infryq

Alright, it's officially ridiculous: some random guy in Pittsburgh and I now know each other by sight because he's tried to pick me up so many times. With his dazzling wit? No. Because we share so many of the same interests? No. He stops me on the street and asks me what time it is, then attempts to start a conversation from a full stop.

Next time he does it I'm sorely tempted to sit him down (after making my romantic disinterest clear, whether or not it sticks) and ask him whether it works on many other girls, and if not (and I really can't imagine it being very effective -- he's pretty pushy), why he persists, and if it ever occurs to him that being asked for personal information by a relative stranger is pretty creepy, or that it feels good neither to have to tell him no now for the third time, nor to be so unmemorable that he wouldn't have remembered asking before.

If he were somebody I knew, it'd be flattering. As it is, it makes me think I should be more nervous walking alone at night.

Huh.

A good listener helps us overhear ourselves. -Yahia Lababidi, author (b. 1973)

I somehow managed to hit the right balance of meatiness, salty, tart, and sweet with this -- so I'm writing it down. :)

Prep sauce and slice all vegetables before you start -- this goes fast!
( Read more... )
Serve with jasmine rice and korean chile-ginger paste.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

-- Wayne Dyer

It's been wet! Really wet! Check out my inbox since around 5 today:

Exciting, huh? It was raining gently around 5 when Paul and I went to dinner, and when we came back. At 6:30 when I left to go up campus to the UC to teach the westcoast lesson, it was pouring soggy rabbits. I managed to stay indoors for most of the way, catching the beginnings of water seeping under the door in the NSH-Smith tunnel by the FRC, but had to exit at the Doherty lobby and make a run for it across, what, a hundred feet of open sidewalk? I had an umbrella. Didn't matter. I still got drenched. :) I had a change of shirt, but didn't even think about pants this morning -- and I was sodden from the knees down. Squishy sandals.

The lesson had a rocky start, but finished off fine once Mitch and I found our teaching groove again -- the right balance of humor, technique, and actually having people dance is an elusive thing. Anyhow, Shafeeq arrived shortly after 7 with news of serious flooding on greenfield ave along the park, raining inside the margaret morrison building, and flooding in the maggie mo parking lot to the point of submerged fire hydrants. We wrapped up the social dancing at around 8:30 to head home, and much of the water had receded although there were still road closures to avoid, and some bits of greenfield ave were being repurposed by nature as adhoc streambeds. But, we didn't get struck by lightning or battered by hail, there's no water damage to the house and only minor puddles in the basement (impressive given the flooding problems of previous basements I've been party to in pittsburgh, although it does help that we're on top of a hill), and we really should get around to cleaning out the gutters. The plants are all happy, and the tall ones are temporarily flat and I expect they'll pop back up when life dries out. The power flickered briefly, enough to knock out the oven clock and the desktop computer, but the jukebox and whatnot weathered it. Candles just in case. Masala chai with ginger. If I'd been thinking I might've put alcohol in it. Next time. And I got to watch the rest of the Colbert Report USO episodes, which were very sweet.

I hope Wean hasn't floated away. Winding through the lower levels felt very safe when the storm was raging and the lightning was close and the tornado warnings were adamant, but word on the txt network is the elevators got awfully wet, and water was coming into the hallways from people's offices -- no good.

But now, to bed.

Mom uses her iPod to make recordings of the choir she sings in. She stands in the back row, and their costumes don’t have pockets. She wants a portable pocket that will hang around her neck and hold her iPod at about bust level, and give her access to the record button on the screen.

I used the incredibly flexible geometry of crochet to incorporate a neck strap into a decorative pocket, including an openwork panel in front so buttons on the face of the iPod can be accessed easily. Check it out:



( Pattern cut for the disinterested )

Design process notes:

1. I did two sketches on paper, exploring two different ways of laying out the pieces. The other one had you do flat construction of the strap: making half at a time, and sewing them together at the back of the neck later. I thought that was much less interesting.
   
2. I didn't swatch.
   
3. ... meaning that I guessed completely wrong about number of rows and number of stitches on my sketches. I did plan for that, but just in case someone's trying to duplicate my design process -- I've made a lot of really bad crochet, and at this point I can eyeball pretty well how far things are going to stretch when I add stitches, and I always go over the side edges again with more stitching to tidy up all the mistakes I make.
   
4. The above instructions are a compromise between what I did and what you'd do if you could crochet straighter than I can. A lot of my bottom and top finishing incorporates sc and slst into the hdc work, to account for lumpy edges. You may need to rip out the finishing work several times before you get a nice straight border, but it's not a lot of work, so imho that's okay.
   
5. If I were to revise the project again, I'd make the fillet pattern for the back and front more identical. I like the wider margin on the front; the back looks a bit messier with the narrower margin.
   
6. I did the paper design in about 20 minutes sitting at my desk during my lunch hour, the bulk of the work during the hockey game on friday (3 hours?) and the finishing and weaving in the next morning (<2hrs, probably about 1h). Easy project. And you won't have to rip out as much, 'cause you have instructions. :)

Words that are pronounced the same, but spelled differently depending on meaning. (homophonic heteronyms?)

• signet (a ring used to impress a seal on documents) and cygnet (a young swan)
  

Words that are spelled the same, but pronounced differently depending on meaning. (heterophonic homonyms?)

• dove (a type of pigeon) and dove (past tense of dive)
  
• read (present tense) and read (past tense)
  

Build a sound by making the envelope on the harmonic series in the fft a function of x -- like, sine.

Set salted water to boil for 1/2 lb pasta of your choice. We like the corkscrew-tube-shaped ones. During the following, once the water boils go ahead and drop in the pasta.

Saute in olive oil until brightly colored:

• 1 red bell pepper, jullienne
• 2 carrots, coins or half-coins
• 1 small onion, about half the size of the pepper bits

Add 1-2 cloves garlic, minced, and continue to lazily saute -- just give it a toss every now and then so it cooks reasonably evenly and doesn't burn. Meanwhile,

Mix in a small bowl (do it in order so the cornstarch is smooth):

• 1 tsp cornstarch
• Juice of 1/2 lemon (2T?)
• Zest of 1 lemon (go organic for that)
• 1/4 c water

When carrots are done and peppers are soft, add the lemon liquid and stir stir fold fold until the starch sets. Add black pepper and sugar to taste, and a breath of nutmeg. If the pasta isn't done yet, add a ladle of the pasta water, turn the heat off the veggies, and angle a lid on them so they don't cool off too fast.

While waiting for the pasta to finish, grate your favorite cheese for pasta. I think we had reggiano -- it went wonderfully with the lemon, and picked up the garlic.

When the pasta's done, drain, and toss with the veggies and cheese. Consume with gusto and a bright red wine. We had a cabernet-sauvignon from Columbia Winery (which I was delighted to find at the PLCB shop in Eastside) which was deathly perfect, giving the lemon a run for its money without bowling it over. One of the best wine pairings I've had in a while. Wine review to follow on invinfryq.

Somewhere along the way I developed a (possibly perverse) fondness for mistakes.

Throwing myself into the pursuit of learning things is easier if the enthusiasm isn't dependent on success or failure; it's too hard to be constantly spinning up and slowing down to stay in step when things go right or wrong. Progress is progress. Process of elimination is a great way to wind up with the right answer; figuring out which answers are wrong gives you context for overlapping questions in the future.

I guess what I mean is, life is this foveated thing that reflects where we've been, and how closely we've looked. Seeking success in all things may result in a higher mean, but you cover far less ground and have much less idea of the lay of the land in general. How boring is that?

Ha! Sign-agnostic logarithmic (or possibly fractal) hedonism.

Which is not to say that I'm the most scandalous risk-taker out there. Some people's volume knobs go up to eleven, whereas mine maxes out at, like, 4. I just think it's silly to make decisions or judge people based on sign alone.

You're going to want to chop everything ahead of time before you start. This was ridiculously good.


1T corriander seed
1T cumin seed
a few szechuan peppercorns
Toast dry in a frypan over medium heat, tossing occasionally, until they just start to smoke. Grind in an old coffee grinder and reserve on a plate. Grind some rice (to clean out the grinder), add to the plate (also the rice starch will help thicken the gravy). Also put on the plate

1/4 t ground cloves
Cinnamon (1T?)
Mace (1 t?)
Savory (1 T?)
and set aside.

2 lbs chicken dark meat (the butcher gave us assorted legs, thighs, and leg quarters, bone-in)
Toss chicken pieces in olive oil and brown over medium-low heat, one side at a time, in whatever pot you're going to cook the stew in. Work in batches so that all pieces have space on the bottom of the pan. Set browned chicken aside.

1 medium onion, medium nicoise (1/2cm x 1.5cm, long side along the root-stem line)
3-4 cloves garlic, in thin slices
Sweat in the chicken pan and stir to deglaze. If the browned bits are stubborn, add a few T of chicken broth. When transparent, add

contents of spice plate
and stir to combine. Make sure you don't leave lumps -- spice dumplings are not fun. :)

Arrange chicken over onions and add

chicken broth to cover
handful golden raisins
Bring to a boil, then reduce to a low simmer. Cook covered 45 minutes, or until meat is easily pulled from the bone.

Remove chicken to a bowl (try to leave the raisins in the pan) and add to the pan

1 zucchini, cubed (could probably do with more)
1/2 red pepper, cubed
2 big old carrots, in half-coins (could probably do with more)
1 sizable stalk celery, small dice
Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cover lightly, and set a timer for 15 minutes. While the veg are cooking, take the chicken off the bones in as large of pieces as possible. Replace the chicken in the pan.


When the timer goes off, the carrots should be just done. Serve over rice, with flatbread if you've got it. A good beer alongside is nice, too.

Photos from the eggs I dyed yesterday with Dani, Kate, Max, Pete, and Shafeeq. Some people got all crazy with patterns, but I like solid colors -- and wound up with a reasonable gradient. :)

Sophomore year my Olin cohort was Wired Ensemble / Signals & Systems / Digital Signal Processing. We learned about sound and signals and got to play around with embedded DSPs. It was kindof... crap, but we tend to chalk that up to Continual Improvement (Class of 2006: Worst Olin Education Ever, and proud of it). Anyhow, the project my team settled on was word recognition, hardcore fft-style. Not knowing much about speech and sound outside of Physics 2 (wave fundamentals and overtones) and music backgrounds, we tried to do it by looking at the overtone shape of the principal vowels of a word, hoping that vowels would be characteristic and any data from the the consonants would be negligible. This did not work very well at all. Since then, I've heard that consonants are actually easier to identify than vowels. Go figure.

Anyhow, I was walking down the hall thinking machine-learning thoughts, and had a truly horrible but wouldn't-it-be-neat-to-see-if-it-worked idea, which is the following, documented for posterity:

Let fL be the lowest frequency we care about (human vocal range), and let s be the sample rate. Let w, the window size, be (s/fL + 1). Let dw be w/10 or so.
1. Take a recording.
2. Get all the windows of the recording.
3. Use the ffts of the window set as the features for a word classifier.

We'd want to have some way to ignore how fast someone was speaking (within reason), and their pitch (within reason). Factoring out pitch will probably suck, but speed is probably taken care of here -- it seems to me this method is the timespace analogy of n-grams.

Could be cool.

Could totally fail.

Implement when I have an itch and a copy of MATLAB.

We often name peoples and languages after the countries they're from. Typically a people and their language and country all match -- French people come from France and speak French. The Spanish come from Spain and speak Spanish.

Sometimes a people is named after their country, but the language is not -- Iranians from Iran speak Farsi; Brazilians from Brazil speak Portuguese (although it's Brazilian Portuguese, in much the same way as people from the US speak American English). Indians from India speak any of some 1500 languages, none of which is named Indian.

There are also people who share a name with their language, but not their country -- for example, the Dutch. This group includes native peoples as well, like the Maori.

Can you think of any country for whom the language is named, but the people are not?

Tomcat 6.0, Postgres 8.1, both running on the same machine.

We encounter a problem occasionally where reloading the postgres schema hangs, but restarting tomcat sets it free and the reload completes successfully.

Today, after experiencing this problem and restarting tomcat, our tomcat webapp couldn't connect to the database. "org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: Connection refused. Check that the hostname and port are correct and that the postmaster is accepting TCP/IP connections." It's eventually "Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out".

Interesting. We restart postgres. Same problem.

I can psql to the database from my account on the server, using the same login info our webapp is using, no problem. So postgres isn't horribly broken, if it's broken.

I can use a JDBC tool from my laptop (!=server) to get the the database using the same URL -- copied-pasted -- that the webapp is trying to use, no problem. Clearly the hostname and port are correct, and the postmaster is just hunky-dory with TCP/IP connections (well, it oughtta be -- it's post-8.0, when they enabled that by default and took the prefs parameter away).

Steve can point a copy of our webapp that's on his desktop to the database on the server, and it works fine. So an identical setup, with the only change being that the webapp is running on a separate machine, works.

This is rather sad-making. Our database will talk to everyone except the webapp it's supposed to.

Our hypotheses:

• Something minor in the system got tweaked, and rebooting will put everything back


• The server's etc/hosts file got clobbered to remap our host.name.cmu.edu to an incorrect IP


• The server's JDBC driver got clobbered just enough to look like it's still working without actually being functional


• ...puppies. Just no clue.

A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

schwerpunkt

PRONUNCIATION:
(SHVEHR-pungkt)

MEANING:
noun: The point of focus; an area of concentrated effort, especially in a military operation.

ETYMOLOGY:
From German Schwerpunkt (center of gravity, focal point), from schwer (weighty) + Punkt (point).

USAGE:
"In the only arty shot, the Dalai Lama, seen in silhouette, sits at the schwerpunkt of a Mondrian-like composition."
Meir Ronnen; Happy Families?; The Jerusalem Post (Israel); June 25, 2004.

"But is the pledge to abolish Australian Workplace Agreements a masterstroke or a blunder? That question could be the greatest contest of judgment between Beazley and Prime Minister John Howard. Should it be the schwerpunkt of Labor's attack or will it be an unproductive dilution of forces?"
Terry Sweetman; Kim Finds a Sore Point; The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia); Jun 16, 2006.

(via A.Word.A.Day)

> "Calling computing 'computer science' is like calling surgery 'knife
> science'." -- Edsger Dijkstra

Tarragon (tsp).
Asiago (lots).
Woodchuck amber draft cider (maybe 1/4c).
Black pepper and nutmeg (dash each).
Roux & whole milk.
pinch salt.

yes.

What's the only thing falling as fast as the stock market these days? Air fares!

...you're doing it wrong

Start enough salted water boiling for 2c pasta (farfalle) while you:

2T flour plus a bit, 1T butter 1T olive oil, roux in a pan for sauce.
Saucify with 1c white wine (Aleveda Fonte vino verde) and let it off a bit, whisk to let the starch distribute through the liquid.
1c half-n-half, whisk to distribute.

By now the water's boiling, so add 2c pasta. Back to the sauce.

4oz chevre, whisk to melt.
a good handful of sage (er-- that you sauteed earlier, melting the butter and olive oil, and scooted out of the pan before the flour went in).

In a small pan, melt 1T butter with 1T olive oil, add 4oz mixed sliced mushrooms and 1t salt, toss to coat, then lid on, heat very low, and forget about it while you deal with the pasta, which is done by now.

Drain pasta, put back in the pasta pot. Put sauce on pasta and toss to coat. Adjust seasonings. (I added pepper)

Take the lid off the mushrooms and go Oooohh. Toss the mushrooms in with the pasta. There's a bit too much sauce but I am SO not complaining.

Eat with more of the wine.

There's possibly too much wine in this -- it might benefit from some stock, or a meatier cheese, or some turmeric. Or a drier, older wine -- vino verde's fantastic, and I love it in this, but you may find it too tart.