Apple executive, about owner: The way I see it, you plop down 14 dollars to listen to Kenny talk for an hour.

Fire department regular, paying check: I'd pay 24 dollars for Kenny to shut the fuck up while I'm trying to eat.

--Lower East Side

Overheard by: mhopkins
via Overheard in New York, Jun 25, 2010

Background and explanation:

• Shopsin's General Store (official site)
• Shopsin's (Wikipedia entry)
• Calvin Trillin's 2002 New Yorker profile of restaurateur Kenny Shopsin (highly recommended)
• "I Like Killing Flies" (documentary film)
• "Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin" (book)

Bob Campbell, my father, was an engineer by trade. 

Bob Campbell at home, early 1980s

He trained as an electrical engineer in the late 1950s and then went to work for IBM. That was pretty much getting into the (digital) computer industry on the ground floor, and back then it was reasonable and even honorable to work for the same company for your entire career.

"Playing" with Bob was always a mind-expanding experience. Flying kites would turn into an impromptu lesson on aerodynamics, which I drank up every word of and retained basically nothing from.  Still, I thought my dad was the smartest guy in the world.  (At least until I became a teenager.)

Bob and Barry, flying kites at Holden Beach, circa 1972

My Father's Day memory of Bob: 

My friends and I, around age six or seven, were building forts in the back yard, down by the creek (a common play area in our neighborhood), wherever there was room.  I was having some difficulties with structural integrity, and I asked Dad for advice.

"Hang on a second, I'll be right back," he said, and wheeled into the house. I imagined that he was going to get some tools out of his workbench, but I wasn't all that surprised when he returned with a clipboard, some graph paper and an ink pen.

Dad drew out plan and elevation views of a structurally sound fort, along with notes on where to excavate in our fortifications for best results.  He then gave me written permission to use one of Mama's garden trowels out of the shed for these efforts, but only if I brought it back (1) promptly and (2) clean.  (Yes, he numbered the requirements.)

(It's no wonder that I turned out to be a tech writer.)

Dad, it's been five years since we lost you.  You were a good father when you were raising me, and later you were a good friend, too.

I'll drink a toast in your memory today.  Since you're not here to drink it with me, I'm going to make it a double Scotch on the rocks.

This is a scanned sidebar from a print article on hiring the handicapped that ran in some official IBM publication in 1984.

Carrie may have just hit upon a million-dollar idea!

She came up with the idea of the falafel-waffle - the Fawaffle, in other words - and conceived of it as a thing that could hold all kinds of sweet and savory toppings, perhaps a form of street food, even.

Falafel is sort of the national food of Israel, but it's a crossroads of many Middle Eastern cultures that Carrie and I love so much, really.

And it all starts with chickpeas and fava beans.

You need to soak chickpeas overnight and then cook them until soft - simmer for 90 minutes or so.

The fava beans you can soak and then cook down to a slurry, spicing it heavily with turmeric, coriander, cayenne and black pepper, cumin...

When it comes time to assemble the actual falafel mix... a food processor can be a big help.  I tossed in minced onion and garlic, more spices, and just a thimbleful of olive oil.

What you wind up with is a smooth paste that you can add to your favorite waffle batter (I think 3 parts falafel and 5 parts batter is about right, but you should start with half-and-half and see where it takes you.

The first batch of Fawaffles turned out awfully well!  There's much recipe tinkering to be done, but the proof of concept is right there and tasty.

Carrie conceived of this as a platform for various savory condiments - here are some that we tried:

The inventor says, "Hurray for fawaffles!"

And so does the chef:

From my Google Voice inbox, this thoroughly puzzling "transcript" of a caller's message:

"Bye really what your bye. So I want balls and I don't know if you have them. He's the trail from capsules. I just this is black box. Okay, see you. I don't know. But I that connect because it bye. I don't know if late but this trip. Yeah. Yeah. Mrs. From 00 North, but if you can all of it. Bye."

Wow. Just wow.

Hi.  I’m Barry Campbell, and this is an application for a job.

I’m an experienced writer, editor and manager based in Chapel Hill, NC, although I also have many clients and friends in New York City, where I lived for the last 14 years. 

I can do at least a couple of things that are worth paying me for: 

• As a manager, I lead highly skilled, cross-functional teams to produce complex and demanding deliverables on tight deadlines and budgets.  (Often, these deliverables are documents with significant business and legal importance, such as proposals and statements of work.)
• As an individual contributor, I explain complex technical concepts to nontechnical audiences, and craft compelling, persuasive business cases and presentations for proposals and grant applications.

Whether you need to hire a player or a coach – I happily do both jobs, by the way, and as a manager I strongly prefer a role as a “player-coach” – I have a long track record achieving excellent results despite limited resources and demanding schedules.   Besides “player-coach,” other (printable) words colleagues have used to describe me include trainer, facilitator, mentor, problem-solver and creative thinker.

I relocated to North Carolina for family reasons.  My wife is going back to grad school at Carolina, and my mother, who lives in Raleigh, is in poor health; we needed to be closer.  Besides, I grew up here, and attended UNC myself; who wouldn’t want a chance to return to Chapel Hill to live?  I love New York City and will happily travel there as required for business, but the Triangle is now my home.

I’ve spent the last four years working with a very dynamic company in hyper-growth mode (see: “Inside the Tornado,” by technology guru/visionary Geoffrey Moore, if you’re curious about what that was like), and I helped the company grow its proposal-based business eightfold (an 808% increase, to be precise) in the first year, once they decided to let me meddle with the processes a little. (OK, I'll cop to it: I built their processes from the ground up and eliminated a lot of churn.) Root-cause analysis of the company’s rapid growth in the last several years would lead you, at least in some small part, to a snapshot of me and my team huddled over our keyboards, knocking out a volume of precisely targeted proposals and RFP responses that would likely surprise you.  (It surprised us!)

I was also responsible for more conventional technical documentation and training requirements, analyst relations, and some other fairly important things, too.

If certifications impress you, I have some.  I’m ITIL v3 Foundation certified (and was v2 certified before that), and a PRINCE2 certified project manager, and a bunch of other things actually; ask to see my resume if you care.  (If you’ve been in this business a while and certifications don’t impress you all that much, I like you already. Even if you don’t hire me, we should have lunch.)

I’m at liberty, available May 1, and I’m taking a lot of lunches. ;-)  You know how to get in touch.

Reviewed: "ITIL Lite" by Malcolm Fry (ISBN 9780113312122)

SUMMARY: If you're thinking of implementing ITIL v3, read this book first. * * * * (4 out of 5 stars)

Malcolm Fry, who has been around the block a time or two in the IT Service Management (ITSM) world, is a big fan of ITIL v3.

But in the real world, especially when you're starting out, you may increase your chances of success if you only attempt to implement a core, defined subset of the full ITIL v3 lifecycle model.

His new book, "ITIL Lite", is about just that: being successful with a defined subset of ITIL. Mr Fry is writing about process improvement in the real world, as real people live it, every day, in real workplaces. He doesn't believe in jargon and The Next Big Thing in process wonkery means nothing to him. 

If you're thinking of implementing ITIL v3, read this book first.

Related: "ITIL Lite" article at BSM Review

Maria the Korean Bride gets married in Raleigh, NC 

 60 Hudson St, NYC, aka the Western Union building, from a morning walk in the rain

Breakfast in Chapel Hill with Mark, Joyce and Carrie

Drinks in NYC with Jamey, Inness, and Jeejo

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

David Frum, "Health Care is the GOP's Waterloo", 22 March 2010, The National Post 

One of the most thoughtfully written and nicely illustrated "how to" books I've seen in a long time, "The Stick And Cane In Close Combat: Jointlocks, Takedowns and Surprise Attacks" is about how to use a stick, staff or cane as leverage in grappling. It's a compendium of jointlocks and takedowns, basically, from the practical to the fanciful, with only passing reference to the short, sharp shot (the best way to fight with a stick is to hit somebody with it, usually.)

A little knowledge of anatomy and physics is a *truly* dangerous thing. I am far from an expert martial artist, but Mr. Lang certainly is, and it appears to me that at least some of these techniques would remain completely accessible/available to older people who might have reduced strength, range of motion, or even balance.

It turns out that Tom Lang is an instructional designer and medical/technical writer, in his day job.  No wonder the book reads so well!

Related links:

Jointlocks and Takedowns with the Stick and Cane (Tom Lang)