Foods that should cancel out (but don't) and other culinary musings

Why is it that if you drink too much caffeinated coffee, drinking a decaff doesn't cancel some of the caffeine out?

Similarly, I have found that a pound of pasta and a pound of anti-pasto don't mutually annihilate in a burst of energy, as the amateur physicist in me expected.

In the supermarket I noticed sugar-free decaffeinated coke. What does that leave? A can of fizzy caramel-flavored water?

On a related topic, four kinds of food I have learned to avoid are:

-- Anything with the word "food" in its name, like "cheese food product". If they have to tell you its food, there's something seriously worrying there. (Originally I thought that the rule should be "don't eat anything with the word 'product' in its name, but eventually I realized that the Food part is much scarier than the Product part.)

-- Anything with a Best Before date measured in years (unless its alcohol)

-- Anything whose label has to tell you what it isn't, like "not a dairy product"

-- Specialities of the region. When I was younger and more naive, I thought that when these words appeared on a menu in some remote little restaurant it meant you were getting some authentic local speciality that was so good, it was a carefully guarded secret hidden from the wider world. Wrong. It turns out its code for "parts of the animal nobody else would be crazy enough to eat". If you're really lucky it won't actually be recognizable as the animal part in question, unlike the time I thought that pig's trotters sounded "authentic".

Haggis is probably the ultimate example of a regional speciality. To make haggis, you basically take a sheep, shear it (optional), stick your hand down its throat, take a firm grip on its stomach, then pull firmly until it turns inside out. Stuff the result with cereal and anything else that happens to be handy, then boil. Serve to passing Englishmen or anybody else foolish to be willing to force down a "traditional" dish.

Small company, big company, midsize company

During my career I've worked at companies of all sizes from small startup to global. And I've come to the conclusion that for the sake of my sanity I should avoid midsize. At a small company you can get things done yourself. At a big company there are people and systems to do them for you. At a midsize company... well, consider what happens when the 'B' key breaks on your keyboard:

Small company: You tell your boss, "I'm just going down to Fry's/Circuit City/Best Buy for a new keyboard." Your boss says, "OK, while you're out could you pick up a terabyte of SATA drives for the server, and bring back Chinese food for everybody." After lunch, you are up and running again.

Large company: You call the support hotline to request a new keyboard. The next day a technician hand-delivers it to your cubicle, installs it, and upgrades your keyboard driver. He manually tests all 104 keys before leaving. A week later you get an email asking you to rate your satisfaction with the support service provided.

Medium company: Your oss tells you that you aren't allowed to uy your own keyoard as it violates the security policy on ringing employee-owned equipment into the workplace. He has heard of "keylogger" trojans and is worried your keyoard might e infected. ut the company has no process to order a replacement keyoard. You can only order a complete replacement PC, and there's no udget for that. For the next two years, until your computer is due for replacement, you avoid typing messages that require the letter ''... the letter ''... Damn.

John Allen Muhammad Goes Free

John Allen Muhammad, the Washington DC sniper, was today sentenced to life by a Virginia court. Since the courts in Maryland had already sentenced him to death, his attorney argued that the sentences should cancel each other out. District attorneys for the two states agreed to call it a wash and the judge immediately set Muhammad free.

Extreme Makeover: Fox Edition

Continuing its practice of completely independently coming up with a similar concept to other networks' reality shows, Fox has announced its own twist on ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. In the Fox version, the design team finds a family that is mean, spiteful, and hated by all its neighbors. While the family is away on vacation, they tear down their house.

And that's the end of the show.

Today is Smunday

I realized that I spend my entire weekend doing chores and chasing after my son, so I need a day between Sunday and Monday to actually relax. So I've invented an extra day called Smunday, which fits between Sunday and Monday.

I realize that my new eight day week may be a tad inconvenient for the rest of the world, but I figure everybody could use an extra day -- and in my new scheme, you get to choose where to take it. Those of you still young enough to party might want to have Fraturday between Friday and Saturday, so that you don't waste Saturday because you got in at 2am, slept till lunchtime, and were useless until you'd had several cups of coffee and had thrown up some toast and orange juice.

Rhode Island Embarks On $20M Statewide Wireless Network

"The $20 million Rhode Island Wireless Innovation Networks (RI-WINs) is expected to be fully in place by 2007, providing wireless connectivity throughout state."


Rhode Island? Is it just me, or does that seem like a lot of money for half a dozen Linksys wireless APs and a couple of range extenders? You could probably cover the whole state with two pre-N APs...

Keith Richards falls out of tree

I don't know about you, I thought Keith Richards had been out of his tree for decades...