RIP: 1/1/1999-10/17/2011 – The Snake Named Kitten

Yesterday, I said goodbye to my snake, Kitten. I’ve had her since I was 19, she’s moved with me 10 different times, two states, and has seen some of the best and worst times of my life. I’ll never forget the day that she got too big to rest on the frames of my glasses, the way she looked at me when I tried to feed her pre-heated mice, or the very last time she looked at me.

I drove out to Ocean Shores in the rain, way out onto the beach, away from the dunes and close enough for the incoming tide to quench the embers.

I have a million stories I could tell… good, bad, silly… but it all comes down to this: I will miss you, my friend.

On Getting Paid As A Contractor

Constructive criticism for large companies who hire contractors:

Be upfront about how you want to be invoiced.
Have a plan about how you’d like to be invoiced. Once a month? Twice a month? Once every two weeks? I’m not saying that you can’t be flexible, or have grey areas, or decide to change your mind levels of okay-ness with not being invoiced in the way that you define, but having some sort of baseline that you advertise is a good place to start.

If possible, automate.
Think about implementing a system with limited automated capabilities. Think web-based forms instead of Word or PDF based invoices. Think about standardization. Think about batch processing. Time will be saved on everybody’s part. Less time to prepare invoices. Clean approval pipelines. Finally, if a schedule exists, your contractor can have some assurances as to when checks will be cut, etc.

Be up front about status.
Finally, if neither of the two is in place in any regard and someone inquires about status… Be prompt and set expectations appropriately. Nothing sucks worse than wanting to find out the status of your livelihood and feeling like it goes into a black hole.

If you happen to be a contractor, use your mad skills to suss this information out of your employer.

In short: set clear expectations, under-promise, over-communicate and over-deliver.

I can haz a rocker! or How Pixie got her freestyle slalom on

I started skating (again) on a whim in March with a girlfriend of mine who is interested in roller derby, but switched to inlines in June to play with slalom. All told, at this point, I’ve been rolling around various rinks around Seattle for about 6 months. Yesterday, I switched from a flat 72mm 4-wheel setup to a 68mm heel and toe, 72mm for the center wheels; a configuration known as a “crescent rocker“.

I am now a proper slalom freestyle skater!

My first revelation was “Wow, minus-2mm makes a bigger difference than I expected”, which occurred in the nanoseconds between me standing and me pitching myself backwards onto the floor, butt first. After a few orbits around the rink, the difference became apparent in entirely different ways…

1. Inlines rocker a bit naturally due to stopping/slowing down with heel and toe wheels
2. Because wear is an organic process, the edge is maintained and functions as a single line
3. Gosh, a 2mm difference is flippin huge

Basically, I went from having an inner edge and an outer edge on each skate… to having 6 distinct edges; toe-center inner edge, toe-center outer edge, center inner edge, center outer edge, center-heel inner edge, center-heel outer edge. (I realized the edge-multiplication after pitching myself onto the floor in the middle of crossover…) I was able to feel these edges while in motion after a few more rounds around the rink.

I started playing with a move adapted from roller skating, where you drag your left heel in front of your right toe and then alternate to right heel in front of left toe, etc. Then I practiced dragging my left toe behind my right heel, rinse, lather, repeat, etc. What I was looking for was the point at which I went from using front two wheels, to center two wheels, to back two wheels… and articulating the new, now two-wheeled, edge.

(you may want to mute your speakers if you click through to the links in this next paragraph, annoying munobal.net music)

I played with a few basic slalom moves like fish and snake before attempting to tackle Marbrouk/Grapevine, a move that’s been plaguing me for weeks. I’m fairly happy to report that after banging my head against the final transition before the pattern repeats itself… that it has been made RETARDEDLY easy by the rockered wheels. I think the reason for that is that, on the rocker, you are able to just use your front two wheels of each skate as you do the toe-toe/reverse eagle spin around the final cone.

(you can unmute now)

At the very end of the night, I got brave enough to try some of the pivots that I’ve been learning, such as Grand Vault/Volte and Korean Vault/Volte. Initial experimentation seems to have gone well.

What I like most about the rocker setup is maneuverability. Like maneuverability times 10. I now have 6 edges and 4 potential pivot points per skate (as compared to 2 edges and 2 pivot points on a flat setup). I imagine that the trick menu could turn into an all-you-can-eat buffet, which is wickedly exciting to me. I think the downside, at least while I’m getting my sea-legs, is speed. There is potential to recover that aspect after I get more comfortable using my edges, but initially I see it as a drawback.

What are your thoughts? Did you start on a rocker? Since being on a rocker, have you tried doing slalom tricks on a flat setup? Do you have any stories about early rocker experiences?

White Lightning Chicken Chili

I found this “white lighting chicken chili” mix at the local QFC (a supermarket in WA) and thought it’d make a fun base to start a yummy a two-day chili from. It was nom, so very nom.

Ingredients

• 1 pkg chicken chili mix (see below for details on what’s in it)
• 4 1/2 cups water
• 2 1/2 cups chicken broth (homemade is awesome, but unnecessary)
• 1 1/2 cups cooked chicken (I used just over 1 lb boneless skinless breast, see prep below)
• 1 4oz can of chopped green chilies
• 3-4 tablespoons of Old Bay seasoning
• 2-3 tablespoons thyme
• 1/4 cup pepperjack cheese, grated

Soup Packet contents and spices:
White beans, pinto beans, carrots, onions, parsley, sea salt, garlic, celery seed, turmeric.

Prep:
Mix Old Bay seasoning and Thyme. Coat chicken lightly in the mixture.

Cook!:

1. Heat skillet over med-high heat. Test heat by using the Lidenfrost effect or until a droplet of water skitters across the surface of the pan.
2. NOTE: Sear the chicken breast. This takes between 15-60 seconds per side (depends on the size of the chicken). When done, there should be a 2mm layer on each side.
3. Set aside for a few. Quickly wash the skillet and return to heat. Return chicken to skillet and cook slowly on med-low until done (slightly browned on the outside, not pink on the inside).
4. Cut chicken into approx 1″ cubes.
5. Combine bean mixture and water in a 6 qt. pot/soup kettle/crock pot.
6. Bring to boil, then cover, reduce heat and allow to simmer for 1 hr.
7. Add chicken, spice packet and veggie packet and green chilies. (If you’re making this from scratch – cook onions, carrots, and garlic until tender and golden brown prior to this step.)
8. Return to boil, then cover, reduce heat and allow to simmer for another 2+ hrs. (NOTE: Recipe calls for only 30 min, but at this time, it was more soup-like than chili-like, hence the additional time.)



Serve:
Ladle into a bowl and garnish with some of the grated pepperjack cheese.

Serves 2-4.

* For a bit of a kick, add one chipotle chili when you add the chicken and other spices.

Black Bean Soup with Chipotle Chiles

I’m bummed that I never did get a good photo of this in it’s final served form. No matter, here goes! Original recipe found on Epicurious.

Ingredients

• olive oil
• 2 medium sized red onions, chopped
• 1 medium sized red bell pepper, chopped
• 1 medium sized green bell pepper, chopped
• 6 garlic cloves, minced
• 4 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 16-oz package dried black beans
• 2-3 chipotle chiles from a can – available in the Latin American section of many supermarkets in a spicy tomato sauce called adobo
• 9 cups chicken broth (homemade if possible)
• 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice (juice from one medium lime)
• plain nonfat yogurt
• chopped seeded vine tomatoes
• chopped fresh cilantro

Prep:
Chop the onions and bell peppers. Mince the garlic. Rinse the beans and remove any bad or shriveled ones.

You will need to chop the tomatoes and cilantro, but they are not needed for several hours.

Cook!:

1. Heat a few teaspoons of olive oil in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat (no need to be exact, just enough to coat the bottom of the skillet).
2. Add onions and bell peppers until brown.
3. Add garlic and cumin; stir until well mixed in. approx 1 min.
4. Transfer mixture to a 6 qt. slow cooker (I used a 6 qt. pot on the stove, but a crock pot will do just as well).
5. Add beans and chipotles, (I chopped up 3 peppers and added some of the spicy tomato sauce from the can as well – it was pretty spicy, your milage may vary. The original recipe calls for 1 tsp chipotle.)
6. Add 7 cups chicken broth. (I added 1 cup at a time, stirring and letting each mixture come to a boil before adding the next cup. The original recipe says add all at once)
7. Cook on high until beans are tender. (Recipe says 6 hrs, but I left it on for about 3…)
8. Transfer beans mixture to a blender; puree until smooth. (Recipe calls for 2 cups, I pureed the majority of the bean and veggie matter. If you do this, beware of spillage if there’s too much liquid in the blender.)
9. Return puree to the cooker/pot.
10. Add remaining 2 cups of chicken broth to the pot. Cook on medium-low for another 1-1.5 hr.
11. Stir in lime juice. Salt and pepper to taste. (Recipe calls for 2 teaspoons coarse kosher salt and 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper. I used a pinch of salt and a a few twists of a the pepper grinder, but like the chiles, your milage may vary.)

Serve:

Ladle soup into bowls. Spoon a bit of yogurt into each bowl. Sprinkle with tomatoes and cilantro. Voila!

Serves 6-8.

Espresso rub seared pork loin with spiced potatoes and sauteed carrots

Tangy and hearty! I picked up the Seattle Spices – Espresso rub at the Farmer’s Market in downtown Ballard a few weekends ago and the idea for this recipe has been kicking around in my head ever since. Not too bad for a first crack. Substitute a red leaf lettuce salad (with a light balsamic vinegar dressing) for the sauteed carrots to enjoy a lighter meal…

Ingredients:

• Espresso Rub from Seattle Spices.
• 1 lb pork loin
• 6-7 small red potatoes (or about 1 1/2 cups of the potato cut/type of your choice)
• 3/4 medium carrots cut in 1/4s or 1/2s (about 1 cup)
• virgin olive oil
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 tablespoon cumin
• coarse ground pepper
• sea salt
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• 2 tablespoons sweet mustard
• 1-2 tablespoons worcestershire sauce

Prep:
Add potatoes, ~2 tablespoons virgin olive oil, paprika, cumin, pinch of salt and pepper to a medium sized bowl. Mix thoroughly or until all potatoes are coated lightly with olive oil. Set aside.

Mix mustard and worcestershire in a small bowl. Set aside, this is the drizzle for the ‘loin when it’s finished.

Set oven on bake @ 425 degrees.

Lay loin on a cutting board. Dust a few tablespoons of the Espresso rub on the loin. Use tongs (or chopsticks!) to rotate the loin and coat the entire loin with the rub.

Cook!:

1. Heat a skillet over med-high heat. Test heat by using the Leidenfrost Effect or until a droplet of water skitters across the surface.
2. NOTE: This will need to be done very quickly.Sear the loin very quickly. 3-5 seconds on each surface should be sufficient. This will create a 2 mm layer on the entire surface of the loin
3. Place seared loin in a flat casserole or pyrex pan. Add potatoes to pan.
4. Place pan in the oven and cook for approx 35-40 min (or until internal temperature is about 140-145). Check temperature and stir potatoes. Add an additional 8-10 minutes to the timer.
5. On the stovetop, heat medium/small skillet to med-low. When butter is fully melted, add carrots and approx 1 teaspoon Espresso rub. Cook until carrots are tender.
6. Remove loin from the oven when internal temperature is ~160 degrees.

Cut loin into medallions, drizzle with mustard-worchetershire mixture. Serve with potatoes and carrots.

Serves 2-4.

Darjeeling Limited and Hotel Cavalier

Darjeeling Limited

Hotel Cavalier

I watched Hotel Cavalier when it was first released on iTunes sometime in the middle of last year, on the urging of a friend who was amused by the dialogue between Natalie Portman and Luke Wilson’s characters:

Nat: Whatever happens in the end, I don’t wanna lose you as my friend.
Luke: I promise, I will never be your friend. No matter what. Ever.

He likened the scene to a particularly destructive relationship in his past. And who hasn’t felt that pull – whether or not it’s been acted upon? You care about someone… but they make you feel good and shitty at the same time?

In short, I really liked it. It’s short, poignant, the soundtrack is beautiful. The interplay between characters is both familiar and distant, punctuated by watching the sun from the balcony with the curtains billowing around them.

Darjeeling Limited

Darjeeling Limited unravels, like a thread pulled from a knit sweater. It’s a story about three brothers traveling on a train called “Darjeeling Limited”. Their father (Bill Murray) is killed by a taxi on the way to the train. Francis (Owen Wilson), injured in a motorcycle accident attempts to bring the family closer together persuades his brothers Peter (Adrian Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) to embark on a spiritual quest.

Francis puts together an entire itinerary of the most spiritual places in India. Like most journeys with a “plan”, things never turn out quite as expected. Unfortunately, they get kicked off the train. They meet and accidentally kill an Indian boy. They find their estranged mother, who skips off after they meet her at the convent where she was living.

Peter is running from his wife and unborn child. Jack is running from his ex-girlfriend. But somehow, their shared experiences allow them to establish a relationship beyond “family”. The journey itself and the search for a spiritual connection being the catalysis. The metaphor is pretty obvious, but established well – sentimental without being sappy, true to the Wes Anderson form.

I think the most compelling thing about Anderson’s work is his expression of the details that actually make up true to life interactions, the real and the mundane. Much in the same way that I appreciate about Murakami, he goes beyond the broad strokes of The Story into the components that make up The Story.

Fighting about petty things like who their father loved more. An affair on the train. Sharing prescription drugs procured in the Indian pharmacies. The special drink served to them on the train. The eldest choosing food for the others.

In short this is another gem from Wes Anderson. Like Hotel Cavalier, the soundtrack is beautiful, tying the movie together with the tunes introduced in Hotel Cavalier. My favorite is “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” by Peter Sarstedt.

I give it a solid – I like it. Go watch it. Enjoy. Damn it.

Trailer
Wikipedia
IMDB

Points on Plurk.

Plurk.

Touted as an alternative to Twitter and gained a degree of popularity during a particularly horrendous Twitter-flakeage (along with friendfeed), and HOW can I blame people for pursuing alternatives?

The Interesting:
Plurk appears to take the “timeline” seriously, there is a scrolling hour display across the bottom edge of the plurkstream. The UI updates posts in a stream that spans the browser window places various individual’s updates in a left (older) to right (newer) fashion. In a way, it’s like stepping into the stream of someone’s updates.

The short “140 character” limit and a UI that taps into the expression of emotional state attached to an action give Plurk it’s micro-blog distinction.

However, there are some problematic elements:
a) The span is less than a day wide. You have to page back to see farther than 3-4 hours between posts.

b) User’s posts seem to be placed haphazardly in the “flow” – someone updates; and there’s no rhyme or reason as to where (vertically) it shows up in the plurkstream.

c) User responses attach to the original post – two things that are annoying about this… 1) you have to go back to the original post to find out what’s been said since the last post/comment… 2) you can tell *if* things have been updated, but “when” – since the overall “design” seems to convey ‘things in order’ – this does not make sense.

d) In order to update your plurkstream or see responses, you have to actually click an “update” link.

Intuitive UI improvements:
Complex or simple. It seems that Plurk has decided to take the “middle road” by making some features less accessible.

a) Just update the plurkstream. The backend is smart enough to figure out that there has been an update, so why not just post it?

Due to the nature of plurk-repsonses; requesting to view only plurks with responses makes sense, however, there is also a visual notification of a plurk-response in three ways – 1) comment number next to the plurk is updated, 2) the comment number is highlighted in red, and 3) the link in the lower left corner of the page indicating the number of responses.

b) Give users the ability to view the plurkstream via more than a couple of hours at a stretch. A single day view with an adjusted hour span would be an improvement over having to paginate backwards – even though there is a marker for “Yesterday”.

c) Vertical plurkstream… Make Sense. There does not appear to be a rhyme or reason for the location of various plurks in the vertical view. Not organized by user, not by time posted…

Usability notes:
a) Combine account and profile settings. It’s more intuitive to the user to modify aspects of their “plurk-sionality” in the same place.

b) You can scan all the way forward, but not all the way back in the timeline.

General comments:
It would be great to have more transparency between Plurk developers and the Plurk community. I’ve posted comments to the Plurk GetSatisfaction page.

Overall Plurk is an interesting little web service that allows you to view and post updates in realtime and consolidating responses to posts in a visually unique fashion. It’s got a number of other kitschy features, such as Karma – a unique bend on the Social Networking scene, time will tell if both Plurk and it’s features have sticking power.

The Number 23

I’ve been watching movies lately. The movie “number 23″ intrigued me from the moment I knew that it existed. Having a teenage relationship with numerology and The Principia Discordia. My number on the swim team was 23. Many of my best friend’s email addresses have the number 23 in them somehow. It’s an old obsession come to life… but back to the story.

I never saw it in the theater. It’s been years since movies on the big screen have moved me to actually make the trek out.

number 23 is a dark and bizarre unfolding of a life forgotten. Pulp Noir mixed in with something else, a strange form of quasi realism that seems to actually hold the film together and yet contribute to the pulpy-disjointed psychosis that takes hold of the main character Jim Carrey. Paranoia comes on slowly, noticing connections that evolve into a singular focus on the number.

What happens when who you *were* starts invading who you have become?

Personally, I love the delta between the hard-ass pulp detective and the mild mannered guy in the present. At all times in his narrative, he appears fearful of himself, timid.

His tragedy is that he has both a present and a distant past. Recent past has been forgotten.

How long can you hide the truth from yourself. Especially when you find a book that is your own confession. Yet the fragile reality unravels. The more a vague picture emerges, like astrology coaless into reality. Then, paranoia.

You see what you search for. Everywhere.

Trailer
Wikipedia
IMDB

The Orphanage

If you’ve seen and loved Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro brings you on another trip into the fantastic, the edge between what is possible and what is not. Reality and imagination – in a way that American’s haven’t really been able to portray in film. It doesn’t seem to be “the way”.

My appreciation of Magical Realism was born out of Gabriel Garcia’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, down the rabbit hole of imagery, that small place where your senses might lie to you.

del Toro takes you on a journey of an orphan, who adopts an orphan… then upon returning to her orphanage, perhaps to give back some of the care she received as an orphan herself. But winds up learning terrible truths about events that took place before she could understand them. The Orphanage itself becomes both her obsession and her prison, love for her son leads her on a chase that will change the way she looks at life, death, and the afterlife.

The film itself leaves clues as to the conclusion – as the children have left clues as to truths of their lives and deaths.

Is it possible to be touched and freaked out by the same movie? The truth unravels slowly, like pulling on the thread of crochet… and the finish is filled with love – the sweet and the sour, life and death, both vibrant, as real as the sun and the sea.

It seems that del Toro has a beautiful way of connecting life and death, making the vision whole and fluid, like waves, beating the shore, like the tide, marching in and marching out – like the rhythm of the world, in constant motion.

Edit: Side note – the DVD menu-ing system is awesome. Visuals cycle, but the sound does not. I approve!

Trailer
Wikipedia
IMDB