On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the U.S. energy department to reconsider California’s request to set its own washing machine standard. While the U.S. energy department has not agreed to the state’s request, it could be granted next year, with the new standard going in to effect some time in 2013.

Jonathan Blees, assistant chief counsel for the California Energy Commission, said the standard does not require consumers to upgrade their machines; it merely requires manufacturers to apply the standard to all California washing machines that are made after the standard goes in to effect.

Blees said many washing-machine models, most of them front-loading, currently meet the 6-gallon standard.

We forget how far the balance had swung under Bush -- this lawsuit against Department of Energy, to enable California to pursue such an obvious energy and water saving policy, is a good reminder. The LA Times blog posting has more details.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The Best Lentil Soup in the World

What I consider one of the best soups in the world and not just the Mediterranean is shurba al-'adas, lentil soup. This is a soup made by countless cooks in the Levant. My recipe came from my former wife Najwa and I first published it in A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST. It was there that Fran McCullough and Molly Steven discovered it to put in there book The 150 Best American recipes: Indispensable Dishes from Legendary Chefs and Undiscovered Cooks (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). It is a soup that I simply could not leave out of my newest book due to come out in December THE BEST SOUPS IN THE WORLD. It's a popular soup in what used to be known as Greater Syria (Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, and parts of Jordan). It's based on brown lentils of course and homemade chicken broth (preferably). Try making shurba al-'adas, you'll be pleased all around.

The recipe is amazingly simple. But you do need a "food mill", whatever that may be. Anyone out there -- can you advise what is a food mill?

However, don't let the war make you think this is some majestic good vs. evil epic space war. Battles are mostly low key. There is lot's of narration and dialog. Sterling self-claims his crammed prose. No kidding. Adjectives rule supreme in this novel; as many as possible are crammed into each sentence. If one would do a histogram of adjectives, this novel would be on the far right tail of the bell curve. Here's an excerpt: " He always wore his spacesuit, [something something], and [multiple length modifiers] body odor came through its [multiple adjectives] collar with [multiple adjectives] pungency." Sentences like this go on and on and on and on and on and on and on throughout the novel. And there's no shortage of hyphenated words, like long-fermented, eye-watering. On one page, there were no less than 11 hyphenated words, plus one triple one.

Similar to the prosthetics of the Borg, the sentences themselves seem interchangeable. Here's another excerpt of a dialogue:
"What was your brigade?
I'm no Cataclyst.
I have your weapon here.
Constantine pulled a ... vial from his ... jacket ..."
You may as well interchange your own sentences: `The tree fell in the forest; it made no sound' or `the space ship went into orbit; it's boots were muddy.' Give it a try. It'll make as much sense.

The lapl.org now links to amazon.com reviews; how cool is that? The above excerpt also goes on at length, BTW. And some reviewers really liked the book, one enough to read it four times. !

My own one sentence view of agile development? It's one way to control schedule variability in circumstances where resources and schedule must be relatively fixed, but the feature list is flexible.

I loved the photo of the pair programming gurus in front of the MacBook. Actually, I think maybe I worked at that company for a couple of years. It was great!

Fabric covered journal with pen holder - Red and Yellow Shibori

Description I'm not good with pens. I purchase a constant stream of them, but they always wander off within a day or two. I mention this only because since making myself one of these journals, I have had the same pen for 43 days now. Never underestimate the usefulness of a simple loop of fabric.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. There are many things of beauty at the Etsy shop of antieuclid. Enjoy and be amazed or if not amazed at least nonplussed.

Git for OS X

You will want to install Git after you watch Randal's talk at Google on YouTube.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Title:

Informal MAX 2009 recap at Busby's in Santa Monica

Date and Time:

October 14, 2009 from 8:00pm - 10:30pm

Address:

3110 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, CA
google map

Agenda:

Want to find out what you missed at Adobe MAX 2009 and meet and talk with other local Flex developers?  Our next meeting will be an informal hang out session at Busby's where folks who attended can share their impressions with those who didn't.  Also, most of the sessions from MAX were recorded and posted on tv.adobe.com, so be sure to check those out too!

Hope to see you all there!

(Busby's is just down the street from our normal meeting place, see the address above).

-Tom

Weds nite, looks like fun!