Do I really miss the old INXS? Or do I just miss the sweet innocence of days gone by, when I did not know the phrase "autoerotic asphyxiation"? Please discuss.

Workplaces are set up such that bad phrases easily enter the lingo. Spell checkers that provide a false sense of security ("There are no red squiggles in my document! How could it be badly written?"), hierarchical structures encouraging people to emulate their higher-ups, and distribution lists that expose dozens or hundreds of people to hastily-crapped-out sentences - all contribute to the modern workplace being a warm petri dish for poor word usage to replicate.

Here are two that I see all the time.

"Exponential"
Exponential growth means that something is growing in direct proportion to how big it already is. An easy example is bacterial growth - bacteria divide to reproduce, so you go from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16. Using the word "exponentially" when describing increasing management complexity or difficulty is almost always wrong. There are many things that do increase exponentially, but the people who interact with those things are usually software developers who are at their desk working while you chat about exponential growth at the coffee machine. People should learn about  other growth functions (linear, say, or logarithmic) so they can accurately describe day to day situations.

"Critical path"
The critical path is the sequence of activities which, based on start/end times, resources, and dependencies, determines the shortest time in which a project can be completed. If a task is in the critical path, delays of that activity will affect the project timeline, usually in a day-for-day slip. Project managers spend a lot of time trying to shorten the critical path by compressing or moving tasks - executing unrelated tasks in parallel rather than in series, doing parts of tasks as pre-work, increasing resources to shorten a task - to cope with unexpected problems or changes in scope. Tasks which are merely important, urgent, difficult, or overdue - but which don't affect the delivery of other tasks or a project - are not critical path, and calling them that doesn't get them done any faster. It just annoys me.

1. As webcomics go, I like QuestionableContent. Sometimes, however, I get the feeling too many strips are there to create demand for merch then thoughtfully provided by the creator. The shirts were one thing, but how long before we start to see these mugs on CafePress?

2. That said, dotgirl and I have deployed to Las Vegas. We ate at Picasso (perfectly executed cuisine, eerily polite and knowledgeable server), experienced Ka (how wonderous the intersection of mechanical engineering and the human form!), and are now trying to convince ourselves to foray out into the 90-degree morning for some breakfast.

At our last house I carried Ortho and Roundup bottles around like a gunslinger--dispatching weeds, errant grass, and even suspicious looking bugs with glee. Things in the grass that looked different from the rest of the grass were poisoned. Vines growing into our yard from the neigbors' back yard were poisoned. Things that grew in the cracks of the sidewalks were poisoned. Things I randomly felt like poisoning were poisoned.

When we bought this place, though, we started growing things near our house for the express purpose of eating them and deploying structures in the backyard for Riley to play on. The back yard is an accessible, integral part of our lives. And largely since Riley equates salads with leaves and has started eating both indiscriminately, we figured it was a good idea to start dumping fewer processed chemicals into the ground and air.

These days, when dandelions spring up, we use a little lawn tool to remove them. When the old mower died, I started using a push mower in its place. When gardening, we use compost and bone meal and chicken manure. When things grow in the grass that I don't like there, I stop and pull them out while mowing. And, most significantly, when grass grows in the cracks of the sidewalk, I burn it to carbon dust with a 600,000 BTU torch.

That last part may not seem to follow logically, but trust me that there are lots of weeds that are damn hard to weed. There are weird mosses and lichens that grow on every flat surface in the Northwest. There are tendrils of ivy winding in through our chain link fence in the back, threatening to choke my garden to death in the night. For all those reasons and because it's an absolute freaking thrill to wield a flame that's 1.5 feet long and invisible, I bought the torch.

Sure, I'm burning a pound or three of fossil fuels every time I use it. Sure, it makes the house smell like a weenie roast gone mildly awry for an hour or two. Sure, the neighbors come outside to see who is toting a jet engine around. But by gods, those weeds are under control. And! I'm not using poison to kill things.

Feeling like Iron Man on a rampage is just an added bonus.

1. Where the hell was Biggles?

2. dotgirl and I are getting whomped - or at least failing to ourselves whomp - in our current game of Civ4. I am all boxed in, and we are behind in the tech race, and sooner or later I'm going to just go blow the damn hell out of something. Whee tanks!

3. Work is a big ball of weird lately. My boss has departed, leaving me and my two cronies - the managers of the network and the storage/DBA teams - reporting to our Veep until the spot is filled. I am working hard to try to maintain what coherence and focus exist among our teams today; otherwise, we may lose significant ground on standardization or see some of our projects run off the rails. The infrastructure services org has made a great deal of progress in the last couple years, and I don't want to lose ground.

4. Our Cinco de Mayo beer bash is on 5/8. We will call it "Beer Bash - the Ocho." A fellow foodie and I are going to raise the bar for future beer bashes by actually making food instead of just bringing chips & salsa. Thus, this weekend I must secure and and then cook off 15 lbs of skirt steak and 15 lbs of shrimp.

5. Good night!

current mood: sleepy

1. Organic growth is good for things like forests.
2. It is not good for things like enterprise networks.
3. It's been a very long time since our network has had a nice, cleansing fire.

So the other day I was complaining about our gratuitous use of firewalls to a consultant - how we seem to run every packet we can through a firewall.

"You use your firewalls like routers, huh?" he asked, grinning.
"God! Yes."
"What do you use as firewalls, then?"
"Um. Syslog?"

Fried turkey flavored with white truffle, rosemary, and sage
Cranberry and bitter orange sauce
Chanterelle mushrooms with leeks in a gingered balsamic glaze
Wasabi mashed potatoes
Tarragon parsnips in brown butter

Or, alternately...
Happy Thanksgiving!

:D

Growing up in southern Louisiana imbued me with many talents. I can make roux. I can shuck oysters. I can use a comealong to get a car out of a ditch. What I never learned how to do, though, was fry a turkey. Our family never fried turkeys for family gatherings - my gramps was a smoking man when it came to his turkey - and while I've seen it done (and eaten the result) several times, I'd never cooked a turkey this way in a house where, say, I pay insurance premiums.

This summer, though, I planted the flag in the ground when I purchased a boiler/fryer rig. I had wanted to start doing shrimp and crawfish boils anyway, but my actual goal was fried turkey goodness for Thanksgiving. We upped the ante when we invited some friends over for T-day and asserted that we would provide the best turkey they'd ever tasted. The jig was up - we had to practice.

So! Last week we bought a practice turkey, last night I bought 5 gallons of oil at Cash & Carry, and this morning I strapped up a tarp outside over a section of lawn I don't like very much. I pulled the silly pop-up timer out of the turkey, rubbed some seasoning on (this Greek seasoning blend that I thought would be good on the skin), watched the video about how if you use too much oil or don't defrost the turkey you can set the entire world on fire, and went to town.

Oh. My. God.

Even though the bird ended up about 5-10°F too done (next time we'll go a few minutes shy of 3min/pound and let carryover cooking bring it home), the meat was amazingly juicy (way better than roasted, even with the foil-on-the-breast thing), the skin was stunningly good, and oh man will it be good on sandwiches.

Since we were just playing with the cooking method, we didn't get fancy with brining or injected marinades; I think we'll at least try the latter on Thursday to impart more flavor. My friend's parents used crab boil and my brother likes butter and Tony's, but we may go for an herbed olive oil kind of thing.

Anyone else ever do this? What are your tips or favorite seasoning/flavoring elements?

current mood: full