Blessed by the Potato

I got my breadmaker up and running last night. It’s a pretty nifty little device and does a decent job of kneading the dough, which is all I used it for in my first batch. I just made up some basic pizza dough. The dough that came out wasn’t very elastic in the end, so I couldn’t shape it by rolling and stretching like I usually would, but instead had to basically pound it into my pizza pan. However, the final pizza was tasty and had a good texture, so I’ll take it. After that, I decided to make some bread, and started with their “basic white” recipe. I was surprised at how much more had to go into this supposedly basic recipe compared to the pizza dough. When I saw that I didn’t have everything it called for, I started to improvise, first with 25% whole wheat flour, and then throwing in some ground flax too. The bread came out pretty good, though the crust is a fair bit heavier and darker than the “medium” I set it to; I think next time I’ll have to try light. Bread from a breadmaker is very strange because the pan is very tall and not very wide, so it’s almost like the aspect ratio adjustment I’m having to make with my monitor…

When I was talking about my bread at work, I was told that ground flax only lasts for a few weeks in the cupboard and was cautioned to keep it in the fridge. I just googled it, and sure enough it does have a fairly limited shelf life (though the somewhat biased flax council of Canada gives it a few months), and that worries me just a little bit since I have no idea how long ago Wayfare bought the flax. Ah, well, the bread still tastes fine, and now I’m going to set about turning the other half of it into sandwiches (fortunately, I’ve got 3 different bread knifes here to get just the right slices, evenly thick all over).

Growing up, my parents have always have a ton of kitchen gadgets, from cappachino machines to juicers, deep fryers to smokers — even stone-bottomed pizza cookers — and my mom always cautioned my dad never to get a breadmaker, since that would clearly be the last straw. She always considered the breadmaker to be the gadget that people bought because they sounded neat, but never really ended up using. So naturally, sometime after Wayfare bought me this one but before I opened it, I told this story to Wayfare. “This is it,” I said “I can’t think of anything to get my mom. I’m going to have to resort to getting her the last kitchen gadget on earth, the breadmaker.”

As long as my mind is on food I also got the first season of Good Eats with Alton Brown. This is perhaps my favourite cooking show because he takes the time to explain why he does what he does. He actively encourages us to come up with our own recipes, and explains what each ingredient is supposed to do, and how it can be modified or substituted. I find I still get something out of the episodes that aren’t really of interest to me for the food (of which there are a lot; almost every one, since I’m such a picky eater). For example, the one on steaks wasn’t hugely useful to me, since I’m not really one to go to my local butcher and select the cut of meat for me, then pan-fry that (if I make steaks for friends, I’d probably BBQ anyway). But that episode did have some handy information on cast iron skillets. Likewise, I really disagree with his opinion on mashed potatoes in a number of aspects (adding red potatoes to purposefully make them lumpy? And I’ve never understood the appeal of putting garlic in mashed potatoes), but I finally learned why the Yukon Gold potatoes I switched to for a time after moving out on my own (which the grocery store display says should be good for mashing) never worked as well as the plain baking potatoes my mom used (the baking potatoes are starchier and less waxy).

Anyhow, I’m home with a sore neck. I have no idea how I hurt it: my shoulder was sore when I woke up, presumably from sleeping on it funny (or reaching up to the breaker board repeatedly last night; possibly from curling, too) but my neck didn’t hurt at first. Then I had a shower and let the hot water work out my shoulder for a while, and when I went to towel off, I couldn’t move my neck. I walked to work all hunched over, and of course my office mates laughed at me. When I went down to the cafeteria, a small child looked at me like I was the boogieman, so it must have been a funny posture indeed. After not very long at all, I gave up at work and came home where I can sort of plop myself down on the couch and slouch enough that I can still see the screen with my chin on my chest.

One of the most amazing things about the SETI project is that there may be any hope at all of understanding alien transmissions that are anything beyond prime numbers blipped out the long way. After all, we can barely get our TVs to talk to each other. NTSC vs PAL, cable/HDMI/DVI/VGA/S-video/and two different types of RCA-like connections (composite and this newfangled Y/Pr/Pb component stuff). Who knows what sort of format an alien signal may arrive in?

Anyhow, as you can probably tell we’re having some issues with our new HDTV over here. The whole thing really makes me think that the technology was released to the market prematurely; couldn’t take an extra few months to hammer out a standard? Or a few years to develop the technology enough to have a single resolution for “HD” rather than this crazy hodgepodge of incremental improvements?. Or get some better widescreen vs. not detection or broadcasting so I’m not staring at grey bars on the side of the TV to square it off to 4:3, then black bars within that because the TV station is broadcasting its “widescreen” format with the black bars as part of the content, leaving me watching a 27″ picture on a 42″ screen…

The first issue is a matter of a defective box: our Scientific Atlanta 8300HD box has a wonky Pb out channel, which means that when we use the component input to the TV, every now and then the picture turns pink (since the only colour channel left is the red one). It can stay this way for a really long time… I wasn’t home when this happened, but my parents did call someone in to fix it. Their solution was to change to using the HDMI connection, which worked rather well… for a time. Then if the TV is turned off, the cable box will turn itself off (which loses the channel you were just on). Fortunately, there is a (rather deeply hidden) setting to get the box to remember which channel you were last on and restart to that one, but it’s still a bit of a pain. However, for some reason with that connector the cable box thinks that my parents’ brand new 1080i TV is only capable of standard definition (over an HDMI connection no less!). We can force it to go back into 1080i (i.e. HD) mode by going back to the initial setup menu, but the bloody thing forgets that setting every time it turns off — which is every time the TV turns off! It’s so frustrating. Even if I could figure a way to make the cable box stay on past the TV’s power-down, I noticed that it has an automatic sleep-mode “feature” so it would turn off an hour after I left it alone anyway.

I’m freaking loving analog cable back in London at the moment.

Anyhow, tomorrow is Christmas Eve and a Sunday to boot, so I don’t know if we can do much at the moment, but I think sometime next week we’ll be trading this puppy in for a replacement.

Update: Well, we called Rogers and they told me that the HDMI signals are buggy that way and that they don’t support them on many of their HD boxes. After power cycling the tuner/DVR a few times the component input went back to showing colours, and I’ll just have to call back later if it goes on the fritz again. For now though, it looks pretty good!

Update 2: The display went pink again. A hard power cycle seems to fix it for a short while, but nevertheless, we’ll be exchanging the HD tuner at a Rogers store in a few days.

I caught the all candidate’s debate on the Rogers community station on tape last night, and it was some good watching. Not so much for the political stuff (though my favourite candidate did do fairly well), nor for the fantastic local media camera work (pan over to the next candidate… ah! too far!… back… ok… crap, now the other guy’s talking!), but for the sheer craziness factor. One of the minor party candidates (Canadian Action) seemed to only have enough anti-crazy medicine to make it through 59 minutes of the hour long debate, because he finished off with a pledge to make London a world-class airship terminus. Air ships, as in zeppelins. Dirigibles. The moderator was stunned after he finished, giving him this “what the hell are you talking about?” look, which was a nice change from the soulless robot impartial moderation most other networks/debates aim for. I had to watch that part at least 4 times to make sure I heard it right (and to see that look on the moderator’s face).

The rest of the debate wasn’t particularly special. Dianne Hasket got booed when she said she was the only candidate who lived in the riding (past tense, perhaps, as all reports place her as living in the States for the last 6 years). Most of the candidates had real trouble speaking to the camera or the audience, having to read a lot (which was surprising as with 7 of them up on stage the responses were kept really short, and also gave lots of time for them to check their notes before speaking). Glen Pearson and Elizabeth May were the notable exceptions.

For years now, my normally previously good memory has been absolutely terrible. Today was extra bad: I had something important I didn’t want to forget, so I grabbed a pen & a post-it note… and had no idea what it was I was going to write down. Rather disturbing.

I’m up stupidly late at the moment watching TV at my parents’ house, and despite having something like eight times as many channels as I do, there really isn’t anything on their TV I want to watch… until I hopped over to the usually lame Rogers community channel. They were showing a curling game, and it’s great! I have no idea what it’s for: some sort of national, but the teams are young & mixed, and they haven’t mentioned it at all yet. Curling is, as you all probably know, my sport of choice. I don’t usually watch it on TV because I don’t usually watch any sports on TV: I’d rather play than watch. But I’ve got to say that I’m surprised curling isn’t a more popular spectator sport, since the pacing and action seem better suited to TV. Football and baseball involve long stretches of standing and scratching, and hockey has a tonne of faceoff flurries where you can’t really see what’s going on at all (or maybe I’m just defective that way, as a real Canadian is supposed to be able to follow the puck on the radio). But curling has a fairly decent pace of stones moving, and you get to listen to the strategy discussions in-between rather than the announcers trying to guess at what the coach is calling for the next play.

It’s also nice because since it’s on Rogers’ “no one watches and no one buys advertising” channel, there’s hardly any commercials. This game is also neat because one of the skips is a 27-year-old research assistant at McGill, so I’m thinking the whole time “that could be me!” (except for the part where I think I’m a much better curler than I actually am). This Quebec team is really interesting: they’re completely bilingual, so one’ll ask a question in French, and the answer will come in English. It was a fun game to watch with a lot of good shots, but also a few mistakes to keep things interesting. New Brunswick was dominating through the beginning, then Quebec started coming back to make it interesting (but never quite took the lead back).

While we’re on the subject of curling, I got a new broom last week: an Olson Reactor2 Carbon Fibre with swivelly head. It’s pretty keen and very light, and actually very similar to what the people on TV are using now. I can’t really say for sure yet if it helps the rock move any further, but being able to sweep with the head perpendicular to the rock does help us get our sweepers in tighter. The really light broom seems to use a completely different set of muscles than my old one. It used to be that I’d go home at the end of the night with aching pecs, but now it seems to be more in the tricep area. I have no idea why that would be, though. I got it at the London Curling Club, which has a very small proshop run out of the closet, essentially. Nobody works it full-time, so you have to find the bartender or one of the volunteers to buy things; however, the costs were very reasonable. I got that broom for $125 including tax, while most other places were charging $160 plus tax plus shipping. However, they don’t have very good selection: if you didn’t want a top-of-the-line broom like that, then there was only one or two basic ones to pick from [originally, I was going to get a keen swivelly head broom that had a traditional fibreglass handle which would have run closer to $80, but was lured by the convenience of getting it at the LCC and the prospect of more broom for not quite as much money as I thought]. While the broom is in good mechanical shape, it does have a lot of large scratches on the handle, taking off the paint in various places. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was a factory second (those prices are very low!), but I think it was probably worth it. Oh, and something to ponder if, like me, you get yourself a fancy new broom: consider getting a replacement head or two, as there’s no guarantee the manufacturers will have compatible heads in even a year or two.

Finally, as my glasses are getting more and more fine scratches on them with use, I’m finding that the usual winter/curling issue of fogging is getting to ridiculous extremes. I’m going to try to find some anti-fog cleaner tomorrow (I know I used to see the stuff everywhere, but since I’ve been looking the last few weeks, I haven’t seen any). I’d appreciate any advice as to which, if any, are actually effective.

Wayfare’s done an incredible amount of packing over the last few weeks, and I’m glad we got the early start. I’ve been really dragging my feet on my room: I threw out a bunch of junk on my desk that I don’t need anymore, but have only packed one box worth of stuff so far. There are bits of my thesis everywhere (even under my dresser!), and over half the closet is filled with Wayfare’s stuff (most of which is, conveniently, already boxed).

Last night the girls upstairs were making an ungodly amount of noise: stomping, music, scraping furniture across the floor. Usually that really gets under my skin, but I was just like “screw you bitches, I’m outta here in a week!” Same with the garbage people leave in the elevators, or the broken exhaust fans in the parking garage. Actually, that last one kinda scared me a little.

I’ve been watching a lot of TV lately, largely because shows are new again in the fall. It took a while for it to hit me, but I suddenly realized that reality shows are finally in a severe decline. There was a point, not too long ago, where if a show had writers and actors, pretty much no matter the quality, I’d watch it. But this season has a couple of good shows (Lost is looking like it’s flagging… really time to start dishing some answers there). Heroes is really coming around, and I’m getting past the terrible narration (mostly because now I focus on the cool integration of the titles into the scenes while he talks). House is still good, but I’m disappointed that they let him get healthy and clean for the beginning of the show only to take it away so very quickly (and I loved the “now I can do this” moment). Much like the Star Wars prequel trilogy, I think I’m genetically programmed to love Battlestar Galactica even if it is getting a little strange now (or rather, has been for a long time). I was really hoping they’d get control of that abandoned Base Star though. It would have made a nice replacement for the Pegasus :( Much like Lost, I think they need to start dishing some answers to long-standing questions. Beyond those shows that I’m actually watching, most of the commercials I’m seeing are actually for real shows, too. I can’t wait for Futurama to come back, and then it’ll be like the last half decade or so never happened.