Fun weekend. Yesterday, we had eleven people over for dinner. We’d only meant to invite a fistful, but figuring that we’d previously had about a 50% rate of return, we invited about 12, and they all could make it. Oops.

We ended up cooking a whole mess of stuff. We started out with the French Laundry’s Salmon Coronets, which were pretty darned good. We made a “test” batch last weekend, and the cones were thinner, because Ei-Nyung used a different mold for the rounds. This weekend’s batch had cones that were slightly thicker, and less delicate. Still tasty, but just a little bit shy of the “full experience.”

I had struggled with what to make for about two weeks. I was going to make Jamie Oliver’s “Simple” lasagna in ravioli form, but I couldn’t really figure out how to make it work. I’d wanted to do a “double decker” ravioli, with the butternut squash and parmesan in one layer, and the meat ragu in the second layer, then top with a cream sauce, to make up for the creme fraiche that I’d have left out. I guess I probably could have done it, but thought it was going to be structurally a pain in the butt.

I ended up deciding that morning to do a Japanese curry ravioli, on a dollop of mashed potatoes. The thought was to have the ravioli contain the sauce, so that when you cut into it wiht your fork, it’d spill sauce all over the potatoes, and then you could just eat it like you would regular Japanese-style curry, except with potato instead of rice.

It actually ended up being more or less like that, but the *problem* was that I made them too much in advance, and with such a liquid center, the ravioli bottoms got really soggy, and as a result, really, really delicate. What I should have done was frozen the curry into ice cubes, and made raviolis around those, which would have defrosted while cooking the pasta. Instead, I needed to quickly firm up the pasta, so I ended up frying them in a really non-stick pan. It made them less delicate, which was a shame, but it needed the structure, or it would have all gone to heck. It also gave them some color, which was also really necessary, as most of the dish was basically white – white ravioli, white potato on a beige plate.

Also, since the sauce was really liquidy, I couldn’t get all that much actual sauce into each rav, so it was a bit drier than I would have hoped. Still, flavor-wise, it was alright, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

The third thing we served was a couple slices of smoked duck breast, which I’d gotten from the farmer’s market earlier in the day, over some random salad greens, with a balsamic vinegar we’d reduced a while ago, and some really nice olive oil. Simple, but really, really tasty.

Ei-Nyung made a take on her Korean short rib dish, and it turned out wonderfully. The meat was really tender, the potatoes were perfect, and we’d made some chive oil to go along with it, which really complemented it well.

The last thing was the molten chocolate cakes, which I’d only ever made small batches of. It ended up turning out really well – the cakes were each exactly the right texture. I’d made the French Laundry’s creme anglaise earlier in the day, and was hoping to sferify some raspberry sauce, but not having ever tried anything that acidic, I had no idea how much of the sodium citrate to add, and with no way of testing for pH, just guessed. I probably severly underestimated, as I didn’t want to add too much, and as a result, the raspberry sauce, when dropped into the calcium carbonate bath wouldn’t maintain any sort of shape. Alas. I ended up using the syringe to dot the creme anglaise with the raspberry sauce, and it ended up looking (and tasting) quite nice.

Sadly, I don’t think we managed too many pictures of the food. Everything was really hectic, trying to get 11 plates out at the same time was really just chaos. A couple of the people we invited ended up helping out, getting plates washed in between courses and such. It was nuts, but fun, and satisfying, even if things didn’t turn out perfectly. Good times with good friends. Couldn’t ask for much more than that.

I ended up passing out around 1. I have no recollection of what happened, but I woke up the next morning on the couch, where I’d clearly fallen asleep.

Today, we went to lunch with an old friend who was in from out of town at Vik’s Chaat, in Berkeley, came home, cleaned up, rearranged the living room, and then went over to UV’s for dinner, where she made some awesome chicken, asparagus, and squash. Delicious.

The room is finally in the “Right” configuration. It always takes us a couple iterations before we figure out how a particular room “should” be laid out, and we’ve probably rearranged our major living space on the order of 10 times since we’ve moved here. Admittedly, a lot of those were becuase our primary living space changed location four times or so, but this is the one that works. It’s immediately apparent when you see it.

Anyway. Good times.

So… sort of a weird topic to broach, but what the heck. Sort of along the lines of ten things people don’t know about you, right? Yeah, whatever.

The thing is, I wonder to myself why I’m often so frustrated with coworkers, or why I react to certain situations in the way that I do. I know, everyone does that. I got a cold the other day, though, and my dad said something that was only tangentially related at the time, which was that I tended to take things “too personally.” I didn’t, and don’t think it was relevant to that particular conversation, but overall, he’s definitely right-ish.

I think of it slightly differently: you’re either with me, or you’re against me.

Not that that’s how I *want* to categorize the way I view people – that’s just the way it is, right now. Where that’s the most relevant is in my relationships with coworkers, simply because that’s where I do most of my collaborative working towards a common goal. I’ve worked in a couple really varied situations over the years. At one company, I was most certainly the least competent person there. At another, I’ve been vastly superior to all of my peers. At still another, I felt a sense of parity with my coworkers, for the most part. So, completely different situations.

Been sort of struggling to post something coherent, despite having a bunch of stuff to vaguely ponder. Whenever I start writing, it all ends up a mess, and not worth posting. Still, I want to get it out of my head, so here’s some short blurbs:

* There seems to be an almost gut-level reaction in me, when I’m faced with coworkers that don’t live up to my standards. It’s not, “Maybe I can teach them,” it’s, “How can I get rid of these people as quickly and bluntly as possible?” I know the teaching approach works better, and can transform less efficient people into more efficient people, but it’s not my first reaction. My first reaction is, “Look, I taught myself this stuff. I worked hard to get where I am now. How can you be this incompetent, and be in the same position as me? Die!”

Still, this isn’t the best reaction, obviously, but it’s *so* visceral, that I wonder if it’s simply a different archetype – like Type A people and Type B people. It almost feels like a piece of evolutionary equipment – some people help the weak, and make them strong, others cull the weak to unburden the already strong. Dunno. I suppose that sounds vaguely genocidal, and that’s not really how I see it. Just that I’m more concerned with success, and if you’re in my way, I want to get rid of you.

* And now, I’ve forgotten what the other bit was.

*shrugs*

A little while ago, I ordered some wacky supplies from http://www.willpowder.net which sells small quantities of wacky chemicals for cooking. Got the stuff yesterday, and as I mentioned before, immediately tried to make orange “air” which basically involves putting a gram or so of lecithin in 300g of orange juice, and frothing with a stick blender. The lecithin stabilizes the foam, and so you can just eat spoonfuls of the stuff. It’s quite interesting, and absolutely trivial to make.

Tonight, I wanted to try “spherization” which is, as I understand it, something Ferran Adria at El Bulli pioneered a couple years ago. It basically involves taking some non-acidic liquid (ph>4), mixing it with sodium alginate, then using a spoon, or a syringe, to make little spheres (hence the name of the technique) into a calcium chloride bath, which turns the exterior layer of the sphere into a gelatinous (probably not the correct term to describe what’s going on) membrane surrounding your alginate-thickened liquid.

This results in something that has a texture almost completely identical to caviar, for small balls of the stuff, and a very, very runny egg yolk, for larger balls of it. I used a recipe off of http://www.texturas.com which is the official product website of the Adrias’ commercialized chemicals. Same stuff, but more marketable names like Citra (sodium Citrate) and the like.

I found that actually creating the spheres was a huge pain in the ass, and frankly, almost impossible. So, I started cranking up the amount of alginate (this was in a bowl of Earl Grey tea) until I got something manageable. Was able to make between dime and quarter-sized spheres, though I wouldn’t actually call them spheres, as they had the flattened characteristics of (again) a runny egg yolk.

Still, quite odd to then roll one around in your mouth, bite down on it, and have a little liquid burst of tea.

I’ll have to try again soon. I think basically, I need to look around, and see what the ratios other people are using are for the alginate to the base liquid.

Fun stuff, though – the “creamsicle” with the orange foam, and vanilla soy milk is really good.

Recipe:
300g orange juice
~1.5g lecithin
.5C soy milk
1 dash vanilla extract
Sugar to taste

Mix the vanilla, sugar and soymilk until you get something you like (yes, super vague. Doesn’t really matter). Immerse your stick blender in the orange juice, and set to high. As the mixer is running, add the lecithin. Try to put the blade of the blender at the surface of the orange juice to maximize foamage. When there’s a reasonable amount of foam, turn off the blender, grab a spoon, and spoon the foam over the soymilk. Drink!

w00t.

Now, maybe the next part of the process is to make orange “caviar” and drop them into the soy milk for an extra orange punch.

from aefre:

RULES: Each player of this game starts off with 10 weird things/habits/little known facts about yourself. People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 10 weird habits/things/little known facts as well as state this rule clearly. At the end you need to choose 10 people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs.

1.) I *love* Cute Overload

2.) I love to cook. The last thing I made was a weird “Creamsicle,” which was a splash of vanilla soy milk with a little vanilla sugar, topped with an orange foam, made by frothing some orange juice and lecithin with a stick blender, and then spooning off the stabilized foam. It was surprisingly tasty. Okay. That’s not that weird if you’ve read the blog, or really know me, but I suspect it’d be a surprise some of my coworkers, say. And yes, that’s basically an “original” recipe. w00t.

3.) I have incredibly flat feet, which resulted in two of the bones in each ankle fusing as I grew up. As a result, I have two bones fewer than most people.

4.) I’m actually perfectly content to live where we do for the forseeable future. That’s not to say I don’t want to travel, and see the world, or even that I wouldn’t mind living somewhere else temporarily. But I think of my current home as “home,” and am perfectly happy about doing so.

5.) I used to have *extreme* self-confidence issues. They’re getting better, and I know a lot of the time, I come off at least a little obnoxious, but for many years, I was genuinely convinced that nothing I ever did was good enough for anyone.

6.) I have a spectacularly poor memory for recent events. With the exception of certain things that I’ll retain with a crystal clarity, if you ask me what I had for dinner two days ago, most of the time, I have no idea.

7.) When I was very young, I used to think of things like cars and mattresses and stuffed animals as having “souls.” I knew they weren’t “alive” per se, but I felt a strong attachment to certain physical objects. Compensation for a relatively socially distant family? Who knows.

8.) I’m completely atheistic, though *technically* I have to admit I’m agnostic. But it doesn’t concern me at all. It’s not someting I ponder, or think about regularly, much in the same way that most people don’t think regularly about dragons or talking eels.

9.) I resist “doing things,” because I often do cost-benefit analyses in my head, and figure that for the two hours it’d take to watch a movie, for instance, I could conveivably do something else instead. 90+% of the time I *do* watch a movie, I enjoy it. 90+% of the time I think something better might come along, I end up doing what amounts to nothing. Which means that in this respect, I’m almost always wrong.

10.) I love my wife. I think she’s the best person in the world, and I’m not afraid to say it. I bet that’s the most surprising thing on this list, to her.

Tag: if you’ve read to the bottom, and you haven’t done this yet, you’re “it.”

So, over the last several months, I’ve had reason to contemplate how someone who is a complete fraud could become incredibly influential, to the point where he can lead seminars, write books, and have a profitable consultancy on a subject that he obviously knows absolutely nothing about.

I’m not going to name who I’m talking about, though if the guy who fought Goliath had the last name of the dude from Half Life, you might get some idea of who I’m talking about. If you don’t know the particulars of why I’d be thinking about this, drop me a line, and I’ll gladly elaborate.

But it’s interesting to me, why this situation gets so under my skin. This man is supposedly an “expert” and people pay to attend his seminars and his talks. He has a published book that supposedly teaches others about the subject he’s supposedly an expert on, and has made at least some money in the process, which boggles my mind.

Now, the thing is, the guy’s a total fraud. I’ve seen him feebly attempt to ply his trade, and it’s an embarassment. The guy is as skillful at his supposed craft as an inept fourth grader. If you saw it out of the blue, you’d laugh at its incompetance. If I told you he was a successful consultant, specializing in this particular thing, I’m sure you simply wouldn’t know how to respond.

The funny thing is, the other day, I found someone else who I feel belongs in the same category, for a completely different field. But basically, the same *type* of person. A fraud.

Now, I thought to myself, these two people are *obviously* frauds. They clearly have no idea what they’re talking about, and both bury their ignorance under piles of large words they don’t understand. They’re both comically inept at what they are supposedly masters of, and yet, have both achieved a measure of success plying this particular trade. They both drive fancy cars, and have a measure of power and control in their fields.

Why? How do they get away with it?

Well, the issue is that both of these people work in relatively subjective fields. If they were scientists, for instance, you could instantly quantitatively prove they didn’t know what they were doing. Their past successes and failures are largely irrelevant because of the positions they’ve achieved in their careers – people don’t actually ask you the specifics of what you’ve worked on, because the generalities sound good enough to invoke some measure of authority.

The most important thing, though, is that both of these people work in positions that other people aspire to. That is, because these people hold positions that other people want to achieve, their advice finds a willing audience who will listen to it [i]uncritically[/i], and treat it as though it has value. The ‘uncritically’ part is the important bit.

Thing is, because these people hold a particular title, their ideas have a certain value. The problem is, that’s the *only* value those ideas have.

So, I’ve now had the “opportunity” to deal firsthand with two people I’d consider “frauds.” That is, they’re people who present themselves as “experts” in a field, but know essentially nothing about what they’re talking about. They have managed to acquire, for reasons I don’t understand, some measure of experience relevant to their field, but the *quality* of the content that they’ve both produced is absolutely abysmal.

It’s occurred to me that there are a few similarities between the two.

1.) They cater to an audience of non-experts. That is, the people they talk to aren’t experts in the field. These aren’t people who talk to programmers about programming, for instance – they talk to garbagemen about how to become programmers.
2.) They throw a lot of words at the issue. In both cases, where something can be said with five words, they’ll say it with fifteen buzzwords jammed in there, as well.
3.) They enumerate everything. It’s “Five things to do,” or “Twenty-Seven techniques of (blah).” The interesting thing about these enumerations is that they’re not actually followed up with anything. If it were a list of “Five Important Directions,” for instance, the list would look like, “Left, Up, Right, Down, Sideways.” And that’d be it. But the list said “important” directions – why are these directions important? How are they different? In the case of both of these people, though, they believe that the creation of the list of items is the *end* result, not the beginning.

I don’t know. This isn’t really all that new, or even that interesting, given that I’ve left out the details about the two people I’m talking about. Maybe one of them… is YOU! No, it’s not. At least, it seems unlikely that it is. But I just find both of these people incredibly frustrating, because they’re *clearly* so inept at their jobs, yet they’re in positions of power, exert considerable influence, and somehow, get paid to do something that they’re *absolutely terrible* at.

I dunno. Pisses me off.

The News: I have given my two weeks notice at Backbone Entertainment. I have accepted a new job, at a location that I will not disclose here. I know that may seem anticlimactic, but there you go. What I can say is that it’s a raise, and a promotion. My new title is “Senior Designer,” and it’s with a company I’m really excited to work for. They have a long history of making high-quality games, and I’m really hoping that this will be a great learning experience, and an opportunity to make something that I’m really excited about. If you’d like to know the specifics, drop me a line, and I’ll be happy to tell you more.

So, yeah. That’s the news. If that’s not cool enough, check this out:

http://www.flytheroad.com

A $23K fully electric vehicle that is basically a TRON cycle. OMFG.

1.) Got interesting news, but I can’t make it public until tomorrow.

2.) Some new screenshots of Forza 2 were just released. Is it just me, or does it really, really look like the Stig behind the wheel?

3.) Fortunately, the cold seems to be breaking. My stomach’s still a mess, and my back is killing me, but I’m much less of a zombie today than I was yesterday, which is a nice change of pace.

Anyway… more tomorrow.

Oog. I woke up this morning, and thought to myself, “Shit, I’ve got the flu.” I took a couple Advil, soaked for a couple minutes in a hot bath, and felt worlds better. I ended up going to work. About 11:45, I felt progressively worse and worse – I could barely keep my head up, my back was killing me, and I felt like my head was being crushed in a vise.

No congestion, no sneezing/coughing, just pain from head to toe, and tired as all get out. Fun!