Why I Must Watch More TV

I find myself in a very strange situation these days. For the first time in life, I am trying to force myself to watch more television.  My goal is to get in several hours a day. It's surprisingly hard.

I’ve watched relatively little TV here, partly because my German has been too poor to understand the local TV and partly because much German TV is just American series dubbed in German. Once you've become used to an actor’s voice, it’s very distracting to watch them with a strange German voice attached!

But now I must watch more TV and movies, to improve my German.  Luckily, my cable box has an integrated DVR, so I accomplished Step One weeks ago…programming some German shows to watch. The Step Two of actually watching them has been more difficult.

So, I’m beginning with what was a 2 week nightly German event – "Ich bin ein Star – Holt mich hier aus!", Germany’s version of the British show "I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!"…and then moving on to some other classics such as "Bauer Sucht Frau" (the dating show “Farmer seeks Woman”), and Doctor’s Diary, a prime time soap with the slogan “Men are the Best Medicine.”

And of course, there are a couple of disaster movies, with this week's premiere of the long-awaited miniseries Hindenburg.

Look forward to some posts from the couch…

iPhone Apps

Ok, I am the last person who should be promoting iPhone apps, since all I currently have is a plain old mobile phone with a pre-paid SIM card…..But this is something I would issue to all first year analysts or anyone starting to work in finance or real estate.  Latham & Watkins has done a few of them - all free - for Banking and European Banking.

  

I wonder if it has the real finance jargon like “open the kimono,” “come to Jesus meetings,” “a little bit pregnant,” and many of the phrases that Goldman Sachs has banned from emails?

Mmmm....Mexican Food

Food in Munich has been a pleasant surprise - Not only is Bavarian food quite tasty, but Munich also has an incredible variety of cuisines available. There is great Thai, Afghan, Persian, Italian, French, Vegetarian, Spanish, and even some good old American burgers and ribs.  There is not, however, much good Mexican. There are some Mexican restaurants here, but they are most loved for their cocktails - the food is only a side to help absorb the sugar and alcohol.

El Gordo Loco has always been pretty good and authentic, and if you ask nicely, they'll make frozen margaritas from scratch. Luckily, we have a new Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood - Milagros, between the Viktualienmarkt and Isartor. It's great food and very authentic Mexican - and the margarita menu is impressive. Both restaurants are Mexican, not Tex-Mex. And I recommend reservations....they're small, and fill up quickly.

For the most part, however, you just have to cook Mexican or Tex Mex yourself. Finding the ingredients, however, is not easy....we have many Asian markets carrying almost everything you could want, but I've only found two Mexican stores: Mercado de Mexico near Donnersbergerbrücke and La Tortilla out in Unterschleißheim. I asked the lady at the cheese counter if she could suggest a cheese that I could use in cooking Mexican food or for quesadillas. She just looked at me, frowned, and said there are none. I highly doubt that, but I got a similar reaction from the butcher when I asked what cut of beef he would recommend for satay. He informed me that you cannot make satay with beef, only with chicken.  Much of Thailand and Indonesia would disagree, but...he's the expert, right????

Herr J gave me a great cocktail shaker at Christmas, so margaritas were a good first test.

I came home from Mercado de Mexico overjoyed at finding queso blanco, tomatillo sauce, canned and dried chiles, and homemade (frozen) white corn tortillas. Using some rotisserie chicken, white cheddar, and tomatillo sauce, i threw together some tasty enchiladas verde, topped with queso blanco. Yum, and so easy! Using some extra chicken and cheeses (we had some yellow cheddar left from cheeseburgers last week and some chips from turkey taco salad), I threw together some chicken nachos as a snack. A tasty treat, and very cute served in cazuelas.

We started with the classic margarita recipe of 3 parts lime juice, 2 parts tequila, and 1 part Cointreau. Perfect! Using up the last of the lime juice, the second ones were a little too limey and tequila-y, so we added a splash of Licor 43 (the secret ingredient to our traditional Dallas Easter Sangria). A very tasty twist on the classic margarita! And it will sweeten it and cut the tequila taste.

Another Tex-Mex fave of mine is Brisket Tacos. I have to order them every time I go to Taco Diner or Manny's in Dallas - no point in even looking at the menu.... 

So, a couple days later, I decided to use some more of the tortillas and give brisket tacos a try. Homesick Texan recently published a great recipe on her site, and it looked pretty good. Surprisingly, it worked perfectly! I still hadn't found fresh chiles to roast, so we just went with the meat, gravy, and queso blanco. They were soooo good! I'm definitely going to make them again. No changes needed to this recipe - for those of you in Germany, the tafelspitz cut of beef is the closest match to brisket. I used a hunk of tafelspitz and a hunk of rinderbrust. Both cooked perfectly, but the rinderbrust has too much fat running through it.

The cooked meat will also freeze well, to pull out for a very easy impressive dinner.

After the empandas, tacos, and enchiladas, I'm inspired to try some other new dishes. Borracho beans (in the crockpot) are high on the list, and I'd like to experiment with some other taco fillings and make some homemade tortillas.  There is a defintely a Cinco de Mayo party on the horizon this year!

Fun with Science at Home

Since the typical German refrigerator is the size of an American college student's dorm fridge, there isn't much room for storing drinks. I've been keeping my drinks "refrigerated" by just leaving them on the balcony, where the temperature has been consistently below freezing for the past week.

Though the beer holds up well, we find an interesting reaction when I open a new bottle of Diet Coke ("Cola Light over here").... as soon as I open it and pour, it immediately turns into a Coke Slushie.  See it here:

Herr J immediately recognized this as "supercooling" the liquid.  The concept is this:  a liquid's freezing point is the temperature at which the free molecules "want" to stop being free and "prefer" to get themselves into a tighter, crystalline formation (because we've taken energy -- measured as temperature -- away from them).  As soon as just one set of cooling moelcules forms a crystal, the others will start forming more crystals right next to the first one.  BUT, if you have a relatively pure liquid and don't disturb it during the freezing process, the free molecules just might hang out in their freer liquid state well below the temperature at which they would normally crystallize.

This is definitely something anyone can do at home... get the kids to like science by making a Slushie!  Wonder if Cool-Aid would work, or if that has too many particles in the water...

In fact, there are a number of neat examples on YouTube where people supercooled water.  In this one, the guy cooled water down to -21 Celsius!  Notice how gingerly he holds & pours the water out -- so as not to disturb it too much.  The disturbance ends up being the water coming into contact with the bowl itself, where it immediately freezes with a cool effect (sorry about the pun).

Then we have this shirtless (Dutch?) guy who is pretty excited about his discovery.  He also "pours" gingerly so the disturbance is the water hitting the ice cube.  "This is not an optical illusion, this is for real!" says the surfer-scientist.

Finally, in this example, we see the entire process of doing this at home.  The water is only cooled to a little below freezing point, so it doesn't crystallize as quickly as in the other videos.  However, you can see that all it takes is a tap on the bottle to get the whole chain reaction going.  And notice that some of the bottles did freeze outside rather than become supercooled (probably because they had extra minerals/particulates in them to get the freezing started)  Warning:  the creator felt compelled to use "Ice Ice Baby" as the audio track.  Mute is advised.

Cool Guy DIY

If anyone knows of a good really high paying job, let me know.  (or any good real estate job in Munich that will take someone not fluent...)

Herr J hopes I'll find something that pays obscenely so he can stay home and eat bon-bons and do man stuff like build things in the back yard.

I'd be OK with this plan, as he's a really great cook. And of course I'd have all kinds of cool things in the back yard.

Wood Fired Pizza Oven

Photo by David Sheridanvia Serious Eats 

(You can find some instructions online at FornoBravo)

DIY Cotton Candy Machine

Herr J swears it's really easy...

Kitty Crack

I admit I'm a little intrigued to see the results of distilling catnip extract, though given that it involves steam distillation and a toluene bath, it seems a little wrong to be making meth for your pets. But hey, as long as they like it....(don't worry, catnip extract is safe for the cats).

Amusing step by step instructions are at Instructables

  Though I'm afraid this all would involve multiple trips to the ER and end in projects like this:

Homemade Backyard Rollercoaster

DIY Rocket Sled

Homemade Batman Tumbler

It's both good and bad to have an engineer in the house....

More Fun with Maps

Along the same lines as the international stereotype maps and US States by TV and movies, there are several fun US maps floating around out there right now.  Sure we can argue with a lot of the data and how they're drawn, but these are just for fun. Yes, I'm a bit of a geography geek and love fun maps.

These maps would lead us to some unusual (and completely unsubstantiated) stereotypes... 

Utah is full of very healthy people, who watch a lot of porn and basketball instead of Jeopardy and have the Highest Reported Wellbeing. Must be the green Jell-O they eat...

Illinois wins the prize for being the most average, which they are...pizza lovers of average health level and of average Jeopardy watching, but with the 5th largest GDP, the most robbery and a great interest in Lotto (hmmm...is there a connection?).

Poor Mississippi...growing up 20 years ago in Georgia, which was often ranked 49th in most positive stats and 2nd or 3rd in the bad ones, we often said "Thank goodness for Mississippi!" In its defense, I quite enjoyed the little time I spent in Oxford...great food, art, and bookstores. But the great Mississippi literary tradition is forgotten here, and instead we see the state portrayed as large, pie-eating, churchgoing, football watching, Jeopardy freaks living in a state with the GDP of Bangladesh.

Texas, as usual, is a bit of a contradiction...though it seems to be full of high school dropouts, it has the 2nd largest state economy (on par with Russia's), the most wind power production, and apparently is very well-fed by steak. We could have a whole blog on Texas, of course, and it is a pretty interesting example economically of doing things right. On the educational side, well...TX is kind of a mess right now...but they are doing something right in terms of innovation, business, and jobs. I'm afraid to ask if the autocomplete "Texas Rangers" is for the baseball team, for law enforcement, or for Chuck Norris.

First we have The United States of Shame, showing stats at which each state ranks 50th (or 1st, where it's a negative statistic).

via Neatorama, original and source data at Pleated Jeans

But Ilya Gerna has made a United States of Awesome map to balance out the shame, showing where each state ranks first in something positive.

via Neatorama

And a bit less scientific, the map displaying what Google suggests first to autocomplete when the state name is typed into the search function:    

via Strange Maps

One that has been in the news often is the Obesity Map

via CalorieLab

And one that might help explain the Obesity Map, the map of foods representing each state

via EdibleCrafts

The original, interactive version is on The Economist website, and also has one by population. Most shocking to me is that Italy has a bigger economy than Russia. I guess it shouldn't be that suprising, but my guess would have been that all the oil and gas and minerals would have put Russia higher.

via Neatorama

And finally, the map of Jeopardy fans...

via Strange Maps

Choosing a Camera...does it fit in my purse?

(Note: this article is supposed to be a summary of the decision process and complexities for buying a new camera.  But then I asked Herr J to "look it over" and, well, you see what happened...  Apologies to anyone who does not have an engineering PhD or permanent pocket protector!)

There are some pretty interesting technological developments today in digital cameras: mirrorless interchangeable-lens designs (the Panasonic / Olympus micro four-thirds standard, and APS-C models from Sony and Samsung), translucent mirrors in DSLRs, and even Phase One's over the top 30 megapixel medium format imaging sensor... now being replaced by an 80 megapixel version!  (For around $44,000 you could buy a car instead.)

 Alternative sensor techologies have been developed too, but are not making significant headway yet.  Fuji has a "reconfigurable" sensor, and Foveon a multi-layer sensor.  Ricoh went further out into left field, and has the GRX system which is a compact camera shell that uses interchangable units combining sensor and lens together! (pretty smart, out of the box thinking!)

Plus, there are increasingly good plain old point-and-shoot models.  The new Olympus XZ-1 has the "fastest" lens ever on a compact digital camera (at 28mm is f1.8!) and the Canon SX30IS has the largest focal range of any fixed lens camera ever made (35x, from 24-840mm!).  As always, there are a slew of proven APS-C and full-frame DSLRs that are the bread and butter of pros worldwide.

There are even innovations in accessories, such as a 3-D lens (for use on 3-D televisions!), wireless hot shoe attachments that send photos to any bluetooth device, and alien-looking lights for macro photography.  But in the end it all boils down to your camera/system working in your lifestyle & budget.

I'm a Nikon person... I love, love, LOVE my D700. It can't be beat for it's color rendition and low-light capabilities.  I'm not the only one -- one husband made a D700 birthday cake for his wife! And it's red velvet, too!!!

http://www.kenrockwell.com and http://www.woohome.com/food-drink/a-wifes-birthday-cake-nikon-d700/1984

I know many will call it heresy, but I also love my Panasonic LX3. Though the Nikon does fit in my larger purses even with a decently large lens, I just can't lug it around all the time. The LX3, however, is tiny (but built like a tank) and takes really great pictures, especially in low light.  (In fact, the LX3 actually changed the market in this regard.  All major players were forced to make a competing model in order to stay relevant: Canon S90/S95, Nikon P7000, Olympus XZ-1, and Panasonic's upgrade, the LX5). I also love my LX3 because of the awesome 10 Bar underwater housing that Herr J and my friends in TX gave me for my last birthday. Best Present Ever! It's a great set up for diving - I'd considered keeping my old D40 as an underwater camera, but the housings for those start around $2,000 and require different fronts for different lenses!!!  The 10 Bar and LX3 combo is so great that I've recently bought another (slightly used) LX3 to replace it when the camera wears out. I started diving with a Sony Cybershot circa 2001, and sadly the camera stopped working long before the housing. We did have a good 10 years together, but it just won't hold more than 15 or 30 minutes of charge anymore.

Herr J is in the market for a new camera, though he's been "in the market" as long as I've known him! It's a pretty big step when investing in a camera system. Whereas I'm already committed to a lifetime of Nikon (except for fixed lens compact cameras), he's still able to make a radical choice and go with newer systems and standards.  Is it better to invest in new models & lens mounts -- with the risk that they don't have longevity, or just stick with today's DSLRs?

Or perhaps one chooses a system based on available high-quality lenses and just gets a cheap body to start.  For example, I have some "good glass" that will last decades and I can reuse on any future camera bodies that have the same Nikon interchangeable lens mount, e.g., if I ever have/want to replace my D700.

What about the portability factor, like with my LX3 vs D700 -- should Herr J get a compact AND a large sensor camera, or just one mirrorless in-between size?  And what about the cost of getting an underwater housing for the camera as part of the total investment?  Housings can cost more than the cameras themselves!  (He loved our vacation photos with the LX3 + 10 Bar housing.)

We've had some good debates about the camera market, and enjoy playing around with different models in the local electronics store.  The current hot topic is "who buys into the micro four-thirds system?"  Ostensibly, micro four-thirds is "better quality than a compact, smaller than a DSLR".  It's an interesting concept and I'm curious to know if it ends up being a long-term market segment or just a brief stop on the way to something new. Obviously it appeals to early adopters who want the latest technology... and those who want better image quality than fixed lens compact cameras. But that's the irony...once you put a lens on it, it's not truly "small" anymore.

Here's the Panasonic LX3 compared to Panasonic's smallest mirrorless interchangeable lens camera, the GF1. The GF1 has a "pancake" lens attached:

The GF1 is little taller and deeper (front to back) and might fit in large pockets -- very portable in any case.  But the LX3 has a 3x zoom capability, whereas the GF1 "pancake" has no zoom -- and most people will miss this.  Well... although the LX3 has a fixed lens, we can changes lenses on the GF1.  So, let's put a lens on the GF1 that is equivalent to the 3x zoom on the LX3.  In this case, we'll substitute Canon's G11-- a direct competitor of the LX3 and similar size (a bit bigger, actually).  Here's what we get:

Whoa.  We just added a good 2-3 inches to the depth of the camera with that lens.  It's not fitting in anyone's pocket, but still fits in purses/bags.  That's the price you pay for getting an improvement in image quality.  The GF1's sensor is 6x larger than the sensor in the LX3 or G11 -- it needs a bigger lens to cover the sensor, but puts out better photos.  Is this worth the decrease in portability?  Hmm....

On the flip side, "m4/3" cameras are somewhat smaller & lighter than a typical DSLR because of the lack of mirror & prism, a smaller sensor & matching lenses.   Here's the Olympus m4/3 camera vs. one of the smallest DSLRs on the market (also from Olympus).   

   
There is definitely a reduction in size -- both heigth and depth, plus weight.  However, with the current market offerings, the small DSLR costs the same or less and delivers higher performance (faster shooting, less noise at high ISO, and greater dynamic range.  Plus the DSLR has a viewfinder and much better external controls for those that manual control of the camera (rather than leaving it in Automatic mode)  We definitely lose performance with the m4/3, but did the reduction in size really give us more portability?  Remember, neither camera will fit in a pocket, so we have to transport it differently.  So where's the right place on the size/quality/price curve?

Lots to think about here.  But maybe it won't be decided on technical metrit.
I pointed out these issues to Herr J, but he laughed and then said, "But most importantly, will it fit in my man purse better?"