CJC.org

This is what I’m currently doing for multigrain bread at home:

1 packet yeast
1/2 cup warm water

Mix these in the mixer bowl and wait to see if the yeast is good.

1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup barley flour
1/2 cup spelt flour
1/2 cup kamut flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup flax meal
1/4 cup wheat bran
1-1/4 cup warm water
1/3 cup melted shortening (canola oil is fine if you don’t have shortening)
1/3 cup molasses

Mix these with the yeast/water to form the sponge. Use the standard mixing paddle rather than the dough hook, as there won’t be enough density for the dough hook to get into. Put this in a largish container and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, put the following into the mixer bowl:

2 cups of bread flour
1 tablespoon salt

Mix, then pour on the sponge from last night. Mix using the dough hook and add more bread flour until the dough forms a ball and is not sticking to the bowl. You’ll probably need to add 1 to 2 cups more bread flour. Add it in 1/4-cup increments. (Note the proportions: it’s about a 1:1 ratio between the various whole grain stuff and the white bread flour. There’s also the standard 3:1 ratio between the dry team and the wet team.)

Let the dough rest for 10 minutes once it comes together and is no longer sticking to the bowl. Then mush the dough around in the bowl and kneed/mix for 10 more minutes for extra gluten formation.

Put the dough ball into a large greased bowl, cover and keep warm. The dough should be relatively cold, with the sponge coming from the fridge, but after a few hours, it will have doubled in size.

Note that if you’re in a rush, you can skip the sponge step, and combine all the ingredients together in one shot. The dough will double in about an hour in this case, depending on ambient temperature. The overnight sponge thing was something from Alton Brown’s bread episode: you’re giving the yeast a time to slowly ferment the flour, so they don’t burn themselves out, as they would at room temperature.

AP flour can be used instead of bread flour, but the resulting loaf will be a little more “crumbly”. Actually, bread flour is strongly recommended for multigrain bread, since a lot of the grains you’re using won’t have much gluten to start with, and you have to get that from somewhere. Yeah, there are gluten additives, but I haven’t tried those yet.

With the dough ball doubled in size, beat it down and divide into portions. I usually put half to 2/3 into large greased zip locks to keep in the fridge for a few days or the freezer for longer (defrost in the fridge overnight in the latter case). The portion you’re going to use can be formed into whatever shape you want. Let it rise for an hour or so, then into the oven.

I’ve been using the toaster oven for bread baking. Half the dough can be further divided into 3 or 4 decent-sized rolls, which bake in 25 minutes with the toaster oven set to bake at 425F. Larger rolls/loafs will take longer. If all the dough were in one large mass, it takes about 40 minutes in the toaster oven; larger masses aren’t recommended for the small baking space, as the heat isn’t distributed evenly enough and the dough near the back will burn a bit in the 40 minute interval. Putting 1/4 cup of water in the bottom of the oven also helps: the steam keeps the dough moist, so it expands more easily.

Note also that the “multigrains” I have in this recipe were simply accumulated over a couple weeks, mainly because I either saw the bag on sale at the local megamart, or the bag had an interesting description of how ancient and wonderful so-and-so grain is. (Yes, I’m a sucker for marketing.) The mix wasn’t the result of careful experimentation and experience. You can use different grains, depending on what you have on hand, what may be on sale, or what may have intriguing marketing. The mix I have gives a good, nutty, flavorful bread, much better than plain white bread. The molasses isn’t too sweet, and makes the bread pretty dark.

Last note: I’m baking on silicone bake sheets. Silpat is the main brandname, but Wal-Mart has similar items for cheap, but made in China rather than France (silicone production is not France’s comparative advantage).

City Data looks like useful summary information for all sorts of US cities. Here’s the page for Ohio’s Bigger Cities (over 6000 residents) and Cleveland in particular. Lots of neat demographic, climate, economic, etc., information.

Amazon has taken the brilliantly evil “using porn to defeat captcha” idea and put it to good use in their experimental Amazon Mechanical Turk. (The name comes from 18th Century chess automaton hoax, where the chess-playing “robot” actually consisted of a chess master dwarf moving the levers, as this page explains).

The Amazon system provides a framework for companies to formalize tasks that humans are good at but computers aren’t. It’s being used to refine A9’s search/local photo database right now, with residents of certain cities asked to pick the best street photo for a given business, out of the set taken by the A9 camera vans; GPS’s margin of error can easily give you the wrong storefront, but a computer can’t know that. This can obviously be generalized, and the Net gives ways to harness the spare cycles available in the human brain.

This BusinessWeek article has some commentators that have been able to register on the very busy system, earning more or less minimum wage during their down time. I’m waiting for some gym to install “Mechanical Turk” panels on their elliptical machines.

Here’s the apple crisp recipe we’re using right now. The apples are given a little bit of “pie filling” treatment:

1/2 stick butter
1/2 cup white sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup rolled oats
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 apples, peeled and cubed
1 lemon, juiced
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 cup water

• Pre-heat oven to 375F.
• Cream butter and white sugar in mixer until “grainy”.
• Add flour, oats, brown sugar, ground cinnamon and vanilla extract to mixer bowl and let it run for a minute until thorougly mixed.
• Meanwhile, peel and cube the apples into a large bowl. Sprinkle the lemon juice over the apples and mix to coat the apple pieces.
• Put apples into oven-safe casserole.
• Heat water in microwave, mix cornstarch into the water, and pour over the apples.
• Cover apples with the contents of the mixer bowl.
• Bake for 45 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes before serving.

I’m actually using a pair of these Emile Henry 1/2-Quart Oval Baking Dishes I picked up at Amazon on sale (about half price). The pair fit perfectly into the toaster oven, and I don’t have to turn on and heat the big oven. Preheat time is also minimal, since the oven space is very small, and, anyway, this is a crisp recipe and doesn’t call for scientific precision. Easier to wash, too, and each baking dish is good to serve two people.

For my own reference. It’s hard to do a clean step-by-step table, mainly because some actions are combined. Some vocabulary can be found here.

Kata 1 (attacker wins)

Kata 2 (defender wins)

Kata 3 (defender wins)

Kata 4

Kata 5 (Attacker wins)

We were in Chicago this past weekend. Interesting town: I certainly felt more like I was in a big city than Cleveland, with the density of skyscapers and tall buildings being about the same as Manhattan. Parts of the city, of course, recalls New York, while other parts, in the style of, say, the townhouses, recalls Boston. (Interestingly, our hotel was in an area that inexplicably reminded me of the Upper East Side, around Lexington Avenue. I realized latter that this was because of all the bars around the corner.) Certainly, the density of tall buildings, the active street life, the traffic, all that reminded me of New York, and felt more familiar than downtown Cleveland. And it’s a cleaner city: the streets underneath the El, while in many ways a 1:3 scale version of the New York subway, isn’t grungy in the way the streets underneath New York’s remaining elevated trains are. The public architecture is, in many ways, nicer than New York’s — Chicago has the big shiny blob next to the Gehry-designed amphitheater (all in the new park), and the Tribune building out-Gothics Gotham — and the lake and picturesquely sized river make for wonderful urban vistas.

There was no time to go to the museums, but we did see the video-image fountains and spent hours walking through downtown. In terms of true-tourist-attactions, those places where natives never go outside the company of out-of-town guests, we went to the top of the John Hancock tower at dusk to see the very flat horizon. The next time we’re in town, we have to remember to buy one of those City Passes: the discounts to the museums (Field Museum, Art Institute, aquarium, etc.) is very good. The line for the observation deck of the Hancock tower is also much, much shorter than the one for the Sears Tower: five minutes compared to an hour. The view is at least as good.

We at at Spiaggia but weren’t overawed. In terms of a high end Italian tasting menu, I thought Babbo blew it away, both in cost and quality. And we don’t have to dress in monkey suits while going to Babbo. At Gino’s East, we settled for ourselves that old debating point on whether Chicago-style pizza is better than New York-style thin crust. We may be partisan, but New York thin crusts beats out the over-stuffed Chicago pizzas hands down. Too much goop: it’s fine for what it is, but it’s arguably not pizza. Note that 1 slice of pan pizza is more or less equivalent to 2 slices of thin crust, i.e., we had a huge amount of leftovers.

Here are the photos:

I was in New York earlier this week to help uke for promotion tests at my old dojo, with Itai testing for ikkyu and Gearoid (who I hadn’t met before) testing for yellow belt. Itai and I started at this together, and it was good to see him get to this rank in person. This was also the last promotion test in the dojo before they move to a new location in the Lower East Side.

Here are the photos (Cari did most of the photography with my camera):

Exposure was inconsistent because I left the camera in apeture priority most of the test. I realized very late that I should have just taken test shots under the difficult lighting, found an appropriate shutterspeed and aperture, and just left it on manual settings. There were a few nice shots that were a stop or two underexposed: I played with the curves for those to get them semi-decent, though that introduced a fair bit of noise into the image. I’ll clean them up if anyone wants the full-sized photos.

Itai was exhausted before it was over. There were a few times near the end when the senseis would coax him into standing up, and then back away slowly, ready to rush in to support him in case he started to keel over. Remarkably, after each of those instances, he did very well: during randori, for example, he tore through the multiple ukes, executing strong throws most of the time. It was when he was standing still that he had problems.

At the beginning of the month, I submitted a few photos to Shutter Stock, a micro-stock photography site, to see if any income can be generated from the pool of photos I’ve been taking. It took a while for their reviewers to get to my submission batch, but I had a fair number approved initially, and have submitted more for inclusion into their catalog. Here’s the current gallery. Hey! I’ve now sold three photos for a total of 60¢ (the bit of product photography with the shoes, a silhouette of a statue, and the Wisconsin capitol dome).

I’m aware that traditional stock photography companies sell photos for hundreds of dollars a shot, usually surrounded by a nimbus of legal documents describing allowed usage, etc., so the 20¢/download from a microstock site is piddly (or I’m being robbed), but consider that their photos are typically shot by professional photographers, some of whom specialize in stock, whereas I just a bunch of photos that I took because I wanted to take photos, and all that my photos had been doing was taking up space on a hard drive. Any income is an improvement over that situation. Also, the traditional model will be under severe assault over the next few years, because a number of technological trends decrease the value of existing stock collections.

Yes, the demand for stock photography has greatly increased, as the places where visual images can be used have spread from higher-end production houses to anyone with a computer. I remember when documents were reproduced by mimeograph (and that alcohol smell) in high school. I don’t recall if there was a print shop class where you learned how to make mimeos (I wouldn’t be surprised, given Stuy’s heritage as a trade school), but it wasn’t feasible to include photographs on those copies. Now, with color laser printers under $1000, any decently financed business can generate their own brochures, and they all want some sort of photos to go in them. Image reproduction as democractized, or massified; whatever term of art you find appropriate. However, traditional stock companies don’t cater to these mom-and-pop brochure makers, who can’t spend hundreds of dollars for a single image just to dramatize a point, and who don’t need the legal wrapping those images come with when all they want to do is small-circulation piece of marketing. And this says nothing about image usage by web designers, who might need a dozen little pictures for a local real estate company’s website.

But supply has increased also, so that indepedent designers now have cheap access to images. The proliferation of digital cameras has put a lot of capabilities into the hands of amateurs and has reduced the cost of processing photos to almost nil. Vast pools of photos lie on hard drives around the world. The vast majority of them are junk, but even if a tiny percentage are good you will still wind up with a large number of images that might interest designers. The simultaneous rise of the Net allows widely dispersed photographers to submit their photos economically to micro-stock companies, who, in turn, can cheaply distribute those photos to the designers. The dead capital stored on my hard drive has become live with this network infrastructure in place, and both supply and demand have been democratized under the feet of the traditional stock companies.

There is still a place for those companies, though, as they cater to higher-end markets that both require and can afford the legal wrappers for their photo collections. But they’ll become a narrow niche while the micro-stock companies wind up with the lion’s share of stock photography revenues. This article notes that iStockPhoto’s revenues are already at a level that traditional companies would kill for.

On the DPReview forums talking about micro-stock sites, a few photographers took offense at the low prices, stating that their discards are worth more than 20¢. This mistakes how prices are determined, as the buyer isn’t taken into account. But is 20¢/download the market price for stock photos? Could it be higher? Possibly, as there are micro-stock houses offering higher prices. We’ll see if Shutterstock’s flat rate subscriptions for graphic designers works, compared to the a la carte model used by others. To some extent, the low prices are because amateurs like me are pleasantly surprised that anyone is willing to give us money for pictures we took without a thought of selling. Some time later, the market will find a price point for micro-stock, but it’s still in the early stages of development. There isn’t an exclusivity agreement with a lot of these companies, though, so the same photo can be sold through different channels. I shouldn’t look at a particular channel’s revenue, but should look at the revenue generated across all the channels. If this sum winds up to be a couple hundred dollars a year, that’s fine pocket change and may pay for a lens down the line.

Here’s an article/marketing cut-and-paste describing various micro-stock sites. Here’s a link to ShutterStock with my referrer ID, which I suppose I should include for completeness.

This is perhaps a few weeks late in terms of the blogosphere commentary flurry — if Internet-years were similar to dog-years, the lifespan of hot topics on blogs resembles that of mayflies — but, arguably, this is for my own thinking in the form of future reminders than anything else.

Anyway, what New Orleans experienced was not the worst case. The worst case was the levees not failing, but with a hurricane pushing so much water into the bowl in which the city sits that New Orleans gets flooded a dozen feet above sea level, all the while experiencing Category 5 winds. People who in reality fled the floodwaters by escaping to roofs or attics would have found the top of their houses shattered. There will perhaps be a thousands deaths attributed to Katrina; in the worst case, the 25,000 body bags ordered by Louisana would have been filled.

A disaster was unavoidable once a faraway butterfly fluttered its wings. In the hours before Katrina’s inevitable landfall, someone poetically saw New Orleans existing in a state of indeterminancy, a horrific, real version of Schroedinger’s cat: we wouldn’t know whether the city was destroyed until the next day, but the dice determining its fate had already been rolled. You can read some of the frantic despair on Brendan Loy’s weather blog, as he tracked Katrina’s approach. You can see the professional alarm at this meteorologist’s Weather Underground blog. These are pieces of history, just as much as newspapers and magazine articles are, but they foresaw what would happen more clearly than, say, the New York Times, whose Sunday 8/28 front page didn’t even mention the approaching hurricane. Part of the media’s absence before the storm may have had to do with all the breathless reporting done before each hurricane, with one hyped up as the storm-of-the-century every year or so. “Wolf” has been cried too often.

“Wolf” may also have been part of the reasoning for the late evacuation call by the city and state governments: they had heard that a killer storm was going to wipe New Orleans off the map just too many times, even though there were fairly accurate models predicting what would happen. We perhaps wander into public choice economics when we observe that the incentives were against Mayor Nagin to call an evacuation until it was too late: if the hurricane hit the Florida panhandle instead, he would have been run from office for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars because of perceived alarmism; similarly, if he doesn’t call an effective evacuation and the hurricane hits, at worst he’ll just lose his job, though perhaps gaining the ability to blame the Federal government for his own haplessness.

In terms of private choices, individuals have to make a decision to leave the city, whether or not an evacuation is called by the government. For poor people in particular, this is a hard choice, as a false alarm will cost them significant earnings and possibly their job because they left town for a few days. Further, “wolf” causes people to not appreciate the costs of staying, as they will believe that they have already survived even bigger, badder storms; more people will stay than otherwise, though, when the Weather Channel reporter bugs out, you should know you’re in trouble. (I had read that some of the local governments in the Carolinas “incentivize” people to leave by going door-to-door to tell people to get out before a storm, and if they don’t leave, they’re given magic markers and told write their Social Security numbers on themselves to help identify their corpses later. This succinctly crystalizes the situation for evacuees.)

To some extent, these private choices to evacuate were even further undercut by the city government’s incompetence. In particular, available local resources were not used to evacuate the indigent, and became truly wasted assets as these working buses became flooded. You will note that private organizations moved their assets of the threat zone: Greyhound got its buses out, and Amtrak moved trains away from the city, even offering to take hundreds of people out at the time. This offer was declined. The thousands of additional refugees in the city would strain rescue resources after the storm.

But the governments of New Orleans and some of these Gulf Coast states resemble corrupt Third World governments in the best of times, so stunning incompetence may not be unexpected. Whither our Federal government? Four years after 9/11, shouldn’t we be able to handle disasters a bit better? Granted, there’s federalism, and Washington can’t simply take over without the state governors acceding, but shouldn’t FEMA have better lines of communication with the necessary people in different parts of the country? Shouldn’t the areas of responsiblity have been more clear, rather than watching the state waiting for the Federal government to offer help while the Feds were waiting for the state to ask for it? And why was an apparent political hack in charge of FEMA? Yes, this was a large scale disaster, and disasters make things hard to do (or else it would be an inconvenience), but, again, this is four years after 9/11, and we should be better at this. As Bruce Schneier points out, the aftermath of a disaster, whether intentional or natural, is handled similarly (though the specific Hollywood-esque scenario of a hurrican hitting New Orleans had been predicted and should have specifically been prepared for (Brendan Loy as the voice in the wilderness who foresaw what was coming! Mayor Nagin as the corrupt politician more interested in votes than the survival of the town! But there was no Hollywood ending; Superman didn’t come down and turn the storm away.)). For this, Bush is to blame: not for the particulars of what happened in New Orleans (which are primarily the fault of local authorities), but for our nation’s apparent lackadasical attitude towards emergency management in our day and age. Here’s a useful summary of the actions of the various levels of government here.

What is to be done? The people of New Orleans and Lousiana have to look at their political structures; it’s their responsibility to make their local governments work better. It’s our responsibility to make the Federal government work better. I voted for Bush in November to fight this war, and disaster preparedness is a part of this war, and am disappointed by FEMA’s ineffectiveness and political hackery. But perhaps we can make federalism work better by having local emergency management offices grade FEMA and vice-versa, all before disaster strikes and not in the orgy of finger-pointing we’re now seeing. Self-criticism is one of the strengths of our society, and we should be better at setting up institutions to use this strength. We may also want to call on private entities to help with recovery, with FEMA serving more as a coordinating role and as the channel through which to ask for military muscle if necessary to restore civil order. It should be noted that Wal-Mart’s inland stores were ready with supplies for refugees loaded on dozens of containers, demonstrating the power of one of the world’s finest logistics systems. With Katrina, public assets were wasted, but private assets were better preserved and able to help in the aftermath.

In terms of private preparations, Instapundit has a useful checklist: basically, don’t expect help to arrive for a few days (because it’s a disaster, not an inconvenience), so make sure you have supplies on hand to last until help does come. There’s a pointer to a $50 survival kit that can be accumulated over time. The main items are potable water, or at least ways to make potable water. And canned food is probably better than dried beans, if only because you may not have a way of cooking said beans. One should have a can opener or Leatherman in that case. There should also be planning on where to go and how to make contact with people afterwards. But the basic notion is to rely on yourself and not wait for help: your government may be too overwhelmed or incompetent to provide it.

Midway upon the journey of life,
I find myself in the dark woods of Windows administration
for the Admin password had been lost.

But this Offline NT Password & Registry Editor helped me blank out the password and unlock the account. I suppose I should download the CD image and start making a small kit of boot/recovery disks.

Note that this is only for older Windows workstations using local authentication. Changing a lost Administrator password on a Win2K PDC seems to require more involved techniques.