iBanjo

We hear all about ‘glass ceilings’ and other forms of institutionalized sexism towards women. Today I’m going to tell you story about sexism towards men.

When we got married in 1998, my wife and I agreed to both take each others’ last names through the common practice of hyphenation. “Frances Collins” and “Ben Sussman” would become “Frances Collins-Sussman” and “Ben Collins-Sussman”. No big deal, right?

Well, it was no big deal for my wife. She walked into the Department of Motor Vehicles, showed them her marriage license, and asked for a new driver’s license. “No problem,” they said, “what would you like for a new last name?”. They quickly issued her a new I.D., which she then carried over to the Social Security Administration to get a new card, and to various other agencies. Each agency was happy to reissue documents for her.

I tried to do the same thing. Despite my showing the marriage license, not a single government institution was willing to change my records and issue me new documents. Each one looked at me like my request was insane, and they all gave the same reply: “Sorry, we won’t give you a new I.D. unless you show us that some other agency has already done it.” No agency was willing to be the first one to do it.

I finally got the Social Security office to give me more details. They said that they’d only issue me a new card if I legally changed my name. In other words, I had to fill out a bunch of forms, swear I wasn’t changing my name to evade debt, place a public notice in a newspaper for a few weeks, then go swear in front of a live judge that I want to change my name… oh, and pay $200 for the court proceedings too. And pay another $220 for the other official name-changing processing. Here’s a receipt that shows the line-items. Then, after all that, I had to change my birth certificate as well. Yes, seriously. Apparently a birth certificate is not an immutable record of history, but it’s some sort of morphable record of identity.

In summary: my wife was instantly allowed to change her name with no forms or fuss. I, however, had to pay over $400 and stand before a judge. My marriage was irrelevant — I went through the exact same process that I would have gone through if I had wanted to change my name to “Glorbo P. Stranborf.”

I’m surprised there hasn’t been some sort of class-action suit against the government about this.

The Apache Software Foundation’s podcast — Feather Cast — just posted a new episode that features me and Fitz talking about Google’s current Summer of Code project.

Maybe I can pull a jwz and ask my readers for help — cooking help! Perhaps even the Hacker Kitchen can advise me.

So there I was, making a simple hot salmon mousse, and the cookbook explains how to make a nice sauce to dribble over it:

Melt 2 Tbsp butter in a nonstick saucepan. Dilute 2 tsp cornstarch into 1/2 cup milk, then add gradually to the melted butter over low-medium heat, while stirring continuously. Add 1/2 cup dry white wine, salt, pepper, and continue to stir until sauce thickens. Remove it from the heat, stir in 2 beaten egg yolks and lemon rind gradually, whisking fast until the sauce is even and smooth. […]

Seems easy enough, doesn’t it? I melted the butter, then thoroughly mixed the cornstarch into some milk and added the milk to the butter. But when I added the wine — bam! Instant curdling. I ended up with a big lumpy, gooey mass in the middle of the sauce. I couldn’t tell if it was coagulated milk solids (reacting to the acidity of the wine), or if it was the cornstarch, or some combination of the two. I was so frustrated that I tossed the whole sauce, and repeated the whole experiment using skim milk (rather than whole milk). Exact same results. So I guess milkfat wasn’t coagulating; it must have been either the milk proteins or the cornstarch.

Mind you, I’m no spring chicken when it come to cornstarch. I remember my naive days of trying to mix cornstarch into a big bowl of soy sauce, and getting ‘clumps’, and then learning how to dissolve it first in a teeny bit of sauce. But this whole experience has bewildered me.

Cooks, what’s going on here?

I know that I usually blog about things that excite me, but it just wouldn’t be a blog if there weren’t some sort of rant every now and then, right?

Let me vent about some miscellaneous pet peeves.

• Digital photo albums:

  I love getting invitations to view friends’ online photo albums as much as the next guy, but it really annoys me when I go to the site and see 100 photos that are clearly nothing more than a thoughtless dump of someone’s digital camera. I don’t want to see blurry photos. I don’t want to see 12 pictures in row that are 99% identical. It’s called a photo album, folks. You know, an album? Like, choose the good photos and put them in a book on your coffee table? Don’t waste my time by making me comb through your ugly contact sheet while trying to spot an interesting photo. Please, put some thought into what you display!

• Notice people around you:

  Pay attention to your surroundings when in public places; it’s not the place to be self-absorbed — you can do that at home. Don’t block the aisle with your cart in the grocery store while you browse a shelf. If you’re going to stand on the escalator, move to the right so others can pass. (I don’t care if it’s you first time on the subway, notice that everyone around you is standing on the right, climbing on the left? Pay attention to the convention!) When boarding a train, let people off the train before trying to push your way in, you insensitive clod.

• Learn how to ask for help:

  When asking for help with software in a public forum (like an email list, or chat room), provide complete information. It’s useless to say, “I’m trying to do [general vague task], and I’m seeing an error message that says [some vague recounting of error text]. What is wrong?” It then becomes a game of 20 questions. Those of us trying to help have to repeatedly pull information from you: what exactly did you type? what exactly did you see as output? how did you configure things? Please don’t make us play this game. We can’t read your mind, and it’s a waste of time to have us repeatedly interrogate. Instead, gather up all of the information that describes your environment and what you’ve done, and present it all up front when you ask for help. We need to see literal transcripts of what you’re doing, not vague descriptions of the task.