Cottleston Pie

I found a very interesting description of how to make a habanero flavored oil with controlled heat content, with a long interesting trail of comments.

This helpful hint by Diane Duane is worth preserving as I think I might find very useful at some point:

Re: touching chilies and dealing with the aftermath

When treating so-called "Hunan hand" in the emergency room, the treatment of choice is a weak bleach solution (approx. 1 tablespoon to a liter of water). Soak your hands in it briefly. The chlorine in the bleach breaks the capsaicin molecule and renders it non-hot. The pain stops immediately.

For those who get the stuff in their eyes (or for gentlemen, somewhere else they, uh, shouldn't have touched before soaking their hands in bleach...), the specific treatment is contact lens wetting solution. This also breaks the molecule.

The last couple days, I've been enjoying a jar of Mrs. Renfro's brand "Habanero Salsa" from Fort Worth, Texas, but found on my local HEB shelf here in Austin. Excellent flavor.

I'm really telling this all backwards.

A month or two ago, I started picking up "hot" HEB salsa picante, but the "hot" label seemed something of a joke. I would describe it as "strong mild." So, I bought the "extra hot" HEB Habanero salsa picante which uses habaneros rather than jalapeños for spicy flavor. The difference is dramatic: it's a lot hotter and has a much more burnt/seared pepper taste (meaning pepper as in bell pepper rather than peppercorn). I'm not too fond of the taste straight-up, which is good because it's too hot for me anyway. I found that mixing a little habanero in with the regular picante spiced it up and improved the flavor a lot.

So, after that whole little experiment, I decided to try some other local (Texas) salsas that were available on the shelves of HEB. I picked up a jar of Jardine's brand "Cilantro Texasalsa (hot)" and also a jar of Jardine's "Queso Amarillo (flame roasted flavor)" for variety. Jardine's is from just down the road in Buda.

The Queso is horrible. It looks like there's some cheese involved, but it smells and tastes a heck-of-a-lot like ranch dressing. A few chips of that and the whole jar was immediately promoted to the garbage.

The Texasalsa is great. I finished it off quickly and have another jar in my pantry.

It was then that I found Teresa's post about making the habanero oil and between that enticing discussion of the joy of the resultant flavors, I decided to try the Mrs. Renfro's Habanero Salsa, another success.

A group from my company spent today volunteering down at the Capital Area Food Bank. (And other groups were volunteering elsewhere as part of an annual "Day of Caring" event.) It was fantastic. We were doing food salvage in an assembly-line environment. I was stacking full boxes of food on the appropriate pallet and when the pallets were full, I logged the full pallet, plastic-wrapped it, and took it out into the warehouse on a pallet jack. I also did various other tasks, running stuff that needed to be moved around on pallet jacks. And I spent a chunk of time taping new flat boxes into shape. Maybe 80 of them? It was a lot.

It was a nice change of pace and I had a great time and can't wait to do it again next year. I'm glad IBM let us do it today on company time (in that way, it was a significant donation).

I well may not need to wait all the way until next year of course if I do it on my own time (there can be logistical difficulties with this, but not completely insurmountable I would guess). And my dept may do some different activity next year (we did a different activity last year and it didn't work out nearly so well). I wish the the CAFB weren't very much on the opposite side of the city.

I had the pleasure of seeing two great movies this weekend. I've spotted Out of Africa on the shelves of video rental stores for years. I finally saw it. Brilliant. The extras on the DVD are excellent as well. The film stands on its own, but stands taller when thinking about the themes: of possession, control (which cuts both ways: wanting some control of what we love and loving that which we can't control), and love (not just of and between people, but of ways of life and of continents).

I should probably write a letter and suggest it for the big screen as a summer movie classic at The Paramount. It would be great on the big screen. Even better if you've a honey, 'cause it's quite the romantic flick.

Speaking of which, I also had the joy of following that up with State and Main. Hilarious. Um, now where to I find a cute and quirky bookstore owner like that? ;-)

Oh no!

It's like this:

• I'm awfully fond of New Orleans.
• I read "Drowning New Orleans" in the October 2001 issue of Scientific American. The Table of Contents reads, "A major hurricane could swamp the city under 20 feet of water, killing thousands." The article described the vulnerability of New Orleans in no uncertain terms. One direct hit by a slow, strong hurricane could be devastating. I don't have the article readily available, but I remember thinking, "Atlantis." It made quite an impact on me.

  (Article summary from SciAm's web site.)

  THE BOXES are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of dead bodies."

  New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh-an area the size of Manhattan-will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn't go very far.

  (hide)

• I read AP article "Hurricane Katrina Gains Strength as It Heads for Gulf Coast" (no longer available online) and I see the map below.
• Therefore: I'm anxious. :-(

Update 2005-08-28, noon: I've now been tipped off that Katrina has moved from a Category 3 to a Category 5 with 160 mph sustained wind (that AP article on the NYT site that I linked above keeps changing). And my "strike-probabily" graphic above has been updated:

Update 2005-08-28, 5 pm : Mandatory Evacuation Ordered for New Orleans as Storm Nears . Unfortunately, if the sea floods the NO basin, it won't drain on its own. The article makes an interesting point about how critical the region is to our supply of imported oil.

Update 2005-08-29, 10:30 am : I'd been wondering how the Superdome would stand up to being used as a storm shelter. While presumably designed to withstand a lot with minimal damage to itself, it wasn't designed to be a shelter. This AP article gives some details about how it's all working out: Superdome's Roof Is Peeled Away in 2 Places (this AP article keeps changing too). Sounds pretty good so far. Pretty impressive that they cannot hear the howling winds inside the structure.

Bonny fortune for the city: Slight Shift Prompts Hopes That New Orleans May Avoid Worst

It has begun: High Winds and Rain Lash New Orleans and Southern Mississippi .

Update 2005-08-30, 11:30 pm : Needless to say that I'm happy the storm veered east of NO. Had if veered west, given the way it was spinning, the damage would have been so much worse than it was. New Orleans Escapes Direct Hit, but Most of City Is Inundated

Of course, the city has courted disaster: After Centuries of 'Controlling' Land, Gulf Learns Who's the Boss. And every year the protection of the delta, such as it is, continues to decline. (I think coastal erosion is a fascinating topic; one of my favorite lectures at Uni was a guest lecture about that topic by Orrin H. Pilkey .)

Not unrelatedly, I found it hilarious to read a quote in one article of a New York visitor to NO who was amazed at the looting he saw. He thought that NO was a "classy city." No, no. NO is a mixed, but significantly poor, improvised free-for-all built on a swamp. Much like NYC actually, but with less money and ambition (which, the current storm notwithstanding, is not to imply any less success).

In Austin, the Red Cross is setting up some additional shelter. Refugees of the storm can't afford to continue to stay in hotels.

Update 2005-08-31, 11:30 am : As the news relates, the relief of yesterday was premature. The delicate infrastructure of the levy system sprung leaks and waters are rising again. Surviving the Maelstrom Was Only the Beginning for Some

The refugees in the Superdome are being transported by 475 busses to the Houston Astrodome where they maybe be able to camp out until December or later! Wow. Bus Convoy to Move Thousands From Superdome to Astrodome . Naturally our imbecilic Texas Gov. has a couple quotes which I find embarrassing.

Update 2005-09-01, 10:00 pm : It's a horror. When traffic is decent and the roads intact, the distance from my house to Metairie is only, exactly, 500 miles. 8 hours. So, I've this feeling of being so close. Yet so far. Except for rising gas prices, I've seen no real impact.

For the first time, I gave directly to the Red Cross. If you're reading this, then I imagine that you're a friend or family and can probably afford at least a $25 donation to the Red Cross . Let me encourage that, less than a dinner for two at a moderately priced restaurant. I'm under no illusions about the reality and limits of caring. My own. I did donate. But not all my savings. In a way, that would be irresponsible to do, poor planning just as NO itself was rendered so vulnerable by decades of poor planning.

Today I saw President Bush say on film, "I don't think anybody anticipated breach of the levies." Bush might not think so. But he might just not think very well or very kindly. Many have anticipated the breach in the not-unlikely event of a hurricane. Louisiana Senators on the news have said how they have given speeches on the floor year after year asking for money for the levies and related infrastructure. It was never enough of a priority to receive financing. So, the country gambled. And lost. It will cost more now to repair than it would have cost to maintain.

I have not personally checked the congressional record to verify the Senators' statements (is it available online? would anyone care if it were proven true?), but I'm inclined to believe them. Certainly the hurricane researchers at LSU have been warning about the city's continuously increasing vulnerability. There's plenty of reason to vote no-confidence in Bush, but I won't dwell on his inadequacies.

It's worth noting that a cat-5 hurricane did not hit the coast. And the cat-4 hurricane veered east (not west, huge difference) such that it did not make a direct hit with NO. The danger is not over and done with.

Update 2005-09-02, 12:30 am : It's neat to see that UTexas and other universities and law schools are making offerings to Tulane, Loyola, and other university students whose home institutions are shut down for some indefinite time by Katrina.

Update 2005-09-02, 7:00 pm : The magnitude of the disaster was no surprise to many of us (the President proclamation otherwise notwithstanding). As the NYT editors point out, there's plenty of evidence that, to some degree, this was a Man-Made Disaster . Also in the Times today, Krugman asks some interesting questions about our government's priorities, not the ones professed, but the ones we see in action.

Of course, lest y'all think I've only got my nose stuck in the NYT, there's plenty of good conversation going on by smart law profs at The Volokh Conspiracy. And other news sources appear to corroborate what I'm reading in the Times. But most of these Times web links, the ones that aren't to AP articles anyway, are such that they should remain stable. Something I don't trust will be true about most online sources.

Awesome: the author of the 2001 SciAm article wrote an op-ed which appeared in the NYTimes today: They Saw It Coming, by Mark Fischetti. I highly recommend it.

Heidi has some good non-advice about interviewing that struck me as useful since I've some friends looking for jobs recently and thinking about resumes and interviews.

While none of my friends were law students looking for internships, a lot of the advice probably carries over.

For myself, similar to Heidi's Florida State issue, when I graduated from Duke, all my interviewers used to think that asking about basketball would be a great idea. It wasn't. (Though I've a healthy pedigree of Duke fandom to call up should the need arise. I did it all for the fun social aspects while I was there and I wasn't really interested with what went on on the court per se.) Yes, I think I've had a number of time-spending interviewers like she describes.

That's what I was thinking anyway, until I thought about if someone were to interview with me. :-) I had an opportunity to interview a couple people a few years ago, and rather enjoyed it. And as interviewer, I'm little interested in what an interviewee has as personal interests that don't impact their potential job performance.

At an interview, I like to focus on how he or she would go about solving problems and communicates. And I'd probably ask hard questions that might make him think I was out to trick him into showing weakness or giving an incorrect answer. And that paranoia might lead you to do the exact opposite of what I'd like.

If I were to ask hard question, I'd rather hear about how you'd go find the answer than have a half-baked answer pulled from your head. I might not even know the answer to questions I ask. I just have some idea how to find them.

And for programming related work, I'd probably test that you won't be reinventing the wheel. If I ask about sorting data, I don't want to hear how you'd code a sorter. I want to hear about how you'll use one that's already available. Life is too short and the need to sort data too common to continually re-invent it. A discussion of the tradeoffs of various algorithms might be interesting though, not because of how it relates to sorting, but because it speaks to how you think about tradeoffs. Engineering is continually about tradeoffs.

That all said, I might be an exception. And for those of you familiar with the DISC profiles, my approach is that of a someone with high D and C tendencies.

Thanks to LH on the last ski trip, I had the good fortune to try "Chinaco" brand tequila, the "Anejo" aged grade. It was night-and-day from anything I'd had before, which is to say that it tasted amazingly good straight-up.

I have two new suits that I had tailored in Vietnam. Because of the color of one suit, my black dress shoes were not going to cut it. So, the evening before flying to a friends wedding where I would wear the suit, I needed to obtain new, appropriate shoes.

Stores were closing so I had to move relatively quickly. First DSW Warehouse, right around the corner from my apt, where I picked up Cole Haan shoes, like those shown below. Then at Foley's at the Highland Mall, I grabbed a pair of Bostonian "Phoenix" shoes, also shown below.

The Bostonian are definitely a bit more comfortable (immediately anyway; without any break-in), and I like the cut of the leather a bit more (the Haan has a stitch right in the front of the toe which I don't like as much). However, the Bostonian also have a horrible non-slip sole -- horrible to my mind because it works and that's bad for dancing. All leather sole is what I want. The Haan have all-leather sole (well, except a bit on the heel). Also, the Haan are a mahogany and the Bostonian are more brown. The mahogany looks better against the fabric of my light suit (they look a bit more reddish in real life than the picture below seems to me). So, Haan it'll be. I'll return the Bostonian when I get back. Looking at prices on the web, looks like I did get quite a good deal at DSW.

All the shoes that I tried that were pre-laced are laced incorrectly with criss-cross lacing. They are supposed to have some sort of straight lacing. Gotta find a web site that tells me how to do that. ... Found one, very interesting. By the same guy, Ian, who taught me how to tie my sneakers. Yay it works! Shucks...I have to be up in hours for my 6 am flight.

UPDATE (2005-08-06): The Cole Haan shoes were excellent. Once during a fast swing, Zuit Suit Riot at my request, I almost landed on my ass because the new leather soles were slick on the dance floor, but I kept my feet. The Cole Haan styling is growing on me too.

Cole Haan "Calhoun" (Style # C00590).
Dress oxford in finest hand-finished leather. Fully leather lined. Waxed and buffed leather sole with leather/rubber heel. Mahogany. Shoedini (multi-side-view)

Phoenix (Florentine First/Flex) (model no. 50464)
Shoedini (multi-side-view)

Turns out hanging fuzzy dice and Mardi Gras beads from your rearview mirror is illegal in Minnesota.

169.71 Windshield.

Subdivision 1. Prohibitions generally. No person shall drive or operate any motor vehicle with a windshield cracked or discolored to an extent to limit or obstruct proper vision, or, except for law enforcement vehicles, with any objects suspended between the driver and the windshield, other than sun visors and rear vision mirrors, or with any sign, poster, or other nontransparent material upon the front windshield, sidewings, side or rear windows of such vehicle, other than a certificate or other paper required to be so displayed by law, or authorized by the state director of the Division of Emergency Management, or the commissioner of public safety.

Source: Minnesota Statutes 2004, 169.71

Neat detail by a Bulverde, TX man (Bulverde being a bit north of San Antonio and south of Wimberley & Austin) about a rainwater collection system. Click on "Rainwater Collection" on his website. He made a schematic of the system and has charts detailing the reserve of his system versus the Central Texas rainfall that he has experienced for the past several years.

The purpose of the "roof washer" wasn't obvious to me, but I found a description in this Harvested Rainwater documentation:

A primary strategy is to reject the first wash of water over the roof. The first rainfall will clean away any contaminants and is achieved by using a "roof washer."

The main function of the roof washer is to isolate and reject the first water that has fallen on the roof after rain has begun and then direct the rest of the water to the cistern. Ten gallons of rainfall per thousand square feet of roof area is considered an acceptable amount for washing. Roof washers are commercially available and afford reliability, durability, and minimal maintenance to this function.

The Texas Water Development Board also has information . And the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center has a expansive and beautiful rainwater collection system (of which I'm an enthusiastic fan, as some who've visited the center with me have witnessed).

Netflix has a "Friends" feature where you can share some of what you watched and what you thought of it with friends who also use Netflix. I've one such friend on Netflix and I was a laughingly offended when I saw her listed like this on the Netflix website:

My first thought was, "Um, excuse me, what's wrong with Winona?" (thinking that it was asking me if I wanted to replace my friend with another). It reminded me of a Shel Silverstein poem where "our little Clarence sent off for two brand-new parents."

(As you might have guessed, I substituted Winona's name for my friend's name. Who knows...maybe someday I'll actually have Winona Ryder on my friends list and I'll have to come back and substitute Winona's name with another name. So check back and watch for that. But don't check often.)