mandarine

This post is an answer to Lorelle’s blogging challenge. I found the theme so exciting that I decided to start blogging just to be able to participate. Lorelle says:

Think about all that you know and choose the one thing you would arrogantly assume you were the master of. Then write about it.

And then I thought: I know a lot about many things, but not as much as professionals of each field do. The only thing I am absolutely certain I know best is what I work on, and it is definitely unbloggable classified technical stuff about aerospace design. But then, that got me thinking… why not write about how many different things I know a lot about ? This could make for an interesting writing (and hopefully reading) experience. And it could even interest Lorelle, who knows so much about so much.

Therefore the post is fragmented into many sub posts. Contrary to my general habit of keeping things structured, I chose to put the list in alphabetical order, to give it a more eclectic feel.

Aerospace design

It has been my job for more than ten years now. It is what I know I can arrogantly assume I am the master of. Unfortunately, that’s classified material.

From other details in this blog, people in the business can already pinpoint my location way too accurately. I will tell no more.

Cycling to work

I live a hundred miles from where I work. To get there, I take the 7:00 train, arriving at 8:45. But I work near the airport, and the train stops short. So I still have to cycle the final 6-mile stretch. Morning and evening, four days a week, that’s 50 miles a week, sunshine or drizzle, headwind or snow: 1500 miles a year.

The perfect ally to the cycling commuter is the MP3 player with a large choice of interesting podcasts, the talking ones, the ones you grow intelligent listening to.

The perfect ally to the train commuter is the laptop computer for writing (the rails are too jerky to let you write anything down with a pen and paper) and paper for reading or proofreading colleagues’ technical prose.

Just for the record: I’ve thinned two sizes since I’ve been doing this (two years now), without any sort of food restrictions, rather the opposite. No gym, no running, no weight lifting, just commuting.

Desktop publishing

My dad has had Macs ever since the first Macintosh 128 (stands for 128 kB of RAM) was out in 1984. He upgraded whenever he could, and some time near 1988, aMac-SE came with Aldus Pagemaker. I learnt page layout, typographic rules, graphical design, etc. by putting together a monthly 4-page community newsletter, which I am still proud of 15 year later. I upgraded to QuarkXpress before graduating from high-school.

In the meantime, I had seen most of everything in the word-processing world: remember MacWrite ? remember ClarisWorks ? remember MacWord ? remember WinWord ?

So it was natural that in a work team full of engineers, I became the DTP guru. I ended up editing cover material for commercial offers because the editing team was so lame. And I cleaned up the official corporateMs-Word templates because their stylesheet was full of garbage styles and because they did not abide by the published corporate graphical rules.

If I can use my ancient knowledge and work experience, I would have two key recommendations:

1. keep content away from layout like you keep chocolate away from heat ! By all means avoid wysiwyg word-processors (even OpenOffice, although I’d forgive you)
2. the layout you can let go of when a new incompatible upgrade of software is published; but your text should be stored in an eternal format - ascii, not binary; public, not proprietary.

I choose TeX/LaTeX. It is almost as old as I am, and still unmatched.

Digital photography

I bought a Nikon film scanner in 1998. So I have been working with 12 Mpix digital pictures from my CANON EOS 100 film camera for much longer than many a pro photographer (Lorelle says to let go of my humble humility).

After years of being loyal to PaintShopPro (I even bought version 7 ) , I shifted to Linux, and I am now having trouble harnessing the power of the GIMP.

I recently went fully digital, buying a CANON EOS 350D, but I still have not found the ultimate backup solution. I crash my hard disk or have it swept by a virus or switch to a new Linux distribution from time to time, and thus have been losing my photos twice a year on average. Had it not been for my film backups (originals in that case), I would have been left with my eyes to cry.

Electricity and plumbing

have been restoring an XVIIIth century farmhouse with my spouse for over three years now. We have done everything ourselves from carpentry to roofing, from storey structure to staircase, from insulation to floorboards, from concrete slabs to terracotta tiles, from plumbing to electricity.
We should be moving in quite soon. Update: we have moved in and we just love it.

It took us three years for three rooms (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom). There are twelve in total. Wish us luck.

French cooking

Let me just introduce you to my best-selling family-award-winning simplest recipes:

Grated pears jam - peel not-too-ripe pears, grate them as if they were carrots, mix with the same weight of sugar, put on the stove the next day until it is thick enough.

Chestnut jam - pick two or three times as many chestnuts as you will need, boil them for twenty minutes, let them cool down, cut them in halves, expell the pulp with a teaspoon (do not care about the thin fibery inner skin), add a little water and mix with a vegetable mill (thin grid) as if it was thick soup. Pieces of inner skin will stick to the grid, you can remove them. You will waste a lot of pulp along, and this is why we picked more chestnuts than we needed - but it takes infinitely less time to bend and pick than to peel the bl***y inner skin. Mix with the same weight of sugar, put on the stove until it is thick enough.

Beef stew - put meat loaves (as big as they come, you’ll split them when they’re done) in a casserole with onions, carrots, turnips, leeks, or any local vegetables that you feel will do. Add salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary, laurel, or any local herbs that you feel will do. Drown in cold water and wine or any local brew that you feel will do. Put the lid on and in the oven at the lowest thermostat setting (little above 100°C). Leave it there for as many hours as necessary (5 or more). Come back from time to time and check that it’s not boiling (it has to be simmering).
Add peeled potatoes one hour before dinner or alternatively serve with fresh tagliatelle.

For those of you who can read French, I warmly recommend this site. It is the Wikipedia of french cooking.

Making oak floorboards

As mentioned above, we have done everything in our house.
This includes making our floorboards from raw oak planks. This is hard work but saves 80% on the cost of finished flooboards.

And we could choose floor patterns that we could not have dreamed of paying for.
Our bedroom floor is made of mixed oak and chestnut boards, with parallel chestnut (lighter) lines and irregular oak (darker) filling, like the steps of an uneven ladder.
We sanded then oiled with linseed oil for protection.

Playing the flute

I have studied and played the flute since I was ten, although I find less and less time and motivation to keep up.
So maybe you should not count this one.

Organic vegetable garden

I have plowed (manually, with my hoe) a small patch of my prairie, where I am growing vegetables with lazy (oops, I meant organic) methods: no watering, no hoeing, no weeding, just 6 inches thick of grass-clippings mulch. And I keep an eye for pests.

Programming in Matlab

OK this is a part of my job that I can talk about.
MATLAB is the ultimate software/language for numerical analysis and rapid prototyping of scientific algorithms. Control systems design, linear algebra, signal and image processing, data visualisation, there are not many things that MATLAB cannot do. It can even serve as a very productive platform for made-to-measure tools and software (including professional-looking GUIs).
I have started with MATLAB 4.2 in 1996 and am now a prominent MATLABv7 expert among my colleagues.

However, the more I develop in MATLAB, the more my code starts to look like JAVA. So if you know JAVA and are not into scientific computing, stick to JAVA, do not go and pay a zillion dollars in licences and maintenance.

Traditional lime coating

The raw stone walls inside our house we have covered with traditional lime coating. And I believe it is the very best material for indoor decoration: its porosity allows to regulate humidity without the constant purr of forced ventilation, its touch is much more sensual that polymer paint or vinyl wallpaper, you make your own patterns or colors, AND it costs nothing (lime at 10 Euros a 35kg bag, sand for even less, a pinch of pigment, and water).
Why people shifted to plaster and artificial materials I can hardly explain. Maybe it has something to do with your having to cope with external contributions like temperature and atmospheric humidity, having to check upon the wall for a few days to see whether it needs sprinkling, having to wait a couple of days before you can paint a patina layer, and not being able to get exactly the same color on all the walls, depending on the underlying material and porosity. But it is so rewarding…

Traditional slate roofing

This was one of the toughest things to learn. There was not much documentation around on central France traditional slate roofing techniques, so I had to guess from surrounding houses. The slates are the shape of fish scales. They decrease in size from the edge to the top of the roof (80 cm at the edge, 8 cm at the top). They are 0.5 to 1.5 inches thick, so they weigh quite a bit.

We had to change the carpentry first, as the roof had been rotten for at least twenty years.
The rafters are covered with poplar planks, and then we nail slates down, intertwining them so that no droplet can find its way through.
It was tough work getting the old slates down, sorting them by size, high-pressure-cleaning them to remove moss traces, recarving the edges with the specially-shaped hammer, climbing the ladder with a load of slates in my backpack (occasionally falling from the ladder one day I had not tied the safety rope), nailing them down the slippery slanted roof, under the terrible sun of the 2003 heat wave.

Then we found out that we did not have enough to finish the roof. So half the roof stayed in the winter rain until the next spring when I was told an old man was restoring his own roof, and was willing to sell his old slates if I agreed to take them down myself. So there I was, with my rope and helmet, 8 meters high on the rotting carpentry of someone else’s roof, picking my slates one after the other.
This episode slowed me down, but we finally had our roof finished.

Writing in English

We say that in the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I believe that in the republic of the French, those who can write good English are a happy few.

Thank you Lorelle to allow me to boast freely. I promise I’ll revert to my usual modesty as of now.

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