dresese

The frothing begins again

My espresso making and frothing experiment began last week. Google has some nice machines:

I've been able to create an OK espresso. That is, it's better than many you will find in New York. But still I have a long way to go.

My cappuccinos have not been so successful. I've made two so far. The first one was fairly good, but the second one basically had no froth at all. The whole frothing thing is very hard to do, since one of my hands has to be on the steam button, and the other holds the milk. The machine is powerful, and so the milk heats up fairly quickly. So far, I haven't gotten things down quick enough to get a good froth yet.

Also, I need to get a cappuccino cup. It's hard to even judge how good froth is when drinking from paper cups. When I get it, stay tuned for pictures. My goal is to be able to create good foam and some preliminary latte art by springtime.

Bukharian cuisine in Queens

The New York Times has an excellent article about Bukharian Cuisine found in Queens. This stuff is close to where I live, although not within walking distance, unfortunately. I really like the pictures and some of the tidbits, especially about the Bukharian Jews not being either Ashkenazi or Sephardi, but instead descended from the Jews of Babylon. I had no idea.

More Philip K. Dick

Besides the previously mentioned Philip K. Dick book, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, I've recently also read Confessions of a Crap Artist and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Confessions of a Crap Artist actually is just straight fiction, no sci-fi at all. I liked it quite a bit; it was often funny, occasionally depressing, and the writing was straight-forward and insightful. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, however, I wasn't very fond of. I have a feeling it was written with Dick was taking entirely too many drugs. It has a disjointed and neurotic feel to it, and the novel moved much too fast. It's the kind of novel where you read it and you feel like you might be coming down with a fever.

Le Pain Quotidien

Yes, it's a chain, but Le Pain Quotidien has my respect. From Belgium, they have locations internationally, and many locations in Manhattan, and Los Angeles. They specialize in dense, chewy, rustic organic breads. I've bought their bread many times, and it is expensive ($10 for a loaf), but the loaf lasts a long time due to its denseness. On Friday, my family, myself, and my friend Adam ate lunch at the branch in the Upper West Side (84th & Amsterdam).

I got a Tuscan bread platter (or something like that). It had a farmer's cheese, a pesto & olive tapenade, prosciutto, shaved parmesan, and a selection of bread. Very delicious, and a deceptively large amount of food.

When in a Belgian place in mid-winter, there's nothing better than a nice Belgian Hot Cocoa. I've never had one like this, which was a separate bowl of froth, and the molten chocolate on the side. It worked fairly well, and the cocoa was wonderful.

Adam got a Sardine & Beet sandwich, which I tried. It was salty with an mild sweetness, and not as odd as one might imagine.

Greta got a couple of tarts. Shown below is the apricot tart. I didn't try it, but she reports that it was really good.

I really like this place. Their whole philosophy of organic, rustic food is something I think New York needs more of.

Google

I've recently received a job offer from Google, and today I just found out that I will be starting next Tuesday in their New York office! The job offer didn't just happen, I interviewed with them on December 1st, and had applied well before then. At any rate, I'm excited! Never again will I have to launch into an unsuccessful explanation of what my company does. I'll just have to say "It's Google!" and everyone will know.

Don't expect any blogging about anything job-related, of course. Not a huge change, I never did do any job-related blogging. But Google does have professional-quality espresso machines, so perhaps expect me to return to my old blogging theme of the quest for the perfect froth.

A historian takes on the JFK conspiracy nuts

In the laundry room of my apartment building, there is a bookcase where people put fairly random books. Mostly they are mysteries or spy thrillers, but occasionally there are a few gems. One of the more unusual books I've picked up is The Historian As Detective, a collection of essays by historians that shed light on the historian's technique.

I'm in the middle of reading this book right now, and am currently reading an essay by Prof. John Kaplan of Stanford University on the JFK conspiracy books. Back when I started undergrad, I very much believed that there was a conspiracy, but after reading alt.conspiracy.jfk, I saw great usenet warriors Brian Holtz and John McAdams argue the conspiracy mongers into the ground. That, together with the conspiracy mongers' own bizarre behavior, which included frequent accusations of various people being CIA disinformation agents, made me realize where the truth lay.

At any rate, back to the book. So, I've always wondered what serious historians think of the JFK conspiracy hubbub. Well, at least John Kaplan doesn't think much of it. He brilliantly dismantles the most popular conspiracy books. My favorite quote, about Lane's Rush To Judgement:

Lane's argument about the smoke over the knoll is equally interesting. Actually, it was not disputed that there was a puff above the knoll... The Commission did not attempt to deny this. Lane's slight of hand is going from the smoke to the assumption that the puff came from a gun fired at the President.... unless the assassin fired a fifteenth-century harquebus it is hard to see how a shot fired at the President could have made as much smoke as Lane implies was visible.

I love a good debunking.

Garfield's Darkest Hour

Hey, remember that Garfield strip where Jon drinks dog semen? No? Well, it seems that someone remembered it and started a thread on the Straight Dope Message Board about it. Was it an urban legend? A misremembered product of a deviant mind, or what? Well, the amazing thing is that eventually the strip in question was found, pretty much exactly as described. I think this settles any question about the usefulness of the internet, don't you?

Buñuel, Linklater, Dick

Yesterday I just finished watching The Phantom of Liberty, a movie made in 1974 by Luis Buñuel. I was quite impressed, and surprised to see a combination of a few styles of film that I like a great deal. One style if the basic slightly surreal style of Buñuel, and the other is the telling of many stories, loosely joined, in sequence. In other words, think of a very funny, wickedly deranged version of Slacker. One sequence in particular (the one with the gunman on top of the building) made me think that Linklater intentionally paid homage to this film. This movie is a must for anyone that enjoys clever foreign movies.

Speaking of Linklater, I recently read Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said which was mentioned at the end of my favorite Linklater film, Waking Life. It was a great book, one of the best of Dick's I've read. And after reading the essay referenced by the movie, though, I've decided he's quite delusional about his alleged coincidences about this book (although I have never read the Book of Acts). For example, he says:

In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.

Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy—this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a restauant together, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him."

This coincidence doesn't strike me as very coincidental. In the book, a girl Kathy forges identify papers, and has a husband named Jack who is either dead or exiled. She is also a police informant. I fail to see the connection between her and a friend of Dick named Kathy who has a boyfriend named Jack, and a relationship with a police inspector. The fact that she is a drug dealer is not coincidental, especially if you consider that Philip K Dick did a huge amount of drugs. Probably half the people he knew were drug dealers. The relationship with the police inspector did not necessary mean she is an informant. The only real similarity is the names, both of which are common.

At any rate, it's a bit silly to dwell on something so obviously crazy, and Philip K. Dick was one undoubtedly mental. But I wouldn't like him so much if he wasn't.

Ruby on Rails

I have a particular personal project, which I've told just a few people about. It is very experimental, and basically has to do with creating a new type of online discussion, that fixes a number of problems I've noticed with discussion boards, usenet, and blog discussions.

I've decided to do this in Ruby on Rails, which is a web application framework that has become very popular lately. This is actually my second attempt at this. My first was fairly successful technically, but proved that some of my ideas about my project were invalid. I believe I've fixed the conceptual problems, so I'm redoing the project.

Ruby on Rails is so well liked because it makes everything simple. Whereas in previous web frameworks, only 10% of your effort went to critical code, the rest going to supporting code. With Ruby on Rails, there is pretty much only critical code. However, I find that still only 10% of my effort if going to writing critical code, with the rest of my time going to understanding the framework, due to strange problems I have.

I believe I have some fundamental misunderstandings about how Ruby on Rails does things. For instance, I was surprised to learn that you can have multiple different objects that represent the same thing! The following code returns false.

a = Foo.find(id)
b = Foo.find(id)
a.equal? b

In this example, we load two objects by the same id, and compare to see if they are the same object. They are not.

This amazes me. If you are in a transaction, and change the state of an object, the same object referred to through some other path will not reflect that change. This could cause endless confusion, but I suppose there is some way you have to program so that this problem would never reveal itself.

A similar problem is one where a change to one object causes a change to another object. So if every call to an instance method of a database object (model instance, in Rails parlance), Foo.doSomething causes some data in a linked object of type Bar to change, then how do I write the code so that this happens? If I change the instance of Bar on Foo.doSomething, then I have to keep that instance as an instance variable on Foo, until I save. Alternatively, I could override the save method, and make the change there, if necessary. However, in either case I have to override save so that the depended instance of Bar is saved as well. This doesn't work, throwing an error about the number of arguments to save.

Also, why do I have to save? And why do I have to specify transactions manually? Why can't everything in one web request be a single transaction, and all modified objects automatically saved?

I guess I really haven't "gotten" Rails yet. Although perhaps there is nothing to get, and it really is only suitable for the most simplistic applications.