Lights out

Gotta power down Reassembler for the foreseeable future. Various work and personal projects afoot.

Not that this is a forever thing, and also not to get all mushy :) but while I’m thinking of it, many many thanks to all who’ve read and/or commented here. (Yes, sometimes people comment without reading.)

At the usual risk of missing crucial people, I’d particularly like to tip the hat to Matt P, the Egg and his several split personalities, DK Transformation, Chessloser, Blunderprone as folks who wandered in early and have left all kinds of interesting footprints over time. And the kind souls who put Reassembler on your blogrolls and/or linked in.

It would be no fun blogging in a vacuum, and you guys don’t suck. (Get it? Vacuum? Suck? Heh. Oh, never mind.)

Guest blogger: Sasquatch

Bigfoot? Really. “Big Foot?” That’s all you could think of? It’s the 21st century and we’re still going to make fun of each other’s anatomical attributes? It’s like I’m being pursued by a pack of slack-witted 13-year-old boys.

For years I thought, yeah, you’ll see me when I’m good and ready. I’ll come out when you demonstrate you’re ready to stop the name-calling.

But lately I’ve changed my mind. I’ll come out once I’ve cut down to 260 - the first thing I’m going to do is sign a UFC contract and mop the floor with Brock Lesnar. You’re all going to find out what a ‘freak of nature’ REALLY looks like.

[Editor's note: He didn't blog it but when I asked why there are so few of his kind, he noted that the last several generations of young lady Sasquatches apparently aren't into hairy backs.]

How you know you’ve learned something

In college, it was the “shrinking textbook” effect. Cramming for an exam, I knew I was in good shape when the amount of textbook material covered no longer seemed physically large and I started to remember where various facts and concepts were in the book. (Side note – turns out this was not a good marker of long-term recollection. But it was reliable for cramming purposes.)

In chess I wonder if it’s a good sign when boring stuff stops seeming boring. My drawn game last night was pretty insipid at one level – again I am trying to stuff my impulse to lash out in practically every position – but there were plenty of nuances that I need to dig into and fully understand, both in the closed/manuevering opening position and in the endgame position that was evolving when we buried the hatchet on move 30 or so.

When simplified positions become truly interesting, I’ll take that as a personal milepost that I’m getting to a different level of understanding.

Tagine 1

Did a somewhat lame version of Ray’s suggestion in the first Tagine post: chicken thighs (bone in, skin on), carrots, potatoes, onions.

Somewhat lame because 1) I wanted to keep it simple & see how the vegetables would come out and 2) I added too much chicken stock, making it unduly soupy and 3) I underseasoned it.

Still fabulous. The chicken comes out ridiculously tender. Next time we’ll reduce the stock and add more spice and more flavorful stuff like olives, apricots, and/or preserved lemons, since I have those underway in the fridge.

The drawback is that the tagine isn’t really all that big. Might try boneless/skinless next time, just for space reasons. (You can cube & brown chicken breast but that seems like a total American Cuisine cop-out somehow.)

But one other cool thing is that the dish and the food stay hot FOREVER. I can see having a couple of friends over, putting the tagine base in the middle of the table and just sitting there picking at it for a leisurely hour. It’s social food.

There’s too much to learn

Editing, security, the Web. How to negotiate. How to sell. How to write marketing copy. SEO. Economics and budgeting and investing. Politics and governance. How to lead. How to follow. How to cook. How to beat Metallica’s One on the hard setting on Guitar Hero. How to play chess endings. How to play the Kan Sicilian, the French, the QGA, the QGD.

Books to write, sites to update, articles to publish, invoices to file, grass to cut, blogs to read.

Occasionally my vision-tunnel is infiltrated by a reminder about the most important thing: Learning how to be a good Dad.

Olympics: Holy mackerel

I just watched a male Chinese gymnast name Chen Yibing do the rings. Absolutely astonishing. The strength. Yowza.

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t care about the medal count any more. I’ll just catch snippets of amazing proficiency in various sports and be happy if the global temperature lowers a tiny bit when it’s all over (and I’m not talking about the thermometer).

Book envy

Update: Well dang. Yet another: Tom Field co-authored Modern Masters: Lee Weeks, hot off the press.

My former co-worker Alison Bass has a new book out:

Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial. Very cool – it is (or was) showing up as a best-seller on several of Amazon’s categories.

We’ve already noted (sometime) fellow club member Howard Goldowsky’s excellent set of chess essays and stories, Engaging Pieces.

Another former co-worker, Carol Hildebrand, teamed up with an executive chef (her brother) to write a series of books based on the idea of cooking great dishes each of which use only three major ingredients.

I also used to work with David Rosenbaum, who won awards for the mystery Zaddik, and my boss and mentor Lew McCreary, who wrote the creepy The Minus Man, which was then turned into a movie with Owen Wilson, Brian Cox, Sheryl Crowe, Dwight Yoakam and other luminaries. (Lew is in the movie – he doesn’t have any lines but gets poisoned in a Wendy’s.)

I have major, major book envy. Just saw a stat that said something like 80% of US survey respondents “think they have a book in them”. I certainly have my one novel mapped out to a large degree in my head. It involves the world chess championship, two brothers who haven’t spoken for a decade, an ex-stripper whose real name is Desdemona, two fun Eastern European complete knuckleheads and a gruff Armenian who tries to bully the nerdiest chessplayer and gets one of the top-ten all-time great comeuppances in geek fantasy.

My wife says it doesn’t sound like a commercially viable project.

Did we really not know we looked ridiculous?

edit: Hm. Some cloaking technology going on when I try to embed? Oh well, here’s the link. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_eSnmYv0KA