The Blog of Many Hats

The folks over at Drivl have a very funny blog about what code doesn't do. As opposed to what movies tell us it does

Check it out.

Oh, and while we're dispelling code and coder stereotypes, I'll toss in my two cents: real programmers abhor animation of any kind. Yes, games are animated. And graphics designers and movie makers need to deal with animation. But we do not build our tools to contain needless, stupid animation. Mostly, we just want to get our work done and animation just slows us down. So when you see a movie guy click a button, or press a key, and a remarkably complex piece of animation plays to indicate that work is being done...yeah, that's bullshit.

I made duck last night.

It's not something I do often because it's kind of a pain in the butt to do it right.

I decided to do it the Alton Brown way. 100% by the book. No variations.

To sum up the procedure:

1. Remove wings and back from duck.
2. Cut duck into quarters.
3. Soak quarters in brine for 2.5 hours or so.
4. Steam quarters for 45 minutes.
5. Crisp skin in a "NASA Hot" cast-iron skillet in the oven.

A major plus for this technique (steam then sizzle) is that a huge amount of precious duck fat collected on top of the steaming water. I managed to collect about five ounces of fat by boiling off the rest of the water. I'm going to use it to fry up some potatoes later this week.

The meat on my duck was delicious. The skin that touched the hot skillet was delightfully crispy. But the rest of the skin was just plain soggy and nasty. I'm going to have to figure out how to fix that.

On the other hand, my friend Rich ate his part of the duck like he hadn't eaten in weeks. So maybe I'm being overly critical.

If I have one beef with the fine folks at CAO Cigars it's that they have too many different cigars to choose from.

Right now, my humidor contains the following CAO offerings: Italia, Brazilia, CAO Cameroon, CAO Maduro, Criollo, and, of course, the CAO MX2.

There are three more CAO cigars that I don't have: the CAO Gold, the eXtreme, and the CX2.

With a line as extensive as CAO has, it's sometimes hard to keep track of what you like and what you don't. Lots of folks rave about the Italia. I don't particularly care for it...or wait, was it the Brazilia I don't like? They both end with "lia" and they're both from CAO and they have very similar bands. It's very confusing.

But there's no confusion about the MX2. I have 20 of them. I just bought a box yesterday.

The MX2 (which stands for "Maduro times 2") delivers lots of full-bodied goodness. It has Connecticut Broadleaf maduro wrapper, a Brazilian maduro binder, and lots of full-bodied fillers (from Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Peru).

This is my current favorite "second course" cigar. Some folks call it medium-bodied, but I think it's on the full side of medium-full. I really can't handle fuller-bodied cigars unless I have one after I've already had something milder. The MX2 is great for my second course because it can deliver good flavor to an already beleaguered palate.

The MX2 has lots of rich smoke. I really love that. When I take a deep draw, I want my mouth to be filled with smoke (delivering flavor all over my palate). MX2 delivers that. It is also supremely well constructed: tonight when I lit one, I did a bad job, but the cigar still burned evenly right until it was burning my fingers. The draw is exactly as I like it: not too easy, not too firm.

But even if it was poorly constructed, you'd have to love the MX2 just on flavor. It gives and gives and gives. It starts out very spicy and rough and smooths out about a third of the way in. It's hard not to smoke it too fast because it's just so wonderful.

Oh, one more thing: the MX2 looks beautiful in your humidor. The wrappers are super shiny and oily, and the band looks like it belongs on the set of Star Trek. I don't place a lot of stock in a cigar's prettiness, but the MX2 has that in addition to all its other great qualities.

So, bottom line:

Strength: Medium-Full
Taste: Excellent
Draw: Excellent
Price: $80 for a box of 20, $4.50 if bought individually.

Go out and try one. Have one of your regular sticks as an appetizer and have the MX2 for dessert. You won't be disappointed.

Mike from Barely Legal has a new blog called In It But Not Of It.

Today, he writes a post that only a man could write. It's about the death of a dear piece of consumer electronics.

I say it's a Post Only a Man Could Write because, really, women don't anthropomorphize things the way us men do. If a woman's favorite hairdryer breaks, she might be sad about it, but you'll never hear her say something like "Oh, Doris! <sob!> You were so good to me!"

But when my 1980 Honda Accord died, I said "Goodbye, Hubert!" and gave a little sniff when the tow truck hauled him away.

R.I.P, Robert Anton Wilson.

You taught me to see the forest for the fnords. You helped me help the Widow's Son. You helped me realize that more laws only serve to make more criminals. You opened my eyes to the great truth that the greatest thing about masturbation is its availability.

You will be sorely missed.

William F. Buckley should get sick more often.

Today's column, which can be found on TownHall.com, contains the following gem:

...It is the responsibility of men and women who seek an audience for their writing beyond the family to instruct or entertain, or to die trying. The ratio is not definitively established, between skills disposed of and weight of literary production.

The grand meaning of this lesson being that eminent people can write eminently awful books and get away with it, and that medical science falls short of shielding us from bad books.

Buckley is writing about Henry James's novel The American, but this quote applies to the blogosphere more than it does to century-dead novelists. Every blogger who wants others to read his work -- and let's face it, that's all of us -- should "instruct or entertain...or die trying."

That is an insanely tough challenge to live up to, but I feel equal to it. How about you?

Now that I've got a little girl on the way, I find I spend a lot of time thinking about teaching.

I'm going to have this whole little person to mold and teach. I didn't even have to apply for a license or anything.

I want to make sure I get it right.

So I spend a lot of my free time just imagining interactions between Eliana and me. I try to imagine things I know she needs to know, but that school will never teach her. I thought about interactions in which I taught her about personal responsibility, self-reliance, the importance of private property, and so on.

Then I started thinking: what things have I learned in my life that absolutely shocked me? What things did I encounter that I was absolutely unprepared for? And how could I best prepare my daughter for those things?

And then I remembered The Light Bulb Incident. And it occurred to me that it will be impossible to prepare my daughter for all the bullshit that will come her way. Because new bullshit is being invented all the time, even while old bullshit never goes away.

The Light Bulb Incident involves labor unions.

When I left home, I was only peripherally aware of the concept of labor unions. I had seen Norma Rae, but all seeing that movie had done was give me the idea that labor unions are good and people who oppose them are bad. I had never actually interacted with one, or with the members of one.

But there came a time, when I was working for the University of Florida, when I happened upon a burned-out light bulb.

I went to my supervisor, and said "Dr. X, there is a burned-out light bulb in the other room. Please tell me the location of the spare light bulbs in order that I may replace it and bring illumination back to those of us who toil for you."

That's when Dr. X informed me that replacing light bulbs was a union job and that not only was I not allowed to change the light bulb, but I could actually be fired for changing it.

I was 18 years old at the time and, of course, thought that I knew everything. I began to argue with Dr. X about the absurdity of not being able to change the light bulb. I pointed out that it was inefficient, that it kept me from doing my job until such time as the bulb was changed, etc., etc. Dr. X, having worked for bureaucrats for many years, just smiled and told me that every young lab assistant that came through his doors had the same reaction whenever they encountered a sacred union job for the first time. He told me that it wasn't worth thinking about and that I should simply put in a request to get the bulb changed and forget about it.

Head hung low, I went to the office and filled out the form that requested a change of light bulb. Then I took Dr. X's advice and tried to forget about it.

Unfortunately, I had to work in the room with the burned-out light bulb, so I was reminded of the whole incident every time I walked in there.

Three days later, I got another harsh dose of reality when the crack light bulb changing team showed up to change the light bulb. I'm sure that, somewhere, there's a joke about "how many union members does it take to change a light bulb?" At the University of Florida, apparently, the answer is "3". One to climb up the ladder and perform the actual changing, one to hold the ladder, and a third to observe the whole process. It took the team 15 minutes to change the light bulb. First, they had to identify the bulb in question. Next, they had to test the bulb -- by flipping the switch on and off -- repeatedly until they were satisfied that it was, indeed, burned out. Finally, they had to set up the ladder properly and perform the changing procedure.

I count at least seven people involved in light bulb changing in this story: me, Dr. X, the girl in the office with whom I filed the light bulb change request form, whoever the form went to after that, and the three crack light bulb changing team members. And I'm probably missing 2 or 3 entire levels of bureaucracy in that count.

I hope one day I get a chance to tell this story to my daughter, but I can't really conceive of a situation in which it might be relevant. But I really hope I find one so that I can inoculate her to one more thing before she has to go out into the big bad world.