a few good items from the NY Times today:

a compelling op-ed about the gay marriage debate

an article about Finnish snow and ice sculptures.. the included slide show is stunning. In a way, nothing beats beautiful temporary art.

a ditty about the web site idea-a-day.com, and the idea of ideas as entertainment. I like.

Cello disco, anyone? You’re not going to find it on iTunes Music Store (I looked…)

I made my best loaf of Italian bread yesterday. What made it so good? I think I finally worked out how much water you’re supposed to spray onto the loaf before it goes in (for the best crusty crust).

Anyway, I think I’ve reached a peak with this recipe, and it’s time to move on to some interesting variations, or some new kinds of bread. I’m not saying that my loaves have been entirely consistent. Ratios of ingredients, the temperature of the oven, and time are about the only things I have a good control over and understanding of. The weather patterns in my apartment, the freshness of the yeast and bread flour from Star Market, the bacteria in the air in my fridge, the quality of Somerville tap water… these things all add a certain voodoo to the process.

I like a little voodoo. It helps my mojo. I’m glad I’m not trying to run a bakery, though.

My next experiment will be a cheddar-pepper loaf. But how much cheddar and pepper should go into a 2 lb loaf of bread? The recipe calls for 2 tsp of salt. So maybe I’ll try 1.5 tsp of pepper at first. As far as the cheddar goes.. well, I don’t have a good answer yet. 1/2 cup?

The recipe I use right now involves a pre-fermented biga, which is a quick version of the sourdough starter. The biga is dough that sits out on the counter for a few hours, then in the fridge overnight, before comprising about 1/3 of the final dough for the bread. It’s what makes an Italian loaf taste different from white bread.

Once I get a decent cheddar-pepper loaf going with my current biga-based recipe, my next step will be to start a sourdough starter. This is more of a liquidy thing, definitely more of an animal in your refrigerator. You have to feed it pretty frequently (with flour and water), and you use a portion of it to make sourdough bread. The longer you keep your starter going (assuming it stays healthy), the more flavor it’ll contribute to the final bread. It’s pretty intense stuff.

Beyond sourdough, there is desem bread. It’s a Flemish loaf my boss turned me onto recently, and it involves a 50/50 ratio of whole wheat and bread flours. The desem is like a sourdough starter, but from what I’ve heard it’s even more finnicky. Myriad pitfalls await, most of them resulting in an entirely foul loaf. The The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book dedicates an entire chapter to desem cultivation.

Question: Could we use genetic algorithms, baking simulation software, and some kind of target taste algorithm to create the perfect loaf of bread?

Hmm. Sounds unlikely.

Someone had the idea last night to create a new political party: the sex party. Use sex to make local, state, federal, and international disputes dissolve in a sea of passion. So many coutries are already in bed with each other in the metaphorical sense, why not take it all the way?

Gives new meaning to International Relations.

Other party ideas that came up:
the sports party (everything can be resolved— with a series of soccer games)
the gambling party (let a coin toss decide our nation’s most controversial issues)

Todd’s moving out. Whitney’s moving in. April 1st. My apartment will no longer look like an architecture magazine, since all the post-modern bullshit furniture is Todd’s. I have mixed, but mostly positive, feelings about this.

updated things of Todd’s I’ll probably have to buy for myself now:

standing mixer
dutch oven
rice cooker
microwave
pouring bottle for EVOO
cast iron teapot
digital thermo
chairs to go around my new table

Thankfully Whitney has everything else I’ll need.. I think.

Here’s a couple photos from my new digicam. I finally took it out last night and this morning, wandered around and took a few pics. The pics are not nearly as valuable as, nor do they hint at, the joy of taking photographs with this camera. Shoot from the hip (this is surprisingly easy with such a mammoth camera) and don’t worry about film… just let the world happen around the camera. It’s a nice idea with no fruitful results yet.

here’s a mildly interesting one.. musicplasma. See links between related artists, and their particular spheres of influence. Graph sites like this are always exciting to see, but consistently leave something to be desired. What is to be desired?

I think more fluidity in the interface would help. But also more information, somehow. Actually, I think different information is what I want. Why does a graph model help show the relationships between artists better than a simple list with links ala. allmusic or amazon’s related artists? Musicplasma isn’t showing me more, as far as I can tell. The lines between artists seem arbitrary (is it “people who bought Fleetwood Mac also bought Paul Simon”?). I know the artists are related without any lines. If lines are made, I want them to have meaning. For example, the color or thickness of the line represents how likely I am to enjoy that other artist, based on which artist I’m looking at and what the system knows about my tastes. Now that’s something Amazon doesn’t show with a list.

Yeah! it was available! So I took it. and I put a site there. Ok, not much of a site. But BS will be a site before it’s a book. Books cost too much to make, waste too much paper, aren’t incrementally updateable, and so on. So I’ll stick with a site until it gets popular enough for a book… or just falls apart.

Meanwhile I need to come up with a tagline for Boston Secrets. You know, like “boston secrets: blah blah blah”

I hate taglines.

Here are some thoughts. Boston Secrets:

… finally told.
… finally revealed.
… for past and present residents.
… for resident presidents.
… a guide for residents.
… a guide for presidents.
… please don’t tell anyone.
… listen closely.
… shhhh!
… self-exemplifying.
… the residents’ guide.
… not a travel guide.
… not for tourists. (can’t use this, because of these people)
… seek them out.
… know them.
… what’s worth it.
… an organized city guide.
… is a such dumb idea.
… I hate taglines.
… fuck this, this is bullshit.
and of course
… Freddie’s Funnel Cake Emporium (offered by Freddie)

Also, received my 10D camera yesterday. I’m not going to post bad photos taken while screwing around with it so far, but I will say that I’m thrilled. Great image quality, usability (it behaves exactly like a really nice SLR: an actual shutter that pops up, almost no AF lag, no shutter button lag whatsoever, etc), and compatibility with every other (Canon) thing I own.

I do wonder, though, if this kind of digital SLR, which is basically a regular SLR with a CCD and LCD screen instead of film, will last much longer. It seems like they’re taking an old technology and changing it just enough to merge with a new technology. In the future will we be rethinking the digital camera into something entirely new? Maybe an all-digital digital camera?

It’s interesting to note what isn’t made useless by CCDs. These things probably aren’t going out of style in the next 50 years:

- lenses. digital won’t slow the demand for good glass.
- as long as you have a lens, you’ll have apeture, focal length, and shutter speed.
- which means mechanical parts are needed to stop down the lens and to move the curtain, at the very least, though something like LCD windows might eventually offer a solid-state answer.
- the shutter button isn’t going anywhere.
- you always need more light (especially with the tiny lenses and CCDs made today), so you’ll always need a flash mechanism.
- the need for a tripod might be reduced with technology, but definitely not eliminated.
- and there has to be a way to see the results. so printers and digital picture frames aren’t going anywhere.

Getting photographs out of the more tumultuous parts of this world has always been a challenge. Steve McCurry tells stories of sewing film canisters into his clothing in preparation for the Afghanistan border crossing. Beyond that, equipment theft, weather, and of course warfare can all keep the film from ever returning (not to mention the photographer).

How about an SLR camera with a digital sat phone back? All images are sent out through the phone as they’re taken. No film, nothing to hide… just this little camera with a big-ass phone attached to it.

Received my first issue of Simple Cooking. I have to say that for an 8-page newsletter, $5 per issue is expensive. On the other hand, this thing is chock full—with a 10-point font—of epicuriocities. Looking at the recipes, it feels like the Cook’s Illustrated with a twist: while Cook’s shows how to make classic recipes taste classic (just as you’d expect them to taste), Simple Cooking’s recipes tend to be either new discoveries of the “eureka!” variety, or based on rumors/hypotheses that played out well. For the back story on “Fried Eggs with Bananas, Fresh Chiles, and Onions in Coconut Oil,” Thorne writes, “… Christine Mackie’s remark in Life and Food in the Caribbean that ‘frying eggs in coconut oil is the finest way you can cook a fresh egg,’ got me to seek out some virgin coconut oil and try it.” And so we follow him on his adventure toward the included recipe.

So how’s the food? Well, so far I’ve only got one data point, but it’s a very tasty data point. This issue is all about breakfast, so I tried it out this morning. I had all the ingredients for “Fried Eggs in Olive Oil with Capers” at hand… on toast, it was a great breakfast, definitely simple, and something I’d never have dreamed up on my own. That’s all I’m looking for. Tomorrow: “Lancaster Farmhouse Baked Oatmeal.”

Well, I just finished my first week of half-time (25 hours), in my new position as “Senior Usability Engineer.”

What am I doing now that I have this extra word in my title? Pretty much exactly what I did before. I think every engineer is a usability engineer—maybe some don’t know that they are.

This first week back felt v. productive. Lots of varied projects… everything from a partial web site revamp to carpet samples for our new office space. I feel like the company woke up from a deep sleep since I left for vacation 2 weeks ago, but it’s probably just a change in my own perception. Anyway, I’m hoping this change of schedule will keep my productive momentum going, both at the office and in my own work. I’ve never been much of a clock watcher in the first place, but at 40 hours a week maybe it’s harder stay focused on one thing. Especially sitting in front of that damn computer.

Which is what I’m doing now, so I don’t know why I bother complaining. But speaking of getting outside, I received my 17-40 f/4L lens this week. This is a pretty new addition to Canon’s EOS lens lineup, and I have no doubt it’s a solid lens. Eventually, when I am feeling irresponsible enough with my money, I’ll get a digital SLR to go behind this lens. Meanwhile, I’m going to get out there with the ol’ 35mm and see how it goes. I’ll resist the temptation to write a review of my new lens—using terms like bokeh along the way—because you’d see me for the equipment measurbator that I am.

Ordered an LCD monitor for home. It pivots 90 degrees! I’m wondering if I’ll start doing everything in portrait mode… 1024x1280 makes a lot of sense for the web, word processing, etc.

Has anyone ever made a movie shot in portrait mode? 9:16 aspect ratio? I’m sure some crazy early 20th century filmmaker did it. Maybe it’s time to do it again.

Long day. Feeling satisfied. Off to bed.

Last summer I was working in my lab, trying to recreate the lemonade served at Baraka Cafe in Central Square, Cambridge. I think they added a category for Best Lemonade to the Best of Boston specifically so they could award it to Baraka. You’d be surprised by how many people share my passion for this particular lemonade. It frequently comes up in conversation, at random. Anyway, now that spring is … uhh… getting ready to start thinking about coming around, I thought I’d post it. If you’ve tasted the Baraka lemonade for yourself and you have your own variation of it, let me know.

Baraka Lemonade

8oz lemonade (sweetish)
cinnamon stick
1/4 tsp rose water
1/4 tsp orange water
a couple dried rose petals (hard to find.. the spice shop in Inman Sq has them)
and some ice

Mix it all together, make sure the rose petals dehydrate a little, and serve. The cinnamon stick is not quite right… it doesn’t give enough cinnamon flavor to the drink. Baraka somehow gets cinnamon flavor into the drink without using powdered cinnamon. Is there such a thing as cinnamon extract

A variation is to do about 1/3 seltzer and 2/3 lemonade as the base… nice fizzy drink.

An excellent article in the NY Times Mag on Timbaland and the Neptunes. My favorite bit:

”The best music right now is country music,” he went on. ”The old country music, the old bluegrass stuff — the lyrics in that stuff are incredible. And the damn melodies? Think about Bonnie Raitt. She’s country, right? She made the illest song ever, ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me.’ ” He sang me a line: ”Turn down the lights, turn down the bed/Turn down these voices inside my head.”

Timbaland also thinks Pat Benatar’s ”Love Is a Battlefield” is the ”illest song ever,” and he adores old hits by Men at Work and the Human League. ”Eighties music is music to me,” he said. ”Those are records that make you feel good, you know? I’m tired of stuff now, even stuff that I do. Coldplay and Radiohead are the illest groups to me. That’s music. Norah Jones is music. I love real music that I can play and never get tired of. The stuff I don’t get tired of is the stuff that’s musical.”

A question: Does your employer send you to conferences as part of your job? From Sundance to SXSW to , every job has its conferences. How do you find out about them (aside from the bigger ones), and how do you know which conferences live up to the hype? Employers will send you to a conference that relates to your job, but it’s up to you to find and attend conferences that further your own interests outside of that.

How do you find out about them?

Some interesting design links from today:

Pentagram is a (seriously) multimedia design shop. Architecture, identity, web sites, interiors, print, you name it. I’m blown away by any firm capable of doing all that. And they seem to do it well— check out the portfolio.

Cinema Redux: “This explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.”

The design and construction of a new Edward Tufte sculpture. Described by the artist on his excellent message board, Ask E.T. See also Dia:Beacon, which I can’t wait to finally visit…

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser: Type in any URL, and get a nice graph of related sites and media (from Amazon) via the Google API. See also, anacubis’s Google/Amazon Demo, if you can. Not only does it require Windows/IE, it also recommends 1280x1024. So I haven’t seen it yet.

Ambient Devices— right here in our fair city. They got some major BBC coverage today, and were on Slashdot I think. I’d really like to get an Ambient Orb and try out their custom API on it. Sounds like a nice, elegant display device. I bet they took the John Hancock Building’s coded weather beacon as a major inspiration.

Engineers Without Borders. Most of the interesting engineering problems are in developing countries, where they have the opportunity to build infrastructures from scratch. Engineers must come up with economical solutions. Organizations must create a direct support infrastructure (so money goes where it’s needed). And of course, as Whitney said last night, it’s too easy to stop listening and try to tell people what they want—the “I’m going to go fix Africa” approach.

Raven Maps look beautiful. Also along those lines, Understanding USA is an interesting book. Unfortunately, the graphics on the web site are shrunk just enough to be totally useless… an unintended statement on the unbearably low resolution of computer monitors? Todd got the book—I’m looking for a spare moment to peruse.

On my half-time restricted budget, I’m not going to buy a lot of books. So I visited the main branch of the Somerville Public Library today and it gave me an idea for an open source movement.

The movement is called “Open Source Design”, and here’s how it works. Open Source Design sets out standards for design among public buildings and small businesses. It is free and can be adopted in part or whole.

It’s up to the city (or business) to deal with the specifics of implementation, but Open Source Design should be versatile enough to handle most situations.

It may provide:

• Guidelines for usability in public buildings. The guidelines should address common usability issues in libraries, schools, city and town halls, the parking office, the DMV, and so on. Ultimately, they provide clear, consistent, usable design across city government buildings, documents, and web sites. The challenge of this project is that it’s both technical and design-related. And cities have no money… which leads me to:
  
• Low- or no-cost solutions for usability: signage, informational sheets (sheets for rules, recycling guidelines, public contracts (think Creative Commons)
  
• An archive of successful building designs to draw from.
  

This is perhaps similar to the Chinese Restaurant Kit. That’s my name for the standardized kit of signs and menus used by many take-out Chinese restaurants. These restaurants are not part of the same chain, but they have purchased the same menu system, the same photograph of General Tso’s Chicken, and so on.

The double-edged sword here is that design and open source are in conflict. Design is best when overseen by one person (“the visionary”), in my opinion. Have we figured out how to facilitate the design process over the Internet? Most open source software demonstrates that we haven’t. If we can’t design open source interfaces as well as Apple, why bother having a branch of open source for “design”?

But there are a few open source projects that have good interfaces. I think you’d find that the interface, or the entire project, was primarily created by one or two people. Other projects with decent interfaces will either copy a commercially available option (eg. OpenOffice.org), or they have a well-defined standard to go by (eg. Mozilla— “to start, it should look and feel like IE”). I want to look into this in more detail: What other OSS projects have excellent interfaces, and why?

Of course, you could also do Open Source Design for profit, or as a public outreach branch of a profitable design firm.

I have a love/hate relationship with European washing machines, but have you seen James Dyson’s washing machine? Apparently it is faster, it’s more efficient, it holds more laundry in a smaller space, and it cleans better than anything we’ve got. Will he ever stop? I hope not.

Household items James Dyson should revisit next:

• The Kitchen Mixer: make kneading more human-like. Use sensors/feedback systems to treat the dough nicely.
  
• The blender and/or cuisinart: keep the size more consistent across and between batches. Every chef wants each piece of chopped vegetable in a batch to be exactly the same size, so they’ll all cook evenly. I’d like to see a cuisinart that can take a carrot and give you a pile of perfect 1/16” square carrot pieces.
  
• Toaster oven: Don’t let anything char. Toast more evenly. Etc.
  

He doesn’t need to revisit the coffee maker, alarm clock, television, microwave, or any other appliaces we already pay too much attention to.

Book idea: The Road Trip Road Atlas. Large format, something you can really get your face into. Along with typical USA road atlas content, this guide adds full-page or multi-page maps of national and state parks, with photographs (to give a better idea of what the terrain looks like), seasonal day/night climate graphs, trails, some indication of scale beyond the simple miles/km scale, and other stuff you should know: What trails you’ll need passes for in advance, what to bring with you when visiting this area, animals to look out for, etc.

Finish this story: “We first met in the trunk of a car.”

Want to start working on a 1280x1024 or higher res. web site. How will the web change when you’ve got 1280x1024 to work with? Do you know of any sites that require it? It could be bad— more pixels means more room for interface. And as they say, no matter how great your interface is, it’d be better if there were less of it. But it could also be good— more room for data. Hmm.. If I ever get a 1280x1024 flat panel, I may start designing for that size, see where it goes.

Read today a lot of camera reviews. Here’s my take on what’s interesting in the smallish-format world:

• The Leica MP. This is just a beautiful, elegant manual SLR. $4000 gets you in, with a 35mm f/2 lens. This is the camera you give to grandchildren. I want to buy this camera and sell everything else. It’s so romantic. Fuck digital.
  
• The Sony F828. 8 megapixels. Zeiss lens. Very responsive. $1000. What more do you want?
  
• The whole Canon EOS digital lineup. Full support for EOS lenses (I already own an EOS camera so this is great). Firewire. And all the nice features you’d expect on an SLR camera. The cheap one is $900 and does 6 megapixels. The expensive one is $8000 and does 11 megapixels. That’s without a lens. But still. I’m excited about where this is going.
  
• For output: The Epson 2200. 13” x 44” prints. Archival inks. And as I hear, everything that comes out of this printer looks fantastic. $700 bucks to get in, plus a buck or so per print for ink and paper.
  

The Leica is the only thing that won’t be half the price within 18 months. But it’s impractical. But even if it’s a good investment, the opportunity cost is high. A year’s worth of 35mm film and processing will buy you a good digital camera.

The cheaper Canon digital SLRs are the most practical thing right now. EOS lenses are great, and they won’t lose value over time (I sold an EOS 50mm f/1.4 lens on eBay for more than the new price I’d paid 4 years prior). You can get an EOS lens for any occasion. Dish out the money for the body, knowing you’ll lose half of it, then just start investing in lenses. When enough CCD improvements have been made, ditch the body and get a new one.

I’m most excited by the prices of the digicams. CCD prices are always dropping. CCDs are getting more dense and larger. There are still problems common to all digital cameras (the kind of noise created by CCDs, the overexposed bits of a picture that bleed out, etc.)… but I’d be pretty happy not to worry about storing thousands of slides and negatives in folders.

But where’s the digital equivalent of the super Yashica T4 Super point-and-shoot 35mm camera? No clear winner yet, I think.

Musicians typically release one album at a time. Twelve or so songs, once per year at most.. usually more like every two years. While outside the studio, they tour to promote the current offering.

With MP3s, the notion of an album is only a holdover from the media of the past. Songs are the level of granularity we’re looking at today. So I predict that some artists will move to a model where they record a dozen songs at once in the studio and they release one song at a time, on a rolling schedule, until they get back into the studio. Tours would feature a rolling set list, which might add a song or two as they are released. The single would come out first, so the artist can perform it at all shows. While on the road, the artist could work out different arrangements for the songs (as naturally happens anyway), prehaps resulting in a remix or two. Song-level releases would keep the act continuously fresh for audiences and the artist alike.

Someone must be doing this already. Who is it?

(On the other hand, it breaks the continuity of an album. How would people react if “Dark Side of the Moon” were released one song at a time? No, thanks.)