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10

  • 1 car
  • 2 career changes
  • 3 residences
  • 12 jobs
  • 2,349 books
  • 4,927 nappies

10 years. 1 marriage. I love you, Abi.

(Abi does a much better job of the whole reminiscence thing, though.)

The actual anniversary was last Wednesday, 23rd July. We didn’t do anything special during the day. Abi was at work, and because I don’t work on Wednesdays, I spent the day stripping wallpaper with Alex. In the evening, though, Scott and Ange came round to babysit, and Abi and I went out for dinner at the Pompadour restaurant at the Caledonian Hotel. Very posh, very nice.

We were also stuck for a present to get each other. I got Abi a diamond ring when Alex was born, and I don’t wear any jewelry other than my wedding ring. A romantic holiday would have been nice, but tricky to arrange. So what could we fall back on? Books? CDs? That didn’t seem terribly special for a ten-year anniversary….

The answer came in the form of tools. Abi’s hobby is bookbinding, and recently she has been craving leatherworking ornaments and various other bits of esoteric hardware. My main hobby right now is computers (sigh), and I’ve been craving a brain transplant and a spinal upgrade for Frankenstein, my PC. So we decided to reward each other with a cash budget to blow on our favourite tools.

It may not sound romantic, but we’re both fairly practical types, and we much prefer getting presents that we want and know we’re going to use, than trinkets that’ll end up lying around in drawers.

Wow. Ten years. I often get surprised looks when I tell people we’ve been married for that long. I was 21, fresh out of university; Abi was 22 and herself only six months past her graduation. By modern standards, we married really young. Still, it seems to have worked out okay so far. 🙂

A very pleasant thought struck me yesterday about the next ten years. In 2013, Alex will be just 12 years old. The last ten years seem like a long time. That means there is still an equally long time of Alex’s childhood to enjoy. That feels really nice to know.

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Sneakernet 2003

Don’t underestimate the bandwidth of a UPS truck filled with 200GB hard disks:

“I’ve been working with a bunch of astronomers lately and we need to send around huge databases. I started writing my databases to disk and mailing the disks. At first, I was extremely cautious because everybody said I couldn’t do that?that the disks are too fragile. I started out by putting the disks in foam. After mailing about 20 of them, I tried just putting them in bubble wrap in a FedEx envelope. Well, so far so good. I have not had any disk failures of mailed disks.

“… lately I’m sending complete computers. We’re now into the 2-terabyte realm, so we can’t actually send a single disk; we need to send a bunch of disks. It’s convenient to send them packaged inside a metal box that just happens to have a processor in it. I know this sounds crazy?but you get an NFS or CIFS server and most people can just plug the thing into the wall and into the network and then copy the data.”

(From an ACM Queue interview with Jim Gray, head of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center.)

I’ve just tried out this technique myself. I’ve got about 15GB of MP3s kicking around at home and at work. Rather than use CD-Rs or network transfers to keep them synchronised, I’ve now got an 80 Gig external hard disk that I shuttle back and forth.

I suppose you could look at it as a primitive iPod…that doesn’t actually play music on its own…and that’s about twenty times as heavy and ten times as big… Come to think of it, it’s a bit crap.

Oh, iPod. Some day you’ll be mine. Oh yes, you will be….

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Not a legend

A week or two ago, a couple of my colleagues came back from the Microsoft Tech-Ed conference in Barcelona. They were loaded down with all kinds of freebies, including CDs and cardboard cut-outs of “Software Legends”. The Software Legends are a gang of some of the most respected programmers and authors doing work on Microsoft technologies right now–people like Chris Sells, Don Box, David Platt… the usual suspects.

They even have their own web site: softwarelegends.com.

Eric Sink, himself no slouch in the “respected programmer” league tables, has now done a brilliant parody: notalegend.com.

I should now also take the time to point out an excellent series of articles Eric has written recently on the subject of marketing. They’re from the perspective of an independent software vendor, but most of the principles should apply to other industries, too.

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Search engines: filling the googleholes

In the article “Digging for Googleholes” on Slate, Steven Johnson talks about some of the reasons why you might not be able to find information using the “all-knowing” Google:

“Search for ‘apple’ on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer?and it’s a page promoting a public TV show called Newton’s Apple. After that it’s all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple’s home page. You have to sift through 50 results before you reach a link that deals with apples that grow on trees: the home page for the Washington State Apple Growers Association. To a certain extent, this probably reflects the interest of people searching as well as those linking, but is the world really that much more interested in Apple Computer than in old-fashioned apples?”

Some of the arguments he uses are spurious. The one I quoted, for example, is like complaining that your friendly local librarian gave you a book on computers when went up to them and just said “apple.” Without more specific information, a human isn’t going to know you wanted to know about fruit. Google may have the knowledge of thousands of librarians at its fingertips, but it still can’t read your mind.

However, this does highlight the issue that Google (and other search engines) don’t make it clear how much information you have to specify before they’ll bring back a relevant set of search results. If you enter one term, you’ll often get back a lot of useless junk. But if you enter twenty words, you might get nothing back at all. Is it better to enter ten words and get a single, highly targeted page that matches them all; or five words to get a single page of results, with the benefit that you can scan the list and see which one is most promising?

(As a side note, I wonder how many words (on average) are sufficient to narrow down a query to a single page of results?)

Searching is a skill that has to be learned. You don’t step into a typical university library and expect to be able to dig up the most relevant information about Mesopotamian goat-herding in an eyeblink. Unless you’ve spent time learning how to use a library, you probably wouldn’t even know where to start. It is often said that knowing how to find information is just as, if not more useful than knowing the information itself. In our information-rich world, this skill is only going to become more important.

Google provides a good, simple starting point, so that even novice searchers should be able to find something. At the other end of the bell curve you have people skilled enough to act as the human back-end for Google Answers. What about the people in the middle, though? Do they even know about all the advanced searching techniques you can use? How will they find out about them? Will they have the time to spend coming to grips with them? The “advanced search” link on most search engines is easily overlooked, and when you get to the advanced page, it is usually orders of magnitude more complex than the simple search.

Personally, I think that Google is as good as we’ve got right now. But I do reckon there’s lots of scope for improvement. And I wouldn’t bet too heavily against Microsoft pulling it off. They have a history of targeting the middle ground of computing, and making it the default option. (And then proceeding to make good money from it.)

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The ultimate hot sauce

I’m a big fan of hot foods. A very big fan. Unfortunately Abi isn’t, and Alex is still too young to properly appreciate my badass voodoo chili. So when I’m in the mood for something spicy, I usually make a plain version and sex up my own portion with some hot sauce.

Sambal OelekI used to use sambal oelek for this purpose. A small jar of sambal is a standard condiment on the tables of Chinese-Indonesian restaurants in the Netherlands. If you get a take-away, you’ll be asked if you want a little sachet of sambal to go with it. Sambal tastes great in chili, and is lovely in scrambled eggs. But it has three drawbacks. First of all, it is still relatively hard to find good sambal here in Britain. Secondly, it tends to be a bit salty. Depending on the dish, you might not want that kind of additional seasoning. And finally, sambal is a mash of peppers rather than a sauce. It still contains whole seeds and small chunks of pepper, which can sometimes detract from the presentation of your dish. (Also, I find sambal a bit mild these days.)

Encona West Indian Original Hot Pepper SauceOne of the biggest brands in hot sauces in Britain is Encona, who make a selection of different flavours. I’ve tried two of them, their “West Indian Original Hot Pepper Sauce”, and their relatively new “Cajun Hot Pepper Sauce”. The West Indian sauce is made from the exceedingly hot scotch bonnet pepper. It has a powerful up-front burn, with a slightly fruity aftertaste. It can add a lot of heat to a dish with very little sauce, but because it front-loads the burn it kills a lot of the flavour from your main ingredients. I’ve tried it in chili, pasta sauces and soups, and although it has plenty of fire, it’s about as subtle as a brick to the head.

Their Cajun sauce is made from cayenne peppers (my favourite), and has a more easy-going taste. It has a much rounder, wider burn that fills your mouth much more gradually. But it is also very, very sweet, and that can have an adverse effect on the flavour of the dish you’re trying to spice up. It’s not as hot than the West Indian sauce, so although you have to add more sauce to raise the flames (which makes it easier to control the heat), you’re also adding more extraneous flavour to your dish. Which of these two sauces you’d be better off with will depend on the type of food you’re cooking, and on your personal preference for heat.

Dan T's Inferno White Hot Cayenne Pepper SauceBut I’ve been saving the best for last. Sambal isn’t the ultimate hot sauce, and neither are the Encona varieties. The best hot sauce I have ever tasted has got to be Dan T’s Inferno White Hot Cayenne Pepper Sauce. It has a deep, full-mouth burn that arrives slowly and lingers. It has a rich, dark flavour that maintains the classic zing of the cayenne pepper, but also adds depth and maturity to its spicy exuberance. The texture is smooth, with a tiny amount of dark red and orange grit that buries itself deep in the crevasses between your tongue’s taste buds. It is capable of raising a sweat in small quantities, but even larger amounts don’t kill the flavour of your original dish. It opens up a wormhole into an alternate dimension of fiery gastronomic pleasure.

It is, in short, amazing.

It also seems to have vanished from all supermarket shelves here in Edinburgh. I’ve tried Asda, Safeway, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. None of them have it. I bought my original bottle from one of them, I’m sure, but now it’s gone! The Encona Cajun sauce just isn’t an adequate replacement, but where else can I get it? I haven’t found an on-line source for it here in the UK yet, either. If you see Dan T’s in your supermarket, or if you find an on-line merchant selling it, please let me know!

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