CJC.org

The typical recipe for Japanese-style curry (on the side of a box of S&B Golden Curry, for example) is basically a spiced meat stew: say, chicken or beef with onions, carrots and other vegetables. This variation is for a less liquid mix of onions, cauliflower and tofu:

1 onion, chopped
1/4 cup ginger, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 head cauliflower, chopped
1 16oz package medium tofu, chopped
1.5 cups vegetable broth
1/2 package Medium Hot Japanese curry roux mix (120g / 4.2 oz)

1. Saute onion, ginger and garlic on medium heat until the onions start to brown.
2. Add cauliflower and saute for a couple of minutes.
3. Add tofu and broth. Cover and simmer for about 15 minutes.
4. Reduce heat to very low and add curry roux, stir with wooden spoon until the roux is fully incorporated. The tofu should crumble during this process. You should wind up with a fairly thick sauce.

Take off heat, serve over rice.

Note that after you have the vegetables prepped, you will be amazed that you have assembled a large quantity of white food. All the color comes from the curry mix.

We bought a new TV this past week, a Toshiba 46HM84 from Onecall.com. This replaces the 8-year-old 27″ Quasar.

The comparison picture to the left doesn’t do the new Toshiba justice, because the 27″ sits so far foward of the Toshiba, it appears much larger than it actual is in. CNET has a simple 16:9 to 4:3 calculator, as does this site, which gives better dimension comparisons. For 4:3 images, the new TV has about twice as much screen real estate as the old set. This, of course, doesn’t count the letterboxed screen shape. In addition, the new TV has a nice, flat anti-glare screen, which works well for our living room, as the windows are behind the TV.

I picked the Toshiba mainly because it is a rear-projection DLP with the TI HD2+ chip, which hit a nice price point. The comparisons were with the “Captain Kirk” Samsung and the Mitsubishi. The Samsung was much more expensive (and I didn’t like the pedestal), while the Mitsubishi had a horrible reflective screen coating that made the set kind of useless in a reasonably lit room. I had considered the HD3 DLPs earlier in the summer (mainly the Samsungs), but the Toshiba came out before I finished moving to Cleveland. We had also thought about a slightly larger set, say, the 52″ versions (52HM84), which seemed to be sized better in the showrooms, but would have been too big for the actual space. Another alternative would have been the 46HM94, which is the 84 with more inputs and a built-in HDTV card. We’re going to get HDTV through the cable box (or some hypothetical HD Tivo), so this seemed unnecessary. I basically want a monitor; if I could have gotten this TV without the unused built-in speakers, I would have.

So far, the picture is very big and bright, even with the lower-powered “night mode” lamp running during the day. We don’t have an HD feed (I have to talk to Adelphia at some point), so at best I can comment about how Standard Definition looks on the set. DVDs look very good, even though I haven’t convinced our very old player to use anamorphic mode (I lost the original remote and can’t access the machine’s menus properly). Video is also through S-Video, so DVD video can only improve as we upgrade the components and interconnects. Broadcast TV is piped through the Tivo, so the image won’t be as pristine as possible out of the cable box. Most of our shows were recorded at Medium Quality, and they don’t look very good on the larger screen (the size magnifies every defect of the NTSC stream, especially the Tivo compression artifacts, so you get banding on colors and regions that digitally “twitch”), but it’s passable. Highest Quality is fine, so “live TV” works well. Tivo’s High Quality is perfectly acceptable, and is probably similar to the viewing experience we had with the old TV. All our shows are now set for High Quality recording.

One minor disappointment is that I’m apparently one of those people who can see rainbows in the single-chip DLP projection, mainly on white objects that move quickly across the screen. The rainbows are very brief and only occassional (I sometimes see them when blinking on a contrasty scene) and don’t bother me very much. I didn’t see rainbows in the showrooms, so this might also be due to Tivo compression artifacts or the Standard Definition video we’re watching.

There’s, of course, a cascade of upgrades once one piece of a 6-year-old AV setup gets changed. I’m keeping the speakers, which are perfectly fine (though the center speaker now has to go in the cabinet underneath the TV, as there’s no flat spot on top to perch it on). The receiver was updated a few months ago with last year’s Harmon Kardon digital receiver when I caught it a Friday sale at Amazon. I’ve ordered a replacement for the DVD player, Tivo and VCR, in the sense that we’re picking up the Humax combo unit (minus the VCR, but plus the DVD burner). Presumably, regular Tivo can be shot out through the component video outputs in addition to progressive scan DVD video; this will make wiring and using the whole setup a lot easier. This Series 2 Tivo will also allow us to stream music from the computer using Home Media functionality. I already have a USB 802.11b adapter we’re not using, but which should work on the Humax Tivos.

Lastly, props/thumbs-up/whatever-the-cool-kids-say-nowadays to Onecall.com. Their prices were cheaper than elsewhere (currently, 10% off, plus a $125 discount for the holidays, and a miscellaneous discount for being on their mailing list) and they delivered the product perfectly fine. But that’s what’s expected: what was unexpected was that I saw that they were having a 2-day sale through techbargains.com, with the price reduced a further almost-10%. Even though I had already ordered the TV and was expecting delivery on that day, I called their customer support and asked them to knock the difference off my own order. Onecall.com doesn’t have a price guarantee, so had no obligation to respond to me, but they let me have the TV for the lower price, the difference being credited to my card. In the end, I wound up paying a bit more than $2300 for the set, plus a $20 tip to the guy who helped me get the TV into the apartment (it’s not heavy at around 80lbs, but bulky) (which was a better deal than paying $160+ for “white glove delivery”). The local stores would have charged at least $2700 + 8% OH tax. So a big thumbs-up for Onecall.

Update: Just a note on the various “zoom” modes to deal with 4:3 content on a 16:9 screen. This Toshiba comes with five different modes:

• Natural, which renders the 4:3 image in the center of the screen, flanked by gray bars. I think Toshiba made a big mistake in not making these bars black, as the gray is too bright and distracting.
• TheaterWide1, which stretches the 4:3 so that the center area is undistorted but the areas on the sides are distorted. This is actually pretty natural to look at, with only occassional noticeable distortion when the action takes place towards one of the sides. Generally, people look a little “fatter” if they’re towards the edges. We watch most 4:3 content in this mode, in part because the bright gray bars in the Natural mode are distracting, or, rather, the bars are more distracting than the seldom noticed distortion on the edges.
• TheaterWide 2, which is a straight magnification without distortion of the 4:3 image. This is for letterboxed content in which the top and bottom black bars are actually encoded in the NTSC stream. We’re using this for most DVD content right now because I can’t get the old player to output in anamorphic.
• TheaterWide 3, which is the same as TheaterWide 2, but with the image shifted up in the screen. This is, again, for letterboxed contect with the bars in the NTSC stream, but with subtitles ranging in the bottom black bar.
• Full, which is for anamorphic output from a DVD player. Anamorphic widescreen doesn’t encode black bars in the stream, but instead has a flag that tells the video monitor that it’s actually a widescreen image so that it will be properly stretched and displayed. The benefit is that some 30% of the video stream isn’t wasted in encoding black bars, so the resulting image is more detailed. The TV is supposed to automatically sense anamorphic video and select the zoom mode appropriately, but I haven’t tested this because of my inability to get to the configuration menus for the player. As noted, I’m replacing this player in the next week or so.

Last month, I joined the HFC Athletic Club, about ten minutes walk from the apartment. Downtown Cleveland isn’t like New York City in terms of gyms. The latter is littered with branches of New York Sports Club, Crunch, Equinox and a sprinkling of mom-and-pop fitness centers, catering to particular urban neuroses about fitness and hipness. The former has a few small chains or independents, and has Geauga County nearby, which was unfortunately on the far side of the overweight-urban sprawl regression. HFC seems to belong to a small chain, and it doesn’t appear to be a massive gym with a long membership list, but it has good facilities: it’s built on top of a parking structure, so it has an outdoors area for tennis, basketball and running. It also has a pool and racquetball courts. The only thing it lacks is a dedicated stretching area, with permanent mats. For now, I make do with the little foam yoga mats that they have stacked in out-of-the-way corners near the stairs to stretch. The hours aren’t as full-time as I’m used to at New York Sports Club: it’s basically open during the week, and just 9-5PM on Saturday. It’s closed on Sunday.

(I think this is due to relatively few people living in Downtown Cleveland. Most of the members are in the area for work, and live in the suburbs. The analogy might be the NYSC down in Wall Street, which had fairly restricted hours during the weekend, as opposed to the ones on the Upper West Side. I’m also under the impression that a lot of people in the suburbs will also have the Bowflex or Nordic Track in the basement. Whether the machine is being actively used or is just a glorified clothes hanger, its presence may make the owner reluctant to shell out dollars to join a gym away from home. Interestingly, most of the people I saw at HFC during lunch time — including the apparently daily/weekly game of pick-up basketball — are older men, a very different demographic from the typical New York Sports Club. Possibly, this may be due to the area’s worker demographic and the existence of the Bowflex at home in the suburbs.)

Back in March and April, after the Match, when we researching where to live, I came up with a list of apartment buildings that had in-suite laundry, covered parking and its own gym/fitness center. This led to a number of nice and not-so-nice places, mostly in Downtown Cleveland, but the place we eventually wound up in, which was head and shoulders above every other place we saw in terms of space and not having wall-to-wall carpeting, wasn’t on the original list because it didn’t have a gym; we dropped in only because we saw the sign and we had about an hour to kill before the next appointment. While looking at the place, the management agent noted that most building gyms tend to be small and crappy, so why use the space for something like that when the building is within a short walk of five or six places? I couldn’t argue with that.

I found a list of local gyms through this helpful Cleveland.com forum posting, and we did visit about three of them: the HFC where I wound up, Cleveland Atheltic Club and The Club at Key Center. A number of people in the building actually belong to the Key Center one, and we had a referral to see one of the membership managers there at one point. The problem with CAC and Key Center is that they’re really not gyms; they’re more like urban country clubs that happen to have gyms attached to them (and CAC has a certain mustiness to it, typical of places that saw better days decades ago). Both have dining rooms that require proper business attire to eat in (and a bar area where you can get food, but with a relaxed dressed code of “business casual”), with the bill being signed to one’s monthly tab. Both also have various club functions, such as cooking classes, social committees and the like, but, really, I just wanted a gym, not a place to take clients or talk with people I just saw in the locker room (on the other hand, I socialize with people I try to throw through the mat; I’m not sure which is stranger). CAC did have more impressive gym facilities than Key Center, though, mainly because of the decent-sized pool (apparently one of the first pools built on a top floor of a high-rise building) and a never-ending climbing wall.

There were a couple of other facilites in Tower City and a FitWorks branch on Euclid somewhere, but I wanted a pool (I’m waiting for the HFC swimming instructor to recover from a sports injury, so I can try learning how to swim again) and didn’t go there. There’s also the YMCA, which apparently has the most impressive facilities including a pool, but that requires a drive to get to, and I don’t want to wind up driving everywhere. That whole urban sprawl-overweight thing, you know.

After reading this NY Times article about the clash between health inspectors and the old school makers of fresh mozzarella, I started to wonder how much effort it’d take to actually make this cheese at home, especially given the claims that freshly made mozzarella is worlds apart from stuff that’s been in the fridge for a few days.

Quick, naive googling got me this Food Network recipe which takes mozzarella curd and mixes it with simmering water to make a pullable cheese. I’m not sure if this makes some sort of stringy Polly-O crap or the nicely textured fresh mozzarella balls I’m familar with, though. But this search led me to google for mozzarella curd as the necessary first step, and I found a few souces, including this Amazon link to a 20-lb hunk of, uh, Polly-O curd.

The Amazon hit made me think of trying A9 out. The useful hit from here actually came from the accompanying image search results off to the side, which looked like some guy stirring a big pot of milk. Making cheese from milk? Yes: from a professor in biology and chemistry down in Cincinnati, in fact, has a recipe for fresh mozzarella from scratch. Basically, you need milk, cultured buttermilk, salt and rennet. I also found a quick-and-dirty method (well, I probably should use the word “dirty” next to food manufacture) on About.com that uses citric acid tablets to acidify the milk, instead of using cultured buttermilk. Similarly for a one-hour process. Just search for “gallon milk mozzarella”.

Interestingly, I’m not sure how well this cheese works for the lactose intolerant, especially in the versions that use citric acid to provide acidity. I’m not sure if cultured buttermilk provides lactobacillus to deal with lactose.

I might give this a whirl sometime in the future. I think it yields just under a pound of cheese.

The aiki-waza didn’t work at all during judo randori, beyond amusing the main instructor. Same for my lame attempt at getting a joint lock on the arm he was using to keep me out. “If you get the kansetsu-waza, I’ll buy you a steak dinner.” This was spoken with a friendly Midwestern drawl that for some reason I associate with farmers. Thus went my second judo class at Mid East Cudell Judo.

This is a small dojo at the Cudell Recreation Center, about ten minutes from my apartment. The room isn’t large, and the twice-weekly adult judo is a part of the general offerings for the Rec Center, but they have nice permanent mats down in the room, vocabulary charts on the walls, and old bike inner tubes hooked into the walls, with which you can fit in if you don’t have a partner handy. I think I’ll be showing up there regularly for now, to complement the aikido. Half the judoka are women, which seems to correlate with having few big macho judoka in the dojo. Everyone is nice, and the black belts have realized that my falling ukemi is prefectly fine for them to throw relatively hard during randori.

Of course, they’re trying to fix my rolling ukemi, mainly by getting me to not tuck my legs. I spent some time during my second class with Akiya Sensei doing simple front rolls, with her trying to get me to keep the legs out. The explanation for the untucked legs was that, in tournament, tucking will generally get you clobbered if your opponent starts ground work by tying up your legs after he throws you. Why make it easy for him? This is actually a better explanation than what I heard from one of the Oishi judo black belts, who suggested that the aikido-style rolls were actually harder on the body than the judo rolls. I also worked on the inner tubs with her (the main instructor told her that I had problems fully turning my hips for throws), fitting in for morote seionage, uki goshi and harai goshi. She seemed pleased by my inner tube work, once I got used to working with it. I finished this individualized tutorial session by doing throws with their big brown belt — ippon seionage followed by kesa gatame (which I’ve apparently been pronouncing wrong all along, now that I’ve heard Mrs. Akiya say it). When randori began, she went off with some of the other students to do kata in a different room. (I haven’t yet figured out what judo kata is.)

During randori, as expected, I didn’t get anything on the black belts unless they let me. On the other hand, the randori wasn’t like with Oishi Sensei, who would frequently point at a spot on the mat, say, “I’ll throw you there”, and generally do exactly that, even with some of his brown belts. In this dojo, I was actually able to stay on my feet longer than I expected. (We’ll ignore those times I got caught on pretty simple kosoto gari-type sweeps.) Next time, I’ll try to throw on the initial touch instead of politely letting them get their grip. We’ll see what happens with the aiki-waza in that case.

One drawback is that there’s less ground work in this dojo. There was none in the second class I took, and about fifteen or twenty minutes in the first class. But there seems to be more direct instruction than at Oishi’s: for the first class, the main instructor had us work on morote seionage for the first half, before the ne-waza and randori. In fact, after the initial stretching and warm-ups, he said, do uchi-komi for morote, 100 times. I thought he was kidding about the 100 times thing, but apparently not. I worked with one of the black belts (“lift uke’s arm up more, so you can get the morote more easily”), and got to fifty repetitions in the first set before getting too tired to continue. I did the 100 in three sets, sort of afraid of how tired my legs would be if we went straight into randori. It wasn’t actually that bad when it came to it.

I realized that I actually don’t have pictures of the completed renovations of our old apartment: I never took any. The only extant photos of the post-combination layout was taken for the Corcoran site for the sale listing. Sigh.

Anyway, I grabbed these before the listing vanishes as a reminder of the old place. Not the best photos, but that’s all there is now:
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I don’t remember when the last time I was up the Empire State Building was. Surely it was a long time ago, elementary school or something similar. Last week, I had time to kill before the closing, so I did the tourist thing and went up to the observation deck to take pictures:

It’s easier to enter on the 33rd Street entrance: the line to the security checkpoint before you can buy the ticket starts around there. It’s in the basement, obviously a post-9/11 contingency location that apparently stuck. Tourists will be appalled at the somewhat dingy nature of the paint, lighting and hallways: the Empire State Building evokes images of art deco strength and wonder, but, symbol aside, it’s a old office building whose interiors have seen better days. Art deco and the jazz age, after all, is three-quarters of a century past.

Just outside the big room where they form the queues to buy tickets, one of the employees was trying to upsell the attractions by pointing out that, for $22, you can get a combo ticket that includes the observation deck as well as New York Skyride. Looking at the line and realizing that it would take at least half an hour to buy a ticket, I jumped at the combo offer. The difference was $10: the Skyride wasn’t worth that much, but, combined with not waiting for the regular tickets, it seemed like a good deal.

Yes, the Skyride was kind of lame. It’s one of those small movie screens projecting a short, swooping film showing off the city; the seats are mounted on machinery that tilts the audience to augment the movie’s conceit, that you’re in some sort of magical helicopter erratically piloted by Kevin Bacon as he shows you the sights of New York. The illusion of pulling Gs is actually pretty effective, more than I would have thought for just a little bit of tilt on your seat.

After this — about ten minutes — it was off to the main queues for the observation deck elevators. There was another security check as the line snaked around the relatively narrow hallways of the building. The ESB isn’t the WTC in terms of architecture: there are no wide-open spaces and soaring ceilings. But then, there isn’t a WTC anymore, is there?

All in all, the lines moved quickly, and I spent some time on the deck taking pictures. The exposure elluded me at times, so these pictures have some post-processing to boost saturation and constrast. Oh, well.

There was a wait for the elevators to go back down to the 80th Floor skylobby, but we had an option to take the stairs down 6 flights. Being in a bit of a rush, I took that route, came out on 33rd Street, and looked for a bite to eat before heading off to the closing. At Herald’s Square, I saw a guy with a video camera pointing up at the ESB. After he left, I went to his spot and took my last shot of the day and headed off.

I had originally flown back home on September 25, expecting to stay until the following Thursday. The apartment closing was scheduled for Tuesday, and I had thought of spending a few days at my parents’ house, putting in a few hours at work, going to a class at the old dojo and generally relaxing around this transfer of ownership and the official end of my residency in New York City. In terms of the paperwork for the apartment combination, everything was done except for the stamp from the Department of Buildings — the letter of completion (LoC) — which the architect had assured me would be done by Monday at the latest.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way. Oh, the pre-closing days were as expected, with relaxation mixed in with calls to the architect on why the hell the paperwork hadn’t been completed yet; he had had a month after the last inspections were done, after all. I was worried, but thought that in the worst case the sellers could accept a large escrow while I made sure the paperwork was completed.
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One bright spot from my long (soon to be detailed) apartment closing was that I was in town for Adi and Cari’s tests at the dojo. Adi was testing for sankyu, and Cari for nikkyu. Both did very well, better than I remember (or not remember) my own nikkyu and sankyu going. Congrats!

Here are some of the pictures from the test:

(There were a total of 230 images (thank god for cheap 1GB CF cards) of which about 50-some were post-worthy (thank god for the D70 burst mode). I’m, of course, absent from the majority of these, though Itai took a few that came out when I was working with Cari on grabs. Adi has CDs of all the full-sized images. Autofocus was a bit off in a lot of cases. Amusingly, there’s one shot where the AF got the live blade perfectly, with bokeh everywhere else.)

Since I’m in Cleveland now and am not spending much time on the subway, I decided to try out the NY Times electronic edition, basically to be read on the computer in the mornings.

So far, it looks good. You have to download and install a special reader (probably for Digital Rights Management reasons), but everything is readable and you can browse pretty easily. I think I wound up looking more closely at the Times than I have in a while, because you don’t flip through as quickly as you would with the paper on, say, the subway. The paper can be displayed so that an entire page fills the screen (not so useful, as my monitor isn’t big enough) or so that the screen width is filled (the normal mode). One of those old “portrait” dimension monitors would be nice, but not necessary: a screen driven at 1280×1024 is more than sufficient. One thing to note is that the B&W images look pixelated, so they’re not storing the full image for these, but the color images look fine. I don’t see an obvious way to download the full image, though. This may not matter that much, because most of the images are from advertisements, and any one you want to look at more closely can probably be found on the NYT website somewhere.

The Newsstand reader has word search and can skip around to different sections. There’s a usability issue in terms of not jumping back to the page you can from, if you’re following a link, so it’s not completely browser-like. This isn’t that bad with the Times, because the newspaper doesn’t really do that much page jumping after the first page of a section, and with the section navigation facility, you can also go to the start of a section. I haven’t tried the word search yet. There are also other untried functions, like mailing a copy off to a friend (not sure about how DRM is handled in this case) or printing a page. So far, it hasn’t been necessary.

The main plus for me is that it’s a full Metro-edition NYT, so I can get read the local New York City news. All the ads are there, for that matter, including the Special Advertising Sections they have every once in a while. Large sections of classifieds or stock quotes can be skipped over.

The cost is $150/year for a full year subscription, so it’s about $0.40/day, including the Sunday edition and Magazine. I’m not sure how the Sunday section will look yet: will it including all the relatively-useles-for-me ad blow-ins?

Update: It looks pretty good on a 1024×768 laptop screen, too. The reader apparently scales pretty well. There’s also amusing DRM stuff going on: if you run a program that might have screen capture capability (inadvertantly, as I was using Irfanview to prep the various photos I posted today), the reader hides itself from view while putting up a warning telling you to turn the capture program off.