This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in April 2003.

Let’s get married and not tell anybody…

A friend sends photos and emails today of the holiday he and his wife took in Arizona. They’re an interesting pair. They’ve been together since early on in college back in 1990 or so.

He wasn’t the “marrying” type — that’s too antiquated. And I think he covinced her of the same … for a long, long time. But The System, with a capital ‘S’, is heavily stacked in favor of those who get married — you know, health insurance, taxes, that sort of thing. So finally after more than 10 years together, they got married on November 30, 2001. Great! Wonderful! Of course all of their friends are happy for them.

Now here’s the twist. It took them a year to get around to telling people about it. A year later, in November 2002, they actually sent out cards announcing the wedding. The fact that they live in California, far away from family and old friends makes that easier. But to keep it secret for a year! I spoke with him several times on the phone over the course of that year, but he never hinted or let on that something was up.

I’ve never heard of someone being so casual about getting married. Apparently they just went down to the courthouse and signed the papers. And that was that. That’s not unusual, but to keep it a secret… that’s funny.

Well, hopefully they’re happy. Seems like they’ve made a good pair over the years. Certainly, his relationship is one of the most long-lived among my circle of friends: 13 years together by the age of 31 is impressive.

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Apple Music

Apple has a new music store. Songs are $1 and can be burned to CD or downloaded onto an iPod. Unfortunately, the music is available only a Mac currently. Fortunately, the iPod is for Win & Mac. The Wall Street Journal had an article last week about the new music service from Apple and noted that it included exclusive rights to such artists as the Eagles and No Doubt. Apparently we’re not missing much. They’ve got 200,000 songs to start with. What I’ve found with most of the music services is lack of depth. They have some hit songs and a smattering of other things but not much else. At least with the Apple service, one can burn songs to CD — that’s a major improvement in itself over some of the music industry’s own online services.

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Shake it, Martini

I bought a martini shaker today. Once I get acclimated again to the dry martini, I’m hoping John is going to invite me to his Wednesday Night Cocktails. News to come…

Update: Thanks for the suggested recipes. Faust also suggests this website.

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Geek Rock Video

Here’s a pretty funny video for all of you geek rockers out there. You’ll probably need a fast internet connection to get the full effect.

In order to watch this video, you have to do the following:

1. Make sure you have both Quicktime 5 and Flash 5.
2. Go to Watchreels.com.
3. Click on the big white “Enter” sign.
4. Wait for the fancy dancy Flash splash page to go by (Broadband would be extremely advantageous).
5. There will be a Search feature on your left side. Enter “whatever” in that search field. Click the little round button next to it to enable the search.
6. A “Search Results” box will pop open. The only result will be “Liam Lynch/United States of Whatever”. Click on that.
7. Another box will open prompting you to choose either the Full Screen Reel or the Standard Reel. Choose the Standard Reel (You have to pay for the Full Screen version).
8. The Quicktime music video will then load in another box.

Thanks, Nicole!

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Wknd Notes

Now that everybody’s back from ETCON, M. and I went for a hike this afternoon up along the Woodpecker Trail. And yes, we heard several woodpeckers. It was a beautiful day here — warm and sunny. The winter dragged on, but it finally looks like its hold has lessened. Tonight is Bend It Like Beckham.

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New Music on DanielStout.com

I was recently in contact with a former girlfriend from college, and of course I offered her some of my music mixes. You can find DanielStout.com Mix 1 and Mix 2 on the music page. I’m sending her Mix 1: “Original Internet Soundtrack” and also an earlier mix called Soft as Fire: Songs of Love, which I’ve just added to this website as streaming audio. It has 79 minutes of the best modern classical music around. It ranges from Bartok to Chopin to Reich to Glass and many others. I think you’ll find it fabulous. So check out Soft as Fire available as Real audio.

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Instant Messaging

After years away from it, I’ve rediscovered the joys of instant messaging. I used to believe that IM would interrupt more than provide a cohesive platform for communication. And at that time, that was probably right on. But now I’m challenging that belief and so far so good — it’s made it easier for people to contact me with a question or comment.

Sorry, what’s IM? Instant messaging, for those who haven’t experienced it, is like a phone conversation through text. It is more immediate than email — that is, you can only communicate with people who are “logged in.” Reading an IM transcript is like reading the transcript of a phone conversation except that the interactions may be even shorter and closer to the point than with the phone.

How do I roll my own? The most common IM program by far is AOL’s client called AIM. You can download it from aim.com. You’ll need to sign up for an account on the system, which is free. Microsoft makes something called either MSN Messenger or Windows Messenger. It’s okay but most people are on AIM. There are a few other ones out there, but I’ll let you find them. So once you’re plugged, you can reach me at xpiscatory.

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The Soy Latte Challenge

The question on my mind: What soymilk makes the best soy latte? The reason: a vegan friend is coming to the city for a visit. The objective: to find a soy or rice milk that creates a flavorful substitute for actual milk — something that will froth effectively and look and taste beautifully.

In the end, I tested three soymilks and one rice milk. I have ranked these according to their performance. #1 being the best of course. All prices are for a 32 oz. container.

1. Silk Organic Plain Soymilk $1.26 (on sale)
2. Rice Dream Original $2.39
3. WestSoy Low Fat Plain $1.69
4. Edensoy Soymilk Vanilla $2.69

1. Silk Organic Plain Soymilk
From the moment I opened the container and poured out a small juice glass, I could tell this soymilk would be a contender. It simply appeared smoother than the rest. I tasted it, and plain it had a pleasant milk-like quality to it. The real test though would come when I heated the soymilk to 140 degrees and made my latte.

As I usually do I pulled a double shot of espresso from my machine. The coffee was perfect — a wonderful crema encased my espresso. I then proceeded to froth the soymilk, in order this was the third and last soymilk I had tried. And it frothed wonderfully — it’s performance was even and dense. It may have been even better than skim milk, which is saying a lot. I mixed the soymilk, which had reached its ideal 140 degrees, and the coffee. The dense froth looked great in the cup. I tasted the results — and Wow! Silk soymilk tasted great. This was by far the best soymilk of all that I tried and I heartily recommend it when you’re making your own soy latte.

In addition to its great flavor, this soymilk was by far the cheapest of all four.

2. Rice Dream Original
This rice milk was the big surprise of the whole contest. In my own mind, I had judged rice milk to be an inferior substitute to soymilk. I was not expecting much from Rice Dream. The surprise being that this rice milk tasted great both in the glass and as a “soy” latte — or should I say rice latte. The rice milk was more expensive than two of the soymilks, and might not be the first on anyone’s list, but I strongly recommend it. It made a fine latte — both frothing nicely and tasting great.

3. WestSoy Low Fat Plain
West Soy has made a marginally tasty soymilk here. I think it would be okay by itself, but it did not perform well in the soy latte test. The frothing was substandard in my opinion. Like all of the lattes I brought the soymilk up to 140 degrees before mixing it with a double-shot of espresso. The taste was not great, and even had a slightly burnt flavor. Another strike against WestSoy is that the website listed on the package www.westsoy.com is no longer valid.

4. Edensoy Soymilk Vanilla
The Edensoy was the most expensive of all the soymilks I tried, and was the reason I started this soymilk challenge in the first place. I have always enjoyed Edensoy, but I think the vanilla flavor was too much for the perfect soy latte. The flavor I found to be quite unpleasant once heated. The plain variety of Edensoy may be a better option than what I found with the vanilla-flavored. Edensoy is also more expensive than other soymilks, which should inform your purchasing decisions.

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Betty Blue

Dear Friends and Readers,
I was delighted to learn the best French movie ever made may be released soon on DVD. According to Amazon, the studio has not made a final determination about whether to release it though. I quote from their website:

The studio is currently not producing this title on DVD, but to be notified when it is available, enter your e-mail address at right. You’ll also be voting for this release; we’ll let the studio know how many customers are waiting for this title.

Please submit your email address and cast another vote for BETTY BLUE. If you haven’t already seen it, this is a fantastic film that came out in 1986 about an aspiring writer and his girlfriend. If and when this is released on DVD, I plan on having a viewing party, and anyone who casts a vote is invited!

And while we’re on the subject of Amazon, I have a new Wish List that you’re welcome to check out.

Sincerely,
Daniel

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Easter

Happy Easter. It’s raining here this morning, but the air feels warm. Have a good day, all.

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Launchcast

I’m always up for new sources of music, and M. turned me onto this broadcasting service that Yahoo maintains called Launchcast. I’ve been listening to it at work mostly, and after some inital scepticism it’s growing on me. Basically, you get a personalized music feed — radio without the DJ. You can start out by selecting genres and sub-genres of music that you want to listen to. And then the hard work begins. Each song that plays, you can give a rating by song, artist, and album. After you start giving ratings, the music starts to shape itself more to your tastes.

Initially I ran into a problem where I started hearing the same few bands over and over. I realized a couple of things — don’t rate any particular thing too highly (i.e. 100) or you’ll start to hear a lot of it. Also, the artists and albums available is richer than one might think at first glance. Launch has a large selection of artists that you can dig through — I forget how I brought it up but there’s an extensive alphabetized list according to genre. Bring up an artist you’re interested in and then rate the albums they have available on Launch.

You’ll need to setup a Yahoo login in order to access Launch, but it was a fairly painless process. There are also a variety of pre-programmed “stations” that you can listen to organized mostly by musical genre. More features are available, but they’re not really worth going into. One additional point that bears noting is that Launch has a huge selection of music videos, probably the biggest I’ve seen online. Not every artist is in there and there are some notable gaps, but after I found obscure videos from Cop Shoot Cop and Swans, I was hooked.

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Saturday night music

It’s been a quiet weekend so far. A lot of people are off to visit parents and relatives out of state for the Easter weekend. J. and I are sitting around listening to some music this evening. We just finished listening to a recent vinyl acquisition of mine:

Public Image Limited - The Flowers of Romance (1981)
PiL is of course Johnny (Rotten) Lydon’s band after the Sex Pistols broke up. The first few PiL albums were really interesting — lots of drums and fairly experimental. Another good PiL album to check out from that time frame is Second Edition. I have both of these on vinyl, but if you click on the links you can see the CD’s are still available over at Amazon.

Another recent aquisition on the turntable tonight:

Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island (1995)
I keep hearing comparisons of Neutral Milk Hotel to other bands that I like, and finally recently I picked up this album new over at the Record Collector. To their credit, I think I’m not going to write a review on first listen (which was tonight). Instead, I’ll give this one some more time on the turntable and see what I think of it. It stikes me as interesting but sort of wimpy, but I’ll give it some time and come back to it in a later blog entry.

And finally, J. and I started out the evening with some high school music that I still have on vinyl:

Erasure - The Innocents (1988)
This is a fun little album with some, of course, great singing by Andy Bell. His feminine voice was always a hit with my gay friends. Erasure reminds me of driving down to Milwaukee on the weekends with Wes. Wes, who isn’t gay, had the best car stereo of anybody I knew, and listening to the ‘shock and awe’ of his subwoofers always put me in the mood for a night of dancing at Club Marilyn.

M. made the observation the other night that I tend to have an 80’s preference for music. She wondered why. I’ll state that that is probably true. It’s mostly because I first really got tuned into music in the mid-to-late 80’s during junior high and high school. The music from that time period has really stayed with me. My musical tastes have evolved over the years, and these days I listen to a lot of 20th century classical. But put on Siouxsie & The Banshees or Joy Division, and I’m a happy man.

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Wild Pig Runs Amok!

Now that I’ve lived a few years here in Iowa, I’ve become more amused than repulsed by photos [Thanks, Jish.nu] and stories of pigs run amok.

It’s a known fact that in my department at the university, there’s been a long-standing tradition of naming web and file servers after breeds of domesticated swine.

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Web Evaders & Photos

Here’s an interesting article on NYTimes.com about “web evaders”: Eluding the Web’s Snare.

Before I turn in for the night, I wanted to mention that I’ve redesigned the photographs pages so it’s now easier to browse through the whole set of photos. Let me know what you think.

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Mac OS X Server

I spent the day at an Apple presentation about integrating Mac OS X Server into enterprise computing. Overall it was time well spent. It’s kind of funny to see the Apple reps talking about how techie the Mac is now. They talked about Unix for several hours. It was an IT crowd, so basically the whole day was geared to appeal to geeks. And believe me they were there. I overheard this conversation with one guy telling another guy he knew what cell phone provider he had because of the make and model of the guy’s cell phone. The first guy then started rattling off the actual make and model of the phone and numerous other unnecessary specs about this guy’s cell phone. The guy with the cell phone responded: “And I thought I was a geek…” He had been trumped. Seriously, people, get a life. I did get a lot of enjoyment through the day as the geeks behind me tried to outdo each other.

So the basic thesis of today was that Mac OS X Server is friend to both creative people and techies.

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Soy Latte Feedback

Ah, thanks, people, for all the feedback on my query recently concerning the soy latte. The common thread through most of the feedback I got was that the good soy latte does exist, and that trying another brand besides the vanilla-flavored Edensoy I tried may do the trick. One reader from Canada reports today that Starbucks uses Vitasoy for their drinks. Another reader says he’s had better luck with rice milk than soy milk. It turns out my vegan friend probably won’t make it down here until the academic year is over at his college in early May, so I have a little more time to experiment. I’m a member of the New Pioneer Co-op, which probably has the biggest selection of soy and rice milks here. I’ll be heading down there tomorrow to check out the selection and will report back my findings here soon. I’ll write too about the equipment I’m using to produce my coffee. More to come.

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Malta Closer to European Union

“Election Results Move Malta Closer to European Union” - NY Times

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I’m feeling satisfied!

Well, as I mentioned yesterday not everyone is fulfilled with blog entries about RSS — even self-affirming geeks who are down with .NET programming! Ah, yes, you geeks les femmes shall remain nameless, but I also hear your pain and so today I offer up this photo which will hopefully satisfy the unfulfilled.

S: Holy Shit, is that Ian MacKaye of Fugazi!
W: I don’t know, I’ve never seen his face.

Click on the thumbnail to see the image.

(Apologies to the North East Rhinos MCC.)

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RSS notes

I’ve made some tweaks to the RSS feed for this website. For my subscribers, you should be getting full text posts now. What is RSS you ask? It’s a way to “subscribe” to a frequently updated website such as a blog or a news site. Instead of having to visit 50 different websites everyday, you can read all the latest posting in one easy application.

What prompted the RSS tweaking was my recent switch from using Syndirella to the much slicker SharpReader. Both are good, but SharpReader is a saavy implementation in .NET technologies (C# I believe). At any rate, with SharpReader (or Syndirella) I can stay abreast of all the websites I like to read. I basically don’t even read personal websites anymore that don’t have an RSS feed.

How can I get an RSS feed? you ask. Probably the simplest way is to use software that automatically creates it. For this website I use something called Movable Type. Other people have had success using an offline software package called Radio UserLand. With Radio all you need is a website to load things to. Like Movable Type, Radio generates that necessary RSS feed.

Feeling unfulfilled? Check back tomorrow for more… Stay tuned, my friends.

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So what do you suppose…

So what do you suppose Dick Cheney is thinking right now? “Thank God, my decades-long dream of liberating the Iraqi children has been realized! Now, to cure AIDS!”

Link here: http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war23.html

Courtesy of boingboing.

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Experiments with the Soy Latte

So, I’ve got this friend coming for a visit. I’m taking him either to the Sanctuary (over 100 different beers including rare Belgian Ales) or to Martini’s for good mixed drinks depending on what interests him.

But in the interest of saving money, we may spend some time here at the Camden Mansion. And at home I make a mean cappuccino and a smooth latte. He seems to me to be more of a latte man, but here’s the problem: He’s vegan and I don’t think he drinks or eats dairy.

So in the interest of being a good host, I picked up some soy milk yesterday to experiment with: vanilla-flavored Edensoy to be exact. I ground some fresh coffee in my burr grinder, measured out 14 grams, and extracted a double shot. Now for the tricky part: I had the chilled soy milk in a stainless frothing pitcher and proceeded to froth the soy. It frothed better than I expected. It was not unlike skim milk in its performance.

I brought the soy milk up to 140 degrees, and made my latte. Okay, everything was going well up to that point. The espresso had a wonderful crema; the soy milk had frothed beautifully. And then I took a sip.

OH, GOD! It was nasty. The soy milk, which tastes great on cereal or in a glass by itself, tasted awful. Once it was heated and mixed with the espresso, something very bad happened.

Maybe my friend is not getting a latte or a cappuccino when he comes to visit. UNLESS, was it the vanilla flavor that did it in? Would another variety of soy milk work better? I don’t have time to test all the permutations so I’m going to rely on you, my reader, to help me out here. What would you use?

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Clinton Redux

Chris, a friend from Los Angeles, writes:
I saw your thing on the blog about Bill Clinton speaking in Iowa. I catered a Beverly Hills breakfast at some dude’s mansion, where he spoke to about 100 people. All the LA bigwigs were there, and, I assume, the big donors. The speech was great. He even used the line, “I come from an oral culture,” I shit you not.

Thanks, Chris. That made my day. Today was one of those days spent on email. As soon as one went out another half dozen would come in that had to be dealt with. It kept coming all day. I dropped by work this evening for a few hours, and it was good that I did — one of the web servers was getting flakey and needed a good kick.

I need a recharge tonight. It was a spiritually intense day.

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RIAA

This has been all over the news, but the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued four students at three separate universities for offering download services that contain hundreds of thousands of music files. Wired writes: “The RIAA charges that one network operator distributed 27,000 music files, while the other three students ran networks offering 500,000 music files, 650,000 files and over 1 million files.” The RIAA is seeking $150,000 (the limit allowable by law) for each individual copyrighted song. Let’s see… $150,000 multiplied by 1,000,000… Obviously this is more about shutting these things down and sending a message than recouping money from college students.

There was a freshman here at the University of Iowa who was doing the same thing — allowing people within the university network to download music files. Given the RIAA lawsuit, he’s probably lucky he got shut down back in February. The story made the front page news and is still up on the Daily Iowan site [here]. (Free registration required.) It doesn’t mention how many files were being offered.

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Iowa angle

I had a press inquiry today regarding my recent entry about Fark.com’s Drew Curtis. For the record, Mr. Curtis and I attended Luther College for our undergraduate years. So there’s an Iowa angle to the story… but perhaps not a University of Iowa / Iowa City angle.

I spent a while at work today, and it seems like most weekends I spend some hours working on things. It’s so nice when the building is quiet, and you can really concentrate on matters.

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Restaurants

Ever get that feeling that you’re seeing more of the inside of restaurants than the inside of your kitchen? It’s been like that for me lately, and yesterday is another case in point. I ended up eating out downtown twice. A professor friend and I had plans to do our usual lunch at Gringo’s, a Mexican restaurant. She’s on sabbatical this semester and has been traveling a lot to do research, so it was good to see her. Then after I got home in the evening, M. called and we went out to the Atlas for dinner. The Atlas is this cozy little place with upscale food and upscale prices. M.’s employer is moving from its downtown location out into the suburbs somewhere, and she said there aren’t any good eating places nearby for lunch at the new location.

It hit 86 degrees here on Tuesday but today it’s only 39. Brrrr.

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Underwear

Historically speaking, I’ve been a boxers man. My underwear drawer is filled with full-cut 100% cotton boxers in a variety of plaids and colors. I buy mostly Jockey boxers, but I also have a smattering of boxers from the Gap and other places when I can find them discounted. Boxers have been my underwear of choice for many, many years. I don’t actually own any briefs and nor do I intend to. My athletic pursuits — one valid use for briefs — revolve around cycling so I do have some cycling shorts which serve dual purpose as underwear and outerwear.

Recently I picked up on a new evolution in underwear — a synthesis of boxers and briefs called the boxer brief. The boxer brief draws elements from both forms: it has the long cut of a boxer but the snugness and fabric of a brief. It’s a great idea. They’re very comfortable and provide a little more control than my usual flying-in-the-wind boxers. I now own three pairs in black.

Buy the man in your life a 3-pack of these, and he’ll love you forever.

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Origins - Fark & Drew Curtis

Somebody recommended the site Fark.com for weird news to me a while back. I do read Obscure Store fairly frequently for interesting news clippings. The interesting thing about Fark to me was that Drew Curtis — Fark’s progenitor — lived two doors down from me in college. In grad school, I wrote a 50-page nonfiction piece for a class that included an anecdote involving Mr. Curtis and his then girlfriend Heather. I’ll have to dig that out sometime and post it.

Drew had said that we took Computer Science 1 together, but I tended to sit in the front row whereas I think he was one of those back row dwellers. My memory of Drew is that he was more sociable, outgoing, and driven than your average computer science student. That’s probably why Fark has become such a relative success. He’s got tech sensibilities mixed with a sense of humor and a no bullshit demeanor. In college, he talked a lot and loudly which annoyed some people, but he usually got his way.

There’s a longish interview with him on some right-wing site. You’ll have to find it yourself in Google. At any rate, check out fark.com. Fark is well known for the often hilarious photoshopped images that users post on a given topic.

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