Category Archives: Friends

Whither Water

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I read this article about restaurants and their corkage fees. Mostly out of dull curiosity I found myself satisfied that I don't agree and there are delightful ways to avoid this entire argument.

But to the vex, paying a corkage fee is a custom where diners who supply their own wine pay the establishment money for the privilege. You have a choice, either pay the insane markup (feels a lot like a mugging) on restaurant wine or pay to bring your own. Either way you'll pay. The linked article even goes so far to comment that bringing your own wine is shaming the sommelier, because you don't like his offerings. So, you quibble with the quality of truncheon that you are mugged with. Ah. I suppose I've never found a use for a sommelier, and that's likely because it's a class warfare thing, sommeliers are great if you're a 17th century royal, otherwise be your own sommelier. Anyhow, the word indicates the servant who ran ahead and prepared a meal. In the United States, nobody runs ahead, unless it's a mugger waiting for you in an alley. So, sommelier, great. The article states that if you really want to be nice you should offer the sommelier a taste. This is amazing. The guy who marks up his swill 1000% gets honor? How about chased out with torches and pitchforks?

Yeah yeah yeah. Be nice. Don't be so grumpy. But why should a meal out spiral out of control and cost you way more than the “food” you are purchasing? The experience is usually the answer. You pay for the experience. So when it comes to wine, you are paying to “enjoy the services of a fine sommelier” or, really, paying for the opportunity to be screwed on price for a bottle of swill and think it's honorable – and defensible.

Partially this comes down to palate. You are paying a sommelier, and his palate to guide you. Because each palate is unique, like a fingerprint, what if you've paid 300 dollars for wine you detest? Instead you've brought a 3 dollar bottle of wine that you love. The sommelier is angry. They charge you a 85 dollar corkage fee as a matter of revenge for not being able to tear the alimentary canal out of the sommelier and staple it to your central nervous system. I mean really, this screams palate bigotry.

So the way out? Water. Fuck you and your worthless overpriced swilly “wines”. No corkage fee, no mugging, no obnoxious useless mugger behaving like a chimpy King Louis XIV court fop being all pretentious and galling over reprehensible palate bigotry. I never asked anyone to run ahead. So, screw off.

But then there is the setting too. “Fine Dining” is a euphemism for “Food Poisoning”, so in many ways that too is just so much of a waste of time and valuable resources. These self-puffed joints get grumpy and bent if you bring your own wine and so either pay their mugger to sulk in the corner or get your food to go and enjoy it at home with your own wine. Alas, you'll need a roll of TP too, so it's not like there is a win condition here anyways.

At least the water is chlorinated, so you at least have that basic thing to go on… Always remember to tip the angry sulking mugger too. He really wanted to bash your brains out and rifle through your pockets for loose change.

I'm honestly surprised they don't have a $50 charge for a glass of water. Seems like they've followed a theme and left out a gloriously glaring exception. After all, this is Fine Dining! LOL.

PAD May 3 2013 – Its a text, text, text world

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How do you communicate differently online than in person, if at all? How do you communicate emotion and intent in a purely written medium?

Each medium has it’s own benefits and vulnerabilities. You can’t communicate the same way from one medium to another. When I’m online I find myself preferring email, iMessage/SMS, and Instant Message because you cannot beat the signal to noise ratio of text. When I’m using my cell phone, I prefer to only communicate over iMessage/SMS because the carrier I’m using, Sprint, has a terrible record of dropped calls and rather poor voice quality. Plus text eschews much of the wrappings of verbal communication, there is no need to preamble and no need for closure statements to indicate communications have concluded, usually. Generally, face to face conversations vary between formal and informal, and I have found that elaboration and clarity excel in formal face to face communications but are annoying in informal senses. When it comes to capturing backchannel cues and extended emotional content in media that doesn’t really have a good capacity to carry that information a wonderful shortcut is the cinema. I have found that it’s quite handy to refer to a common corpus of movies in which quoting scenes can convey everything from mood, through atmosphere, including sense and quite often, the message itself. The only issue is establishing that cinematic common corpus that those that communicate with me need to make sense of some of the shorthand phrases that I use to carry backchannel messages.

What movies? There are so many. Off the top of my head, pretty much anything Disney has produced because it’s ubiquitous. Comedies are rich with great scenes and raw material and I find myself referring to the classics such as Airplane!, Clue, Noises Off, Planes-Trains-and-Automobiles, Transylvania 6-5000, and the entire oeuvre of Mel Brooks, such as Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. Also, worth mentioning is a classic comedy, The Kentucky Fried Movie. There are also other movies that lend detail and depth that aren’t really comedies, such as “Love, Actually.” and “Serendipity”. Then of course scifi movies like Serenity, the Alien series of movies, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Generally, since I keep much of this for the informal channel of communication the people who need to understand this corpus have likely seen these movies several times, likely with us.

Encrypt Everything

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Lavabit and Silent Circle have given up when it comes to providing encrypted email communications. Mega plans on providing something to cover the gap and in general the only real way to deal with privacy-in-email is end-to-end encryption. There was talk that at some point email might give way to writing letters and using the US Postal Service but there as well you’ve got Postmasters writing commands taped to mail about how everything has to be photocopied and stored – so even the US Postal Service is full of spies, the only thing the US Postal Service can be trusted to carry is junk mail.

What is the answer? Pretty Good Privacy. PGP, or rather, the non-Symantec version of it which is the GNU one, the GPG. If you really want to keep what you write private when you send it to someone else, the only way to do that is for everyone to have GPG installed on their email system so you can write email using their public key, which converts your email to cyphertext, secure from even the NSA’s prying eyes, and requires your recipient to unlock the message using their secret key, which they have.

I’ve been playing with PGP and GPG now for a very long time and I decided I would at least make a route available if anyone wanted to contact me with privacy intact – my public keys are on my blog, they are also on all the keyservers including the one hosted and run by MIT and the GPG Keyserver as well. To send me a private message via email all you need to do is get GPG, set it up, create your secret and public key, get my public key, use it to write me an email and only I’ll be able to read it. The NSA will just flag the encrypted contents for later analysis and thanks to AES–256, they’ll be hard pressed to get to the plaintext in your message.

That’s the way around all of this. GPG for everything. GPG public keys for email, for chat, for VPN, for files, and HTTP-in-GPG. Everything pumped through GPG. Since the government won’t stop spying on us, it’s our duty as citizens to secure our own effects against illegal search and siezure, and technology exists to do so.

Encrypt everything.

Wine Tasting Notes for 2013 Traverse City Tour

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Chateau Chantal

Bob Flight –

* Chardonnay – watery and acidic 70
* PR Chardonnay – wee butter, weakly Oaked 78
* Pinot Noir – fertilizer – basic taste uh 60 color is brown
* PR Pinot Noir – burnt sugar n slightly better 76 color is brown
* PR Trio – nasty n bacon wrapped in rotten leather. Taste is okay. 78
* PR Cab Franc – toffee coffee n early tannic pack, lame on follow through 78

Laurentide

* 11 Chardonnay – lemon and lime with light pear notes 84
* 11 Sauvignon Blanc – funky and sour nose, urinal ammonia taste, weak lemonade notes 70
* 11 Emergence white – very light burnt wood scent with a strong lime note low acid 84
* 10 Pinot noir – plaster and drywall dust nose dry with a sandy talc grip 85

Verterra

* Pinot noir 11 – curt with a nose of urinal puck 85
* Reserve red 11 – excellent development 89 great long finish

2lads

* 11 sparkling Pinot Grigio – bubbles and heat 78
* 11 Pinot noir – alcohol raspberries and strawberries n great lasting power on the palate 89
* 11 Pinot noir cuvée Beatrice – vinyl and leather n quite late on the palate 90
* 11 cab franc merlot – blackberry and raspberries 88

CGT

* Laika gruner veltliner – dry 84
* 11 barrel fermented Chardonnay – floral hibiscus. Spicy warm post palate 88
* 11 gamay noir – bubblegum nose tart cherry velvety mouthfeel 89
* 11 silhouette red wine – punchy tannins 88 nice acid
* 11 edelzwicker – melon canteloupe n funky 72
* 12 late harvest Chardonnay – pear n champagne bite and nicely sweet 85

Bowers Harbor

* Rose – simple 82
* Pinot Grigio – nice nose 84
* Wooded Chardonnay – 86
* Pinot Noir wind whistle – burnt sugar caramel n delightful finish and very tight and high tannic package 90
* Claret – raspberry and blackberry on the nose – super tight tannins. 88

Black Star Farms

* 2012 arcturos Pinot noir rose – acid 87
* 2011 arcturos barrel aged Chardonnay – caramel on the nose butter and oak with notes of caramel and apples and pears. 89
* 2011 arcturos Pinot noir – maple syrup on the nose , buttery and spicy, 90
* 2010 vintners select – spicy 89
* 2011 arcturos Cabernet franc – harsh and tannic 85

Brys Estates

* 12 Pinot Blanc pear with lime chasing it 88
* 12 naked Chardonnay – coconut and pear 87
* 11 Pinot noir – lingering spice, velvety smoothness 90
* 11 cab/merlot – half sour pickles pepperoni salami n – smooth and chewy 91
* 11 merlot – sour cherries 87
* 12 Riesling/Gris – strawberries and cherries 87
* 12 Pinot noir/Riesling – sweet with a shine of sour chasing it around 84

Hawthorne

* Pinot Grigio – light n pear and bright spicy flash 86
* 10 barrel res Chardonnay – light nose light butter and apricots 88
* 12 rose – too clenchy 80
* 12 gamay noir – delicious nose quite good with spice and peppers 87
* 10 cab franc/merlot – 88

PAD 5/7/2013 – Key Takeaway

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Give your newer sisters and brothers-in-WordPress one piece of advice based on your experiences blogging.

If you’re a new blogger, what’s one question you’d like to ask other bloggers?

The best advice I can give is to be honest but have control over what you say. Honesty is the best policy, as the old adage is fond of saying and it keeps blogging simple as you don’t need to remember any lies you’ve written in order to keep your blog internally consistent. However, honesty has it’s limits, and that has more to do with sharing and privacy. Depending on why you blog, sometimes you may find yourself wanting to write about something private. I think that assigning posts passwords is a great feature to WordPress and makes sharing securable.

Some things are worth talking about, writing about. Some things you share aren’t really meant for your coworkers of your employer and then the best policy here is to slap a password on the posts and keep them private from wandering eyes.

There are a lot of great reasons too, to blog independently from WordPress.com. Having control over your content, not having to worry about quotas or paying for extra services all make self-hosting with WordPress.org really worth it in the long run, especially with the right hosting provider. I’ve found a lot of the plugins that enrich the self-hosted option of WordPress.org makes the product really shine. Here are some things to look into if you think blogging may be for you:

1. Fixing your .htaccess file on your blog. This can be configured to restrict your blog from foreign browsers. I’ve decided to ban entire countries from reading my blog mostly because I don’t agree with their politics, and in the case of China, I’ve gotten quite tired of comment spam. By limiting incoming traffic from browsers using this file, you can preclude them from ever being a problem. Just because the Internet is global doesn’t mean that you should feel forced to respect that globality.

2. Blacklist & IP Filter – These two plugins help identify unwanted IP addresses that are unwanted on your blog and the plugin IP Filter helps you block those with more configurability than you can get with .htaccess.

3. Akismet and Jetpack really help protect and extend your blog. Every blog I host has these two plugins and once you get them configured properly they add so many wonderful features to your blog that it’s difficult to imagine using the blogs without them.

4. PhotoDropper – This plugin makes searching for and inserting pictures in your blog posts a cakewalk. It takes care of searching for the terms you want, only shows you Creative Commons licensed imagery so you don’t accidentally run afoul of image copyright holders and automatically includes credit lines to your posts to help respect the people who are sharing the imagery you are using on your blog. It’s about as turnkey as I’ve been able to find when it comes to finding and crediting blog pictures that I use to enrich my blog posts.

Beyond plugins it’s also worth it to mention AgileTortiose’s iOS app Drafts. This app makes writing anything, journal entires, emails, and blog posts a snap. You can update on any connected device until you are ready and the destination selector feature makes pushing your updates out to various service a snap. I journal with DayOne and I post to WordPress using Poster. Drafts has options for these other apps and a dizzying array of more just for the tapping.

C2E2: Where is DC?

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A disturbing thought occurred to me this morning. In regards to DC and their lack of show-floor presence at C2E2. When you come to a convention like this, it’s your best opportunity to connect with your fans, otherwise known as your customers. The usual way to do this is to have some prefab construction that your fans can spot and congregate around. Marvel, Dark Horse Studios and the three big tee-shirt companies Graphitti, Stylin Online, and SuperheroStuff. No DC presence at all on the trade show floor. When asked about this, DC stated that they wanted to engage in the panels and let their artists engage in Artists Alley.

I can understand the logic, but It seems rather remarkable and upsetting. Marvel brought their A game with a big beautiful HDTV with Avengers on a play-loop. DC? They didn’t even come to the game, let alone bring anything for us. They are still giving things away, as is the custom, but only in the panels. It’s fine really, but indicates a disturbing new take on how DC considers conventions and fan/customer relations.

What occurred to me that pushed my worry buttons even harder was the way DC is treating their writers and artists. I call it DC’s Musical Chairs for their creative staff. This upsets the fans because you like how a story is being told and how it’s being illustrated and after a few issues things change. This points to DC turning their creative staff into a commodity pool. You have X random writer and X random artist and they seem to be selected by dartboard or roulette wheel. Ignoring the convention goers by abandoning the trade show floor shows a mark of carelessness that only gets reinforced by the musical chairs. Who cares who writes Superman? Who cares if he’s made of teeny triangles, stick figures, or photo-realistic styles? DC doesn’t. This turns their conventions and their creatives into commodities, just another rude list of ingredients which lowers the art down to mechanistic pablum to seed fandoms and sell movie tickets.

I say rude because this squandering of talent and respect is eroding the brand identity. Marvel is making off with all the jewels. Our attention is on Marvel, on The Avengers, not on DC, Green Lantern (movie flop) or, and here’s the real obnoxiousness, where is Superman?!? You’ve taken a archetypal hero (he is now, everyone recognizes superman) and squandered him. The Man of Steel movie comes out in a few weeks! What are your fans thinking? We’re thinking about Marvel, The Avengers, and Iron Man 3.

Superman didn’t show up.

This was an error DC. You are sliding down the drain and eventually your fans will wander away. I only hope this sort of concern, and the reasons for it are just a blunder, never to be repeated.

WordPress Security

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Bank vault doorI run a gaggle of WordPress blogs, both for personal reasons and for work reasons. My SupportPress site runs on WordPress.org and the host I’ve been using all along, iPage sent me an email informing me that they have detected a botnet-sourced cyberattack directed at the login pages of WordPress.org installations. They also informed all their customers that they have installed network limits on these attacks, but that even though the attacks have been greatly reduced, that it shouldn’t lead to a flagging of security vigilance.

No time like the present to get things installed on all my WordPress blogs. The first thing I can think of since all my passwords are 16 to 20 characters long, randomized, stored for me in 1Password, and stored in such a way that even I don’t know them – is to install a plugin called Limit Login Attempts to all the WordPress blogs I manage. This will prevent people from screwing up their login attempts and it will email me when they try. So far this blog is covered and I don’t really expect any problems here.

Thanks to social networking, especially Twitter and my good friend @wyrdsmyth, and my hosting provider iPage I have been protected all along. More security is usually a good thing and in this case, warranted with this extra plugin. Next stop are all the other blogs I manage.

photo by: walla2chick

PAD 3/31/2013 – Odd Couple

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Does a messy home (or office) make you anxious and cranky, or is cleaning something you just do before company comes over?

There is a minimal amount of clutter that I can contend with. I don’t keep my house immaculate all the time, and there are certainly phases where I feel like the house has devolved into a mess and it has to be addressed. Quite often it’s when family comes to visit, but they are more of an excuse than anything else. I don’t want to be seen living like a slob, even though I don’t, not really. It’s impossible to say that I’m not at least a little bit slovenly but I will say that I’m at least functionally organized at home. The only bits that make me cranky are when there is too much obnoxiousness all in one spot – a giant heap of dirty clothes strewn about and dirty socks in random places, for example. It doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does that gets to me. The solution is snap easy, just gather everything up and throw it into the washing machine. Dirty is clean, at least in a bin, and it just takes a wee bit to put order to that chaos.

One thing that I will admit to is that a messy or disorganized kitchen does drive me to distraction. I’m fine with making do with what you have, but things should be with other things that are like them, the wooden spoons need to be together, the spatulas need to be together and the knives need to be together. I don’t think I’m too pushy about these things, but they do get to me.

My Ideal Kitchen

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My ideal kitchen is something that has occupied my mind on and off for years. I’ve worked in galleys and small kitchens and large kitchens and I’ve found myself able to cook well despite the small spaces. After a while I figured that if you do not have the space, you have to become more clever. Repurposing and multi-purposing tools you already have become paramount and blogs like LifeHacker are a great place to discover new clever ways to use what you have and make it really perform tasks that you’d never think before. Working in a very small kitchen, for example, if you need more counter space for chopping or mincing then pull out a drawer and put a cutting board across the drawer. It’s the perfect height, and adds just the right amount of space when you need it and pushes away when you don’t need it. It’s that sort of cleverness that really attracts me.

So size isn’t so much of an issue. What it really comes down to are really high-quality durable tools that make sense to use. Great refrigerators with numerous zones, whole-doors, and the freezer on top. A really excellent oven, using natural gas for fuel, a smaller oven on top of a larger one below, with interiors that are nice and clean. I’m particular about the design of the oven space itself. Ovens need good temperature controls, but that’s only part of it. Ovens, no matter what system controls the temperature inside the oven can benefit from bricks. Cheap and easy, bricks are awesome in ovens. They absorb heat and radiate heat slowly – the oven takes longer to get to temperature but the variability of the temperature cycling is smoothed out as the bricks compensate for the variability and make your baking much more reliable. The cooktop needs to be large, or as large as it can be. Lots of burners and with the right tools even the most basic of ovens with cooktops can become a great and versatile tool. For the cookware the kitchen needs to have at least a various compliment of Lodge Logic cookware. I prefer in nearly every situation to cook with cast iron. There are exceptions, proper steel pans for crepes for example, and stainless steel 18/10 sauciers. Kitchen gadgets and tools are pretty much dominated by OXO brand as far as I’m concerned. Much of what they make is superior to other options because they are designed well and cleverly, like measuring cups you can use looking down into them instead of across of them. There is another brand called “The Pampered Chef” that makes wooden spoons and they are exceptional. All of these things are good selections in the perfect kitchen, but the most essential tool in any kitchen, the ones you want to really concentrate on because you’ll use these tools the most are your knives. Every kitchen should have a host of fine knives and they have to be sharp, non-serrated, and of multiple sizes. paring, small chef, large chef, butchers blade and optionally a Santoku blade. I’m a huge fan of Victorinox brand for knives. They are inexpensive, durable, sharp and of exceptional quality. Your knives do not have to be expensive label-whore blades, but they have to be razor sharp and regularly sharpened. Nothing contributes to kitchen injuries more than struggling with a dull knife.

So my perfect kitchen can be a movable feast. I would want to bring my own knives with me if I were to go wandering – everything else is pretty much either a standard or can be worked around. Perhaps someday I’ll have a house where I can design the kitchen and that’ll be where the heart of my home will be.