AaronDunlap.com // Blog

The Crazy Ones

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:47:36 -0700

I knew Steve would be passing soon, but I didn't ever know how I'd take it.

I still don't, really.

Comments: 3 Comments.

Patterns

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 18:03:42 -0700

It is exceedingly easy for me to fall into simple patterns. Something about the way my brain has been programmed makes it susceptible to routine and sameness. Like a mill ox, if I do something enough times I start digging myself into a rut and remain content to loop around in it endlessly.

I can illustrate this with eleventh grade of high school. I transferred from private to public school when I entered high school, so I didn't really know anyone or have any war-buddies from the recess playground. The people I did know in school were the people I happened to know from outside activities, and they all happened to be at least two years older than me. Come junior year, all my friends had already graduated and I had nobody to sit with at lunch.

Rather than remedy this problem in a socially progressive manner, I solved it in an intellectually conservative one: I didn't go to lunch, I went to the library. During my lunch hour, when most kids were packed into the cafeteria and standing in line for chicken nuggets swimming in an oddly yellow gravy, I'd head straight to the library. I usually either read whatever novel I was halfway into or do some homework that was due later that day (honestly, outside if class it was the only time I got any homework done) or, if I was absolutely without a thing to do, I'd just wander the aisles and flip through whatever book looked interesting.

The teacher of the class I had right after lunch didn't mind us eating in class so long as we were done by the time he started talking, so I ate my lunch then. I had the timing worked out to Swiss precision. Seven minutes before lunch was over, I'd leave the library and head to the cafeteria (the lines were gone by now) and get the same thing: a turkey wrap and a mixed frozen Coke and cherry. I'd bring these things to my next class and be at my seat with a few minutes before class begun. I'd quickly scarf down the sandwich, and take my time with the frozen drink and watch CNN on the classroom TV until the teacher turned it off and began lecturing.

This pattern repeated continuously for months. Every day, the same thing. Read in silence, turkey and high fructose corn syrup in silence.

Occasionally I would feel some kind of repetitive stress bubbling up at the base of my psyche and like some kind of free-spirited Haight-Ashburian I would smash conformity and add a Rice Crispies Treat to my order at the cafeteria.

I don't really know the significance of that, other than it is representative of how comfortable I can get with patterns.

For the last six months I've found myself in a hell of a pattern where I haven't "blogged" a thing here.

I know exactly why that is. Since I moved to Chicago and away from my family I noticed that they started using this place as a way of keeping up with my life, which kind of eeked me out. Also, since this website was on my resume most of the people at my job were aware of it and referenced it occasionally, which also eeked me out. Then I'd get the occasional reader comment from some person I don't know at all but has been reading this space for years for reasons I can only estimate at being its own little rut for them. That, too, eeked me out.

In short, I have a hard time finding the tone for what I put here. If I was ever on stage in front of an audience comprised of my family, my real-life (TM) friends, my internet friends, and my coworkers, I wouldn't really have much to talk about. I think most people have their "friend self" and their "work self" and their "family self," and like most people I generally have the luxury of keeping those selves on distant islands separated by oceans of distance and interest and the cost of airline travel. When it comes to putting words on this page, however, I can't pick a self.

In the end, I usually round up and write something that I'd be comfortable with my mom reading while I sit across a dinner table with my hands folded, trying to guess how far she is by the pattern of smiles and eyebrow-furrows.

It's a crippling thing, really, and in a lot of ways it's why I haven't officially said a thing here since March. I implemented the Twitter system because with 140 characters I can keep things light on context and emotion.

Thing is, though, I think I'm usually a lot happier when I'm blogging, or at least writing regularly. When I don't write, I kind of sink down into my head and set up camp and build an infrastructure and establish a small economy and chamber of commerce in there. My head's an interesting place to be, and I wouldn't mind terribly if an intergalactic villain sentenced me to a lifetime there, but the outside world passes by pretty fast when I'm in there.

But now that I've established this pattern of inaction, it's hard to break out of it. I've wanted to write something here countless times, but my screwed-up brain gets more satisfaction out of maintaining a pattern, for better or worse.

So this post is, in some way, a step toward the compromise I eventually need to make with myself. Eventually, I'm going to have to say the type of things I wouldn't want to say in proximity to my mother and I'm going to have to go to work some morning not knowing whether everybody around me read whatever self-aggrandizing nonsense I'd furiously typed into this box the night before.

This post is a Rice Crispies Treat. I hope it works. I think you and I could have some fun together here.

Watch this space.

Comments: 1 Comments.

The Green Stuff

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:40:05 -0700

Whatever they use to dye the river green every year for St. Patrick's Day is still a guarded secret.

Comments: 0 Comments.

DIY Graham Elliot Turkey Confit Sandwich... err... "Grahamwich"

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 19:42:40 -0700

I love sandwiches. I love Thanksgiving. Put those together in the form of a Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich, and you've won my heart over completely. So when famous Chicago chef Graham Elliot opened a new restaurant near my workplace featuring gourmet sandwiches and including a sandwich inspired by turkey leftovers sandwiches, I had to give it a try.

This Friday I had a chance, and I can say without exaggeration that it was the best sandwich I've ever had. Problem is, the sandwiches at this place (Grahamwich) are ten bucks apiece, plus 11% downtown sales tax, and they don't take debit cards, so it wasn't something I could really make a part of my daily lunch routine.

As a way of conquering this bit of injustice, I spent the weekend trying to recreate the sandwich at home on my own. Sure, I probably spent more on groceries than I would have at the restaurant, but being able to make the thing on my own gives me at least some power over the situation. Once I had a completed sandwich, I took a picture and tweeted my results to mild fanfare.

Even Graham Elliot himself was impressed! (I guess he keeps an eye on Twitter mentions of his name, to see if anybody is badmouthing his soup).

In the spirit of a tradition I started six years ago and immediately abandoned, I photographed every step of the process so I could produce a bit of a walk through for you all to enjoy on your own, or at least so you can appreciate what nice pots and pans I have (Circulon Infinite; they were a birthday gift, I recommend them highly).

Graham Elliot doesn't publish many recipes, so I had to use at least 70% of my cunning to try to recreate the experience from taste memory and the sandwich description.

It's a pretty basic sandwich, though made of pretty atypical ingredients. The description on the menu just lists:

turkey confit
candied yams
stewed cranberries
field greens
sage mayo
Hawaiian bread

So I'll go through the ingredients piece by piece. Click any of the pictures to see full-size on Flickr.

Turkey Confit

Confit (cohn-fee) is an old French culinary term that, over the centuries, has almost entirely been separated from its definition. It officially means "various kinds of food that have been immersed in a substance for both flavor and preservation", but what the heck type of cooking does that not describe? Confit is mostly associated with duck confit, a staple in classic French cuisine wherein a bit of duck is cured in salt then poached, roasted, or boiled in its own fat. Duck confit is actually more popular than the term confit itself, so "confit" has been sort of come to be associated with that dish than the actual meaning of the word. So.. to confit something else (like a turkey) usually (but not definitively!) means to cook it in duck fat (even if the thing you're cooking isn't duck).

Yeah, French cooking is confusing. For the purposes of the recipe, I would say that the turkey confit is basically just stewed (or slow-cooked) shredded dark meat turkey. Throwing the term confit in there needlessly complicates things for the purposes of cooking this sandwich at home. Of all the ingredients to this sandwich, this is the hardest to come by. You can buy chicken, pork, and beef pre-cooked in any configuration you can imagine, but except around certain Thursdays in November, turkey meat products are limited to basic deli meats, whole frozen turkeys, and simple butcher's cuts of either breasts, drumsticks, or thighs.

I'm generally a fan of white meat, but in the interest of pointless originalism I decided to go with dark meat. Drumsticks and thighs are the dark cuts, and my grocer (Peapod) only had drumsticks available, so drumsticks I got.

Sadly, to produce some cooked turkey meat I would have to actually roast these drumsticks like a turkey, which would be plenty tempting to eat on their own.

Since it's against the law to cook a turkey without brining it, and the classic confit paradigm calls for salt-cured meat, I decided to let the drumsticks sit in the refrigerator for a while covered in what would seem to be an excessive amount of salt. The salt is just to tenderize the meat (horray for chemistry!), and it'll be wiped off prior to cooking, so don't feel bad about completely smothering the meat in it.

Once salted, I put the drumsticks in the fridge for about 2 hours, but you could go as long as 24. I was in a hurry.

After chilling out in the fridge, I wiped off the salt with a paper towel and prepared the drumsticks for roasting. I added a more reasonable amount of salt, plus some pepper, thyme, and some poultry seasoning. I also made sure my oven was pre-heated to 350 degrees, even though I hadn't mentioned that until now.

Into the oven they go. Notice the oven thermometer? You really can't trust the sensor on the oven.

I can tell doneness with my nose and my eyes, so I didn't really time the cooking. It was probably between 1.5 and 2 hours.

I held onto the drippings from the pan, as they will come to use later.

Oooh, baby. Must. Not. Eat.

Once they had cooled down, I stripped the meat from the drumsticks. There are a lot of thin bones and tendons in drumsticks, so I had to be careful to make sure all of the non-meat was removed from the is-meat.

At Grahamwich, the turkey is probably shredded naturally via some excruciating slow-simmering method. I haven't the patience for that, so I took the shortcut of shredding the meat by hand. Two forks in a bowl is how some people shred meat.

You could also use a food processer with a dull blade, or the sharp blade turned upside down so the dull side is out. I'm a masochist, so I did it by hand. Shred shred shred!

I then poured the pan drippings over the shredded turkey, then topped it off with turkey broth. I forgot to buy turkey broth, so I had to make some the old fashioned way with the bones and scraps from the drumsticks. You can see how that works in three steps here.

I put the broth-covered meat in the fridge overnight. Hey, it's not leftovers until the next day.

The Next Day

The natural collagens and gelatins in the drippings/juices/broth most likely solidified in the fridge. This process does amazing things to the molecular structure of meat, and explains why sometimes reheated stew tastes better the next day than fresh from the pot.

Yeah, that looks pretty solidified.

I dumped the whole turkeybrick into a saucepot on medium-low heat and forgot about it for a while. Do not think about cat food during this step.

After a few minutes, the brick fell apart and began simmering and smelling amazing again. I let this simmer for about half an hour so it could absorb more of its juicy goodness.

Sage Thyme Mayo

The Grahamwich sandwich lists sage mayo, but I made an executive decision to go with thyme instead. Sage and thyme are both classic turkey seasonings to the point of interchangeability, there was a lot of sage in the poultry seasoning I used on the turkey, and thyme comes in a much finer powder compared to sage (which has a consistency like lint) so it would integrate into the mayo easier.

I just took some mayo, scooped it into a bowl, sprinkled on some thyme and pepper, and mixed it up. Not complicated stuff here, people.

Hey, that spice container looks familiar...

Stewed Cranberries

A fancy way of saying "cranberry sauce." (How do you make cranberry sauce? You stew cranberries). Unlike most of my family, cranberry sauce is a favorite and integral part of the whole thanksgiving turkey oeuvre to me, and it's one of the best parts of the leftovers sandwich.

Most grocery store deli areas have a pretty good pre-made (in the store) cranberry sauce/relish/compote/chutney, so there's no reason to make one from scratch for the purposes of a sandwich. I happen to know that Peapod has a quite amazing cranberry sauce (with bits of citrus peel in there), so I just went with that.

Candied Yams

Emphasis on the "can."

I do feel kind of sleazy using canned sweet potatoes, but like the cranberries, it didn't feel worth it to make some from scratch just for a sandwich. The only reason I went through all the trouble for the turkey was because it's impossible to buy shredded roast turkey, let alone in dark meat.

I drained the yams from the syrup (no high fructose!) and sliced them into thin planks that would make sense on a sandwich. Done!

Hawaiian Bread

Perhaps a rarity to some, King's Hawaiian Sweet Bread has been a favorite of mine since I was young. You can find it at most grocery stores, and it's great for everything from sandwiches to french toast. I was pretty excited to see it in this sandwich.

It comes in wide, round loaves so I cut off two of the heels so I could have a crusty top and bottom slice. I toasted it very lightly, on the very lowest setting my hey-look-how-fancy-my-toaster-is toaster allowed. You don't want a crunchy toast texture, just enough of a browning to let Maillard do his work.

Just look at that! Awesome-looking grill marks totally unintentional.

(Also note: I'm skipping the "field greens" ie lettuce ingredient because that's pretty obvious. Get some nice, green leaf lettuce. Romaine or bibb. Just not iceberg)

Sandwich Assembly!!!

Cranberries on one slice, herb'd mayo on the other.

I microwaved the sweet potatoes for about 30 seconds, just to get them lukewarm so they wouldn't be cold and gross, then shingled them on one of the slices (the one that would become the top slice)

Then I added some lettuce (in that picture, probably too much) and scooped some of the turkey from the pot. I had to squeeze it to get rid of most of the juice, as I didn't want it to be a drippy sandwich.

Join the halves into a sandwich, cut it diagonally, and stack it like a true sandwich artist and take your vanity picture before scarfing down.

Your final product:

Two drumsticks probably made about 3 or 4 sandwiches worth.

It wasn't as amazing as the Grahamwich original (there's some kind of sweetness to the turkey there that I can't put my finger on, I might have to eat two or twenty more to get a better idea), but for home cooking it was pretty great. My leftover turkey sandwiches are usually made of large and unwieldy chunks of turkey that always fall out the sides when I take a bite. Shredding the turkey and simmering it in its own juices made it much easier to eat and gave it an awesome extra-turkey boost.

I might try this again soon with white meat, just to see how it compares.

Comments: 2 Comments.

Snowy Day

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 17:21:29 -0700

It's been snowing since I woke up this morning.

It was snowing while I waited for the train.

And while I waited for another train.

And at work.

A lot of snow.

Comments: 2 Comments.

I Was At The Rally

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:51:32 -0700

Click image for original.

I was at the Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear) in Washington DC on 10/30/2010.

I'm not much of a "joiner," and not a big enough fan of The Daily Show or Colbert to hop a plane to DC. I only really made the trip because I was already sort of invested in the event due to my participation in a social news website called Reddit, and how I along with thousands of other members donated to Donors Choose, a charity of which Stephen Colbert is a board member, to help show the organizers of the rally how serious we were about its message, and to show the world that "the internet" isn't just a bunch of people who laugh at pictures of cats and occasionally creep on kids.

The chronology is a bit muddled, but the legend goes that long before the rally was announced, a member of Reddit had an idea that Colbert should do a mock-rally to lampoon Glenn Beck's bile-churning "Restoring Honor" DC rally. Such a movement grew on Reddit and the greater internet behind this idea, that we tried to find ways to get the attention of Colbert and let him know that this demand existed.

Eventually, someone came up with the Donors Choose idea, and so a campaign to raise money in the name of this rally was begun. The initial goal was to beat Hillary Clinton's Donors Choose fundraising total of about $27,000. If we could beat Hillary Clinton's fundraising power within a month, surely we would be noticed.

It was beaten within five hours.

Within a day, over $100,000 was raised by members of Reddit for Donors Choose. Last week, just around a month later, the total hit $500,000.

This is all money that goes directly to buy classroom supplies for teachers in impoverished American school systems who are forced to pay for these supplies out of pocket. It's a really great charity that puts all of the power in the donor's hand. You choose what classroom and what teacher gets the money for the supplies they need.

Well, it turned out that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were already planning to hold a rally, and this whole grassroots internet campaign was a kind of kismet demand for something that was already coming.

After putting my own money on the line to (in theory) get this rally to take place, in the form of several Donors Choose donations to help get the total past various milestones, I sort of felt like I had to be there.

So, besides being a Rally for Sanity, it was also a bit of a Reddit meetup.

It also doesn't hurt that my brother lives and works in Washington DC, that I could stay with him for free, and that his birthday fell around the same time and I could double-duty the trip. Also, I have a friend who lives and works in the same area, and he had every intention of attending, so I wouldn't be entirely lonely.

The view from where we stood.

When people ask me my impression of the event, I don't really speak in terms of the message or the comedy or the music. I speak in terms of numbers. There were more people there than I have ever seen in one place in my life.

Independent estimates put the crowd's size at 215,000 people, with a margin of error of 10%. Firsthand accounts indicate there could have been tens of thousands more in attendance, if there were more loudspeakers and bigscreens. People were showing up, realizing they were too far from the stage and speakers to hear anything, and leaving to watch the event on the TV at nearby restaurants.

I live in the second or third (depending on who you ask) most populous city in the country and I've never seen that many people at once. The entire city of DC was slammed.

The Metro train into the city was packed so tight with people that after a few stops, new riders physically could not board the train.

Along with many other members of the Reddit community, I and my friend (and his girlfriend) stayed after the rally ended for a few hours to help pick up trash. It was another of our attempts to show the world that we aren't all bad, and to prevent the otherwise-inevitable "Look how much trash these liberals left!" propaganda from those opposed to the rally. By the time we left the Mall, the massive crowd had made its way into the city and had descended upon every restaurant and bar with an "Open" sign.

Every single restaurant we passed had a line out the door. Even the little, out of the way places we didn't think anybody would have heard of had multi-hour lines. When we tried to just leave town to get food elsewhere, we were turned away at the Metro stations because there were too many people to fit on the platforms. The escalators were all breaking down ("becoming stairs") because of all the people.

When we finally found a restaurant with a reasonably short wait, we were almost flooded out of the place because the dishwasher backed up from overuse and dirty dishwater began pouring into the dining room in an everexpanding brown lake.

The DC Metro system says there were over 800,000 people through the system that day, several dozen times more than the average weekender traffic.

So, regardless of what you think about Stewart's more serious message at the end of event, or about the political/nonpolitical tone of the whole thing, I think enough of a point is made by the attendance. The event permit was filed for 60,000 attendees, and there were over 200,000 people there, and millions more watching at satellite rallies in cities across the country.

I think enough is said by that, and by the fact that a small internet community raised half a million dollars so poor schoolkids could have the supplies they need to learn, and that a few grumpy, asocial snobs like me volunteered to pick up other people's garbage with their bare hands to keep America's front lawn clean.

There's a lot of people out there who think the world could use a dose of sanity, and they're not afraid to work to make it happen.

That's my take on the rally. You could delete the entire on-stage event from my memory and the impact would still be just the same.

There are a lot of us.

Comments: 0 Comments.

Sleepeasy

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:07:04 -0700

I used to take me a very long time to fall asleep. I would often lie in bed for an hour or more with my eyes closed before I finally fell asleep. Now, I'm out within a few minutes.

This seems like a great thing but it's kind of annoying. That lie-in-bed-try-to-sleep time used to be the only time of the day when I could just think. Most of the time when I'm awake I'm reading something, walking somewhere, listening to something, or doing some kind of work. The pre-sleep in-bed time was my only chance to think about things. I usually used that time to think about stories or stuff I wanted to write. I came up with the whole ending to my novel while trying to fall asleep.

That time became so creatively productive I had to start budgeting it. I'd decide before hopping into bed which of the nine hundred thousand stories I've been brewing I would think about. It was like supercomputer processing time and I had to schedule some time for every project.

Now, though, I don't have the benefit. When I put away whatever I'm reading or watching and go all close-eyed I have maybe 5 or 10 minutes to think about the mechanics of a particular superhero's tactical equipment before I start shifting through brainwave cycles and before I know it, it's tomorrow.

I'm not entirely sure why this is. The only major life change I've made in the past year has been everything. It seems like as soon as I moved out of my parents' house and to Chicago, the sleeplessness has stopped. This isn't really a narrowed-down cause, however. It could be that I was extremely depressed for the last year because I had no job or money, or because I could feel my dreams of living in Chicago slipping away which also made me extremely depressed (depression causes restlessness). Or it could just be that the air conditioning in that house was poorly designed, causing it to often be way too hot in my room. It's hard to fall asleep when I'm too warm. Now that I've got my own place and the air conditioning unit is mere inches from my bed, I can keep it exactly as cold as I want it to be (very).

Or perhaps it's just that I have a job now, and I actually do real things during the day, so I'm more mentally worn out at night. Or perhaps because I went from walking zero miles per day to an average of 5. Or maybe, just maybe, goblins.

Comments: 1 Comments.

"Search" Does Stuff

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:28:48 -0700

Still in very, very early stages, but the "search" link on this site actually does something now. I threw together a very basic search engine that currently only shows 10 results and is useless without javascript, but does a resonable job of being a search engine.

So now you can find out how many times I've used dirty words here over the years.

And also see what a right-leaning d-bag I used to be.

Comments: 1 Comments.

One More Phone Thought

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:30:08 -0700

I got my first cameraphone when I was a senior in high school. I had a job at Circuit City, and I saved up my dough for quite a while to buy a Nokia 6820 for $400.

After I graduated, I went on my first road trip to Chicago. While there, I had a real camera but I took a few pictures with the phone for the heck of it.

Here is one picture I took:

That's taken from the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) observation deck.

That is the actual size of the photo. Not resized or anything.

Now here's a picture I took with my $200 phone yesterday:

That's not full size. Here is a larger version, but Flickr wont let me upload the full size image without paying for Flickr Pro. The actual image from the camera is 2.5x larger.

Here is a comparison of the image dimensions between the two cameras.

All I'm saying is, my phone has a good camera.

Comments: 2 Comments.

Time Travel

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:44:08 -0700

Mark burst into the third-floor apartment, as he always does, tossed his backpack onto the supposed dining room table, like he always does, and plopped down in the middle of the couch, like he always does. The wood frame of the couch squeaked with the force. It was an old piece of furniture which, at its prime, was slightly more off-white than the carpet, which was just as slightly more off-white than the walls. It was a cheap, poorly appointed apartment that reflected the priorities of its two, twentysomething, bachelor residents.

Dale spun around in the computer chair to face the couch. "Did you get it?" he asked.

Mark smiled, reaching into his left pants pocket. "Had it sent to the office." After some trouble reconciling the poorness of his posture and the tightness of his jeans, he was finally able to draw a slick, black-and-silver phone from his pocket.

"Awesome," Dale said, rolling the chair closer until the carpet wouldn't allow it.

Mark spun it around in his fingers a few times, before handing to Dale. Dale admired every inch of it, examining it like a rare specimen.

"Any problems getting it activated?" Dale asked, turning the on the screen and swiping a finger across to unlock it.

"No," Mark said. "Pretty simple, this time."

Dale stared at the screen, wide-eyed. "This is so damn cool," he said. He flipped through a few pages of the installed apps.

"Yeah," Mark said. "Wifi and 3G internet, GPS for maps, video calling. It's the future, man."

"Totally," Dale said. "If I could go back in time and show this to my twelve-year-old self, he/I would go nuts."

"Hey, yeah," Mark said. "We should do that."

"Yeah," Dale chuckled, "sure."

"No, look," Mark said, walking over and taking the phone. He flipped a through a few pages of apps and pointed at an icon labeled, "Time Machine."

"Oh, hey," Dale said, "this one has Time Machine data backup service?"

"No," Mark said. "It's an actual time machine."

Dale looked at Mark for fourteen seconds. "...What?"

"Yeah, just... here. Hang on."

Mark pressed the icon to launch the app. The screen filled with text. "Just skip through these warnings.... and.... here, see?"

On the screen was was a simple, plain-text readout of the current date and time, and below it was a dial to select a new date and time.

"What year was it when you were twelve?" Mark asked.

"What, are you serious?" Dale asked, incredulous.

Mark didn't reply. He was busy with math. "Er... 1995, right?" He spun the numbers until the date was changed to 1995. "Sweet, here we go..."

"Wait, wait, hang on." Dale said. "What the crap are you talking about?"

Mark looked confused. "What?"

"Time machine?" Dale said.

"Yeah," Mark said. "Why not?"

Dale thought about it, then shrugged. "Whatever."

"Alright, then," Mark said. "Here we go, for real." He pressed the big red button on the screen.

Then they were falling.

They landed on a tar and gravel roof. Dale on his stomach, Mark on his back.

"Ow," Dale said, his face pressed against the roof.

Mark sat up. "What was that? What happened."

Dale spun around, wiped away the pebbles stuck to his face, then stood up. "Where are we?"

Mark got up as well, then walked to the edge of the roof. "This is our street," he said, looking down at the ground. "This is our corner. This is where are apartment is."

"Or will be," Dale said. "Our apartment building is, what, ten years old? There used to be a pizza place here."

"We are now on top of said pizza place," Mark said, leaning awkwardly over the edge, looking at a sign that said "Rizzato's."

"So we're in 1995?" Dale asked.

"Looks like," Mark replied.

"Crazy."

"We probably should have done that from a ground-floor location," Mark said. "It's lucky there was a building here before, otherwise we would have fallen three stories instead of one."

"Yeah," Dale said. "That's what I'm focusing on now."

The two argued for a bit about the mechanics of time travel, the nature of existence, the possible rules of causality and the ramifications of altering the space-time continuum. Deciding that they couldn't undo the entirety of existence with a ninety-nine-cent app, they decided they would probably be fine if they kept their visit brief and didn't kill anybody likely to become important.

"You probably should have read those warning screens," Dale said as the two walked toward Dale's childhood home. "It might have said something about butterfly effects and whether they exist."

"Come on," Mark said. "Nobody reads those things, so when they made the program they had to have known people would skip through it all. If it were dangerous, they'd make you take a quiz or get a license or something."

Dale had been wondering if his mother, in 1995, would be able to see him, fifteen years older, and recognize that he was her son, who, to her, was only twelve. It was a bizarre hypothetical, and frankly it hurt his head more than the time-paradox stuff. He decided it would be best to avoid his 1995 mother altogether, so when the two arrived at his 1995 home they snuck through the back door and into the basement, where a twelve-year-old Dale was playing video games.

"Hey," adult Dale said.

Younger Dale paused the game and looked over. "Hey," he said. "Who are you guys?"

Dale knew that he couldn't rightly just say he was from the future, the younger version of himself wouldn't believe him. He'd have to ease him into it, and find some way to convince the younger him that he wasn't lying by using knowledge only he, fifteen years later, would know. During the walk, when he wasn't thinking about whether his mom would have recognized him, he was thinking about that.

"Well," Dale said to himself. "It's hard to say, exactly, but basically--"

"--He's you from the future and I'm his-slash-your friend from the future," Mark said. "Hey, is that Super Nintendo?"

Young Dale looked at the two for a moment. "Me, from the future?"

Adult Dale cringed. "Yeah," he said. "Sorta."

Young Dale furrowed his brow for a second. "Well if that's true... what girl do I like right now?"

"Ah, jeez," Mark said. "I didn't think you'd be quizzing yourself. We should have prepared for this for a bit. I know I don't remember anything about the girls that I--"

"Becca Layton," adult Dale said, to his younger version's surprise.

"Wait," Mark said. "Becca Layton... isn't she that girl on Facebook you're always--"

"Shh--er--ah--shubbaduh," adult Dale interrupted.

Young Dale was convinced. "So do I ever have a chance with her?"

Mark was just as curious.

Adult Dale stammered for a bit, "Er, I don't think.. uh, spoiler alert. Yeah, that. I'm not here to; that is, I don't want to change the way things unfold."

"Isn't that what we're here for?" Mark asked, holding up the cell phone.

"Well, yeah, but that's... for that, we can be mysterious and then leave. I can't tell him how my actual life turns out."

"Whatever, space cadet," Mark said, handing adult Dale the phone. "Just blow his mind with the thing so we can get out of here. I'm having legitimate concerns now about this thing's battery life. I didn't bring a charger, and there aren't going to be any made for about a decade."

"Right, that." Dale took the phone, switched the screen on, and walked over to his younger self.

"Basically," he started, "I came back in time because this phone just came out and I knew it would rock your world."

Dale flipped through the pages of apps.

"Cool," young Dale said. "Touch screen."

"I know!" older Dale said. "Touchscreen stuff barely existed back... now, Mark."

Mark nodded. He was checking out the Super Nintendo games on the shelf. "SWAT Kats, awesome."

Older Dale continued with the demonstration, "and, obviously, you can make calls with it. Here, I'll call and order a pizza." Dale tried to dial a number, but there was no service.

"Oh, right," he said. "Cellular systems were analog until a few years from now, and I don't even know if Mark's carrier even exists yet."

"Lion King?" Mark said. "You had The Lion King for SNES?"

"Hey," young Dale said. "That game is cool. Right?"

Older Dale looked away, then back at the phone. "Anyway, well you can get on the internet using wifi--- wait, 802.11 wireless networking doesn't exist until, like, 2002. Crap."

"Very impressive tech demo so far," Mark said. "Hey, you don't have any Final Fantasy games here."

"Final what?" young Dale asked. Mark's eyes widened.

"--Anyway," adult Dale interjected. "Well, it's got GPS, at least, so the phone can actually tell you exactly where you are..."

Dale launched the navigation app, but nothing happened.

"Aw, hell," Dale said. "GPS doesn't go online for civilian use for another three or four years."

"What's GPS mean?" young Dale asked.

Older Dale just looked at him. "Well the communication systems might not exactly be available to show off, but you can at least see how it plays music and movies. Mark, did you put any media on here?"

Mark shook his head. "I was going to sync it with my home PC."

Older Dale's head dropped. "Alright, so this thing can't exactly do anything right now, but you should still be impressed. Look how small it is, and this thing's got more processing power than... crap, I don't even have a computer yet in 1995."

Mark was reading the back of the Homeward Bound VHS cassette case. "When does the PlayStation come out?"

"I don't... I don't remember," older Dale said. "This is very distressing. Look, kid. Look at this thing! It's so small. Be impressed!"

"Yeah, it's cool I guess."

Older Dale's eyes narrowed. "You guess? This thing can hold, like.. several thousand songs."

"For what?"

"For... for songs. For listening to!"

"Who needs to listen to that many songs?"

"That's not the point! Look at this thing, it is a technical marvel!"

"If you say so," the kid said. "I like my Nintendo."

"Yeah, well... wait until the Wii comes out. Huge disappointment."

Younger Dale laughed. "The wee comes out of what?"

Older Dale took a long, deliberate breath. "I hate you, me."

Younger Dale shrugged.

Older Dale turned to Mark. "Well, this has been terrifically stupid." He handed Mark the phone. "Let's go back now."

"Finally," Mark said.

He flipped through the pages to find the Time Machine app and launched it. Dale looked around. "We should probably go outside, though. I don't even know who owns this house now."

"Err..." Mark said. "This sucks."

"Well, not now, I mean," Dale said. "I mean, I don't know who owns this house in our time. Our now. Not now-now."

Mark wasn't responding. He was staring at the phone's screen.

"What is it?" Dale asked.

"I read the warning screen this time," he said.

"Yeah? What? Crap. Did we screw up the future?"

"Nnnno," Mark said. "It's not about that. It says, 'Warning: Time travel feature requires wifi internet connection and GPS location detection. Do not travel to a time without these services'."

"Oh," Dale said. "Yeah, that sucks."

Comments: 3 Comments.

Random iPhone 4 Thoughts

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:05:15 -0700

Photos

I took the above photo from work with my new iPhone 4. I took some more on the way home today.

It's very, very nice to have a phone that can take a half-decent picture. I moved to this city primarily because I love taking photos of it so much, but I rarely have a proper digital camera with me, so all I'm left with is my phone. The iPhone 3GS had a lot better camera than previous iPhones, but it was still pretty sub-par as cameras go. The iPhone 4's camera is comparable (note strategic use of word) to actual point-and-shoot digital cameras, so I'm excited at the prospect of being able to shoot quick pictures of things without them looking embarrassing on a computer monitor.

One thing I love about taking pictures with an iPhone, as opposed to most digital cameras, is that the iPhone tags photos with the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, so inside software like iPhoto (or, now, on the iPhone itself) I can see all of my photos represented on a map. That makes it easy to, say, find all the pictures I took while in Grant Park, or the photos I took while at my brother's place in Maryland. I find that feature so appealing that even when I have a superior camera with me I'll choose to use the iPhone so that I'll automatically have that location information stored.

Lines

I waited in line for four hours to get my iPhone 4 last night. I had a reservation, and reservations expired at midnight, so if I didn't deal with the line to get the phone yesterday, it would have been at least a month before I could have gotten one. I checked out the line at the Michigan Avenue Apple Store on my lunch break, and it was about 5-6 hours long. When I eventually got in line after work, it was a bit shorter. By that point, only people with reservations were allowed in (no "walk-ins"). It's amazing that a phone can draw that kind of line.

Apple handled the line rather well. It wrapped entirely around the block, but there were store employees all around, making sure that curbs, entrances, and sidewalk crossings weren't blocked and answering people's questions. Apple even paid for a local burger restaurant to give anybody in line free burgers, lemonade, and milkshakes, on top of having plenty of bottled water to go around, and for the first half of the day there was coffee and iced tea. When I was in line, a radio station was handing out bottles of SoBe Lifewater. I felt very looked-after.

Prior to this, the only line I'd been in close to that length was for roller coasters. I figure that if people can reasonably wait 2-3 hours for a ride you'll experience for about 77 seconds, the same amount of time for a phone I'll enjoy for at least a year can't be that absurd. The people nearby in line were pretty friendly and talkative. There was a nice mix of people, not the sort of sweaty geeks you'd expect to see lined up for a product launch. The guy behind me was editor-in-chief of his law school's Law Review.

For the record, I waited about an hour to get an Xbox 360 (which I don't really regret) a few days after launch, and about 40 minutes for a Nintendo DS (which I regret entirely).

Face-Time

The addition of a front-facing camera and a built-in protocol for video calling is nifty, but right now I'm like the one guy in 1987 who owned a fax machine and couldn't wait for someone else to get one so he could make use of it. Since iPhone 4 has only been out for a day, and only people with iPhone 4 can use Face-Time, there's nor many people for me to Face-Time with.

I suspect that in a year or so, the video calling environment will be a bit more accessible. Hopefully, Apple will add in support for people using their iChat software on Macs (which is in itself a rather well-performing video chatting utility), so that (so to speak) people will realize that they had fax machines the whole time.

Long-term, though, I don't think video calling will ever catch on in the way that the past's version of the future predicted. Video chatting requires you to worry about how your face and hair look, and it requires your full attention, whereas you can be naked and rollerblading and hold a vocal conversation over a phone perfectly well. Our laziness and vanity will probably keep widespread video chatting on hold for quite a while, until we've reached a point where shame and privacy are no longer common traits among humans.

Screens

Much hay has been made over the iPhone 4's buzzword "retina display." A previous iteration of me would have spent time researching the specific pixel matrix resolution mathematics involved in the newfangled screen to formulate a solid opinion regarding whether Apple really accomplished a legitimate feat of engineering, or just hobbled together someone else's invention and put a marketing spin on it, but at this point in my life I don't or can't care.

All I know is that the screen is so crisp, my brain can't process it. It's crisper than any display (computer or handheld) I've ever seen. Text isn't represented on the screen, it exists on the screen. The words just pop out at you. Comparisons to printed paper are meaningless, because the concepts are entirely different. Text on the iPhone 4's display is a whole new kind of thing.

The Catch-22

I think the mostly-plastic iPhone 3G and 3GS were kind of ugly from the back, but didn't mind so much because the back was always hidden by the various multi-layered cases I bought for them. It was in my interest to protect the iPhones from the various drops-on-concrete I subjected them to, so the ugly back wasn't an issue.

The iPhone 4, however, is much better-looking a phone. It's a rather gorgeous little brick of steel and glass. Sometimes I just look down at it, sitting on my desk. Hello, little phone. That beauty comes at a price, though. The glass front and back means it's got twice as much surface area susceptible to catastrophic breakage.

That means that it's in the phone's best interest to get some kind of protective case for it. But it's in my best interest to leave it naked so I an continue to ogle its curves and edges. Because it's so pretty, I don't want to cover it; but because it's so delicate, I want to protect it. I feel like the parent of a teenager struggling to find the right balance between overprotective and irresponsible.

The Verdict

Upgrading from the iPhone 3G to the 3GS had a very sharp, immediate payoff in that apps ran twice as fast. It's an easy selling point: iPhone 3GS is faster.

Upgrading from the iPhone to the iPhone 3G also had an immediate, obvious payoff: it had 3G cellular internet, which was much faster than EDGE, plus it had actual GPS. Easy selling point: iPhone 3G has faster internet.

Upgrading to the iPhone 4 doesn't really have that wham-bam payoff. It has a lot of improvements and niceities, but nothing that gets all up in your face and tells you how stupid you've been for having a crummy ol' 3GS. It's faster, sure, but not several times faster. It doesn't have faster cellular internet. It has a much better camera, and a crazy-awesome screen, but those aren't huge selling points to the general public. Basically, it's just a ton of gentle improvements upon the former phone. Its selling point: iPhone 4 is just better.

Comments: 1 Comments.

Tweeter Feetchers

Sat, 15 May 2010 10:34:10 -0700

I swear, I put off being a Twitter user for a long time (despite my signing up for it very, very early to get a premium username before I'd eventually be relegated to being "AaronSk8erboi839191_4") but I had to build in some Twitter-related features to some websites I was doing for clients and work and that put the bug in me. It's ridiculous how easy it is to make custom applications to fetch and display tweets of any classification.

And then I moved here to Chicago and I felt like the people from back home would probably have a slight, slight interest in what was going on with me, but with a full time job it was hard to find the energy to write full-on blog posts, so Twitter it was.

When I decided that I was comfortable with it and that I wasn't going to drop it, I decided to make my tweets get pumped directly onto my blog here so that I wouldn't have to explain to my parents what/who/how/why/where a Twitter was, and just to generally make life easier. Also because I like to make things that do things with data from other places. It's my thing.

So I took some code I'd made for a client website to pull in tweets, changed a few things, and plopped it onto this site here.

That's worked out pretty well, but my nature doesn't allow me to let a good thing remain good when I could screw around with it and make it better, so I just added a few more features:

Firewall Bypassery

A few people whose workplaces have firewalls that block Twitter have told me that this prevents the display of Twitter content here. That makes sense, because my script is just telling your browser to get a data feed from Twitter and then interpret it, but it also cheesed me off pretty hard. I didn't like the idea of my website breaking for people at work because of IT policies put in place to prevent secretaries from wasting time at Friendface and Twitbook and such.

So I've added a thing that tries to detect when the script is having trouble fetching the tweets, and then will (unobtrusively) ask the user if they're behind a firewall. Answering "Yes" will attempt to bypass any firewalls using a homespun proxy. I may remove the whole confirmation thing and just attempt the proxy automatically if the first attempt fails, but I liked the look of the confirmation message...

Geolocation/Stalker Enhancements

Twitter recently started allowing for tweets to be encoded with the geo-coordinates of whereever you happened to be when you sent that message (if whatever you're using to send the message allows for it). My phone allows for it, so when I tweet from my phone it includes the location. Even though it kind of creeps me out, I thought it was cool enough that I now display any geo-location information that may exist along with a tweet. You may, on certain messages, see something like this:

The general location of the message is displayed in text form, and if you click the location (or the little pin icon) it will take you to a Google Map showing exactly (exaaaactly) where I was. I think this can supply a little context to messages, the benefit of which should hopefully outweigh the creepiness. Please do not use this information to murder me.

Image Auto-Thumbnailing

Basically, if I link to a TwitPic or Flickr image in a tweet, the script will try to generate a thumbnail for them. Yeah. Fancy stuff.

Comments: 0 Comments.

We Need Better Superhero Grammar Education

Thu, 06 May 2010 15:04:53 -0700

Ardent fans of this site (quick question: why?) may remember that some time ago I laid out the rules for superhero nomenclature.

Therein I state the following to rationalize the correct formating of Tony Stark's alter-ego, Iron Man:

He's not Ironman or Iron-Man, though. He's not half-iron, half-man and he's not just a guy who is really into iron. He is an iron man.

Clearly one of the film series' stars needs to read that post (or read it again!), because she doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on the rules.

In her weird half-blog, half-magazine (blog-magazine), Gwyneth Paltrow cannot remember how to format the name of the movie she's starring in. In this startlingly detailed article about how she got in shape for her return to the role of Pepper Potts (the only female comic book character with red hair!), she screws things up from line one:

I have just traversed the globe doing promotion for Ironman 2, getting asked the same question repeatedly: how did I get in shape for the movie?

No.

Wrong.

Iron Man 2.

Simple.

Comments: 0 Comments.

I Have Super Powers

Mon, 03 May 2010 10:56:48 -0700

If you polled everybody who knows me in real life and asked them to think of the most annoying thing about me, and you discarded the most common answer of "caustic, self-absorbed jerkface," most people would probably come up with some variant of "mumbles a lot, can barely hear what he's saying."

Growing up, my older siblings and other people whose job it was to highlight my flaws would very often tell me to stop mumbling. A lot of times, I'll say something incredibly funny and anybody who isn't within four feet of me will see the other people laughing and say, "What, what did he say?"

I speak at a rather low volume. I won't deny that. There are various contributing factors to this, but key among them is the simple fact that I have super powers.

My hearing and vision are above average. My eyes see at a higher "framerate" than most people, and because of that I can often see things that other people aren't supposed to. No, not ghosts. Halogen lights have an unusual pulsing flicker going on all the time. Other people don't notice it, but to me, they tend to make everything look a little bit like a strobe light. This doesn't really bother me anymore, and it doesn't affect other people in any way more significant in that they occasionally don't understand when I try to explain why certain department stores give me headaches.

My hearing is what causes the most problems. I can hear slightly higher frequencies than are typical (those dog whistle things sound like a mosquito flying past my ear), but I also just generally hear better than most. Because of that, when I speak at a volume that seems appropriate for my superhero ears, nobody else can hear me.

If I talk at a volume other people seem to talk at, I feel like I'm shouting. To me, most people seem like they're shouting all the time.

I'm not alone in this. My sister seems to be the same. Her and I can have a conversation in public that, to any observer, looks like we're either whispering or somehow reading eachother's lips. Somehow she learned to speak at a reasonable volume around other people, and I did not.

So, I get a lot of "what?"s and "stop mumbling"s. After a lifetime of this, I've grown to become pretty sensitive about being asked to repeat myself. I hate it. If I tell a joke (and if my mouth is open, I'm telling a joke) and somebody asks me to repeat it because they didn't hear my subsonic vocalizations, I almost always have to stop and let a bubbling range simmer down before then deciding if I can handle the shame of repeating myself for an audience of non-superhumans.

I can't decide if my intense negative reaction to being asked to repeat myself is a product of my sense of humor, or some kind of shame that I'd spoken incorrectly in the first place. As I've [over-]established, I make a particularly large deal out of being spontaneously funny. I don't tell "jokes," as it were, as much as I just say funny things appropriate to the situation. People tell me I should be a comedian at times, and I tell them that I never could, because comedians have to tell the same jokes over and over, and I feel like I've failed as a human if I use the same line for a laugh more than once.

If I crack off a one-liner and a few people didn't hear it, my repetition of will have lost half of its oomph because the context changed.

Or, as I said, it could be the shame. I have a weird mental self-defense protocol that tries to stop me from thinking about, or being aware of any negative aspect of myself. From 6th grade and all through high school, whenever someone made a fat joke to or about me, my brain would lock down for a moment and go through a little process of, "wait, he wasn't talking about me, because I'm not fat. He was talking about another guy, a guy who isn't here, because he's in another universe, but he looks like me, but he isn't me, but-- hey, pumpkin pie!"

It never actually hit me that I was fat until about a year ago when my doctor (of all people ) told me I could lose twenty pounds (or lose sixty pounds, as I eventually did).

Without the context of a joke to wash it away, there was no way my stupid brain could divert my attention from that.

And now that I'm working in an office where I sometimes have to tell people things that aren't jokes, them not being able to hear me becomes an actual problem. Only now do I have a volume problem that I cant rationalize away as other people simply not having super-hearing.

So now I have to remember, whenever I open my mouth, to talk about 20% louder than I think I should, even though it feels incredibly wrong.

I think I need a lozenge.

Comments: 6 Comments.

Inline Tweeties

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:39:48 -0700

Since I moved I've been Tweeting a bit more often, so I decided to throw together some javascript to include my latest tweets on the blog here. They get mixed in along with blog entries based on their timestamps so everything appears chronologically.

This only works when you actually come to this page. People reading via RSS won't get that amazing new feature.

Comments: 0 Comments.