Category Archives: My Bidness

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Injeolmi -a kind of manna from childhood

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My favorite food blogger, Maangchi, posted her recipe for injeolmi, a rice cake. Traditionally made from steamed rice which is pounded into an elastic paste with a forty pound hammer, shaped and cut unto lady finger sized pieces and rolled in toasted soybean powder, it would take half a day to make a batch usually suitable for a feast. Maangchi’s method (http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/injeolmi ) makes single serving in about fifteen minutes. It is brilliant and perfect! I did substitute yoolmoo cha as the soybean powder was unavailable. Nom nom nom. And yes Maangchi, I did pound it more than fifty times.

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Zombie Gunship -a review, and an explanation of why Zombie things relax me

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Zombies are definitely putting their stamp on the zeitgeist. Until recently, vampires were all the rage, but they were never my cup of tea. While vampires are about forbidden seduction -think Don Draper and your mom (didn’t know he was a vampire, did you?). The thing that people don’t get about Zombie movies and fiction is that the Zombies aren’t really the center of the action. This was illustrated in one of the finest Zombie movies to date, The Road (didn’t know it was a Zombie movie, did you?). Zombies are the Gom Jabbar of a Humanity Test (didn’t think I’d reference Dune, did you?). Like a round of golf, a person’s response to a Zombie apocalypse is all about character.

Zombie Gunship is an iOS game that puts you in an orbiting AC130 airplane equipped with mini guns, and two different kinds of cannons. In it, you are the gunnery captain whose task is to obliterate zombies marching on the entrance to a bunker complex. It’s night time, and the battle field is lit up in infrared. Uninfected humans light up the screen bright white, while the walking dead Zombies are a cold black heat sink on IR HUD. Your job is to kill the zombies, keep them from breaching the bunker entrance, but allow the humans through.
The Zombies, when not attacking the bunker, munch on the humans. The problem is that you are allowed to kill only 3 humans inadvertently before it game over -the commander orders you out of the airspace. It’s a simple game with no other characters or maps (a common complaint in the reviews) to mess things up. You gain credits for zombie kills and for each human who make it into the bunker, and you use these to upgrade the weaponry. You can also buy credits through the game (slick) so you can max out the specs on your three gun types (don’t ask me how much I’ve spent).
On an iPhone, the game is a portable addiction like a bag of jelly bellies. On the iPad, it’s engrossing and all consuming, like a really big bag of jelly bellies, and it is the way to play this game. The hook is this. You score better when you ignore the humans and just kill zombies, but then you see the poor blokes getting attacked by the zombies, albeit in tiny ant-sized distance on the infrared. You then are compelled to rescue them with a well gauged barrage from the mini gun, or a carefully distanced blast from the 40mm auto cannon. If you successfully kill the zombie and free the human, you get some points, and praise from the commander. You feel good about yourself in fact. In fact, you end up caring for the poor people running in the night for the shelter of the bunker and may get sidetracked into playing hero. Unfortunately, in this game, and as in all good Zombie movies, playing empathetic hero is not the best way to win at this game. The most efficient at clearing the approaches of zombies without killing yet not rescuing humans do best. There is no punishment for letting Zombie nature take its course.
A recent NYT article (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/books/review/the-state-of-zombie-literature-an-autopsy.html) pontificated about the Zombie phenomena, tying its popularity to the uncertainties of our times. I would add that Zombies have been with us before Romero created them as the basic fear of being consumed by anything that is not us -whether it is a great white shark, a Tyrannosaur, or an illegal immigrant.
Despite the fearsome images and terrifying drama of good Zombie films and literature, I find them a compelling and a great way to unwind and relax. A Zombie apocalypse, it turns out, does not necessarily favor the strongest or best armed. Rather, aside from a bit of luck, you need your wits. A Zombie armageddon is fair and meritocratic. A level playing field. And who doesn’t like that?
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Japanese Beetles!

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My apple trees, azaleas, and rose bushes are infested with Japanese beetles. I went to my local garden center and the fellow there imparted information on how to get rid of these “vicious invaders” with such passion that I could picture him in camouflage imparting orders on killing the Japs invading the island. I am glad that nothing bad is named for Korea, but there are enough Asian named pestilences and diseases to leave me smiling wryly whenever I hear about these Japanese beetles, the bane of gardeners in the Midwest. The Asian Carp which in another time would have been the Chinese carp if we didn’t owe them so much money is another invasive pest that gets much scorn. I can only wonder what non-Asians think when they see more Asians on TV, at their golf courses, and in their families. I think we’re just part of a long tradition going back to the Spanish Flu, and the Black Death which was blamed on the Muslims. Harmless? Not really because it associates bad feelings with a locale or nationality.

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The Perfect Game

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Wakond Club No. 1, from blue tees, May, 2011

The perfect game in baseball is a rarity among rarities. Only a handful of no-hitters are seen in a season of baseball, but the perfect game of 27 consecutive outs and no base runners has been achieved only 18 times in baseballs modern era. In golf, the perfect game is all 18 holes played in par or better, and it is a seemingly reachable perfection. Like a dangling fruit just out of hand’s reach, par golf sits there printed on the score card. For the majority of golfers, it is as unattainable as pitching in the major leagues.

The quixotic and perverse nature of golf is that anyone with the means can play a round where a professional tournament is held (aside from uber private locales). And during that round, the average golfer may get a glimpse of perfection in the form of a par on a famous hole, a perfect sand blast to within a foot of the cup, or a chip that clatters against the pin and settles into the hole. These transcendent moments of golf perfection are gobsmack hits of opium for the golfer that brings the poor hack coming back for more. On the score card though, these bright spots of perfection are just holes in the roof letting in shafts of celestial light. I used to keep a golf log, and over the course of two years, my best scores on every hole on my home course resulted in a perfect 72. It was in me, but I suppose I never let it out.

Woe betide the golfer who yearns for more and tried to do something about it. I have finished reading the testimony of John Richardson,  who did such a thing and is the proselytizer of the perfect. His book, Dream On: One Hack Golfer’s Challenge to Break Par in One Year (link), is an engaging story that requires golfist faith -the faith that the honesty of the player is a given and that his tale is as true as a score card submitted for handicapping at the clubhouse. It is no big fish story, John’s tale.

I find a lot of things in common with John. We are of similar age growing up in areas where golf is part of the social mesh -me in North Florida, and John in Northern Ireland. I spent many years at the now defunct Baymeadows in Jacksonville, Florida, dreaming of playing with the best while struggling to break 90. Both of us admired Seve Ballesteros and his swashbuckling approach to the game. Both of us gave up golf to become working adults -me to go to college, medical school, and postgraduate training, John to work at becoming a successful  entrepreneur. And both of us took up golf again at similar points in life, after marrying and starting families.

What is different about John was that he took his obsession and channeled it into a deliberate path to perfection. At  the start, he struggled to break 100, but within a year, he broke par. While it was no surpise, the ending of the book in the kind of ethereal round of golf that all hackers dream of, the tension and drama were there nonetheless. The great thing about the book is not necessarily the end result, but the year long journey he took. John proved that all the well worn excuses that golfers have about themselves -including mine about not letting myself be scratch, are mistaken justifications for continued hacking. In fact, whenever he fell into a rut, it was revealed to him that it was a swing error, something as elemental as grip, posture, stance, and alignment, and not always his negative thoughts. That is correct -it’s not your negative thoughts, but instead bad form and lack of practice that leave your game rotting at bogey or worse.

He does seek professional help -and I have taken this advice by taking my first lesson with our amazing new club professional, Mr. Aaron Krueger. He also sought clinical motivational advice -not a shrink, but very close, because a golfing rapture is limned by golfing madness. And he practiced. A lot. Particularly his short game.

This is like one of those miracle baseball movies you can get where some average Joe all of a sudden is throwing heat in the big leagues. I read his book with the same suspension of disbelief that I have for big fish stories, with golfing faith. It gives me hope, and a renewed sense of purpose. So what does it all mean?

I will hereby publicly declare my intention to break par by the end of next season (October 31, 2012) and bring you along with me. May good golf come walking with me and endow my ball with angel wings.

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First Match

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Golf is about competition, and it starts with competing against the racing horses of fear, ambition, greed, and pride. In competing against others, golf is a beautiful combat sport. Wakonda holds several competitions and the season long two man best ball tournament is among the best in that very strong teams can get beaten by seemingly weaker teams, based on how well the players master themselves and their competitors. Today is a good day for golf as there is no lightning, but it is raining and cool in the forties. If no one shows, I will be disappointed. Pictured above is my ball marked with my golfist symbol – a golfball with angel wings.

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Extreme Golf

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I took tax day off and played a round during an ice storm. Good for building character, playing in inclement weather is useful in testing your game against many more variables than just the usual yardage, light wind, lie, elevation, incline, etc. Add to it slickness of grip, 35mph prevailing winds, stinging rain and sleet, and hypothermia and you have a sport -Extreme Golf.

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Should I keep the balls in my icy drink?

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This was suppose to be a straightforward science project about temperature’s effect on bounce across different categories of balls. The surprise which shouldn’t be is that golf balls bounce more when frozen solid in a freezer for a week. Which leads me to ask, should I keep the balls in my drink and not my pocket?

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update: iPad’s cost/benefit bar set high by Hackintosh netbooks

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Addendum: 3/30/2011 -as I await the arrival of my iPad 2, I can now look back at this post and chuckle. In the year since this post, netbooks have tanked as over 15million iPads were sold. While hackintoshing is fun for a while, the stress of upgrading the OS is not, and I sold the netbook, sans OSX. The Macbook Air covers the gaps left by iPad, and in fact, it is fairly rare for me to need a laptop when I have internet access via my iPhone or iPad. The iPad2 will be the 3G version on AT&T -I chose it because I want the flexibility of buying a local provider’s SIM card when I’m abroad. The thing is this -I don’t think that Apple will want to launch iPhone 5 this year, even though most contracts for iPhone cycle around the summer. It’s like giving gifts to a girlfriend -the timing has to be right and given too frequently, you beg for contempt.

If you want to know what the iPhone5 will look like, I think you can see it in both the iPad2 and more importantly the iPod Touch 4G. iPhone5 will be similar to both with metal back and thinner. It will also feature a 4 to 4.5 inch screen. If it is to keep it’s battery life while getting skinny, it will have to get wider and taller. iPhone4 won’t be phased out but will become the cheap phone.

FROM LAST YEAR JANUARY -MARCH, 2010

The iPad launch yesterday was not up to the hype -you needed the device to have time travel capabilities for people to be satisfied. That said, the question for this first adopter among first adopters is, “Where does this fit in my man purse?”

I need portable internet access for many reasons -I write a lot and am working on several research projects as well as need to keep in touch with a vascular team -the iPhone (now disconnected from AT&T) still serves as my primary email device because the HTC TouchPro2 that I have from Verizon has a maddeningly inconsistent email app that jumps between HTC’s beautiful interface and the horrible, ugly Windows Mobile 6.5 bones underneath. Despite this, the TP2 has earned a semi-permanent place because of the $30 app called WalkingHotSpot which will turn the TP2 into a Wifi hotspot.

I have a maxed out dataplan and tethering plan through Verizon, so I am just using the data that I have already purchased, just not for a Windows laptop but also for my iPhone which I can now use again for my golf GPS apps.

The middle spot between a big laptop (my 15inch Macbook Pro) and the iphone is the need to have a bigger screen than my iphone especially for iTunes movies and content, but at the same time having a keyboard, with at least 5 hrs of battery life. The netbooks do fill this niche in terms of hardware very nicely, but the software just isn’t there. I have become very used to iLife and iWork -thinks look prettier and works nicer through these than anything in the Windows or Linux environment.

The solution came in the form of Hackintosh. The Dell Mini 10v is a netbook which seems to have been designed solely for Hackintoshing. Hackintosh is a non-Apple computer made to run Mac OS X. This technically is a breach of the software license, but I own the computer and I own the shrink wrapped software license for this Hackintosh.

With this, I have a portable internet solution that goes 5hrs on battery, and more with the additional battery, all for a total of $400 bucks for the hardware. If you choose to go this route, you should buy the OS license.

The instructions are here: link.

This works nicely for now, because Apple didn’t have something that effectively served my needs in this space. Now they have iPad. We won’t be able to get our hands on one for 59 days, 89 if you want the 3G/Wifi version. Maybe my netbook days are numbered.

I’ll tell you why. The trackpad, designed by Dell, is one of the worst pieces of industrial design ever created by humans. Dell, after I ordered the netbook, took my money but didn’t acknowledge I even ordered the netbook until I spent two hours on tech support. It was only through the graces of a very nice lady in India, that I eventually got a netbook 10 days later than promised. The next OS upgrade to 10.6.3 may break the netbook again, requiring another round of hacking, which I used to enjoy, but not so much anymore. The 10inch screen is adequate, but I know, compared to the OLED screen on iPad, it will be like night and day. I see that a lot of people are giving up their netbooks on eBay, and this is most likely because the hardware being, well, not Apple.

So I wait, with my proverbial tent pitched outside our local Apple store.