Why you can trust an IT person to save your life, but not to give you recipes for cookies or software
The occasion for this post is my attempt to bake my own Ubuntu Sugar Cookies.
The reasons for this post are 1) too much free time on my hands; 2) a childish pleasure that I find in turning the kitchen into a mess; 3) an attraction to the open-source software concept associating it with communism and philanthropy.
This piece of art brut, took from 10h30 to 3h00 AM to produce, despite the first-sight simplicity of it. I vividly recall being busy typing lines and lines in the terminal, fixing the sound, resolution, internet connection and whatnot of my dearest Ubuntu laptop in the same span of hours with the same unconvincing success, all that after being reassured by a couple of IT people that Ubuntu is indeed for human beings, "don´t worry - you won´t have any problems [despite your UNIX ignorance]", "plus people using Linux are increasingly sought after". My favourite programmer uncle - the person who initiated me to science fiction and who gave me Adams´ Hitchhiker´s Guide To Galaxy - could not have lied to me, could he? And my Dearest other IT competent somebody too?
Well, they didn´t. Nor did the creative-minded geek-chef who wrote the cookie recipe. It´s simple and rewarding and you love it and don´t want to leave it for pirate copies of Windows or sweets bought from the shop once it´s done - both the OS configuration and the cookies. However until you get it fixed you feel like the three Chinese monkeys in one - you see no evil (Windows) because your monitor denies to you seeing anything; you hear no evil (tarararam Windows start-up song) because your ALSA mixer has given a vow of silence; and you are speachless remembering how ´easy´ it was supposed to be.
Same goes for the cookie recipe. It can only be written by somebody armed with the patience and enthousiasm of a programmer. It takes ages to freeze and unfreeze the soft melting dough in every step, to get it in the right shape, measure and cut each element of it so that it fits with the rest, make the colour intense enaugh (in the dough more than on my hands), all along kneading into it the positive spirit of the Ubuntu philosophy.
To me cooking is a kind of chemistry. And chemistry to me is an obscure Chinese dialect mixed with math. I won´t say what math is to me because I believe it can find no analogy except in the sort of love-hate-horror relationships that I hope never to have.
Nevertheless I like all linguistics, chem and cooking experiments and the collected data of this lab-investigation amounts to :
- quantitatively - a dozen of sugar cookies with
- qualitatively - a destinctively pleasant sweet taste and chewy texture.
The lab-volunteers a.k.a. my sister and her Korean schoolmate / my roommate approved of the final result (and consumed it asap) without much regard towards the aesthetic aspects of it.
Not that there were much aesthetics... I used cane sugar instead of white - this made for brownish cookies, and apparently I got the cutting trick wrong because the colourful Ubuntu logo turned out as an abstraction of an Ubuntu logo. It was so far away from the original thing that I suppose I don´t even need to feel guilty for using it without asking. Forget the concept of the people holding hands in a round - it was more like a triplet of people turning around (not in a circle though - in a triangle) so fast that you can´t destinguish anything but colours.
But then again, my bio-chemically substantiated hypothesis (that anything with so much sugar and butter will be appreciated because by evolutionary pathways we are programmed to savour lipids and carbs) was confirmed by the speedy destruction of the samples a.k.a. cookies.
I also hope that it was some food for thought for my dear family and made them consider (while chewing) shifting from Windows to open-source - you can´t have the Windows conceptless, philanthropical-less logo turned into cookies as sweet and round as these, can you?
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