Ruins of the old Williamsburg Hospital

Just a quick hello between Christmas and New Years. I hope everyone had a great Christmas, I know I did. While my family history has often been rocky, it is amazing and humbling the kindness I have been shown by so many families throughout my life. This year was no exception.

A few photos were taken. They can be found through the picture linked above.

Black and white photography is something new to me. Those with more official training in photography usually start shooting only black and white and I think that I see why. It is the same as working with a prime lens in that it removes a variable from the equation of taking a good shot. Rather than having a multitude of variables, I am forced down to just focus, aperture and exposure. That leaves more of the brain able to concentrate on framing the shot.

I don’t think I will start shooting exclusively black and white to practice, but as we exit fall and enter winter, there are not very many colors to speak of and I think it will allow me to explore other aspects of my picture taking.

A few more pictures from the same set are on my flickr page. I didn’t make a set, so it is probably easiest to click on the one above and just go backwards and forwards.

Well, as you may have noticed (unless you are using an RSS reader), I have changed the look of my blog. I wanted something cleaner. Some things are still a work in progress, but it is getting there. Hope you like it. If it looks broken to you, shoot me an email. Thanks.

Updated: If it looks like crap in IE, I’m sorry. IE is a stinky browser, please use Firefox or Safari.

Before I headed out of town last week, I looked at the three bananas I had sitting on the counter and wondered what to do with them. I realized they were already past their prime and would be goners by the time I got back. Then I had a thought; BREAD!; BANANA BREAD! So I tossed them in the refrigerator so they would not be fuzzy when I got back.

You know I hold Alton Brown in very high regard, so I pulled out his second tome, I’m Just Here for More Food. Pages 98-99, Banana Bread. Muffin Method, here I come.

I got back in town last night and swung by the grocery store to complete the ingredient list. One special note, backing soda with an expiration date 9 years in the past won’t cut it. Yes, I tested it. Get some new.

And lo, the book decreed that this was to follow the Muffin Method. What is the Muffin Method, you ask?

• Mix the dry team together.
• Mix the wet team together (yes, that includes sugar)
• Combine the two items and mix until just combined.
• Do Not Overmix!

The ingredients:

• The Wet Team - Squad 1

  *   Overripe bananas - very overripe; black but not fuzzy *   1 cup sugar
  

• The Wet Team - Squad 2

  *   1 stick unsalted butter - melted and cooled *   2 large eggs
  

• The Dry Team

  *   2 cups AP Flour *   1 teaspoon baking soda *   1 teaspoon salt
  

The preparation:

First step was to prepare the pan. Alton has a good section on doing so. The first step was to cover the ends of the pan (but not the center) with shortening and flour. Then, using parchment paper (not wax paper), cut a piece and use it as a “sling” over the middle of the pan. This allows for very very simple removal of the bread from the pan upon completion.

Also, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Make sure it is actually at 350. I found that my oven heated to 400 if the knob was set at 350. Use an oven thermometer; trust the oven thermometer not the knob.

Melt the butter and let sit aside to cool. Microwave is your friend here, just go low and slow. (For me it was maybe 2 minutes on power level 3.)

Unskin the bananas into a bowl. Mine were almost falling apart. That is the way you want them. Think mush. I added the sugar to them and used a fork to mix them all together. The recipe suggested a potato masher (which I do not have). I could see that being better for not so mushy bananas, but mine were so ripe that they just fell apart. They turned into a soupy goo as seen in the larger picture below.

Next, the cooled butter and eggs get mixed together in their own bowl. Once combined, mix all the wet ingredients together in one bowl.

Now for the dry team. Put the flour, baking soda, and salt into the bowl of your food processor. We are not using the food processor to mix the batter together, just to aerate and combine the dry ingredients. Pulse them together for a few seconds to combine and then move them to a big mixing bowl. Big enough to hold all the ingredients together.

Now we reach the critical stage of the muffin method; Mixing!

Pour the wet goods on top of the dry goods. Do not stir the mixture, fold it together. And as I said at the beginning, the key here is to not overmix the ingredients. I am sure it has something to do with gluten production. I found a rubber spatula did the trick quite nicely.

When it just comes together, stop mixing. It will be lumpy, but that is ok. Really, I was dubious, but it turned out ok. I tried to check to make sure there weren’t huge balls of dry flour, but that was about it. Pour the mixture into your prepared pan and into the over it goes!

The recipe says to cook for 50 minutes to an hour or until the internal temperature of the bread is 210 degrees. I found that this took over an hour (1 hour, 10 minutes). I started checking at 50 minutes and then every 10 minutes or so.

As it cooked, the whole house started to fill with a wonderful aroma. Sadly, the ability to convey that to you over the web is, um, lacking. Sorry.

When it was time, out of the oven it comes. Let it rest for 15 minutes in the pan and then move it to a plate. The recipe says it will last 5 days tightly wrapped. I doubt mine will survive that long un-eaten.

I’ve included a few more pictures below, but the full set can be found on my flickr page, here. Thanks for reading.

Beyond the obvious stress and uncertainty of the search for a job is a very interesting process. Each institution does it a little differently and those differences can offer a window into the innards of the company. Some go for the marathon interview session while some do a simple chat, others do one that involves broad challenges that the candidate must solve and some concentrate on a very specific technical topic. A job hunter can learn as much or possibly more about a company from the interview than the interviewer learns about the interviewee. I don’t think there is one method that is superior to any other in an absolute sense. Each method is tailored to the organization it serves. I find this aspect of the process very interesting and have had to restrain the urge to ask an interviewer how well their system works for them on a few occasions and on a few others control the urge to criticize their methodology.

Having gone through any number of phone calls and a few interesting offers I ended up turning down, I am learning that the challenging aspects of this search are different than I expected. It is critical to me that I find an opportunity that is of a very high quality both for my own career and for the organization I end up with. There is a strong urge to accept the first thing that comes along and just run with it even if it may not be the right opportunity. In a perfect world, one would receive all the job offers you will get and then be able to compare and contrast them to pick the perfect opportunity. Unfortunately, in reality, you get one offer at a time that must be judged on the merits of itself compared against the hope of getting a better match later. A harrowing decision to make as I am not a gambling man.

I think the later one is in one’s career, the more care and consideration that must be taken at this point. Now is the time to find an opportunity that will allow me to grow to the next level of my career. But finding this opportunity is turning into more of a challenge than I had expected. Finding that small company that has a wonderful technology, smart people, and is on the cusp of needing the skills to grow to the next level is not an easy task. But I am hopeful; patience is just required.

The hunt goes on.

On a slightly less introspective note, I have been doing things other than just hunting for “the next great thing.” I have taken this as an opportunity to try to catch up on the stacks of books that have pilled up over the last year. I thought I would highlight a few that I have finished lately that are worth mentioning. No spoilers, just recommendations.

• The Road - Cormac McCarthy - Hauntingly wonderful, I could not put it down.
• The Accidental Time Machine - Joe Haldeman - Light reading but fun.
• Thirteen - Richard K. Morgan - He had a lull in quality, but I think he is picking up again.
• Halting State - Charles Stross - Fun tech mystery
• The Nine - Jeffrey Toobin - Good read even if the author had an evident bias. (And I was tickled by the most likely unintentional ode to Tolkien in the title.)
• Blink - Malcolm Gladwell - Seriously makes you think. Successor to The Tipping Point.

Beyond reading books, there are plenty of tech issues to keep abreast of; I have started looking at the topic for my Master’s project and will hopefully be nailing that down soon. There have been camping trips (pictures here and here) and lots of other excitement.

Never a dull moment here in sleepy Williamsburg.

So. As most of you know, GuardianEdge decided to relocate my office to the West Coast and I decided not to go. This is the tactful way of saying that I am unemployed. One would think that when you are not spending 8 hours a day in an office that you would somehow find more time to relax and enjoy yourself. Sadly no. Not that I am overly unhappy, just busy and stressed and a bit worn out.

Hmm. Might have something to do with the nearly 800 miles I traveled in a 45 hour span starting at 3am on Monday morning. You think?

Not much news I feel like writing about on this topic. I know that people are curious and I know that people care how I am doing, but it gets a bit tiring talking about it all the time. And since this is my blog, I’m not going to. I’ll let everyone know when something is more solid.

Have a good…um…what day is it? I guess there are some side effects of this after all.

P.S. click on the picture above to see some things from my NYC trip.

You paid $599 for an iPhone; so did I. And then Apple reduced the price to $399. Now you are whining.

Please shut up about it, ok? I don’t want to hear it. If you didn’t think it was worth $599, why did you pay that much for it? Yes, it is cheaper now, so what? Now people who didn’t think it was worth $599 but is worth $399 will be buying it too. It is called supply and demand, that is how the world works, get used to it.

And now you get a $100 credit from Apple which is nice, but you don’t “deserve it,” you are not “entitled to it,” Apple is being generous.

So. Please stop whining.

Today was a hard day. It isn’t worth getting into now. It will work itself out over time, but for the purpose of this entry, let us just say I had considerable motivation to have a nice dinner. There was also a very strong motivation to just order something, and have it delivered, but I knew it would be more restful to make something myself. I didn’t think to take pictures until I was mostly done, so you get to see more of the end product than the process.

The ingredients:

• Ravioli
• 1 zucchini, halved, then sliced into half moons
• 4-5 medium sized “baby bella” mushrooms, chopped
• 1 green onion, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 anchovy filets

I started by putting salted pasta water on to boil. I then heating up a medium pat of butter with some olive oil in a frying pan. Once the butter just started to brown, I added the chopped mushrooms and let them reduce for a little while with a medium pinch of kosher salt and some black pepper. I tossed in the anchovy filets at this point and let them dissolve.

Next the zucchini was added and I turned up the heat to help cook them a little bit. As the pasta was just about to be finished, I threw in the green onions to give them just a minute or so to cook.

I then added the pasta and plated the dish. You may notice that I left out an ingredient, the garlic. After I had plated the dish, I realized the minced garlic was still on the cutting board. Oops. I had planned to add it just at the end of the cooking anyway to keep it sharp, so I just sprinkled it on top, which made a nice presentation.

As a side, I made a variation on my normal cheesy-bread. This time, after toasting the bread first, I placed some of the chopped green onions directly on the bread. These were then covered by some pepper jack cheese. The whole thing was then placed in the over to melt the cheese. By placing the onions under the cheese, they stayed nice and sweet instead of getting burned by the heat that bobbled the cheese.

All the pictures can be found on my flickr page.