Still alive + grill shots

Well, after 24 hours there appear to be no ill effects from the undercooked brat, other than my dad calling me a wuss and telling me to suck it up. I assume not hearing anything from my mother means that she's on a plane flying out here in preparation for any future illness.

In other grill related news, I bought one on Saturday. Here it is:
It's not very large, but it fits nicely on the deck and is also pretty cheap. Strangely, Seattle law permits gas grills on balconies, but prohibits charcoal grills. This doesn't make a ton of sense to me, since most buildings are fireproof while few buildings are explosion proof. The cool thing about this grill is that the stand actually breaks down and turns into a carrying cart, so if I ever find an inhabitable beach here I can bring my grill. The downside of the small size is that it uses little camping containers of propane, which likely won't last very long. We'll see.

Here are some more shots of the grill in action tonight... the foil packs are vidalia onion and corn. The onion was quite good, the corn left a lot to be desired. The sausages were way overcooked... which shouldn't be a surprise.

Grill with city in background... this is 8:10pm folks. Lots of sunlight here.

I might die in the next 72 hours

I went to a barbeque tonight and ate about half of a fairly undercooked bratwurst. I was sitting down chatting with people when someone asked "Hey, is that even cooked?" I looked, and while the exterior was nice and browned, the interior was basically red. The other guy eating a brat noticed it as well, and we both threw them back on the grill for another 10 minutes.

So, it's entirely possible that I now have the trichinosis, or whatever pork-born diseases hang out in sausage. Or worms (just thought of that one).

I'm sure my mom is freaking out now, so I should say that while red and undercooked, the brat was actually pretty warm to the touch, and had been on the grill for quite some time. And it's been four hours and I've felt no ill effects. I think I'll be okay. Also, I'm watching Anthony Bourdain eat warthog, um, "colon," and I assume he doesn't die.

Memorial Day golf

Technically, Memorial Day Sunday. I played with the other Tyler and my friends Chris and Sarah (Sarah is the only golfer I've seen who runs between shots). We played at Washington National, which is where the UW golf team plays. It's really an amazing course, and I have spent that four hours since getting home trying to figure out why it wasn't packed to the gills. We arrived at 2:30 and were told we could hop on whenever we wanted. There were three or four girls on the range who played for UW (tall, blonde, and with swings to die for... I was smitten), but otherwise the place was empty. Anyways, the course is a gem, and it's where I'll take people when they come and visit me. I returned to form this week... consistently driving it in the fairway, pretty close to the green, and then butchering the hole from there.

The round in numbers:

• Score: 87 (5 4 5 7 4 5 5 4 3 = 42; 7 3 4 6 6 5 3 7 4 = 45; 6 pars, 1 birdie, 3 doubles, 1 triple)
• Fairways: 10/14 (I hit the fairway on the wrong hole once, and drove the green once, and missed the fairway by 3 inches once)
• Greens: 7/18
• Putts: 34 (two three putts, 3 misses inside 5 feet)
• We played the blue tees, which are 6400ish yards, slope 136. I'm afraid we'll play the blacks (6780 yards, slope 139) next time we go back.
  

Highlights:

• Shot of the day: Kind of a half-stinger 5 iron from 175 on #2; it flew low and under the wind with a little draw and landed 8 feet right of the pin.
• Worst non-putt of the day: Lazy sand wedge for my 3rd shot from 95 yards on #4 (a 600+ yard par-5) that came up well short and landed in a cavernous bunker; I proceeded to make 7.
• Most disappointing non-putt shot of the day (#1): 3rd shot on #14, which is a(nother) 600+ yard par-5. I had 167 to the pin and was too lazy to go back and get a 7-iron. I killed an 8-iron (Tyler H described it as "towering"), but it went about 154 yards, which was about how far I can hit a high, soft 8. It also was well short of the green. The 7 would have been perfect.
• Most disappointing non-putt shot of the day (#2): 2nd shot on #17, which is a short par-5. I had 215 to the front with a tailwind; I smoked my hybrid, and while I pushed it, I felt like I made good contact. Apparently not, as it found a big pond which I had no business hitting into. Drop + bad pitch + indifferent putting = 7.

Anyways, my handicap is now at 11.6, which is a personal best. I remain optimistic about my game and my quest to break 80.

Freak dance expert

More to come later. But this is worth the 30 second commercial.

Update: Here is the 2nd interview (the one linked above is the 3rd in the series).

Comcast lives down to expectations

I think I had good things to say about a couple of months ago. I take them all back. To be accurate, their customer service has been surprisingly "good." Of course my bar for "good" customer service from a cable company is between "no technician has fallen asleep on my couch" and "I didn't swear at the person I spoke with on the phone."

However, leave it to Comcast to use tecnology to make me unhappy with their product. The cable boxes they have out here use some sort of Microsoft operating system. Which means that the system will stop responding to inputs for 30-50 seconds at a time (mainly when trying to fast forward or rewind through programs). Even better is the "auto-off" feature. Unfortunately, the "auto-off" feature is nonprogrammable, and so the fact that it usually activates in the middle of shows I am watching or recording is especially annoying. Normally I'd blame Microsoft, but I know people who work there and they seem nice, and I don't know anyone at Comcast, so I feel much better about vilifying them.

My three interview questions

I've been occasionally frustrated with the people that I work with. In general they are all talented, but talented in a very different way than the type of people I've worked with in the past. I wouldn't say this is a good or bad thing (at least I would say it on a blog), but it's different. My experience in past and current jobs has led me to formulate the following three questions (or, more accurately, three topics) that I will ask everyone I work with in the future. I consider passing all three tests the bare minimum for holding employment in my presence.

1. As I welcome the candidate into my office, I will place an apple on the desk. I will force the candidate to acknowledge its existence. I will then move the apple to a drawer where the candidate can no longer see it. Then I will start talking about random things... the weather, the company, etc. Question #1 will be: Does the apple that was on my desk at the start of the interview still exist? What does this test? Object permanence. I am convinced that most people I work with have reached this developmental stage (which happens between 3-6 months), but certainly not all of them. If the candidate gets this right, they may eat the apple.
   
2. My next criteria is that the candidate must have a firm grasp of cause and effect. I will present the candidate with several "action/reaction" pairs. Question #2: Can you correctly order the action/reaction pairs? Example pairs might be: "my nose is broken/someone punched me in the face", "I went to the ATM/there is cash in my wallet", or "I sell less stuff/I raise the price of a non-Giffin good." For senior managemen interviews, I will expand this question to test for the ability to differentiate correlation from causation. I would expect that less than 2% of candidates will be senior management eligible.
3. Lastly, the candidate must be able to generalize their problem solving. I am not setting a high bar. I will present the candidate with a magic box. I will inform them that the box outputs 10x whatever is put into the box. To demonstrate, I will insert $1 into the box, and $10 will come out. To reinforce the example I will insert two pencils into the box, and 20 pencils will come out. Question #3: If I put three paper clips into the box, what comes out? Of course the correct answer is not "potato chips". Alternately, I will place a pen, a piece of tape, and a piece of candy on the desk. I will label them "dog", "folding chair", and "radiator." Question #3b: Please write your name and have a snack. If the candidate responds "I can't use a dog to write my name, nor do a eat car parts", they will be dismissed.
   

Obviously I'm blogging about this because I'm frustrated about something, specifically with people's inability to answer Question #3b correctly. I had about two hours of conversations today trying to convince people that if you do exactly the same set of functions, but call them by different names, you are only dealing with "thing", not two. I heard a lot of "potato chip" answers today.

Bacon that grows in the ground

As I've detailed in past posts, Huan and I have been desperately searching for morels in the hills around
Seattle, with really no success at all.

However, the beauty of the global economy is that if you can't find it in the wild, you should probably just look at your local grocery store. Or, brave the crowds and flying fish and go to Pike Place Market.

So rather than waiting until next weekend (there was a lot of rain today, hopefully foreshadowing good fungus growing weather), we bought some at the Market. It must be high season, because prices have dropped from $50/lb on Monday to $30/lb on Friday to $20/lb today.

Anyhoo, Huan sauteed them with garlic and butter. Wow. Fantastic. They definitely don't taste like mushrooms as much as they taste like meat... specifically, bacon. Now, obviously some of that taste is due to the butter, but there's clearly something meaty going on. All my life I've been waiting for something like this to come along: pork that grows from the ground. Is there anything better? Maybe doughnuts that grow in the ground, but I still think that gets the silver medal.


So I wholeheartedly suggest that you go to your local grocer, pick up a half pound of morels, and get on the pork fungus train. Great stuff.

My Amex seems to indicate I've aged well

Went out to dinner with the other Tyler after golf yesterday at a place he described as a "classier Hooters." It's not an inaccurate description, but I feel I need to clarify. If Hooters is a "2" on the classy scale, then this place is an "8". They just seem to hire really attractive waitresses and have them dress in all black. It feels out of place for Seattle... it feels like a place you go in Vegas before gambling for 9 hours.

Anyhooo, we stayed at the restaurant bar after dinner for a drink, and I had the following interaction with the bartender after ordering drinks:

Me: I'll have two beers. [Hand over my Amex] You can keep it open.
Bartender: [Stares at my Amex]
Bartender: Um, is this supposed to be your ID?
Me: Um, no, it's my credit card.
Bartender: Oh duh, I'm such an idiot. I need your ID.
Me: [Handing over my ID]
Bartender: Oh wow, you've aged well.
Hobbs: [Coughs as he is clearly stunned by this statement] Haven't I aged well too?
Bartender: [Nothing]
Me: [Approaching 1000 on the self-confidence scale]

Sadly, I never saw this particular bartender again, so I couldn't thank her/ask her out/get her to sign an affadavit that I've aged well. That said, I am disappointed that being 30 means that I'm considered "aged." Oh well.

Golf blogging

Golf stories stink. I say this despite the fact that I love sitting around and retelling them over and over (and over and over) again. But for people who don't play, or really even people who didn't play in the round under discussion, golf is a painfully dull sport. There's no poetry in the 75 foot lag putt. There's very little romance in the wedge that spins back for a kick-in birdie. There are only so many times one can say "Chicks dig the long ball" after you nail a 300 yard drive.

But I'm going to spit in the face of popular opinion and write about golf. I'll start by detailing my best round ever, which happened yesterday. I shot 82 at West Seattle, which ties my low score in absolute terms, and is my best score relative to par ever (+10). It lowered my handicap to 11.6, which is the best its ever been. You would think that I'd be jazzed, but to be honest, I'm pretty confused about the status of my game.

(West Seattle is a pretty cheap muni, but it has amazing views of the city. The first 16 holes were designed by the guy who designed Pebble Beach, so it has some nice old-school design elements. See pics below.)



Why am I confused? Normally I'm good off the tee and hit decent irons, and I can be a streaky good putter, but I'm terrible at chipping the ball. I hit exactly one fairway yesterday (on #17 after being mocked by my playing partners for threatening to hit 3-wood). Well, that's not entirely true... I probably hit 7 fairways, but 6 of them were on the wrong hole. But I managed to hit back into the greens complex, make a decent chip, make a short putt, and get out with par or bogey. I was never really in trouble. It was a stressful 82.

In the end the score is a partially a function of luck... West Seattle is designed with rows of trees separating fairways, so there isn't much of a penalty for being wild off the tee. But between this round and the WaDuke round I really like the way I'm striking the ball. I finally think I'll be able to hit my New Year's resolution of breaking 80 this year.

The round in stats:
Score: 6, 5, 3, 6, 4, 3, 4, 6, 6 (43, +6); 4, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 4, 5 (39, +4)
GIR: 5
Fairways: 1
Putts: 30
Birdies: 1
Pars: 7

Salsa redux

Huan and I have become somewhat infamous amongst the Harvard MBA/Microsoft crowd out here for our salsa exploit back in February. It's nice to make your mark early on... now everyone is terrified we're going to walk out of their party with their wedding china.

Anyways, I was at a (mostly Microsoft) BBQ on Derby Day with my friends Pat, Krim, and Cathy. We were standing around on the patio trying to huddle for warmth. Cathy brought over a plate of various snack items... some cheese, some chips, smoked salmon, and some salsa. I didn't recognize it by sight, but as soon as the salsa hit my taste buds I knew its origin. Within seconds the beautiful concoction of tomatoes and onions and cilantro and other goodies was coursing down my throat. I was in heaven. I'm quite sure my eyes rolled back in my head.

It was the Costco salsa.

Pat's a blog reader and so he pretty quickly caught on that we were dealing with the salsa of the gods. I don't remember if anyone encouraged me to try and sneak some out of the party, but I had met the hosts (who were quite nice), and guilt quickly convinced me to leave the salsa be.

But if I'm at another party with an anonymous host... the salsa is fair game. I've got a rep.

Free fries

The weather the past week has been pretty fantastic, so I spent a lot of this past Saturday outside. In the evening I went to the Mariners-Yankees game (Yanks spanked the home team 7-2 in a fairly uninteresting game), but I spent most of the day on a hike of Mount Si. Or, at least while we were driving there I thought we were going to do Mount Si, which had me a little nervous. My friends Chris and Sarah do pretty much every extreme sport known to man and they rate Mount Si as "fairly strenuous", and while I'm getting in better shape, I'm not sure I'm up for fairly strenuous yet.

Luckily, neither were my hiking companions, who directed us to Little Si, which is a much easier hike and was quite pleasant given the weather. Here are some pictures from the top of Little Si:


The handsome devil with the sunglasses is, of course, me. You'll note that I'm pretty much completely draped in technical wear, but I still found reason to hit REI on Sunday. I mean, it was their anniversary sale. You'll also note that I'm looking a bit shaggy, but I managed to get a haircut after the hike.

Anyways, the title of this post is "Free Fries". Mount Si is in North Bend, which is notable for having something to do with Twin Peaks. (It's also not very far from Roslyn, WA, which is the fabled Cicely, Alaska from Northern Exposure [which, oddly, is on one of the HD channels out here]). North Bend has a restaurant that offers unlimited french fries if you eat their Mount Si Burger. Now you might expect this to be a difficult task, but it's simply two 1/3 pound patties with cheese. I was nearly convinced into eating it and thus earning the table unlimited fries. I figure there are better competitive eating deals than that, so in the end, there were no free fries.

Easy as bagged lettuce

I'm not sure what started me thinking about this (it was probably being at the grocery store), but I wonder what my generation's "As easy as sliced bread" metaphor will be.* I thought about this while walking home with seedless grapes, bagged and washed lettuce, and peeled baby carrots. None of these are particularly sexy sounding, but in terms of making food preparation remarkably easy I think they are amongst the big players. I mean, who buys a head of lettuce these days?** When is the last time you peeled a carrot? Every now and then I see a real carrot in the grocery store and I wonder what kind of growth hormones it must be on to get that big.

Anyways, the real genesis of this post was my newfound love: butter lettuce. How did I not know about this until two months ago? The trick with bag lettuce was always finding a kind that would last more than two hours after being opened, which wasn't terribly difficult if you didn't mind eating lettuce that tasted like shoes. But this butter lettuce stuff (BTW, just fabulous branding... if more vegetables had butter in their name we might not have an obesity problem in the US. Butter broccoli, I'm looking in your direction) is just fantastic. It lasts a full week, it has a nice taste, and, I can't believe I'm writing this, a very velvety texture. Who knew lettuce had texture. Props to butter lettuce.

On the downside, I can't get decent yogurt out here. I became very attached to Stonyfield Farms (or Stonybrook, or Stonysomethingorother) yogurt during the past year. It had a nice mix of fruit and yogurt, a decent texture, and it was never cloyingly sweet. It was also organic, which I'm a big fan of. I can't find an organic yogurt out here that is any good, and that's very disappointing.

Update: Yup, I was right. I don't know how to ID a metaphor. Saying that simile was my 2nd guess probably isn't very believable, but it was my 2nd guess.

* Please let me know if this isn't a metaphor. I know Mrs. Lange hates that I got a 5 on the AP Comp exam without knowing this.

** I do know two people who actually cook who buy real lettuce, but I'm not sure they read the blog.

I'm shutting up about the weather

So today was the kind of day when people who complain about the weather (i.e. me and me) in Seattle shut up and say "Oh, that's what you mean when you say the weather is perfect in the summer." It was stunning today... low 70s, light breeze, and more than enough sun to rejuvenate everyone who's been indoors for 6 months. I'm pretty excited about the idea of playing 18 holes of golf after work, which is a legitimate possibility here.

That said, it wouldn't have hurt anyone to sprinkle in a day like this here or there in March.

Another benefit of so much sun is that I found out that I had a view of Mt Rainier from my bedroom (sadly, our balcony is blocked by other apartment buildings, so we can't see Rainier from there). I've lived here for three months and I'm not sure I knew that before. My buddy Pat is in town for a couple weeks and he was bowled over by how impressive the mountain is. Like an idiot I didn't think to take a picture until it was dusk, so even with some Photoshop work it doesn't appear as impressive as it is in person. Still, not something you see in DC.

Weather Update

I had to turn on the heat this morning. For those of you without a calendar handy, it's May 3. Heat. Because it was cold. It was almost more of a kick in the pants when I opened the shades to find that it was gloriously sunny. But that didn't warm anything up.