Pavel's Blog

Curried Chicken Salad

2009-08-22T23:06:11Z

While on our recent vacation down to San Francisco and Ashland, my stomach got to rumbling every time I saw curried chicken salad at a grocery store. It was, indeed, yummy, so I decided to try making some of my own. The variety across all of the zillions of recipes I found on the web convinced me to just take my own stab at it, with the intention of playing around with the recipe each time, eventually (and asymptotically?) homing in on Pavel's Favorite Curried Chicken Salad.

I just finished making the first batch, and while I'm waiting 24 hours for the flavors to combine and settle before judging its success, I thought I'd revive this blog with the first-iteration recipe:

3 lb. boneless, skinless chicken breast, cooked and diced
1 cup plain Greek yogurt
1/4 cup deli mustard
3 stalks celery, finely chopped
1/4 cup slivered almonds, chopped a bit finer
1.5 oz. raisins (i.e., one mini-box)
2 Tbsp. crushed garlic
3 tsp. curry powder
1/2 tsp. cumin
1/2 tsp. ginger

Combine the yogurt, mustard, garlic, and spices in a small bowl, mixing them together well. Put the chicken in a large bowl with plenty of room for further mixing, and then add the yogurt mixture and stir well. Add the celery, raisins, and almonds, and mix everything together thoroughly. Store in the fridge for several hours (or overnight) before serving. Yields about 55 oz., or 9 servings of about 6 oz. each. Nutrition per serving: 256 calories, 7.6g fat, 6.8g carbs, 0.5g fiber, 3.9g sugars, 40.4g protein.

Twisty Neighborhood

2007-10-21T22:31:56Z

While Kathleen and I were taking our daily one-mile walk 'round the "block" just now, a car pulled up alongside us. The driver leaned out and asked, a little plaintively, "How do we get to the main street and get out of here?"

The streets around our neighborhood are a bit maze-like...

Entrepreneurship

2007-09-04T05:09:05Z

A lot of people, when they learn that I co-founded a company, and that the company was eventually acquired by Microsoft, tell me that I must be a real entrepreneur. The whole start-up thing certainly was an undertaking, to refer to the original French meaning of the word, but since I wasn't the CEO of the company, or even directly involved in a sales or marketing position, it somehow just didn't feel all that entrepreneurial to me at the time.

Now, however, I do feel like I'm engaging in a bit of real entrepreneurship: I've decided to start trying to sell some of my mechanical puzzles online. As of a few weeks ago, I have officially registered the trade name "Pavel's Puzzles" with the state of Washington, paid for a business license, and set up a new blog that's also my storefront.

I'm using the free PayPal-supplied shopping cart service, which makes it really easy to put "Add to Cart" and "View Cart" buttons on the website and, of course, to take credit-card payments from buyers. I'm even dipping my toe into the world of online advertising, using the Project Wonderful ad-placement auctioning system. As I type this, I have (very simple) ads running right now on two web-comic sites: Girl Genius (a favorite of mine with lots of hits) and Help Desk (a cost-effective mid-volume site I found via Project Wonderful's search tool). I've had the ads up for a day or two now, and I'm getting a steady trickle of click-throughs at an ad cost of about a penny per click. (Mind you, I haven't had any of those click-throughs convert to an actual sale yet, but I've got a long list of rationalizations about that...)

Of course, this isn't in any danger of replacing my day job; it's just a fun way to explore the world of DIY entrepreneurship in the context of my most active hobby. Still, there is a certain thrill to the whole thing right now.

Anyway, head on over and check out my store, and help support yet another new small business!

Don't Mess with Our Chocolate!

2007-04-20T18:01:02Z

There's an insane proposal to the FDA to allow manufacturers to use hydrogenated vegetable oils instead of cocoa butter and various "milk substitutes" instead of milk and still call the resulting concoction "chocolate". The deadline for feedback to the FDA is April 25th, less than a week from now. Educate yourself at dontmesswithourchocolate.guittard.com and then send your comments to the FDA to keep this terrible idea from being accepted.

Virtual Catharsis

2006-11-29T21:02:47Z

This was vastly more satisfying than I expected.

No, really.

A reprise and an inspiration

2006-06-25T21:24:09Z

Returning to the subject of my very first blog enty, Kathleen and I went back to the Harvard Exit yesterday, to see the new crossword-puzzler documentary Word Play with our friends Natasha and Norman. It was a fine and beautiful day, if a bit on the warm side, and all was going fine driving there until we hit the police roadblock at 10th Ave. and E. Highland Dr. Apparently, we were wrong: the Raise Your Voice March, part of Pride weekend, was not going to be limited to the southern end of Broadway. It took us a while, but we finally backtracked enough to find a way down to the near vicinity of the theater, only to discover that (duh) it was all parked up solid. It turns out, though, that you can pretty easily find a parking spot on the street that only costs $35, paid to the municipal court system...

Anyway, the Harvard Exit remains a very comfortable place to see a movie, and the cafe across the street, Joe Bar, has changed their ways and now sells both sweet and savory crepes in the evenings. On the negative side, though, Joe Bar no longer appears to offer their "PB & J" crepe (formerly served with a glass of milk), so I never got to try out that delicacy.

The movie centers around Will Shortz, the crossword-puzzle editor at the New York Times, and various contenders in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. It's a fun, quirky look at some really fun, quirky people and their passion for puzzles. The latter third of the movie gives good feel for the action and the ambience at the championships and the twists and turns of final rounds are surprisingly exciting.

Inspired by the movie, I suppose, I didn't skip over the Sunday Times crossword puzzle in the paper this morning. I'd never tried any of the NYT puzzles before, let alone the hardest one of the week, but somehow I couldn't resist attempting it. At first, as I slowly worked my way down the Across clues, looking for any that I could fill in (in pencil, I admit: I'm not totally rash), I began to despair: I could only fill in maybe half a dozen answers, and I wasn't particularly sure of some of those. I got a couple Down answers right off, though, and that opened up the upper-left corner, and that led to the answer to the first of the "theme" clues, and finally I was making real progress. I'm pleased to say I finished the puzzle in pretty good form, with only a few answers that I didn't understand (who knew there was a "Brooklyn-born rapper" named NES?), after about 45 minutes of work. Along the way, there were several wonderful groaners ("German crowd?" was DREI), some very nice bits of misdirection ("Tower, often" was REPO MAN), and of course a fun theme (recontextualized advice from "Dear Old Dad").

Boy, standard crosswords have certainly changed while I've been off focusing on cryptics! I may just have to check out this Sunday puzzle next week, too.

Keeping its head while your child is losing theirs

2006-04-12T20:56:04Z

Oh. My. God.

Topic 357 in the IRS's collection of tax writings is entitled "Tax Information for Parents of Kidnapped Children".

No, really, it is.

Don't let your own family kidnap your kid: if they do, you can't claim him or her as a dependent any more. It's important to keep your mind on the big picture in such a stressful situation. Certainly the IRS is.

(From a nice piece by Benjamin R. Cohen in The Morning News, whose Tournament of Books ends tomorrow.)

The "March Madness" of Modern Literature

2006-03-21T23:31:39Z

Generally speaking, I don't pay much attention to the major book awards. The Pulitzers and its brethren (with the possible exception of the Newbury medal) just don't seem any more relevant to me than who Oprah's picked for this month's club.

All that changed this afternoon when I came across a new exception to this rule and realized that part of what made those awards boring was that we only get to see the results, not the process that led to those decisions. The process is the fun part, of course, and the online magazine The Morning News understands that. For their Tournament of Books, just beginning its second incarnation, the process is entirely transparent, completely out in the open, and promising to be a lot of fun.

They, with some help from their readers, have chosen 16 widely hyped books from 2005 and laid them out in classic atheltic tournament brackets for a cascading set of one-on-one, mano a mano, no-holds-barred faceoffs with each contest's winner advancing into the next round. Each weekday, starting today, the results of one pairing are announced via a short essay by that competition's pre-chosen judge. There's even a kind of play-by-play commentary by the Tournament's chairman, author and TMN contributing writer Kevin Guilfoile.

Pavel sez, "Check it out!" As the website proudly proclaims, "the Tournament of Books brings the bloodlust so lacking in the publishing world's awards." Who among us couldn't get into a little literary bloodshed?

How low can you go?

2006-03-17T19:13:22Z

I would never have guessed that a web site could be as truly, deeply, unintentionally-but-awesomely bad as http://www.globalaigs.org.

No, really. Trust me on this one. You have to experience it to believe it, that's how incredible it is.

(You'll need both Flash and a sound card to ... appreciate ... the site. Thanks to David Nichols for the pointer to this compendium of bad sites, which naturally had to include that one.)

You were warned.

Finally, the recognition I deserve...

2006-03-15T07:20:32Z

Back in September, when I upgraded the blog to the new version of Movable Type, I noticed that they'd added support for moderating TrackBacks, so I decided to try enabling them. It would be fun, I thought, to see all the interesting sites where other people were linking back to my blog.

Heh.

And thus was I introduced to the concept of TrackBack spam. I was, by then, already pretty familiar with comment spam; indeed, the support in the new version of Movable Type for semi-automatically dealing with junk comments was a major reason why I made the upgrade. That's worked out reasonably well, actually, and the same machinery also manages junk TrackBacks, so it's really just a question of going into the admin interface every once in a while to clear out all of the junk it's automatically quarantined for me.

Last night, after posting about the funny cats video, I decided to do some junk cleanup. It had been a little while since the previous scrub, so there were about 150 junk comments stacked up and about 250 junk TrackBacks. As usual, I skimmed through the two lists fairly carefully, making sure that everything there was really junk. But last night, for the very first time since I enabled TrackBacks, there was actually a real one buried in the middle of the junk! Somebody somewhere had actually both linked to an entry on my blog and used blogging software that bothered to tell me about it via the TrackBack mechanism.

Lia, from cheesedip.com, had somehow come across my Mount Tee posting, been ... impressed? ..., and linked to me. Here's the best part, though: she didn't just say, "Wow, that dude has one heck of a lot of T-shirts!" No, indeed! Lia, obviously being a person of penetrating discernment, recognized my true nature. She has named me, truly, "the Imelda of T-shirts"!

What a great title! Now I just need to get that printed on a shirt...

Cats do the darnedest ...

2006-03-14T07:23:09Z

This video arrived as an email attachment today and I thought it amusing enough to be worth passing along in a less server-resource-intensive manner. Judging from the laugh track, this is captured from some "funniest home videos" kind of television show.

The first segment will be familiar to anyone who's been visiting long enough to remember the "why sumo is better than karate" posting, but the rest of it was new to me. I think my favorite is the second-to-last segment; I can so imagine our own cats doing that.

If you've got some cute, or funny, or otherwise good video of cats, feel free to send it along. Obviously, I'm a glutton for this kind of thing, so I might as well admit it and get on with just enjoying it.

Mount Tee Rises Again!

2006-02-20T07:15:29Z

It was only late last April that I previously laundered all of my actively worn T-shirts, but like clockwork, every nine months or so, the necessity comes back around on the guitar. So it was that, for the past week, I've been running over a dozen loads through the machines and, more tediously, folding, folding, folding. I'm pretty pleased, though: after starting the laundry loads Sunday night, I managed to finish up all of the folding on Friday night, while watching the DVDs of Brideshead Revisited that we checked out of the local library. Nothing like a long, slow-moving English drama to move the process along nicely.

The count this time was 259, roughly evenly split between the whites/greys/neutrals (122) and the other colors, including black (137). Well, that was the count before Kathleen made me sit down and go through all of the piles to make sure that they were all shirts I still enjoyed wearing. She was right, as usual: we ended up finding 13 shirts (about 5%) that were either ugly, boring, inexplicable, or some combination of the three. (Why, for example, did I have a "train with the insane" shirt from 24-hour Nautilus, even though I've never been there?)

So, really, I now have "only" 246 shirts in active rotation, so I guess I'll be right back where I started last Sunday, loading shirts into the washing machine, in only about eight months from today. Sigh. Just in time for Halloween, I guess...

Multi-Touch Interaction Video

2006-02-09T22:12:20Z

Imagine a drafting-table-sized computer monitor that is touch-sensitive and allows more than one finger to be used at a time (kind of like having more than one mouse, but easy to use because they're your fingers). Imagine all of the cool, intuitive user-interaction styles you could support.

Now stop imagining it and see the future now. This video, copied from the Multi-Touch Interaction Research website at NYU (which is currently being hammered with traffic, making it hard to get the video from there directly) shows a wide variety of very slick demos using such an interaction surface. I think my favorite is the virtual Lava Lamp that lets you play around with the floating lava blobs...

(Thanks to the AppleGeeks blog for pointing this out.)

Alright already: Veronica Mars, too!

2006-02-04T22:23:24Z

Melissa and Lynn objected to my not including Veronica Mars in my recent list of TV shows I love. I was trying to narrow my lists to things that people might find surprising or intriguing; that's why I didn't include any of the TV shows we're actually watching right now. That list would include Veronica Mars, Alias, Lost, West Wing, Commander in Chief, Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, and 24. That's the things we watch together. By myself, I also watch what Kathleen calls "guy stuff" (Mythbusters, New Yankee Workshop, This Old House, and The Woodwright's Shop) along with the occasional episode of Powerpuff Girls that I haven't already seen. Thank god for TiVo.

So, see? I am cool enough to know to watch Veronica Mars. Sheesh... :-)

Four Things

2006-02-03T20:27:26Z

Since I run my blog from a private site, as opposed to a big aggregator like Live Journal, and since I don't have that many regular readers (not least because I don't post particularly regularly), it's not surprising that I've never been "tagged" before. Tagging is kind of the blogging equivalent of a chain letter or other pyramid scheme: somebody posts on an unusual topic, or addresses some set of (typically inocuous) personal questions and then names a set of other bloggers who are thereby "tagged" to do the same. Unlike chain letters, tagging doesn't appear to involve dire consequences for those who refuse the call, and unlike pyramid schemes, nobody's getting rich at the top of the pile.

Anyhow, to my knowledge, I've never been tagged before, so it was kind of fun to have Lilly tag me on a recent posting. Far be it from me to refuse my first-ever tag, so here are my lists of four:

Four jobs I've had:
1. Playing a male Elizabethan actor who only gets to play female roles from Shakespeare (at the Southern California Rennaissance Faire)
2. Organizing the international newspaper collection at a major university library
3. Teaching mathematical logic and reasoning at a summer school for gifted 12- to 15-year-olds
4. Co-founding an Internet company that was later sold to Microsoft

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Shakespeare in Love
2. The Matrix (but only the first one)
3. Harold and Maude
4. 'Breaker' Morant

Four places I've lived:
1. Bloomington, Indiana
2. McLean, Virginia
3. Berkeley, California
4. Yellow Springs, Ohio

Four TV shows I love:
1. Strange Luck (sadly cut short)
2. Babylon 5 (not counting the fifth season)
3. Firefly (tragically cut short or not?)
4. Sports Night (Lilly was right, Sorkin is/was the god of dialog)

Four places I've vacationed:
1. Lake Champlain, Vermont
2. České Budějovice, Czechoslavakia (so-called at the time)
3. Tolsta Chaolais, Isle of Lewis, Scotland
4. Thoraígh Island, Donegal, Ireland

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. "Stuff on rice", especially Saag Lamb
2. Northern Gold Cashews & Raisins Granola, with milk
3. San Jose scramble, at Hobee's
4. Chocolate-covered dried cherries, from Peet's

Four sites I visit daily:
I subscribe to over 40 RSS feeds inside my mail client, mostly so I don't need to visit sites daily, but these survive:
1. AlterSlash (much more usable feed from SlashDot)
2. OED
3. Wikipedia
4. Windows Live (for my "only skimming" RSS feeds)

Four places I'd rather be right now:
1. In my garage woodshop
2. At home, watching a movie with Kathleen, with a cat on each of our laps
3. In Second Life
4. At a table in the coffeeshop upstairs from Bloomsbury Books, in Ashland, Oregon

Four bloggers I'm tagging:
1. Hans (because he didn't know what I meant by "tagging" when I mentioned it at lunch)
2. Derrick (because his "favorite dish" answers should make great reading)
3. Lynn (because she's one of the few other bloggers I know who reads my blog)
4. Melissa (to force her into finally starting a blog!)