Seattle and the SAF06

I'm in Seattle now, listening to an ESB presentation at Microsoft with snow outside and the feel of winter in the air. It's absolutely gorgeous and a nice change from the spring winds of Wellington. But what a journey to get here!

My arrival into Seattle coincided with a "interesting meterological phenonomen" according the pilot: lightening and snow at the same time. Great but as a result we had to stop by Portland for an hour before heading back to land at 10pm in the tailend of the snow storm. Now the roads aren't geared up for snow and ice here so the city was shut down for that night. I didn't get to the hotel till almost 6am in the morning. It was long wait at the airport for a shuttle bus. Fortunately the people sitting near me were wonderful and the seat was heated with blankets. The joys of travel...

Now I'm here because of an invitation from Microsoft to attend the Strategic Architects Forum 06 and my employer has paid my way here (note: very thankful). The conference has 250 attendees and another 100 Microsoft staff. I'm in the financial sector and there are people here from across the world, especially europe it seems to me. The size of their organisations is rather greater than my own but we all share similar problems.

I'm struck by a few points in particular.

• The difficulty to make change in a bank
  
• The lack of standards outside of payment instructions
• The cost of testing
• The importance of identifying the commercial value.
  

I'll have to see how the conference progresses to see if there are any significant lessons I can take away.

Movember Sponsorship

It's an off chance - hardly anyone views these posts.... but if anyone does, and it's still the month of November in the year 2006 then please feel free to sponsor me for my November Mo!

You can find all the details here: http://www.movember.com.au/nz/home/

It's open to Mo Bro's and Mo Sista's (I'm a Mo Bro of course...). And the idea is we try and get a bit of sponship for ourselves and our teams. To sponsor you just need a creditcard, the link to the sponsor page - http://www.movember.com/nz/sponsor/, and my rego: 52272.

I promise to post a picture tomorrow, all the team have had pictures taken by the team captain.

Also, keep your eye out for the mo gala festivals - I'll be missing Wellington's (I'll be in Seattle visiting Microsoft and the Strategic Architects Forum 06 thanks to current employer!)

On an off chance...

Banh Xeo

I've had these fantastic filled rice pancakes at restaurants and my wife has enjoyed them in Vietnam - but I've never had success making them.

Whenever I follow the recipes on the net - invariably made with rice flour, coconut milk, tumeric and a touch of salt and sugar - I get a dismal mess. Now, I thought I was alone in this failing, but in fact I'm not. There is a brilliant article on this very sticky problem at Viet World Kitchen (http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/bookshelf/articles/banhxeolat.htm) authored by Andrea Q. Nguyen writing for the Los Angeles Times.

Now Andrea appears to have nutted out the core problem: by adding cooked rice and mung beans to the (uncooked) rice flour batter the extra starch should crisp up the pancake.

Andrea's research in her kitchen showed a couple of tablespoons of cooked rice and a tablespoon of steamed mung beans would do the trick for a rice pancake batter normally made with 1 cup of long grain rice. Just in case the original article is ever lost the essential part of the recipe was:

1 cup long-grain or jasmine rice
2 tablespoons cooked rice, firmly packed
1 tablespoon steamed, ground mung beans, firmly packed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons water
1 green onion, sliced into thin rings ( 1/4 cup)

1. Place the raw rice in a bowl and add enough water to cover by 1 inch. Let soak for 3 to 4 hours. Drain.
2. Place the soaked rice in a blender with the cooked rice, mung beans, salt, turmeric, coconut milk and water. Blend until very smooth and lemony yellow, about 3 minutes.
3. Pour the batter through a fine mesh strainer into a bowl and discard the solids. Stir in the green onion. Set aside. As the batter sits, it will thicken to a consistency like that of heavy cream. Makes 3 cups of batter.

Refer to the link for instructions on soaking and steaming mung beans (basically 2 hours soaking and steam for 8 minutes); and on frying the pancake (basically fry onion, shrimps, pork and mushrooms then add pancake mix then cook about 3 mins covered and then another 3 uncovered to crisp up) .

I've gotta try this!

Report back later...

What's going on here?

I'm constantly asking myself this.

I've walked backwards and forwards past a building site for 3 days. Never seen a level. Never seen a string line.

This morning they'd poured a concrete floor - the women do all the labouring work by the way. (The men seem to stand and watch or handle the power tools.) Everything seems bodged. Concrete block walls are better described as breeze block; there's so many holes in the mortar. I can't figure out if there's a building code or if it's just ignored. I suspect there is but it's just ignored.

Why does the road up to our resort have intermittant footpath? Some of the properties appear to go to the edge of the road surface, and in other sections there's a nice footpath at the side. What sort of legislation and compliance regime operates here? Is there a building inspector?

Where does the sewerage go from the apparently uncontrolled development on Rei Lei? How is storm water managed?

I find myself very doubtful of the integrity and transparency of the governance systems deployed across Thailand. What I'm wondering is how this has occured and what will happen in the future. Hopefully a progressive transition to a better operating model but I'm sure that a lot will be lost along the way.

Broad Beans

Gotta love em... not!

At least not usually, not until yesterday. At lunch yesterday, prior to the usual serving of fried flat rice noodle with topping of vegetables, shrimps and thickened sauce (my staple diet), the restaurant served up a bowl of crispy, deep fried, salted broad beans. These things are good!

A quick check on google shows the recipe to be the fairly obvious one... (repeated from http://www.uktvfood.co.uk/index.cfm?uktv=recipes.recipe&iID=513320):

Ingredients
Vegetable oil for deep-frying
500g freshly podded broad beans
Salt

Method
1. Heat the vegetable oil in a wok or deep saucepan.
2. Add the broad beans to the hot oil and fry until lightly coloured.
3. Remove the fried beans using a slotted spoon. Drain on kitchen paper. Season with salt.

Gotta to give it a go when I get back home.

Thailand - Incredulous

What an odd place. We've been on holiday for two weeks and I'm confused and amazed.

I'm staying in a 5 star resort with oompa loompas carrying luggage up and down 3 flights of stairs. Shiny purple outfits, long white socks, and black shoes. No lifts but just the sight of these characters hauling 30+kg luggage up and down stairs. Cheers to you oompas!

I walk down the pavement with the trend being people on the right, and yet the cars drive on the left!? This doesn't conform with the way it works in NZ, AU, US.

They drive like complete lunatics and yet whenever parking on a slope they carefully put a brick under the front tyre - even for the numerous brand spanking new Hilux 4wd utes. And just why are so many of the vehicles so new? I couldn't afford one of these back home.

We're walking through Krabi township and an Islamic girl walks by in headress and long sleeve shirt - imprinted with the Playboy motif...

Across the country comes the sound of Hotel California - why, why, why!???

We eat lunch at a small white walled joint with the usual cooking stations out the front. It costs between 25 and 50 baht for lunch, about 1/5th the daily income of many of these people in the room. It's almost nothing to me and yet back home we'd squirm if we had to pay 3x as much on lunch.

Five drinks at a bar with a pool table cost us more than a candlelite, waitered meal by the sea with a 1kg crab selected from the tank and freshly cooked on the spot for us. How on earth does that work?

We go to Rei Lei and visit the Diamond cave. We're the only visitors during our stay - and yet Rei Lei is full of people, bars, guest houses, resorts, posing climbers, mad uncontrolled development, crap stuck in the mangroves, and the general detritus of short term exploitation. The cave was worth the visit.

And Hotel California plays where ever we go...

Artisan Bread Makers Guide

After spending the last 15 mins searching yet again in Google for my favourite pizza dough site, I've got the time and the smarts (for once) to load it on this blog. From now on I will know the link - and maybe you can get some use as well.

http://www.theartisan.net/bredfrm.htm

And just in case the site ever goes down the essential recipe (as originally adapted from Vincenzo Buonassisi's PIZZA Plus, English Edition, William Collins & Sons Ltd. 1985, who adapted it from the original Italian Edition by Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, S.p.A., Milan, 1982. ISB 0-00-411202-4... ya da ya da ya da...):

Starter
2 tsp dry yeast (14g)
1/4 cup water (59g)
3/4 cup flour (100g)

Let starter work for 1 hour.

Dough
7/8th to 1/4 cups water (207 to 296ml) (depending upon desired wetness of dough - refer to site for details)
2 1/4 cups flour (300g)
1 tsp salt (5g)

After kneading leave to double in bulk on floured cotton (100%) canvas.

Cook at high heat on pizza stone or in pizza oven - should be complete in less than 5 mins.

Also, note that the home page is a good jumping off point into other sections as well... http://www.theartisan.net/

Another dark and (slightly) stormy night

But what a great adventure...spotting eels and fish by torch light.

 I've never seen so many fish in a small river before. They were spell bound by the light. With my hand in the water I could attempt to grab them - but the wriggly eels would slip straight out - so very slippery and velvety smooth, but not far. They just hunker down again and hope you've gone away.

What had in the past seemed so ugly and returned such childhood fears, seemed instead quite pretty and so very well set in the background of the dark bush and running river. 

And the little native fish - again we could spot them out: splotchy black and stunned at our arrival. Silly buggers, but smart enough to know to run when I tried to bend down and touch them. They very would very quickly depart.

Back on the 4 wheel bike up and over the boulders on the river bank, through the water then racing past the trees looking out for possums. None seen - lucky for them because the rifle was only a short return trip.

Mental note - fish, leeks, silverbeet

Before I forget, forever here I document.

Warehou/Orange Roughy/Snapper - white, full bodied fish
Marinate in lemon juice

Gently fry in lots of olive the sliced white part of a leek.
Lightly caramalise.
Add bayleaf, maybe thyme and a little (remember little!) bit of chopped basil.
Add white wine and reduce.
Add chopped silverbeet and caper berries.
The chopped up stems are important!
Also - salt - you need this get the right flavour from the silverbeet.
Soften the silverbeet - remember the stems so not too short on the heat.
Add parsley and a small amount of cream and butter.

Add the fish and the remaining lemon juice.
Put a lid on the frying pan.

Just tooooo good...

Robinson Crusoe

It takes me a long time to read anything these days - never enough time. However, I have managed to complete Daniel Defoe's classic Robinson Crusoe. It's pivotal.

Anyhow, I have to share Robinson Crusoe's (Daniel Defoe's) tirade against the spanish. Not that I have anything to say against them - I'm sure you're all a lovely lot. But this certainly says something about the English-Spanish relationship in the early 1600's.

"That this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, and where they destroyed millions of these people; who, however they were in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a mere butchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and such, as for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible to all people of humanity, or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the product of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind."

Well...

Hans Rosling

I strongly recommend this presentation at TedTalks - http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=hans_rosling. The world is changing and this guys shows how.

Vista 5472 installation

This install has gone well and it's certainly better than the beta 2 but I've still found a couple of annoying points.

The sound doesn't work with the SigmaTel-C driver loaded from the internet. On my Dell Latitude D610 I could only get the right hand speaker to go. Using the Dell AC97 driver for Windows XP resolved that problem.

Secondly, I couldn't get the (unsupported) Microsoft Control panel applet for mounting ISO images to work. Not a problem use Virtual CloneDrive from http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html. This works a treat and it's freeware.

Ducks do damage

Goldfish gone. Prior to yesterday there were in excess of 30 happily living in the pond. I haven't cared greatly for them. At times the water has leaked out to leave an uncomfortably shallow puddle. I feed them once in a blue moon. But by crikey they survived the last 2 years well enough, at least until last night.

Two ducks swimming in the pool. How nice I thought - nature at play. Oh yes, and then I saw a duck with a large goldfish hanging out of its beak. And now, it seems they're all gone - except for a big one floating under an overhanging bush:(

Corsair in Kapiti

Didn't see a seal this time, but I did see a Corsair flying over the house. It seems to have taken off from the local airfield in Kapiti. Very loud! There's a good description on the Corsair at http://www.aviation-history.com/vought/f4u.html.

Seal crosses road

I saw a seal crossing the road today. We were on our way home - it was dark, and cold; a southerly had blown in this morning. And on the wet and windy 4 lanes with cars everywhere was a seal. We all stopped - my daughter said "where? where?? where???", and I stared.

It appeared to have come from the entrance to the Pauatahanui inlet. It must have decided to take a short cut across State Highway 1. Fortunately it appeared to make it intact across the road. A couple of people hopped out to take a look. We decided to move along. My daughter will have exciting news for her return from the school holidays!