Mr. Smith Goes to a TED Talk

There was a TED talk posted on a technology oriented page at work a short time ago.  The talk itself was not terribly interesting or relevant; it was the kind of talk that a corporate environment doesn't find very threatening, while trying to promote some claimed new type of thinking.
But all TED talks have links to other TED talks below them that seem to be relevant according to some key words or computer algorithm or something.  One link led to another and after listening to a few more talks, I came across Larry Smith's talk on Why You Will Fail to Have a Great Career.  I listened to it with mild interest before moving on to efforts more focused to current work, but that talk kept lurking in the back of my brain.
I've listened to it a few more times.  Some of the posted discussion after the talk centered on more of the minutia of why Mr. Smith is saying we won't have a good career - his specific examples are not what I think he is actually talking about.  It is unfortunate that one must wade through the plebeian "Best TED ever!" comments to get to some of the more interesting discussion...
What I actually think Mr. Smith is saying is just that most of us have more general reasons as to why we won't have the great singularly career-focused life, and this is far more dangerous - more along the lines of career is all that matters, and everyone outside of those obsessively focused will fail at life by design.
Mr. Smith references the revered Steven J(obs) - do you think Steve Jobs was ever able to go on a vacation without his iPhone?

Mr. Smith goes so far as to denigrate the inventor of Velcro, not acknowledging the huge impact wonderful things like Velcro have had on life; more broadly denigrating those who create and invent small improvements that make every day life easier and better, more interesting (I'm baffled by his issue with interesting)!  He is looking down on those whose ambitions don't start in the clouds - he is criticizing one brand of passion at the expense of another, by only his own nebulous distinction.  Within a few feet of me as I type this are probably at least 10 hook and loop fasteners quietly doing their jobs - quietly when not being opened.  Even disposable diapers now use a very inexpensive but surprisingly effective form of hook and loop to fasten.  But Mr. Smith patronizes Velcro as worthy of only derision.  A great career can only be one on the scale that creates a grand unifying theory of physics and a Nobel prize?  Great ideas are almost never huge, grand eurekas, but are more likely due to an inquisitive person staring down at something and saying, "Geez, that is funny."  This is then followed by an interesting idea that builds to something else that seems so simply obvious after the fact that everyone else says, "Why didn't I think of that?"  How often is something new compared to the exceptionally mundane "sliced bread" - I've never heard anyone say, "That is the best thing since Loop Quantum Gravity Theory!"

In a subsequent interview, Mr. Smith advocates looking for a passion.  Life is littered with people who look for, and invest in something, only to watch it whither with time or realize that personal passion translates poorly to the outside world.  I'm quite convinced that "looking" for passion is as likely to fail at greater expense than not having it in the first place.  Passion is created organically over time, and the investment to go from an interest to a passion is enormous.  And there lies the paradox:  passion requires investment, sometimes significant investment, but investment does not guarantee success ... or passion.
I'm reminded of what Bill Withers said, "One of the things I always tell my kids is that it's OK to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful, you're gonna have to pass through all right.  When you get to all right, take a good look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you're gonna go."

I realize this must devolve into talking about work, which I don't do.  But best to let this bell ring down naturally at this point.
I've eluded to the job change over the last few months.  The extended transition has now run to completion.  There is excitement at starting something new, but this transition has had some moments of second guessing as well.  Things were both safe and frustrating at my old job, and that may not be the best place to work.  My new job (location, focus, coworkers, etc.) is not home though, and a coworker who came from and went to the same organizations a few years ago said it still isn't for him either.  This is troubling.
PBS had a short series on the History of the Elements that I caught a few months ago.  For all the mired-in-details work, it was an absolute joy to watch as it brought me back to why I got interested in science in the first place.  It brought me back to the steep side of the learning curve in high school and as a Freshman in college.  It wasn't a Smithsian passion at the age of 18, but the three hours of time spent watching the documentary came at just the right time.  And yet, I'm just as happy doing what I am as I would be doing grand first principle theoretical work.  I was recently awarded two more patents, for inventions that are probably less life-changing than Velcro.  Warp drive indeed...

There are no shortage of people who complain about TED Talks - either generically or specific talks. I like Ted talks; many make me think.  The short format is a good contrast to dictatorial diatribes, and if any given talk doesn't turn out to be interesting or as advertised, not listening to it is as easy as listening.  Just one click.

Susan Cain's talk on Introverts is one that I've listened to a few times.  This has also surprisingly been used at work.  I say this is surprising, not because it isn't a great talk, but surprising since cubicles are ever-present, and being replaced by the even more heinous "agile office space."  Her comments on group work are almost too on target.  Sadly, teamwork can devolve into group-think of the loudest voice, or often the best interrupter.

After watching many TED Talks, I think the best TED talk may not actually be a TED Talk at all.  Parody as art form, but the format is more a caricature of the intellectualesque bourgeoisie than of TED Talks in particular.

With all deference to Mr. Smith, who is a respected economist at the University of Waterloo, I don't know if I have a good career, a great career or a lousy one.  And I don't care.  My job should work for me as much as I do for it.
Whether anyone has a great career is secondary to whether that person has a good life.  A job, a career, should be a tool, one of many, to lead the interesting life.  Anything on top of that is just a bonus.

I'll end by turning to Bronnie Ware, as I have before, and suggest that very few people at the end of life will lament that their career wasn't great enough.  If only...

Summer's First Bounty

They spring up this time of year, seemingly overnight.  Zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, maybe some misshapen bell peppers.  Nope, I'm not talking about the garden.  I'm talking about produce at the office.
Every place I've worked at in my adult life has collection spots where food converges.  Often this is leftover food from meetings, with clear indications of what people do not like.  But this time of year, vegetables start to sprout up that were brought in from home.

Gardens start out with good intentions, but painfully don't meet even meager intentions.  More often, the most anticipated fare is coaxed into producing only a few delectable morsels while the general haul is filled with far too much of some other edible that begins to take on weed status, crowding all others out.

"Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined." - Michael Perry

Someday nobody will remember what an Enron is and will have to read on Wikipedia to be reminded.
My 2011 garden was my last really ambitious one.  In what can only be described as exceedingly poor planning, I created that garden just outside of the reach of the closest garden hose.  I also started many of my plants in peat containers that I failed to heed the directions and rip the bottom off of when planting outside.  Between the subsequent poor root growth, questionable clay soil, difficulty watering, incessant invasion by weeds and rabbits, and my general laziness, that 2011 garden produced basically nothing.  A big garden seems like a good idea on those cool spring afternoons, but weeding takes on a hateful attitude in July's heat and humidity.  That 2011 location just out of reach of the garden hose has now been reenlisted to general lawn duty.  Not that the lawn is that much better than the garden, but it doesn't come with the same sense of acute failure every time I look at it.  I'm content with the chronic sense of failure that the lawn elicits.

More recently, the flower beds have been reenlisted for garden duty.  SO had the great idea to employ landscaping fabric and mulch, also using much sturdier garden stakes that can actually hold up to a tomato plant.  Regardless of one's belief in mixing flowers and produce plants, the beds look as good as they ever have.
Three of the four tomato plants are producing well.  The small sweet red cherry tomatos are great for drive-by eating.  The medium Cherokee Purples have grown to unexpected proportions.  The larger Cherokee Purples are overlaiden with green fruit - oddly warped in a way that only heirloom vegetables can be proud of.

I impulsively planted seeds taken from store-bought Kumatos.  Only one sprouted, and I discarded the rest only to see that dumping them may have been premature as new sprouts were evident a short time later.  Perhaps that was prescient; so far the Kumato plant has happily created copious flowers, but not a single fruit.  I am beginning to suspect that Syngenta has played some gene warfare game on Kumatos.  And I thought eugenics had been discarded in Europe?
In a fit of depression, the one lone pumpkin plant appears to have committed suicide.  Sad to see life cut so short when it had so much more to live for.

Someone's garden cucumbers showed up at work last week.  I've never understood why "burpless" cucumbers were marketed until I ate one of those gratis cucumbers over the next few days.  Yes it was tasty ... the first time.  Since they sell burpless varieties, I'm now searching for where the burps go.  There must be a cucumber variety sold as super burpy - there is a market, however niche, for everything!

I have contemplated in the past bringing a durian in to work and placing it at the food location.  It would be interesting to see the reaction of those who know what it is, as they recoil in horror and wonder where it came from, compared to those who have never been exposed to it and wonder what to do with it.  Cutting into it at work may result in new rules for office-appropriate food.

Summer will soon give way to fall and more overripe vegetables that seem to whither and rot within the time span of a work day.  November 1 will eventually arrive, when leftover Halloween candy pushes away anything healthy and green in the office food spot.  The candy disappears quickly.  Except those few hard candies with partially open wrappers or broken lemon suckers, which seem to linger until they are mercifully discarded.

REC TEC Pellet Smoker!

After two failed attempts to find a lunch spot while on a cross-country motorcycle trip in 2014, I ended up getting a Burnt Ends and Pieces sandwich in Chariton, Iowa which ranks as one of the best lunches I've ever had.  The sandwich contained smoked chicken, pork and beef bits on a bun - simple, but exquisite as real barbecue should be.
That cross-country adventure had an inordinate amount of smoked meats, with another barbecue joint in Farmington, New Mexico also quite memorable.

I already had an inexpensive water smoker, given to me from a former coworker's husband over a decade ago.  I've used it a few times, but it has terrible temperature control and the charcoal tends to extinguish itself after the ash reaches a certain level.
A few times over the last couple years, I've looked at pellet smokers, and golly some of those things are expensive.  But one of the 10 Rules of Life is that the cheapest bid is almost never the best deal.

Traeger used to be the only game in the pellet smokin' town, but once their patent expired in 2007, many competitors came on the scene greatly accelerating improvements to the overall design and features available in pellet smokers.  Around the same time, the original Traeger Company was sold to a conglomerate, and has been resold a few more times.  Now pellet smokers are available below the bargain basement price of $300 with seemingly no upper limit to fully customized units.  Sadly, it seems the entry-level Traeger smokers have cost saved themselves into second tier.
Reading reviews of smokers is much like reading reviews of lots of other products.  There are lots of good grills and smokers available; I use the term smoker since for actual high heat grilling, I still prefer a raging-hot charcoal grill.  People are more likely to complain than they are to praise, and many reviewers give very low ratings for things that others might find trivial, or will give one star solely due to something being made in China.
Off shore manufacturing doesn't necessarily equate to low quality.  There may be a tendency for Asian manufacturers to have issues, but quality is still something that can be controlled regardless of where it is made.  There is one pellet smoker which is manufactured in the US that I didn't want to touch at even half the price - mostly because of inadequate support for some real observed issues.  Witness what happens when poor quality and lack of support combine.
What I really wanted in the pellet smoker was small size, good build quality and I definitely wanted a solid temperature control system since that is the heart of the smoker.  The cheapest units' slow/medium/fast augers wouldn't cut it.  PID controllers would be best, but not an absolute necessity since it sounds like some of the intermediate options actually worked pretty well.

I finally had the choice narrowed down to three units, each with strong and weak points.  These were all smaller units in the middling range of price and features.  I probably would have been happy with any one of them, but eventually narrowed it down to the REC TEC Mini.  While still deciding, I had started to create an order only to second-guess myself on it and think a little more.  REC TEC happily sent me an email reminding me I had an unfinished order.  Shipping was much cheaper when ordering directly from REC TEC so I went that route instead of Amazon.  The smoker arrived quickly although somehow the FedEx driver got up and down my driveway in the evening without me seeing him.  The smoker arrived in great condition.  My starter box of hardwood pellets ... not so much.

Even if the box had been bumped around a bit, the smoker is packed very well.  In addition to a functionally brief manual, there was a business card including the direct contact information for the REC TEC owners, should it be needed.  This was a nice touch and is evidence they stand behind their products.

Once unpacked, the smoker only takes a few minutes to set up.  I'm a strong believer in function over form, but the unit sure does look neat.

REC TEC advises that an initial burn be used to give the powder coating a final set, as well as burn off any manufacturing effluvia.  Once that was complete, I was ready to smoke.

When done right, ribs are probably my first choice for meat.  Even mediocre ribs can be pretty good as long as they are not boiled.  Pre-smoker, my typical method of cooking them was to wrap them loosely with aluminum foil and bake them for a few hours, finishing them on a charcoal grill with sauce as a glaze.  Some sauces are OK, but I've always believed that really good smoked meat needs, at most, a very small amount of sauce.  My first meal on the smoker had to be baby back ribs with a simple dry rub.
I made a dry rub from sea salt, paprika, fresh ground pepper and brown sugar.  Setting up the smoker, I smoked those babies for four hours at 230F, spritzing them at hour two and three with a mixture of cider vinegar, olive oil, garlic and just a touch of soy sauce.  The REC TEC smoker worked very well, holding temperature rock solid as long as I didn't open it up for too long.  Given that this was the first use of it, it was hard not to frequently peak inside.
The results were very good.  I was really surprised how much honest smoke flavor was well-incorporated into the meat.  I probably had a bit too much salt in the rub, and that demonstrates the fun I'll have in the near future as I tweak the ribs ... and eat them all.

The following day I tried boneless country style ribs - really just a smaller version of pork shoulder.  I had to start these before I started to mow the lawn, so I smoked them at a slightly lower temperature of 220F for five hours.  I frequently caught a whiff of the smoker when I got near it while mowing, and they continued to smell better and better through the afternoon.  As with the ribs, the smoke flavor - good smoke flavor - made these extremely tasty.

With only two meals made, I'm not sure I'm ready to pronounce the smoker a total success nor myself a pitmaster, but it is an excellent start.  I can only assume that it will get better with time as I explore new meats, rubs, sauces and ways to use these.
Two things that I'm not enamored with:  I like the digital PID Controller and it works great, but it can be hard to see in the bright sunlight.

The wheels on the REC TEC Mini work great when moving the smoker around in my pole barn where it is stored, but my driveway where I use it is gravel and the wheels are pretty useless there.  I had an old piece of scrap barn siding and I employed this to easily roll the unit to where it will sit when I'm creating smoke magic.

Both of these issues are minor with solutions easily found.  I'm quite happy with my choice of pellet smoker.

I'm not sure I'll be trying to make a burnt ends and pieces sandwich anytime soon.  The memory of that lunch is seared in my brain and I don't want to try to compete with it.  Besides, food tastes better on vacation and food after hundreds of miles on the bike is even better.  Still, as I was eating leftover REC TEC ribs at lunch at work I remarked, "I bought one of those pellet smokers and I'm not sure my life will ever be the same."