Holiday Letter 2009
Submitted by Michael Cooper on Sat, 12/26/2009 - 14:50- Music
- Manji
- Bread
- Running
- TO Pride run
- Swimming
- Gym
This is my web log, or "blog". I'm not much of a blogger (yet, anyway), so don't expect to post frequently. I'm also not using blogging software, so there's a bit of extra overhead to posting stuff and don't have an RSS feed for the moment. Mainly this is an archive of "diary" type entries, as distinguished from the less time-specific stuff in my writing section.
I had occasion to practice making moulded chocolates for a birthday party. It was a lot of work for the occasion, but was good practice. My previous attempt at making these chocolates was less than successful. The chocolate was tempered, but lost its temper either because of the instructions I followed to warm the mould, or to refrigerate to help set the shell, made worse when I had to rewarm it in the mould when it set too much.
I saw some Seville oranges at the grocery store and had to pick them up. It was definitely an impulse buy, I don't usually buy fresh fruit and certainly didn't know there would be enough of a market for these oranges for the stores to stock them. Getting these meant I had to make marmalade.
I've received a few holiday letters and thought maybe it was time for me to do my own. I apologize that I'm not a reliable correspondent, but at least this way I can catch people up with the main things going on. Of course snail mail is très passé and I'd probably miss a lot of people, so I'm doing it as a Web page.
As my airline miles card shows, I've done a fair bit of traveling this year (even though less than most of my colleagues).
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 was published as an official standard December 11, 2008. I've been involved with this work indirectly for 10 years, and directly for 6 years, so this represents the culmination of a lot of energy and focus. For the past few years we've just been processing the thousands of comments we've received. This year alone we pushed out three stages of the document, each of which required certain formal work to be done.
I lost a fair bit of weight recently, due in part to intense exercise, but the last 10 pounds mainly to a careful diet. The main rules of this diet were limit carbohydrates after the morning meal, get lots of protein and vegetables, minimize fat, and eliminate refined sugar. This is a reducing diet, not a maintentance diet, meaning I don't have to live the rest of my life so ascetically, but did need to do so for a few months. Here are some tricks I collected to get me through things.
I've been experimenting with how to make chocolate covered cherries for a couple years now. I'm getting better at it, but still get a lot of them leaking the juice from inside. I thought I'd write about what I've learned to date, to record what I've learned and for the benefit of anybody else interested in the topic. I should say that I have no training in chocolate work, so some of my mistakes may seem amateurish - they are. But, I believe amateurs should be able to do cool things and I've tried to learn how to do it with an eye to how a hobbyist would go about it.
Every year at the holidays I like to make a gingerbread house. There's something about creating art with food that's more interesting than inedible art - the charm of it, the magic of how the physical properties of the food make it even possible. Because it's interesting, I'm able to do it (in general I'm not too good at crafts).
October 15, 2007
This is a loosely organized collection of things I wrote to various people when my cat Kofi died. I haven't tried to organize this into a coherent narrative, and probably won't. I just wanted to keep a record of what I was feeling at the time.
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