Don't get me wrong- I enjoy a side of bacon as much as the next omnivore. But since Ev's coming to visit, I decided to go looking for some tasty vegan recipes to make while she's here. I do like the vegan food: vegan donuts in Seattle, vegan Thai food in Seattle, vegan comfort food in Berkeley. In the process I discovered that some of my favorite recipes are, in fact, actually vegan.
Beer Bread (from Jane):
- 3 cups flour
- 1/4 - 1/2 cup sugar
- 3 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 12 oz beer
Mix dry ingredients well. Add beer and mix until thoroughly combined. Put into loaf pan and bake at 375 for 50 minutes - 1 hour.
Spinach coconut dal (serves 4):
- 1 and 1/2 cup red lentils
- 3 and 1/2 cups water
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp turmeric
- 1/2 tsp chili powder
- 1 lb fresh spinach, chopped
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp mustard seeds
- 1 tsp garam masala
- 1/2 cup coconut milk
Boil the water and add salt, lentils, turmeric, chili powder, turn heat down to med/low. While the lentils are cooking, saute the onion in the olive oil, cumin, and mustard seeds until the onion is transparent. Add the onions and spices to the lentils, and then add the spinach to the lentils. Simmer lentils until soft, then add the garam masala and coconut milk. Serve.
Moroccan Stew (serves 4):
- 1/3 cup olive oil
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 2-3 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp turmeric
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp cayenne
- 1/2 tsp paprika
- 1 tbsp freshly grated ginger
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 2 medium potatoes, chopped
- 1 medium eggplant, chopped
- 1 green bell pepper, sliced
- 2 small zucchini, chopped
- 2 large tomatoes, chopped
- 1 can garbanzo beans, with liquid
Saute onions in oil and add garlic and all spices, saute until onions are translucent. Add vegetables in order given above (carrots, then potatoes, etc) pausing to saute each for a few minutes before adding the next. Add garbanzo beans. Add water or veg stock if stew is dry. Simmer on low until all vegetables are tender. This recipe is quite flexible- add or remove vegetables, vary the amounts and it still ends up tasting pretty good.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Adventures in start-up land: part 2
After 6 months at a startup building an eco-friendly database of product and company information, I have decided to move on, to another startup focusing on deployment and auto-scaling platforms for cloud computing systems. Part of my motivation is that the company moved offices in an unfortunate way for me, increasing my commute to 2-2.5 hours each way (which is rough but could be workable). But also, while an eco-friendly database and search engine is really cool, I've realized that it also falls under a very risky category of funding and possible business plans. Would a product like this really take off in a recession economy? And how will it make money? The answer to this last question (at least for most website startups) is usually "advertising," but user traffic is fickle, the switching cost for search engines is 0, and name-brand advertising companies have very specific and strict requirements for user demographics and traffic patterns. It's a noble goal, but perhaps too risky for me personally to justify the commute or relocation...
Also, I'm pretty excited about the cloud computing space. Last November Amazon launched the Elastic Compute Cloud, a pay-per-use linux server farm built on Amazon's existing, successful, massively scalable data center management infrastructure. Since then many startups have deployed onto EC2 (I personally deployed my previous startup onto it), and have seen drastic cost savings and flexibility compared to traditional hosted deployment models.
In the past, companies either had too much hardware or too little. If they needed to save money, they would purchase too little, and a sudden burst of unexpected traffic would take their site down, usually taking hours or days to recover from. The safe but costly alternative was to buy more hardware than you need, and let it sit idle most of the time, but utilize it when the traffic surge occurred. This was very expensive.
A good analogy for this problem is figuring out how many active cash registers to have at a store at any given time. If there are 20 people and 1 cash register at a store, the line to the cash register will take so long that people will leave without buying stuff, and the store won't make as much money. If you open up 4 more cash registers, then the lines get short enough that the people stick around and make their purchases, and the store makes more money. But if you have 5 cash registers open all the time when there aren't many people, this costs the store more without additional gain, so how do you know how many cash registers to keep open at any given time?
With a cloud computing system like EC2, you set up your production website architecture on the number of machines you need to handle your current load of traffic. For most startups this is the bare minimum needed to ensure redundancy and eliminate single points of failure. Then you set up monitoring to notify you when your traffic starts to spike up. When it does, you can automatically (or manually) scale out your application fleet to handle the traffic by booting more machine instances of your application server. When the traffic subsides, scale the fleet down by terminating the extra machine instances. In the EC2 model you only pay for what you use, so you only pay the high cost of running many machines for the time period in which you need them. The tricky part is how to automatically scale in an efficient way that minimizes cost, minimizes downtime, and adheres to your SLAs? That's where my new startup comes in. :)
Also, I'm pretty excited about the cloud computing space. Last November Amazon launched the Elastic Compute Cloud, a pay-per-use linux server farm built on Amazon's existing, successful, massively scalable data center management infrastructure. Since then many startups have deployed onto EC2 (I personally deployed my previous startup onto it), and have seen drastic cost savings and flexibility compared to traditional hosted deployment models.
In the past, companies either had too much hardware or too little. If they needed to save money, they would purchase too little, and a sudden burst of unexpected traffic would take their site down, usually taking hours or days to recover from. The safe but costly alternative was to buy more hardware than you need, and let it sit idle most of the time, but utilize it when the traffic surge occurred. This was very expensive.
A good analogy for this problem is figuring out how many active cash registers to have at a store at any given time. If there are 20 people and 1 cash register at a store, the line to the cash register will take so long that people will leave without buying stuff, and the store won't make as much money. If you open up 4 more cash registers, then the lines get short enough that the people stick around and make their purchases, and the store makes more money. But if you have 5 cash registers open all the time when there aren't many people, this costs the store more without additional gain, so how do you know how many cash registers to keep open at any given time?
With a cloud computing system like EC2, you set up your production website architecture on the number of machines you need to handle your current load of traffic. For most startups this is the bare minimum needed to ensure redundancy and eliminate single points of failure. Then you set up monitoring to notify you when your traffic starts to spike up. When it does, you can automatically (or manually) scale out your application fleet to handle the traffic by booting more machine instances of your application server. When the traffic subsides, scale the fleet down by terminating the extra machine instances. In the EC2 model you only pay for what you use, so you only pay the high cost of running many machines for the time period in which you need them. The tricky part is how to automatically scale in an efficient way that minimizes cost, minimizes downtime, and adheres to your SLAs? That's where my new startup comes in. :)
Santa Cruz and elephant seals
Spent labor day weekend in Santa Cruz, a very mellow beach town filled with surfers and tourists. They have a boardwalk there that rivals Ocean City NJ in its novelty food stands and amusement part style midway. They had the boardwalk snack classics: funnel cake and garlic fries, as well as some more frightening fare like deep fried twinkies. Seriously- a whole stand dedicated to deep-friend twinkies.The beach and boardwalk were ridiculously crowded, but the we found the beaches a few miles north of Santa Cruz to be more sparse and clean, and did some swimming and sunning there.
A few miles south of Santa Cruz is a beach park called Ano Nuevo, which is an elephant seal sanctuary this time of year. We took a hike down to the beach and did in fact see lots of elephant seals- they are the big gray lumps on the beach in the photo. They are huge- they can weigh up to 4000 pounds!
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Also in Chile: rapa nui, theoretical penguins, cartoon irony
Easter Island is about 2000 miles off the western coast of Chile. Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to go there- it would have taken 4 days out of our 8 day trip, and another $1000 for tickets. But we did visit a museum about the island, where this Moai statue sits, in the shrubberies, guarding the residential streets of Vina del Mar. Unlike most museums (that don't want to scare children or disturb sensitive people) this one did not gloss over Easter Island's brutal history. Civil wars, colonialism, and mismanagement of ecological resources led to famine, death, and the near total destruction of the native people. So little of the culture from before the late 1800s European invasions was preserved that the Rapa Nui language from before that period remains undecifered.Also in this very blunt museum was an installation describing, in great detail, the ritual of creating shrunken heads, with actual shrunken heads behind the glass! This was not a mystical process: the skin was removed from the human head, wrapped around a monkey skull, and dried until it shrunk to fit the smaller skull. Clever.
80% of the world's population of Humboldt penguins nest on a protected island off the coast of Chile, in a suburb of the town of Zapallar, a few hours north of Vina del Mar. I was very excited to go see the penguins, figuring it would probably be my only chance to ever see them in the wild. But unfortunately the penguin island was obscured by fog. Can you find the penguins in this photo?
In Valparaiso we found the Mirador de Lukas House Museum, a collection of the cartoons and journalism of Renzo Pecchenino ("Lukas"), a political cartoonist in the 1960s.
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