I’ve been added to the roster of authors at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change publishing and technology blog. I’m going to be posting about issues relevant to developers in the publishing industry, and also speculating on some directions that publishers can take when dealing with online content. TOC’s primary audience is trade publishers, but I’ll occasionally address topics from the academic publishing world where I spend most of my time.

My first post is on the sexy topic of ebook file formats.

You might notice from my biography on the TOC blog that I appear to have quit my job to be an independent consultant. My first day with no paycheck is International Workers’ Day.

Quickly skimming an online version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, I came across this strikingly modern prose:

“I never was at his house; but they say it is a pretty sweet place.”

I imagined for a moment that Sir John lived in a rent-controlled penthouse featured on Apartment Therapy.  It was disappointing to re-read it correctly:

“I never was at his house; but they say it is a sweet pretty place.”

By E. A. Vander Veer
First Edition January 2008
Pages: 268
Series: The Missing Manuals
ISBN 10: 0-596-51769-6

Note: This was a review copy I received for free

I’ve done a bit of writing and editing for O’Reilly on the programming side which means I’ve come to expect a certain dry, technical style. That’s rarely a bad thing, though, as any developer who has suffered through someone else’s cutesy variable names can attest.

But this is a manual for a web site — already an inherently ridiculous concept — and what’s more, it’s a manual on Facebook. Currently on my Facebook home page:

• J– is now a fan of Fall Out Boy
• T– received a “fluff gift”
• Oh and Southwest airlines is apparently having a fare sale

These are not likely to be the subjects of the next Knuth book.

So on the lighter topic of Facebook.com and Facebook apps, it’s appropriate to interject some personality and wit:

Facebook lets you join only one regional network at a time. If you try to add a second, Facebook simply replaces the first with the second. That’s kind of annoying if you’re a multiple home owner, but on the bright side, you own multiple homes.

Plus, I’ll admit it, I learned some things. Facebook has an annoying habit of renaming concepts that already have names, so for example I had no idea that Notes were actual blog entries, and could be imported from external blog sources (I use a third-party app for that). I was also inspired to finally figure out how to get added to the network of my college alma mater, and start a new network for my company. So hey, useful.

The book has sound advice throughout in terms of the fuzzier aspects of Facebook: how to maintain a modicum of privacy, how to use the system to promote yourself or your employer. (The author also recognizes that the first thing everyone does is look up their exes, and provides helpful tips for that too.)

I hadn’t seen any of the Missing Manual series before so the layout was new to me. For me, a tech book just needs some text and an animal woodcut but for a popular “technical” book it’s pretty nice — lots of useful callouts in soothing colors and no incomprehensible icons or annoying cartoons. I don’t know if I’d recommend this book to any of my friends who are clearly all-too-capable of using Facebook already, but I totally recommend it for your boss who wants to know what this “MyFace” thing is he keeps hearing about.

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov (trans. by Burgin & O’Conner)

I’m obsessed with being completely unspoiled about a book once I have made a commitment to reading it. This includes avoiding the back cover or inside flap until I am at least two-thirds of the way through. Since I knew I was going to read The Master and Margarita as part of this project I did no research whatsoever on it. I knew only that it was Russian, obviously, and I had a faint idea that it was written in the 1930’s. Otherwise I approached it as a completely blank slate.

I’ll extend the same courtesy to others and not describe the plot, even though I realize I’m an extremist in this regard. I will instead say this: The Master and Margarita is among the most moving, fantastical, dark and savagely funny novels I have ever read. I finished it before bed, thought about it for an hour, slept, woke up and re-read the haunting and beautiful conclusion the next morning.

I may not have felt this way if I hadn’t been “forced” to read it. The early chapters are disorienting and erratic, and if I had been reading casually I might have set it aside. That would have been a tragedy. This is a truly great work.

Death in Venice

Thomas Mann (trans. by Heim)

The Master and Margarita translation is in contemporary English, with crisp, conversational language. It was a real bummer to shift right into Death in Venice with its languid, overripe, high-falutin’ prose. Sure, I realize that it’s meant to evoke Italy and cholera and Greek tragedy and a gradual descent into idleness and debauchery. Maybe it was just the wrong time to read it (the book was listed for March). Luckily it’s short. I’m happy to move on.

Oriental Veal Casserole

1 lb veal
2 tbs shortening
1.5 cups sliced celery
2 small onions
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1 can condensed cream of chicken soup
2 tbs soy sauce
.25 cups uncooked rice

Hot Dog Casserole

Potato Buds ®
.25 cups sweet pickle relish
2 tbs salad dressing
1 tbs instant minced onion
2 tsp mustard
4-6 frankfurters (sliced in half and inserted into the casserole dish upright)

Cereal Topping for Vegetables

Enhance vegetables with a buttery, crisp topping. A delightful disguise for warmed-overs.

1 half cup Cheerios ®, Kix ® or Wheaties ®
1 tablespoon butter
salt

Stir and sprinkle over creamed vegetables

Franko Corn Thins

2 eggs
3/4 cups milk
1 package Betty Crocker Corn Muffin Mix ®
Parmesan cheese
5 frankfurters
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/4 teaspoon garlic salt
salt

Cheese Pennies

1 jar Pasteurized Processed Sharp American Cheese Spread ®
1/4 cup shortening
3/4 cup Gold Medal ® flour

Other recipes omitted:

Olive Cheese Balls
Spicy English Muffins
Cereal Funny Faces
Sassy Sausages
Nippy Shrimp
Polynesian Ham Loaf
Tomato Bursts

Some of the rules are the same: no authors I’ve read previously, no books that I’ve seen adapted into film, a baker’s dozen. New rule: works in translation with a different language each month.

I’ve ordered them, somewhat nonsensically, based on climate.

January: Russian
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita

February: Japanese
Mishima Yukio: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

March: German
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice

April: Dutch
Harry Mulisch: The Assault

May: Spanish
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

June: French
Michel Houllebecq: The Elementary Particles

July: Italian
Italo Svevo: Zeno’s Conscience

August: Arabic
Elias Khoury: Gates of the Sun

September: Anglo-Saxon
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation)

October: Chinese
Mo Yan: The Republic of Wine

November: Yiddish
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Enemies

December: Norwegian
Knut Hamsun: Hunger

Bonus book:
Portuguese
Jorge Amado: Dona Flor and her Two Husbands

It felt odd to omit all of India but I couldn’t find anything I was interested in that wasn’t written originally in English. I bumped Portuguese in favor of Arabic — the list was too heavy on Romance languages. Within any given language, I went with contemporary over classic.

(I read some excerpts from Beowulf in high school but it was a different translation and I’ve wanted to read this one anyway, plus it’s my project and I can cheat if I want to.)

This Ask Metafilter thread was invaluable, although the project is somewhat different: Which books are most representative of each country?.

Usually when it’s our birthdays we have two dinners: one is a big multi-course prix fixe extravaganza at a nice restaurant, and the other is cooked at home. The home-cooked dinners are easy comfort food (in their own way) and unlike most nights, the other person does not have to do the dishes. That’s the real gift.

When I make dinner for Dan’s birthday, it’s ma po tofu, adapted from Land of Plenty by Fuschia Dunlop.

My birthday was more recently. Dan made pastitsio, from Cook’s Illustrated Best 30 Minute Recipe.

Recipes follow:
Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I had to prepare an impromptu dinner for one. I made a veggie burger with bacon and cheese. The burger was cooked in the bacon fat. It was delicious.

On Friday I had dinner at NYC’s molecular gastronomie center, WD-50. We ordered the tasting menu. An incomplete list of what we had:

• Foie gras, extruded into a squared-off tube, and tied, somehow, in a knot
• Deconstructed French onion soup
• Deconstructed eggs Benedict (the egg yolk sous vide, the hollandaise sauce separated, breaded, and deep-fried)
• “Pizza pebbles”

I was disappointed that “pretzel consomme” and “popcorn soup” were only available a la carte.

Last night while the Red Sox were playing and they were leading 231-2, I tried picking up a book to read but was a little too distracted. I needed something mindless but faintly interactive. So I logged on to Amazon Mechanical Turk to earn $0.02 a minute clicking on links.

Actually I was hoping there were some faintly interesting writing jobs but they were all the sleazy “write a glowing product review on this blog” kind. Instead one of the more mundane tasks caught my eye: “help refine search results.” Hey, that’s basically what I do for a living.

The task was to rank the relevancy of various web page results for a given search query. All of the results seemed to be from Wikipedia (including the Talk: pages and other material not likely to be of interest to a general audience). The queries appeared to be genuine user data.

I learned a number of things from this experience. First of all, searching Wikipedia is often nothing more than a snapshot of the day’s vandalism. The snippet from “Roman Catholicism in Myanmar” suggested that I “keep doin it you pimp!!!” Quite a few pages had no other content besides “fag”. These articles were corrected immediately, no doubt, but their cached states were immortalized by the search engine, and users’ misspellings were often exact matches for misspellings by vandals.

Happily, the query for chicken sexing matched an entire article devoted to it and very few vandalized articles containing the words “chicken” and “sex”. I wish more people knew to quote their search terms because a great percentage of the queries matched an article with those exact words as its title. Correctly quoted, Google would return these highly-relevant pages as the #1 result. Sometimes the queries would find an exact Wikipedia match but be too broad in their scope, resulting in a disambiguation page. Peevishly, I started highly ranking non-U.S. results (”Spanish Civil War” for civil war) even though I knew from context that these searches were all by Americans. A little historical perspective never hurt.

Another thing I might have learned (had I not known it already) is that search engines are idiots. I don’t know the answer to Who helped elect Arnold Schwarzenneger but I do know it wasn’t “New Kids on the Block“. There probably isn’t an answer to Who invented pi but it is definitely not “Hat“.

Often the searches weren’t so much actual queries as cries in the wilderness. I had no idea how to respond to parenting help or debt consolidation. Wikipedia didn’t either.

I stopped, eventually, not so much because I got bored or because the game was ending, but because the sad queries were getting to me. It’s like reading that page that turns up #1 in Google for the query cancel google. At first it’s kind of funny, you know, “Ha ha people don’t understand how search engines work.” Then you realize, here’s this incredible technology that has changed everything, and most people in this scientifically-advanced first world country don’t know a thing about it. And then you come to a query like the Bible says spending too much time on-line is not good, and it’s so much worse than you could’ve imagined that you just close the computer and walk away.