Meat...

When I was a kid, I used to love eating chicken. That is, until one night when I was done eating and started inspecting the bones. I had a wing which ultimately connected to the back and the spine. I sat there at the table examining the vertebrae... And I started to get a little nauseous. I felt a little too connected to the life that I had just consumed.

I've always had this love-hate relationship with meat. I like eating meat... when it's just meat - a food. It's the bones that really get me...

I was just preparing to put my first turkey in the oven. I rarely ever prepare any meat at home. I can't stand the consistency of raw meat. It's slimy. It's messy. I always feel like I have to wash my hands. This feeling is compounded because my wife and I generally feed our cats raw meat. I've managed to convince my wife that the prepared raw meat from the pet store is adequate...

So I was washing the turkey after letting it soak in brine overnight. I have a nice deep-well sink with a detachable faucet, so it's an easy operation. As I was turning the turkey and lifting the wings and legs, I started to feel that nausea return. The flesh was nicely pliable from the soak. The limbs moved - the wings spread. I could see the muscles of the bird flex under the plucked skin. I could really SEE the bird.

I had to quickly pat it dry. Hopefully, dry enough... I threw it into the roasting pan and started to baste with butter. I kind of felt like I was putting suntan lotion on a child. Not a good image...

So I grabbed the salt and pepper. After such a coating of butter, the salt and pepper hid the bird's skin nicely. I crammed my cubed butter, garlic, shallots, and fresh herbs inside. I reached around front and realized I'd left the giblet bag stuck in the neck... What the heck!

I tossed the thing in the oven and closed it. I proceeded to wash the blood from my hands (ok... there wasn't really any blood). But it did take a while to clean the counters and the sink - lots of soap and hot water... Hopefully by the time the oven beeps at me, what will be inside will be more like Thanksgiving Dinner than a great fowl with wings that flex and muscles that ripple.

I appeased myself by preparing the vegetables to be roasted later. Maybe I just have less appreciation for the life force of plants, but chopping vegetables seems almost contemplative...

Bond... James Bond

I caught the new Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, the other day. I think I need to right a longer post-modern critique of Bond... But for now, suffice it to say that I was a little confused throughout the movie. There were several references that I assumed were to parts of Casino Royale. So I rented that this weekend and sure enough, the two are very tightly intertwined. In fact, QoS appears to pickup immediately where Casino Royale leaves off. To get the best experience of QoS, be sure to watch Casino Royale again right before going to the theater.

As for the movie - well, the new Bond is more exciting. The focus is on action and not gadgets and girls (although there are plenty of the latter - but this new Bond doesn't sleep with as many as the old Bond). Seeing how Casino Royale starts off with Bond first getting his Double-Oh status, I think these movies are a return to a younger, less-experienced, brash Bond. There is considerably more character development for Bond in these films compared to the old (which isn't saying much because the old Bond had zero character development in 30+ years).

As for the movie title, I think this video sums it up nicely:

Shopping for a Digital SLR

I've decided to upgrade to a DSLR. I've been using point and shoot cameras for years and feel that I'm being limited by the camera. After playing around with a friend's Olympus E-400 and another friend's Nikon D60, I've decided to go with the Olympus. Right now, the E-510 is available for about $550 with two lenses. That's over $100 cheaper than the newer E-520.

Automotive Bailout

I've scratched my head many times over the general problems with the economy. I'm a geographer, not an economist. So I don't really have a good foundation here. Personally, I'm a strong believer in keeping markets as free (libre) as possible in areas where a market economy makes sense (durable goods, commodities, etc.). But I also strongly believe in a closed market or even government-run (re:socialist) operation where that makes the most sense (space exploration, basic necessities like health care, managing the environment, etc.).

I have held the belief for a couple decades that the US automotive companies - the Big Three - have been teetering on the edge of a horrible demise. Among the three, Ford has done the most to voluntarily reinvent itself and it shows both in their cars and their valuations. GM has done everything it could to fight reinvention - from forcing H. Ross Perot off it's board of directors to having to create an entirely separate company, Saturn, to even explore some of the ideas that Edwards Deming taught the Japanese after World War II. And of course, Chrysler has been a helter-skelter mess. The product of the first major bailout in the 80s, Chrysler continued to make some beautifully designed cars that weren't worth a hoot. You could always tell what part of a Chrysler was made by Mitsubishi - it was usually all that was left after a few years!

Now the UAW is an easy target in the bailout because it seems that GM isn't able to truly function in a free market. But it's the same managerial issues that keep it from really changing the way it works that creates the need for organized labor negotiations. GM management just has it's collective head stuck up it's tailpipe.

So, how do we create a "bailout" that is truly fair to Americans? I'm loathe to think we'd just give GM and Chrysler a fat paycheck. Instead, let's give the American people a nice tax credit for buying a new car. Let's divvy that $25B among 100M US households at $2500 per household. But you can't tie it to a particular purchase - otherwise we'd just be trading GM's problems for Toyota's and I think they both employ about the same number of Americans.

If this doesn't work, then GM should just close up shop. We can use the next $25B to retrain it's workers to build solar panels.

CDs vs. USB sticks

My HP laptop is about two years old and has seen heavy, heavy use. This use level is quite prominent in the glacial boot-time for XP. Sure, I get the GUI and Start button in just a few seconds but it takes several minutes to figure out the rest of what it wants to do before I can click on the Start button. Being an old Windows-hat, I know this means it's time to wipe the hard drive and reinstall.

I first attempted the process using a TinyXP CD. This got about 99% of the way through and then started crapping out while reading some files from the CD. Rebooting only gave me more heck - the TinyXP install wasn't even recognizing the hard drive.

Next, I tried a hot-off-the-burner WinXP Pro iso I downloaded. Similar results - wankiness on reading certain critical files form the disk.

I'm burning these disks on my HP desktop that's less than 10 months old. These disks are getting errors on the 2-year old DVD-RW in the laptop. Annoying as shit... I have a colleague who I gave a copy of MRVIN to recently and he got errors on the disk - which was burnt using the laptop.

So I'm trying to circumvent the problem - I'm building a WinXP installation on a bootable USB stick. The setup uses BartPE and the basic instructions are included with the download. The weirdness involves snagging the ramdisk drivers from the Windows Server 2003 SP1 download - 350MB to get about 300K of drivers.

My wife's Toshiba laptop is about a year older than the HP. I've noted before how much better the components in the Toshiba are than the HP. And the Toshiba is literally "the cheapest laptop at Office Depot" on the day I bought it. The HP, in contrast, was a mid- to high- range custom build dv6000.

We'll see what happens...

Microsoft...

I recently joined the IEEE. I think I was a member about 20 years ago but didn't keep up. I got an email soon after joining from the Microsoft MSDN Academic Alliance (I am a student member). I had access to this site before because CU-Boulder is recognized in the program. But I perused the software list again and was quite pleased.

About the only thing students can't get free from Microsoft is Vista Premium or Office. Server 2003, WinXP, and Vista Business are all there (along with a slew of OS variations I'm not familiar with). You can't get Office (even though Microsoft sells it to students for $60). But you can get Groove, Visio, Access and Project - go figure. You can also get Microsoft's media suite - which I've never even installed. I have an academic license for Adobe CS3 and would likely be disappointed.

The development tools have been expanded to include the Team edition Visual Studio (both 2005 and 2008). This is exciting to me. I've been wanting to use the code profiler in Team on MRVIN. I've tried other profilers and MRVIN implements a memory instrumenter but I'd really like to get some details on where my code spends the most amount of time...

Oh yeah - all this stuff is basically free if you are a student...

Obama in the Southeast

I mentioned my experience in the power of race in elections before - when I discussed a really bad situation where a McCain/Rice ticket would triumph over a Clinton/? ticket. I think we are about to see a demonstration of the power of the disempowered.

My favorite poll monger website is 538. They do a good job of aggregating the statistics. But their statistics are still based on voluntary polls. If the Census constantly struggles to accurately assess the numbers of disempowered, how can these polls claim to accurately reflect their votes?

I predict an Obama win in South Carolina, Georgia and possibly Mississippi and Louisiana. For instance, South Carolina is 30% black by the 2000 Census (which, by all knowledgeable estimates is an undercount). This population will turn out in record numbers - likely well about 90%. Assuming 90% of the black population in South Carolina turns out in favor of Obama, he only needs about a third of the white vote to win. Sure, South Carolina is strongly Republican among white voters. But even in Utah, the most "red" state in the country, Kerry managed 26% of the vote in 2004. If Obama has greater appeal to white South Carolinians as Kerry did to Utahns, it's practically a shoe-in.

This has far reaching consequences because the turn-out will impact the Senate and House. These states are considered "safe" for Republicans in Congress. I bet that a couple of these states end up with Democrats in Congress as fall out from the Obama turn-out.