Bacon: Food For Our Times October 11, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Bacon, Food
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In these difficult times, filled with economic uncertainty and political unrest, people turn to familiar things that provide deep, soothing comfort. As a result, I predict a sudden uptick in the demand for… bacon. Crispy, chewy, salty, greasy, wonderful bacon. Hot or cold, strips or bits, is there any food so perfectly soothing and comforting?
Bacon, on its own, provides three of the four fundamental food groups: protein, fat, and salt. Bacon is missing only sugar, the fourth group. As a result, bacon is more soothing than even chocolate, which only provides fat and sugar. (Those in need of the ultimate comfort food should turn to chocolate covered bacon, which may be more decadent than most people can handle).
Who can resist a delicious strip of bacon? Just a bite, chewy and salty and hot, pushes back all the concerns of the moment and provides a brief but rejuvenating respite of pure food enjoyment. When camping, we literally cannot cook bacon fast enough. People will eat bacon as quickly as it is pulled from the grill, and we normally cook two or three pounds before the initial demand is sated and we begin to accumulate a backlog of bacon to eat with the rest of breakfast.
And there is bacon’s true appeal: it makes everything taste better. Pancakes for breakfast? A strip of bacon makes it that much better, adding a salty counterpoint to the syrup and pancakes. Eggs? Of course bacon makes them better. A sandwich? Is there any sandwich that isn’t improved by a few strips of bacon laid across the top?
I could go on and on. Potatoes? Of course. Other vegetables? People add bacon to any vegetable to make it better. Fruit? Yes, even fruit: melon is infinitely more delicious with a delicate slice of prosciutto draped across it. I’ll bet you could wrap a grape in bacon and it would be wonderful: salty, juicy, sweet, and chewy, a burst of juice followed by a lingering salty finish. I recently had a wonderful hors d’eourve that was a crisp square of fried prosciutto topped with pear marmalade and a bit of parmesan cheese. Dairy, fruit, and bacon in each mouthful. You could eat them until you ruptured an internal organ.
Bacon is so good atop any food that I cannot understand why fine restaurants do not have a baconniere. This person would roam the restaurant with an enormous wooden bacon grinder and, with a twist of the wrist, deliver just the right amount of fresh-ground bacon atop your meal. Wouldn’t that be great? We have bacon bits at home; why not fresh bacon when we dine out?
The appeal of bacon is so ingrained in our psyche that even vegetarians cannot resist it. Dreaming of bacon but fretting about the impact on the pig? No problem: just dig into a few strips of vegetarian bacon. Even those who swear off meat cannot keep themselves from the crunchy goodness of bacon.
The lesson is simple: look away from the devastation on Wall Street and the banks. Stop thinking about who to vote for. Instead, fry up a pound of bacon, sit back, and lose yourself for just a moment in the primal goodness of bacon. And when you come back to the real world, buy stock in Hormel.
Triumph Over The Man September 30, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Bureaucracy, Cookware, Shopping
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They are back! The great corporate giant has yielded to my demands, and S.O.S Pads are once again available at my local grocery store!
Regular readers know that S.O.S Pads were discontinued recently in my area. I was astounded by this decision, and even more perturbed by the cavalier nonchalance with which the store manager informed me of this decision. Other shoppers clearly felt the same way and, after my posting, shared similar concerns. My Mom even sent me a box of S.O.S Pads, which was a welcome but unexpected side effect of the post.
After a flurry of activity that included glaring at the store manager and filling out the online customer comment form, the pads suddenly reappeared in their rightful spot on the kitchen cleaner aisle. Other shoppers played it cool, showing little emotion as they became aware of the pads’ triumphant return. But I knew they were appreciative, and that my hard work had paid off to the benefit of the entire community. The will of the Man has been bent, and we are all the better for it.
Fight The Power! August 10, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Bureaucracy, Shopping
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They’re gone. The S.O.S Pads are gone.
I was food shopping Sunday afternoon, dutifully traversing the aisles, expecting everything to be in its place. I know that this expectation is not always met, as devious marketers move things in an effort to break my concentration and tempt me with new and exciting products. On rare occasions, the entire store gets reconfigured, just to shake things up and keep customers off-balance.
This was different. All the other kitchen cleaning products were in their places, but the S.O.S Pads were gone. Not sold out, not moved slightly, but completely removed. I looked for the shelf tag that should mark their familiar home, but none could be found. Had then been shifted to a whole new store neighborhood? Perhaps they were no longer considered a kitchen cleaning tool, but had been shifted to the skimpy kitchen/hardware/automotive section as a garage accessory. Hard to imagine, but the mind of the store layout person is difficult to plumb at times.
Instead of wandering the store in a Sisyphean search, I went right to the manager and asked where they were.
“Oh, we don’t carry them anymore.”
“At any store?”
“Nope. When they reset that display, the pads were not included.”
I walked away, rendered mute by another example of corporate grocery incompetence. In one fell swoop, some drone within the depths of Harris Teeter had eliminated 91 years of product history, removing a product as American as Corn Flakes or Wonder Bread from the shelves. How could this be? Have people suddenly stopped scouring things? Is there insufficient margin on steel wool and soap to justify their sale? Or have S.O.S Pads been found to be environmentally unacceptable?
Surely it cannot be the latter. After all, on the same shelf that used to contain the Pads are environmentally safe quick-dissolving dishwasher detergent pouches. Honestly, if you are concerned about the environment enough to fret about the safety of the dissolving pouch that contains the detergent, wouldn’t you have long ago sworn off automatic dishwashers and reverted back to eating off hardened disks of week-old bread to ensure a completely carbon-neutral eating and washing experience?
In this case, I suspect a bad decision by a powerful committee. A committee that holds our fate in its hands, deciding with the stroke of a pen how we will clean our pots and pans. Are we going to put up with this? Are we going to allow The Man to decide how we scrub and wash? Or are we going to stand up and fight this injustice?
I will fight. I will go to the Harris Teeter web site and lodge a formal complaint. As hundreds and thousands of others do the same, our voices will be heard and S.O.S Pads will be returned to the shelves. A great tradition of shiny American cookware will not be interrupted by petty bureaucracy.
Are you with me? Let’s hear it: Scour To The People!
A Slide What? May 15, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Education, History, Math
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My son and I were driving home from an errand last night, engaged in a typical Guy Discussion: the mechanics of building a nuclear weapon. My son observed, correctly, that building an atomic bomb was easy; it was getting it to explode that was really hard. The trick, I pointed out, was getting the right material in the right shape at the right time.1
My son asked how the first bomb designers did this. I replied that while current designers use extensive computer simulation (which is why we design and build ever faster computers: bomb design and weather prediction), the original designers did it all by hand, with slide rules.
My son looked at me and asked, in all seriousness, “What’s that?” I gave him an incredulous stare, completely at a loss for words.2 “No, really. What is that?” My son, 13, is an outstanding student, way ahead of the curve in math and science and currently fascinated with computer-aided bridge design. He was asking an honest question.
“Umm, well, it’s a computing device. It has three wooden sticks with numbers, and you slide them back and forth to line them up so that you can multiply and divide. Nicer ones have extra scales for trig functions.” To help bring this detailed description to life, I used my fingers to simulate the mechanical action of a slide rule.
I may as well have tried to describe some medieval leather tanning contraption or a turn-of-the-century gadget that trimmed lamp wicks. For a teenager with his own cell phone, laptop, iPod Touch, and game console, the idea of a wooden calculator is either pathetic or hilarious. I half-believe he thought I was making it all up just to tease him.
Sigh. Another cultural touch point has been reached. Slide rules are officially ancient and unknown to the current generation. Close on its heels are tape in any form (cassette, 8-track, reel-to-reel), followed by analog video. Phones with cords aren’t far behind, either. Time marches on. Does it matter? Yes and no.
In terms of the actual device, it doesn’t matter. I have my father’s K&E Log Log Decitrig slide rule, a beautiful device that was given to him when he graduated college with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. It was his most important tool on a daily basis and no practicing engineer could work without one. It still works, although the slide sticks a bit. Still, it has been completely replaced by calculators of all stripes and for good reason: slides rules are only accurate to a few digits and are slower to use.
In terms of how it works, the loss of “slide rule awareness” is devastating. General math abilities in the US are at an all-time low. No one knows how logarithms work, or why this might be important. No one understands precision, accuracy, or error ranges any more. As a result, people cannot interpret numerical data, understand relationships, or make informed decisions. Even worse, it has become apparent that most people cannot compute percentages or interest rates on a loan. A disturbing number of cashiers cannot compute the change from $20 in their head.
Not everyone should be able to use a slide rule. But maybe if we tried to teach everyone to use one, a pleasant side effect might be that everyone would at least learn percentages, and subtraction, and the ability to discern “bad” numbers from “good.” Such an education will never happen; we’d wind up with lots of people who feel bad about themselves because they failed the slide rule test, and that’s just not acceptable these days. Instead, we’re building a nation full of happy idiots, lacking the basic skills to survive in a modern world but certainly feeling very good about themselves.
1How like life itself. See my next blog post for more on this.
2Those who know me can attest how shocking this situation is: I am never at a loss for words.
Professionalism May 12, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Engineering, Professionalism
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I am an engineer. Specifically, a Software Engineer. Although my career has taken me to a senior management position in my field, my core skills are those of the engineer. I am trained to evaluate, analyze, design, and solve problems. In the same way that every CFO is an Accountant, even as a CIO I am a Software Engineer.
To further cement that discipline, I am an Engineer from Georgia Tech, one of the finest engineering institutions on earth. I carry the traditions and reputation of that school with me and am required to be not just an Engineer, but a Hell Of An Engineer. To be anything less is a personal embarrassment and diminishes all those engineers that came before me and that will follow in my footsteps.
In short, I take this stuff pretty seriously.
This past week I had the unfortunate opportunity to deal with software that is the result of decidedly unprofessional engineers. Various systems that we are in the process of deploying failed in test and early release because the developers were not professional, were not disciplined, did not care, and most certainly do not carry the title of Engineer. I should note that this software is being supplied by external vendors; it is not the result of my team or anyone I work with. Good thing, too.
In the first case, a team of developers decided to skip their normal quality control process and not fully test the customizations they are developing for us. In the course of development, they also decided to replace, in mid-stream ,certain database drivers on the production system. The result is that we were handed a system that in its first test spewed out 10,000 errors. Fortunately, the system is limited to reporting 10,000 errors so it stopped at that point.
The lack of disciplined engineering allowed this team to break all sorts of rules. The idea that you would develop and release code without testing is incomprehensible to me. The idea that you would change a core system component on the fly, in production, is horrific. That you would ultimately expose your customer to all this is embarrassing and unacceptable.
The second case involves a piece of software that has one of the worst configuration interfaces I’ve seen in a long time. Without going into detail, be assured that it is confusing, cryptic, hard to use, and breaks dozens of well-understood UI design principles. The fact that making a mistake in this interface would knock hundreds of users offline and potentially corrupt their personal data only makes it that much worse. Whoever developed this interface truly did not care for the end user or make any effort to understand how the tool would be used.
How do these situations arise? When we fail to train new members of our profession, discipline falters. When we refuse to hold people to high standards, quality suffers. When there is a lack of accountability, errors are tolerated.
As Professional Software Engineers, we are required to enforce the discipline our field requires to ensure that we have the trust and confidence of our users. If we were building bridges or skyscrapers, we’d be in jail for these kinds of errors. Although our failures may be less dramatic, they are no less important.
If you, like me, seek to carry the title of Software Engineer, take it seriously. Wear it with pride, but earn the right to wear it, no matter what your position or title.
The Effective CIO 