourdough. This spent the night on the bench next to the fermenting starter.

Friday I combined the soaker and the starter into a double batch of my “house bread,” a multigrain sourdough conglomeration. While I wasn’t looking, this sticky dough crawled out of the mixer and enveloped the motor assembly. The thermal overload switch tripped, stopping the motor. Baking tip for the day: don’t leave your mixer unattended!

The sourdough got a 5-hour bulk ferment (an hour too much), after which I shaped two boules and put them into bannetons to rise.

Meanwhile, the pane siciliano was unexpectedly under-risen. I put the dough into a warm (80°) oven to come up to size. Finally it was ready — too late for us to make it to dinner on time. I phoned in our apologies as the bread was going into the oven. We’d be late, but the bread would be fresh.

I usually bake these on a stone, but following the revised recipe, I cooked them on a sheet pan and suffered an oven mishap: uneven browning. I was happy to have five loaves, so I could pick the two best to bring to dinner. They were decent, but not spectacular; the crumb was too tight, and I should have pushed the bake a bit harder to retain some crispness in the crust.

Saturday, the sourdough loaves came out of the cooler for another few hours of rise time. I couldn’t tell if they were under-risen, or undersized due to the fact that a big handful of dough had had to be tossed (motor grease is not generally considered an accepted dough enrichment). Finally I scored the loaves and baked them on a stone. The white powder in the picture is rice flour, essential for keeping the dough from sticking to the baskets.

I got a nice oven spring, surprising given the length of fermenting. I brought the nicer of the two to dinner, where it garnered numerous nice comments for the modest baker. But it ended up on the table right in front of me, so I think I ate about half of it.

So now I have five (more) pounds of sliced bread in the freezer. I’ve spent about 12 hours over the past few days in the kitchen, endlessly mixing and measuring and stirring and washing and wiping and waiting. I am so sick of baking, I can’t even tell you.

Which means it will be about two weeks before I do it again.

A friend recently reported that he was unable to send me email. He received bounce messages that were not helpful at all — the message was generic, like “your message could not be delivered.” Apparently that’s a technical term from Microsoft; the meaning is “Exchange Server blows big chunks,” or possibly “Due to our contempt for users, who we think are too dumb to be exposed to anything so scary as an SMTP error message, we’ll hide the cause for this failure and instead give you a bland and useless note that discourages you from finding out what’s really happening, much less fixing it.”

After several hours of research, I discovered the problem: my server was configured to refuse inbound mail from remote servers that have broken reverse DNS.

“Broken reverse DNS” means that a computer’s address has no corresponding name in DNS, the Domain Name Service. I know of no reason why any public mail server would be configured this way, except through ignorance.

So, basically, the reason my friend couldn’t send me email is that his employer’s IT department screwed up their DNS configuration.

I called the company’s help desk to report the bug. This caused no small amount of consternation, for I’m not an employee. They have no procedures in place for handling bug reports from non-employees. But to their credit, they took the report… and then sat on it for two weeks. I called back weekly — long distance! — to check status. “We’re still working on it” is all they’d say.

Finally I got a call back. The tech told me they would be unable to fix their broken DNS because their security software prevents it. This sounded to me like a brush-off. Certainly it’s possible that some sort of Windows security software would prevent established Internet standards from functioning… that’s no less plausible than Exchange Server’s crappy bounce handling.

I asked the technician if he realized that that meant nobody at his company would be able to send mail to AOL. He was understandably mystified, until I explained that AOL’s inbound mail servers, like my own, block mail from remote servers that have broken reverse DNS.

We set up a test. Lo and behold, his test message never arrived at my AOL account. This had the desired effect; my original bug report was amended and kicked up to a higher-level tech. It seems that not being able to send mail to me is not a concern. But not being able to send mail to 35 million AOL users is a problem worth fixing.

Three days later, they’d fixed their DNS and asked me to help them verify it. I was so pleased, I laughed out loud. “Our security software prevents it,” indeed.

According to ClimateStar.org,

If every family in the US replaced one regular light bulb with an energy saving model, we’d reduce global warming pollution by more than 90 billion pounds, the same as taking 7.5 million cars off the road.

That sounds like a staggering amount of pollution to prevent. Of course, there are a staggering number of families in the US — we’re talking about lots of new bulbs.

I have few wasteful “heat bulbs” left to replace. But I know people who appear to insist on spending 4x as much energy to light their homes. Perhaps for their next birthday they’ll receive a selection of Compact Fluorescent bulbs and a card with the quote above.

(I’ve written before about the color of compact fluorescent lights… information that is relevant for first-time CF buyers.)

wreckedexotics.com: the internet’s largest collection of exotic car crash photos

Wired’s Googlemania is a collection of 10 stories about Google. It offers short takes on several interesting facets of the Google story, like Google vs. Microsoft, 3rd-party Google API apps, PageRank-killing comment spam.

The opening piece, “Surviving IPO Fever,” contains a list of IPO cautionary tales: sudden wealth going wrong, culled from longtime members of the Silicon Valley community:

• The mousy guy in accounting who dumps his mousy wife and runs off to Mexico with the admin.
• The lonely programmer who goes off to a men’s club to celebrate his new wealth and marries a stripper he meets there.
• The sober family man who, upon discovering that he’s half-Native American, renounces his US citizenship and moves to an Indian reservation so he won’t have to pay taxes.
• The programmer who quits, buys the sports car of his dreams, crashes, loses everything in the resulting personal-injury lawsuit, and ends up broke, back in his old job.
• The senior executive who takes his new wealth up into Los Altos Hills and spends the next decade putting the money up his nose one gram at a time.

Another great story of the darker side of IPOs comes from Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first employee:

“Before [eBay] went public, I used to send out a company-wide joke each day, just as a way of loosening things up,” says Skoll. “The day after the IPO, I sat down at my computer to write that day’s joke and in walked the general counsel. He says to me, ‘You know that joke of the day thing? I think it’s very funny.’ Gosh, thank you, I replied. ‘Well, stop it,’ he said. ‘We are a public company now, and we don’t want to offend anyone. If you want to keep sending out jokes, they can only be about lawyers.’ So I tried sending out lawyer jokes for two weeks - and then I gave up.”