Cascadia Summit – Sounders vs. Timbers

I went to the preseason Cascadia Summit match between the Sounders and the Timbers last night. Thank you to Calissa for accompanying me. I’m really anticipating the season, although unfortunately I won’t make the opener versus the Galaxy on the 15th. Would have been nice to see all three of Juan Pablo Angel, David Beckham, and Landon Donovan.

The match last night? No so pretty. My impression from the stands was that the Sounders have not improved on their problems from last year.

  • Passing. The Sounders couldn’t pass to save their lives. Even simple passes kept being sent too far in front of or too far behind their intended recipients. Long passes were invariably intercepted. That might be the result of playing on a small pitch where there isn’t a lot of separation in space. However, the Timbers got some long passes in just fine. Short passes were often directly to the feet of the Timbers. I think the longest passing sequence was maybe 6 or 7 touches.
  • Ball control. Also awful. When passes were on target, the recipient couldn’t control it, a Timber would swoop in and take it away. When our center backs knocks balls in the air down, the ball wouldn’t fall to us. They couldn’t get it out of the final third, and they couldn’t get it to a Sounder.

  • Finishing. The shots taken were rarely on frame unless they were softly hit. Fernandez somehow managed to take a shot from 4 yards out that went 10 feet over the top of the goal. There had already been a foul called, so it wouldn’t have counted. You can have a shot defended from that range, but you really shouldn’t miss over the top. I’m a big fan of testing the keeper. If you don’t have an open shot, hit it hard on frame and make the keeper work. Then someone can swoop in and get rebound shots or get a corner. We had a lot of corner kicks in the match, but not from saved shots.

On the plus side, our defense was actually pretty good despite giving up two goals. Portland’s Kenny Cooper looks really pretty good, but Parke and Hurtado were up to the task. Alonso was a hustling monster as always. Montero worked his butt off too. That’s an improvement over his first year or so when he didn’t always keep playing when he lost the ball.

I have tickets to the Whitecaps match on Sunday. I’m looking forward to that. The games are fun even when we don’t play well. (Well, except for that Galaxy game last year where the Sounders just gave up.)

Opinions and analysis are the product of armchair coaching by an unqualified amateur. This is worth exactly how much you paid for it.

Working out goal

Well, I didn’t get started quite like I wanted, but I’m moving on it now. Sometimes the universe conspires against you and the best thing to do is use it as inspiration.

When you are out of shape getting you’re heart rate up for cardio is really easy. According to the machine 32 minutes, 3500 strides, 292 calories.

Also, using the phone keyboard feels very odd with the left tip of my thumb still healing. I can’t feel the keys normally. Just a tingly sensation.

Shrimp and Stuffing Bake

Back to cooking some new things for me. This one is based off a recipe from Better Homes and Gardens Biggest Book of Casseroles (page 105 if you care). Other than the soup, little else is pre-made.

The recipe calls for frozen or fresh medium shrimp, but I prefer smaller shrimp in dishes. So I got canned since I didn’t see any of the small shrimp in the freezer. The downside is there’s a lot of salt in canned shrimp. I figure boiling the shrimp removes some of the salt though. I also avoided the condensed soup in the recipe because the only condensed version of cream of celery at Whole Foods was super high in salt. If I remember correctly, it was about 33% U.S. R.D.A. per serving. So I got an uncondensed kind and used a little bit more. It was pretty thick stuff, so I only increased the amount used by a couple of ounces over the book’s recipe. I bought bread made in store, which unfortunately doesn’t list the sodium content. It is the third ingredient on the list though. I’m thinking the sodium I don’t know about in the bread is balanced somewhat by the amount of sodium taken out by boiling the shrimp.

  • 12 oz. canned shrimp (1980 mg sodium)
  • 1 celery stalk
  • ½ large onion
  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • about 12 ounces creamy celery soup (720 mg sodium)
  • ¼ cup milk (32 mg sodium)
  • ½ teaspoon sage
  • ¼ teaspoon dried thyme
  • dash of pepper
  • 2 eggs
  • 10 oz. crusty bread loaf
  1. Cut bread into cubes/small chunks
  2. Bake bread at 350° for 15 to 25 minutes to dry it out/firm it up
  3. Boil shrimp for about 3 minutes (if fresh/frozen, until they are opaque)
  4. Chop the celery
  5. Chop the onion
  6. Cook celery and onion in butter until tender (can use the same as the shrimp)
  7. Add soup, milk, sage, thyme (crush first), and pepper
  8. Beat eggs
  9. Add eggs to the concoction
  10. Mix well
  11. Fold in bread chunks
  12. Fold in shrimp
  13. Transfer to 1.5 quart casserole dish
  14. Bake covered for 30 minutes at 350°
  15. Bake uncovered for 15 minutes.
  16. Let it cool.

Pretty tasty is the result. About 4 servings. About 690 mg sodium per serving, done my way.

Also, now I know basically how to make stuffing. Can’t say it tastes a whole lot better than boxed though, which is cheaper. This has less salt. Without the shrimp the price might be comparable and the salt in this really a lot less.

And yeah, I know I’ve been harping on the salt a lot lately. It’s been one year today since my grandfather died, and I’m basically of the opinion that a high salt diet was the proximate cause of his heart attacks in the last year. The doctors told him on a couple of E.R. visits that salt intake was what caused his shortness of breath that prompted the 911 call. Can’t know what would have been; without the salt it might have been just as bad. Still, I owe it to myself to make these changes now rather than when I have heart problems at 83.

Negative interest rates

One of the problems with the economy is that we are up against the zero lower bound. For my non-economics inclined friends, one of the ways that the government (specifically the Federal Reserve, our central bank) manages things is by raising or lowering interest rates. If inflation gets too high, they raise interest rates. If unemployment gets too high, they lower them. In other words, to combat high inflation, they put people out of work. To combat high unemployment they allow inflation to rise.

However, unemployment has been high in the U.S. for long enough that the Fed has run out of room to lower interest rates. It’s been at 0.25% since December 2008. They can’t lower it any more, which causes all sorts of issues. Paul Krugman has been blogging about this for 3 or 4 years.

However, it turns out that the zero lower bound is more psychological than real. I missed it at the time, but Sweden instituted a negative interest rate in August 2009. Banks that banked their money with the Swedish central bank actually paid a penalty to do so. I don’t think they went negative on interest rates to loan money, which might be more complicated. The Fed funds rate above is more like the second, but the two interest rates should move in tandem. (Couldn’t find a link to the comparable Fed rate.)

What penalizing banks for saving money does is make it worth their while to loan it out, where they can make money.

And what’s the result been? Sweden’s highest quarterly growth rate ever.

The Sorensons, found

One of the first branches of the family that I worked on was that of my grandmother, Lillian Solle. My aunts Sue and Jane put together a book of mementos about the Weiss, Solle and Sorenson families and gave it to me in 2004. Prior to that I knew nothing about my grandmother. She and my grandfather divorced in 1966. After that, according to my mother, Lillian would have nothing to do with the family.

I took the information in the memory book about Lillian and her parents and their parents, and started gathering what I could find. Lillian’s mother was Flora Sorenson, the 4th of Nels Hansen Sorenson and Katherine Hansen’s living children. Nels and Katherine emigrated to the U.S. in July of 1883, and settled in Madison, Wisconsin. They built a house at 1118 E. Gorham St., and lived there until they died. They were both from Langeland, Denmark, an island about 2/3 the size of Whidbey Island.

I’ve documented a number of other descendants of Nels and Katherine, some of whom make for a really good story. But I was kind of stuck at finding more information on their parents. I assumed the church in Denmark kept pretty good records, like the church in Sweden did. But I didn’t know how to obtain them and, being swamped with other branches, hadn’t pursued it yet. (I’m not kidding about being swamped. Click the thumbnail to the right to see my Windows desktop filled with icons of newspaper articles I’ve saved in the last few days and that I haven’t yet cataloged.)

All I’d found from Denmark was a record on the Sorensons in the Danish Emigration Archives that showed when they left. It’s just an index, and I haven’t yet purchased a copy of the actual records.

A couple of days ago, I came across a profile on Ancestry.com that looked very much like it matched up with the Sorenson family as of the time they left Denmark. It was entered by a woman in Denmark. I wrote to her, then sat on pins and needles hoping for a reply. I get replies about half the time when I write to relatives I find. One in Sweden wrote back once, and then didn’t reply after that when he realized I wasn’t going to pay him. Like a few genealogy people, he’d turned his hobby into a business and was looking only to sell what he knew about the family. I have living relatives in Sweden who will correspond without payment, so I didn’t bother. I was hoping this woman wasn’t one of that group, because she’s the only person in Denmark I’ve found so far who is connected to the family.

I got a reply this morning! She traces her ancestry to Rasmus Jensen Jørgensen. He married Nels’ mother Marthe Kirstine Nielsen after she had Nels by someone else. So we aren’t related by blood, but do have some of our trees in common.

I had found Niels’ marriage and the birth of his two sons and then suddenly I could not find him anywhere. I should have guess that he emmigrated. Two of his halfsisters did.

So now I have a bunch of information to add. A lot.

Taqwacores

I had lunch at Louisa’s today, and grabbed a Stranger rather than read my book. The Stranger Suggests for tonight was The Taqwacores, based on a book I read 2 or 3 years ago that I loved. So I headed up to the Northwest Film Forum tonight to see it (last night showing).

It’s hard to be as good as the book, because they can’t just fit everything in. There was less punk in it than the book. So some of it was more like Muslim deadbeats living together rather than Muslim punks. And it was choppy; the character progression wasn’t smooth. Both issues really attributable to being able to fit less story in. But they kept all the main characters, and the best scenes. The acting was really superb, particularly the “straight-edge” Muslim punk who you could just see the anger at having to live with less devout Muslims steaming off him. And the overall effect was just as good as the book: outcasts trying to reconcile their heritage they don’t want to give up with their rebellion which rejects a lot of that heritage.

Also, I swear the roof of the building they lived in coulda been the same roof as in Clerks. There’s just not a hell of a lot of difference between tarred roofs of brick buildings.

Magic Fields proportional image resizing bug

I’m posting this in the hope that it becomes sufficiently Google ranked that other folks who have had the problem can find the answer explain, as the sources of this information were buried in a Google Group and were not complete answers.

I am attempting to build a new book review blog. I want to have book cover images attached to posts, as well as a lot of other meta-data. My current plan is to use the Magic Fields WordPress plugin.

I created a new MF custom panel called ‘Review’ and added a field called ‘Cover’ with the type of ‘Image (Upload Media)’. Then I used get_image(‘cover’, 1, 1, 1, $post_id, ‘h=150&w=150’) to retrieve the image in my theme. This seems to do a ‘zoom-crop’, which is a term I haven’t heard before (call me clueless). What I got was an image that where the smallest dimension (in this case, the width) was reduced to 150, and the extra from the other dimension is just cropped off. What I want is for both height and width to be reduced until both are below 150.

There’s a zoom crop option, that can be forced off. I tried that: get_image(‘cover’, 1, 1, 1, $post_id, ‘h=150&w=150&zc=0’). The result is the upper left corner of the cover.

The solution as reported by Brandon Sorg is to replace part of the code of of the Magic Field file MF_thumb.php. Lines 118 to 174 of the original file get replaced with this much smaller piece of code:

	        // don't crop, just resize using $dest_w x $dest_h as a maximum bounding box 
	        $crop_w = $orig_w; 
	        $crop_h = $orig_h; 
	        $s_x = 0; 
	        $s_y = 0; 
	        list( $new_w, $new_h ) = wp_constrain_dimensions( $orig_w, $orig_h, $dest_w, $dest_h ); 
        }

MF_thumb.txt is the complete file (with .php replaced with .txt). Download, rename to MF_thumb.php and copy over the file in your plugins/magic-fields directory. Please check the contents of the file and verify them yourself, as I take no responsibility if it does not work as intended.

After that, the zc=0 in get_image must still be used: get_image(‘cover’, 1, 1, 1, $post_id, ‘h=150&w=150&zc=0’)

The next time you upgrade Magic Fields to a new version, your changes will be overwritten. Hopefully they’ll have fixed the problem by then. If not, you’ll need to re-do the changes. Which is why I hate hate hate fixing bugs by hacking around someone’s original code. I do not like forking.

WordPress as a CMS? Not so much.

Over the last year or so, Matt Mullenweg, Automattic (his company), and a coterie of bloggers who develop the WordPress platform have been claiming WordPress is a content management system.

I gotta call bullshit on that.

What they’ve done is build a back end (if you use the right plugins) that can be used to create content.

What WordPress can’t do right now, so far as I can tell, is deliver the content. So far, I’ve seen only one plugin that lets you do layout, Carrington Build ($499). I’ve seen no plugins that let you display generic meta-data. Lots and lots that let you create generic meta-data. But every single one that I’ve seen requires that user modify code in a theme to display the information.

To illustrate: let’s say I want to build a book review web site in WordPress. Now let’s say I want to have an index of reviews where all reviews of a certain author are displayed, sorted by author using a standard name sort (surname, given name). Really not easily done without writing code.

I have any number of plugins that allow me to add that author information. None so far for displaying it. Not without writing code.

And I’m pretty sure that moving the created data from one plugin to another would be a complete pain in the ass, because there’s no standard format for storing that.

I so wish the Drupal user interface were comprehensible. (Maybe it is now, I haven’t looked at it in a year plus.)

Magic Fields

I haven’t posted on my goals in a while. Still actually working on them, though not as hard. This is an update to my goal of getting my blog moved to the new domain with new features by January’s end. It didn’t happen.

I did get the author reading event list moved over to it’s new web site. What that entailed was:

  • figuring out which event listing plugin to use. I ended up sticking with Events Manager. Marcus Sykes has taken over development for David Benini and done some good work with it. He appears to have fixed some of the problems with the old plugin. I’d had to hack around them and upgrading the plugin meant losing my hacks. Looks like I won’t need the hacks anymore.
  • Moving the events listing to the main page of the site. That part was pretty easy.
  • Create a new page for displaying blog posts there. If you don’t have it on the home page, you gotta have it somewhere else (or not have it). It wasn’t hard, but it does require a bit of code hacking. The problem will be if I change my theme. I will lose the code hack I did. I don’t know why there isn’t a built in way to do that.
  • Create an event submission page. The old page just listed an email address. The submission page lets me add fields like “event start time” and “location” that some omitted when they emailed me.
  • Add events. Have to do this normally. No big deal.
  • Write the first blog posts. Basically this is just a weekly post of the upcoming week’s events so anyone who wants to get new events can read them via RSS rather than having to remember to visit the site.

After taking that live, I decided to let everything sit for a bit. See how it worked out. I didn’t want to be in the middle of moving the rest of the site to its domain and have the readings site go south. I have a few ideas for additional items for the readings site that may or may not happen. Stuff like email subscriptions, reviews of readings, recordings of readings, ads, promotional author stuff (interviews, guest blogs, etc.), and a few other smaller technical items. But they will all wait to see how it goes and definitely won’t happen until after I get the rest of the book site to its new domain.

Everything seems stable enough so I’m actively working on that. Hence the title. My current task is to figure out how to integrate meta-information about the books and other stuff I read.

before, I’ve just posted it in the text of the review. That has some drawbacks though, such as being unable to extract it in a meaningful way (index of authors, put it in the sidebar), and also requires that I have post templates to cut and paste from. The latter is a problem, because the best plugin for that hasn’t been updated in a while. The author decided to go commercial with the plugin, and his commercial sense isn’t so great. I paid for the commercial version even, but if he’s since done new versions he hasn’t notified me and his site forums are now filled with spam. And some more minor features of it stopped working with WordPress 3.0.

Supposedly WordPress 3.0 has support for custom post types (i.e., things like reviews), but it doesn’t have any UI for them. You are supposed to use a plugin for it. Which there are a billiondy of, and none of them seem to be very well documented. I’m currently testing out one called Magic Fields, which doesn’t even appear to use custom post types. It might do what I want though. I have to hack the theme though to display the meta-information. I’d rather not do that, though since I’m using Carrington Framework, I only have to write overrides for very small parts of the theme.

Anyway, WordPress as a CMS has a lot of work left to do in its usability and documentation.

Vodka sauce

Yesterday I made a pasta sauce not from a jar for the first time ever. I’d planned on making it on Monday, but what with my thumb getting partially removed and the last dish lasting longer than I expected…

Since my basic cookbooks don’t have a vodka sauce recipe in them, I turned to the internet. AllRecipes.com had a vodka sauce recipe, and that’s what I started with. Steps below are how I made it, which is not exactly what was in the linked recipe.

  • 1 cup vodka
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • ¾ pound prosciutto
  • 3 heaping teaspoons minced garlic
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
  • One 28 ounce can diced tomatoes
  • One 15 ounce can no salt added tomato sauce
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  1. chop prosciutto
  2. chop parsley
  3. chop basil
  4. heat olive oil in a large pan
  5. sauté prosciutto, garlic, parsley, and basil until prosciutto is evenly brown
  6. add vodka
  7. simmer 10 minutes
  8. add diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, and 1 cup water
  9. simmer 15 minutes
  10. add cream
  11. cook 2 minutes

I’m guessing it’ll make six servings. Four so far, and it looks like about two are left.

The sauce was thinner than I expected. Next time I’ll just omit the cup of water. And drop the prosciutto down to a quarter or half pound at most. Normally I’d have used no salt added diced tomatoes too, but when I was poor last month, Deirdre was kind enough to donate a can of diced tomatoes to me. This kind would actually qualify as low-sodium under F.D.A. rules, but when you add it all up it’s still quite a lot.

Salt content:

  • Prosciutto: 7680 mg
  • Diced tomatoes: 1540 mg
  • No salt added tomato sauce: 70 mg
  • Cream: 160 mg

Total sodium: 9450 mg
Per serving: 1575 mg

That does not include the pasta. Definitely up there in salt. Cutting down the prosciutto will cut a lot from that. Not sure if there are lower salt prosciuttos out there.