Here’s the page where the comment appears (it’s the one right at the top of the comments), and the comment itself (from “Wil W”) quoted below.

I think we underestimate the need for partial IT laborers in the next five years. There is a growing need for employees who are not working in IT that have some IT training and ability. These employees would not be working on IT stuff more than 20% of their time, but that 20% will be spent using and fixing technology to the productivity benefit of the business as a whole. Often this is called the decentralization of IT, but it has more to do with the tools the people are using in the workplace.

Imagine for a second the value of a worker on the assembly line with no computer training or ability. That is what we used to have 99% of the time. Yet computers have become a greater and greater part of the process. The value to the company of these workers is decreasing or at a minimum not increasing even though their productivity is increasing.

Now imagine a new worker. He does not have a computer science degree, but has training and computer abilities above the average. Most important he has an inclination to be able to handle computers outside of a pre-scripted process. The value of this worker to the company is not only greater than the first worker, it increases as the use of computers increases.

I am not saying that education is the answer, but that IT is and will be more in the future spilling over into more labor centered areas and that those employees with or acquiring these skill sets are going to be paid better (or should be if allowed.)

The Luddites are one of the most misrepresented groups ever. In the early nineteenth century, they wrecked factory machinery which was destroying their livelihoods and communities. They were not opposed to all technology but specifically to “machinery hurtful to the Commonality.” They were not against progress at all, but violently disagreed over what constituted genuine progress. What they sought was democratic progress, for the public good, not progress solely for the rich at the expense of the poor. Today arise Ned Ludds across the world, dishonestly dubbed enemies of progress, but actually arguing for genuine progress, for the whole of society. Kirkpatrick Sale, in _Rebels Against the Future_ (1995), speaks for Luddites ancient and modern. “The pace and range of the technosphere is unstoppable, as if it had a will of its own that no form of public protest or restrictive rule or moral caveat could appreciably affect.”

The dog is the happiest creature, because he is not cursed with the twin agonies of memory and ambition.

And thus, we are moving out. We’ve got some other short term sublets lined up and we’ll be filling in the gaps with whatever we can, be they cheap hotels, Airbnb, or whatever else we can find.

So the time-table for my worrying about packing up stuff was moved up quite a bit by this, but ultimately the goal is going to be the same: fit all of my belongings into two air-travel-friendly suitcases, or less.

Of course this is not quite accurate. There is an option to ship boxes to a more final destination in the US. It is a slow option, taking many months using the cheapest method, and even using the cheapest method it is also a somewhat costly option. And so while not strictly true, that I need to prune my belongings down so extremely, it is one still effectively true when considering the incentives in play.

And so the source of some anxiety over the last couple days, and perhaps a bigger one in the coming week before moving out, has been deciding what to keep.

What, among my things, would I actually consider irreplaceable? Or, if not that, so expensive as to be effectively the same to me? I don’t actually have that much that I think wouldn’t be easily replaced after moving. Clothes? Old laptops? The last computer I bought for myself was a Samsung NC10 about 5 years ago.

The only things that would be really hard to replace are personal affects I have as souvenirs from travel or that other people gave me. Photos from trips have all but completely gone digital, but before the age of digital cameras there are still photos from when I was a little kid and letters to penpals and other curious relics of a more analog age and those things are the things I can’t really bear to part with.

It’s not that I even look at them with any regularity. I just like having them and on the rare occasion I think to take them out, it’s nice to have them as reminders. I can’t shake my doubts about scanning and digitizing and preserving the messages without the medium. I know it wouldn’t be the same to read a letter without the experience of crinkling the paper as I opened it. The physical object is decaying with every moment I keep it, and more than that, the very act of pulling it out probably does irreversible damage. Would I cherish these things if they did not decay?

Books are an interesting case. When I came to China I carried a few with me but in the years since I’ve slowly found myself going over to the idea that really I don’t want to have books on a shelf, I’d be happy enough with just reading them on an e-reader. I’m not sure when the physical objects lost their appeal, though I suspect it coincided with one of my many apartment moves here.

But even those curios I still have amount to less than a plastic produce bag from a grocery store’s worth of stuff and so it is surely not those either that fills the space in the apartment.

Of my clothes, perhaps there is some legitimacy to the argument that it is indeed cheaper and easier to pack them along with me than to replace them. My suits, which I wear almost never, should probably get adjusted one last time in this land of cheap labor, and then I will haul them around to be dragged out for interviews and weddings. The rest of my clothes does not have much variety, I am not one for exuberant expression of self through my appearance, and though it would probably be easily replaced, it is also something I would no want to do without for a few months while waiting for them to arrive.

And so it seems the packing list is quite short:
* Enough clothes for a couple weeks at most (for where am I going that would lack the means to do laundry?)
* A few electronic devices. A tablet, a computer, a phone. Chargers to match. Maybe a portable hard drive as well.

With so many airlines limiting people to a single checked bag, I think I might be able to get down to even that.

Modern life is plagued by what’s been called “time famine”—the sense that we have way too much to do and way too little time to do it. Everyone seems to feel this sometimes overwhelming sense of having too few minutes, hours and days—and it leads to all sorts of untoward consequences. Perceived time scarcity has been shown to disrupt sleep, to sap our self-discipline and ability to delay rewards. It undermines health, leading to more fast food consumption and skipped medical exams. Rationing out our precious time leads inevitably to self-centered disregard for others. The list goes on.

It goes on to say that the remedy for all of this is to have or think about and awe-inducing experience.

…those who were primed to feel awe—those volunteers also saw time as much more expansive, less constricted. They felt free of time’s pressure.

This got me thinking a little and reminded me of a passage I read a while ago and posted here. The quotes, from Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, slightly expanded as found elsewhere online:

It is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness….

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. That is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting-on a process, that is, of subtraction.

What around here is truly awesome? I suppose in the absence of ready answers to that question, I’ll just have to prime myself to think about the stuff from before. At least the wallpaper/background on my computer at work is this awesome photo of the US East coast at night, from space, right?

In this conversation, I said that the last time I built a computer to play games with, the only games I was worried about playing were half life and quakeworld.

Then I realized those games came out in 1998.

So actually it’s not quite true — I upgraded in college but the fact is my pc gaming days basically ended at half-life 1, a game that is now about 14 years old.

I was introduced to nukazuke by a friend of mine who’d spent a lot of time in Japan. A bit of reading led me to believe that I could probably manage to pull off this kind of pickle, but then for years that’s where I was stuck.

I never actually got around to finding where to buy rice bran, or getting a container I could use to pickle in, or really doing any sort of actual prep or execution towards making these pickles.

Finally last weekend things came together and Cin and I managed to have time and supplies to get started.

I pieced together a plan from a variety of guides online.
Wandering Spoon‘s post about Nukazuke
Joi Ito‘s guide to Nukamiso
A post in the egullet forums by helenjp
The Black Moon‘s page on Tsukemono

Here’s what I came up with:

1kg of rice bran (米糠 mǐkāng)
670 ml of water
330 ml of tsingtao
150 g of salt （盐 yán）
a 2.5×5 piece of seaweed, soaked in cold water (海带 hǎidài)
1 slice of bread
a handful of cabbage, about 100g (白菜 báicài)

I also decided to try adding:
a few dried red peppers （干辣椒 gānlàjiāo）
a few dried mushrooms （干香菇 gānxiānggū）
a couple cloves of garlic, peeled （大蒜 dàsuàn）

These ended up buried in the mix.

I was going to do twice as much, but as I was weighing out the rice bran, I realized that it was a lot more voluminous than I’d expected.

The first step was to toast the bran. This proved not very easy to do in our limited kitchen, so we did it in a lot of batches. In our case, toasting meant mainly getting it hot, scorching the bottom, then making a mess trying to stir more. The end result is a very uneven toasting.

Next up, boil the water, salt, and beer. Then we broke up the bread and dropped it in and waited for it all to cool down.

Mixing up the bran and water to achieve a consistency something like wet sand.

After this, though we neglected to get pictures as our hands were covered in bran at this point, was burying the starter cabbage and then finally wiping down the sides and setting it down to wait for a day.

Some other (crappy) photos of this process are on my flickr set.

back to Ferments

Later still, while living at the corner of Dongzhimen Beixiaojie (东直门北小街) and Dongzhimen Nei (东直门内）I came across a reference on a friend-of-a-friend’s blog (via a tweet of Beijing Haochi) about where to find specialty flours for bread making, and yet somehow I never actually made it 100 meters down the street to check it out. I even got my bike repaired next door!

Finally, last weekend I managed to swing by and check the place out, having already struck out trying to find rice bran at another grain type shop up near the Lama temple.

The place is kind of a mess inside, though the couple running the shop were pretty great. They’re from Dong Bei and offered me some really tasty hazelnuts. They mentioned that all sorts of foreigners come looking for special flours and brown rice and such, as well.

[Map]
19 Dongzhimen Nanxiaojie, Dongcheng District (150m south of Gui Jie)
Tel: (010) 8401 7569
东城区东直门南小街19号

So I did what any reasonable food-interested nerd would do and started searching for how to get a sourdough culture started.

After reading a few different guides, most of which seemed intimidating and complicated, I decided “to hell with all that!” and got started loosely following the instructions on this very approachable guide.

I had an empty jar that previously contained bottled spaghetti sauce, a large bag of Chinese all-purpose flour sitting in a larger box that used to hold frosted mini wheats, and as much Beijing tap water as I needed.

I mixed together equal parts by weight of water and flour, and let it sit out for a couple days uncovered. After that, I started regularly “feeding” the culture, which involved stirring it up, pouring some out, and then replacing with new flour and water.

After a few days, you can imagine my surprise when I noticed that it was bubbling up and had a not unpleasant smell. I’d expected some kind of foul spoilage with colorful mold and putrid odor. (All of these I have been treated to since in other failed attempts to start a culture.)

It was only then, culture alive and bubbling, that I decided to give it a name: Melvin. I think my sister Cara and I were hanging around on the roof and possibly drunk when we came up with that one, but either way the name stuck.

I started trying to use Melvin to make bread, and the first few loaves turned out a little… flat, but with repeated effort I was eventually turning out tasty little loaves.

Eventually though I moved to a new apartment with no oven, and I gave Melvin to my mother, where he continues to thrive and provide delicious local Beijing sourdough flavor to those fortunate to be a guest to dinner when my mother entertains.