My grandfather made this salad, which the camera’s white balance made look like a cookbook photo from the 70s. All the better.

Karl and I enjoying the first spring meal on the porch: Couscous salad with grilled veggies.

And, for memorial day weekend, some real meat. Bacon-wrapped pork loin with a black olive chutney, balsamic-glased grilled pears, and some broccoli rabe that we threw in under the coals. This was all from Let The Flames Begin, which so far has taught me a lot about grilling.

Kombucha Update! The kombucha turned out well and I have gone on to make two more batches. It gets a little vinegary if you let it brew for too long, but when you drink it at the right time, it is delicious. It tastes like the juice of a yet undiscovered tropical fruit.

Now that I’ve officially quit my job, I have to find something to do with my life. Clearly I need a piece of software to tell me what the next hot Web 2.0 idea is, so I can code it up, flip it, and retire.

That’s where lokobot comes in. Lokobot currently offers about 900,000 Web 2.0 business names and mission statements. Sorry, there’s no RSS feed or Ajaxified crossfading.

too much food, not enough murder.

I’m terribly unresponsive to e-mail. It’s not on purpose, of course. I just let days go by sometimes, and then I look down at the bottom of my inbox and there’s something I should have replied to that is now two weeks old. I’ve improved the situation recently by storing only items that need my attention in my inbox, and moving everything else to the trash or some archive folder. This is the Getting Things Done approach, sort of.

At work we’ve been doing a lot of recent work with the Kaizen method of process improvement—redesigning our processes to be more efficient, where efficiency is measured very closely on a few different axes. The Kaizen method makes the outliers of any process very very clear, and everything else just flows through. Some of our processes are managed with simple translucent bins posted on the wall. Every bin represents a different state in the process, and all of the bins have a time limit. Time is money after all. If a piece of paper (representing a task) sits for too long in one bin, it gets moved into an “urgent” bin where it must be dealt with that day. For example, if the bin represents an external part of the process, handled by someone outside of the company, with a four day time limit, this might simply mean that after four days of inaction, we have to send a ping: “How’s it going?” The followup is important to keep people from getting upset, and to keep things moving along, so it represents an action and when it’s done, the paper can move back into the regular bin to wait another four days.

I’d like to see this with my e-mail. If I haven’t replied to something in four days, I want it to come back to show up in an urgent folder and turn red. I need to at least say “Look, I’m not ignoring you, but this is taking me a little longer.”

You would think this possible with Apple Mail, but it’s not. You can’t set up a smart mailbox to do it, either. “Unreplied to” and “Unforwarded” are not filtering options. And I don’t want to flag messages in need of reply, because that takes too much time and I have to unflag them later.

So for now I’m keeping unreplied messages in my inbox. It’s simple and sometimes it works. When is e-mail going to get a much-needed overhaul?