Newsletter Updates for July 2014

Two aspects about leveraging machine learning are largely under-represented in the lit, especially when it comes to production use cases: feature engineering and the comparative evaluation of multiple modeling approaches. To that point, check out “Streamlining feature engineering: Researchers and startups are building tools that enable feature discovery” by Ben Lorica. The article mentions Spark Beyond, which “finds deep patterns in your data.” I was lucky to get a demo of Spark Beyond earlier this year and talk with the principals – and highly recommend taking a good look at their wares. Between the ongoing advances in deep learning and symbolic regression, a direction seems to be emerging … that perhaps one of the more difficult parts of machine learning workflows, namely the feature engineering aspects, could become more automated.

For another great article, check out Including Men in the Conversation About Women by Scarlett Sieber. Among my biggest peeves about Silicon Valley are the “brogrammer” lopsided demographics, and the gender bias which is quite real and nearly epidemic. Our data science teams have generally been quite mixed, why can’t engineering teams in general leave the 19th century behind, let alone stop being so hostile? Not naming names, but two of the SV firms in which I’ve worked in the past five years are both well known and well poised for harassment lawsuits. Taking a stand against that nonsense as an engineering manager is a great way to catch hell, which I’ve gladly engaged before. Another related pet peeve is where one of the same firms was actively pressuring their engineering interns to quit university degree programs. As a behavior for an engineering manager, I find that highly unethical. Some of those who are engaged in these practices know quite well who I’m talking about.

Spark Summit

The big, BIG news last month was … (wait for it) … Spark Summit. All of the speaker videos have been posted – those are probably the single-best resource for learning about Apache Spark. Of course, the big surprise at the conf was the announcement of Databricks Cloud. If you missed the conf, you can watch Ali Ghodsi’s spectacular demo which kicks in at about the 14:40 time marker.

Spark Summit keynote practice, T-15 hours

One surprise learning from the conf was that one product line from SAP generates more annual revenue than all of the other Big Data vendors (HW, Cloudera, etc.) combined. Other pleasant surprises included: Flambo, a Clojure DSL for Spark; and Thunder, for large-scale neural data analysis, which shows some excellent integration of PySpark, SciPy, scikit-learn, etc.

Our training sessions at Spark Summit set some kind of new records. In particular, check out the advanced material for great lectures there. Those who attended the conf received a free ebook preview for the upcoming Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analytics by Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell, Matei Zaharia; O’Reilly Media (2014).

Also, I got to host the Research track of session talks at Spark Summit, which was a real treat. We had a special #geo break-out session following the Geotrellis talk by Rob Emanuele. We will hopefully be expanding that focus in future confs. There were so many other great talks that it’s hard to pick favorites. Even so, I’ll be studying up about two in particular: Quadratic Programing Solver for Non-negative Matrix Factorization with Spark by Debasish Das, Santanu Das; and Distributed Reinforcement Learning for Electricity Market Bidding with Spark by Vijay Srinivas Agneeswaran, Vishnuteja Nanduri. The latter seems almost ideal for integration with recent work on genetic programming.

Stay tuned for the next Spark Summit, which will be held on NYC in early 2015.

OSCON

I’ve just returned from OSCON 2014. What an excellent conference! Check out the content recently posted online: keynotes, photos, speaker slides.

Of course, this event was carefully timed to overlap with the Oregon Brewer’s Festival. Top two picks: Double Latte. by Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.; and Lorenzini Blood Orange Double IPA by Maui Brewing Company. Many thanks to Erin Rasmussen for suggesting about OBF!

Blood Orange IPA

Back at OSCON… one of my favorite Ignite talks was What Science Fiction Can Teach Us About Building Communities by Dawn Foster. Another favorite, speaking of #geo, was a preso/proposal for Open Aerial Map by Kate Chapman.

During the conf, Andy Orem did a video interview where we discussed perspectives and current projects: Ag+Data, Industrial Internet, sketch algorithms, Apache Spark, etc. Andy was the very first editor I worked with at O’Reilly Media, ten years ago. He’s a much better interviewer than I am an interviewee, so I enjoyed learning much through our work together. Also fun to work again with the amazing video team.

"With great power comes some data, plus wrinkled shirts"

The tutorial for Just Enough Math had 50+ people attending, and we got to evaluate an intermediate stage of a new tutorial software platform. For that, I needed to get a bunch of USB drives from Amazon, but the order/delivery #failed. At the last minute our 10 y.o. daughter and I made an emergency run to Fry’s Electronics (she was eager to observe ground zero for nerdliness) … but the only 4Gb flash drives that they had left in stock were Marvel Universe comix characters. Arriving back home, our 9 y.o. daughter was aghast that adults would be receiving comix figures in a lecture :)

The Data Workflows for Machine Learning talk received lots of great responses – as did earlier versions during meetups in Seattle and SF. It become of the “top-shared” slide decks featured on the SlideShare home page. Perhaps that needs to be turned into a mini-book?

new book kiosk

As my last-o’-the-day book signing was winding down, after almost everyone had left the convention center for “nearby locations of beer taps”, a friend mentioned “Hey, look there’s another pile of books – these look different.” So a few lucky latecomers got signed copies of the galley drafts for our new book Just Enough Math, which probably still won’t be released for months – this rev is quite rough :) Oddly enough, the first person to read it looked up and said, “Where are the other O’Reilly books about math?” Indeed.

Sketchy Things

Speaking of Just Enough Math, we’ve put up a companion site for the video+book+tutorial at http://justenoughmath.com/ to provide additional resources and related links:

• set up a Python programming envon your laptop
• code+data files for examples in the video+book
• “gists” that show expected results for the examples
• links to external resources that get referenced
• recommended books and videos for further study
• monthly newsletter sign-up

The tutorial at OSCON previewed a new chapter recently added about sketch algorithms, following from notes at an excellent Foo Camp session led by Avi Bryant. I will be focussing on Spark Streaming use cases for Strata EU in Barcelona this fall, particularly where approximation techniques (think: examples of monoids in action) can leverage both Spark and Cassandra. If you have examples to share of Spark Streaming production use cases in general, I’m eager to build case studies to publish in Radar. Meanwhile, for a great resource about sketch algorithms, check out the archives of the AK Data Science Summit – Streaming and Sketching from last summer.

Card-Carrying Green

A friend recently brought up the topic of navigating questions about extinction and climate change for preschoolers… I’m getting those too; however, in my experience the questions become much better formulated after an additional 5–6 years or so. As a parent, as a human, it kills me to see all the ginormous FUD spewing from the political lobbies for the coal industry, fracking, Monsanto, GM, etc. How about giving ample air time and consideration for some points from the other side?

First off, I’ve mentioned it before but it bears repeating: The Land Institute is a phenomenally excellent resource for understanding some of the insanity and pure tragedy of contemporary agricultural practices, particularly when it comes to monocultures, annuals, hybrids, let alone unnecessary tillage. To paraphrase Wes Jackson, “The plow share has destroyed more options for future generations than the sword.” On a related note, I’ll also point to an excellent article by Michael Pollan, as a forward to Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey through Carbon Country by Courtney White. Moreover, check out The Solutions Project. That latter site has more substance than perhaps its web-design polish indicates: it’s about the work by Mark Jacobson, et al., on how to power the planet via renewables now while mitigating hurricane damages, etc. One would think that the reinsurance revenues alone would justify a significant investment. In any case, these three links point to the fact that any emerging “dialog of despair” about global warming, etc., is purely FUD. Much can and will be done.

Phylo, the trading card game

I’m particularly grateful to be associated with O’Reilly Media, which provided OSCON attendees with a nice treat in their schwag bags: Phylo, a trading card game. Its gameplay emphasizes endangered species, climate change, food chains, and other environmental pressures. “Phylo is a project that began as a reaction to the following nugget of information: Kids know more about Pokemon creatures than they do about real creatures. We think there’s something wrong with that. Apparently, so do many others.”

In a related development, check out Nerds Without Borders: “We are looking for all sorts of people to help: Engineers, Scientists, Writers, Artists, Dreamers, Activists, Organizers, Fundraisers, Financiers, etc…” Starting with use of IoT sensors and cell phone networks to protect sea turtle hatchlings. Good stuff.

Looking Ahead

Another fun follow-up from Foo Camp and OSCON: getting to talk with Scott Jenson about his work on The Physical Web at Google. Check out his preso, Why Mobile Apps Must Die. The big idea is a kind of “micro-DNS” for low-cost digital tagging of physical items that can be accessed by mobile devices. No app installs required.

In other news, Trafodion was recently released as open source by HP. The name is based on the Welsh word for “transaction”. If you recall about Tandem Computers and NonStop, this product line has a long history of tech innovations – for highly reliable, highly optimized real-time SQL at scale. My uncle retired from Tandem, and lately I’ve spent time with the Trafodion team and am quite impressed. This release brings an interesting new level of Enterprise robustness to real-time transactions+analysis atop Linux+Hadoop. One to watch.

Another to watch closely is The Distributed Developer Stack Field Guide by Andrew Odewahn, Courtney Nash, Mike Loukides, et al. This is a GitHub-based book from O’Reilly. If you see any points in there that need editing, embellishing, etc., then two words: pull request, for the win.

In terms of upcoming events, registration is now open for Data Day Texas 2015, and I’m really looking forward to that. Will be teaching Spark at Scala by the Bay in SF on Aug 8–9, speaking at #MesosCon in Chicago on Aug 21, followed by another Spark course in Chicago on Aug 25.

Flashbacks

I’ll close with a look back to a 1990 Documentary about Cyberpunk. That provides a good summary of what we up to in the early 1990s with Mondo 2000, bOING-bOING, FringeWare, WiReD, The WELL, Turkey City, etc. Tim’s monologue around 15:30-ff is hilarious – both because of his ever-optimistic “There will be mass democracy in the streets” miss, and how much it contrasts with just about every other major point coming true within 25 years. Warning: gratuitous F242 clips, throughout. Time marker 27:11 shows what I was doing as a vendor at many, many raves… Meanwhile, check out a recent bOING-bOING article Alien Autopsy: William Barker on Schwa, two decades later for some of the more astute counterpoint about what was really going on, then and now.

That's the update for now. See you in Chicago with San Diego on the event horizon!

westward ho

Some friends of mine live in the Westport area of Kansas City, across the street from a marker which notes the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the California Trail. For many people in North America during the 19th century, their resolve to migrate west was tested there.

View Larger Map

So it is for us, with two little girls ready to travel. Our oldest is eager to live in hotels again, because they promise TVs, room service, and jacuzzi pools. She was done with KC as soon as she got her fill of fresh snow. Our youngest has been missing the ocean, especially the seals. She's asked, "When do we go home?" just about ever since we arrived in KC.


A woman from Kansas a few days ago made a few rather hostile remarks about how Californians feel about seals -- right after my little girl got through declaring how much she loves seals and whales.

Unforgivably callous. Intolerably ignorant. Not entirely unexpected. In other words, par for the course. I'm sorry to have to feel that kind of resignation, but it is entirely realistic. I bit my tongue to avoid making an offhand retort about "fly over zone". After all, parts of the Midwest are highly recommended.

Two bright spots have made these past 10 months worthwhile...

One is my team in the Analytics department at Adknowledge -- a.k.a., "Team Mendota". Those people have been a joy and and honor to work among. In addition to several contributions to R, Hadoop, AWS, RightScale, and points inbetween, we've made big strides in methods for having statisticians and developers working side-by-side on "Big Data" projects -- with tangible results. Frankly, I would have left much soon (supra 3 yr old tugging daddy's heartstrings) if it had not been for how much I appreciate this team. Flo, Chris, Nathan, Chun, Bill, Shan, Vicky, Margi, David, Gaurav -- I wish you all very well. My regret is that I did not get to work with you long enough.

The other is our collective friends and families in the area, met through our kids -- mostly because of their school, Global Montessori Academy. My wife has served on the board there. The teachers and just everyone involved have been amazing. Not sure quite how that place emerged here inside of KC, and I'd be hard-pressed to believe that anything much like it exists between Chicago and Austin... but GMA and the people associated will be missed.

I found myself thinking, many many times while living here in KC, "How can I teach my daughters about the principles in which I believe, if I cannot live them here?" GMA actually does represent those principles. Highly recommended.

For everyone else, see you back on the Left Coast!

wal-mart's peanut butter manifesto and "Slavery 2.0"

Is the world's largest multinational corporation, Wal-Mart, on the decline? Or is it simply riding the political ebb and flow as it tracks a neoconservative agenda to undermine people of color and drive a wedge through the Democratic Party?

Interesting news comes today that a judge in Chelan, WA has declared the building permit illegal for a new Wal-Mart "supercenter" being constructed there.

The mix of reactions from locals in Chelan seems characteristic of other areas in which Wal-Mart has faced opposition. Older or poorer residents look at consumer prices and tend to want access to cheap goods, which Wal-Mart provides. Local retail businesses generally know that they'll be forced into a situation in which they can no longer stay open, resulting from changes in traffic and spending patterns, changes in zoning, etc. Real estate organizations lobby ardently on behalf of Wal-Mart, often in direct opposition to homeowners. Local political officials get paid off and cut corners legally to accommodate corporate plans. Homeowners know that as a supercenter comes into an area, the crime rate tends to rise, the traffic becomes clogged, and the home values tend to fall.

Where we own a home in Austin, news came last month that Wal-Mart had obtain a building permit to open a 220,000 square foot, 24/7 "supercenter" in our residential neighborhood. To place this into perspective, that would become one of the largest "big box" stores in the state of Texas - in our residential neighborhood.

In brief, there is an old shopping center called "Northcross Mall" which was built decades ago when this area was on the very outskirts of Austin. When my wife was a kid here, Northcross was the shopping center of the region, but for several years it has been largely vacant - mostly due to rather harsh policies by its absentee landlord. The city has grown to a point where this neighborhood is now considered "central" and is mostly residential. When I bought a home in this neighborhood 12 years ago, nearby retail properties were mostly in decline; however, several innovative small businesses have worked hard to renovate the area, so that we have a place were neighbors can walk to local businesses. WMT came in, arranged with Austin's city manager to obtain a building permit without a public hearing, the city manger recused herself from further comment on the issue, and now we're going to have semi-trucks driving through our neighborhood to supply a 24/7 superstore. On one side there is the Real Estate Council of Austin, pushing hard to promote the WMT/Clinton agenda. On the other side, there are five neighborhood associations - in other words, the political power of approximately 2500 soccer moms plus their best friends, family, and neighbors, which multiples into about 10% of the city population - looking ahead toward rising crime rates, lower home property values, degraded public schools, etc.

It is interesting to look at the political activity of Wal-Mart. Notably, they spend most of their political funding - more than 80% - on conservative, "Religious Right" Republican candidates. At the executive levels, WMT contributions to RNC exceed their contributions to DNC by approximately a 30:1 ratio. Those candidates tend to represent the bulk of WMT customers, two-thirds of whom come from "Red" states: poor, under-educated, working-class people in rural America. However, there is also a healthy stream of WMT political funding heading toward Democratic leadership, particularly in the Senate, such as Clinton, Ford, Bayh. Clinton in particular was on WMT's board of directors for several years during its major growth period - during its main period of destroying "ma & pa" retail businesses throughout the US, during its main period of undermining laws for employee benefits.

What is intriguing and arguably appalling is how much emphasis WMT has placed on African-American political lobbies. One blantant example is found the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, where WMT with its Democratic party candidates in tow has been systematically acting as a wolf in sheep's clothing to tear apart support for Black voting rights, labor protections, etc. Lee Walker of Heartland Institute argues a racial case for "sell on the downside" case on behalf of WMT:

When a city government steps in and makes it illegal for some businesses to pay less than $10.00 an hour and an additional $3.00 an hour in benefits, it effectively makes it illegal for those businesses to hire many black applicants. Crucial entry-level jobs that would enable young blacks and ex-offenders to start climbing the career ladder to better-paying and more fulfilling jobs will be closed to them.

IMHO, if Walker, et al., do not represent a neo-conservative push toward "Slavery 2.0", I don't know what else would be reasonable to call them.

Looking at the arguments about Wal-Mart, the issues are not about "access to reasonably priced consumer goods" or "protection of a free market". WMT is just about as oppositional to "free market" economics as any entity in the world, considering how their growth in recent years has been built by literally threatening local elected officials into changing laws which support WMT at the cost of destroying existing businesses and communities, not to mention their lobbying against labor protection laws, minimum wage, health care rights, etc. The underlying issue is about how to compel poor people - mostly people of color - to work for less than an affordable living, as the conflict in Chicago exposed so directly.

Admittedly, I am a Green, and in some ways the WMT corporate history of predatory acts have helped to illustrate what I believe are the fundamental and unresolvable flaws of the Democratic Party - racial prejudice being among the foremost. Even so, I am encouraged to find that currently DNC front-runners such as John Edwards and Barak Obama have broken ranks with Clinton, et al., with respect to WMT. The issue there appears to be foreign policy: Clinton arguably has no foreign policy beyond "Let's increase the trade deficit with China" or "Maybe we should invade Iran". Thankfully, other DNC candidates appear to have a more global (read: less self-serving) perspective for the long-run.

If one were to take a counterpoint position, what would be important to consider vis-a-vis WMT in terms of conservative American interests? Notably, WMT is one of the largest employers in the US, and it accounts for a substantive chunk of our foreign trade. Given those measures of strategic importance, it is interesting to review the security risks which WMT faces. For example, while they appear to have built and continue to nurture a solid foundation for political support and a huge base of consumers, they have a systematic weakness in their vendor relations. Quite arguably, a culture of fear has emerged where WMT actively pits one vendor against its competitors, to leverage that fear for lower wholesale pricing. While in the long run their pattern of sublation will most likely expose WMT to antitrust actions, in the short term their vendor policies expose a significant vulnerability to so-called "terrorist" attacks. If a non-state actor were to arrange for systematic delays of the supply chain of vendor deliveries - even on the order of trucks being delayed on the highways by mere minutes - then some of the most essential WMT policies would be triggered and come into play. Effectively the corporation would begin to attack its own internal operations.

Not that I am encouraging such acts, but as a thought experiment, does that risk worry anybody? If some non-state actor were ambitious enough to stage that kind of attack, the most likely outcomes imply that it's time to "stop eating peanut butter" in Bentonville.

aws rocks the free world

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is perhaps one of the most fundamental and far-reaching changes in the computer industry ... since perhaps when, recently, SecondLife hit the cover of BusinessWeek magazine. In fact, this news will be the cover story of BusinessWeek next week.

I knew about a friend working on this project a couple of years ago, and helped a little (on the sly) with documenation. So when it came time to provide offsite backup services for HeadCase, we thought it might be good to check out AWS. Price-performance comparisons showed 90% reduction in cost over going to an ISP or other backup service, plus the Amazon approach ("S3") had better reliability and other uses, such as tiered storage.

Overall their "cloud" of grid/utility computing services allows a small technology startup to begin playing with REALLY big scale services - it fits almost perfectly for those of us who share a perspective of REST + SOA. With "S3" as a storage grid, "EC2" as a compute grid (Linux images, Java API), "SQS" as a transaction message queue (somewhat reminiscent of IBM's MQ), and MTurk for the "human computation" and crowdsourcing, this business strategy precipitates a fundamental shift in how to plan for IT infrastructure, how to manage QA resources, etc.

As an engineering manager, I would expect to pay a lot to get access to that kind service - especially giving Amazon's remarkable quality of service. Instead, I pay pennies on the dollar compared with a hosted service - and moreover I don't have to staff up my operations, since Amazon handles that as "outsourcing". And thereby our firm inherits that quality of service, since the Amazon AWS services handle the public-facing aspects of our SOA.

The bottom line here: the fundamental issue with cost of scaling Internet infrastructure is not the processors (thank you very much, Dell or HP) but instead - as IBM knows oh so well - the utilities involved, such as power. Amazon is building out data centers in the Pacific Northwest, located near cheap, plentiful hydroelectric power generation. This has a significant Green effect, optimizing the electrical power generation and usage by collocation, then exporting the "refined" use as data center services.

This almost as major change in the industry as when DNS was invented, or HTTP/1.0 became accepted, or Skype launched. Wall Street is tending to comment that Amazon is not following a core strategy, without clearly understanding that Amazon has just put several big players on notice for substantive business model disruptions: notably IBM, Microsoft, Google, EMC, HP, BMC, (and for what it's possibly still worth) Sun. As the article in BusinessWeek does mention, this is clearly a good strategy for launching a tech startup with vastly reduced capital and substantially enhanced quality and scalability. In other words, in the eyes of VCs, that implies better opportunities to leverage capital.

Here is an example pattern of usage:

1. Design your data model to be stored in the Amazon S3 storage grid. For example, we have requirements for running a Java JSR 170 content management system, which fits well with S3 capabilitities.
   
2. Prepare images for your application servers (Java, PHP, whatever) to run on Amazon EC2.
   
3. Point the client side of your applications, such as Ajax requests, at the Amazon SQS message queue.
   
4. Allocate your server images in the EC2 cloud to pull requests off your SQS queue.
   
5. Your middle tier processes requests within EC2, persisting data out to your S3 storage.
   

You can also run "back office" tasks such as reporting or data mining based on the same pattern - without disrupting customer services.

I've read about people beginning to use this kind of pattern to setup their QA environment for regession testing or load testing - again without disrupting other operations or requiring costly server + network replication.

It would seem to fit quiet well in, say, with Java Server Faces used for an Ajax UI... based on a tech stack that used Seam, clustered JBoss servers, Hibernate for the persistence layer, and clustered MySQL underneath that.

in praise of seitan

Recently my wife asked me how to cook eggplant. First, we had received some nice egg-shaped eggplant with our Greenling delivery last week. Secondly, there's a popular eggplant dish in Persian cuisine which I like to fix for the family, and Erin was perhaps hinting :)

The Persian word for eggplant is "bademjan". I remember a similar word used to describe a popular eggplant salad in Russia - which was delicious, but perhaps not quite as savory as the Persian variety.

However, this time we changed up the recipes a bit. We had a craving for "setian" - also called wheat roast or fu. So here goes one for our recipe book, an adaptation of a Persian lamb stew called "khoresh" with our substitutes for the meat - in prase of Seitan:

Slice eggplant - optionally peel them if the peels are too think and tough.

Soak eggplant in brine overnight, to leach out the bitterness - not required for Japanese style eggplant.

Drain eggplant, removing the bitter brine.

In a large iron skillet, heat a centimeter of grapeseed oil, adding freshly grated nutmeg, black pepper, and Hungarian paprika.

Once that begins to snap, add eggplant slices.

Cover and cook, stirring occaisionally so that all the eggplant becomes cooked evenly.

When the eggplant flesh becomes soft and somewhat brown/purple, add equal amounts of seitan (roasted kind).

Stir together, adding enough tomato paste to coat all the "meat".

I like to garnish with a chiffonade of cilatro and garlic chives, which just happen to be locally in season.

I also like to serve this over rice. A nice basmati should work well enough... Persian dishes tend to use a technique called "chelou bah tadig" where the rice is slightly under cooked, then placed into a tall pot which has hot oil and saffron in the bottom. Make "holes" with a wooden spoon all the way from top to bottom of the rice, and wrap the pot's lid with a towel.

The result is a golden crisp at the bottom, where the the rice above becomes a little fluffy and gains an almost "nutlike" or "popcorn" flavor. Place the tomato + seitan + bademjan mix atop that and you'll enjoy a tasty entree.

In fact, I have been tempted to name this dish The Great Seitan.

greenling

I prefer my food slow, local, and organic.

Eating at restaurants too often - in other words, more than a few times per week - just does not feel wholesome to me. Eating fast food often at all just feels wrong.

For one thing, I cannot stand the size of portions which are typical at American restaurants. It's absurd. A friend of mine in Japan remarked that it's great when he visits because he can just order one meal and then carry home another entire meal!

The amount of fat, the horrid condition of ingredients, the excesses in packaging - all of these factors make restaurant food unlikely for me, except for really good meals, which are probably 4x food cost anyway and not what I'd care to buy other than for a special treat or a social gathering outside a home.

I prefer slow food. I love to cook at home - and spent a whole bunch on building a nice home kitchen. After those early years where I earned my keep as a cook at times, and after so many fun evenings hosting dinner parties - or "FringeWare Fridays" back when we had the bookstore in the late 1990s - a meal cooked by a stranger just doesn't necessarily sound fun.

Ah, but where do all those lovely ingredients for fine home-cooked meals come from?

There has been a notion of CSA and excellent farmers markets around Austin for a long while - quite appealing. Several years ago I met the couple who run Tecolote Farm... imagine getting a basket of fresh, locally, grown organic vegetables delivered to your doorstep weekly. Then imagine having to wait on a list for a year or two! Alternatively, the Austin Farmer's Market is a treat - I enjoy taking my daughters there on the weekend. For that matter, Austin is the headquarters for both Central Market (which I adore, admittedly corporate but supportive of locals and independents) and Whole Foods (which I detest, ultra corporate green-posers aka "Hoalf Udz"), and the area features some wonderful natural food co-ops. We even have an organic farm inside the city - Boggy Creek Farm, which has sustained since the years when Austin was the source for most fresh spinach in the region.

As a home cook, I've been a fan of growing veggies, herbs, raising chickens, etc., since I was a kid... Growing up on the Central California coast, I had not questioned the idea of "slow food"... Local seafood was abundant - each week we ate the abalone which my uncle couldn't sell from his catch. Many of the neighbors were from Portuguese families which had immigrated there, largely for the fishing - and they showed up everbody when it came to fixing seafood well! Local farms featured fresh berries, apple orchards, all kinds of vegetables - especially artichokes - and fresh dairy. We used to buy a side of beef for the freezer, selecting a steer out on the ranch... ranches tended by families who had gained the land 200 years earlier as Spanish land grants, or often some Swiss-Italian immigrants who brought Tyrolian styles. And of course, what wasn't ranch or farm was soon to become wall-to-wall vineyards, with soil and microclimates approximating a range from Burgundy to Tuscany.

Moving away from SLO, I found the rest of the US held no such values. Especially in Texas, where a "meal" seems synonymous with a drive around the block to Whataburger.

There have been exceptions. One chef transplanted from France to Austin - Jean Luc Salles - teamed up with Boggy Creek Farm to feature local, organic vegetables in season at his bistro. I was lucky enough to catch Salles and author Carol Ann Sayle from Boggy Creek give a cooking course at Central Market, and I highly recommend Sayle's cookbook Eating in Season.

Of course, all of this requires extra time and effort, and probably would seem obscure to people who don't share my values (or half-French blood?)


Which is why I've been stunned to find the wonderful value of a new service called Greenling. They take the notion of "CSA" plus home delivery and cooking foods in-season - and bundle it into a family-oriented package. Wonderful. It convinced my wife, and is convincing my neighbors - about as fast as they hear about it. Greenling delivers an ice chest of fresh vegetables, plus extras - each 1-2 weeks. For our family, we've chosen 2 week intervals at first, but we're switching soon to weekly. We get a surprise selection of in-season produce from local organic farms. We manage our delivery account on the Greenling website, and can take on extras like organic dairy, honey, etc.

We're forced now to cook at home, using whatever is seasonal and local. It's delicious. I'm actually learning to love okra again. We've reduced our trips to the grocery store (I have mixed feelings, because I love to shop at Central Market, but I appreciate burning less fuel to drive there.) We've been sharing with neighbors and friends.

The idea of a CSA is great, but the close pairing of one farm to a set of subscriber families - it comes out a bit awkward. With a service like Greenling, there can be some economy of scale, some buffering and variety, by incorporating producer/consumer relations between many farms and many residences. I could imagine this kind of service hanging around the farmers market just about when it closes - to bid on what's left over.

More importantly, one could imagine this kind of service going national. Soon.

first day at the new job

It was my first full day at the new job. Still in stealth, we're making good progress. As the Technical Director, my day starts out with a quick peek through Gmail. What's come in from our Executive Producer in Australia before she called it a night? There's a blurb from Google Calendar, describing my agenda for Skype meetings throughout the day. Any news from LA while I was alseep? A few personal messages, then check through Google Reader for interesting news - maybe I'll forward one or two to my partners. Shut down the iBook, time to spend a while with the kids, feed the chickens and the koi, do a few dishes, clean up my new "office" space in the oven-temperature garage, and then off to my real workplace... Just a short ride away on the mtn bike to park for a few hours in a local coffeehouse. Austin has 40C weather, but early in the day it's not so bad; ozone levels won't peak until much later in the day.

Curling up to a mocha and iBook, it's time to twiddle for a while on the company's network architecture diagram, then get to real work for the day on Second Life, winding my way through LSL. Two aging Boomers at the next table are scamming/being scammed for an investment in a bogus Third World water treatment technology. They stare nervously, trying to detect anyone who's seeking to steal their IP. I have my headset blasting Thirteenth Step to drown out the ambient babble so I may focus. This is how life was meant to be.

After a few espresso shots and plenty accomplished, I put my helmet and cleats back on, and ride back home just about the time the sitter is leaving. At few more dishes done, never enough of that with two toddlers in the house. Watching the younger girl while my wife gets a breather. Later, I'm back in Skype to catch a conf call with our Executive Producer and Creative Director, getting prepared for some video production work.

I have time again. Time to spend with my wife and kids. Time to think about what I'm working to build online, or what I need to write. Time to nurture a small urban farm, to show my daughters the different kinds of trees on our property. Time to cook food, slow food, the kind of food that doesn't cost 4x for convenience while causing excess obesity amongst the population, such as most of Corporate America "enjoys" for lunch. Food that makes me feel healthy, working at full potential. Time to rest. Time to return to my regular practice of yoga, fitness training, and mountain biking. Time to exist in my own personal terroir. Time to become, again.

On one hand, some things about my previous job will be missed dearly: some good friends met (online or in the office) daily, a wonderful developer team in Russia, the health insurance package, ... but not the mainframes. On the other hand, I'm enjoying the entertainment business much, much better already :)

Meanwhile, I tend to judge my quality of life based on a couple of factors: how few times per week I must drive a car, and how many times per day I get to cook my own meal. So far, so good!

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tags: Second Life, Slow Food, Terroir