Berkshire Hatha Class B Ord Shs	-9.82%
Mindray Medical International Ltd	-18.97%
PowerShares Water Resource Portfolio	-2.29%
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc	12.19%
Mueller Water Products Series A Ord Shs	-15.13%
Central European Distribution Corp	6.06%
Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp	-8.10%
Grant Prideco Inc	3.39%

Overall, the combined portfolio is still down 10.87% on the year. For most of the first three months of the year, only a couple of stocks in the 39 combined family picks were up; today six are. The three above, plus RIMM, CVS Caremark and Costco Wholesale.

The Inspirational

First, the inspirational: Roger Ehrenberg on future generations looking back on this time as the halcyon days of entrepreneurship. Combined with the non-stop morphine drip of posts on 37signals' Signal vs. Noise blog, and it starts to seem as though someone has called together a massive, decentralized, grassroots flash mob recruiting campaign for the entrepreneurial life.

The Hilarious

Next up, the hilarious: via crummy.com, a link to literal translations of Atari 2600 game cover art. Brilliant. My personal favorite would have to be “Backgammon for Friendless People”, or perhaps “Obligatory Educational ‘Game’”.

Lately, coinciding with my own nostalgic forays into the history of personal computing, there seems to be a renewed interest in old-timey computing kitsch, perhaps best exemplified by Jeff Atwood’s graphic description of the horror of programming in Basic on the Atari 2600.

Even the meager search engine traffic I manage confirms this trend—most of my traffic this month has come from people either looking for Tuesday Night Football (circa 1980), or for people looking for Mattel’s Talking Football (circa 1972).

Stay tuned…I’m on the trail and will document everything fully as soon as I have something interesting to discuss.

For what it’s worth: TNF was written in 1980, and consists of 834 lines of Applesoft Basic. I’m considering doing a Ruby port (for my own edification) since I seem to be having no luck getting the original program to run in one of the many OS X emulators. I’m thinking that a literal port of it will be much fewer than 834 lines (although the Basic source contains many compound lines), but that the size could be greatly reduced after refactoring.

Ralph Waldo Emerson immediately came to mind. The 19th-century essayist/philosopher and Transcendentalist wrote often about the intellectual life of the individual, and of the virtues of independent thought and Self-Reliance over the weakness of rote conformity in thought and action.

While he preached self-reliance and ideas originating from within, Emerson remained a man of the world, not drawing inward like his tenant Henry David Thoreau, whom he thought a misanthrope. Emerson writes, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Retain your ideals in the world, but let the the neck-beard-wearing idealists be the ones to go into seclusion in their shacks.

The Case Against Emerson Liking Java

“Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.” —Self-Relianace

Reading Emerson, it’s hard to see him embracing the constraints of Java at its most enterprisey. He wouldn’t survive in the typical corporate development shop, where compliance with the standards necessary to steer such a massive ship would produce deep dissatisfaction. But this is just rejection by association; while we can safely say Emerson wouldn’t last at a company such as SAP, where a single four-year project has 2500 developers coding away, this only indirectly condemns him to distrust of strong typing. Conventional wisdom holds that shops running four-year projects involving 2500 coders by necessity must embrace not only more rigid statically typed languages, but a byzantine set of internal standards and expectations of conformity as well. SAP’s future relies not on the will of any individual, but of the collective of 2500 wills to produce great work that conforms. The success comes down to the individual(s) who set the expectations for conformance; if they falter (by, say, following the convention wisdom Emerson distrusts) or fail to subjugate enough of the individuals into alignment, the iceberg-like mass of 10,000 developer-years will not save them from the upstart innovation arising from collections of individual intellects working in harmony.

The Case Against Emerson Digging Design Patterns

Emerson looks not to the past for guidance, but within, and it is hard to imagine him looking at the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns book with anything other than scorn. Emerson would develop his own patterns, no doubt, and his own style, but would routinely reject the old way for the better way. In fact, much of his writing is calling for the rejection of patterns by shredding the patterns of the past with layers of anti-patterns. The only pattern he aspires to is the rejection of received patterns. (Or as the Boomtown Rats put similar words in the mouth of God: “I’ll let you in on my big secret Ray/The final truth is there is no truth.”)

The Case for Emerson Being Refactoring Junky

“Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” —Self-Reliance

Emerson valued a very rational, fresh look at problems. He wouldn’t grow attached to a particular design, fall in love and fight against changing it. The code and facts would speak and he would adjust as necessary. Junky might be too strong of a word; his refactoring wouldn’t be endless for the sake of ever-increasing clarity, but would be pragmatic, for the sake of solving the problem as better understood today.

The Case for Emerson Being into Functional Programming

“Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you.” —Compensation

What Language Would Emerson Use?

Before reading Self-Reliance and Compensation again, I pegged Emerson as a Ruby guy. He’s too idealistic to go with PHP; too unconventional to go with Java or C#. Despite the functional quote, I don’t see him going down that route. In reading his essays again, I came away with the distinct sense that Emerson’s sweet spot would be something pragmatic, yet baroque in an unconventional way, and not lending itself to patterns other than those that come from the programmer himself. It would have to be a language that let him live in the world, and reflect the sense of an entrepreneurial landlord rather than the idealistic tenant.

In short, Emerson would have hacked Perl.

Berkshire Hatha Class B Ord Shs	-5.56%
Mindray Medical International Ltd	-32.65%
PowerShares Water Resource Portfolio	-10.09%
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc	5.51%
Mueller Water Products Series A Ord Shs	-14.08%
Central European Distribution Corp	0.19%
Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp	-15.06%
Grant Prideco Inc	-11.33%

Interestingly, one of the most popular searches leading to my site is people searching for info on Berkshire Hathaway. My contention has always been that historically, BRK.B trails in a bull market and does better than the averages in a bear market, and therefore is a relatively safe place in stormy weather; BRK.B is essentially an index fund with no recurring expense fees chipping away at the return.

Best stocks in the cumulative family picks: Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD), up 5.51%, CVS Caremark (CVS), up 1.91% and Intuitive Surgical, Inc, () up 0.42%.

Worst pick YTD? Suntech Power Holdings ADR, off 50.73%.

On the scale of a movie adaptation’s quality relative to the source material, the book clearly wins out in this case. Mezrich’s book has an immediacy and reality that screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb failed to capture. Steinfeld and Loeb didn’t have an easy task—blackjack doesn’t possess the same dramatic possibilities of poker. The uncertainty of Mezrich’s ending didn’t dissatisfy; non-fiction is like that, and not everything is wrapped up cleanly in real life. Geeks and geek culture are hard to capture without falling into stereotype (even harder on screen than in print), and almost nothing on the screen gets it right (save the occasional show like Freaks and Geeks, a series which nailed it but sadly proved not to be a commercial hit.)

Knowing the basic outline of the real-life story, for me the arc of the screenplay plodded woodenly and inevitably, although had I known nothing about the book, the shallowness of the development still would have left me even hungry for something more. Within the framework the actors are given to work, they perform well—the movie’s problems begin and end with the screenplay.

The movie trudges along methodically, the highs not particularly high, the lows not overwhelmingly low, until it starts a dive around three-quarters of the way through the movie, a dive that bottoms out with a jarring thud when a down-and-out Ben Campbell (played by Jim Sturgess) shows up on Jill’s (Kate Bosworth) doorstep in a scene that could only be called emotionally hollow and cringe-worthy.

Hollowness, in fact, captures the tone of whole movie. After clipping the treetops with this nearly fatal plummet, Steinfeld and Loeb resort to a tacked-on set piece of Hollywood twists in an attempt to salvage the screenplay, but these don’t quite sit right either. Throughout the movie we never feel anything really is at stake. There’s almost no inner emotional life to these characters and what motivations that are presented are thinly developed. Ben Campbell, genius in the counting of cards and the creative use of strippers as vehicles for money laundering, is implausibly dumb when it comes to securing his own winnings. When he tilts, there’s no logical explanation established nor retroactively given. Even Fisher’s flame-out is explained after the fact as jealousy but we are given no set-up for this. All the characterizations are notable only in how incredibly flat they are.

In the end, the movie serves as a passable adaptation, if only to get people to read the book, yet the troublesome screenplay has the feel of mercenary work outsourced to the lowest bidder. As gambling movies go, it’s no Rounders; Damon’s voice overs gave Rounders a depth and closeness that 21 lacks. As capers go, it’s no House of Games (and Spacey, in this role, is no Joe Mantegna). As Vegas flicks go, this is no Casino; we get the Hard Rock and Planet Hollywood, and maybe this is unfair as the Vegas of Casino was of a grittier time than the antiseptic sheen of Vegas today. As adaptations go, it’s no Searching for Bobby Fischer, a movie that amplified and completely captured the spirit of Fred Waitzkin’s book. Look at Laurence Fishburne’s performance and character in Fischer compared to his role in 21, and you have a hint of the opportunities missed here.

Read the book first; wait for the rental.

Playing around with a slightly older version of the database containing data through the 2005 season, I’ve come up with The 2005 Edition of Firebones All-Time Leet Hall of Fame. To qualify, a player must have one major statistical category that meets the definition of leet; namely, a statistical category for which their career total is 1337.

The Starting Lineup

Roberto Kelly (CF) (1337 Games Played)
Ivan DeJesus (SS) (1337 Games in the field)
Dave Magadan (3B) (1337 Games in the field)
Johnny Mize (1B) (1337 RBI)
Ed Coleman (RF) (1337 AB)
Fred Manrique (2B) (1337 AB)
Domingo Cedeno (LF) (1337 PA)
Mario Mendoza (C) (1337 AB)
Bobo Newsom (P) (1337 AB)

Bullpen and the Rest of the Rotation

Hank Gastright (R) (1337 Hits Allowed—in the freakin 19th century!)
Dave Mlicki (R) (1337 Hits Allowed)

Discussion of the Leet Lineup

Okay, I had to fudge a little. Dave Magadan only appears due to a glitch in the fielding data collected over the years from different sources. When this error was reconciled in later releases of the database, Magadan no longer has 1337 fielding games. But I needed a 3B, and the premise is stats through 2005, so cut me some slack.

Most of these guys turn out to be banjo-hitting middle infielders, so I have to take some liberties and press the ever-flexible Mario Mendoza (of Mendoza Line fame) into service as a catcher. No slackers need apply; Mendoza must justify his place in this august group. Mendoza also serves as our closer—he once finished a game in 1977 pitching 2 innings and ending his career with a 13.50 ERA, which is as close to a leet ERA as you can get if you have exactly 2.0 innings pitched. And because we are obligated to do all we can to stem global warming by increasing the ever-dwindling number of Pirates.

Ivan DeJesus wins the SS position because I watched too much WGN on basic cable and Harry Caray made me. If worst comes to worst, we can trade him to the Phillies again for Larry Bowa and Ryne Sandberg.

I moved Domingo Cedeno to LF based on his single game and lone putout in that position in 1994.

Johnny Mize gets first base because, well, he’s Hall of Famer Johny Mize.

For pitching: we have to go with the three-man rotation for now with our ace, Bobo Newsom (most similar player statistically: Charlie Hough) eating innings for us. I mean, the dude played 20 seasons over 24 years, lost 20 games three times, played during WWII AND the Great Depression, won 20 games three times, completed more games (246) than Mendoza’s OBP (.245), was a four-time All Star, and as a pitcher still had one more career RBI than Mario Mendoza.

A couple of active players just missed the cut by unfortunately extending their careers beyond the realm of their leet counterparts. Rondell White had 1337 games batting at the end of 2005; Tom Glavine had walked 1337 batters at the end of 2005. Sadly, by refusing to promptly end their careers with leet membership securely in hand, they forgo membership.

There are no managers meeting leet status; the best we can do is former Yankee skipper Joe McCarthy, whose 1333 losses comes the closest to the magic 1337. (And 7 World Series titles and 9 pennants aren’t too bad either.)

Me	$87,694.07	-12.31%
Niece-in-law-to-be	$85,331.46	-14.67%
Little Firebones	$84,163.55	-15.84%
Mrs Firebones	$82,892.81	-17.11%
Nephew	$70,340.52	-29.66%

Of the stocks selected, the only winners are my pick of Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD: up 5.6%) and my wife’s pick of CVS Caremark (CVS: up 0.25%).

In terms of indices, I’m beating the following indices:

• NASDAQ Composite
• NASDAQ 100 Stock
• Russell 2000
• CAC 40 (France)
• DAX (XETRA) (Germany)
• Nikkei 225 (Japan)
• ASX All Ordinaries (Australia)
• Korea Composite

The “wisdom of the crowd” theory is not holding up well; the combined portfolio is down 17.92%, which ends up being closest in YTD performance to the NASDAQ 100 Stock index (which is down 17.71% YTD).

For Christmas, I received a Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker/Smoker. The WSM is a bullet smoker–throw some charcoal and wood chunks in the bottom, fill a bowl of water to serve as a heat sink, and dial the temperature in at around 225 degrees Fahrenheit and four to twelve hours later…awesome barbecue.

So far this year it had been either too cold or windy to break it out, but a weekend ago the weather warmed up and it was a perfect 50 degree day to make a test with some baby back ribs. I picked ribs as the optimal choice for low cost (in case I screwed up) and tastiness (in case it turned out well.) Despite a few beginner errors, it worked out fairly well.

The Recap

Prepare the Meat

I started about 11AM preparing the slabs. For the first smoke, we cooked two, each about two-and-a-quarter pounds, slightly larger than is recommended (you typically want a slab that’s just under two pounds.) Since the meat was (unfortunately) injected with some sort of “flavor solution” intended to make the ribs juicier, the weight most likely was higher than it would have been.

We mixed up the Best Ribs in the Universe (BRITU) rub, which on the surface appears a lot spicier than we’d normally go for, with cayenne pepper, but trusting those who went before us, we mixed up a 1/8th batch (and ended up with enough rub after a light dusting for pretty much all the smokes we’ll do this year.) These ribs were pre-trimmed, so I had no membrane to pull off, just a few areas of excess fat to trim back.

As the ribs sat at room temperature for two hours, I went out and started getting the smoker assembled and fired up. First, I poured out one chimney of Kingsford briquettes and set those aside; then another heaping chimney of Kingsford which I fired up.

Fire Good

A word about chimney starters: get one. Seriously.

These things make lighting charcoal easy. They’re about $14, hold a chamber full of charcoal, and only take about two rolled up pieces of newspaper to get six pounds of charcoal fired up. No lighter fluid hassle, no “match light” bags full of starter fluid smell, no medieval looking electric starter with extension cords. Just roll up a circular wick/ring of papers underneath the chimney, set the chimney on your charcoal grate inside the smoker, light it and wait. In about twenty minutes, all the charcoal is ashed over and ready to go; dump it in the chamber, add the unlit charcoal and the smoking wood.

For this smoke, I used chunks of apple and cherry. Most people are lucky enough to find “fist-sized chunks” or “tennis ball sized chunks” of wood, but within a five mile radius of my house, the only fruit wood I could find were golf ball sized chunks of apple and cherry, so I had to throw a few more in to make up the difference, and reassembled the cooker to try to bring it to temperature.

Cherry and apple make for a sweeter and smoother flavor. The real BRITU recipe calls for a chunk of oak, but the only other wood chunks I had were some hickory. Most people I talked to didn’t like the strong hickory flavor in ribs, so I held back and stayed mild.

Wait

Most of the work was done; I just had to wait another hour for the temperature of the smoker to stabilize and for the rub to draw out the fluid from the meat. About 1PM, I rolled and skewered the ribs and put them on the top grate, with temperatures of the smoker at 300 and 210 at the lid and top grate respectively. This was the first indication that something was wrong—normally the temperature differential is more like 30-50 degrees. (Later: speculation on the cause of this mistake).

I hadn’t yet had a chance to buy a real rib rack, so I went with the soaked bamboo skewers. The downside of using skewers is that you can’t lay the ribs out flat in a real slab when you’re finished, as they tend to break into several smaller slabs of 3-5 ribs each; also, you can only get about three on the top grate skewered, but can get as many as six with a rack and careful placement.

Check, Please

At around 3PM, a bit of internet checking revealed my rookie blunder of an incorrect assembly; since it was time to check the ribs and turn them, I also took the opportunity to don the heat-resistant gloves and fix the assembly by locating the water pan in its proper location. This is when I realized that I also hadn’t used enough fuel, so I tossed in a bit more, along with a couple more small wood chunks, and prepared for disaster. I most likely totally hosed up the temperature at this point. Opening up the smoker causes the coals to get a lot more oxygen and throw off a lot more heat, so even though you let a lot of ambient heat escape, the fire itself gets harder and the risk is that you can’t keep the temperature cool enough. Reassembled, the temperature at the lid spiked even though my purported grate temperature crept slowly up.

At 4PM, I checked and tried to run the temperature up for the finish, to 250-275 degrees. Although I couldn’t get the grate temperature about 222, the ribs themselves were done; a probe showed them well over 195 in most locations which was more done than I expected. I quickly pulled them off, prepared for the worst.

We went with the recommended 5:1 mix of KC Masterpiece with honey which is intended to take the spicy/salty edge off the BRITU rub. I’m not a KC Masterpiece fan; I’m more partial to Smokehouse myself, but we hadn’t had foresight to make a Smokehouse run, and didn’t have time to experiment with a homemade sauce. No complaints though, and it worked out better than the other sauce we had which was an extra-hot Gates sauce.

At the end of the day, I was pretty satisfied. I ended up on my feet most of the afternoon trying to figure out my temperature problems (all user error and mistakes I won’t make next time.) When I got things set up properly and dialed in, maintaining temperature in the WSM worked as advertised. I only burned myself twice; once when I tried to adjust a vent with a bare finger, and another time when the metal probe of my electronic monitor brushed my finger (same finger.)

With all that fun so described, I bring you:

Firebones’ Five Reasons to Get a Weber Smokey Mountain Smoker

It’s Geeky

Something about making minor adjustments to the airflow to control the temperature, trying to get the amount of fuel right, measuring the temperatures, preparing the meat–it turned out to be a little more geeky than I thought it’d be, like being a human fuzzy logic controller to optimize the smoking. I could easily see this devolving into a Make Magazine project involving radio sensors, actuating arms to control the vent settings, and multiple temperature logging real-time feeds. This way leads to madness.

It’s Idiot Proof

Despite all my blunders (see below), the ribs turned out quite well. For a first time cook, it’s apparently hard to screw up ribs or beer can chicken on the WSM. Once I master temperature control, I’ll move up to more expensive cuts that take longer. I learned a ton so I expect that in the future this will become as easy and as reliable as my gas grill (but better tasting).

It’s Fun and Maybe Even Fashionable

I had a choice to make in the morning when I set things up–put it in the backyard where no one could see me obsessing over the smoker, or in the front, where I could field the question of the occasional passer-by. Not entirely because the front was in the sun most of the day and the house served as a windbreak did I pick the front; it turned out it made for a more social activity than I expected. And after all was said and done, and only a pile of bones remained, it turned out to be a great way to kill a Sunday afternoon.

It Cleans Up Well

Later, after the fire burned out and the coals cooled in the 40-degree night air, and after watching the finale of The Wire, I disassembled everything and cleaned the grates, dumped out the water pan and emptied the cool ash into the yard waste container. The only messy part of the whole cleanup was wiping the fat drippings out of the water pan. That whole experience set me on the path to only smoke once every few weeks–my arteries may not clean up so easily.

Most Importantly, It’s Tasty

Despite all the mistakes, the ribs turned out good. The kids, who routinely hate anything I grill, sang the praises of Dad’s cooking. (Not really sensitive to Mom with that, were they?) Even a guest who hadn’t had ribs before became a convert. Because the guests were last minute, I didn’t get a chance to eat as much as I’d hoped, but I was pleased. While the “bark” was a little tough due to the bungled temperature control, the meat itself came off the bone cleanly and was juicy. Being the first time, I can’t grade the effort; all I know is that my fears were not realized.

Four n00b Mistakes

As this was a learning experience, let me share my screwups.

Picking Subpar Meat

The ribs I picked up were injected with a solution that is intended to make the meat juicier and more flavorful. In reality, I believe it simply is done to increase the weight of the slab, make you pay more per pound. It tends to make the meat saltier than it should be. Since I don’t really have anything to compare it to, I can’t say for sure; in fact, the added moisture may have compensated for overshooting the temperature.

Some (Mistaken) Assembly Required

While the WSM is insanely easy to put together, requiring one-time use of a screwdriver and a wrench, when it came time to put things together I messed up and ended up setting the water pan on the coals directly. How could I screw that up? Perhaps fascinated by the wonderful fire I failed to remember that the water bowl has a nice ledge it sets into far above the flames. I think the net result was that the smoker held a less consistent internal temperature. About half of the way through the smoke, I fixed the situation, but a chain of events had begun that took a while to sort out.

Additionally, I forgot to foil the water pan. When the meat cooks, the fat drips into the water pan. This isn’t that big of a deal, but it did make it a little messier to clean up. (The real reason to foil on a long cook is to prevent excess fat consolidating in the bowl letting water overflow into the charcoal chamber.)

Messing up the Fuel

Because I most likely ran too hot, the fuel ran out before the end of the smoke, so I had to add a few briquettes in the last half of the cook. The mistake: when a recommendation calls for “two heaping chimneys”, use two heaping chimneys, not two “sort of level” chimneys. The amount I added was close to what I left off from two heaping chimneys.

As mistakes go, this one was easily corrected by throwing in the extra fuel as needed through the access door when checking the water level.

Checking the Thermometers

I used an electronic probe threaded through the vent hole and held in place by a potato on the top grate to get one temperature reading, and a probe monitor from my gas grill through the top to get a lid temperature. Normally, the difference between lid and top grate is about 30-40 degrees; during my cook it was closer to a 75 degree difference. What’s not clear is why. I hadn’t calibrated either thermometer (by putting them in boiling water and checking how close to the boiling point the temperature was). I’m suspicious that the wire probe temperature might have been low due to the threading through the potato, and that the actual temperature was a lot higher. I don’t believe I ever exceeded a grate temperature of 221, yet the meat was done earlier than expected.

Overall: Get One

If you like BBQ, like to experiment, and need an excuse to goof around all day working on dinner, get a WSM and have some fun. As hobbies go, it’s one that’s low-key, gets you outside in all kinds of weather, serves as the perfect excuse to knock back a few while cooking, has science-y elements and culminates in a delicious result. The smoker can also be readily converted to a normal charcoal grill if you want to do steaks, burgers, or hot dogs “hot and fast” instead of real barbecue’s “low and slow” (low temperature, slow cooking.)

I’ll most likely take another shot at ribs or beer can chicken to get my temperature woes straightened out before moving on to a more advanced topic like brisket. Check back.

Also thought I’d share a little more insight into the indirect Slashdot effect. The echo resulted in:

• Visits from 52 countries (with the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, India and the Netherlands leading the way)
• Visits from 36 states (with California, Texas, Washington, New York and Virginia leading the way)
• Visitors from Microsoft edges out visitors from Oracle, 6-5
• The most popular follow-on article for visitors: The Tuesday Night Football post
• The most popular subsequent search target: my Soul of a New Machine review
• 100-odd comments on the Slashdot story, 36 comments on Richardson’s site, and 2 comments on my own
• Referrals from Richardson’s site outpacing Slashdot referrers just under 4:1
• My first commenter (none other than Susan Lammers herself) posting about her new site which resurrects the original interviews from Programmers at Work.

One other interesting side-effect turned out to be that I hosed a few of my site’s rankings in Google by posting the story; Firebones was not a heavily-used term in the Google index, but because the word appeared in the Slashdot story, lots of scraping and syndication sites that copy slashdot stories have mirrored the story and the keyword all over the place. This resulted in a lot of my previously higher-placed links dropping down. (This was a fairly short-lived effect, and matters little–most people searching for Firebones are looking for something other than this site.)