DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I met a number of people at Etech whose work I’d seen before. Invariably one of my initial reactions was to think, you’re much shorter than I would have guessed. But I suppose this is to be expected, considering that I’m eight-foot-seven.

Steven Levy was at the conference. His 1986 book, Hackers had a huge influence on me in college. It was the first time I’d seen the expression, “Information should be free.” I have vivid memories of writing a paper about the Hacker Ethic for a philosophy class approximately 100 years ago. I spoke with Steven briefly, until he gave me a look like “I’ve gotta sit down in the lobby and wait for the limo,” and I reluctantly let him go, pretending, too, that I had a really important meeting in my hotel room with the stained carpet and bacteria.

Another famous (not particularly tall) author, James Surowiecki, whose name caused everyone who attempted to pronounce it to stumble, gave a presentation on concepts from his recent book The Wisdom of Crowds. The book’s premise would have you believe that polling the approximately 500 conference attendees about the correct pronounciation of “Surowiecki” would, assuming you could filter and refine the answers through some sort of market function, result in the precisely correct pronounciation.

There’s a great transcript of Surowiecki’s Etech talk on Wade Roush’s weblog.

I will be attending the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara in April. Let me know if you plan to attend, so I can rent you the 2nd bed in my hotel room.

I mean no offense to the guys pictured in the banner reproduced here; in fact I’ve just paid $1000 to hear them all speak next month. But isn’t this the least compelling ad you’ve ever seen? I mean, sure, most technical conferences consist of a group of middle-aged mostly white guys standing around hotels yammering about obscure software features and implementation details, but is that the best pitch the promoter can make?

Here, take this test: after seeing this ad, which of the following best describes your next course of action?

1. Buy shares of ORCL.
2. Schedule an appointment with your hairdresser, just in case.
3. Spastically click the browser’s “BACK” button before any more photons bounce off that image and hit your eyeball.

Those are your only choices, because nobody clever enough to read debris.com could possibly see that advertisement and think, “OMG, reserve my seat today!”

During the first few days of his life, my son frequently made an unusual and unsettling noise, a sort of combination gagging and gasping sound that was no small cause for alarm for his first-time papa. I asked a nurse about it. Her explanation was reassuring; she said that Raphael was “managing his own secretions.”

I was relieved. Not only was Raphael not ill, at less than a day old he had managed to learn something lots of college seniors still haven’t figured out.

The nurse’s phrase struck me as excellent advice, in general:

1. Manage your own secretions.

   Combine that with what I’m told are the two core rules of Google’s Engineering team:

2. Don’t be evil.
3. Don’t be stupid.

and you’ve got an entire life philosophy. Those three rules will certainly get you through school with more grace and success than is achieved by most graduates, or at least me. In fact, most of the things I regret about my life so far could be attributed to either being evil, being stupid, or failing to manage my own secretions.

Who do you stare at in public places? Which coworkers do you like the least? Who makes up the endless stream of losers who appear on talk shows like Jerry Springer? In all cases, the answer is the same: people who are evil, people who are stupid, people who fail to manage their own secretions.

The next time you fly, look around at the other passengers. If you’re very lucky, at least those nearby will be neither evil (hogging the armrest, reclining into your lap) nor stupid (trying to stuff a carry-on the size of a refrigerator into the overhead compartment), nor failing to manage their secretions (drooling, sneezing, other possibilities I can’t bear to contemplate).

Unless you keep a journal, in which case all those behaviors are entirely welcome. Heh.

“These vegan cookies suck!”

Pictured is a cross-section of the best bread I’ve made in a year. I hit a perfect combination of dough hydration, timing, and oven technique.

I baked 25 loaves like this last year, and seven so far this year. Yesterday’s two were superior: crunchy crusts with nice Maillard coloring, chewy crumbs with fully gelatinized starches, distinct but not overpowering sour flavor.

The recipe is always the same, or nearly so — my own multigrain sourdough. Yesterday I made three changes from the usual procedure:

1. I used no whole-wheat flour in the dough (although I did use it to refresh the starter). Because the finished dough contains such a high percentage of non-gluten grains (spelt and rye) and flax seeds, the finished bread is usually somewhat dense. This time, I used high-protein organic bread flour (Guisto’s Ultimate Performer, about 14% protein) exclusively to compensate for the other grains and seeds’ lack of gluten. This made for a somewhat lighter loaf and a significantly more open crumb.
2. I used 33% more starter, adjusting flour and water in the final mix to compensate. Using a higher percentage of starter in the dough can bring more flavor, at the possible risk of accelerating yeast growth to the point where the dough rises too quickly, the yeast cells die off, and the loaf gets acidic and nasty.
3. I cooked the hell out of the breads. I was going for what bakers euphamistically call a “European bake,” which is what you get when you pull the bread out about a minute before the crust turns black. I pushed these about as hard as I could; in fact I was pretty sure I’d burned one of them, because when I thwacked it it sounded like an empty shell.

The dough turned out wetter than usual. This means it both rises faster (less resistance to gas pressure from the wild yeast) and needs to be baked earlier (so the yeast still has a kick when the dough starts to spread in the oven). The higher-than-usual percentage of strong flour lent the crumb some structural assistance. And the deep baking ensured a thorough gelatinization of starches, as evidenced by the shiny translucence of the thin walls around air pockets in the crumb. This is the science behind great bread — for more, read Reinhart or even McGee.)

We served the bread with a recreation of the spread we’d liked so much at Millennium, “truffled sun-dried tomato butter.” I had no recipe, so I dumped arbitrary amounts of each of the ingredients named in the title into the Cuisinart and whizzed it into a pink paste. It was awesome, although I felt oddly guilty for slathering the goo over my perfect crumb, not that that kept me from eating about a pint of the stuff.