Ring, Ring, Why Don't You Give Me A Call?

Today was lunch with the 11:30am crew. Other than A, they're the only people I know who eat lunch that early, which means when I'm too hungry to be able to last until 12, I intrude on their lunch (I do ask if they mind). Despite the fact that Mr Brioche had a terrible lunch yesterday when he decided to "try something new", they both insisted that I do so. So that was today's adventure... Thai chicken on rice. Was actually pretty nice.

That's the picture covered, so at lunch, I mentioned how nobody needs to remember phone numbers anymore. Both Michael and Mr Brioche instantly rattled off their wives' phone numbers. I pointed out that they both just gave me their wives' phone numbers and I could call them right now. They both dared me to, and asked what I would say.

I couldn't really think of anything bad to say, other than their husband had died. Both of them jumped towards the affair angle, saying I could pretend to be someone having an affair with them. I asked the same thing at 440 dinner tonight, and Uni Paul and Nina went the affair angle, too. Although Uni Paul also suggested that I could start describing getting eye surgery in gory detail. That would be enough to ruin someone's day.

So the two points I think to consider are: 1) your call has to be believable. I could have called and said, " died in an accident." but as soon as he got home, they would know it wasn't true. 2) the other person can just hang up. If you start describing eye surgery, the other person can hang up on you.

My first thought was you could say something along the lines of, "You should feel bad for what you did." The idea being that everyone has done something they feel bad about, Though Michael, and everyone at the 440 dinner didn't seem to agree, so that one is probably not a good choice.

MrBrioche said the worst thing he could hear is someone calling saying one of his kids died. Even if it turned out not to be true, it would ruin the rest of his day.

Uni Paul seemed to think that I'm using this to try and find out people's deep, dark secrets. I am not! I think it's an interesting question to think about. Perhaps it's easier to think about if you flip the question around: what's the worst call you could receive from a stranger? Both Special K and I thought it would be a call with the news that a loved one died. Even if it was untrue, we both have a neurotic personality, so we dread that kind of thing all the time.

Does this question provide perspective on someone's personality? I imagine for some people, it would be being told they were fired, or that their house had burned down. You get to see what someone truly values. What kind of phone call would cause you pain?

I should point out that I had never intended to call anybody! I didn't even catch either of the phone numbers, as it was just a mumble of numbers. And even if I did, I wouldn't do it! I'm not evil, geez!

Not an Impostor

https://mobile.twitter.com/tdierks/status/835912924329836545

MrFodder linked me this tweet today. If you have a look, a lot of people responded saying similar things, that they often need to Google how to do simple tasks,


I have mentioned in the past that I feel like I don't belong at work, and that I often feel like I have no idea what I'm doing - typical symptoms of the Impostor syndrome. Well, I still feel like that, but one morning, I ended up in the lift with an intern from my old team. He mentioned that he felt really lost, and I got the impression that he was feeling like I do now. This was pretty much confirmed by Special K.

I sent him an email describing how Grad Daniel and I would message each other in the morning, detailing what we were asked to do. Then, between the two of us, we would Google-fu our way into some sort of solution. We pretty much helped each other out until our projects diverged enough that we weren't familiar with each other's code and the questions got too specific for us to Google without all the background knowledge. I offered to help run him through the framework used by the team, so that at least he'd have some idea how it all hangs together, since a lot of it is done by "magic".

Now I find myself in this weird position, where I was once the impostor, and now I'm a semi-mentor? I did do mentor training a few years ago, but once again, I was the most junior person there, and the only person in the group who wasn't a manager of some kind, so the whole time I felt like I wasn't good enough to be there. Am I ready to mentor someone else? Special K actually asked me to mentor her, saying that I was pretty much acting like one anyway. I declined, saying that we're friends, and it would be tough to keep a mentor relationship and a friendship at the same time. I still feel like that is the case, which is why I don't want to mentor this intern either. It also feels dishonest to be giving other people advice when I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing.

Anyway, it was nice to read the tweets from other programmers who have years of experience, admitting that they sometimes don't know how to do the simplest of things. I think part of it was to show that technical interviews where you are asked to regurgitate documentation don't really do very well at wedding out bad programmers, but I think the other part of it is to reassure people that the super pro, been programming since he was born developer still needs to look up the Javadocs for String methods every now and again, and that's OK.

Tomorrow, I will go to work with my head held high, and write code with confidence! Maybe one day I'll work up enough confidence to take someone under my wing.

Your Name Review

One of MrFodder's friend suggested we go and see Your Name when it was showing last year, and while I was hesitant to see it, it was screening during the Japanese Film Festival, so I thought it would be suitable for the theme of movies I had lined myself up to see, so I responded that I'd like to go. Even though I like Japanese culture, I find some movies a bit hit or miss, as I'm not generally a fan of the over-the-top acting, super contrived scenarios, or harem-style stories (though Love Hina is an exception for me, probably because it was the first anime I was introduced to, courtesy of my cousin).

So I went into the screening of Your Name with very, very low expectations, despite the fact that the reviews were incredibly positive. Ever since I discovered the "Trailers always spoil" trope (warning: TV tropes link), the only movie trailers I've seen have been ones that screen at the start of another movie, so I had no idea what the movie was about at all. I was quite surprised to find that within the first five minutes or so, I was already hooked.

MrFodder and I went to see it again today with darkpast and kawarimi, and after the movie, we discussed how someone would go about trying to describe this movie to someone in order to convince them to see it.

I guess I should start by saying that the movie is in Japanese (I don't know if an English dub exists, but I'm pretty sure there isn't one at this moment), so if you're not into reading subtitles, probably best to give it a miss. The next thing I should mention is that it's animated - not CGI-style animation, but anime-style animation. Lastly, it's a sweet romance movie, so if that's not your thing either, then you can give it a miss (though it's not overly saccharin-saturated romance, it's actually quite touching, I mean, even MrFodder was willing to watch it twice!). OK, now that that's over and done with, on to what the movie is actually about.

It starts with Mitsuha, who is a high-school girl living in a small village in Japan. She, along with her younger sister, are the local shrine maidens, which she seems to find embarrassing, and wishes she were a boy living in Tokyo. She begins a dream, believing herself to be a high-school boy called Taki, who lives in Tokyo. Not long after, *minor spoiler*, we discover that sometimes when they sleep, they end up waking up in the other person's body. In order to help each keep track of what went on while they were swapped, they'd leave notes for each other about what they did in the other person's body.

Both characters are quite reasonable about the situation, and neither one of them seems to behave in an, "I'd rather be you than me" way. They actually end up helping each other out with their lives, by doing things the other one wouldn't normally be able to do.

I hope that that was enough to sell the movie to you, I definitely don't regret seeing it twice!

Girl, Interrupted

The coolest T-shirt that I saw at the conference, which he said he bought from Qwertee.

Day 2 of the Playgrounds conference, I was on shift, but still got to hear some pretty good discussions, and I plan to watch some of the talks on skilled.io later. One of the talks I did get to hear was from Adam Bell who works at Facebook. He spoke about interruptability. It seems that in earlier versions of iOS, when you clicked on something, like opening a photo, the phone would drop all inputs until the photo finished loading. So even if you changed your mind, or wanted to do something else, you had to wait for the animation of the photo loading to finish first.

Obviously, that's pretty annoying from a user experience perspective. especially when some animations feel long and pointless. It reminds me a lot of DVD menus, and how some of them can be stupidly long. Sure, it's nice to look at the first time you open it, but when you have a 30 second menu animation between each navigation option, it can be frustrating pretty quickly if you want to do something as simple as turning on the subtitles.

I mostly do back-end stuff, but I imagine animations started out as something used to hide the fact that there was processing going on in the background. I remember from our UI class, back in old versions of word processors, when you saved a doc, you could tell the computer was doing something, because there would be the loud chugging sound which came from the computer writing the data to disk. So once you hit save, you got audio feedback that your click went through. But once hard drives started becoming faster and quieter, you lost that source of feedback. So people were clicking save, and not knowing whether anything was happening or not. I can't remember if it was a spinning icon, or something saying "Saving..." but it was introduced to indicate that something was happening to the user and that they didn't need to keep hitting the save button.

Now that computers are pretty fast, I think some of those things aren't needed anymore, but if nothing happened on the screen to indicate that the save had happened, the user would still be left wondering if their document had been saved or not. But if I click on a photo, I can see that it's loaded because, well, it's on my screen. I don't need some flashy sliding animation. I don't need the background to be blurred out. I just want to see the photo.

I don't know, I guess I just prefer more spartan designs, when it comes to UI.

Oops, I just went on a huge tangent. Anyway, Adam talked about interruptability, which is where you interrupt current processing to listen to a different input. So in the example he demoed, there's an app that takes photos, and you can swipe away the last photo taken in order to delete it. After swiping, there's an animation showing the photo flying away, but while that animation is happening, you can't take another photo or do anything else. In order to provide a better interface, what you should allow is for the user to do other things while the photo is being deleted.

I did end up meeting some new people at the conference, including someone who works for MrFodder's rival company! One thing I forgot to mention in my last post on the conference, rather than having a Q&A at the end of the talk, the speaker would move to another room, while the next speaker came on. Anyone who wanted to have a more intimate discussion with the speaker would be able to, while it would also allow the conference to fit in more talks during the day. Also, the organiser said that some people are too shy to ask a question in front of a large crowd, so having a discussion in a smaller room also meant people who wouldn't normally have spoken up would have the chance to.

However, one downside to this structure is that it forces you to choose between having the opportunity to speak to the speaker after their talk, or listen to the next talk. Unfortunately, it did mean that some speakers didn't have many people to talk to after their talk, because the speaker after them happened to have an interesting talk. But being in the room, listening to the discussions going on, I found that people were more engaged, and some of the questions that came out were quite fascinating. One of the speakers was from Uber, and while he did say a few times, "I'm not allowed to talk about that without clearing it with legal", I think he felt a bit more comfortable talking, and wasn't censoring himself as much - though it did seem like a lot of people who came to talk to him already knew him, so maybe that's why.

I have to say, the meme-level of some of the speakers was quite high. The international speakers had a bit of a running gag between them to put in a slide that was upside down (because they're down under), there were all these references to reddit in-jokes, gaming in-jokes, once again, I have to say, it felt very welcoming to find other people who are just like me. I mean, just look at today's photo - how many people would be so willing to let you take a photo of their shirt like that?

My Pot Arrived!

Nothing really much to report, other than the fact that the bowl I made while in Kyoto has arrived!

You can see my ugly handwriting on the bottom:

I feel like an artist now. So if a Universal Basic Income is introduced, I won't be the scum of the earth.

In other news, I've created a poll to examine gamers' views on having a gaming partner. Please answer if you have the time. It's 20 questions long, with 6 of those questions being optional. Even if you don't currently have a partner, answer as though you had one, but they didn't play games.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeN1J2JqSvMHqOeOjQwSuqlwt4Oe_B8bTg-RJtK8HksCjTTaw/viewform

I'll close it after a week and post a look at the responses.

Playgrounds Conference Melbourne 2017

Today was the first day of the first Playgrounds conference held in Melbourne. It's a conference dedicated to Swift and Apple developers, of which I am neither, and I don't own an iAnything, so you might be wondering why I was there.

The main reason is that I just wanted to help out. I think we don't have nearly enough tech conferences in Australia, and if I can help contribute in any way to getting one off the ground, I'm all for it. The other reason is that it's probably a good idea to keep an eye out on what else is going on in the industry. I think the founder felt the same (about conferences in Aust). From what he said, he has been to a bunch of conferences, and every time, he felt sad that there wasn't something like that in Australia. Eventually, he decided to get it done himself, and took a huge gamble using his own money to start this conference. So he works full time, and manage to organise this conference (along with help from some other people). That's some pretty commendable passion. I really hope he managed to break even on ticket sales.

I have to say, the talks were a good mix of low-level and medium-level tech talks. The organiser did say that he tried to space them out so that it's not one heavy-hitting talk after another, in order to give the attendees a bit of breathing space, and overall, I think it worked really well.

One of the talks I really enjoyed was Wendy Lu from Pinterest, who talked about their last major refactor. If you squint really hard, you can see their "burn down" chart (which she used to show just how difficult it can be to refactor code - in case you can't see it, rather than the line trending downwards to show progress, it took a 90 degree turn upwards).

There was also a talk on path finding, which was the talk I was most interested in hearing, given my interest in gaming. I thought it was going to be a really complex subject, but the speaker explained the algorithm they use really well, and it was really easy to follow along. I actually really impressed by the path finding algorithm, and never even considered some of the things you'd have to deal with when multiple objects are moving at the same time. I will vow to yell blame myself more often when I take a sub-optimal path in Dota 2.

Matt Gallagher also gave a great talk on achieving high performance with Swift, which I'm pretty amazed that I managed to understand (I think going to Peter Lawrey's talk, and attending the vJUG 24 conf also helped a lot with that). Even though it was Swift based, I think a lot of the same principles carry across to Java.

That's one thing I did notice about the conference. As someone who is pretty much purely a Java developer, I was able to follow along with all of the talks today, and I don't consider myself a hardcore developer (it helped once I figured out that protocols are pretty much interfaces from Java, with some differences). I've seen a few Swift snippets of code on Stack Overflow and reddit, but never used the language myself.

All the talks were recorded and will be available on skilled.io after the conference.

I think the best part about tech conferences is the feeling that you're surrounded by people like you. Other than at PAX, I have never seen such a concentration of geeky T-shirts before. Walking around and listening to people talk was really nice. Obviously there were people who worked together, or knew each other from other conferences, but I noticed a lot of people just jumping into a conversation and being welcomed. I was a bit wary about approaching people who were standing by themselves at first, but I saw other people doing it, so I might give it a shot if I'm ever at another conference. I didn't have any problems doing it while enforcing at PAX, but it feels like people are more open to chatting to you when you're wearing an official volunteer shirt, compared to some random.

Overall, I really enjoyed myself today. Got to help set up, listen to some awesome talks, and meet new people (yep, even someone as introverted as me was able to meet new people).

Automated Meaning

Apologies for the crappy photo, I went to a talk where someone presented a robot they had built, but I forgot to take a photo myself, so I had to take a photo of someone else's photo.

Pharmacist linked me this video where Elon Musk talks about how Universal Basic Income will become necessary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6HPdNBicM8

Essentially, it's something he believes will have to happen due to the RISE OF THE MACHINES. The idea is that certain tasks will become automated, so we won't need people to do them anymore. But what will we do with all those people? How will they earn enough money to get by? He says that the conclusion is to have a basic income for everyone, to cover living expenses, I assume, but then he raises an important point: many people derive meaning from their work, and so how will people who are just being paid to live feel like they have meaning in their lives?

I have often claimed to be a utilitarian, and though I don't really talk about it often, I don't really like the idea of living past the age of 50-ish, as I believe the amount that I can contribute to society will be less than the resource drain that I will impose on society. Something which is easy to say now that 50 is quite a while away, but that's currently how I feel. I would like to point out that I don't feel compelled to go on an elderly killing spree, it's just a belief that I hold about myself!

I feel that way because for me, the idea of being a burden on the people around me makes me feel terrible. On the flip side, if I believe that someone else is a burden, it makes me feel sad. I guess it depends on what level of income the universal basic income is. We have the dole in Australia, and I'm not sure how well people can live off it, but it's probably low enough to be a disincentive for everyone to want to live off it, and hopefully high enough that people are not living a massively diminished life while on it.

So suppose that the UBI was high enough that everyone could live off it. Robots are able to do all the things that we need to do to produce food, energy, services, so nobody ever has to work. What kind of world would that be? Assuming the robots don't rise up and demand equal rights, of course. It sounds kinda nice. You'd have more time to see those people you never have time to see, more time to take up that hobby / sport you never had the chance to do. People would, in an ideal world, be able to do what they enjoy doing, rather than what they are compelled to do for 40 hours a week in order to make ends meet. Sounds wonderful, right?

In essence, I think it would suck, and for exactly the reason Elon Musk states: you would lose all meaning in your life. Leisure would become work. For some people, there will still be a drive to excel, and they may enjoy having the opportunity to hone their craft, but I imagine for a lot of people, the desire to indulge in relaxing will be stronger than any desire to make a real effort doing something.

Everyday leisure would eventually become boring, so let's scrap that world and move on to what I think the next automated world would look like: people are free from having to do menial tasks, so they have more time to work in "innovative" fields. There would be an increase in the number of artists, or inventors. The people who create the TV shows and movies for us to enjoy (unless that can be automated, too), and the people who improve upon existing technologies will be those that are praised. Perhaps they will be paid more than regular non-creator people? Will we still end up with a class system, where you have creators vs non-creators? What will the non-creators do other than consume? I feel like that's a pretty empty life as well. As nice as it is to veg out in front of the TV every now and again, it's not something that I'd like to do for the rest of my life. I could try my hand at creating as well, but how rubbish would you feel if you tried and failed, confirming your status as a useless mouth to feed?

Ultimately, I can't seem to get past that point: why bother living if I'm not contributing anything? In Japan, it felt like there were a lot of "busy-work" jobs, which I didn't think were really required, but perhaps they are only there just to keep people employed? We saw some people at the entrance to parking lot whose only role seemed to be to tell people that there was a car coming out. Except there was an automated voice system which was saying the same thing, and a beeping sound. We don't have that here, and people seem to be able to cope fine. But maybe that's the solution - create enough busy-work that people do feel like their life has meaning.

Perhaps there are people who are required to answer surveys all day to get a general feel for the population's opinion on X. We could live without it, but it may help drive things like future planning decisions. Or, as Autofix linked in an interesting article, maybe you have more people doing the same job, but working less. If it takes 10 people to do a job for 40 hours a week, maybe you could hire 20 people and have them each only work 20 hours. That means you employ twice as many people, giving them all some meaning to their life, and (ideally) the same amount of work gets done.

As much as I dream about winning the lottery and retiring, work does form a large component of my life, and it is something challenging that I'm forced to face, so I feel compelled to work hard, thus giving myself a sense of fulfilment at the end of the day.

I of the Beholder

I guess one thing the Steam sales are good for is getting some games on your Wishlist. Even though I spend a majority of my time playing Dota 2 and Town of Salem, I still have a single player niche that needs filling, for when I don't have anyone to play with. I noticed this game during the Christmas Steam sale, but it didn't pique my interest enough to be worth buying at the time.

It was on sale again recently, and now that I've finished Beautiful Japanese Scenery - Animated Jigsaws, I thought I'd give it a shot.

You play Carl, an apartment manager in a totalitarian city (I can't remember if it has a name). You and your family move into the basement of the apartment that you manage, and must make ends meet while also following directives from the ministry. There will be minor spoilers in this review, but I'll try to keep it to the first 15 minutes of the game, as the game is still fairly new.

As the apartment manager, you aren't expected to do typical things like repair pipes (though on occasion, there will be broken furniture that you need to fix). Instead, you are expected to spy on your neighbours, via installing hidden cameras in their apartments, searching their rooms when they aren't at home, and peeping through their keyholes. Of course, you don't need to do any of these things, however, your family has needs, your wife wants to buy groceries, your son has university expenses, and one of the few ways to make money in this game is to turn in reports on your neighbours, or blackmail them.

Periodically, the ministry will issue directives banning certain things. If you catch your tenants doing any of these things, a red icon will appear, and you can record it in your journal. After that, you will get an option to turn your tenant in to the ministry.

(Ignore the incorrect date in the screenshot, I fixed it later.)

The ministry will review your report, and then send police to verify. What the police do after they arrive is... pretty disheartening.

I had to get a new tenant for apartment 1.

The game forces you to make some tough decisions. Your son requires books to study at university, which cost $2000 (you make about $300 for a quest). I managed to borrow the books from one of the tenants, which made my son happy (and saved me $2k). Then I get a phone call from the ministry telling me to spy on that tenant (who I'll call Boris). I felt pretty terrible, but I did it anyway, because you can see the fate of the last apartment manager in the opening scene of the game, and it's not pretty.

So when I got the order to "make Boris disappear", I felt obligated to try and make it up to Boris in some way, so I warned him that he was in danger, which I thought was the right thing to do. Boris thanked me, but then revealed that unless he was able to falsify a passport, he wouldn't be able to escape, and they'd kill him. At that point, I figured what's a little fraud compared to wrongful murder, so I helped him get his papers in order, which involved bribing someone else, and soon I started down the rabbit hole.

I ended up losing the game in my first playthrough and being fired, and it was fascinating to think about all the decisions I made along the way, and how I got there. I started the game telling myself that I'd have an iron-heart and do what needed to be done (after all, I'm supposedly lawful good). That crumbled pretty quickly -  I mean, why would you ban wearing jeans?!

So despite Pharmacist calling me a fascist, I couldn't do it. I ended up getting fined for breaking the law, didn't have enough money to pay the fine, and got fired from my job. Game over.

Next time, I will have an iron heart!

Apple Pie Ice-Cream

The ice-cream adventure continues. One of this month's experiments is apple pie!

Using the leftover tart crust from my tarte aux pommes, I decided to finally get around to making the apple pie flavour. Using the vegan vanilla ice-cream base from Serious Eats, I made the vanilla base, added about a teaspoon of cinnamon and let it cool in the fridge.

Then I peeled, cored and diced a Royal Gala apple into 1cm cubes, and cooked it in a small saucepan with enough water to cover the apples, a teaspoon of cinnamon, 57g of sugar and a tablespoon of Nuttelex. I let it simmer until the sauce had reduced into a syrup (which is what I should have done for the tart T_T). Remove the apple pieces from the syrup and allow both to cool. I also crushed the tart crust into crumbs. I had about a handful (not a very accurate measurement, sorry).

Prepare the ice-cream in your ice-cream maker according to the directions, mine makes a sound when it's time to add stuff in, it was about 40 minutes into the freezing process. But when it starts to get somewhat hard, around the frozen yoghurt level of consistency. Add in the crumbs and apple pieces. After another 5 minutes, start pouring in the apple syrup. I initially wanted there to be ribbons of apple syrup, and I think I poured it in too early to get that effect, but it ended up being a good thing, as the apple-pie-ish flavour is all the way through the ice-cream.

It's not a very strong flavour, but still delicious. Next time, I'd add more apple and more cinnamon for the syrup, and maybe caramelise the apple before adding the water. I was thinking about it all day at work, and it was the first thing I ate when I got home. I also had a second helping of it. Have I mentioned that apple tarts are one of my favourite foods?

Soufflé Attempt #1!

As promised, I attempted soufflé this weekend. The recipe I used was Gordon Ramsay's hot chocolate soufflé recipe. Mine didn't rise nearly as much as his did, starting from this:

And turning into this. So it rose about 3cms.

I think one of the things I goofed was the ganache. The cream seemed to separate a bit, so I must have heated it up too much. I also don't think my oven was hot enough, despite the fact that I had the thermometer in there, as the first time I took the soufflés out, they were still uncooked inside.

However, despite the lack of rising, the texture was still really nice, and they were very soft and airy on the inside, a bit like a mousse cake. I'm not sure if that's what it meant to be like, as I've never had a soufflé before, but it looked really pretty.

I ended up eating one (even though it's pretty much all egg, with some dairy as well), and I can't say I understand what the fuss is about. Sure, it's definitely something that's difficult to get right, but when it comes to the taste, I'd much rather eat a fudge brownie. I would still like to get it right though, but since most recipes seem to be for 4 of them, it's not really something I can cook for just me and MrFodder. We currently have two of them covered in plastic wrap and sitting in the fridge at the moment. I'm not sure if that's how you're meant to store them, though I don't think soufflés are something that you store anyway. They have very much deflated, and look like some sad cupcakes.

So I don't think I have passed the soufflé boss yet. In a way, I'm a bit glad, as I don't really know where to go from here. Pharmacist says his dad considers béarnaise sauce one of the most difficult things to get right, so maybe that's next, I am determined to conquer this dessert though. People keep asking me what my end-game with all this cooking is, and whether I plan to open a cafe or something like that. I find it a bit of a weird question, as cooking is really just a hobby for me.

Packin' a Box

Helped a friend, M, pack boxes to prepare to move today, someone who I haven't seen in years. It was nice to catch up, and helping someone to move is a strangely good way to reminisce about past times.

I met M at uni, and I'm pretty sure he was the instigator of Late Night Settlers. In fact, he did mention that he still had the computer that stored all our LNS stats, and it was famous for rolling more 10s than any other number (I don't know if it was just a freak of stats, or if there was something broken in the RNG built into the client we used). I think LNS would have to have been one of the highlights of my time at university. M, as the host, would always get his preferred colour, which was red, and that colour always reminds me of him. Which is odd, because at work, I'm always the one who ends up playing red (we discovered last week that my red set is missing two road pieces, so that's probably why nobody else wants to play it).

One of the things I also enjoyed about today was not being the nerdiest person in the room. M and R both played Warhammer 40k, and various flavours of pen and paper roleplaying games. I had actually completely forgotten until now that M and I played Pendragon together, though I still feel bad about my character in that game, as she spent most of her time sleeping (I was the only spellcaster in the game, and in that particular system, you have to rest to recover from the exhaustion caused by casting spells. The more powerful the spell, the longer you have to rest).

It turns out that M is a fan of the Honor Harrington series, and I think I ended up reading at least one book while I was at uni, at his suggestion, but when he handed me a copy of the first book (of which he said he has 4), it didn't ring any bells at all, so I am going to give it a shot. It's fortunate that I just finished the last book I was reading on my kindle. He also tried to give me a CD containing a song from Civilisation IV (Baba Yetu, which is the first song from a video game to have won a Grammy), which I tried to decline, as I don't listen to music all that much. R ended up taking the CD, saying he was going to help me become more cultured. While dropping R off at home, he conveniently left the CD in my car...

Even though I hate moving, and hope not to have to do it again for a very long time, I enjoyed catching up with M and R, and I think the company is what made it enjoyable.

Lost in Translation

I came across an interesting question on the French Stack Exchange site today: What languages are perceived as classy or fancy to French speakers? (the original title was "What do the French do when they need a French word?" which I thought was funnier, but less clear what the meaning of the question was).

The gist of the question is that when English speakers want to sound fancy or posh, they will often throw in some French phrases, one of the examples is choosing to say au contraire rather than on the contrary, but what do French people do when they want to do the same? My initial assumption was that they'd simply do the opposite, and throw in some English phrases, but according to the answers, that doesn't seem to be the case. Some answers proposed German, Italian or Latin, but the general feeling is that they don't seem to do it. One answer proposes a historical reason why this might be the case: in the 17th - 19th centuries, French was often spoken by nobility, even in the Russian, German and Scandanavian courts, so it makes sense that being able to speak French was seen as a sign of power or wealth.

I actually feel pretty embarrassed speaking French to non-French speakers for that reason, because I feel like I sound a bit too tryhard. A few my former co-workers know that I'm learning French, and so when a French developer visited the team from London, they were trying to get me to speak with him. I really wanted to practice with him, but I didn't want to practice in front of everyone else, so I ended up hiding behind my monitors the entire time he was there.

Anyway, that's not the part I found most fascinating. One of the answers goes into some of the difficulties that translators can face when trying to translate things like movies. The example given is a movie where two people are escaping from a POW camp in Germany. One is able to speak French and German, and the other only English. They seem like they're able to make it past the German guard, but when the guard says, "Good luck" in English, and the Englishman replies, "Thanks", there's a bit of an uh-oh moment, because English wasn't commonly spoken in Germany at the time, so he is exposed as a foreigner. To do the reverse, and have the guard say "Bonne chance" and the person reply "merci" wouldn't have nearly the same effect.





SPOILERS FOR THE GAME OF THRONES TV SHOW COMING UP....









TURN BACK NOW.





LAST CHANCE.







EH.... I GUESS BY THIS POINT YOU DON'T CARE.







That reminded me of a post I saw on reddit, asking about how Hodor's name got translated in other languages, since season 6, episode 5 of the TV series revealed that the reason he always says "Hodor" is because Bran warged into him in the past and he could hear Meera saying, "Hold the door" in the future. The answer can be found on the Movies Stack Exchange site, but I'll paste it again here in case you're too lazy to visit it:

• German: "Halt das Tor!" whereas Tor is better translates to gate than to door. This actually works well for "Hodor".
• French: As pradyot commented "Qu'ils n'aillent pas au-dehors!" becomes "Pas au-dehors!" and then "Hodor".
• Russian: "затвори ход" ("close the passage") which transitions to "hodor" in quite a strange and unusual way. Word "ход" here closer to "hatchway" than "door".
• Spanish: "Aguanta el portón" (Not Ocluye el corredor) in Spain the word door "puerta" was replaced with main/front door "portón" in order for an easier transition to Hodor.
• Spanish (Latin America): "Déjalo cerrado". A strange way to say "keep it closed", also needs some imagination to make it work.
• Turkish: "Orada dur!" which means "Stand there!". It is not dubbed but subtitled. It evolves as: "Orada dur! -> Ordadur! -> Hordor! -> Hodor!". Our interpreter guy, esekherif, translated it that way and I think this is the closest that Turkish language can possibly get.
• Japanese: "ホーダー" [Ho-da-] which is a transliteration of "Hodor", coming from the English "Hold the Door". Interestingly in Japanese, door is pronounced ドア (doa) which if transliterated as such would make the name a lot closer to the English pronunciation. In Japanese, "hold the door" would be ドアを持って (doa wo motte) which would have more chance of making his name something like ドアモ (Doamo) in a purely Japanese version.
• Brazilian Portuguese: "Segure a porta" ("Hold the door") -> "a por-" -> "Hodor"
• Italian: First shown in English with italian subtitles (literal), then in Italian with integral translation after one week. Translators decided for a little addition to maintain the original meaning and then make the "Hodor" works: "Blocca la porta, trova un modo!" (Hold the door, find a way!) -> trova un modo -> rov...odo.. -> hodor
• Danish: "Hold døren!" (subtitles, literal translation, no attempt to preserve alliteration).
• Swedish: "Håll dörren!" (subtitles, literal translation, no attempt to preserve alliteration).
• Norwegian: "Hold døra!" (subtitles, literal translation, no attempt to preserve alliteration).
• Finnish: "Pitele ovea!" (subtitles, literal translation, no attempt to preserve alliteration).
• Serbian: "Hodi, dobro drži vrata!" ("Come on, hold the door tightly...")... then "Hodi... dobro..." ("Come on... tightly..."), then just "hodor...". Alliteration was preserved as much as possible, while it's obviously not the best way to say it.
• Czech: “Drž vrata! Honem!” (“Hold the gate! Quick!”), where the evolution to Hodor is quite a stretch…
• Greek:"Κράτα την πόρτα!". It sounds nothing like Hodor, so from one point on they used greek letters to write "Hold The Door" (Χολντ δε ντορ) which eventually became "Χόντορ". This is a common practice in Greek and it's called Greekglish.
• Hungarian: The meaning was changed "Holtodig óvd!" (Defend him till your death!), but the sound works more or less: Holt-óv > Ho-tó > Hodor

MrFodder asked his Chinese co-workers, who said that in the *cough* unofficial *cough* Chinese version they just had a subtitled version, with the English audio, so they got the gist of it from what the characters were saying.

(This post goes into more detail in how the name transformed in certain languages, and how it didn't really transform in others: http://www.livinglanguage.com/blog/2016/05/25/sosten-la-puerta-game-of-thrones-and-challenge-translation/)

I guess it's just one of those things you tend to take for granted unless you tend to watch foreign movies or read foreign books. One that I thought was particularly funny is in the English translation of the Erast Fandorin novel The Winter Queen (originally written in Russian), some characters are mentioned playing "American Roulette", which involves taking a revolver, putting a bullet in a random chamber, spinning it, pointing it at your head and pulling the trigger...

The Russian developer at work who originally put me onto his novels asked me whether there are other differences, so I guess I should start making a list. He speaks fluent English (though with a somewhat thick Russian accent), but he read all the books in Russian.

Bread and Bread

One of my favourite things to do is rip off a chunk of bread from a roll and eat it before digging into the rest of the baguette. I've always loved the taste of bread, even as a kid, I was perfectly content to eat plain slices of bread. I think discovering baguettes is one of the best things that has happened to me in my life. I know they're generally made with butter, but it's one of those things where I don't care. It's worth it.

I think this is my favourite type of bread. Even though I love the softness of Japanese / Asian breads, and the sweetness of steamed buns, it's hard to go past crunchy exterior, and the chewy interior.

So from my careful research, done by watching episodes of Yakitate!! Japan, I have learned that in order to get a crunchy top, you need water in the oven, because having water settle on the dough while it bakes gives it that crunchy crust. I read that professional ovens will spray water during the baking process, but since most people lack an oven with that feature, I've read that you can open the oven during baking and use a spray bottle, or maybe have an oven-safe tray with water in it to create steam that will settle on the crust.

There aren't any baking comps for the foreseeable future (though Mr_Boss suggested Anzac cookies for ANZAC day), so I think my next focus will be baguettes.

Cold Cup of Coffee

I've become one of them. I bought my first coffee machine last Tuesday, it's one of those slow cold drip ones (which I mentioned in my third post for the year: http://annatheannoying.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/caffeine-hit.html). I didn't post about it for so long because it takes a while to make a brew, and I kept being lazy. Well, I've made one at home now, and MrFodder has made one, and I also made one at work for the baking crew. One of the reported benefits of using a slow drip is that the coffee is less bitter, as the water doesn't get hot enough to extract the bitter parts of the coffee, and the slow drip process also means that you get only the good stuff.

The very first one I made, MrFodder had only ground up 30g of coffee, and I added 700ml of water, so the ratio of water to coffee was all wrong (it recommends 60g : 700ml). Plus, I also left it at home while we were in the office, and it was pretty hot that day, so the coffee was above regular room temp, when it's supposed to be made with ice water. Needless to say, when we were finally able to try it, it was pretty horrid. Even though it was incredibly diluted, it was still way too bitter for me. MrFodder made another brew with the right ratio, but I wanted to wait to try with MrBrioche's sweeter beans, as I'm not as much of a fan of the strong coffee taste as MrFodder is. MrFodder did say that the brew made with the right ratio was much better.

I took the drip into the office, and started a brew at around 6:30. We had the tart comp, blah blah blah, and after lunch, the three of us met up again to give it a taste. There really wasn't enough coffee in the bottom by that time, but I'm not really a coffee drinker, so I opted only to have about a teaspoon of coffee. It was much stronger than the first (diluted) batch, but not nearly as bitter. After watering it down with about 1/4 cup of water, I was actually able to drink it. MrBrioche and Michael both seemed perfectly content drinking it straight. I've left it in the fridge at work for the past couple of days, and it has finally finished dripping, so I'll bring it home tomorrow.

Definitely, definitely, definitely keep the water cold though! Much better.

The reason why I bought it is because I had $168 in the broken build jar when I left my old team, and a lot of them were unhappy that the coffee machine at work was taken away. I thought that this could be a replacement. I'd start a brew before I left for the day, and it'd be ready in the morning. The coffee is already cold, so keeping it in the fridge over the weekend isn't really a big deal. The only issue is scaling and restocking the coffee grinds (as I won't be breaking anymore builds in my old team (hopefully)).

I also wanted to see if it was possible for me to enjoy coffee. MrBrioche made me one with his sweeter beans and an Aeropress, and while it was still pretty bitter, it was definitely drinkable, and I enjoyed it more than I've enjoyed any other coffee. And I do like the smell of coffee. I pretty much don't like the idea of being chemically dependant on something.

I'm still not a fan of coffee, and I think because I'm not used to it, I crash pretty hard, so I'm unlikely to have my morning coffee. But the people at work seem to like it. I'm undecided if I should leave it at the office or not, as MrFodder likes it, and all the big coffee drinkers seem to have their own preferred method of making (hot) coffee.

V-Day

Someone on my old team came up with the idea to leave heart-shaped chocolates on everyone's desk for Valentine's Day this year (using the money that was raised by the social committee), and they roped me in to do my new team. So I diligently laid out the chocolates. The first person to come in, who is in the same sub-team as me, came over.

D: Fodder, did you leave something on my desk?
Me: Yep!
D: Was it a Valentine's Day chocolate?
Me: Yep!
Me: Don't worry, I left one on everyone else's desk, too.
D: Thank f@#$.

Great first impression I'm making on my new team, as the only female developer, and the person who "brings people together". I think I do have to be a bit careful though, as I don't want to give the wrong impression. My new boss speaks pretty freely, but I think there are some topics that he considers over the line. We were talking about some wedding TV show that he watches, and he said one of the brides was accusing her husband of having an affair because he was talking to another woman. I joked that every time he spoke to me, we were having an affair.

Normally, when people make jokes with him, he'll play along, but this time, he laughed, but didn't reply. I guess that's one of his lines. He is actually pretty close to all of his direct reports, and he often asks us about our personal lives as well as our work, but he seems to often make it very clear that getting too close is inappropriate. One of the other developers changed his background picture to a photo of D, and while he normally leaves his background picture when we change it to silly things like Donald Trump, he was very quick to remove the photo of D.

It was a nice thought though, and as other people came into the office this morning, they were all pleasantly surprised to find a chocolate on their desk. Sometimes it's the little things that make people happy.

In a nice surprise for me, MrFodder got me a card this year (we don't usually do anything for Valentine's Day).

It's pilfered from The Simpsons, but the thought was there.

(Edit: I didn't meant to sound like I didn't like the card, I just wanted to attribute it to The Simpsons! I do like the card, it's exactly MrFodder's sense of humour.)

Tartes Aux Pommes Bake Off!!!

It finally arrived, the tartes aux pommes (French apple tart) bake-off.

Just so everyone can remember just how crazy I am, I was talking to Michael about whether cooking is an art or a science, and I was on the side of science. So I decided I should try to be scientific about this comp.

So I went and bought all the different types of apples that I could find.

Then I made tarts with all of them.

While people were over, so that they could vote. I didn't tell them which tart had which apple, and they gave feedback.

It was a bit unscientific, in that some of the tarts had been made earlier, and some were freshly made. Plus, the earlier ones had a burnt crust, until tributed spoke up, and the ones after that were better.

I didn't tell them which was which on the day, but here's what they were (each tart above is labelled with a post-it note):

#1 Golden delicious
#2 Pink lady
#3 Fuji
#4 Jazz
#5 Royal gala
#6 Granny smith
#7 Red delicious

None of them stood out as the clear winner, however, most people voted the jazz apple tarts either first or second. Then the next most popular ones were golden delicious and royal gala. I went to buy apples from the market (as you can't seem to get jazz apples from regular supermarkets) only to find that I couldn't see them anywhere. I looked online, and it seems they are currently out of season! So I tried for the golden delicious, as Serious Eats said they're good, and that seems to be out of season, too!

In the end, I settled for royal gala apples, but I felt like it was already off to a bad start.

So you would think I had learned my lesson after the scone incident, and not tried a completely new recipe, but stuck with the recipe I had used 11 times already, but nope. I had faith in Thomas Keller, so I gave the pâte brisée (savoury pastry) recipe a try. And this time, I tried the apple tart recipe from Smitten Kitchen: https://smittenkitchen.com/2007/11/simplest-apple-tart/, which meant I didn't blind bake my tart.

The pastry was super straightforward, and that part went OK. The filling started off fine, but I added far too much water while making the glaze, and it took forever to reduce down to a syrup. When it hit midnight, I decided to call it a night, added some apricot jam, drained some of the water (and the amazing smelling apple flavour that went with it), added a bit more sugar, and managed to reduce it to a fairly watery syrup. Gave my tart a quick brush, and went to bed.

In the morning, I had plans to make coffee with Mr Brioche, and sadly found out that he had forgotten about the comp, so he didn't bring anything. While I was there, Michael arrived, and luckily, he did remember.

Here are our two tarts:

So, you're probably wondering which one is mine, and wtf happened to the one on the left.

Before we start, let me remind you that Michael is the French master chef.

We did the usual experiment, I left my voting box out, the tarts were cut into small pieces (rather than slices, we decided "squares" would be better, as eating two whole slices of apple tart, especially after breakfast, is quite a lot), and the plates were labelled A and B (the left one was A, the right one was B).

Here are the results:

The results were 2 : 3 : 8, with one of the votes for A saying, "What is it? Where is a texture? Is it a pie? Taste really good though :)" The general consensus was that plate A tasted better, and plate B looked better.

I can't believe that mine looked better. I never make anything that looks pretty.

Remember my dumpy Santa Claus cookie?

So to answer what happened to plate A, Michael had some friends over during the weekend, and ended up making the apple tart for them, and bringing the leftovers to work. Despite the fact that I knew it contained milk and egg (he made the Normandy variation), I tried a piece, and it was amazingly delicious. I would have voted for it over mine, if I had been allowed to vote.

It turns out that Michael has quite a bit of experience making tarts, and his feedback for me was that my crust was too thick (and Mr Brioche said it was a bit too salty), and I needed more apple glaze, and maybe to also blind-bake my crust. MrFodder said something similar about the crust (he ate some of the leftover crust I baked for my ice cream, but wasn't able to eat the final product).

As I think this may be the last baking comp on my old floor (since Michael and Mr Brioche seem to have lost interest), I was thinking about it on the way home today. I know it seems like I'm super competitive about it, as I go to crazy lengths to buy things like giant rolling pins, and benriners from Japan, but I honestly don't think that was ever the thing that was spurring me. When I lost the brioche comp, it actually made me happy (I know nobody is going to believe me, but it is the truth). The thing that I craved most out of the baking competitions wasn't the competition itself, but the motivation to push myself.

For most of the things that I do, the person I am competing against is myself. I honestly think I would be perfectly content losing baking competitions every day for the rest of my life, if I knew that I was improving every day. To think that a year ago, I had never made a croissant, couldn't speak a word of French other than basic greetings, please, thanks, and boisson, had never made melon pan, strudel, anpan - the entire world of bread and pastry feels open for exploration. I've learned so much about French cuisine, and fine dining. I've expanded my culinary toolkit. I've made my own ice-cream! To think that all of that was triggered by one simple conversation on the way to the train station. I sometimes wonder if that was one of the sliding doors moments of my life, and if I hadn't asked to join Michael that day, how different my life would be right now.

Elise left a comment on my post about crème caramel:

I didn't know soufflé was supposed to be extremely difficult! My mother made them regularly for dinner growing up and I have made cheese soufflés pretty successfully! Just have to beat the egg whites to the correct point. 

And after today, I feel inspired to give it a shot this weekend!

The Consouls

Yesterday, we went to see The Consouls play. They're a YouTube video game jazz band, and have remixed (is that the term?) various video game songs in a jazzy way. They just released a new album, so that's why they're doing live performances.

Ever since I started playing World of Warcraft, my gaming has pretty much become quite limited. I have 113 games in my Steam library, but have probably only played 40 of them. So the music from some of the more recent games is completely unknown to me. Still, the music was really enjoyable, and I had a great time.

We (MrFodder and I) ended up buying their CDs:

Their latest album, Super Monday Jam, was created based on fan requests. So the way they explained it, whenever someone does things like covers of video games, there will always be comments like, "That song was great. Now can you do (song from game they like)?" So they figured, why not do the next album entirely from song requests. So they decided based on Twitch chat (always a reputable source), and I think they said they streamed part of the creation process. They covered a song from Turtles in Time, which I had completely forgotten about until we heard it last night. My brother and I played that game so much. The keyboardist, Julian Sanchez, even said, "Big Apple, 3AM" like it does in the game. My inner nerd is so happy.

I hadn't even heard of the band before someone from SEE invited us to go and see them with him, so I didn't watch any of those streams, but it seems like a pretty interesting concept, so I will probably check out their videos once I have some time (they're over an hour long)! But while I'm making my apple tart, I'm going to listen to their CDs.

Au revoir!

Wifezilla

Here's the chat as a larger screenshot, if you were too lazy to click the above image:

So the comment that annoyed me was the one saying, "An Engagement Party? And the Fiance to be allowed this?!?!?"

I think I've ranted about this before, but when we were planning the wedding, the wedding planner kept looking to me for confirmation about everything, and insinuating that it was meant to be my day. But it isn't. It's a day that's meant to celebrate the two of us becoming a legally married couple. I really resent the idea that the wife is the controlling one in the relationship.

I feel like a marriage, or any long term relationship, should be about people entering a mutually beneficial relationship. You give up some of your freedom, at the expense of certain benefits, similar to how society as a whole has come together. Sure, I can't eat fried chicken every day, but I have someone who takes care of me. I don't think of it so much as controlling, but more as giving up some of your liberties for the sake of the relationship. And to be honest, fried chicken really is bad for me.

This was going to turn into a post about people wanting their partners to game, but after speaking to Pharmacist and MrFodder about it, I think I might do a poll first, so that post will have to wait.

Artful Thanks

I got some new fridge artwork!

The last fridge artwork we had was from MrFodder's niece, and these two are from the kids of my co-workers. We went to a pokémon store while we were in Japan, and as I knew two of the people on my last project had children that were really into pokémon, I wanted to buy something for them in return. I bought one a box to hold his decks of pokémon cards, and the other one a pokéball shaped mug (as you can see in the image he drew).

I thought it would be a good way to thank their mothers for working with me on the project, as the mothers themselves wouldn't accept a gift, but they would accept one on behalf of their sons.

It was so nice that both of them decided to draw a picture for me in return. They both got the accent on the E wrong, but I didn't say anything... Regardless, I was pretty chuffed to get the pictures. :)

Rising Crème

One of the things I learned to make while in Paris was crème caramel. It wasn't what I had intended to sign up for (I meant to do a croissant class), but it turned out OK. I haven't tried making it since Paris (which was nearly 2 years ago), and this was my first time making it unsupervised, so I was a bit surprised that it turned out so well.

I feel like I've come a long way as a cook, since my humble beginnings during university. Similar to how I came to think Subway cookies were the best cookies ever, someone told me that risotto was incredibly difficult to make, and something only left to the best chefs. It's also one of those things that's almost always made with butter, so it was never something I had ever tasted.

After watching the movie Ratatouille, I felt like maybe Chef Gusteau is right: anyone can cook. Sure, you need the right tools, ingredients and recipes, but with the Internet, and YouTube in particular, I feel like the days where making fancy meals was only for Michelin star chefs is long gone. OK, so I'm not going to start making elaborate chocolate constructions, but things like risotto are not unreachable.

French desserts have always been something held in high regard for me, I can't even remember when I started believing that, or who told me. Though it might have something to do with one of the most famous difficult foods to cook: the soufflé. I've still yet to attempt one, as there hasn't been any occasion to, but it is something I'd like to do before I die.

Though we did manage to find soufflé pancakes while in Tokyo - we even had to wait 20 minutes for them to be served, just like if we ordered a real soufflè! Definitely something I want to try soon.

Crème brûlée is also on that list, but as I'm banned from buying a blow torch, and I don't want to make it any other way, I will have to settle for crème caramel for now. Onwards and upwards, to the next cooking adventure. I'm not entirely sure what it is yet, but I'm sure inspiration will strike soon.

Lawful Good

MrFodder asked me a couple of interesting questions, "Which alignment do you think I am?" followed by, "Which alignment do you think you are?" I said that I thought he was chaotic good, and that I'm lawful good.

(As a side-note, I was thinking about all the people I've been attracted to in the past, and I think I'd consider them all chaotic good. So I think if someone were to ask me what's my "type", I think that'd be my answer.)

Near the hotel we were staying at in Japan, there was a convenience store across a road. The road was lined with fences, so there were only a few places at which you could cross, and they all had traffic lights at them, but they were pedestrian crossings, i.e. it wasn't an intersection of two roads or anything like that. It was a small road, only one lane of cars each way, and no room for streetside parking, so it could easily be crossed in a short amount of time,

At each of these pedestrian crossings, there was a button to press, similar to the ones in Australia, to indicate that there's a pedestrian waiting and that the lights need to change. These didn't seem as common in Japan, and so we got out of the habit of pressing them (I'm guessing the lights just rotate on some set timer?). Also, crossing at places other than the designated crossing locations was something the locals seemed not to do. I didn't watch that carefully, but I noticed usually the only ones crossing the road in weird places was us.

It was late at night, and we needed to go to the convenience store, so I pressed the button to cross. MrFodder asked why, as this was the middle crossing, there were no cars coming, and both the crossing behind us and the crossing ahead of us were both red lights for cars, so they weren't going to enter.

I responded that it was the lawful good thing to do, and he replied that by following the law trying to be good, I was actually being bad because soon the other lights would turn green, and the cars would start coming through, only to be held up at another set of lights. We could have easily just crossed the road in the time we spent waiting for the pedestrian light to turn green, by which time the other cars would be here and have to stop and wait.

Sure enough, we ended up waiting a couple of minutes for the light to turn green, and a car had just made it to the crossing, so it had to stop. I felt bad about that, as if we had crossed at a red light, that car and the ones following it would have been able to cruise through the crossing, and it would have been more efficient for everyone overall.

So here's my reasoning: I hate it when other cars don't use their indicators while turning / changing lanes. But sometimes, when I'm driving late at night and I don't see any other cars, I think to myself, is it even worth it to turn my indicator on since there's nobody around to see? And in the end, I always side with yes, as there might be someone around who I can't see, and they would benefit from seeing the indicator - like a pedestrian deciding whether to cross the road or wait for me to go by. So I kinda feel like the same thing applies with traffic lights. Maybe there's a car that's just about to zoom through, and they don't notice us about to cross. And at the same time, we don't notice them either. Then BAM! CRASH! KABLANG! EVERYBODY IS DEAD.

Still, I like to think that we're generally observant, and it's super unlikely that something like that would happen. So the better thing to do would have been not to press the button and just cross.

MrFodder said he thinks I'm neutral good, and if I'm willing to reconsider something like that so easily, maybe he's right.

Dawn of the First Day - 14 Weeks Remain

During the trip, we had the (mis)fortune of having a scale in the changing rooms at the ryokan where we stayed. I weighed in at 59.6kgs. It was pretty shocking for me, actually. Ever since I managed to get under 60kg, I felt like I didn't want to go back.

I stopped going to the gym, but I did start taking barre classes and gymnastics. I guess without the cardio aspect of it, I wasn't able to maintain the same weight while eating as much as I do.

When I first reached my fitness goal while still at the gym, the personal trainer suggested I set a new goal of trying to run in a marathon. I laughed at him, because I've never been a runner. I run to get exercise, but it's not something I particularly enjoy like I enjoy playing games, or cooking. But there's someone I work with who took up running to lose a bit of weight after having a kid, and she now runs in marathons. So if she can take care of two kids, work, and train for marathons, what's my excuse?

Enter the Couch to 10K app - because you should go hard or go home, right? It's pretty much the Couch to 5K app, but extended for 6 extra weeks to get to 10K. The idea is that you run for three 30 minute sessions a week, for 8 weeks to get to 5k and 14 weeks to get to 10k. Although I looked at some of the later runs, as I couldn't work out how you could go from a couch potato to being able to run 5kms in 30 minutes (including warm up and cool down) and it seems some of the later runs are much longer (~50 mins).

The app works by alternating periods of walking and running, with the app telling you when to change. As you progress, the total time spent running increases. I like this better than just running on my own, as I find that the hardest part for me is pushing myself. I'll have some days where I'll push myself really hard as I feel motivated, and other days where I start making excuses like I've had a long week at work, so I need to go easy.

My first run was yesterday, and it wasn't too difficult. My only issue is that my current earphones aren't very good, and I ended up hearing a lot of ambient noise. That made it quite difficult to hear some of the prompts to change speed. I actually ended up missing a prompt to start walking, and I was beginning to get quite tired, wondering when it was time to change when I checked my phone to see that there was only 30s left in this walking interval (that is 90s long). I couldn't find an option to increase the volume of the voice but not the background music.

On the plus side, it was nice to listen to all the CDs I just bought.  Disney songs make such good running music for me.

Fodder vs The_Boss - Scones, Part 2

After tossing and turning last night, I came to the conclusion that I needed to bake another batch of scones, because I couldn't let my new boss crush me so badly in this competition. So I checked the opening time of the nearest supermarket, and set my alarm.

I had invited the other developers and some of the ex-developers as the judging panel - and Emma, of course. It was the usual blind taste-test, and people voted for A or B in both categories: naked and not-naked.

Here are the final votes:

I won the not-naked category easily (mostly because strawberry jam was preferred over plum jam), but the naked category was quite close. I think I only just barely won because my scones were freshly baked and The_Boss made his last night.

But I'm glad I got up early to make batch 2, as the team appreciated it.

I thought it was funny the things people were saying to work out who made which batch.

"The ones with whipped cream must be Fodder's, because there's no way The_Boss could be bothered whipping cream."

Oh! Another comment that I thought was interesting was about the cream. So mine had whipped cream, and his did not, so I had chucked the container for my cream out, since it was all in the bowl. The_Boss had his sitting there (and it was a pretty fancy cream). So people were commenting on how the fat content of the fancy cream would make it taste so much better, even though it was a bit runny still. However, we both bought the same cream. I guess technically, whipped cream has air in it, so the over all fat content for the same volume of cream would be less, but a lot of people were commenting on the difference of flavour. Maybe whipping the cream was a mistake? N said the ultimate combination would have been my jam with The_Boss' cream.

There's already talk about the next comp, and K wants to join, too! :D

Fodder vs The_Boss - Scones

Grad Paul: So how is your new team?
Me: The_Boss has challenged me to a scone bake-off on the 6th of Feb!
Grad Paul: I like how you base it on bake-offs. "Is there a bake-off in the future? Yes, then all is good."

That pretty much sums up how much I like my new team. I think I get along with everyone on the team, or at least I'm still too new for anyone to have complained about me yet. It might have been a bit of a bad impression for me to have started in a new team, gone away for the Christmas break, returned, then left for Japan for 2 weeks, but the Japan trip was booked long before I knew I'd be changing teams, so I hope they understand.

Today was my attempt at baking scones. I followed the scone recipe in Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery book, which I haven't tried before. I know, I know, that's completely unlike me, normally I put in weeks of preparation and research before the bake-off. Well, I did do some research. I researched enough to find out that Thomas Keller is a world-renowned chef, and his scone recipe was highly recommended. Then I got distracted by Dota 2 and Town of Salem... The other bit of research I did was that I found out about this thing called clotted cream, or Devonshire cream, which Emma says is heavenly. She's from the UK, and I could listen to her say Devonshire all day long, so I think that's enough to make her an expert for me.

So today was an attempt at scones and clotted cream. And both seem to have failed. Starting with the cream, I think I misunderstood the recipe I found. I thought you were meant to heat the cream over low heat, and every hour, skim off the top. However, it seems that if you heat the cream for too long, the butterfat starts to separate, and you get this ugly goo thing (I should have taken a photo). So I think what the recipe meant was that you heat it for 60 minutes, then skim, and as it cools, more delicious cream floats to the top, which you continue to skim.

There wasn't enough time to make another batch of cream, so I'm going to whip some cream in the office tomorrow morning.

I'm not sure if scones in the US are different to scones in the UK, but the scones in this book seemed a lot thinner than the ones I am used to. The recipe said that they do rise a bit, but I found it didn't rise that much. So I have some scones that are thin and taste like shortbread. And they are pretty crumbly.

On the plus side, the competition has two parts - naked scones, and scones with dressings. I'm hoping the shortbread flavour will help win the naked-scone part, and make up for the ugly scones.

I have been thinking about cutting the tops off half the scones, and the bottoms off the other half, to make it look like I've pre-cut the scones in half, so even though my scones look like they're half the size of regular scones, I can make twice as many and make it look like they were pre-cut, but I feel a bit like that is cheating.