An investment from VCs in the bank and visions of grandeur. That’s where we were in the Spring of 1999.

We needed office space and found 3500 sq. ft. of it in the west end of Ottawa. Nice space, nothing fancy, but nice nonetheless. There’s an old rule of thumb that says 120 sq. ft. per person is adequate, unless you’re using cube farms in which case you can crunch that down to 64 sq. ft. Not being a believer in overcrowding I stuck with the old belief of 120 sq. ft. of space per person, preferably with a door and a window. That meant we could cram in about 30 people in the space we’d rented, less in reality as the boardroom was to remain off limits.
As we were moving from my basement to the new digs all it required was getting phone and Internet service. That took some doing but soon enough it was done. We had our domain moved over, we had FreeBSD boxes up and running our mail and web services, and we were in business. It was cool! And we realized the real work was about to begin.

We ordered chairs (Aeron, of course) and desks (cheap, Business Depot jobs). I got a used one we found in the basement of the building we were occupying. The chairs cost us $1000 while the desks cost us $100. We had desks from the basement as well, so we equipped each office for approximately $1100 initially. Cheap, really.

We went out and bought inexpensive chairs for the boardroom but fortunately it came with a large table, which from the looks of it had the room built around it! Lucky us. Computers were the next order of business. I had been dealing with a small firm in Ottawa and Joel, the owner, agreed to build us up the equipment and order in the software we needed. It took a few days but soon enough machines were rolling into the offices. Not the fanciest machines, but ones that would do the job. Everyone got a new box and a 19″ monitor. Now for the coding.

But it wasn’t meant to be. Just as we’d set up the systems, installed compilers, libraries, etc., in came the VCs. They had other plans. They needed to talk, and it couldn’t wait.

So we went into the boardroom and sat. The lead VC, David, said that he didn’t want to see us coding. He wanted designs and requirements created. He didn’t want any code out of us until he saw reasonable plans both design and test. We needed to hire a QA Manager to complement our Chief Scientist. Tony was asked to join us as we figured out our next steps.

Our next steps turned out to be simple: what was left of April to June we were to create design and requirements documents. These were to be approved of by myself, as CEO/CTO/President and by Tony, our Chief Scientist. And, once we had a QA Manager aboard, all plans and designs would have to have corresponding test plans as well. A release schedule was to be drawn up against estimates. We were to have all of this done by June, in time for the next Board Meeting.

I’m used to doing designs, but have long believed that minimalist designs are better. It’s easier to change the documentation if there’s not much of it. Besides, you typically learn more by doing and talking to colleagues and friends in the industry than staring at Word. But, “He with the gold rules” as they say, so we did as we were told. Were I to go back in time I’d have done it differently, though. Producing way less documentation and focusing on crisp diagrams and short (1 – 2 page) documents explaining the key components. Enough for everyone to know what was needed and something everyone could read. Today I’d dump all that in a wiki, but back then they were too new to even know about.

Back to the reality of 1999.

Techies, design? Documentation? Hmmmm? Odd. OK, we thought, fine. Let’s get down to it. I tasked Tony with leading the charge and we began laying the ground work for the “Algonquin” as SecureRealms was called before we had a real name for it. The entire team spent days in the boardroom hunched over sheets of requirements arguing about the pros and cons of XML, custom protocols, X.500, X.400, LDAP, etc. Each discussion resulted in a resolution and design elements that were laid down and codified as Texar Law. It was 1999 and some things just didn’t exist, or weren’t mature enough to use. XML was one, we had a long argument back and forth. The following was the discussion concerning how the various components that made up SecureRealms would communiciate:

1. Use a custom protocol
2. Use LISP as the protocol
3. Use XML as the protocol

Number 3 was abandoned as we had no idea how long, if ever, XML would take to be adopted. Furthermore, it would require a lot of work and slow the process down. I also feared the Board wouldn’t agree to us adopting yet another emerging technology. It was bad enough we had decided to build the entire engine in Java, but to also add XML to the mix seemed too much in 1999. Option number 2 was also dropped, although it had many supporters. Tony eloquently argued that moving s-expressions around would both be feasible and efficient. Others worried it would be cumbersome and slow. We were worried about performance. I liked Tony’s idea and believed everything should be s-expressions. The Web-based admin tools should spit out s-expressions to the backend engines. It was easy to parse and easy to control. But it would require additional code and there was the unknown performance issue. Sadly, it was dropped.

Finally we had option number 1. It wasn’t the best option but was what was used in early prototypes. It worked and we opted for a protocol based on AT&T’s Plan 9. As ours was tailored to security we called ours “Plan Nein”. It was a simple and elegant protocol. It had one major flaw: it was fixed.

Looking back we should have opted for s-expressions. They were close enough to XML we could have easily moved to XML at a later date. But I was overly cautious. Which was weird, because I wanted to do s-expressions. Tony wanted to do s-expressions. And yet, somehow, I talked myself out of it and, in the end, talked everyone else out of it as well. Hindsight would show it was a stupid decision not to go with s-expressions as they would have provided ample flexibility and better aligned with the core engine.

And it wasn’t that Plan Nein didn’t work. It did. It worked marvelously well. But it wasn’t as flexible as an XML or s-expression solution would have been. And, it turned out, we wouldn’t revisit the notion of s-expressions until Version 3 of SecureRealms was in design a few months before Texar ceased to be.

Again, looking back, the right decision would have been to build a few prototypes and then weigh the pros and cons. I’m now a strong believer in building small demonstrator programs that illustrate some of the capability we’d be after in a project. Code that can be tossed but that provides insights into what it is the team is trying to accomplish. I’m sure if we’d done that we’d have quickly realized that Tony was 100% right and the proper way to proceed was with s-expressions. I firmly believe that paper design is a complete waste in software if it isn’t augmented by demonstrators that can be manipulated so as to get a feel for where the software ultimately will go.

So June rolled around and we had the Board Meeting. It went well and the design was accepted. Tony and I had nagging doubts about not going with s-expressions, but we had chosen a direction and off we went. We laid out the plan to the employees and divied up the work. Within a few weeks we had a working Plan Nein stack. Within a few months we had a working version of SecureRealms. And we had our first problem. It was slow. Brutally slow.

Plan Nein, being light weight, was not the problem. It was the engine itself. Written in Java, we were breaking new ground. No one had, as of 1999, tried to write a full fledged application in Java that was, in effect, real time. For SecureRealms to work it had to return a response to a complex policy-based query in less than a second. In fact, the specification indicated that it had to do so in a fraction of a second, preferably in a hundredth of a second or less. In its first run it took hours. It was so slow we thought it had hung. It was that bad.
Optimization, which should always wait, began in earnest. Tony quickly discovered a series of optimizations which sped the program up enormously. Others found other optimizations and soon we had the policies being evaluated in minutes instead of hours. Still brutally slow, but a huge improvement. The VCs dropped by again.

They had been kept abreast of the situation and were worried. If the engine was too slow, the product would fail. No one was going to use a policy engine that took hours to make a decision. Who cares if it could be programmed with any policy you could imagine, if it took hours to make a decision it was as good as useless.

The VCs went right to Alberto, our QA expert. Alberto said we’d made significant progress. They nodded gravely and followed Alberto into the QA Lab. They wanted the truth, they told Tony and I to stay out as they discussed the situation with Alberto. When they emerged Tony and I were relieved to see both of the senior VCs smiling. They said that they were pleased with the progress and Alberto had instilled in them the confidence that we’d get the performance numbers. The speed issue was normal, we had a good team. We’d address it. We quickly endeavoured to ensure Alberto’s prediction would come true.

By the late Fall of 1999 we had the engine running at a reasonable speed. it could perform policy evaluations at a clip of a few dozen a second on a Pentium III. But one of our new hires figured a way to improve it even further. With the help of Tony they figured they could get thousands a second. They sequestered themselves away and emerged days later, battered but happy. They offered a CD to Alberto test out. For the first time, the entire company went to the lab to see what would happen.

Alberto loaded up the newest version of the engine onto the test machines and we all waited. He fired up the test suites and we watched. Alberto frowned, checked the screens and said something was wrong. Tony, grinning, indicated that there was nothing wrong and that Alberto should check to see if the results of the run matched prior runs. They did. But the program had finished in seconds. It worked. And it worked amazingly well. It flew!

And shortly thereafter someone else flew in to see SecureRealms run: the VCs. And they did. Vindication. They said that other VCs had said it would never work. Other experts claimed it couldn’t work as advertised. But it did. In fact, in 2004 experts from various security firms told me they still didn’t believe it worked that fast on the hardware available in 1999. Except that they’d seen it run that fast. And, damn, how did we do it? We obviously had something of value. I was to learn it was especially true after others, including folks from various banks and MITRE told me that they’d spent millions and never gotten such an engine to work efficiently. And ours, written in Java, ran on anything that Java ran on. We truly thought we’d hit a home run. We were on the way to the big leagues.

So the VCs watched the demos and noticed that it ran faster than they could have hoped. The worst technical hurdle had been overcome. But more remained. We needed agents and admin consoles. We needed manuals and training material. And most of all, we needed paying customers. The company was about to change shape again in a number of ways. But the one way it most needed to change was with regards to paying customers. And we were to learn over the next three years that timing is everything. And Texar had been founded at probably the worst possible moment as three successive events would suck the life out of the high tech community and eventually suck the very life out of Texar.

The first event was well known. The year 2000 was approaching and everyone was dreading Y2K. Trying to sell a security product to a world fixated on Y2K was harder than any of us, including our investors, could ever have imagined. Everyone was more worried there would be no tomorrow than worry about protecting tomorrow’s assets.

And so we were in for a hell of a ride in 2000, more so than anyone could imagine and nothing like what the Y2K doomsdayers were predicting. We were about to find out if the world was ready for on-the-fly, real-time, rule-based, true policy-based security. Were they ready for a revolution in computer security?

• James Anderson [all things security, reference monitor, Multics]
• John Backus [FORTRAN, Algol, loads of other stuff]
• Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston [Visicalc]
• Vannevar Bush [Information Visionary]
• Fernando J. Corbato [First Timesharing System + Multics]
• Edsger Dijkstra [Moved State of the Art forward]
• Doug Engelbart [Mother of All Demos]
• Richard Fateman [Macsyma]
• Grace Hopper [First compiler + COBOL]
• Kenneth Iverson [APL]
• Alan Kay [GUI, Smalltalk, ...]
• Donald Knuth [TeX, moving CS forward big time]
• J.C.R. Licklider [Internet, Multics, ...]
• John McCarthy [LISP]
• Ted Nelson [Xanadu, hyperlinks, web-like stuff, mark-up, ...]
• Dennis Ritchie [UNIX, C, ...]
• Claude Shannon [Crypto]
• Richard Stallman [Open Source, ...]
• Ivan Sutherland [Graphics big time]
• Andrew Tannenbaum [Moving CS state of the art forward]
• Ken Thompson [UNIX, C, ...]
• Alan Turing [Loads and loads ...]

Looking over that list today I wouldn’t change a thing. No one else comes to mind as being sufficiently great so as to go up on that list. If you just read works by those 22 individuals you’ll have yourself a dandy CS education.

I also never fully understood their idiotic notion of having so many devices. I even mentioned this to folks I knew when I worked at Bell. Why so many variants? And they weren’t alone in this lunacy. Same held for Motorola. Or Bell, for that matter, with their infinite number of combinations to create a cellular plan. I railed about that but the “adults” as we jokingly called them claimed going to a simple set of plans (casual, student, power) would not be profitable. Instead they spent inordinate amounts of money attempting to lure customers from competitors. It was madness. Even crazier was that each of their surveys showed the product lines were too confusing. Solution? More product lines.

And thus in my peripheral dealings with RIM I saw the same lunacy. Instead of taking a deep breath when the iPhone came out and saying: “We’ll make two devices: one with a keypad and one without.” They instead started making more and more with keypads and a couple of horrid devices without. It appeared to be an attempt to be “different” but instead just confused issues more.

And then there was the stupidity of not properly supporting the Mac. A lot of Mac owners wanted Blackberrys before the iPhone came out and those that had one couldn’t properly sync and otherwise link up to their favoured desktop. It took until 2010, I believe, before an adequate solution from RIM appeared for the Mac. That was sadly way too late.

I now watch the circus that is happening at RIM and read various articles on what’s going on and fear that RIM isn’t long for this world. In my opinion they need someone who isn’t tethered to the old world thinking of telephony and handhelds. They need someone who can look at where the market will go, not where it is or has been. Mimicking the iPhone is a losing business strategy. That market is sewn up near term. They need instead to find out what the iPhone is NOT good at and focus on those aspects. What is it that the iPhone users wish they could do and ensure the next RIM phones do that. And, no, it’s not Flash. What they need to find is the 3 or 4 main features that a majority of their users wish and then focus madly on those 3 or 4. They need to eliminate the vast majority of their handhelds, reducing it to 2 at most. Each should be fully featured, no crippling. And they need to be an utter joy to use.

Finally, they have to make a decision of whether they stick with QNX or opt for something else. Personally I think opting for QNX with a 100% compatible Android layer is the way to go. That way they can focus on a very robust and secure operating system which will appeal to businesses while offering Android compatibility. And I’m not talking partial compatibility but full compatibility. Effectively a Posix-like layer atop QNX but for Android. And why not switch to Android? Security. QNX offers massive advantages in security that Android, which is built atop Linux and is a huge OS, cannot. A focus on security, especially messaging security, would be huge as more and more people worry about their privacy. Allow for P2P-based “cliques” to be formed for messaging and provide that P2P software for Android and iPhone so that users on those devices can interact in those environments. People love being part of a group so RIM should provide a way of creating those for people.

Sadly I feel that what RIM will do is more of the same. I further fear they will end up like Nortel with other firms who were their lesser just a few years ago picking at their bones.

I’m sure when all the dust settles RIM will either be another sad tale in a future edition of The Innovator’s Dilemma or will have found their way to defeat the dilemma. The way their going right now they’ll be a future sad chapter.

Yet publishers, well some publishers, seem to hate the Kindle. I’ve seen books I’ve been interested in buying priced at or above! the price of the Kindle version by publishers. What the hell is going through their brains? If the hardcover is $18.70 why is the Kindle version $18.67?

What this has done to me is that I simply will not buy books from any publisher that does that. I will buy from those that price the Kindle version fairly from $3 – 13, depending on a variety of factors that I can live with. But I won’t buy an electronic copy of a book for the price I can have a hard copy for. And I won’t buy the hard copy so as to justify the asinine price structure the publisher is pushing. In other words, I will boycott those publishers. And if I truly want to read the book I’ll borrow it from the library. I want to enjoy the convenience electronic books offer, not be shafted.

The only outcome I see from this type of stupid pricing structure is to push more authors towards self-publishing via Amazon. And they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

And don’t get me started on DRM, which is another issue entirely and another one that publishers are stupidly foisting upon us readers thereby creating the very monopoly they’re now bitching about with Amazon and the Kindle. It’s not Amazon’s fault that publishers demanded DRM on the books. The fact Amazon is the biggest purveyor of books meant they’d sell the most electronic copies. Ipso facto that means that Amazon would slowly get a near-lock/near-monopoly on electronic versions.By ensuring a Kindle version of a book can only be read on Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle apps the publishers created the very thing they most feared. Brilliant.

So, I ask, are publishers insane? Or merely stupid?

But what of before that point? No one, not Dawkins, not Hawking, not anyone that I know of in science can explain why there is something instead of nothing. Not even books that use “nothing” and “something” in their titles and proclaim to be “science” books explain it. They always fall back upon materialism, upon physical “things” to explain why there is something. But they fail miserably when trying to explain why those physical things even exist or why the laws that govern them exist.

It seems that a lot of people who think they’re very smart seem determined to show the world that they’re really very shallow thinkers. That they wish to deconstruct the universe and creation into nothing more than a bunch of rules governing a bunch of physical “things”, things that just always have been. To ask why those rules or things even exist is “stupid” to them. It signals a lower intelligence according to many of them. Yet, to me and many others — especially philosophers and theologians — it shows these “new atheists” to be little more than infantile generalists with little comprehension of philosophy let alone theology.

The fact that new atheists will simply wave their hand at anything before the universe existed as unworthy of intellectual effort is an affront to the curiosity of man. We all awake with a wonderment of creation and a desire to know why we’re here, why is there something instead of nothing, why does the universe even work in a way that’s comprehensible. To “new atheists” that type of thinking is troublesome, the font of all evil. Instead, we should simply focus on what can be materially tested. No more. To think beyond that is “stupid”, to quote a favourite word of many of the “new atheists”.

As a scientist I am constantly and fully disgusted by the “new atheists” and their inability to leverage curiosity beyond the confines of the natural sciences. To wonder what more there may be. To believe that only that which their senses detect is all that there can be. The arrogance, hubris, and naiveté of that type of thinking is mind numbing. The fact they’re also insulting, childish, churlish and intolerant only makes there views more repugnant.

The new atheists love laughing at fundamentalists of various stripes and yet display the same level of hatred, distrust and narrow thinking they claim to abhor in said people. It would be funny if it weren’t so utterly sad.

This has been a long time coming. I had hoped to get this up a few short days after taking the course at Le Cordon Bleu but work and life got in the way and before I knew it months had passed. They say better late than never.

The course was offered the week of September 19th at Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa, which is situated in a beautiful old building on Laurier Street across from Strathcona Park. We were fortunate to again have Chef Faure as our instructor, who is animated and amusing  and a joy to be taught by. He is a fire hose of information about not only what you’ll be baking but also bits of trivia from French history, baking history, and even personal anecdotes that suit the situation.

As per the other courses I’ve taken I took this one with my good friend Alberto, or my Baking Buddy as I call him. We enjoy these courses and I think our wives just enjoy that we’re out of the house making a mess someplace else!

Boulangerie II requires you to have taken Boulangerie I. The Chef does not stop to explain the various elemental aspects of bread baking learned in Boulangerie I and thus you go headlong into the first recipe. Unlike some other courses the Boulangerie courses are structured as interwoven demonstration-practical sessions. Thus, you watch Chef do aspects of a recipe followed by you going off to your station and doing what you just saw. Once you get to the point where the next element of the recipe must be performed, you go back to the front where Chef describes and demonstrates the next part. And you do this repeatedly for the 4 days. Each day lasts 7 – 8 hours, sometimes a bit longer. The Chef — and the student assistants — stay there to ensure you complete everything. Obviously you can’t take all night, but they have a great grasp of how long it takes and the capabilities of various students. If a student is having difficulty either a chef-in-training from the school assists or the Chef does. At times additional Chefs would come in to assist, or just to catch up on how things are going. It’s a very convivial and jovial environment.

Chef Christian Faure

This time around we did a wide variety of breads including bagels, pretzels, multigrain breads, multi-ferment breads, ryes, English muffins, and pita as well as some rich doughs for kougloffs and cakes.

Of all the breads we made the only one I wouldn’t do again are the English muffins. A lot of effort for little gain. I didn’t find much difference in taste between what we did and the ones you can buy in the store. You must cook them on a griddle so at least you don’t have to fire up the oven, but I just couldn’t be bothered ever doing them again. For the curious I did try to bake them in the oven, and that just doesn’t work at all. It was a good learning experience for everyone as we were all curious and I figured, what the hell. What happens is the muffin just explodes out sideways resulting in a very distasteful locking “muffin”. Not good.

The most fun was the pita. Watching it puff up was cool because I always wondered how to make pita. And now I know. Not sure if I’d do it again or not, but knowing how means at least if the desire strikes me I can. But we have a couple of excellent Lebanese bakeries in town that make awesome pita so I’d rather just head down and get some of theirs, to be honest.

As with prior courses I took some pictures as best I could with the tool I had at hand, my old iPhone. So I hope readers will forgive the quality of the photography — it’s both the tool used and the tool using it .

As can be seen by an observant reader many of the people were at Boulangerie I. It was nice to see familiar faces. And each of us seemed to have enjoyed the course, even with the inevitable mistakes — including when I misheard Gabrielle and went on to do her rye which I thought was but a starter. I wondered why she had so much dough. Sadly, my misunderstanding ruined her rye but she was very forgiving. I’ll try not to blunder so badly next time.

The first day was bagels, pretzels and sourdough and apple (natural) starters. Being that we were going to make breads with starters for the entire course, the first day had to make “breads” that required no starter, hence the bagels and pretzels.  This really wasn’t that exciting and the effort was, to be frank, not quite worth the effort. I’d rather just pop down to Kettleman’s or The Bagel Shop and buy bagels there if the desire strikes. Soft pretzels are cool, and my son loves them, but again the desire to make these is pretty limited. It was great learning how to make them, but I’ve not had the desire to do them again though Alberto has.

The second day was pumpernickel bread, pita, kougloff and English muffins. We also refreshed our sourdough starter and did our mise en place for day 3′s bacon and onion bread. The apple starter was left alone to continue naturally fermenting.

On the third day we were to use the sourdough for our onion and bacon bread, potato bread and focaccia. We were to use our apple starter for our apple cider bread.

The apple cider bread was most interesting. I had no idea what it was going to taste like but when it was baking and when it came out of the oven it was divine. You could smell the pungent ferment and the sweetness of the apple. And the bread came out nearly cake soft, but with the typical bread bounce of the crumb you’d expect. The taste was wonderful. It is definitely something I’d make again.

The focaccia was pretty straightforward and it was more interesting having Chef Faure explain how to make various sandwiches with it than the making and baking, which was rudimentary. Chef Faure provided us with salmon sandwiches from his batch of focaccia and other breads and it was great (see pic). It is well worth making the bread simply to create awesome sandwiches.

The onion and bacon and potato breads were OK. Not my cup of tea. I found the potato bread a bit dense and rather uninspiring. The onion and bacon bread was OK but I’m just not a fan of breads that have things in them, unless it’s olives. I pretty much prefer simpler breads. That said, most of the other students adored both of these. And those to whom I gave part of my production also loved them. I guess my taste buds aren’t indicative of the majority.

At the end of the third day the Chef told us that on the fourth day we would finish off any of the breads that we’d not had time to finish as well as doing a rye with the remainder of the sourdough ferment. We would also need to come up with at least one recipe of our own. This, he said, was what was done for those taking the diploma-based courses and the only difference was that he gave us the ingredients ahead of time. We would be able to pick ingredients from the  (typically) “black box” of ingredients to come up with a new recipe based on the techniques we’d learned. And the judges would be himself and other chefs. Obviously there was no real pass/fail, but everyone was determined to impress the chefs and chefs-in-training. As indicated, this was similar to what the chefs-in-training went through for their courses. The only difference was that Chef took pity on us by providing us with a list of the black box ingredients, making it a bit easier. I thought it was a brilliant way to see if you actually learned anything. There was no minimum number of ingredients you could use, nor a maximum. The point was to come up with something uniquely your own that you thought you would love to bake and that would be edible by the judges.

I took the challenge to be think about it at home and come up with a recipe. Some others took it to mean find a recipe and apply it. When we arrived on the fourth day Chef saw most people whipping out cookbooks. He came by and indicated that we could not use a cookbook recipe. That it had to be our own. So the books were put away, with audible groans, and we all continued.

The night before I had decided to keep whatever I did fairly simple. I’m of the school that too much of a good thing makes for a bad thing, especially in baking. So the fewer ingredients the better. I had truly enjoyed making certain dishes, but found some too sweet or too bland. So, my goal was to combine ingredients I liked — lemon, sugar, simple syrup — and create small cakes similar to kougloffs. That meant grabbing a dozen small kougloff forms as quickly as possible. I was also going to make something akin to Sicilian bread, namely a twisted loaf covered in sesame seeds with a goodly amount of olive oil. A bread and a cake, I figured that would cover all bases. Plus, I had my rye starter left in the fridge which I was thinking of extending with a second and third ferment to add flavour, which I did. The chef was pleased that I opted to extend the recipe by creating a grape-based starter and accelerating it with a bit of yeast. The added grape ferment added a complexity and lovely huge holes as can be seen in the picture. It also coloured the loaf a nearly mauve colour. I was quite pleased with how that turned out.

The little cakes I opted to make were going to be based on how kougloffs are made. In those you create a chemisage within the pan by generously buttering the sides and then adding sliced almonds so the cake pops out easily from the mold. I didn’t like the idea of the almonds as my mom’s allergic and so opted for heavy buttering and then a goodly amount of sugar, followed by refrigeration. This resulted in each mold being heavily buttered and liberally covered in sugar which I believed would caramelize at the 385F it was to be baked at. I made the dough and put it into the molds and left them to rise. Once risen I popped them into the oven to bake until done.

As I was taking the little cakes out of the oven Chef Faure came over. He asked what I’d done and I explained it. He said that they would not come out of the molds, that they would stick. I said “I don’t think so. I buttered them heavily and then coated them with a good layer of sugar.” He said they will stick and picked one up to turn it out and it came right out, much to his surprise. He then looked at me and said: “Had you asked me if this was something you should do before you did it I would have said it would never work. And not only did it work, but it came out beautifully.” He thought it was one of the prettiest cakes he’d seen in a long while. It looked like it was studded with diamonds and had a hard caramel coating to boot! He asked if he could take it to show the other chefs and if they could try it. They were very impressed. And soon I was handing out samples to the other students, the chefs-in-training, and the staff. The greatest complement would follow when Chef Faure said he’d proudly serve this at Signatures, the school’s on site restaurant, and asked me for the recipe, which I forwarded to him. And since the inspiration came from cakes my mom and my mother-in-law make I opted to name the cakes “Babis”.

As indicated, though impossible to see in the photographs, each Babi has a hard caramelized shell that resulted from its baking. It adds just the right amount of sugar because the dough is actually not that sweet. Chef Faure thought it would be a perfect little cake to use for desserts at the restaurant where they’d add a fruit compote or ice-cream into the hollow left by the pan. I think that would be the perfect way to present this, especially as a breakfast cake along the lines of how a brioche is used in France.

The recipe for the curious is as follows:

Babis

Biga

• 190g milk
• 30g        fresh yeast
• 190g    flour

Dough

• all of the biga
• 440g    flour
• 12g        salt
• 220g    eggs (5 eggs)
• 60g        butter

Simple Syrup

• 60g        sugar
• peel of one lemon
• juice of one lemon
• 60g        water

Chemisage

• sugar (for lining mold and some for sprinkling on top)
• butter

Method

1. Combine ingredients for biga, knead in mixer, set aside someplace warm, covered, 1 hour until proofed.
2. In small pot place lemon peel, lemon juice, sugar and water. Make simple syrup by bringing to boil and then set aside to cool.
3. Take 10 small kouglof molds and butter each well.
4. Take each well buttered mold and line with sugar by placing 3 – 4 tbsp sugar and coating the butter evenly. Remove excess sugar.
5. Place molds in fridge.
6. When biga has proofed, place biga in the bowl of mixer.
7. Add flour, sugar, salt, and strained simple syrup and begin to mix.
8. Add eggs one at a time.
9. Add butter in small pieces.
10. Mix until well incorporated, like with a brioche, and dough is smooth.
11. Set oven to 375F.
12. Pour dough into molds until 3/5ths full with dough. Ensure there are no air bubbles. Sprinkle the top of each with a teaspoon of sugar.
13. Allow to rise to top of mold.
14. Once dough has proofed, place molds on cookie sheet and bake in oven for 20 minutes or until done.
15. Take out of molds immediately after baking and place back in oven, upside down, for 5 minutes so sugar coating hardens.
16. Enjoy!

Now the problem was that somehow I finished 2 hours before everyone else. I initially thought I’d forgotten to do something, but it seems that I was just really efficient. Alberto mentioned that I was like a machine, just working away. I guess I end up in the zone when I bake much as I do when I program. To me baking is a logical progression of steps which I just do and enjoy. Friends and family have all indicated that I should think of opening a bakery when I retire. Even Chef Faure indicated it would be something that I might consider pursuing as he finds I have an uncanny knack for baking. And perhaps I will. Only problem is I’m not a morning person. Maybe I’ll have to be the lazy baker who gets up in the morning but whose goods aren’t ready until noon. Not an easy career change, but the thought of working with dough every day is oddly very appealing. And the joy I get from it is amplified when I give bread to friends and family. I’ve had to reassure them that it’s not trouble and that I enjoy it, but they are very surprised that I enjoy baking as much as I do. My wife continues to comment she never sees me as happy as I am when I’m baking. And to be honest, the peace it brings me is great. I wish everyone could find something like this in their lives.

Of note is that Le Cordon Bleu is adjusting their short courses. It seems they are vastly more popular than the school had anticipated and people wish to take follow on. So we’ll be seeing new pastry courses, for example, which will be interesting to check out once they go live. Chef Faure indicated part of doing the more advanced courses is procuring the additional pans required for the various pastries and other baked goods. Obviously, if you’re simply outfitting your own kitchen it’s no big deal. But if you have to outfit a kitchen so that twelve bakers can be going at the same dish at the same time it requires a lot of pans — and the subsequent space to store it all. And then there’s the setting up of the course itself. I’m sure each course is a subset of the larger programs, but they have to be tailored and that takes time. I fully appreciate the time and effort that takes and continue to recommend Le Cordon Bleu school to anyone interested in any type of course. I’ll stick to baking, however, as I so fully enjoy it that I find it hard to explain just how fully. Maybe I was meant to be a baker.

Here are pictures of what the production of just the last day looks like. To think we made that much each day! It still boggles my mind how much one can bake using a single oven in a few hours.

Here are pictures taken from each of the four days showing various breads done or on the go. And, yes, the Chefs do feed you while you’re there. We had a variety of sandwiches made, only a few of which I’ve captured on film.

Obviously naming the chin would be important. Being that the animal truly doesn’t smell the kids figured the perfect name would be Stinky. And so, we have Stinky the Chinchilla as part of our home now. He’s been with us for years.

Of course, anyone who owns a rodent knows the thing needs a cage. And my kids indicated that not just any cage would do, but the biggest one that they could find would be best so they had us buy them a 4 foot high cage with many levels which, to be honest, the guy really enjoys. The kids also rearrange it regularly so that he has new places to explore — or so they claim. But the funniest thing is that the little houses and other wooden constructs bought for his chewing pleasure must be in certain positions. Now, this isn’t our kids who want it in certain positions. No. It’s Stinky who wants them in certain spots.

And when I say he wants them in certain spots, he will push and shove his various “furniture” around until he gets it to how he likes it. It is not uncommon to hear crashes as he pushes structures off of other levels down to the lower level. Or constant scraping as he moves his little wooden chew house around until it’s “just right”. I’ve watched him do this for hours as he tugs it back and forth. It’s incredible how much effort he puts into arranging his cage.

And he’s a smart rodent to boot. You cannot leave any door or drawer in the room even slightly ajar. He will open it and dash off into the recesses that door offers. It happens all the time. When we had furniture that he could crawl under he would regularly take my wife’s Crocs and pull them in behind him so as to lock us out of getting to him — or so he thought. He was not happy when I simply lifted the night table to get him out from under there.

But the thing that most intrigues us is when he sits on the ledge of the window and stares. We don’t know if he’s just staring at himself or actually through the window. Since he also does it when the window is open and there is only a screen we think he’s either enjoying the colder temperatures of the window — though he does it in summer, too — or he’s simply looking outside.  Here’s a picture so you can see what he looks like as he “ponders the universe” as we put it.

Another aspect of his personality is that if you are the one spending time with him so he can get his daily run around time he will stop what he’s doing if you’re not paying attention to him. It’s funny to see him sitting there (another picture to show that event) and stares at you until you are paying attention and then madly dashes off. My kids call it the “Look at me, dammit!” expression. To add to his personality he also will climb up on your book or iPad if you’re not paying attention so that you have no choice but to pay attention. Of course, if he clambers onto the iPad his little feet do a number of selections, so we try to discourage that.

Anyone who’s not seen a chinchilla bathe themselves is always surprised by the way they do it. Stinky just loves his dust baths. He’d do them non stop if he could. And it’s amazing how clean he comes out after one.

Although he was pretty jittery when we got him years ago he is much more relaxed now, allowing you to pet him and feed him. He knows you won’t be taking his food away from him so he doesn’t try to run and hide, unless it’s a particularly tasty treat. Most of the time he will sit there and chew away as you rub or scratch his head, which he seems to enjoy more now that he’s older. He’ll even lower his ears to indicate he wants to be scratched and then closes his eyes while you’re doing it. To say it’s cute is an understatement.

The only problem with Stinky is that he figures the house is one big chew toy. He especially seems to love trim. It looks like we’ll have some repairs to do courtesy of Stinky, but for now we just try to keep him away from it. Though, when you tell him “No, Stinky” he simply turns his back to you figuring “You can’t see what I’m doing!”. Sigh. We’re not sure if he’s normal for a chinchilla but he does strike us as exceptionally bright.

We’ve grown so used to Stinky that it would be weird if he wasn’t here. They tell us chinchillas can live 15 or more years, so he’ll be with us another decade at least. But he’s such a character that it will at least be entertaining.

Between the two shows I particularly like Canadian Pickers because I find Scott and Sheldon to be warm, friendly, funny guys that’d you’d hoist a pint with. Mike and Frank over on American Pickers are OK, but sometimes they come across as just too prototypical American — i.e., loud. And now that I’m older I think I can do without loud friends . There’s just something appealing about quiet. Never thought I’d end up this way, but I guess it happens to us all. Next up I’ll be complaining about the racket of rock and roll, to paraphrase The Pursuit of Happiness.

What attracts me to the shows is that these four guys are crazy into old junk. They look at it not as junk but as something that they can buy and flip for a profit. To me — and probably most of their fans — it looks like a bunch of old, rusty crap they’re buying from various and sundry folks across North America. And yet they have customers who obviously buy this stuff. And I just don’t get it.

Just the other day I watched as Mike from American Pickers bought what is easily one of the ugliest metal legs for a table I’ve ever seen. They were done up as seahorses. It was badly rusted. Yet he was positive he’d be able to sell it no problem. And I don’t doubt him. But I can’t fathom why anyone would want that in their home.

And then there’s this love of old oil cans, old tin cans, old any can it seems. At least Scott and Sheldon said what some people use them for: garbage cans to add a bit of a talking point to a home office, say. I can sort of see that, but I’m not sure I’d want a rusty old can sitting on my nice hardwood floors. And getting the females in my house to touch said rusty old garbage can? Highly unlikely. It’d probably end up on the curb as junk on garbage day, never to be seen by me again.

Or the signs. It seems people are utterly insane for signs. And not just the type of signs you can sort of understand, say a Pepsi sign or Coca Cola sign that’s, say, 2′x3′ and would look cool in a man cave or rec room. No, I’m talking about signs that are easily a dozen feet across and some weigh hundreds of points and look like the Taliban used them for target practice.

I’m probably just one of those people who just isn’t into “old stuff”. I’ve never liked antiques. I just don’t know why anyone wants some old shit in their homes.

But, I enjoy watching those four guys “pick” through what to me is garbage and find various things. You even learn a bit of history and the people they meet are quite fascinating. And after watching 2 seasons of Pickers I’m now wondering if I should go find an old Pepsi sign to put in my basement man cave. That’d be cool. Damn, maybe those guys have a point…

One of the things I liked about Steve Jobs was his total disregard for Wall Street. He focused on pleasing his customers and proved that an insane focus on the consumer was all that really mattered. The pity is that so few have comprehended this fact even while they try to “replicate” Jobs’ success.

I’m hoping well abandon the “dumbest idea in the world”, as Welch puts it. It’s time. In fact, it’s past due for CEOs and others in senior management to focus on the needs of their customers. The hijacking of corporate America by Wall Street needs to end so that the very fabric of the West — the middle class — isn’t utterly destroyed.

Like many people I get a lot of my news online. Thus, I get to read it at my computer and, if something is interesting, save it. I read from various sources, conservative, liberal and neutral alike. It’s best to stay as best informed as possible so as to minimize the likelihood of exacerbating any given bias. But it seems some people are just incapable of doing that. They cling to sites that expound their personal biases. Some of the beliefs are mistaken but harmless, but others are harmful. And the problem is that people with a similar attitude then read the associated articles, sometimes purported to be “news”, thus reinforcing their prejudices or non-scientific beliefs. And because of some of these misguided beliefs people have died — such as those unwilling to take common vaccines, for example.

Again, I don’t know the cause — poor education, the long-standing glorification of the idiot, the hate for anyone intelligent, … who knows. But what I do see is that these idiots congregate and then use their congress to espouse stupid things. Because they tend to vote in blocks, stupid things get enacted by governments. This is all not good. And yet, the irony is the very systems these people are using to congregate and push their various stupid ideas was created by the very type of people they loathe. For if it were up to those that seem to hate anything advanced or intelligent we’d still be swinging from trees.