On Chili and a better VNC

This weekend, I'm having my first pseudo-party at my new place. I would have done something sooner if not for the fact I spent the first 3 months terrified of my neighbors who (allegedly) are have the Campbell PD on speed dial and have a quick trigger when it comes to complaining to the local boys in blue about noise. We'll see how it goes. If I never blog again, someone better come bail me out. It's going to be a tribute to chili.

So on that topic, I have to share something that could be a bit graphic in nature:

Cincinnati Chili

So be brave, click on the link and then imagine yourself eating that. The best part of that article:

"Because of the large amount of cheese piled on top, the first few bites often consist entirely of cheese, at least for inexperienced diners."

I have to admit, if live ever brings me to be in Cincinnati, my first meal will be a Skyline, but I will definitely have to enjoy a few bites of cheese before I get to the heart of it. Many thanks to Gary for shedding light on Cincinnati chili.

As I wrote this I had to fight the temptation to spell "bites" as "bytes". I've been doing too many code reviews that say things like "you can't assume our architecture will have 4 byte ints". Hawaii cannot come too soon.

My good friend and technical consultant Gene recommended "NoMachine NX" as a way to get a better VNC experience on Linux. He was right. Its probably a bit faster than Window's Remote Desktop over the same kind of pipe and it gives you the full Linux GUI of your choice. Now I just need a bigger monitor at home so I can run the same resolution at home as I do at work.

On stir-fry and a guiltless plug for the Allman Brothers

I spent a lot of time (way to much time) of my Christmas break watching cooking shows. Why you might ask? Well, the only way I could be watching a cooking show on TV is if its daytime (you almost never see cooking shows in primetime) and I'm not thinking about or doing work. This introduction is going no where, so lets get to the point.

Anyway, one of the tips I saw on the cooking show was to coat your stir-fry meats in a small amount of corn starch before you subject them to the hot pan. I'd heard this from a couple of different places, but I tried it for the first time today with a chicken-onions stir-fry.

I made a simple marinade out of the corn starch, pepper, a pinch of garlic salt, and a dash of soy sauce. Then I rubbed the chicken cubes in the sauce until it was all soaked up before throwing them into my hot oil and garlic. The light starching makes the outside of the meat get a lot of color from the pan and it also keeps the juices in the meat much better. It made all the difference in the world and I'm definitely going to do it again. I've made that recipe for ages without marinating the chicken in the starch mixture and things were way more delicious this time. For a small amount of effort the benefit was huge.

I got another Allman Brothers album today and wow, they are a fantastic band. If you like blues-rock, you gotta listen to them. Of course, there really is no good excuse for not liking blues-rock because it is up there with Latin-jazz as a genera of music that anyone with ears enjoys. It really doesn't get any better than the blues.

Britons in America and Album Dates

I found a very funny article by a BBC corespondent that had just moved to a new assigment in America. There is some stuff about politics that is pretty standard, but he has some funny things to say about self help books and American portion sizes:

On self help books:

When we changed planes in Chicago midway through my never-ending New Year's Eve, I found myself lingering in the self-help section of the bookstore, puzzled by the sort of advice for which Americans are prepared to pay.

I now own copies of God Wants You To Be Rich and You're Broke Because You Want to Be.

If I ever disappear from this programme for a few months, you can assume I will be holed up somewhere writing a self-help book called something like: God Knows Why I'm Broke.

On bacon:

Bacon is no longer really a meat; it has become a garnish served alongside or on top of other foods, as though it was a kind of porcine salad vegetable.

Occasionally it even comes ground up and sprinkled over your dinner like a kind of dark, meaty snow.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to be born on the other side of the pond. I would appreciate 6 weeks of vacation a year, a healthier lifestyle, and a countries with world cooperation as a foreign policy goal. However, I'm happy here with near universal air conditioning, suburbia, and people who shower daily. You have to give up something to get something.

I've been trying to spend more time at the library to expand my horizons now that I'm not formally in school anymore. The tricky thing when you are in a library (or bookstore) is to have some heuristic to decide which book/CD of two you should rent/checkout/purchase. I know you can't judge a book by its cover, but can you use other facts about a CD to determine which one is going to be 'better'?

Some things I look at are artist, date published, and track listings. Obviously, if I've heard to the artist that is the top node in the decision tree. If I've heard of any of the tracks on the CD, the more power to it. However, most of the tracks you know on a CD are the "made for radio" garbage that lacks the potential to have a great album. I'm really looking for great albums when I get something because if there is one song on an album with a great hook, you can get it on iTunes. Finally, I try my best to ignore the picture on the cover and look for published date. Amongst two articles by the same artist, I always try to get the first published album, with the assumption that for almost every artist, the early stuff is better. This of course is the most flawed approach, but if its the library, then the cost of failure is another trip to the library to get the other album.

I thought the previous paragraph would be a lot more interesting when I started to write it, but the only real point in it is the great moral dilemma of "is a typical artist's early or later work better?" The jury is still out on that.

Political leanings and New Years Resolutions

In this season of politics, I'd like to out myself as a Libertarian. I think that is most in line with what I actually believe, but as with any theoretical model for a belief system never quite smacks the nail directly on the head. I think posting this forces me to forgo a career in politics, for which I am grateful.

I definitely believe in social liberalism. I really don't care if you want to marry that man or that woman or even get married in the first place. I don't really care if other people have abortions or not. I don't care if you own a gun as long as you don't do stupid things with it. That couldn't be more of a personal choice. I just want the same liberty in return. If everyone could just behave like adults, we wouldn't need all of these societal morality laws.

I also believe in a small government with limited taxes. I'm fine with tax money going to build roads, schools, and graduate computer science research, but I'm not down with spending a lot of taxes on defense and the inevitable embezzlement that comes with big government. I don't really like giving 1/3 of my paycheck to the government. I think I'm responsible enough to handle my own retirement savings. Its easy to say a lot of these things when you know that you'll never see a small government in your lifetime. You can always dream how nice things would be if I didn't spend 1/3 of my paycheck making sure the US Navy has the fastest and most stealthy submarines in the world.

So for now, I'm registered Republican, but I'm definitely not down with their morality. I'm especially not down with how much money they spend and the tremendous national debt they have been able to create.

I'm not a big fan of politics either, so I guess if you have limited government, then maybe we'll have limited politics as well. Who knows.

So the headline is very misleading. I only have one resolution so far, to go left. Ironically, I happened to announce that in the same blog as when I talk about my political views, but no it has nothing to do with red and blue states. I'm referring to when I have the basketball, I'm going to dribble left about 60% of the time. I need to practice my dribbling left, so I'm going to stop shooting 80% of the time and going right 20% of the time and shoot for something like left 60% of the time, shoot 20% of the time and go right 20% of the time. Because I'm right handed and not terrible good at dribbling with my left hand, this is going to be a tough resolution to keep. I'm hoping that by telling this to the world, it will help me keep it.

Understanding your customers desires and CGN rocking the free world

Yesterday, I had dim sum with a good friend from Stanford who works for Facebook. We were talking about firestorm Facebook got for their new 'Beacon' (Honey, that jewelry and lingerie purchase you just made better be for me or you're dead meat) feature that more or less forced users to share their purchases with their friends unless they could figure out a complex opt-out screen. He more or less said they forced the feature to be on by default because "otherwise nobody would use it".

That's quite possibly the worst possible reason to force a feature on people. Perhaps this is taken a bit out of context, but its still inexcusable to have that attitudes on a number of different levels. Windows had a feature called 'Windows Media Player' that they turned on by default and they got sued by the European Union for it. Even if you can slap your customers around and they still won't leave you doesn't mean you should.

Any business should know that they need to mix what is best for them and what is best for their customers in their product. The cliche "the customer is always right" should apply to the internet as well. Even if you make a feature that can be easily monetized, you have to still weight the costs and benefits of it. Websites have privacy policies not because its best for them, but because its best for their customers. Selling customer data would be much more profitable, but clearly not in the customers' interest.

The problem here may be that Facebook's customers are different from their users. Their customers pay them to display adds and their users post content and click on advertisers links.

There is something to be said for beta testing and customer discovery instead of the web-based ship new code and feature every night. Facebook does quite a few things right, but they prove, a little bit of testing goes a long way. Everyone makes mistakes every once in a while.

The one and only Code Green Networks is the number one of Five data leak prevention companies to watch. 2008 should be a good year for the DLP space. 2007 had 3 big acquisitions and we'll probably see a few more in the next year.

Google Webmaster Tools and Sleep Train

One of the really fun things about having your own website, is you can play around with Google Webmaster Tools. This is a site where if you authenticate yourself as a webmaster (basically put a 'meta' tag in some html on your website), then you can view all kinds of fun information about how people use Google on your site. This includes search queries where they served links to your page, links that were actually clicked through, and page rank of various pages on your site. Because I am a page rank whore, I find this very interesting.

One of the cool stats they give you is the number of people who RSS subscribe to your blog. Much to my surprise, that number was 4, twice the number I expected. That means there are a couple of mystery subscribers out there that also use Google tools to read this blog! It also showed that some people actually clicked through to my blog for various topics I've discussed (like changing 220V plugs on my dryer).

I now own a new bed and I got it for less than half of the 'Sleep Train guaranteed to be the best price' price. It all has to do with price matching Costco's price. As I learned from a bunch of other mattress websites, they sell the same mattress at Costco and Sleep Train, but they call it different things, so you can't price compare them. Sleep Train had a nice Sealy mattress for about 1500 bucks that was named 'Park Meadows' which is the same as Costco's 'Sedona Springs' mattress which goes for about $650. I went into the store when they weren't busy, presented my research, got a price match, and have my mattress delivered the next day. I got the service and showroom of Sleep Train and the price of Costco. Very niiiice.

Storm Coming and Happy New Year

Welcome to 2008! This there could be a lot of big things in store for this year:

1. The Giants very likely could lose 100 games.
2. Code Green Networks could make us all rich or not...
3. I could have a great trip to Hawaii
4. Bellarmine Alumnus Kevin Frandsen could be an everyday 3rd baseman
5. My kickball team might win our league, twice over.
6. I might learn how to shoot a basketball again.
7. Kevin Love could win an elusive NCAA championship for UCLA.
8. I could be consistent and end every one of these with a period or not...
9. I could move for the 4th time in as many years
10. I could have 2 siblings applying to PhD. programs and in 5 years could be the least educated person in my family.

Hmm, I was hoping to have half good things and half bad things for this, but the only for sure bad thing would be the Giants losing 100 games. I also happened to put that first because it is on the top of my mind. So here's to learning to live with the one scary bad thing at the top of your list and enjoying 2008.

With all this in mind, there is supposed to be a monster storm coming in the Bay Area and given the fact that my backup generator didn't start this morning and my battery backup is a 9V, any significant rain my be the end of this website for a week. I guess that's one more thing that 2008 could bring us!