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A member of a motorcycle email list forwarded a link today and it got me thinking.

I love driving and motorcycling so I have really mixed feeling when people take after SUV owners. I sometimes think it is the thin end of the wedge and any day some of these people will turn their focus on my vehicles, both of which get good mileage but neither are "green" (though I can make a good argument that my moto is, but that is a topic for another entry). That said, the suburban and, worse, urban SUV represent a lot of things I find objectionable about our culture. I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t drive a truck unless you need it and if you need it you should get the commercial registration and plates, pay the taxes, keep out of the left lane and stay off the parkways. It’s a fully enclosed truck. If you needed a station wagon or pickup you should have gotten one. We should make allowances for the people who live more than, arbitrarily, 20 miles from a large urban center or make their living by farming or trades like contracting. If you live in Northern New Jersey and work a desk in Manhattan and still want it to take the kids to the store in a 4500lb. vehicle, fine… just pay up and suffer the incoveniences. We shouldn’t encourage you or the manufacturers.

So I get a chuckle out of the three-year-old "I’m changing the climate" bumper stickers sold at this site and here, in all its bad taste, is the link to a site dedicated to random people expressing their opinion on the Hummer H2…FUH2.

Each year Maria and I bake cookies and give them as gifts to neighbors, coworkers and the like. People in my office ask me when I’ll again bring cookies. Cookies aren’t hard to make and they’re genuinely appreciated. They’re more personal and something unusual when "homemade" ends up meaning boxed mixes of pre-measured and combined dry ingredients or plastic tubes of slice-and-bake. Folks are busy and don’t want to spend their time doing this but we enjoy it.

Maria does all the planning (naturally) and we share the work. I’m better at following the directions and some kitchen techniques- rolling pastry dough, for instance- and she’s much more patient and persistent and thinks months in advance about things like what we’re going to put the cookies into (if left to me, it would probably end up being ziploc bags). The thing about the cookies is that both of us tend to forget that making one batch of an involved recipe is a small challenge, easily accomplished. It’s turning out two or three batches of them when making two or three batches of four other recipes that it gets difficult. It’s not uncommon that we turn out eight hundred cookies in a single day so simple is obviously good.

This year we kept it simple and chose three known, tested recipes (pfeffernuesse, rugelach- three varieties of filling- and an orange almond sugar cookie), a new variation (chocolate sugar cookie rolled in crushed pistachios, same initial dough as the orange almond) and one new one (pecan caramel shortbread bars). We worked from The Joy of Cooking and the Better Homes cookie magazine. Even so, there is a lot of tasting and testing before putting together the gift boxes and by the end of it all neither of us wants sweets.

We have a galley kitchen and scaling up the cooking when the rest of the kitchen doesn’t is hard. We have a counter-top mixer and a second mixing bowl which speeds the assembly. Having a double oven would easily cut the time by half or more. Having more counter space would trim it a little further. We’ve learned a lot over the years of cooking together. This year’s lesson: caramel making doesn’t scale well. We ruined a triple batch and created a half-crystallized, half-sticky mess in our favorite enameled cast iron pot. Damn, that’s a pain to clean. I chipped and pried most of it away and boiled the rest off in batches. It probably was uneven heating and we succeeded with three smaller attempts. If we had a stove that put out a higher, more even heat it probably would have worked.

I took pictures of all this and I’ll have to get them uploaded. Probably after the holidays.

I haven’t blogged in a while. This explains why.

In the early 1980’s there was a game named Sundog where you took the role of a trader working the galactic spaceways, hopping from planet to planet, learning your way around the cities and the galaxy, looking to make a buck anyway you could and trying not to get yourself killed. The idea had been done a few times before and a number of times since but Sundog was unique in the freedom of action and the complexity laid out for the player. It was a great and captivating game and I spent many late night hours in front of my Apple ][e playing it.

Some of those ideas- in a much slicker package- are present in Ambrosia Software’s game Escape Velocity: Nova which they released in early-2002 and recently updated. I stumbled across it while looking for their superb asteriods game from 1993, Maelstrom, tried it and popped for the shareware registration within a week.

The genre is familiar. Again you take the helm of a spacecraft and again there are trade imbalances to exploit and missions to complete and a catalog of aliens and ships to understand but it’s not a dull rehash. The graphics are gorgeous and the sound effects are good without being annoying. It lacks the on-planet depth and expansive cities but introduces long and fairly complex mission threads and shorter subplots and it has a realistic handling of galactic affilliation and citizenship which has a direct effect on play- wanna be a freebooter pirate? Expect to get shot… by everyone. Snuggled up to the Federation? Don’t expect the Aurorans or Polariis to treat you nicely. The controls are easier- though I might be better at this after nearly twenty years- and the galaxy map is the most expansive since VGA Planets (one of my all time favorite games). Also interesting is the plugin system that allows you to alter and extend the game which I expect I’ll do when I complete a few of the original missions.

So if you wonder why I’m suddenly not replying to email, why my eyes are dark and bloodshot or why I’m not updating the blog, it’s because I’ve been playing the one of the best space-themed action/strategy games ever written.

What’s been going on…

• We had "Comp" day last week and received our bonus numbers. Firm had a good year and so did we. I compare it to finding a $50 bill on the ground… I don’t plan my life around it but it’s nice when it happens. Helps to validate the effort all year.
• Much in the way of holday parties, drinks and dining with my coworkers. I skipped the firm office party- I know why they schedule them on mid-week nights and that I should go, but getting some sleep seemed like a better idea. Maybe next year. I enjoy more the little gatherings.
• Got reamed for supposedly screwing up an internal-but-widely seen web-based project. Turns out it’s the corporate filtering proxy and some very subtle timing/rendering issues with Javascript on some browsers. The acknowlegement that my code was correct when not filtered was not nearly as loud as the earlier chastising. Suckage.
• Digesting an internal course on our global namespace and change management from its implementer. Excellent.
• Production change blackout starts this week. Good time to clean up and study some new APIs we’re releasing. I will eventually be teaching the use of these so it’s doubly important.

These turned up on the Risks digest mailing list today. L. Peter Deutsch collected some and wrote others circa 1991. Everyone working on distributed systems should commit them memory…

1. The network is reliable
2. Latency is zero
3. Bandwidth is infinite
4. The network is secure
5. Topology doesn’t change
6. There is one administrator
7. Transport cost is zero
8. The network is homogeneous