Month: July 2009

Yomigaeru Aiyan Sheffu!

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Watashi no kioku ga tashika naraba†…Iron Chef was a television program produced by Fuji TV in Japan from 1993 to 1999. The format of the show showcased an eccentric gourmet named Chairman Kaga and his team of Iron Chefs.

The Iron Chefs, handpicked by Chairman Kaga himself, were prominent and much respected chefs within their particular cuisines (French, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian). In each episode they were pitted against a challenger from Japan or abroad and for one hour each contender was expected to cook a multicourse meal using a theme ingredient chosen by the Chairman.

The battles tended to be very intense with the chefs scrambling to complete as many dishes within a one hour timeframe. Following the one hour contest, the prepared dishes were then served to a panel of tasters. These tasters comprised of Chairman Kaga with his invited guests (typically famous personalities and food critics). Upon completion of the food tasting, the tasters would then judge the food against certain criteria and then Chairman Kaga would announce the winner.

Of the 300 episodes of Iron Chef that aired in Japan, roughly 180 of those episodes were dubbed into English when the Food Network picked up the program to air in North America. It’s one of the shows that I really miss from Canada. However, the internet being my friend, I’m currently bit-torrenting an archive of 156 shows, which I will shortly inflict on Katy :D

†If my memory serves me correctly…

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We’re all going to die in the name of greed and kickbacks.

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News like this is making me more and more reluctant to go back to Canada, if only because it’s too close to the FDAs. The sad part though is that greed, corruption and nepotism are global. I fear for the human race.

“The Washington Post reports that the Department of Homeland Security relied on a rushed, flawed study to justify its decision to locate a $700 million research facility for highly infectious pathogens in a tornado-prone section of Kansas, according to a government report.

The department’s analysis was not “scientifically defensible” in concluding that it could safely handle dangerous animal diseases in Kansas — or any other location on the U.S. mainland, according to a Government Accountability Office draft report obtained by The Washington Post. The GAO said DHS greatly underestimated the chance of accidental release and major contamination from such research, which has been conducted only on a remote island off the United States.

DHS staff members tried quietly last week to fend off a public airing of the facility’s risks, agency correspondence shows. Department officials met privately with staff members of a congressional oversight subcommittee to try to convince them that the GAO report was unfair, and to urge them to forgo or postpone a hearing.

The criticism of DHS’s site selection comes as the proposed research lab, the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), was expected to win construction funding in the congressional appropriations process.

“Drawing conclusions about relocating research with highly infectious exotic animal pathogens from questionable methodology could result in regrettable consequences,” the GAO warned in its draft report. DHS’s review was too “limited” and “inadequate” to decide that any mainland labs were safe, the report found.

The new developments started another round of accusations that politics steered DHS’s decision in January to build the proposed lab in Manhattan, Kan. Critics of the choice argue that a Kansas contingent of Republican Senators aggressively lobbied DHS to pick their state. Records show that a DHS undersecretary and his site selection committee met frequently with the senators, one of whom is a member of an appropriations subcommittee that helps set DHS funding.

“They call it ‘Tornado Alley’ for a reason,” said an attorney for a competing consortium. “This really boils down to politics at its very worst and public officials who are more concerned about erecting some gleaming new research building than thinking about what’s best for the general public.”

The DHS lab would replace and expand upon the mission of a federal research facility on a remote island on the northern tip of Long Island, N.Y. Critics of moving the operation to the mainland argue that a release could lead to widespread contamination that could kill livestock, devastate a farm economy and endanger humans. Along with the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease, NBAF researchers plan to study African swine fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever and other viruses.

GAO’s draft report said the agency’s assessment of the risk of accidental release of toxins on mainland locations, including Kansas, was based on “unrepresentative accident scenarios,” “outdated modeling” and “inadequate” information about the sites. The agency’s analysis of the economic impact of domestic cattle being infected by foot-and-mouth disease played down the financial losses by not considering the worst-case scenario.

The agency noted that the United Kingdom’s outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, which resulted from an accidental release at a biological research laboratory south of London. Six million sheep, cattle and pigs were slaughtered to stop the contamination, and the country’s agriculture market, comparatively a fraction of the U.S. market, lost $4.9 billion.

DHS had cited a foot-and-mouth disease facility in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as evidence that doing this research on the mainland is safe. But GAO said that is illogical: The NBAF would have a less sophisticated method for containing releases than the Winnipeg lab, it said, but would handle as many as 10 times the number of animals.

Selecting a spot for the lab has been rife with political battling and vigorous lobbying from five states that were finalists. Though the general public repeatedly voiced concern about the safety of such research, elected leaders were seeking the $3.5 billion jolt that the facility was expected to bring to its host’s economy.

“This has nothing to do with politics,” proponents say. “This is about logical reasoning . . . and was in the interest of everyone’s time.”

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Getting old and senile.

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There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to todays teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio bork this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’

Computers and Videogaming

18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
19. The scream of a modem connecting.
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
23. DOS.
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
28. Counting in kilobytes.
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
32. Joysticks.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
35. Recording a song in a studio.

The Internet

36. NCSA Mosaic.
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
39. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
41. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
42. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
43. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
47. Archie searches.
48. Gopher searches.
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
50. Privacy.
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
55. The time before PC networks.
56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.

Gadgets

57. Typewriters.
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
59. Sending that film away to be processed.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
61. CB radios.
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
63. Rotary-dial telephones.
64. Answering machines.
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
66. Pay phones.
67. Phones with actual bells in them.
68. Fax machines.
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Everything Else

70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number.
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
78. Neat handwriting.
79. The days before the nanny state.
80. Starbuck being a man.
81. Han shoots first.
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
84. Trig tables and log tables.
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
87. Swimming pools with diving boards.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
89. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil of break off the first finger
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
91. Having to manually unlock a car door.
92. Writing a check.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
95. Cash.
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
98. Omni Magazine
99. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
100. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

The ones in red are emphasis mine. How many can you relate to?

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Weekend redux, and today is going to be another one of those days…

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The weather gods were clement and the BBQ we had planned for Saturday went off without a major hitch. At one point, I was juggling 12 sausages, 7 burgers, 6 koftas (with pita!), 2 ears of corn, asparagus and a large mushroom. Apparently, I have mad grillin skillz. We fed (and overfed) everybody who came and people seemed to have a good time. All good.

We went into town in the morning and bought 20 pounds of meat. I kid you not. The butcher had very good deals on so we left with 5 pounds of stewing steak, 5 pounds of minced lamb, 5 pounds of minced beef and 10 chicken breasts. Hopefully that’ll last us for a while :)

Sunday was a bit rougher, morale-wise. I spent part of the day making purees for the beastie. I’m not in my happy place at the moment. I seem to have misplaced my happy place. I miss my happy place. These days, I’m anxious and stressed and scatterbrained and fairly useless as a husband, father and general human being (yay!).

Katy woke me up at 2am this morning because I was snoring very loudly. I was in the middle of a deep sleep cycle and I couldn’t get back to sleep at all. In the end, I got fed up of staring at the ceiling so I went downstairs and had a cup of tea and watched bad late-night/early morning TV.

So yeah. I’m tired, irritable, and generally not in a good mood today and I don’t see it improving in the short term. But it has to, cause I’m not happy any more and I miss that and things need to change because the status quo can’t carry on.

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I do not need another allergy

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Last monday, Tolstoy paid me a visit while I was in the bathroom. I gave him a quick scratch on the head and a stroke on the back and my hands immediately became itchy and red. † I figured that he’d been rolling around some stringing nettles or something of the sort – it happened before, so I didn’t really give it a second thought. Except that the itch didn’t go away. I’ve been putting steroid-based cream on my hands for the past week and it still itches like a mofo. And now, something has spread to my elbows, back of my knees and top of my feet. I went to the doc this morning and she says that this are all classic signs of eczema. Damnit, Jim, I don’t need this shit right now. The “consensus” right now is that it’s mild, and might go away by itself considering that it appeared so quickly and that I should just keep my eye on it. We’re going to wash all the bedding and keep the cats out of the bedroom for a while and see what happens. In the meantime, I *must*not*scratch*!!!!

In other news, I went for my yearly eye exam and my prescription changed, but not significantly and my eye pressure is still very good. This makes me happy.

In other other news, the gold cross that I’ve been wearing since I was 18 broke this morning and I don’t think I’ll be able to fix it. This makes me very sad :(

† Wikipedia tells me that this is dyshidrosis (aka dyshidrotic e., pompholyx, vesicular palmoplantar dermatitis, housewife’s eczema) and only occurs on palms, soles, and sides of fingers and toes. Tiny opaque bumps called vesicles, thickening, and cracks are accompanied by itching which gets worse at night. A common type of hand eczema, it worsens in warm weather.

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