Happy birthday, darling! You picked a gorgeous day to get older; it’s sunny outside, crisp and cold. Let’s spend it all inside celebrating your awesomeness.

I love you.

From: Jeremiah Winzell
To: Pär Winzell
Date: 05:45 PM
Subject: st
—————————————————————————
ther ormeny probloms thet we nyd to stop!
hry we most go?

Zell: [glumly walks around house]
Karen: What’s wrong?
Zell: It’s the little toy game I’m working on. I’m starting to think watching a simulation of mold spreading is just not that exciting.
Karen: Oh honey.

The only two print publications I read cover to cover these days are Foreign Affairs, well-respected and pragmatically oriented around America’s foreign affairs, and Dissent Magazine, unapologetically leftist and very intellectual. In some ways, these magazines are nearly opposite each other. And yet, they are brethren in the dwindling tradition of genuinely penetrating analysis and intellectual honesty. Dissent regularly trashes the self-deceptive foibles of blaha liberalism, and Foreign Affairs would as readily publish Castro as Blair (or so I imagine).

Anyway. All I wanted to do here was link to one of the most evocative things I’ve read in years - something about these passages gets to me more than any actual poetry. The piece is just the mix of epic drama and dispassionate intelligence that I like most, and you can find it here. Go ahead, it’s worth the five minutes.

I have a favourite cake. It is not the traditional birthday cake of my people, with the whipped cream and fluffy bits and the vanilla filling - although I like that too.

No, this is a heavy duty chocolate cake. It’s not actually all that epicurially fancy, although in my mind it’s a very special sort of cake. My parents would occasionally make it when I was growing up, and I have long yearned to make it myself.

The recipe was published in some Swedish magazine way back when, and my mother cut it out and collected it. I seem to have salvaged the recipe in late ‘99 and typed it into a text file that’s still sitting there in my home directory.

I think the time has come to A) translate and publish it for the sake of the common good, and B) actually make it myself.

Today is A) day. Please forgive the metric measurements. Work it out.

The bits that aren’t chocolate:

• 500g almond paste (you can get this in decent super markets)
• 4 egg whites (yolks used below; swedes are practical)

Grate the almond paste and mix it with lightly beaten egg whites, then spread the resulting batter into three thin layers, 20 cm in diameter, on greased cookie sheets. Bake these for 15-20 minutes at 175C, until they’re golden in colour. No, there is no explicit sugar added to the batter: the almond paste is already very sweet.

That what is:

• 4 egg yolks (you saved them, right?)
• 1 dl sugar
• 1 dl heavy cream
• 1.5 tbsp instant coffee (i’m sure strongly brewed black coffee would work fine too)
• 100g semi-sweet chocolate for baking
• 150g butter

Stir the yolks, sugar and cream in a heavy sauce pan; heat to a slow boil and stir continuously until everything’s nice and thick and goopy. Take the pan off the heat, stir in the coffee, and finally add the chocolate in, melting it. Stir occasionally and put away to cool.

Finally, simply interleave the almond layers and the chocolate sauce, finally covering the whole thing in chocolate. Make lovely patterns with a fork on top and decorate with scalded, roasted almonds (these days this just means buy roasted almond halves or slivers in the supermarket).

This cake keeps very well. It only gets better as the days go by. Make it and slowly nibble away at it over the course of a week. Find your house mates hovering around the fridge at 1 AM because they want a tiny slice before they finally sleep. Mmm.

So as Jeremiah and I were outside building a snow lantern (snölykta) I was also snapping photos. After half a dozen or so, the camera abruptly stopped working. It’d turn on, the screen would blaze “CANON” in delightful blue, then it’d shut down. Sometimes it’d beep a little first.

Various battery changing experiments and such later we had to conclude our camera was for all intents and purposes dead. However, I chanced upon this repair guide for what appeared to be my problem (the lens cover wouldn’t close and there were disheartened mechanical noises from inside the camera), although the guide was written for a rather different camera than ours.

Despite the daunting nature of the instructions, I set out to follow them. Hours went by. Substantial electrical shocks were received (who knew flashes had such huge capacitors in them?). So here it is, Sunday evening, and I’m nearly done. I pushed through 90% of that repair guide — you know, the disassembly bits.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll put it back together. Yeah, tomorrow sounds good.

I really wanted to do NaNoWriMo. I was a little behind after five days, but fully intending to catch up. My writing was horrible, but I really liked the story I’d mapped out.

But then this week the planets misaligned and it’s been a struggle just to get work days in, and there’s been just no time for leisure.

Worse, I’ll be traveling for pretty much the next two weeks without cease. So, 50,000 words is simply not going to happen.

I’ll try next year.

I spent most of July doing telecommute work for Christopher Allen and Skotos on the SkotOS 2.0 project. We’re finally approaching some kidn of early, limited alpha release, and with that release comes the hope of turning what is essentially a one-man project into something more collaborative.

Also in July I flew to San Francisco to interview with the illustrious Three Rings Designs and to chat with their chief pirate, Daniel James, an old friend of mine from the SF Bay Area and from the pinnacle years of the now-defunct MUD-Dev mailing list.

He had bangers and mash and I can’t recall what I had, which probably means he chose the more interesting dish.

Um, anyway, things went well and agreements were signed and so (apart from the fact that I’m in Sweden on sort-of vacation for most of August) that’s where my professional energies shall henceforth be focused. I’m quite excited about this (somewhat surprising) turn of events, and thrilled to be doing something so new and different — while I have oodles of experience with online multi-player gaming in text I’m honestly rather new to building graphical user interfaces, and it’s fun stuff.

And then the other week I finally cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft. It’s a lovely game, and I made a lot of friends there, and I don’t regret the copious amount of time I spent raiding with them. But it does take a lot of time to do well, especially since I’m not so great with moderation. And it’s time to live more fully in the present, to maybe fix up the house a bit.

And tomorrow Jeremiah and I fly back from spending almost three weeks in Sweden, I’ll be doing new things with most of the hours of my days, and so I think September represents the turning of a new leaf in more ways than one.