No biting the personnel

This page has been going around work lately. The video is hosted by YouTube. I’ll admit I find it incredibly powerful and inspiring. No, it’s not a fake.

Turn up the volume and take 4 minutes of your time today to watch it. You won’t regret it.

I was in Montreal this past weekend for a friend’s wedding. Enough happened that I’ve decided to write about it. Plus I’ve learned that AM reads it to keep in touch.
 
The wedding itself was a blast. The ceremony was one of the most original I’ve had the chance to attend. I especially enjoyed the 4 consecutive readings: each in a different language. French speakers spoke a lot about the French poem afterwards but, in truth, every text was great. Even if you didn’t speak the language, you could feel the emotion in the speakers’ voice. It was very moving.
 
What struck me the most was how international the attendees were. The bride is from Montreal and met her husband in Boston. His family is from Puerto-Rico. They now live in Oxford. I got to chat with people from New York, Boston, Mountain View, Vancouver (on her way to Lausanne, Switzerland), Martha’s Vineyard, Nova Scotia, Israel, Montreal and many others. The jobs were as diverse.
 
Besides the wedding, I also caught up with many - but not all - of my friends in Montreal. It’s interesting when you see people twice a year to hear and see how lives evolve. You finally meet the girlfriends and boyfriends (or you learn they’re single again). The baby I saw over the holiday is now walking.
 
I got asked a lot whether I miss Montreal and if I like Seattle. I miss Montreal: the smile on people’s face and the city’s energy and vibe. Bars and dance clubs are open until 3 AM. On Thursday evening I went dancing until 2 AM. On Friday I chatted over drinks with friends in a downtown bar until closing time then went out for poutine. Downtown was packed. I got home at 4:20 AM. There’s one or more festival every weekend: the Jazz Festival finished last week and the Just For Laughs started a few days ago.  This morning I was awake (and re-energized) at 6 AM. The sunshine makes such a difference.
 
Would I want to move back is the next question I hear a lot. I would not. Funnily (or sadly), most understand to some degree. Some are even planning their own move out of the province. It was a great place to grow up in, it’s nice to vacation too but you wouldn’t want a career there. The locations I named earlier? These people all once lived in Montreal. Yeah, brain drain is a reality. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of youthful energy still floating around. It’s just fewer and fewer of my acquaintances. Whatever this crush is, it’s even starting to affect French-Canadians (who, in my statistics, have historically remained in the province).
 
Interestingly, my grumpy Francophone friends have different reasons than the Anglophone one’s. The complaints range from: work culture that doesn’t encourage the “go-getter” personality type, family and friend mentalities that push down the dreamer or over-achiever, a medical system that’s falling apart, a lack of professionalism in some professional circles, the increasing number of bums and migrants, etc.  Crime is becoming an interesting topic. A man died from machine gun wounds at the other end of NDG a few days ago. That’s only a few miles from my parent’s place. A machine gun! A friend just bought an Audi A3 which he showed me proudly. It is a nice car. The insurance rate isn’t too high either; not because he’s got a good driving record or because statistics show that Audi A3s don’t get into accidents as often but because it’s not a popular car for thieves in the city: the parts don’t resell well. Work ethics and employment policies are another interesting topic. For all the evil things we hear and say about performance evaluations, I know now that I wouldn’t want to go back to a world where my worth to an organization isn’t directly tied to my performance and measured mostly objectively. I don’t think I could live now with the idea of working x number of years before pension eligibility.  Montreal is a changing city.

Year after year I keep wondering: what are the great jobs in Montreal? Law firms are still big business but, besides them, where do you go if you’re young and willing to kill yourself at work to change the world and get rewarded for it? I hear even investment banking doesn’t pay that well since there are so few openings for the number of candidates compared to Toronto.
 
It’s a weird feeling that I can’t completely put into words. I doubt I’m the only one thinking about this. Enough for now. I’m back in Seattle.

“He’s not getting the real one; I can’t believe people like that really exist,” she said looking at me.

Oops, I missed the chance to help.

I’m not friendly when I travel. The bubble closes and nothing will reach in. My mind narrows on a task. Frankly, I don’t want to socialize: I don’t want to talk or play card games. I’m a very bad traveling companion. You wouldn’t even want to tag along when I’m walking around the airport.

In fact, you could be a single woman who came off of the same AC8100 flight from Seattle I was on. You could be stuck in a very boring one-way conversation with a random guy (who also came off of that flight). Said companion even approached with the truly creative line: so, where are you going today? Sadly, you could be in line with him behind me at customs for 90 minutes; I wouldn’t notice.

To whoever you were, I’m sorry. It would have been easy for me to step in: my brain was elsewhere.

A few Sundays ago we decided to make one of our favorite dishes: gumbo. For this, we use the recipe from Cook’s Illustrated book. The results are always amazing and there’s always enough left overs for a few days. Cooking gumbo, it turns out, takes a while but is not difficult. The biggest unknown is the roux.

Here’s the step on roux from the recipe:

Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or large, heavy bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat until it registers 200 degrees on an instant-read thermometer, 1 1/2 to 2 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium and gradually stir in the flour with a wooden spatula or spoon, working out any lumps that form. Continue stirring constantly, reaching into the corners of the pan, until the mixture has a toasty aroma is deep reddish brown, about the color of an old copper penny or between the colors of milk chocolate and dark chocolate, about 20 minutes. (The roux will thin as it cooks; it is begins to smoke, remove the pan from the heat and stir the roux constantly to cool slightly.)

The first time we did the recipe, it took us more than 80 minutes to get the roux to a copper color. We got a nice copper roux without ever burning the oil. You need dedication to your stomach though to move a wooden spatula in oil and flour for that long. You can’t let the roux alone otherwise clumps of flour will form. The entire recipe took more than 4 hours to complete.

So what’s the trick to obtaining a dark roux in 20 minutes or less? Notice the words “reduce the heat to medium?” If you raised the temperature to 200 degrees then reduce the heat, will the temperature keep rising or will it drop below 200 degrees? The recipe doesn’t say. The sentence is misleading. This time, having other plans for my evening, I cheated; I raised the heat up to 350 degrees after adding the flour. By continuously stirring and monitoring the temperature, I kept the mixture right below the burning point. Low and behold the white roux became a dark roux in ~18 minutes.

There are two lessons here:

1. Although America’s test kitchen’s recipes are wonderful, their recipes are often misleading and confusing. Read between the lines.
2. Get yourself an instant read thermometer.

P.S.: Our other pet-peeve with Americas]’s Test Kitchen is that, in their big book, they didn’t total the preparation and cooking time for the recipes. You have to read the recipe very carefully ahead of time. Otherwise, what you think will take an hour turns into 3.

After the last seminar at the Seattle Cheese Festival, I met up with acquaintances who had been wandering the market. S caught up with us. The four of us spent the next hour sampling the cheeses. S usually doesn’t like cheese: the taste and texture are foreign to her palate. I’d never thought of cheese as an acquired taste but it makes sense. If your parents immigrated from europe, you probably ate a lot of cheese unavailable at the regular grocery store. The festival was perfect of her.

Soon out-of-town friends of our acquaintances joined us. They’d already been walking the concourse for some time and had bought one cheese: a camembert from Mt. Townsend Creamery. I’d also bought myself one cheese to bring home that day. The same cheese actually. This camembert has the usual attributes of a camembert: a white rubbery-like exterior, a yellow-ish or beige creamy interior which changes from soft at the edge to hard in the middle. The selection was still too young to be runny and pungent. It was a lot milder, soft (yet still firm) and salty. The light flavor of salt adds a nice contrast to the camembert’s classic taste. Out of all of the cheeses of the festival, we’d both decided on this hidden gem.

Once home, I couldn’t resist and cut my self a slice. Out of habit I also cut one for S. When I think of accessible cheeses, Camembert doesn’t make the list. Surprise of surprises, S likes it. She likes it enough that since then we have bought 3 at the farmer’s market. Now I need to convince her that Pont-Levesque and Munster are only slight variations.

As a newcomer artisan cheese maker, Mt Townsend Creamery has some incredible cheeses. The creamery is only 10 months old. They’re based in Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula. They make 3 cheeses: a tomme, a camembert and specialty cheese. Their tomme is also wonderful although they don’t yet have any aged one. We’ll certainly buy more and more of them in the future. We wish them luck and, if the opportunity arises, we’ll go visit.

P.S.: Seattle Times review.

A few weeks I spent the good part of a day at the Seattle Cheese Festival. The event is organized by Delaurenti - we love that store - in Pike place Market. The festival is a great opporunity for all to discover wonderful cheeses and meet local and foreign producers. In addition to the concourse, there are the educational seminars. This year I attended two.

The first was a tasting of washed rind cheeses and a conversation with Hervé Mons. Mr. Mons was one of the 4 winners of the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France in the cheese section in 2000. It was the first time that this discipline was judged in the contest. In short, this title is a recognition by their peers that an individual is at the top of their field in the country. Quite an honnor. Mr. Mons was at the cheese festival representing the Cooperative Isigny Sainte-Mere. They make some of the best known French cheeses including my favorite, le Pont-Levesque, which is often considered “stronger” than camembert (something they also make). If you find their cheeses in the US, you’ll notice that they clearly stamp it Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC); the same laws that protect french wines. Champagne - aka sparkling wine anywhere else - is a good example of this. All of this to say that Mr. Mons makes a great speaker: he knows his subject matter and is passionate about it.

The second seminar was a pairing of Washington wines and cheeses. It was setup as a panel of local cheese makers, local wine makers and 2 food critics. The panel was hosted by someone from Beecher’s. I’m not a huge fan of Beecher’s cheese although I recognize they’ve done a lot for the local cheese industry. It’s hard to walk by their store in Pike Place Market without stopping in to taste their products and watch them work. To their credit, their cheese was one of the best in the wine tasting: it enhanced almost every wine paired with it. One of the critic though was Laura Werlin, author of The All American Cheese and Wine Book. She makes her living educating people about cheese and wine. She ran the panel for the same seminar last year. Her strengh I think is in helping the non-initiated understand how to taste cheese (and wine); what are the motions; what smells, tastes, textures and colors to look for; what’s important to you. After all, as she says, it’s all about you: did you enjoy the combination? I won’t list the wines or the cheeses mostly because I don’t think the experiment was a success: very few of the combinations tasted significantly better than their parts separately. However, it was still a lot of fun. The room was packed and you could see people enjoyed themselves while learning a lot.

Finally, there was the cheese concourse: an opportunity to try a lot of different cheeses. Whatever your taste might be, I’m sure you would have found something. Sadly, I did not see Pont-Levesque. There were also few aged cheeses (typically more expensive). The various representatives in the main section had stuck to cheeses they knew almost everyone would enjoy. There was a special section for local producers of small volume. While the rest of the concourse was free, this section had an entry fee of 5$. Out of all the cheeses, this is were I found the hidden gem of the festival. More on it later.

We saw it last night. Why? Because we were in Ballard, walked by the Majestic and said “Why not?”

My rating fits the Rotten Tomatoe rating. It was decent but not incredible. To me, one segment made it worth the admission price: the Vatican setup. That was the closest setup to the impossible mission of the old TV series. It felt nice.

What are we talking about the day after?

1. Why is the wife a nurse? It seems so stereotypical. If Ethan Hunt was a woman, would she be marrying a nurse or a doctor?
2. Where do they get the Program Management skills to run their missions so neatly? Wouldn’t it be great if projects at work were run as tightly? You’d announce to the entire team a realistic ETA that fits the team’s needs; you’d meet your ETA; if there was an unforeseen problem, you’d handle it without revising the ETA. Moreover, you’d always look good at it.
3. There’s one scene where Tom Cruise stands at night on the edge of a building’s roof. I swear the scene is setup like the movie cut-scene from any modern computer games. The hero stands on the highest point in sight, back straight, strong posture, determined look on his face as he surveys the land.
4. The Vatican has incredible bathrooms.
5. Interestingly, early in the movie you see him riding a motorcycle without a helmet. As I saw that scene, I thought: stuntman. Yeah, I’m surprised, Cruise did all the stunts in the movie himself (supposedly) including bungie jumping and letting a jack-knifed semi go over him.

The details are more interesting than the movie.

A good friend of mine lives in Geneva. Last December, I added a stop-over in that town on my way home for the holidays. When I go on vacation, I’m always beat for the first few days. This was no exception. Our plans to go skiing and to stay out late all fell apart. The weather didn’t help: it was gray and damp, very much like Seattle. Yet I remember visiting the old city and the public markets, climbing up the towers of the cathedral, taking a boat across lake Leman and walking back along its shores. The first picture I posted on this blog was from that trip.

Which is why I was excited to read this trip report. My friend’s mom was in Geneva not long ago. I admit: her descriptions of the city and its region bring back a lot of memory. I went there. I saw those sites. I envy her for her trip; she had more sunlight than I had.

Maybe its time for me to take a vacation.

This evening we saw V for Vendetta. What a wonderful movie. It’s not too cheerful nor too dark. It has a message. It tugs at your emotions and your brain yet has enough high speed movement for the action fans. It has twists. Overall, well worth both the time and the money. I’ll remember the movie for a while which, to me, is the real test of how much I liked it.
Mostly, I found it had plenty of hidden gems. For example, there’s one scene when Natalie Portman is wandering in V’s lair for the first time. In the background starts playing this jazz song. Within a few notes I leaned over and whispered: Cry me a river. Yet I couldn’t identify the voice. For one of the most sung jazz classics, this was one rendition I wasn’t sure I’d heard before. It nagged at me. Even when the song was played a second time, again, I was lost. At least, I thought, they didn’t have Diana Krall singing. Her deep voice would have been too much for the scene I think.
Coming back home I tracked down the artist: Julie London. Yes, per this wikipedia entry, she was the first to sing this famous song! What a nice touch for the movie. How sad though that we don’t hear her work often anymore.

The Wall Street Journal has an article discussing the latest effort to change the international image of the American people. Supposedly, after 9/11, the newly appointed undersecretary of state for public diplomacy tried to do this with a short lived publicity campaign describing the integration of muslisms in the U.S. It didn’t get picked up outside the US.

This effort instead aims to inform traveling American business people of some basic cultural and behavioral differences between their homeland and the rest of the world: what shouldn’t you say or do. 

This past Saturday, while on my morning run, I had a long discussion with an acquaintance about her time visiting Paris last Fall. Somehow, many Americans I speak to are convinced that the French hate them and will mistreat them. Yet, whenever the topic comes up with someone that has traveled to France, there are few complaints. The WSJ has a 9 point sample list from the non-profit running the new campaign. It’s fascinating since most of the suggestions you could come up with yourself or, at least, you could find in any good travel book. They are exactly what I heard this weekend. For example:

No slang: “Even casual profanity is unacceptable.”

Religious restraint: In many countries, religion is “not a subject for public discussion.”

Political restraint: “Steer clear… if someone is attacking U.S. politicians or policies. Agree to disagree.”

No great secret here: when in a foreign land, use common sense.

On a different note, I liked this one:

Slow down: “We talk fast, eat fast, move fast, live fast. Many cultures do not.”

Since I moved here, I’ve learned to slow down when speaking English. English in the US is spoken at a slower rate than Spanish or French. Food for thought: I also believe that French in Montreal is spoken faster than French in many other places.

WSJ article.