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The boring life of a goody two shoes |
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2004-03-31
Friends Reunited
Barely two weeks ago something happened that quite some time ago we had stopped hoping for. Steffi called.
For our last two years of highschool as well as a substantial part of our university time, Steffi had been our best friend - a vivacious, woman with an indomitable humour, a zest for life, and a passion for history, language, and discussion. Then, in her second year at university, she started a new relationship with a guy that seemed to us even less well-matched to her temper than the one she'd had during most of her highschool time - slow, lazy, with nothing you'd call a passion unless you count sex and pot. Entangled in his lifestyle, she quickly gained weight, slacked at her courses, even got pregnant from him (but fortunately - at least in hindsight - lost the child early into her pregnancy). Their relationship soon started spiralling down when she caught him cheating with one of his TAs and had all the reason to suspect that this was not a unique event, she in turn cheated on him, and things quickly got worse from there.
At that time she had been slowly drifting out of our lives for some time, but the mess that was her relationship seemed to acccelerate the process. She stopped having time for us, then stopped calling and answering our letters, and last we heard (second hand), they'd split up. Seeing as neither me nor my wife are the type to have droves of friends, that was a staggering loss which hurt us deeply, especially with another of my wife's dearest friends doing the same to her at aproximately the same time. So we tried to keep in contact but basically hit a wall, and so had to arrange ourselves with a life that would be poorer from now on, without S's company.
Fast forward to an afternoon in early March this year. For as yet unknown reasons, Steffi had attempted to reach us under our old phone number and had talked with my mother-in-law for the better part of two hours. This is nothing unusual, Steffi and my mother-in-law always had an instant chemistry that was almost scary to behold. They've barely seen each other more than half a dozen times, but put them together in the same room or give them some means of communication and you'd never know, because more likely than not you'll find them talking like life-long friends or close family.
Equipped with our new phone number, she then called us. And we talked half an eternity, and except for the fact that the most important events of all the years we hadn't seen each other were what we talked about, catching up on our respective lives, it was almost as if it hadn't been more than four years since our last contact of any kind. Last Saturday, she came for a visit, bringing her husband and six month old son with her.
And a good time was had by all. Their son is reasonably well-behaved, if slightly more boring than the more active son of a colleague of my wife, who came by to visit us a few weeks ago. Her husband is a great guy - extroverted but neither overbearing nor hectic, good-natured but sufficiently strong-willed to hold is own against S, quick-minded, and equipped with an infectious, slightly subversive humour. Most important to us, though, Steffi is almost her own self again. A bit calmer and more mature than during our early years of friendship, but without much of a trace of the mess she was in when she disappeared from our lives all those years ago. She's admittedly still weightier than during her best times, but she has ambition and energy again, and she's strafing at the bits to get out of her unemployment and back to doing what she is best at - being a kick-ass teacher.
In other words, these two are just about the perfect extroverted and energetic counterbalance to our own calmer and introverted selves. There was instant chemistry between us as well as much laughing and talking, even troughout a minor messy accident with the little one, but then, that's why we have floor tiles on the ground floor...
I'm forcing myself to remain skeptical, because one Saturday afternoon meeting is hardly enough to establish anything, but it looks like in this case it is possible to revive old highschool and university friendships, provided there is enough of a basis for it to grow again.
Color me hopeful and, at least for the moment, happy.
2004-03-23
Of Bread and Bricks
I'm a German, which almost by definition means that I love bread. After all, Germany is the country with the highest per capita consumption of bread in the world. It is also the country with the biggest variety of bread, with even a medium sized bakery carrying at least a dozen wildly different breads, ranging from all-rye over the popular rye-wheat mixes down to the all-wheat, from pan-baked to freeform, with or without additives like sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame, flax seeds or half a dozen other things. The bread you can buy from most bakeries is also of reasonably high quality, or at least used to be until supermarkets began opening their own bakery mini stores using parbaked bread, and small mom-and-pop bakeries were squeezed out of the market by big, sometimes even international, bakery chain stores.
Which is why, except for toast (which we don't make ourselves), we haven't bought a bread yet this year. As I wrote some time ago, we have switched to our own sourdough culture, started from scratch. It's a nicely active and cold-resistant culture with a nice fruity smell when properly cared for although it starts to smell like paint thinner if left in the fridge too long without feeding. We are still learning how to tweak the whole process to produce the bread we want, but unlike some beginner's stories on rec.food.sourdough, we have until now avoided producing inedible doorstops. Granted, some of our efforts where rather bricklike in density, but at least they were invariably edible, tasty bricks. ;-)
The first breads were baked in a crock pan and lacked both taste and a proper crust. Soon we switched to freeform breads, which gained us a nice crust but also a more brick-like crumb. Apparently, the crock pan was good for more than keeping the dough together. So we played around with the proofing times and produced a variety of breads, some incredibly sour and delicious but rather dense, others with a nicer crumb but somewhat deformed. Things have improved since then, and our latest efforts are both nice to look at, tasty, and mildly sour. And while they are still a bit tight in the crumb, they are sufficiently far removed from a brick in density that we have dared surprise the in-laws with them when they came over for diner one evening, when they met with approval.
A nice, unexpected side effect of baking our own bread (on top of the nice and expected effect of less indigestion and less passing of gas for both of us, which confirmed our suspicion that our formerly favourite bakery had changed something in their breads) is that our home made bread keeps more than two weeks - far longer than any bakery bread we've had for years, let alone the abominations you can buy at the local supermarkets - without the use of any chemical additives. Which kinda, sorta begs the question why anyone would actually add preservatives to a perfectly fine bread, but then, the breads with the preservaties probably weren't quite perfectly fine to begin with...
Anyway, we hadn't expected such nice progress when we started out on our bread baking adventure, and neither had we expected to be able to painlessly integrate the whole procedure into our daily routine, but baking bread takes surprisingly little time, and the results are definitely worth it, even if we haven't totally foresworn pre-packaged bread-mixes for our wheat bread, which we haven't even come close to mastering yet. But the breads produced with this mix are delicious, so we'll stick with them for the foreseeable future.
And now excuse me, I've gotten hungry and there's some fresh bread waiting in the kitchen...
2004-03-16
Rick Cook: Wiz Biz
Most books I would read after Jeffrey Eugenides' absolutely fantastic "Middlesex" was bound to be weak when compared to its predecessor, but the two I've read immediately afterwards were weak on their own account.
Aaron Allston's "Doc Sidhe" had promise with its setting of our world connected with the world of the fair folk, which resembles our own in its development although it lags behind by about a century, the plot of a Sidhe trying to sever the cords between the worlds so he could establish his own rule over them, all this intermixed with the struggle of a couple to save the two worlds and their own relationship. But somehow it fell flat of its promises because the characters stayed strangely remote despite the obvious attempts of the author to bring them closer to the reader, the plot failed to keep the tension, and the world building wasn't all that convincing to me after all.
Christopher Anvil's "Pandora's Legions" held promise of a different kind with its postulation of a relatively peaceful, space-faring mega-civilization run by a species that was on average less intelligent than humans, and what happens when they finally meet the intelligent and strangely warlike and quarrelsome humans with all their weird ideas. But although the book was entertaining in places, it somehow felt stitched together, as if someone had taken a collection of short stories all set in the same universe and then tried to glue them together into a novel.
After those two disappointments I very much wanted my next read to be entertaining, and Rick Cook delivered where both Anvil and Allston failed. In fact, I haven't had so much sheer unadulterated fun with a book for quite a while. "Wiz Biz" comprises the first two books of Rick Cook's Wizardry Series, "Wizard's Bane" and "Wizardry Compiled", and I really want to read the other two, so my next order from Amazon will contain both omnibus editions, "Wiz Biz" and "Cursed and Consulted", which contains the other two books of the series.
The general story isn't all that original: someone from our modern times gets transported into another world that is technically far less advanced, but sports such things as real magic and dragons for compensation. This time, it's a Silicon Valley computer geek without any magical talent who gets Summoned by a powerful wizard of the White League to help them against the evil mages of the Black League and the ever encroaching wild magic of the world at large. The problem is that the wizard dies in the process, and no-one else knows quite what to do with this seemingly worthless geek who thanks to an Infatuation spell of the dying wizard has developed a hefty crush on the beautiful hedge witch the wizard had cajoled into helping him in his unlucky Summoning.
Things only change once William Irving "Wiz" Zumwalt applies his substantial knowledge of software programming to create a magic compiler which allows him to develop his own special brand of magic. With the help of his magical software tools and his wit, Wiz finally manages to vanquish the Dark League, rescue the damsel in distress, and make her fall in love with him in the end. When the remants of the Dark League abduct Wiz, and one of his spells gets hacked to destroy everything magical it gets pointed at, and the whole world hangs on the brink of a war with all the magical races threatening to unite and exterminate the human race, which is now slowly but effectively killing off all magic users in the world, Wiz' love travels to Earth to bring a whole bunch of geeks back into her own world to help her find her love and fix the magical imbalance in the world...
If this book has one flaw, it's its rather narrow target demographic. If you know what Emacs is, if things like "Forth", "Lisp", and "Modula-2" ring a bell with you, if you know what a 640 KB limit is and what the Dragon Book by Aho, Seti & Ullmann is all about, you'll feel right at home with this novel. If, on the other hand, your eyes have glazed over by know, there is a good chance that you won't enjoy the book very much. You'll miss out on about 90% of the jokes and a good part of Cook's considerable skill in correctly and believably portraying the peculiar outlook and humour of the typical member of the hacker culture and their fight against deadlines and project reviews.
Make no mistake, this is a fantasy book for geeks and very likely has little appeal to non-geeks who don't at least know some hackers well enough to appreciate the in-jokes, the weird references to the geek culture as well as all the puns. Being a geek myself, I had an immense amount of fun reading the book. Heck, I frequently had to stifle a loud and hearty laugh when reading in bed with my laptop in my, ahh, lap, so I would not wake up my wife who was already peacefully slumbering beside me.
If you identify as a geek, you owe it to yourself to read those books, if conversely you do not, you can safely ignore them. I for one am looking forward to my next order from Amazon...
2004-03-10
Security and Sleep Deprivation - Microsoft Style
My in-laws know next to nothing about computers. In other words, they know just enough to be dangerous. This is somewhat less true about my mother-in-law, who is working for a non-profit that has a computer for most employees, but no-one administrating the resulting mess. Thus, she has learnt some discipline in the self-interest of keeping her box running, and she has absorbed a sufficient amount of admonitions from me when she brought her computer to me for some installation and clean-up work. Due to being left alone and having to fix things on her own at work, she also has learned to fix simple problems herself, and leave things the fuck alone the moment she notices that she's in way over her head.
My father-in-law though, who has worked the last dozen years before his retirement in an environment that boasted corporate IT staff complete with a hand-holding department as well as a well-protected coporate intranet that is nothing like the wilderness that is the 'net, has no such constraints while at the same time knowing even less about computers than his wife. Which means that he's dangerous with a computer, if only mostly to himself...
Combine this situation with the fact that they have a PC running Windows XP dangling off an ISDN line, and you have a veritable nightmare for the guy who is doing technical support for them out of the goodness of his heart, read: me. So I ordered the current CD with the collected Windows security fixes from Microsoft, because sucking Windows updates through anything less than a DSL line is not my favorite idea of spending oodles of my copious spare time.
In a bout of temporary mental weakness I decided to bring my own tightly secured Windows 98SE installation up to date when the CD finally arrived yesterday. Bad move. The fact that the html on the CD wouldn't properly render under Mozilla should have woken me up, I guess. Alas it didn't.
Now, we have a Windows security update programm, faced with a Windows 98 installation that doesn't have Internet Explorer and Outlook Express installed (I'm using the excellent 98lite). Ask yourself this simple question: what is more secure, a system that lacks those two piles of excrement that are simply the most prolific virus vectors in the history of computing, or a system that has the latest versions of Internot Exploder and Outhouse Excuse installed, which are known to contain unpatched security vulnerabilities? Now what should a reasonable security update do? And what, conversely, does the Microsoft Security Update do instead?
Right. It tries to foist that insecure shit onto my system, in a procedure that sports a dialog window with a helpful cancel button that is not-so-helpfully disabled. And it leaves the system in a mess of ddl-hell that is impervious to my attempts of fixing it.
Thanks, you fucking morons!
So it's 1:30 a.m. before I finally crawl into bed, the system freshly installed, but still lacking a working sound card, which stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the existance of the properly installed drivers, a browser, and and IM client. Those things will hopefully get fixed tomorrow, or even today, should my wife not feel well enough to go to the movies to watch Cold Mountain tonight.
If it weren't for my love of computer games, I would have sworn off Windows ages ago. Gah!
2004-03-06
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex
It was in the wee hours of the day of my last business trip to Frankfurt that I found myself on Berlin Ostbahnhof station with nothing to do and twenty minutes of idle time. So I wandered down into the main hall and found to my surprise and delight that the book and newspaper shop had already opened. I wandered the aisles, savoring the smell of paper and ink, browsing the shelves of books until almost on my way out again, my view settled on a paperback titled "Middlesex". I remembered Sedalina's praise, took a copy and started reading the text on the back, which triggered the memory that I had heard about this book before somewhere and that it had received high praise. Intrigued by the glimpses of the story in the cover text and those memories I bought it on an impulse.
This impulse buy turned out to be one of the better decisions in my life so far. Had it not been for the gorgeous sunrise on the way to Frankfurt an the company of that fascinating lady on the return leg, I would have spent all ten hours of the journey there and back again in the pages of this book.
After reading the first few sentences I a bit disappointed, because the author lets Cal Stephanides, the protagonist, tell the story of how he came to be what he is from an odd mix of omniscient narrator and first person perspective, and I've read a sufficient amount of poorly written first person stories that I knew this was hard to pull off right. But Jeffrey Eugenides has a talent as a writer that few can rival, and he puts it to good use. Cal Stephanides has a distinctly human voice full of charm, warmth and humour, and Jeffrey Eugenides is as gifted in his use of words as he is in spinning a story that spans eighty years and three generations.
The story starts off in a tiny village near Mount Olympus and two of its inhabitants, the siblings Desdemona and Lefty. Through the chaos of the First World War and the equally big chaos that are their emotions they find themselves on a ship to the USA, where they arrive no longer as what they are but as new persons with a new life in front of them, and even more importantly, as a married couple.
From there, Cal Stephanides' narration takes us on a journey through time, we see the desolations that were the first Ford motor company assembly lines and the Prohibition, we see the racial riots of the sixties, and we see this family of former immigrants surviving the hardships life throws at them, conquering them, and building themselves an existance that finally brings the second generation, Cal's parents, to a comfortably well-off life. This in itself is a family saga to rival those of Isabel Allende, but the author doesn't stop there, reminding us through Cal's voice that there is more at play here, and that the genetic defect that Desdemona and Lefty have brought with them from their Greek village is awaiting its chance.
This chance finally comes when Cal is born as Calliope Stephanides. Here the story changes track, switching from family saga to coming of age story without losing its appeal. Here, also, is my one very small token complaint: somehow, despite the intriguing story, despite the fascinating looks into the mind of Cal/Calliope, despite the looming catastrophe of puberty when the genetic defect that made Cal look and consquently get raised like a girl although he is equipped with a XY-chromosome set, despite all this the story looses a bit of steam. Mind you, this is a token complaint, because you only notice that in comparison with the first part of the book, it's still a fascinating narration that is only rivalled by few.
Middlesex has a few other intriguing (at least to me) qualities. Jefrey Eugenides has lived in Berlin for some time, and it shows. The story of the present-day Cal Stephanides that is interwoven with the main story of the past takes place in the Germany of 2001. To my not inconsiderable joy he gets Berlin right, catching the vibes of this city. Seeing the locations I myself have visited so often described through Cal's eyes gives them a new, freshly haunting outlook. Eugenides even seems to have visited Hehringsdorf (not Herringsdorf as in the novel), the village on the Baltic Sea which Cal visits in the ongoing search for his private happiness. In such ways, the author again and again intertwines his own life's experiences with those of his protagonist and even gives Cal an outward appearance that is easily recognizable as being based on his own (minus the receding hair line).
I don't find it surprising that this book has won critical acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize, but I find it somewhat disappointing that in stark contrast to the crap that normally gets the media's attention around here the book doesn't seem to be widely known or advertized in Germany. If you haven't read it, make sure you do so in the not too distant future!
Sedalina may have it right - Middlesex (surely not Hemmingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls!?) just might be the best novel of all times.
2004-03-04
Lnl!
Zl jvsr unf vffhrq n ona ba guvf vasbezngvba hagvy Rnfgre. Arireguryrff V arrq gb funer guvf evtug urer naq abj orpnhfr V'z nyzbfg ohefgvat jvgu wbl, naq V jbhyqa'g jnag nalbar gb unir gb pyrna hc gur erfhygvat zrff jura naq vs V npghnyyl qb. Va n srroyr nggrzcg ng cebgrpgvat gur thvygl, ernq zr, V'z ebg-vat gur grkg.
Zl jvsr vf certanag! Lnl!
Bs pbhefr, guvf zrnaf gung gur ubhfr nofbyhgryl zhfg or svavfurq ol yngr fhzzre gb cercner gur neeviny bs gur yvggyr jbaqre, ohg gung vf pregnvayl qbnoyr. Vg nyfb zrnaf gung V'yy unir gb artbgvngr fbzr neenatrzrag be bgure (cngreany yrnir sbyybjrq ol rvgure n jbex-sebz-ubzr qrny be fubegrarq jbex ubhef yvxr n sbhe-qnl-jrrx) jvgu zl obff, juvpu ybbxf fbzrjung yrff qbnoyr naq vf fbzrguvat V fb qba'g ybbx sbejneq gb.
Ohg evtug abj, V'z whfg nf unccl naq pbagrag nf V pna or, naq ab fznyy ovg sevtugrarq nf jryy, vs gur gehgu or xabja.
2004-03-02
Eleven?! You're joking, right?
While it is the best adaption of the book yet, Return of the King is seriously not that good. And while I can see things like Best Makeup or Best Special Effects, giving it the Oscar in every freaking category it was nominated for is overdoing it, in my not so humble opinion. And by quite a hefty margin at that. Heck, I can so understand the remark of the Canadians who won the Best Foreign Language Movie award - at least they had a fair chance, seeing as RotK couldn't possibly run in that category.
And it's not as if the rest of the nominees were shit. With entries like The Last Samurai, Lost in Translation, Cold Mountain, or Master and Commander we had some damn fine candidates. So much so that you almost start having a glimmer of hope that Hollywood has stopped producing crappy shit exclusively and is back to putting out decent movies at least semi-regularly. But that just might be taking things a bit too far as well. We'll see, I guess.
Anyway, to get back some perspective on the whole LotR thingy, I present The Very Secret Diaries, containing some pretty damn ribald, politically incorrect, and occasionally tasteless fanfic, but it happens to be funny in places as well. Sadly, this isn't exactly the greatest fanfic ever written, and it's far inferior to the laugh-out-loud funny Naked Quidditch story, but it's irreverent like all hell, and that's what I needed after watching the Oscar ceremony last night. Warning: if you don't like "Bored of the Rings" or are a fan of Political Correctness (but then, what are you doing here?!), chances are you'll hate this stuff, so don't say I didn't warn you.
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