← Home Subscribe Blog Listening Reading Playing Photos Replies Archive Colophon bmannconsulting.com »
  • Two Japanese places

    I read two stories about tourism and Japanese villages. The first is The Morioka Experience by Craig Mod.

    Why Morioka?

    Because your city is beautiful. Because your food is delicious. Because your people are kind and committed. Because your streets face nature in a way that buoys the spirit. Over and over I said: Thank you for making this city. I am honored to walk your city. I am healed by your city, by what I see and the archetypes I feel all around. Thank you for making this place and letting me be here.

    Are there other places in Japan like this?

    Is Morioka the only place in Japan like this? There are many cities like Morioka. Strong, fair social contracts have made these places and the lives lived within them possible. But Morioka is, in its own right, archetypically unique. The number of youth not just returning, but vigorously returning is remarkable. It’s thrilling. In the context of all the chaos happening in the world, I walk a city like Morioka and think: Yes, this is possible.

    There is other interesting tidbits hinted at, with local creatives running businesses locally.

    The other Japanese place is Miyama, a story in The Tyee: Revive Tourism? An Answer from One Japanese Village:

    Miyama was recently recognized by the United Nations World Tourism Organization as one of its “Best Tourism Villages,” showcasing small towns taking smart and sustainable approaches to tourism. The town has also been recognized as an important preservation district by the Japanese government thanks to its many thatched roof cottages known as kayabuki.

    A small town that is ~3,400 people and shrinking, and trying to figure out what “tourism” means.

    I see this local vs global tension everywhere. And also the tension of making a city for living in, that can remain a place where young people can grow up and stay, or come back to, and build new things.

    I’m still feeling pessimistic about Vancouver being a city where one can do things. Never mind just live.

    → 4:15 PM, Feb 21   •  Blog
  • Trial run of Chefs Plate

    My first delivery of Chefs Plate meals arrived today.1

    My company sent everyone SnackMagic boxes with treats for the holidays, and the box also came with a discount code for Chefs Plate, a meal delivery service.2

    I decided to try it even though I’m not really the target market for it. We live close by to grocery stores and I enjoy cooking things from raw ingredients.

    But, it was steeply discounted, and I’ve always been curious about these services. I don’t know how long this one has been available or what others there are in Canada / are live in Vancouver.

    I picked the meals ahead of time with Rachael. This order included:

    • Herby Panko-Crusted Chicken
    • Creamy Butternut Squash Orzo
    • Loaded Beef Burrito Bowls

    Usual price $60CAD, discounted price $27CAD. For 2 people for 3 meals that’s pretty good.

    Unboxing

    You can pick different days of the week for delivery and they leave it at your door.

    There is a glossy double sided print out of meal prep and cooking instructions. My first reaction was that this is a lot of packaging and paper and inks and it’s definitely wrecking the planet.

    The kits are in a big cardboard box, each meal’s ingredients in a bag. The bags are compostable so you can use them for your bucket liner (as it says in the explainer).

    There’s a compartment in the bottom with an ice pack and things that need to be kept cold. This week, chicken breasts and some ground beef. There was also a loose whole bulb of garlic.

    The kit bags aren’t full to the brim, so the tops could be folded down. But I still had to find room in my apartment sized fridge to stick them.

    Making Herby Panko-Crusted Chicken

    We decided to make the chicken for dinner.

    Here’s everything from the kit laid out on the counter. The sticker on the bag has a full ingredient list for everything like the spice blend and then mayo, plus the nutrition info for the whole meal.

    The double sided instructions are good. Tells you the equipment and other stuff you need (basics like salt, pepper, oil, honey). And the instructions are laid out in time it takes to cook. So preheat the oven right away and get the potato wedges started.

    And now we’ll teleport all the way to the plated meal. Chicken breast covered in mayo and panko-crusted, potato wedges baked in the oven with Montreal Steak Spice, and honey glazed carrots.

    It was good! We added our own salt and pepper to everything as instructed and it was nice and flavourful.

    It called for parchment paper for both the potato wedges and the final bake of the chicken. That was a nice tip for me to save on clean up and keep things crisp.

    It definitely reminded me that potato wedges are something we can make any time!

    The carrots are pretty much how I make them anyway - finished with a little butter and honey. Dill if you like, or I’ll add cumin seeds sometimes.

    The mayo-instead-of-egg was another nice tip that I’ll be using.

    All in all, a good, tasty first experience.

    On Meal Kits Generally

    The discounts to get me on a subscription is very much an investment driven business.

    The packaging feels like a lot. But: no plastic other than on the meat.

    There is an app, so maybe I can opt out of the printed meal instructions.

    Are the ingredients local? Could one check a box and have 80% local ingredients?

    Could one apply this to community supported agriculture?

    This meal was ~$9CAD with discount, ~$20CAD without. For 2 people, that’s reasonable. The chicken breasts alone would cost me $5-6. Everything else low cost: 2 carrots, 3 potatoes, mayo, steak spice. Maybe another $1.

    We used to do zero take out. And then the pandemic. Now we’re at 1-2 take out meals per week. This would be cheaper.

    I’m interested in perhaps doing some food sharing with people, where everyone cooks a larger quantity and then shares with the group. Don’t know if I’ll get to it as a habit this year, but it’s the sort of thing I’d like to see more of.

    And bulk buying!

    I have done zero research on this in Vancouver. If you have thoughts on meal kits or on fun community food locally, let me know!


    1. Yes, I’m going to use a referral code when linking to Chefs Plate. You get $80 in discounts, I get $40 in credit. [return]
    2. I assume that Chefs Plate pays SnackMagic to get it into the hands of people who are already getting food delivered to their homes. [return]
    → 11:29 PM, Dec 17   •  cooking, Blog
  • One feed to rule them all - now cross posting to this blog

    Time for another blogging about blogging and Mastodon’ing.

    It turns out you can import posts made to Mastodon into your own Micro.blog.

    So I did! Both @boris@toolsforthought.rocks and @bmann@social.coop RSS feeds are being imported here.

    I also turned off cross posting to Social Coop, because that would cause a time loop ;)

    This means that with current settings, you can subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed and get all of my posts across local Micro.blog posts (like this one) and those two Mastodon accounts.

    There is a “blog only” feed that I’ll need to figure out around these long posts — but they’ve been in short supply over the past several years!

    Blog to Mastodon and Back Again

    You can search for and follow the blog directly on ActivityPub systems at @boris@blog.bmannconsulting.com 1.

    Screenshot of MetaText view of Micro.blog profile page for my blog

    Screenshot of how the blog profile looks in MetaText on iOS

    Erratta

    It’s not at all perfect yet.

    There is something strange where Markdown is inconsistently parsed.

    For this post on the blog, italics were applied, but the asterisks weren’t transformed into an unordered list.

    And the URLs were not correctly linked.

    And only the first photo was included, not all four.

    See [original on social.coop](https://

    social.coop/@bmann/109496328943570699).

    For Twitter cross-posting (which goes Mastodon -> Micro.blog import -> Micro.blog Twitter cross-posting), this may cause all sorts of things to happen. Sorry Twitter readers!

    Feature Requests: Only import public posts

    This post is an unlisted reply but got imported.

    Ideally only public posts would be imported. This isn’t a cross posting tool, so I wouldn’t get much more complex than that.2

    Mastodon RSS

    This is a side effect of taking whatever comes out of a Mastodon RSS feed. I’ll have to dig into all of the errata and other items to understand what’s in the feed, how it’s represented, how the content might be escaped or marked up as structured data.

    Micro.blog would need to run a whole bunch of parsing tools to handle these cases. At the same time, there’s likely a good case for a shared library here.

    And of course — it’s a bit of a hack. ActivityStreams are a different, arguably richer vocabulary which natively contains all this information. Squeezing it into RSS isn’t necessarily the right thing to do.

    Up Next

    I’ve still got 3 conversions of my bmannconsulting.com site underway. It will likely end up being on LogSeq with GitHub Actions publishing.

    And finally, my FoodWiki. It’s now statically published TiddlyWiki, also with GitHub Actions.

    It doesn’t yet have an RSS feed, but it will, and will likely also get folded into this main feed.

    But Why????

    Im experimenting, as I often do when these social network and posting systems evolve.

    For me, I can have rich posting interfaces on my phone for short microbloggy posts across a number of topics, as well as long form blog posts, and I get one archive. The one archive may be the least interesting - especially if it lightly mangles posts and misses images.

    If anyone out there in RSS land hates it, let me know!


    1. The direct link on the web to follow the blog is managed by micro.blog. You can’t really go to a profile page directly. [return]
    2. I help maintain Moa.Party which is a cross posting tool. People would like many different options and toggles, making the interface very confusing. [return]
    → 11:52 AM, Dec 11   •  Blog
  • Self hosting Mastodon & supporting collectives & code

    I was reminded that I wrote about running your own Mastodon (on Heroku!) back in 2017. Heroku is on its way out, so I wouldn’t recommend it today.1

    Interesting to look back at that post and see how the beginnings of what would become Fission are there.

    Digital Ocean also has one click installs & @RangerMauve reports that you’ll need the $12/month droplet size.

    This is fine for highly technical people who like to experiment. @walkah is running his own Pleroma instance — I think even at home in his lab?2

    When I rejoined Mastodon more seriously 2 years ago, I joined Social.Coop. I didn’t want to worry about the care and feeding of a server, database, backups, and so on. I did want to be part of a group that supported such an activity.

    As you pick a Mastodon server to be part of, do some research. Who are the admins? Where is it hosted? Do they have a place to accept donations and support? Can you get involved in governance of the server? Which instances do they block? Or not block?

    At this point my main recommendation is to look for a donation and support link. As a “regular” user, $5/month or $50/year seems about the right amount to be donating.

    If you do a search on Open Collective you’ll see several pages of results of server admins having set up collectives.

    This also includes the “core” Mastodon project.

    If you’re going to be running a server instance for yourself or for an organization, don’t forget to also donate to your upstream. The way Open Collective works, you can use your collective to fund other collectives, so you can make this part of your standard way of operating. Supporting open source software development in this way should be a standard expense.3

    And anyone who says that’s “too hard for everyone” — sure, those of us who are more tech and media literate may need to go first. But if we’re not willing to support something better, who is?


    1. I haven’t had serious time to look at new alternatives to Heroku. I’m still allergic to Docker, and Digital Ocean works for a lot of classic apps. Railway is the one I’ve got my eye on but haven’t had the right project to try with it yet. [return]
    2. Pleroma is an ActivityPub server written in Elixir that is compatible with Mastodon. Or rather, Mastodon also runs ActivityPub, the open protocol that people can implement compatible servers for. [return]
    3. yes, you could also contribute in kind with code, answering support questions, documentation, etc. Please do, it’s likely even more valuable than cash donations! [return]
    → 2:48 PM, Nov 7   •  Blog, mastodon, Open Collective
  • Kickstarting an app ecosystem

    I’ve been thinking about kickstarting a couple of different app ecosystems.

    I’m going to be a bit vague here, but imagine a tablet like dedicated device. I wrote a post about using the reMarkable — so maybe consider something like that. But more open and a desire to build a software ecosystem around it. If you’re intrigued, ping me and I can tell you more1.

    At the same time, for my own use and generally thinking what I want to see in the world, I’m a fan of end user programming.

    Or at least, no code like customization. That could range from Zapier automating getting data from one system into another, or building custom forms, data, and views with Airtable.

    The web technology stack is the one with the lowest bar to entry for custom apps. And even there you immediately need logins and storage to make an app that users can come back to and have some preferences and content tailored for them.

    When thinking about new systems — new interfaces, new devices — how do you get developers to commit?

    Actually, even better, how do you get developers — or end users — to start?

    One way is customization directly. Think MySpace2: give people tools to directly customize their environment.

    But is that even the right metaphor? With smartphones, users customize some icons and widgets and background screens. Very much within proscribed parameters.

    To be clear: I think in popular culture, the concept of an “app” is an excellent base layer object. Web apps, mobile apps, I have an idea for an app, what app do you use for that? — and so on, this is very mass market concept at this point.

    So: you should support apps, and developers. User accounts choose which apps to use to customize their usage of the device. Maybe you support some sort of git-repo aka “link” based sideloading, because the lift of going “full App Store” is a lot. Maybe you want to have some app manifest files with required info to get basic info from the developer and for the user. Use a git repo of your own for people to PR in links to their plugins and widgets, and use that as a source for your “App Store” to start.

    What if we think in more basic primitives? What do I want from a reading / processing / note taking device?

    Notes. Links. Images. People. Environment-wide entities.

    Pretty quickly you maybe end up taking on the whole complexity of the mess we’re in. At the same time, there’s a lot of stuff and standards out there.

    Do I want to sync my contacts to such a thing, so it needs to support CardDAV? Not really, although as we know, every piece of software eventually gains the ability to send email3.

    But email is maybe an “API that isn’t an API” to consider. Can my device system account be issued multiple inboxes? So I could configure and route all sorts of info — from notes to self to read letter to images — into the system.4

    RSS might be another primitive that works as an inbox like thing.

    And since connective tissue tools like Zapier have both email and RSS outputs, creative users can pipe a lot of stuff.

    Bonus: build your own first class Zapier integration that exposes your system primitives as much as possible.

    And of course, you need outgoing tools in the same way. Sync is a super power. Export is considered harmful.

    Right. Display layers and canvas and widgets. Being able to target a widget type as a Zapier endpoint for max flexibility.

    The reMarkable has notebooks and pages as its core data metaphors and visual / display metaphors. It has list view or grid view. No dashboards. No clock widget. No histogram of pages created by day / week / year.

    Making some core widget types like lists, galleries, show first N words and then a more link, etc.

    At which point developer-designer-tinkerers5 can make custom widget display types before they have to make an entire app.

    There’s a whole other riff here about building plugins and widgets into OTHER systems. eG build a widget for WeChat-like super App ecosystems, so content from your ecosystem can easily be manipulated inside the super app, and easy content flows in the other direction.

    And I think I’ll end my somewhat context-free stream of consciousness here. Stay tuned!


    1. Yes I pre-ordered the founder’s edition. [return]
    2. Ok, this is an extremely old reference, and one that I personally didn’t experience. The story is that people learned HTML in order to customize their MySpace page. [return]
    3. I was thinking about this today when I entered my email address into a point-of-sale machine that sent my a receipt by email. [return]
    4. Or go full IMAP (or DeltaChat!) and use email as a sync mechanism! [return]
    5. there are people in certain code ecosystems — eg the Drupal or TiddlyWiki site builder archetype — who become expert at plugin/widget configuration all with the tools of the system, with perhaps some light CSS and/or JS skills to do customization. But you need the right level of remixable primitives. [return]
    → 12:43 AM, Jun 2   •  Blog
  • Last Weekend in May 2022

    Looking back at this weekend, it was filled with adventures and cooking AND relaxing.

    I had a fancy work lunch on Friday with Ryan at VV Tapas Lounge. It’s close to our coworking space (Makeshift) and we hadn’t tried it yet.

    Warm Cauliflower Dip

    Beet Salad with Parsnip Crisps

    Hanger Steak with Mango Slaw & Chimichurri

    I had meant to make it to a YVRDAO meetup but cancelled and instead Rachael and I went for dinner at Kin Kao, a great Thai place in our neighbourhood. Had this rice noodle, chicken, and gai lan dish for the first time. Really good!

    And yes we started watching Stranger Things new season to round out our Friday night.

    On Saturday, we went to Oide Coffee on Clark for the second time. A friendly bunch, and Rachael really likes their matcha lattes.

    A quick lunch snack at Rise Up and then we grabbed an Evo and went to the Nikkei Museum. The Japanese Design Today 100 was excellent: a showcase of Japanese designed items in many categories.

    Titanium cups made in a way to recall the colouring of more traditionally made Japanese cups.

    One of the three spaces with the items displayed:

    After the design exhibit we went next door to Suzuya, a Japanese grocery store. Stocked up on locally made frozen ramen noodles, snacks, and a couple of condiments: Yuzu salt and Ichimi Togarashi.

    We decided to see what was at the Burnaby Art Gallery but skipped the show and instead walked the park grounds there.

    This was a perfectly shaped tree in my opinion

    View across the water to Metrotown towers

    The rhododendrons were in full bloom and gigantic.

    The final Saturday stop was a big shop at Real Canadian Superstore, since we had the Evo car share for several hours already.

    We usually shop locally on foot in our Commercial Drive neighbourhood, but Superstore has fried onions that Rachael likes for salad crunch, so we stock up when we go.

    I bought two big club packs of meat. One of blade steak and one of ground beef.

    The ground beef got turned into taco filling for dinner. I was happy with how it turned out. I used a food processor to mince a bunch of cilantro, an onion, and three cloves of garlic. This was sautéed in a little oil until the onion and garlic started to brown. Then I processed 5 tomatoes in the food processor as well.

    I browned the meat separately with some cumin seeds and salt and pepper.

    I combined the mixture, added a diced yellow pepper, and seasoned with ancho chile and cooked it down.

    I froze some of the ground beef and combined the rest for meatballs later in the week.

    The blade steak I trimmed of fat and gristle and chopped into a crock pot. Combined with 4 chopped carrots, half a head of chopped green cabbage, a bay leaf, garlic, and salt and pepper, plus about half full of water. It cooked overnight.

    Today on Sunday we went out for a longer loop walk to Laughing Bean Coffee on Slogan and then down towards Wall Street.

    We stopped and read on a park bench in Burrardview Park for a bit.

    Here’s Rachael taking a close up of a flowering red hawthorn tree.

    We watched a little bit of Stranger Things every night and finished it this evening.

    A good weekend.

    → 12:15 AM, May 30   •  Blog
  • Some Mastodon Notes

    If you’re checking out Mastodon the open source Twitter-like microblogging service, my first recommendation would be to pick a home server that isn’t the main mastodon-dot-social one.

    There is a list of community servers. 
Figure out who runs different servers, what their model is to be sustainable across moderation & hosting, and what kind of people hang out there.

    What do I mean? What could go wrong with many part-time server admins? Read @atomicthumbs thread for some examples. 
And yes, you should consider if #socialcoop is right for you. It’s my home server that I pay to be a co-op member of. Read more on the Social Co-op Wiki.

    And of course, this is open source software. Consider supporting Mastodon on Patreon.

    I know that @walkah recently setup a personal Pleroma server at walkah.social, which is an option if you’ve got a bit of a home lab.

    My personal goal would be to see truly individual p2p microblogging flourish. The tools and protocols that we’re building at Fission are meant to help with that.

    And we’ve got grand hopes from our friends at Bluesky, who are also dedicated to moving “from platforms to protocols”.

    Finally, I help run a little twitter <> mastodon cross posting service called Moa Party. You can hook up your accounts on the app at moa.party and read more about the project at https://moaparty.com.

    We’re looking for both volunteer maintainers as well as developers who are paid an honorarium to work on the Python codebase. I wrote a thread about moa with more info.

    → 1:45 PM, Apr 27   •  Blog, mastodon
  • Weekend Adventure Day

    Yesterday was a nice weekend adventure day with Rachael.

    Didn’t get up too early, had some nice bacon & eggs weekend breakfast, and lounged a bit in the morning.

    Rachael needed to go out to pick up a new ceramic mug she ordered. We stopped in at an art / craft / design market being held in the Bosa space on Venables at Commercial.

    Here’s work by ceramic vendor Dirt Spindle with some fun pieces:

    Then to the mug pickup on East Hastings, and on to Laughing Bean for a hot chai for Rachael to drink.

    Having come this far, we headed towards New Brighton Park.

    The ducks are enjoying the pool that we try and spend lots of time in, in the summer.

    There was a big drop of snow on the mountains over the weekend. And there was a bit of sun shining down through the broken clouds.

    Rachael and I with weirdo expressions, testing the new iPhone camera.

    On Saturday I ended up buying a new iPhone 13. Not the pro version, but going from 8 to 13 means a huge leap in camera quality and features.

    The main reason was battery life, as illustrated by my Seattle trip this past week and needing to carry around extra battery packs and chargers.

    From here we walked further east to Grog Studios which was having a pottery sale of different artists.

    Danica Kaspar’s colourful & psychedelic patterns were awesome.

    And, Annabelle Choi with a pop up of her baking. We got a brown butter apple knot thing, and a mini rhubarb custard loaf.

    Having walked quite far, we looked for an Evo car share but they were all farther away than a walk home. We ended up getting on a #4 bus at Renfrew and shortening our trip a bit, but we did put in 10K steps by the time we made it home.

    I’m finishing this post up on a Monday morning. There’s snow outside and a busy week ahead. Have a good week!

    → 8:58 AM, Dec 6   •  Blog
  • Feeling locked in by open source

    Ton wrote a post about his usage of the Post Kinds plugin for WordPress and used the word “lock in”.

    I understand what he is trying to reference by using the phrase “lock in” but I think it’s problematic. It’s open source software (as is WordPress itself) — you are not locked in, you just have to decide where to invest resources of time, money, and energy.

    A user has (at least) two options that work with the plugin:

    1) Fork it

    Find likeminded users and support a fork that does what you want.

    Maintain it over time, either as a full fork or cherry picking updates from upstream.

    2) Add features to the current plugin

    Suggest the feature. Find like minded users. Find a developer to make a PR or compensate David to do it.

    And of course for plugins like this, compatibility with the “host” system means keeping up with major architectural changes over time, too.

    I don’t mean to suggest that Ton should do either of these two things, just that lock in is not the right phrase at all.

    His plan is to store the Post Kinds data directly in the “main” WordPress content:

    Over time I can replace the existing Post Kinds dependent postings (about 900 in this blog) in the same way, clearing the way for switching it off entirely. This should increase the autonomy of keeping this blog, and decrease dependencies.

    And so the dependency is just on (open source) WordPress, which has a very large user and developer base and is likely to be maintained for a long time.

    Also via Ton is a good read on Permacomputing, which has themes I’m thinking about with respect to user agency and maintenance of software over time.

    Currently, I think we are entering into a post-open-source world. Large corporates are behind a vast majority of maintained software that happens to be licensed as open source. Software is built dependent on proprietary cloud platforms in such a way that being open source doesn’t make it portable.

    I am interested in non-commercial open licensing as a new default I want to encourage for software developers, such as the Prosperity Public License or IndieCC.

    And on the user agency side, I want to encourage collectivism: pool your time, energy, and resources to #BuildSoftwareTogether. Not as a “user”, but as an owner or member that wants to see a piece of software thrive.

    For this collectivism, new tools like Open Collective exist. I have a handful of projects there running to bootstrap a few pieces of collective software myself.

    Anyway, thanks Ton for the writing prompt. Don’t feel locked in!

    → 9:32 AM, Aug 15   •  opensource, Blog
  • Bandcamp Friday: Lambs & Wolves

    I realized that Bandcamp Friday is continuing, where Bandcamp passes all sales on to artists on their platform without taking a cut.

    So here is a recent purchase, “Not a Party at All”, by Lambs & Wolves:

    This is a German indie pop band, singing in English, that I honestly forget how I found it. Possibly through the Bandcamp “New and Notable” section. The album was just released, on Jan 15, 2021.

    I’ve got an embarrassment of music suggestions lately, with the #music-exchange channel in the Fission Discord chat getting new posts daily.

    I can’t believe we’ve hit February of 2021 already. Go forth and buy music, support artists!

    → 7:50 PM, Feb 5   •  music, Blog
  • Feedback to Ben

    I read Ben Werdmüller’s post on his Medium experiment and started writing in his comment form, and ended up here1.

    Mean time to comment is an interesting metric to think about for the different channels in which readers read your blog.

    I didn’t email you because I am in my RSS reader or in my browser and the effort level of ALL the stuff I have to talk to you about crowds out the brief comment ;)

    This is totally not an average user thing, but Medium like “comments that are blog posts” is maybe interesting.

    The way I’ve thought about this is, use Micropub! You have a comment form, and people write in there, but you give the option to authenticate to their Micropub blog. I would write a post, but it would end up as a reply on my own blog.

    Also: logging in via Twitter and posting to Twitter would work too (or Mastodon). And probably be much more widely used.

    Or: check a box and say “email these comments to Ben and don’t publish them” or however to word that.

    I currently use Micro.blog. I only get comments via Twitter. I need to wedge Webmentions in there but self hosted that plus Bridgy plus various ways I need to set that up… unlikely to happen. Plus I’ve been thinking about what to use for subscribe to my blog by email, since RSS doesn’t work for everyone.

    Reply by email to comment —which Discourse forums do — is another thing.

    Also: because you have a form — I wrote a TON and just hit submit! Which will likely lead to an email back and forth!

    Can I pay for social comments?

    Last idea, because you want to build community, is that Discourse forums can be set up so that every blog post gets a forum thread.

    It is relatively easy to setup for someone technical like you or me, costs about $10/month on Digital Ocean.


    1. I ended up posting to my own site, because I wrote so much that the submit button scrolled out of view on mobile! [return]
    → 2:57 PM, Jan 30   •  Micropub, IndieWeb, Blog
  • The new Gowalla, and open data around places

    I saw that Richard Eriksson shared news about the “new Gowalla”.

    I replied to Richard’s tweet:

    I haven’t delved into it, have you see anything about data licensing?

    I’ll just come right out and say that I’d love for the basics of location data to be openly licensed, maybe synced or improved with OpenStreetMap over time. <twitter.com/bmann/sta…>

    I then headed over to LinkedIn and posted there to see if I could get some mapping friends to weigh in, tagging Will Cadell of Sparkgeo of and Eric Gunderson of Mapbox:


    I am completely uninterested in spending a bunch of time on a platform which doesn’t have AT LEAST non-commercial re-use of data around locations.

    Do you all know anything about state of the art location (business, place, etc) licensing?

    Are people syncing back to Open Street Map as a shared layer?

    Can we include IndieWeb protocols like Micropub “check ins” so we can extend beyond a silo from day one?

    Any info, speculation, or hard earned learnings welcome ;)


    I’d be happy to participate in Gowalla-like activities – but I don’t want to do it if the links, identifiers, and data are all owned by another locked down platform.

    The location of a store, what type of store it is, and user “enrichment” like photos, reviews, etc. shouldn’t be locked in one data silo.

    There is more awareness around these issues, so maybe we can raise them early, and get these platforms to address this up front.

    → 12:47 PM, Jan 29   •  Open Web, Micropub, IndieWeb, Blog
  • Listening: Hotel Neon, via Flow State

    Unfortunately, I don’t remember at all where this link came from.

    Flow State is a newsletter which promises “every weekday, two hours of music perfect for working”.

    They shared Hotel Neon earlier this week:

    Today we’re listening to Hotel Neon, an ambient music trio based in Philadelphia. The group uses synths, guitar, and strings to produce beautiful sound atmospheres conducive to deep focus or meditation.

    They recommend starting with their most recent album, released on Jan 1st of this year (yes, 2021!), All is Memory:

    Their full Digital Discography is 80% off…so I bought all 18 releases.

    Happy music buying in 2021 everyone!

    → 12:11 AM, Jan 22   •  music, Blog
  • Listening: theNewDeal

    I was delighted to find theNEWDEAL on Bandcamp!

    TheNEWDEAL

    I watched them live in Ottawa when I was living there in the early 2000s, and the self-titled album came up in my local collection rotation and I went to see what else they had :)

    I bought their June 2020 release Isolation Suite to hear their latest1. This is the third track, Cycles III:

    And after listening to a couple of different albums, decided on 2016 release, Mercury Switch. It’s high energy bopping and grooves. Here’s the title track:

    The Internet Archive also has a lot of their live recordings. Here’s a 10 minute track from a January 2020 show in Pittsburgh. Yes, they are super fun to experience live!

    While this sounds like something that comes straight out of a computer, this is all played and performed live – bass, keyboards, drums, percussion.


    1. yes, it’s a pandemic album: “Composed, performed, arranged, recorded and mixed in isolation” [return]
    → 1:09 AM, Jan 19   •  music, Blog
  • Cultural deafness and controversy in tech debates, by @baldur

    We may all be writing in English, debating in English, and working in English, but the web dev scene is thoroughly multicultural even though online discourse doesn’t seem capable of taking that into account.

    @baldur Cultural deafness and controversy in tech debates

    What a great post. I’ve experienced this for 20 years, being of German background but growing up in Canada. I can more easily translate from what appear to be blunt German commands when typed in English.

    This came up in the recent discussion with Rosano, who pointed to Ramsey Nasser’s Arabic programming language.

    But @baldur’s post is more about the tone and style of English use, which differs by culture. The average American or Canadian gets afraid or agitated by an intense argument.

    I know I get energized by them, and am looking for a counterpoint who fights hard enough to get me to change my “strong opinions loosely held”.

    Web dev culture is an anglophone culture.

    We can’t change that.

    But maybe we should, at the very least, try and make it less American

    👏👏👏

    → 10:16 AM, Jan 17   •  Blog
  • Reflecting on 20 years of Drupal & my personal mission

    Dries, founder of the Drupal project, posted his thoughts and wishes from 20 years.

    He included 3 birthday wishes.

    The first one, never stop evolving1, includes this passage:

    First and foremost, we’ve been focused on a problem that existed 20 years ago, exists today, and will exist 20 years from now: people and organizations need to manage content. Working on a long-lasting problem certainly helps you stay relevant.

    So, roughly, the short phrase for this is “content management”. It was very interesting to read this, because it’s not at all the reason I contributed to the Drupal project.

    I got involved using it personally, joined the mailing list, and starting contributing. It was my first open source project and community and I learned so much and have so much to be thankful for to the project, to Dries, and to all the wonderful people I got to meet.

    My first contributions were around CSS class names and the recipe module.

    Anyway: I got involved and built a company around Drupal because I wanted to enable personal publishing. Not the content management part, but rather giving individuals and groups agency over their content: using open source software to publish their own words online. Without having to go through mass media of a newspaper or other publisher, which is all there was at the time.2

    I’m still on that same mission, in part because of Drupal being built as a full stack LAMP application: much too hard to host and maintain by individuals. This reduces user agency: you’re relying on someone else to have the knowledge and expertise and trust to run and maintain a server stack, and hopefully back up your content.

    I’m pleased that people are in part solving this by banding together as co-ops and collectives.3. Some of the first worker cooperatives that I was exposed to were building on Drupal, like Agaric, or Vancouver’s CanTrust Hosting Co-op.

    My goal: a user with a smartphone as their only computing device should be able to create and publish directly, and participate in the web.

    Alongside of this is an understanding that humans make software and can be supported directly, which wish #3 is about.

    Wish #2 is continued focus on ease of use, with a specific mention of out-of-the-box experience.

    I hacked together SQL queries and config files to invent install profiles for Drupal, with many more capable people doing an actual good job of this afterwards ;)

    Mostly, the Drupal community hasn’t internalized what it wants to be out of the box. Modules rather than products. It has gotten better, but there is a lot more to do here.4

    And, the immense gravitational force of Dries’ commercial company Acquia being focused on (enterprise) content management pulls things in that direction. This is also at odds with my personal interest in individuals and groups, who have very different needs

    This is not really this category, but I have been reflecting on it so will include it here:

    At the time (in the early 2000s) I had little to no awareness of the concept of equality and inclusion. Around me I saw mostly white, young, and primarily male faces. I was - and am! - so privileged to be able to spend time participating in OSS communities.

    This, too, is usability and ease of use.

    Wish #3 resonated most strongly with me and I think Dries and I are very aligned on this goal: Economic systems to sustain and scale Open Source.

    He links to a shop local analogy: think about the software you use, and understand that choosing software with an open source license pays dividends for you and the people around you.

    Related to privilege, I am thinking a lot about “open source as a job”. I have long tried to get open source devs paid in different ways. Now, I think it’s time to have apps as a small business. Can we enable devs from around the globe to earn a living from building and maintaining apps? Yes, we can, and we must — and move past just North America and Western Europe as the focus for this.

    All of the things I’ve mentioned are a core part of Fission, my current company:

    1. User owned content and personalization of apps
    2. Out of the box components for users and developers to build apps
    3. A model for users to participate with and support developers directly, so devs can have “open source as a job”

    I am so glad to have met Dries and have him as a friend, so we can continue to work together, debate, and argue over priorities over how our missions overlap ;)

    Dries is one of the very few people on the planet with 20 years of history of guiding a large open source project, and the changes and awareness of issues related to this that has happened over that time.

    Congrats to him, to the entire Drupal community. Here’s to another 20.


    1. A Drupal phrase is “The Drop is Always Moving” – because Drupal’s logo looks like a drop, and it’s always evolving. When new services or protocols launched, the Drupal community usually had a module supporting it in weeks or days. [return]
    2. Dries did message me after I posted and said basically “Yes! This too!”, as well as “blogging is about sparking conversations”. [return]
    3. I wrote about the Social.Coop collective I joined recently. [return]
    4. I should be more positive here. There are 139 actively maintained distributions for Drupal 8. Next up: solid financial support models for a wide range of distros. [return]
    → 11:58 AM, Jan 16   •  Drupal, opensource, Open Web, Blog
  • Not Played: working my way through my music collection, and listening to Primus (again)

    I’ve got myself setup to go through my “old” music collection, carried through into this digital streaming future through my iTunes Match subscription. Funny enough, I still think of “gigs of music” – as in, how many GB of space does the music take up.

    I checked, and I’ve got 11,279 songs, which totals 32.7 days worth of music, or 73GB of music.1

    I haven’t really used or setup the iTunes Music app in a long time. That is, no stars and curated playlists and such. I’m not used to investing in a desktop music player like this.2

    I made a “Not Played” smart playlist which just gives me songs that haven’t been played in 2 months. It’s been a nice start, shuffling through all sorts of different music, dropping a ❤️ here and there for songs to come back to, making it so that Christmas music and Dave’s Jamaican podcast files don’t hit the shuffle in the future.

    Primus came on, The Devil Went Down to Georgia (I don’t think I’ve ever seen this video, it’s amazing!):

    Did I want to be listening to Primus? You know what, this track isn’t even weird, it’s just a great tune. Aside from the Rhinoplasty album that has this Devil song on it (1998), I also have Pork Soda (1993) in my collection.

    Which of course, made me go and look: yep, Primus on Bandcamp. The newest album is The Desaturating Seven (2017).

    Here’s a comment:

    If you enjoy the trio Primus especially at their weirdest then this is the Claypool Concept album for you. It grows on you after each listen, I promise.

    Here’s the one preview track from the album:

    Wow, from 1993 to 2017 and back again. I guess I’m listening to Primus, again.


    1. I had to look up how to find total music library size. Open Apple Music on desktop, click on “Songs”, and then under the View menu, select Show Status Bar and the numbers will display at the bottom of the window. [return]
    2. And, I’ve gotten “algorithm lazy” – Amazon Prime Music or Spotify just serving up various songs. Don’t get me wrong, the algorithms surface some interesting things, but it’s only when I look artists up (prompted by that one track listen), that I really feel like I’m listening. [return]
    → 12:24 AM, Jan 16   •  music, Blog
  • Music from Steve McQueen's Lovers Rock

    We watched the Lovers Rock movie, part of the Steve McQueen’s Small Axe BBC film series. It’s all about music.

    The Independent has a write up, and embeds a Spotify playlist in the article.

    This means I can do another playlist deep dive, and find where to look for the artists and tracks separately.

    Robin Hood, Cry Tuff & The Originals

    On YouTube:

    Didn’t find this track on Bandcamp, but did find this one by Cry Tuff:

    The entire Pressure Sounds catalog is amazing. In fact, the album covers are all the original 45 records, which you see them playing in the film:

    Screen Shot of Pressure Sounds discography on Bandcamp

    You can buy the entire discography for only like £500!! Tempted…

    Kinta Kinta Dub by The Revolutionaries

    I originally found the none dub version, which lead me to asking, what does dub / dubplate mean Wikipedia?

    A dubplate is an acetate disc usually of 10 inches diameter, traditionally used by studios to test recordings prior to mastering for the subsequent pressing of a vinyl record, but pioneered by reggae sound systems as a way to play exclusive music. They would later become an important facet of the jungle/drum and bass, UK garage, grime and dubstep music scenes.

    The first use of dubplates is commonly attributed to sound engineer King Tubby and reggae sound systems such as Lloyd Coxsone and Killamanjaro.[1] Special and one-off versions would be cut to acetate for competing in a sound clash, utilising vocals specially recorded to namecheck the sound system. As such, these would become known as “dubplate specials” often remarking on the prowess of the sound system playing it, in a bid to win the clash.

    Oh, interesting, so a reggae sound system is…?

    The popularity of a sound system was mainly contingent on one thing: having new music. In order to circumvent the release cycle of the American record labels, the two sound system superstars turned to record production. Initially, they produced only singles for their own sound systems, known as “Exclusives” or Dubplates—a limited run of one copy per song.[4] What began as an attempt to replicate the American R&B sound using local musicians evolved into a uniquely Jamaican musical genre: ska. This shift was due partly to the fact that as American-style R&B was embraced by a largely white, teenage audience and evolved into rock and roll, sound system owners created—and played—a steady stream of the singles the people preferred: fast-shuffle boogies and ballads. In response to this shift in supply, Jamaican producers introduced to their work some of the original elements of the Jamaican sound: rhythm guitars strumming the offbeat and snare-drum emphasis on the third beat, for example.[3] As this new musical form became more popular, both Dodd and Reid began to move more seriously into music production. Coxsone Dodd’s production studio became the famous Studio One, while Duke Reid founded Treasure Isle.

    Yeah, this is awesome, and depicted in the film, or at least the version that immigrated into the UK.

    He’s the Greatest Dancer by Sister Sledge

    Remix version by Lucas D:

    Probably a little too clean compared to the version on the film.

    How Long Will it Take by Pat Kelly

    Darling Ooh by Errol Dunkley

    And found it still available on vinyl as a re-issue. Here’s the description:

    Errol Dunkley was an early reggae star and one of the youngest, recording his first side (“My Queen”) at the age of 12 for Prince Buster in 1964 and scoring his first hit (“You’re Gonna Need Me”) in 1967. Later, he became a key performer in the ‘70s Brit-Reggae scene, just missing the Top Ten in 1978 with his remake of John Holt’s “OK Fred.” Helmed by groundbreaking female producer Sylvia Pottenger, Darling Ooh! is actually his 1972 debut album, but like a lot of records that came out on small Jamaican mprints that later got swallowed into the mammoth Trojan label, its history is complicated; this record came out on the Gay Feet label under the title Presenting Errol Dunkley and also on the Trojan imprint Attack the same year as Darling Ooh! with different art and an expanded track listing (and, just to make things more confusing, a 1979 Trojan reissue had the Gay Feet track listing and the Attack artwork).

    Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglass

    Classic.

    “Kung Fu Fighting” is a disco song by Jamaican vocalist Carl Douglas, written by Douglas and produced by British-Indian musician Biddu. It was released as a single in 1974 on the cusp of a chopsocky film craze and rose to the top of the British, Australian, Canadian, and American charts, in addition to reaching the top of the Soul Singles chart. It received a Gold certification from the RIAA in 1974 and popularized disco music. It eventually went on to sell eleven million records worldwide, making it one of the best-selling singles of all time. The song uses the quintessential Oriental riff, a short musical phrase that is used to signify Chinese culture.

    Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung…>

    Things in Life by Dennis Brown

    After Tonight by Junior English

    Lonely Girl by Barry Biggs

    Different track, also from Pressure Sounds label:

    Here it is on YT:

    Baby My Love by The In Crowd, Jah Stitch

    Whole Flabba Holt / Roots Radics / Jah Stitch discography looking great, here’s a one track:

    Actual track on YT:

    Silly Games by Janet Kay

    Yes! On Bandcamp:

    This was one of the key songs from the film. Looks like it was released on BC for the film:

    Janet Kay also is known as the Queen of Lovers Rock earned the title when she made history by becoming the ‘First British born Black Female Reggae Artist to have a No. 1 in the British Pop Charts’ - Music Guinness Book of Records. With this classic song ‘Silly Games’ it was a hit not only in the UK but also in Europe.

    Keep it Like it is by Louisa Mark

    Another Trojan Records, on YT:

    Minstrel Pablo by Augustus Pablo

    I’m mainly seeing some sweet melodica action (a keyboard you blow into). Found this in Rockers International Discography.

    Actual track on YT:

    Dreadlocks in Moonlight by Lee “Scratch” Perry

    Absolute legend:

    Lee “Scratch” Perry OD (born Rainford Hugh Perry; 20 March 1936)[1] is a Jamaican record producer and singer noted for his innovative studio techniques and production style. Perry was a pioneer in the 1970s development of dub music with his early adoption of remixing and studio effects to create new instrumental or vocal versions of existing reggae tracks.[2] He has worked with and produced for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Marley and the Wailers, Junior Murvin, the Congos, Max Romeo, Adrian Sherwood, the Beastie Boys, Ari Up, the Clash, the Orb, and many others.

    Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_…>

    Well, now I want to go listen to The Orb. Their latest comes out this year:

    I have Live 93 in my collection already (one of their earliest), so I now have the pleasure of working my way forwards.

    Looks like The Orbserver in the Star House features Lee “Scratch” Perry. Yeah, this is a rabbit hole I can fall down.

    Have a Little Faith by Nicky Thomas

    Another Trojan Records.

    Yes, Trojan Records exists:

    Trojan Records was founded in 1968 when Lee Gopthal, who operated the Musicland record retail chain and owned Beat & Commercial Records, pooled his Jamaican music interests with those of Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. Until 1975, they were based at a warehouse in Neasden Lane, Willesden, London.

    Trojan was instrumental in introducing reggae to a global audience and by 1970 had secured a series of major UK chart hits. Successful Trojan artists from this period including Tony Tribe, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Upsetters, Bob and Marcia, Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff, Harry J All Stars, The Maytals, The Melodians, Nicky Thomas and Dave and Ansel Collins.

    The bulk of the company’s successes came via licences for Jamaican music supplied by producers such as Duke Reid, Harry Johnson and Leslie Kong. While the company’s focus was firmly on the sale of 7” singles, it also launched a series of popular, budget-priced compilations such as Tighten Up, Club Reggae and Reggae Chartbusters.

    Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troj…>

    Also credited with getting us to rude boy:

    Rude boy, rudeboy, rudie, rudi, and rudy are slang terms that originated in 1960s Jamaican street culture, and that are still used today. In the late 1970s, there was a revival in England of the terms rude boy and rude girl, among other variations, being used to describe fans of two-tone ska. The use of these terms moved into the more contemporary ska punk movement as well. In the UK, the terms rude boy and rude girl are used in a way similar to gangsta, yardie or badman.

    Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude…>

    Which could take us to two-tone ska and ska punk, but I think we’ll leave it there :) Watch the film! It’s pretty intense, and some of the energy around how women are treated is horrible, but it’s an amazing look into west London Jamaican music parties.

    → 10:55 PM, Jan 13   •  music, Blog
  • Campbell's Dec 2020 Playlist

    Campbell @cambel sent along a note over the holidays with a link to a Spotify playlist of some music that he has been grooving to.

    Since I’m in music adventure mode, and looking to buy direct from artists as much as possible, it was a good excuse to do some research into each of the tracks.

    Thanks for sharing, Campbell!

    Machine Gun, by Commodores

    Only thing I could find on Bandcamp this remix by Jayphies. Which is pretty great!

    Released in 1974, it’s an all instrumental track with lots of synthesizer. More on Songfacts:

    1974 marked the first signs of disco, as R&B was morphing into something with a little more boogie. This is a great example of that sound, an instrumental song by the Commodores, who were recently signed to Motown Records. This was their first single.

    The original is on YouTube. The comment on that video: “Machine Gun has only funk music and is devoid of slow-paced ballads.”

    Zombie, by Fela Kuti

    Fela Kuti has an entire page of albums on Bandcamp. Here’s the Zombie track from the Zombie album:

    In my collection, I already had the two disc set1 from 2000, The Best of Fela Kuti, which includes the Zombie track.

    I’ll also recommend the nearly 16 minute long Roforofo Fight:

    Spitfire, by Public Service Broadcasting

    Nothing on Bandcamp, here it is on Youtube:

    Genre is listed as Dance/Electronic – but kind of chill at the same time.

    Here’s a direct link to the track on Deezer. Never heard of Deezer, signing up! Here’s my borismann account liking this track.

    Here’s an Android Authority review of Spotify vs Deezer.

    Hit the Ground Running, by Smog

    Smog is on Bandcamp, but only the Cold Blooded Old Times track is available for preview.

    Here’s the Hit the Ground Running on Youtube:

    And on Deezer.

    Voice and lyrics reminds me a bit of Andrew Vincent and the Pirates which I shared back in July, except Smog is a little slower tempo.

    Autumn Sweater, by Yo La Tengo

    Just one album on Bandcamp, here it is on YouTube:

    Here’s a cover by Hunting Bears:

    I have the “And then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out” in my collection, from 2000. It probably sticks in my mind because of the strange name, but I do like Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House:

    Human Performance, by Parquet Courts

    Sea of Love, by Cat Power

    Wow, there are a ton of covers of this song on Bandcamp. One the 2018 Wanderer album is on Bandcamp, so here’s YouTube:

    Here’s an electronic cover I particularly liked:

    Florence-Jean, by Damien Jurado

    On YT:

    And a cover on Bandcamp:

    Doll Parts, by Hole

    1994! Other than Oasis, probably the most “commercial” track on this list. From 1994, on YT:

    Lots of covers on Bandcamp. I listened to a couple of them, a lot of them are just bad, several others are just super basic :)

    I’m a 90s kid (graduated high school in 93, university from 95 to 99) so this is right in my prime music listening years.

    In fact, I made a smart playlist of 1990 to 2000, and I have 3,300+ songs from that timeframe! That of course includes things like the Fela Kuti best of that came out in 2000, so not totally accurate.

    Champagne Supernova, by Oasis

    This is the “official HD remastered video” on YT:

    And yes, many covers on Bandcamp.


    1. “two disc set” just sounds so quaint in 2021, but that’s how I would have bought it, and then converted it in iTunes. [return]
    → 12:30 PM, Jan 10   •  music, Blog
  • Listening: Jesse Bru, The Coast

    I don’t remember how I ended up finding Jesse Bru’s The Coast. He’s even Vancouver based!

    Jessebru thecoast album art

    I’ll quote the beginning of the description from the Bandcamp album page:

    Returning to French label Happiness Therapy is Vancouver based producer Jesse Bru, with his first LP in 9 years! Influenced by early 90’s hip-hop’s use of samples, Jesse Bru’s sample-heavy music production style is highlighted in this diverse 15 tracks release spanning from Anthemic Summery House to Jazzy Emotional Electro.

    My personal genre category for this is electronica, I guess? I used to just call it all house music when I was buying British import CDs in the mid to late 90s.

    Some of the rest of the description says “minimal dub vibes, bumping chicago house to astral drum and bass”. I feel like I need to do a deep dive in exploring all these genre labels.

    The last track is In My Heart, “an uplifting anthemic house track”:

    → 5:46 PM, Jan 9   •  music, Blog
  • “The code you depend on depends on you” @kemitchell’s commercial license sales for public software

    “the code you depend on depends on you”

    Kyle Mitchell is working on the next iteration of a standardized non-commercial license for public software. You may have heard of License Zero which was his previous work in this space. I am a big fan of the clarity around the Parity and Prosperity open licenses that came out of that.

    The new project is currently called StrictEq for “strict equality” but it’s likely going to get renamed.

    It’s both a catalog of software, and an approach to selling licenses for commercial usage under a standard deal:

    To use software listed on stricteq.com to make money or for work, you need to buy a license. If you’re part of a team, everyone on your team who uses the software needs to buy a license.

    This is mostly optimized for libraries and components that get combined to build larger apps and services.

    The intent is to start baking in the expectation that software builders contribute to pay for the software components they use — if they, in turn, are making money with the software or using it in a commercial company context.

    My interest is more around entire applications that get used by “end users”, but I’m a fan of Kyle’s work and supportive of the movement to pay open software maintainers: to have open source as a job, without necessarily having to wrap an entire company around the software.

    Join Kyle’s Artless Devices forum to give feedback on naming — and more generally, topics related to building thriving open source software.

    Disclaimer: I help run the forum with some light moderation and admin tasks

    → 2:59 PM, Jan 9   •  Blog
  • Tide data as a calendar subscription

    My mom recently told me that the site she used to use for subscribing to an annual calendar of local tide heights and sun / moonrise times isn’t working any more:

    I am stuck, trying to import this to iCal. I used to go to this site, but I cannot open the website and I don’t get an error message. And, yes, I have Internet access as I can go onto other sites. https://tides.mobilegeographics.com/calendar/year/6029.html

    The one below has good info but I don’t see how I can import that data into iCal. https://sunrise-sunset.org/search?location=Point+Atkinson+

    I looked around and couldn’t really find a place where calendar subscriptions are. They all seem to be generated SEO pages with ads on them.

    Xtide is available on MacOS as an app, but only has US locations and no calendar subscriptions. The command line tool tide doesn’t seem to be available for MacOS, which is what I was thinking I might be able to get raw data from.

    The government of Canada has annual tide charts published as HTML tables or a PDF. Here’s the one for Point Atkinson for 2021.

    I took this info and imported it into Airtable. I had to take the individual Day / Time fields – plus add year, month, and GMT Timezone offset columns – and then use a formula column with Airtable’s DATETIME_FORMAT to turn this into a “real” date column.

    Then, I could use the build in Calendar view in Airtable to generate both a calendar view and a calendar subscription link.

    With a little more cut and paste work, getting this all done in Airtable for one location (Point Atkinson is the spot closest to Bowen Island where my mom lives) for a one year calendar wouldn’t take that long.

    I could follow the same technique to cut and paste sunrise/sunset data too.

    I may investigate some web scraping tools to make this a little more scalable, and maybe turn this into a static web page.

    Any other suggestions on websites that already do this or techniques to follow would be welcome :)

    Also: if you have a location you’d like calendarized, send me a note: I’m happy to repeat the process!

    → 11:06 AM, Jan 6   •  Blog
  • Engineering vs writing code, @benwerd

    “The goal is a creative, detail-oriented [software] team that finds the best solution using the full weight of their diverse skills and creativity, and has fun doing it.”

    — Ben Werdmüller, Engineering vs writing code

    Somewhere in here is a longer discussion about building products vs solutions, understanding who you’re building for, and even on to things like learning by doing, prototyping, and more.

    Building a business built on software vs writing code to solve a problem for yourself is maybe the two aspects to contrast?

    I don’t think the distinction between engineering and programming / hacking that Ben makes is the most useful one.

    And perhaps this is my Canadian perspective where “engineer” is a protected, professional term like doctor or lawyer.

    So much of software still appears to be based on fashion.

    But I do take Ben’s point. This concept of rigor is interesting to me as I think “beyond open source”. I use to think that the license of a software was one of its most important aspects. Now I feel that way more about open data structures, standards, and protocols.

    If we agree on the protocol, we can always build the code again, and it can be built by hackers or by engineers as long as the protocol still works.

    Do protocols need to be rigorously designed? And we’re back to square one ;)

    → 9:50 PM, Jan 5   •  Blog
  • Playing: Monster's Den Godfall

    Monster's Den - Battle View

    Monster's Den - Dungeon Screenshot

    Monsters’ Den: Godfall by Monstrum Games is a turn-based RPG.

    You manage characters in teams of 4 (initially only a single team of 4) and have a home base. You travel overland or in dungeons, and then move to a turn based combat view.

    Complex game with things like different factions, time limits, crafting, research, supplies, and your home base to build out. Characters level up into different sub classes.

    At the same time, a “simple” fast game to just pick up and play. At 50% off, definitely worth it.

    On sale for Windows and Mac on Steam »

    → 2:28 PM, Jan 4   •  video game, Blog
  • Regular reading, playing, and listening: intentional media

    Ben Werdmüller writes up monthly reading, watching, playing, using posts. I like these type of posts, and have been enjoying writing up some of my regular habits.

    I’m doing reading for books and playing for video games.

    The music category would be listening, although I guess it started as Bandcamp Fridays.

    I’m unlikely to do watching: I don’t intentionally watch a lot of stuff other than perhaps an evening show that Rachael and I happen to be watching.

    Using could be apps, but those usually are for work and end up elsewhere, like this Open Source Company Stack wiki page that I keep adding to.

    I can already think of several more video games to post about - like my way-too-many-hours in the Tales of Maj’Eyal rogue-like, or the Vermintide II that I picked up and played for a couple of hours tonight.

    I’m still looking through my long term music archive for old artists to revisit, as well as figuring out Bandcamp for discovery.

    Here’s to a 2021 of intentional media consumption.

    → 11:29 PM, Jan 1   •  Blog
  • Reading: N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance and Alastair Reynolds' Revenger

    Being sick over Christmas meant that I was flat on my back with lots of time for nothing but reading.

    N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy

    A fantasy trilogy of politics, world building, and god and human relations. As I wrote before, it’s on sale right now.

    Inheritance trilogy

    Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger Trilogy

    Far future space opera with pirate semantics. I’m on book two of three.

    Revenger series

    → 2:24 PM, Dec 29   •  reading, Blog
  • Playing: Deep Sky Derelicts

    Deep sky derelicts definitive edition switch hero

    I bought this on sale from Steam. It’s a fun sci-fi RPG, rogue-lite, turn-based card battler.

    I’ve put about 20 hours into it already across 2 runs. You have a party of three characters that you get to pick a base class for, and then pick a second specialization for.

    Lots of loot, plus crafting. It’s not very hard, although when pirates invaded the station on my first run I did get completely wiped.

    Recommended!

    → 1:44 PM, Dec 29   •  video game, Blog
  • Forcing Amazon to Behave

    “Amazon wants to replicate every product it sells, discarding partnerships once they have their own version of that partner’s product”

    Dave Mark on the WSJ article ‘How Amazon Wins by Steamrolling Rivals and Partners’, found via mjtsai.

    This is exactly how I feel Amazon treats open source. It’s not illegal according to various licenses. mjtsai’s other linked commentary makes the same point about a physical product example.

    But the result is the same: clone and crush.

    I know there are well meaning open source folks at Amazon. I use Amazon for infrastructure. I think AWS has amazing operators.

    But your actions and culture are actively damaging. If you only listen to the law, rather than ethics, courtesy, and a spirit of partnership, we will evolve licenses that force you to behave.

    → 1:53 PM, Dec 23   •  Blog
  • Cognitect post on sponsoring the Clojure ecosystem

    “Imagine if every company using open source were to provide tangible sponsorship, on an ongoing basis, directly to the developers of the open source libraries and tools they use and rely upon.” – Cognitect, Sponsoring Open Source Developers

    So many great quotes in this article. I disagree with some of it, eg:

    Open source licenses effectively preclude developers from charging for their work.

    But the whole thing is laying out facts that have been obvious to some for a long time. It helps build the awareness and movement of the evolution of the concept of open source and how businesses should treat it.

    With Fission, we’re just taking the first steps on this path. We’re going to blend “traditional” open source with non commercial, with users banding together to fund features, and more.

    I’m really glad to have publicly posted our beliefs.

    → 2:21 AM, Dec 20   •  opensource, Blog
  • Bandcamp Friday: Resurgam by Alias, + bonus Song Exploder and iTunes Match

    I’m working my way through past purchases. It’s been nice to at least spend time every Friday listening to and exploring music a little bit. This week is Resurgam by Alias, released in 2008. The artist passed away in 2018.

    Alias resurgam

    Here’s the I Heart Drum Machines track:

    I’m bad at genres, this is labeled on Bandcamp as electronic / hip-hop / beats. This also gives me a starting point to look for other music that is new-to-me. /me starts browsing ‘beatz’


    Song Exploder Vol 2 is now on Netflix:

    I really enjoyed the Dua Lipa and The Killers episodes. Genre-wise, I guess both of these are “pop”.

    I bought Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia (out now) and The Killers’ Sam’s Town (from 2006!).

    The bigger “commercial” artists however mostly only sell through platforms, so I bought these two through iTunes.

    I do use Amazon Music for random play lists and discovery. I have had a bunch of Dua Lipa favourited in there that I’ve been listening to.

    Oh, and my iTunes Match subscription renewed. It’s not really promoted by Apple any more. For $30CAD annually, all my music from any source (e.g. music I buy on Band Camp and add to the Music app) is stored by Apple and available on any device. Essentially, a fancy unlimited file sync service, optimized for music.

    → 10:53 AM, Dec 18   •  music, Blog
  • Bandcamp Friday: Keleketla by Coldcut

    As recommended by @carchrae, here’s one of my Bandcamp Friday purchases: Keleketla! By Coldcut:

    Keleketla

    → 3:52 PM, Dec 14   •  music, Blog
  • Bandcamp Fridays: The Japanese House and Dirty Spells

    I became aware of Bandcamp Fridays from Jessica @ticky and it just so happened that I was buying Good at Falling by The Japanese House:

    I also bought Evil! by @dirtyspells. This track America is currently melting my brain in a good way:

    → 1:57 PM, Dec 6   •  music, Blog
  • The Sifter in Atlas Obscura

    The Sifter thesifter.org

    a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks.

    – A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It, Atlas Obscura

    The data on this site is super interesting. Whatever is running the site is not great. It’s some sort of out of the box Microsoft thing including default loading animations.

    But! It aims to be a sort of Wikipedia. I’ve signed up to be a contributor and I hope that this can be built on and be licensed for re-use.

    I did a search for “Vancouver” and found only one entry, so my used cookbook collection may be able to add a handful more. It does say it only wants pre-1940 cookbooks, but it’s unclear why.

    It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, a guide for ladies running middle-class households in the 1850s.

    Yes! Super interesting to me. Looking forward to see how this evolves.

    (From the Gastro Obscura section of A.O.)

    → 7:30 PM, Oct 13   •  AllTheBestRecipes, cooking, Blog
  • Fall 2020 Chromebooks for back to school in Canada

    I always work across multiple machines and operating systems. I wrote up my laptop choices back in Feb 2020, and I ended up dipping my toes back into Windows with a laptop. Before that, I had bought two Chromebooks in a row, and I still think they are some of the best value.

    Ryan recently asked me a question about Chromebooks:

    I’m thinking of getting my 12 year old a Chromebook for back to school and wanted your input. For context, most of what they’ll be doing is google docs driven and she’s not a gamer.

    Yeah, the Chromebooks are solid. And now that you can put Linux on them as a built in feature, there’s lots more that can be done with it.

    You can also game on it: with streaming services like Stadia or Geforce Now, or Steam and some Linux games.

    I usually follow the Wirecutter recommendations – I have personal experience with buying two ASUS Chromebooks and have been very impressed.

    Looks like the ASUS Flip C434 is available at London Drugs for $700CAD.

    The Lenovo model that is current WireCutter top rating looks to be good and available for about $560CAD.

    If you see Chromebooks for less than $500CAD – they are usually way too underpowered.


    And then Greg emailed me, so I’m turning this whole thing into a little Chromebook FAQ:

    We’re wanting/needing to get something for my kids to use for school, and since they use the GSuite at school a Chromebook seems like a good idea. However, they still want to be able to play Minecraft.

    Is there a site you would recommend for me to go to, in order to figure out what Chromebook to order? What Chromebook are you running?

    Today, you don’t need to “dual boot” into Linux any more. Like WSL for Windows, you run any flavour of Linux that you want and you can run graphical apps like Minecraft no problem. This site on installing Minecraft for Chromebooks has too many ads on it, but basically – Linux stuff installs directly on Chromebooks these days.

    Having a really solid browser environment, plus basic apps you can install, makes for a good stable system that is very inexpensive for what you get. You need to pay more for a Windows or Mac laptop – approximately 2-4 times the price of a solid Chromebook – to get equivalent performance.

    My current Chromebook is the ASUS C434, but as I said at the top, I’m also switching between an ASUS Windows laptop and a Mac desktop.

    I still wouldn’t pay more than $1000CAD for a Chromebook (and even that is pretty high).

    → 4:25 PM, Sep 2   •  Blog
  • Custom Bags and Shipping IP vs Products

    I’ve just ordered myself a custom Timbuk2 messenger bag.

    Custom? Yes, custom: you pick and choose fabrics and colours and various other options. This is mine.

    I have had a great red/gray reversible messenger bag for many years that my sister Gaby gave me. First one of the inside clips broke so it needed to stay gray, now the outside closing clip broke.

    I still use it while walking, but open bag flaps and biking don’t mix.

    Asking the Internet about bags is hard, so I went to Wirecutter and they said Timbuk2.

    When I was looking earlier the custom options weren’t as obvious, and I kind of wandered off. Did I want a bag the same as everybody else, especially in drab colours?

    Which led me over to Freitag, which my current bag is sometimes confused for.

    Colourful, unique, up-cycled bags? Yes! Well, except for two things. 1. Fashion is pricey — about $350CAD before shipping 2. Did I really want to ship up-cycled bags across the ocean?

    For a well-made, relatively unique bag that I intend to keep for a decade, price isn’t the barrier.

    But (2) got me thinking: can we ship IP rather than products?

    Especially as the pandemic has people thinking about supply chains and supporting the local economy, what would it take to collaborate with someone locally in Vancouver and make a bag?

    Vancouver has lots of apparel, outer wear, and other gear designers, so that’s a plus.

    And in fact, when I asked around and shared the idea a bit, both of the people I talked to had a 1-degree connection to people who had made bags. And then I even found a 1-degree connection of my own who had made his own bag and was making more.

    So let’s say I budget $400-$500 for a customer one of a kind bag. Could I find 10 or 12 other people locally who would be interested?

    And once I did this, could I make the design (and sourcing of materials and manufacturing/sewing, etc) available for others to do in their local areas?

    Yes, I could. And we might just have a little network of locally made goods. Never mind connected links of makers and supporters interested in this sort of thing.

    Are you interested in the Vancouver custom bag experiment? Is there another custom thing you’d like to see created locally? Let me know!

    More on co-op models and small business peers and shipping IP another time.

    → 1:11 AM, Sep 1   •  Blog
  • Bike Ride to Riley Park and Van Mural Fest at River District

    Starting from the north end of Commercial Drive where we live, we did a grand loop and various adventures on the e-bike today.

    We started at Woodland and Venables, going up Woodland to the 10th Ave bike route and headed west.

    Federal Store, Quebec at 10th

    Federal Store stamp on take out cup

    First stop was at The Federal Store, on 10th just before Ontario.

    Rachael’s tea latte cup had a lovely little stamp. My cappuccino just had “The Federal Store” stamp. Note: The Federal Store has Johnny’s Pops and is open most days until 6pm.

    Then headed south on Ontario Street.

    Main at 28th

    Rad Utility Bike on Main Street

    Rachael went across the street to Jasmine Mediterranean Foods for fresh limit (Turkish bagel) and picked up a few other things.

    Riley Park (Ontario at 30th)

    Rad Utility Bike at Riley Park

    We lay in the grass at Riley Park. It was a gloriously sunny day, but with a bit of a breeze blowing. We had our coffee & tea drinks with limit and hung out for a bit.

    Looking at the map, it seemed like a pretty straight forward route south on Ontario and then east on Kent to the River District, which is a new Van Mural Fest neighbourhood.

    Rachael and I have never been down in that area at all, so seemed like a good adventure destination.

    East Kent Avenue

    We drove down Ontario until we hit Marine Drive. We passed by Coupland’s Infinite Tire and continued on a couple of blocks into an industrial area and a set of east - west train tracks. There’s a great bike path all along Kent Avenue.

    It’s a bit confusing at times which side of the tracks you need to be on. Both are East Kent Avenue, labeled S or N. In some places there is a clearly marked and dedicated bike path, in others you’re going along the road.

    Gladstone-Riverside Park

    Panorama at Gladstone-Riverside Park, Vancouver - looking at Fraser River

    We stopped at Gladstone-Riverside Park – we made it to the Fraser River! Across the river is Richmond, so this is the southern edge of City of Vancouver.

    There are a variety of both bike paths and walking paths, again on either a northern “road” path (which had bike paths, too), or a mixed pedestrian - bike path walk ways on parks and green space that is right next to the river. Several other bikers and e-scooters were stopping and looking at maps.

    Google Maps Gladstone Riverside

    You can see in the map the dotted green paths along the river, as well as East Kent N and S. We stayed on the road (which had a separated two way bike path), as the park paths had a lot of pedestrians.

    It was very interesting to see the mix of single family homes but really quite a lot of condos and townhouses either newly built or under construction. This is an area that I know nothing about. It was nice to have bike paths, but it seemed like where we were there was no transit at all, and no retail either. I guess all of that runs along Marine Way.

    River District Murals

    Here’s a custom Map label for roughly where the murals are (you can see it in the screenshot above on the right hand edge).

    It’s in the middle of a ton of construction, and there are detours and fences that will guide you in a loop through the construction. If you’re following audio map directions, they will be very confused and insist that you u-turn :)

    Rachael did a much better job capturing the murals and artists, so I’ll embed her Instagram here:

    View this post on Instagram

    @bmann and I did an epic ride to the River District to see @vanmuralfest murals. A few are finished but most are still works in progress. They are all fantastic. It’s an area we’d never explored before along the Fraser River… . #getoutside #vancouvermuralfestival #vancouvermural #publicart #streetart #vancouverart #yvrart #vanmuralfest #explorevmf

    A post shared by Rachael Ashe - Paper Artist (@rachael_ashe) on Aug 30, 2020 at 3:48pm PDT

    The murals are great and many of the artists are at the end of their epic week or so of painting. Apparently they will be up in this temporary space for about a year or so – installed along fencing and the path that detours through the construction site.

    The photos I captured below really were about me thinking about this construction and neighbourhood and some of the contrasts.

    IMG 3706

    I asked this artist how they got here, and they said Uber. I continue to have questions about how we’re still building car oriented dense housing in Vancouver.

    Caitlin Mcdonagh

    Caitlin Mcdonagh - River District Mural

    Instagram/@northweststyles

    IMG 3708

    This and the next murals were along an east-west path, fencing off a construction site with a few abandoned industrial buildings still remaining.

    Rachael looks at an unfinished mural

    IMG 3709

    The sketched out design looked super cute!

    Instagram/@luke046_art

    IMG 3710

    Overhead Power and Construction

    IMG 3711

    You see old, original poles, skinny and weathered brown, and the new, larger, treated greenish poles. And this ridiculous jumble of overhead wires that we have all throughout Vancouver. Even in this new area, I guess they’re not burying lines and laying fibre for Internet?!?!?

    Van Mural Fest River District Sign

    IMG 3714

    Lists all the artists. More discarded building materials and some sort of hangar or industrial building in the fenced off area.

    Looking west, Rachael looks at a mural

    IMG 3715

    The fence to the north (right in this photo) blocks off rail tracks, then East Kent Ave N, with condos, townhouses going up on the north side of that avenue.

    Blackberries, Barbed Wire, Power, and Construction

    IMG 3717

    Kerr Avenue

    After seeing all the murals, it was time to head home. There are a couple of different south / east routes, the most straightforward looked to be heading back along East Kent, and then going north on Kerr Avenue.

    IMG 3720

    Well, it turns out Kerr is an incredibly steep climb from East Kent to Marine Drive, and then keeps going up with Fraserview Golf Course on one side and Everett Crowley Park on the other. The area at the top is called Champlain Heights :)

    Anyway, got off the bike and walked it up a good chunk of this. Not enough power for getting both of us up here. There are a couple of epic hills in Vancouver, where a slightly more powerful motor would really help.

    We stayed on Kerr until it turns into Rupert next to Killarney Park, then west on East 45th which is a bike route.

    Then right and north on Earles Street, crossing Kingsway at the Purdy’s Chocolate factory.

    Left and west on Vanness, which turns into BC Parkway path, and a little left along the edge of Slocan Park.

    Right and north on Slocan, which is a long down slope. You’ll pass Banana Grove Market at 22nd, and keep going down and north until you hit South Grandview Highway.

    Cross that, and you’ll hang a left and be heading west on North Grandview Highway, which is the Central Valley Greenway.

    The CVG has been another common route for us, we’ll often head out to Burnaby Lake. But heading home and west we go to Lakewood, and then head right and south until we hit Adanac, and then turn left and west until we’re back at Commercial Drive and home.

    We were at one bar of power by the time we made it home, so one of the longest trips we’ve made. Doing a rough map calculation shows about 30km. There are a couple of mega hills in there as well as just long continuous slopes that are rough with two of us on the bike.

    Wesgroup

    At home now, I’m doing a little research on this River District. This is a “planned community” being built by Wesgroup. Here’s one article:

    The River District is located along the Fraser River, just off Marine Way, west of Boundary. It is a brand new, award-winning, master-planned community created by Wesgroup – a Vancouver based builder that has been building in the Lower Mainland for over 50 years. Wesgroup has spent the last decade carefully planning River District, the last waterfront development in the city. Spanning 130 acres, it is three times the size of Granville Island and will soon become a vibrant destination for living and shopping when complete in 2017…

    It’s now 2020, and there are lots of new homes completed, but as you can see from my photos, lots of new buildings still going up.

    → 5:20 PM, Aug 30   •  Biking, Vancouver, Blog, VanMuralFest
  • Applying free shipping as well as a 100% discount in Shopify

    Shopify Shipping Rate Settings Screenshot

    There are 20 pages of requests for multiple discounts for Shopify to be able to apply free shipping.

    The way to do it without a plugin, is to add a new rate, label it “Free Shipping”, and set the conditions to only apply when the min and max are both $0.

    Any other paid shipping options will still display – and be selectable by the customer! – but obviously they can just pick free shipping and there won’t be a charge.

    So to give a “free” item to someone, make a dollar value discount code of the price of the item, so that the cost is zero, and then this free shipping rate will appear. Note: if you are dealing with multiple currencies, sometimes the conversion means that your dollar value discount code makes it not quite $0. You’ll need to experiment and set a discount $ value appropriately.

    → 5:54 PM, Aug 24   •  Blog
  • LinkedIn 1746

    Chris Fralic of First Round Capital explains how to figure out what your LinkedIn member number is.

    Basically, go to your own profile, “view source” to look at the code for the web page, and search for “member”.

    I’m member #1746. Yes, I was early to social networks :)

    → 1:15 AM, Aug 12   •  Blog
  • We're all in the same lifeboat

    The hashtag #MozillaLifeboat is highlighting the ~250 people laid off by Mozilla.

    Here’s Mitchell Baker’s official announcement.

    Daring Fireball has further links and commentary, including that the layoff number is “about on-third of its workforce”:

    Firefox was very popular, and Google paid Mozilla a small fortune to make Google search the default in Firefox because it was so popular. But then came Chrome. Why should Google fund Mozilla when Chrome is about 10 times more popular than Firefox, other than out of the goodness of their heart?

    It is a very good thing for the world and the web that a truly independent browser exists from a privacy-minded company, but there’s not much of a business model for it unless it’s popular enough to get the dominant search engine to pay for placement.

    The Open Web, open source, Web3, global Internet commons infrastructure. Security. Privacy. Data ownership. We’ve got a lot on our plate that is looking pretty concerning.

    I pretty much felt the same in the early 2000s, facing down FUD from Microsoft vs. open source. And we … won? Sort of? Except now it’s time to reboot again, because the ad supported web and big tech owned open source is an awkward place to have ended up.

    I don’t know Chris Riley who just got laid off and tweeted this, but I’ll bold the key part here:

    It’s been a heck of a ride at @mozilla for the past 7 years. But this is where I get off the train too. I’m sad; I’m going to miss the people, a lot. For me, my calling to make the internet better will continue. I just need to find the right next venture for it. #MozillaLifeboat – @MChrisRiley

    We’re all in the same lifeboat. Grab an oar and get involved.

    → 12:49 AM, Aug 12   •  opensource, Open Web, Blog
  • Craigstarter - open source crowdfunding tool for Shopify

    Craigstarter on Github

    A free to use / edit / extend crowdfunding tool for Shopify with multiple goals and variants as campaign tiers.

    Shopify is an absolute massive ecosystem. Blending crowdfunding with straight up sales is a really powerful way to more directly own your platform for the long term, whereas one-off Kickstarters you immediately need to plan for off-platform websites, sales, communications, etc.:

    Kickstarter is an excellent way to run a crowdfunding campaign. But if you already have a community built up, and have communication channels in place (via a newsletter, for example), and already run an online shop, then Kickstarter can be unnecessarily cumbersome. Kickstarter’s 10% fee is also quite hefty. By leaning on Shopify’s flexible Liquid templating system and reasonable CC processing fees, an independent publisher running a campaign can save some ~$7,000 for every $100,000 of sales by using Craigstarter instead of Kickstarter. That’s materially meaningful, especially in the world of books.

    This is particularly relevant because I’m in the midst of learning more about how to run and setup Shopify stores, both for work, and ideally for some side projects. Gathering interest from a group of people so we can collectively fund / buy things is exactly the kind of thing I want to do.

    Via @pat

    → 11:14 PM, Aug 11   •  opensource, Blog
  • Public vs Common Goods in Open Source, responding to @tobie

    Responding to @Tobie’s thread on examining open source as a commons.

    In the context of digital abundance, the open source code itself can be infinitely copied.

    1) open source code = public good

    2) support, maintenance, etc. = common good

    3) paying customers = common good (assuming multiple consultants or hosting services etc.)

    From my understanding of @Dries’ Makers and Takers post, the distinction between a public good which can’t be depleted and a common good which can be, and must be protected, is key.

    Commons Grid - Private Goods, Common Goods, Club Goods, Public Goods (from Dries' Makers and Takers)

    The activity around open source code is a common good. It is provided by the maintainers and other contributors. @tobie mentions maintenance, but also documentation, marketing, communication, responding to issues, and so on.

    The “consumers” of these activities may evolve into new contributors, so in one model providing this activity will grow the commons. And even the add to the public good of the code if the new contributors eventually provide code, too.

    But taking time for these activities is a scarce resource, as Tobie points out. Sponsorship and similar types of funding can potentially “buy” more of a maintainer’s time, so they can provide more support for (2) – but isn’t really a business model or a commons management strategy on its own.

    Finally, my third point from above. Dries made this point quite clearly: if you have multiple businesses built around an open source code base, the (paying) customers are a common good: they can (mostly) only be the customer of one business.

    Approaches that restrict aspects of a project to paying users run the risk of making this no longer a common or public good, and yet Ostrom mostly proved that “good fences make good neighbours”. This is the challenge we face that @tobie highlights, and the ongoing experimental phase that I see open source at large moving into.

    For a sustainable commons that goes beyond code, we need more makers than takers.

    → 10:33 PM, Aug 11   •  opensource, Blog
  • Developer community chat tools: @swyx points out Slack ⬇️ and Discord ⬆️

    Slack is Fumbling Developers and the Rise of Developer Discords by @swyx

    Slack’s revenue is firmly linked to enterprise, so I don’t see this as a strategic error. It is, however, a fact that open developer communities are increasingly using Discord.

    I also expect more Matrix adoption in the next 1-2 years.

    Although Discord open sourcing at least server instances while still following their federation model could be interesting. Or interop with the Matrix protocol.

    I have a draft post that I’ve been meaning to finish for months of how Fission uses Discord chat + Discourse forum. Soon!

    → 9:00 PM, Aug 3   •  Twitter, community , Discord, Blog, Discourse, chat
  • Digital Abundance and creator compensation

    Kyle Mitchell writes The Truth is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free as commentary to Nathan J. Robinson’s editor’s note in Current Affairs of the same name. “Quality” journalism is paywalled and the rest is free?

    This point by Robinson on membership models seems key:

    a podcaster who sells their product on Patreon rather than giving it away but filling it with mattress and “box-of-shit-a-month” ads has an important kind of freedom: they only have to please the audience, not the sponsors.

    “Open Source”, funding, and digital works available at no cost have many parallels in industries beyond software, including journalism.

    Kyle points out that not all creators should expect to be compensated just because they are creators:

    I deserve…no compensation whatever for the bad musical improvizations, repetitive doodles, or unfunny or dead-end software libraries I churn out from time to time. Everyone, including me, should be fine with this.

    Also, that in areas of creative work, especially those available digitally, “giving away” work may be the best strategy:

    I happen to believe that in most areas of creative work, and in most adjacent industries, giving more away for $0 online would improve outcomes for most players, overall. Our business instincts and well-worn patterns haven’t quite kept up with the times, and never do.

    I’m thinking a lot about digital abundance lately in this same context.

    Read the whole thing. You can also sign up on Kyle’s Artless Devices forum if you want to discuss this further.

    → 5:04 PM, Aug 3   •  opensource, Blog, Kyle Mitchell, digital abundance, paywall
  • Last BC Day at Millers Landing

    My parents have sold their house on #bowenisland. They move out in October, after 41 years living there.

    This also means shutting down the Seven Hills B&B, which they’ve run for 25 years or so.

    They’re lucky to not have to leave Bowen. They’re building a 4-Plex with 3 other couples, which is just 500m closer to Snug Cove from where they are now.

    It was a lovely BC Day long weekend. But also a bit of an end of an era. My childhood home, that was always there for me, always “home”, won’t be around much longer. I’m lucky to have had it, and of course my parents and Bowen Island itself are still there.

    → 4:04 PM, Aug 3   •  Personal, Blog, bowenisland
  • Is an open source Instagram possible?

    The Sunlit 3 beta is available, and now open source.

    Is an open source “Instagram” possible?

    I had a long discussion with an artist about moving off Instagram and Facebook. I told him he was putting photos up inside a mall, and he didn’t disagree. Because he can sell inside the mall.

    He was uncomfortable about it. That I was kind of accusatory, shouldn’t he go first, to walk out of the mall and lure people outside instead.

    So how do we encourage people that doing street graffiti is something they might want to do?

    Putting my technologist hat back on, an open source mobile app like Sunlit is an interesting starting point.

    Supporting Micropub and WordPress are great starting points.

    Now what about a SquareSpace interface? Drupal and Joomla? Mastodon?

    Tumblr? Flickr?

    This mix of open source and protocols and networks gets us to an interesting spot.

    Does multiple forks of Sunlit help? That is, say other people use the code and deploy apps to the App Store. Can that be additive to a network of users using open protocols and platforms? I’m sort of asking if we can kickstart a more open and federated network.

    What if that app added “Buy Now” buttons? Where users could add their own links to a place where they could buy what is in the photo. Or tip the photographer!

    Thanks @manton for open sourcing. That begins to give us the opportunity to contribute and build upon what’s there now.

    → 6:47 PM, Jul 25   •  Twitter, opensource, Open Web, Micropub, Blog
  • Discord and the Cozy Web

    Tom Critchlow writes ‘Setting up a Discord Room for my Blog’, calling it a “cozy chat space”, for me a direct call back to this:

    the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams — Venkatesh Rao, Extended Internet Universe, May 2019

    I have introduced/explained Discord to several friends with kids who use it extensively for gaming and hanging out with friends.

    I’ve used Discord for several years now, as many of the global tech communities I’m part of use it. I’d say that there is definitely an increase of adoption by open source projects.

    I tweeted about why Discord:

    [Discord has much better] permissions [than Slack]! It's default open, with members, roles, channels being able to have permissions.

    Plus, of course, mod powers like Kick and Ban.

    Slack is swipe card entry only, Discord is a public festival with various members only sections, VIP rooms, and an operations center.

    Our usage for public, group, and company-only chat at Fission has gone well, all in one server.

    I have a longer post in draft about how we pair it with Discourse forums.

    Discord being free means…something else is the product. Mostly it’s stickers right now.

    Matrix is my exit plan.

    Mozilla selected Matrix as the chat protocol / platform to move to, away from IRC. It is an open protocol as well as being open source, meaning many clients and servers can be built and interoperate.

    New Vector, the main company behind Matrix development recently announced that Automattic, makers of WordPress, made a strategic investment.

    All these things make it clear that Matrix has momentum, and it’s important that there be an open — and secure! — option for chat.

    At the same time, because chat is ephemeral, I consider it less important that such a platform be open: the feeling and UX rank much more highly in importance.


    You can join the Fission server or try out my AllTheBest.Recipes server if you’d like to experiment.

    Prompted by Ton commenting on Tom’s post.

    → 7:53 AM, Jul 14   •  Discord, cozy web, Blog
  • I believe you mean SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE

    I believe you mean SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE

    SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE retro vapour wave style neon blue snake head with dark purple background and pink neon grid
    Screaming Snake Case by Fission

    Let me know if you want a sticker sent to you!

    I’m considering illustrating “Kebab Case” as one of our next projects.

    → 2:31 PM, Apr 13   •  Blog
  • Foundry Company Captable Consideration

    Foundry Company Captable Consideration

    Part of this depends on the very structure of how the foundry support happens.

    I would suggest that the thought process is kind of like an “N+1” cofounder. So the foundry initiates the projects, looks for co-founders — 1 or 2 people who are the founding team. A company isn’t created right away, but rather worked on inside the foundry. The foundry funds this and facilitates the founders working on the project. The foundry has additional staff and other resources that are put into the project.

    Then, at some point, the company is actually formed and the equity is split as founder shares. There are 1 or 2 founders, maybe some early staff, and the foundry itself. The foundry has ideated and also funded things. They are getting founding shares for that work. And, it’s also likely that at this point they are putting $$$ in to keep the company moving forward (because that’s one of the few reasons to formalize the company formation).

    So, money has its own rules, and likely going in as convertible debt or SAFE so that outside money sets the valuation is the right thing to do for that part.

    For the foundry “founding shares” component — maybe 10–20%? If this is fully vested, maybe 10%. Should a foundry have shares that vest over time, meaning they continue to actively work with the company? This really comes down to an “it depends” and works into the model of the foundry itself.

    All that being said — absolutely I have heard that upstream funders look at the foundry equity on the captable and think of it as “dead” equity.

    → 10:33 AM, Apr 26   •  Blog
  • Hello SPADE

    Cross-posted from Boris’ blog: https://blog.bmannconsulting.com/hello-spade/

    → 2:17 PM, Oct 4   •  Blog
  • EDCON, WalletConf, Magicians & Summer in Berlin

    All of the presentations were great, and lead to good Q&A in the room, and extended discussions in hallways and over meals. Being the first one, we had a bit of the “wall of presentations” issue — where after EIP0 and EDCON and this 9am to 8pm day — the people in the room just had full brains from processing so much stuff. The key lesson: more whiteboards and discussions, less front of room lecturing.

    Lots of opportunity to do more deep dive Working Groups in all areas going forward. There are so many meta-problems at various levels of the Ethereum ecosystem that projects are grappling with individually, but need a high level of coordination to solve. The Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) process is one way to do this — but we do need to get to interoperability of implementations, which means working together on buckling down and writing lines of code.

    Here’s the wrap up wiki post from the event. Thanks again to Derek from Thunder Token & Dan from Kyokan for organizing & running the day, and L4 Ventures / Stable Fund for sponsoring.

    Magicians

    My experience at WalletConf and other meetings around EDCON has led to me joining the forum that represents the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians, a community group dedicated to improving the technical excellence of the Ethereum platform.

    The UTF8 “sparkle” emoji is the logomark for the Magicians.

    This is a primarily technical group, whose vision is stated as:

    The Goal. To keep Ethereum The Best It Can Technically Be.
    The Mission. To Nurture Community Consensus on the technical direction and specification of Ethereum. 
    The Work. Primarily, high-quality Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), accepted by a consensus of the Community.

    The full proposed mission statement makes for good reading to understand what the Fellowship is.

    I realize for a community that is just booting up, and setting itself very hard goals about remaining decentralized with no central leader or lead organization, that I can contribute some of my community learnings, event organizing skills, and reflection on how we might do things differently this time around.

    I also contributed was a “How to Run a Working Group Event” wiki post first draft, reflecting on the WalletConf experience, and left a long comment on how things were in the early Drupal community.

    It’s great to see that the Smart Contract Security & Audit community is already well on its way to organizing their first Working Group session, which will take place in September alongside ETHBerlin.

    I’m now volunteering with the Magicians to help organize the Berlin Council in mid July – the second of planned Tri-Annual meetings to gather the Magicians together in person (and via Livestream) to have the face to face discussions that lead to “Rough Consensus and Running Code”.

    If you’re interested in community & technical excellence, join the forum, and join us in Berlin for extended discussion.

    Or, since we’re decentralized – organize your own local meetup, Working Group, or other event to make the Ethereum community better.

    Summer in Berlin

    Waiting in Frankfurt Airport for flight to Berlin, viewing the Lufthansa planes

    I’m spending the summer in Berlin. Rachael and I both needed a bit of a reboot, and Berlin is a great city for both us: lots of tech activity and seemingly the center of a ton of Ethereum activity for the next little while, and great arts & culture scene for her.

    I’m doing research on the local Berlin community and events that are happening on the Frontier Community under the ‘berlin’ tag.

    I’ve been introduced to a number of people already and am looking forward to learning more about the local community. If you’re in Berlin, or have connections or tips, please leave me a comment or edit my Berlin Research wiki.

    Cross-posted from the Frontier Foundry blog

    → 12:03 AM, May 30   •  Blog
  • Pho Sate at 24 Train Express Noodle House

    Pho Sate at 24 Train Express Noodle House

    On the way home from Bowen the other day, we needed a late lunch and stopped before getting home to our temporary place in Yaletown.

    There is a Vietnamese noodle place just around the corner that we decided to try.

    I’m not entirely sure why the menu says Pho Gold Train and it says 24 Train Express Noodle House on the outside.

    There is pink and blinking lights and so much other stuff crammed in.

    The menu is big. I like to have the “special” pho most places – with tendon & tripe & beef balls & rare beef – just to get a baseline around their broth flavour and quality.

    Here, I noticed Pho Sate which I had never heard of before. When ordering, I got asked “coconut or lemon grass” – I didn’t know what I was in for so picked coconut.

    The bowl is pictured at the top of this post. Yum!

    Researching it now, an old Chowhound post describes Pho Sate:

    Pho Sate is a variation on Vietnamese Pho soup. The difference is that Pho Sate has a spiciness and heartiness from the addition of some sort of chili-peanut paste. When done correctly, it’s heaven on earth… the most satisfying soup in existence. My sources from my favorite Winnipeg Pho spot (Thanh Huong) tell me that it’s a specialty of Northern Vietnamese cooking and that there are moslty southern Vietnamese in Montreal, thus the lack of Pho Sate on menus.

    It very much reminded me of a Singaporean laksa soup (which has coconut milk & curry).

    A simple quick lunch, cheap and tasty. Now to explore the lemon grass version and where else in Vancouver I can try Pho Sate.

    On Foursquare »

    → 11:50 PM, Mar 23   •  Blog
  • Beef Short Rib Pesto Tomato Stew

    Beef Short Rib Pesto Tomato Stew

    For my mid March 2018 Bowen Weekend, I spent Saturday afternoon making a beef short rib stew.

    The short ribs were two packages of frozen organic beef short ribs from Famous Foods. One package had bones, the other was giant chunks of mostly meat. I put some olive oil and salt and pepper on them, and stuck them in a 400F oven on roast.

    While the ribs browned I prepped my mise.

    A chopped onion and three cloves of garlic. Frozen tomatoes picked last summer in Lillooet by my mom. A couple of green peppers. A couple of zucchini. A half bag of spinach. A handful of mushrooms. A plan to put in a couple of spoons of pesto.

    Browned! About 15 minutes or so. Since they started frozen, I pulled them apart and flipped the non-browned bits down. Another 10 minutes in the oven.

    Next I set the meat aside, leaving the beef fat and oil in the pan. I sautéed onions & garlic, added two fresh Bay leaves, and two Tablespoons of pesto. I let that simmer on low heat for 10 minutes then added the tomatoes.

    Worked the tomatoes around until coated in oil and pesto and then put the lid on and let it simmer and thaw for a bit.

    Then the spinach, mushrooms, and green peppers. I wanted the spinach to melt, but the zucchini would be too mushy so I left it until later.

    Also 2 cups of red wine and salt and pepper.

    I put the lid on and stirred it occasionally on the stove top until everything was mixed and melted. Very technical, I know! I added a Tablespoon of tomato paste to get the umami to bring out the beef flavour.

    I put the browned ribs back in at this point and put the whole thing in the oven, covered, at 300F. After 30 minutes, here’s what it looked like.

    Going for our afternoon walk, I left this covered on the stove top, then came back and cooked for an additional 2 hours at 300F, covered. I put the zucchini in for the last 30 minutes.

    No pictures of the final production! Served with rice in deep plates, and some baguette to dip into the sauce as well. The meat was super tender. There was a little salt missing, and the pesto flavour didn’t really come through at all. Next time I would skip the pesto completely.

    → 2:08 PM, Mar 18   •  Blog
  • A Bowen Weekend

    I walk to work from our temp place in Yaletown. This is the pedestrian part of Robson, the art gallery, and green roof of Hotel Vancouver with some amazing clouds.

    At the end of the day, hurrying over to the first stop of the Horseshoe Bay Express 257 bus, I really liked the evening light. Perhaps Daylight Savings time is good for something? Looking south up Burrard with Hotel Vancouver from the other side.

    Once you are on the ferry you can start leaving the mainland behind. This end of day view of coming into Snug Cove on Bowen Island is something I’ve carried with me for my whole life.

    I do lots of cooking when I’m home. Lovely to have fresh eggs from neighbours behind my parents’ place, with such green colours too. And sun!

    One of the things Rachael said about coming over this weekend was that she needed to go visit the forest. Our temp adventure in a Yaletown condo has been interesting, and it’s lovely to be close to the seawall, but we feel farther away from green.

    This is Rachael at the edge of Killarney Lake, and then a view in each direction from the bridge by the Meadows.

    We met a lovely black and white cat walking back from the lake.

    I could put in a half dozen photos of a beef short rib stew, but we’ll leave that for a separate cooking post.

    With the sun out, fitting in two walks is a must. A short trip to “my” beach, Pebbly. The tide was up and there are lots of winter storm logs. The sun is out, but the wind is whipping the waves and through our coats.

    A couple of crazies at the beach.

    The magnolias are coming.

    Today is Sunday and is much more gray. I’m sipping my third cup of coffee and writing this post. Slowly we’re thinking about what ferry to catch, and errands we need to run for the week.

    → 11:25 AM, Mar 18   •  Blog
  • Testing & Validating Open Angel Models

    Testing & Validating Open Angel Models

    Hi Bonnie — thanks for the kind words. Small in quantity, High in Quality has definitely always been the goal. Or put more simply, curation.

    To answer your question, we tested those ideas in the format of the investment dinner series, and didn’t see much changes.

    As we ran events, we came to see investors as our customers. After year 1, we charged membership fees to investors, and increased those fees in subsequent years. We conducted interviews with members and did some yearly surveys on member investments and feedback.

    “We” are looking for other people to test/validate further ideas. So we are open to other suggestions on what path Open Angel should follow.

    At our year end 2017 board meeting, we kicked around a number of refresh ideas for 2018. One of the hypotheses was that the core mission — “Connecting founders & funders” — had absolutely been met. The social connections of investors and different sets of founders was/is valuable.

    We brainstormed a bit what it might look like on getting leads/syndicates to attend, to have larger events — potentially with no investment presentations, but rather investing/company building topics. What would 100 person events look like? What follow up could be done? How would we measure success? (we really hate “bums in seats” as a metric)

    We also looked at potentially doing more with mentorship and facilitation, as we saw no correlation between companies attending any of the local incubator programs and being investable / successful. But even doing “mentorship light” is a ton of work as a volunteer organization.

    We have also in the past kick around various side car funds or pre-committed funds as an option to solve the lack of leads problem: having the first cheque already be in place for, say, half the companies that presented. Probably something that would work, but better run by a for-profit entity.

    Personally, I (Boris) felt that new investors was a thing we could do more of. What does it mean to have “young” investors? Could there be a format where founders invest in each others’ companies, to teach angel investing early?

    I have some other thoughts that indicate that the model of the last 15 years of early-stage angel investing in tech companies may be at an end, but that’s a whole other post. If we focused on IndieVC-style convertible loans, this might be a much better path to “some” companies becoming venture sized, but many more becoming sustainable businesses. And solve the number one issue for many angels — liquidity and capital available for investing.

    → 5:03 PM, Mar 12   •  Blog
  • Open Angel Reboot

    Open Angel Reboot

    Shutting down the investment dinner series, call for collaborators

    A couple of weeks ago we sent out an email to our members and angel investors letting them know that the February 2018 Open Angel investment dinner would be the last one. We opened the doors and invited everyone to attend, including many previous presenting companies.

    Photo by Suzanne Rushton

    Ed and Boris have been running the event for almost 4 years. It’s been a good experience but Ed and Boris both have other, increasingly demanding commitments, from Ed’s travel to Uganda to support Ensibuuko, to Boris’ new company Finhaven.

    We originally created Open Angel because of the prevalence of pay-to-pitch (which still didn’t result in cheques written), or pitch theatre (startup presentations without any serious investors in attendance) events. As many of you know, we focused on “cheques written” as our sole measure of success.

    We do feel proud of having run a high quality event that curated both presenting startups and investors, without charging startups to present. Many local investors stepped up and bought annual memberships, or paid to attend individual events.

    Is Open Angel shutting down forever?

    Open Angel Canada is a BC non-profit society. It has 5 directors — Ed, Boris, Justin Young from Osler, Amy Rae from Vanedge, and Alan Albert. It has a website, a contact & mailing list, and a bank account. It is a member of the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO).

    The board has been a “working board” — meaning that much of the work has been done by board members directly. Except, of course, for our Progra Manager Shawna Quinton, who has been instrumental in helping run things smoothly for the past couple of years.

    We also have a number of supporters we’ve called the “Unterboard” — a core group that we ask for feedback on new ideas and support in getting the word out.

    Lastly, there have been a number of volunteer facilitators — mentors that were assigned to each presenting company ahead of the investment dinner pitch event. They met with the teams, workshopped the pitch deck, and helped explain what investors are looking for. Thanks to all of you that have helped out.

    For now, we aren’t shutting down the society, but we are shutting down the investment dinner series.

    Photo by Suzanne Rushton

    Angel Investing in Vancouver

    We seem to have a pretty good process for picking companies from the last research we did, but we haven’t seen an increase in the number or size of cheques written. We haven’t seen new angel investors step up. We have seen the creation of professional angel investment funds (Chris Bissonnette’s Pallasite Ventures in particular) that have had huge impact, but that has nothing to do with Open Angel.

    Our sense is that, at best, we have redirected some of the existing investment dollars into the companies we curate. But we didn’t move the needle on seeing more deals funded or larger investments made, so we don’t think we changed the amount of early-stage angel investment risk capital in Vancouver.

    We don’t know why, but we have some opinions:

    Lack of new leads

    The biggest issue we saw — especially since Open Angel isn’t a group that manages investments directly — is a lack of deal leads.

    Of our members and attendees, few felt comfortable going first / negotiating the deal. More often than not, we see first-time founders being the ones who issue a term sheet, often a SAFE, and at best getting a few small $10K — $25K cheques from individuals.

    There are some family offices (Conconi) and seed funds (Vancouver Founder’s Fund) who are great leads & were often attendees. These funds don’t necessarily work to broadly syndicate their deals, they tend to invest a little later, and they aren’t necessarily changing the number of deals they are doing so this doesn’t move the needle on deals in Vancouver.

    Investors Feel Companies are “Too Early”

    Many of the companies that presented at an Open Angel investment dinner told us that it was a pivotal moment for them. Their connection to the facilitation process and experience of the event “woke them up” for what investors needed to see.

    These companies went on to get accepted into TechStars and other premium accelerator programs. And yet, they would often accept this funding, go through the program, and raise money on Demo Day without any Vancouver area investors participating.

    This is an area which could be improved across Canada. Angel investors could invest into companies as they went into top-tier accelerator programs, and they would see a lift in valuation across the portfolio of companies by Demo Day. It would also keep ties back to home for those companies, rather than “losing” them to the US ecosystem.

    Should Open Angel or some other group keep tabs on this or run a broad syndication program to invest in all Canadian startups going to foreign tech accelerators?

    Investors Want to Find Their Own Deals

    Before we started Open Angel, a common refrain amongst angel investors was that they would invest more if there were better companies to invest in. Our research shows that this just isn’t true.

    If we have learned one thing from our efforts it’s that raising the bar for the companies that pitch doesn’t lead to more investment. There are a handful of professional angels who are genuinely looking for the best deals, but in cash-short Vancouver they don’t need a pitch event to find deals — everybody just comes to them.

    The rest of the angels seem to prefer to source their own deals and don’t worry too much about whether or not those are the best available deals.

    Attend the Open Angel Reboot Meeting

    Many people have approached us saying they want to help, or perhaps take over, the investment dinner series, or to help reboot Open Angel in some way.

    We are inviting people to come to an information sharing session on Wednesday, March 21st, from 4:30pm to 6:30pm, at the SFU VentureLabs space. We’ll share information, answer questions, and see how people want to move forward. Please register on our site if you’re going to attend→

    We’ll ask that interested parties prepare a one page intention or vision document of what they want to do going forward, and submit that to us by the end of March. We’ll review it as a board, and see what’s next.

    Thanks to everyone for your support and participation. We look forward to what’s next for Open Angel in Vancouver.

    — Ed, Boris, Shawna

    → 10:25 PM, Mar 11   •  Blog
  • When does Vancouver hit “peak coffee shop”?

    [1] Technically the first co-working space in Canada was community run in Charlottetown, PEI, before the term became popularized. I’ll stick with WorkSpace as the first commercial co-working space for sure.

    → 12:15 PM, Mar 4   •  Blog
  • Using a Bitcoin ATM to withdraw CAD in Victoria

    Using a Bitcoin ATM to withdraw CAD in Victoria

    I’m in Victoria for a couple of days and I’ve been exploring the city. I went past a hemp clothing store and saw a sign for a Bitcoin ATM and decided to try it out.

    A good point to make is that while I am working on a company that deals with blockchain tech and cryptocurrencies, I personally don’t really hold much crypto, other than to experiment with. I don’t have “trader” mentality so I focus a lot on the technology and the community. The bitcoins I sold I mostly got from Earn.com.

    BitBrokers at Hemp & Company

    Here’s the BitBrokers sign that explains a bit of background.

    I probably should have taken a photo of the whole machine. It’s a big box that has a number of different slots and printers and cameras.

    This is the welcome screen. I picked Sell Bitcoins.

    I found this next screen very confusing. “For how much cash you want to sell?” isn’t the correct way to say this. I knew how much BTC I had, how much would the machine give me?

    Maybe “How much cash would you like to withdraw?” might be better wording.

    I finally figured this out and thought I’d take out $80CAD.

    I did try the “Buy Bitcoins” option as well just to see. That green “Preview” box is a live camera view for scanning QR codes. Crypto wallets are one of the apps that have really taught people that QR codes are a thing again.

    Back to the flow of selling BTC for CAD.

    I skipped photographing several screens here.

    One prompted me to enter a phone number for SMS updates. This was a great idea, but either I typed my phone number in wrong (the touchscreen double entered numbers and was hard to backspace) or it didn’t work at all.

    The other screen displayed an address and a QR code of the address I should send BTC to. As noted above in the final screen, I needed to do it within 60 minutes.

    The machine also printed out a ticket, again with the QR code that I needed to send to. This made it easy to open my crypto wallet and scan the address to send to.

    On my end, I hit send and then my crypto wallet gave me updates on confirmations. Unfortunately, the store was closing and the transaction didn’t confirm by the time I had to leave.

    The next day I came back and selected “Redeem Ticket”. This meant aligning the QR code of the ticket with the Preview box until it scanned. Having been folded in my pocket overnight, this took some doing.

    Finally, success! The machine spat out four $20CAD bills.

    In case you’re wondering, I turned it into meat & beer for a delicious birthday dinner ;)

    End Notes

    I need to sit down and figure out all the fees I was charged and what the conversion rate actually was. I paid a lot to go from BTC>CAD.

    But, if the store had been open longer, I could’ve completed the whole transaction within about 10 minutes. Too slow for an ATM use case, very fast for an investment account to cash withdrawal.

    Usability was terrible. The touchscreen was bad, the UI was not clear/badly written, and the camera and how to use it was both bad and unclear. So I guess this is a novelty? Or no competition?

    In emerging markets, regular ATMs are rare. But everywhere there are agents that take in mobile money and hand out cash, or take in cash to turn it into mobile money. I can see SMS or USSD interfaces working peer to peer, or for smartphones, a direct model with QR codes shown on screen / scanned with camera on the phone. I’ve been handing out Dogecoin using the iOS dough wallet and it’s been working great.

    Merchants taking crypto directly is most interesting. I have some thoughts on “regional tokens” that I think builds the right kind of community and usage.

    → 10:41 AM, Feb 26   •  Blog
  • Maybe we don’t need a new token standard, we do need to work on security token interoperability

    Maybe we don’t need a new token standard, we do need to work on security token interoperability

    Hi Matthew Unger — great to hear from you!

    I agree, we are unlikely to need a completely separate token standard. ERC20 has been widely used and has broad interoperability for the last 18+ months. ERC721 has rapidly become the standard for non-fungible tokens / digital collectibles. As I mentioned in the original article, ERC777 has some good upgrades but is backwards compatible with ERC20 which is what the whole industry will likely need to keep supporting as the ecosystem is so young.

    The reason for pursuing a standard is to have the discussion in public and find other people to cooperate and interoperate with. If all we do is develop single, non-decentralized front ends to security tokens, we are just re-implementing the way security exchanges need to be setup per country.

    We’ll be writing more about this next week, but here is our draft ERC around validating tokens for a variety of business logic needs. We want something that is broadly accepted and interoperable, and are drafting in public and holding community meetups so we can work with others around the world. The Harbor team created a repo for their R-Token, which we think is very similar to our thinking.

    Will the EIP process be the best place / way to create interoperability? Not sure, but that’s what we’re starting with, and we think it’s a more “shared space” than forcing people to only come into “our” Github repo.

    Totally agree that identity / KYC is an evolving area. Along with privacy of individual peoples’ details, I don’t know if it’s feasible to create decentralized KYC — so people don’t continually need to re-KYC themselves. I do want Finhaven to work with all sorts of identity providers and standards, and meet the needs of different regulatory bodies.

    Hope to continue the discussion in person in Vancouver!

    → 3:18 PM, Feb 17   •  Blog
  • Setting up my Chromebook

    Setting up my Chromebook

    Exploring a Chromebook for day-to-day & development use

    ASUS Chromebook Flip C302–12.5" touchscreen, Intel m3, 64GB storage, 4GB RAM

    Back in October 2016 I had explored what my next machine after my Macbook Air 11" might be. Back then, I didn’t replace my machine, but bought a very cheap Chromebook to experiment with. I was pleasantly surprised by the options available in installing Linux, but it was such an under-powered machine that I would find opening too many tabs in Chrome crashing it completely.

    This past week, I decided to buy a more powerful, full featured Chromebook, specifically one that supports installing Android apps & recommended by The Wirecutter, the ASUS Chromebook Flip C302. The price was $670 Canadian after taxes, import fees, and shipping. The list price is $449USD.

    I documented my adventures so far on Twitter:

    If you review the thread, you can see I spent several hours cursing the fact that my main (personal) Google account is an “enterprise” account tied to bmann.ca, and “my” user kept being prevented from enabling installation of Android apps, or switching into developer mode.

    Once I got past that and started poking around, I’ve been super pleased to see that I can use Android apps, and that this more powerful machine is well built and easy to use.

    I briefly considered dual-booting GalliumOS, a Linux distribution that is tuned for Chromebooks. But if I were dual booting, I should just run Linux. And I got a Chromebook because worst case scenario, I’ve got a stable and secure browser / OS combo that I don’t have to configure and will just work.

    Chromebooks do run Linux underneath, and actually expose the ChromeOS Shell, aka “crosh”, by just hitting Ctrl-Alt-T, and then typing in shell. However, since we’ve got a nice big screen and window management, you’ll want to install the following two Chrome apps. The Chrome Secure Shell is an SSH client, but more importantly a configurable terminal. I don’t use it directly at all, it’s just a pre-requisite for running Crosh Window, which is one click access to crosh in its own window, so that various Control key shell command sequences don’t get picked up by Chrome.

    Maybe I don’t need to install anything else?

    Since I last tested a cheap low end Chromebook, it’s clear that ChromeOS itself, especially when paired with Android apps, can do a bunch of things directly without installing Linux or anything else.

    (and specifically, crouton — Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment — is what you can use to run Linux side-by-side with ChromeOS)

    In particular, Chromebrew brings a similar interface to Mac OS X’s Homebrew to crosh, letting you easily install various command line packages.

    I’ve started installing various things to crosh directly and will see how far I get. Much like the Linux-underpinnings of Mac OS X, this may be the perfect balance of stable graphical interface plus full command line access.

    Apps for Chromebooks

    With Android apps available, there are now three ways to have apps on Chromebooks:

    1. Web Apps: anything you can run on the web you can obviously run in a Chrome browser window. You can also “pin” URLs to the launcher, and select the option to have them launch in a new window.
    2. Chrome Apps: some of these are not much more than websites wrapped in an app shell, but many are targeted at ChromeOS directly and work offline. And realistically, most of them are terrible — either the Web App version or Android App version will be better, except for a select few.
    3. Android Apps: available from the Play store, you can install phone- or tablet-apps of all kinds. In some cases, the Web App version of something is better than the Android version, especially with the expectation that a touch interface is being used.

    I don’t have a long list of apps to recommend. Anything you already run will likely run as a Web App or Android App, and since there are relatively few apps that are tablet optimized, the desktop browser version often runs better.

    I will be exploring Android apps that work in touchscreen / tablet mode, and happy to get suggestions from people.

    Parsec: Streaming Games to Your Chromebook

    This was one of the original things that made me want to see if a relatively cheap Chromebook could do something like gaming. For the Christmas season, I had a little bit of downtime and signed up with Parsec to stream Windows games from my Steam account to my old Mac Mini, my mom’s ancient iMac, and my MBAir 11". Parsec streamed to all of them beautifully. And I saw that they had an “experimental” APK for Android.

    Short answer: it works great! I haven’t connected a wired mouse or gamepad to this Chromebook yet, but I assume that might even go OK.

    Underneath, Parsec uses Paperspace, which provides the cloud servers that run your instance. I have full access to the Windows machine, so I could install anything.

    Left: Dragon Age: Inquisition streaming via the Parsec APK; Right: Windows desktop, where I could install anything

    Development-related Reading

    My $169 development Chromebook details not enabling developer mode to keep the security of verified boot. Instead, it recommends using Termux as a user-space full Linux environment. This looks really promising, and I will experiment with this, even though I did have to enable developer mode in order to run the unsigned Parsec APK.

    Coding on a Chromebook goes through multiple options and apps, including more details on crouton. The author also maintains a build of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code that runs on Chromebooks, sitting on top of a crouton-powered install. The Chrome app editor mentioned, Caret, is what I had used previously, and it is a decent programmer’s text editor.

    Thoughts so far

    I haven’t run into any issues. It’s a solid machine that is 1/3 the price of a Macbook, and 1/2 the price of a Macbook Air 13".

    I mean, don’t be like me and join your machine to your enterprise account. And my work account, which I signed in with as a second user, again can’t install Android apps. So, I’m using my personal account and then also logging in to various work Google accounts, but that won’t be different than how many people run their desktop computers.

    With both Android apps and Chrome browser windows, window management feels a little strange, but the “show all windows” command does tile both Chrome windows and Android apps, and Alt-Tab cycles between them too. I do find that many Android apps expect you to be using the touchscreen.

    I’ll be using it as my primary machine and see what pops up.

    Chromebooks, especially with Android apps, are a viable every day computer. Adding streaming and a cloud-hosted machine means you can do basically anything you need.
    → 11:49 AM, Jan 13   •  Blog
  • This is a great article in trying to explain forking in the context of blockchains.

    This is a great article in trying to explain forking in the context of blockchains.

    But today, the chain itself is not the entire community. If changes are made to the chain, then various applications – many of which are NOT open source – need to decide to support this new chain.

    I think we’ll have thousands or millions of chains (depending on whether you think of them as databases). Orders of magnitude more tokens that are defined on top of these chains. There are various use cases that lead to unique super nodes or mining, but many token situations are better served by living on top of a base chain, without mining.

    Perhaps some thoughts on what forking means with respect to miner choice. I’m already seeing wallets and others struggling to run, host, and query the nodes they need to. Across the top 6 chains, that’s already 18 servers for minimum redundancy. Re-centralization at this node layer is problematic as well.

    I really like the concept of using the existing ownership and having a different distribution post fork. But ownership, control, and participation are only loosely related to the base chain.

    → 9:40 AM, Sep 13   •  Blog
  • Yes, thank you Roland Tanglao – fixed!

    Yes, thank you Roland Tanglao – fixed!

    → 9:26 PM, Sep 11   •  Blog
  • Blockchain Definitions

    Blockchain’ ethos of trustlessness and decentralization is in part what drives interest in it, especially by people who don’t have the background to build the technology directly.

    People like Trent McConaghy may subscribe to some of these beliefs, but are also highly accomplished technologists, computer scientists, and/or cryptographers, actively working on innovations which power different tools.

    Josh Stark’s recent article Making Sense of Cryptoeconomics explores similar thinking around the cross-disciplinary nature of the field:

    Cryptoeconomic systems like bitcoin feel like magic to someone who views them only as a product of computer science, because bitcoin can do things that computer-science alone could never accomplish. Cryptoeconomics isn’t magic – it’s just interdisciplinary.

    I’m looking forward to further evolutions and enhancements around the fields of blockchain, cryptoeconomics, and decentralized web, and how we apply our ethos to these capabilities.

    Available on the Frontier Foundry blog »

    A stand of merkle trees at dusk, because Medium likes having photos. Photo by Asso Myron on Unsplash
    → 7:34 AM, Aug 19   •  Blog
  • I have seen most blockchain teams not be very good at “classic web” technologies.

    I have seen most blockchain teams not be very good at “classic web” technologies.

    How many CRYPTOPROJECT.herokuapp.com sites are there for Slack invites, where seemingly the team can’t get it together to map a domain name to the Heroku platform? (takes maybe 5 minutes)

    But that’s a digression. I don’t think building desktop apps fixes security at all.

    Random apps – without knowing if they’re secure or not – downloaded to your Mac or Windows desktop? Where they have full access to everything on your machine? No, that’s not more secure.

    For less technical end users, a mobile app on iOS or Android downloaded from the official App Store is likely the most secure.

    → 9:54 PM, Jul 26   •  Blog
  • Automated Tickler Reminders are Key

    Automated Tickler Reminders are Key

    The automatic follow up with people after a lapse in communication – aka a tickler file – is a killer feature.

    It gets even harder when something as “intimate” as text messaging is missed by these systems.

    No, Capsule doesn’t do this. There are ways to create follow up lists – eg a filter of all cases that haven’t been updated in 30 days.

    Nimble does this and captures social messaging as well.

    Contactually is a good product. $40 per month is not expensive if you make just one sale per month.

    → 11:45 PM, Jun 19   •  Blog
  • Not a format issue

    Not a format issue

    Maybe I overdid the title. Not a matter of representing the notes (although a constrained, simplified system could help), but rather one of representing them in a way that syncs as CalDAV and CardDAV do.

    Parveen Kaler mentioned WebDAV, which may do. as a protocol, but I guess the question is, will the OS vendors play along with notes as a cross platform concept?

    → 7:16 PM, Jun 11   •  Blog
  • Time for a vNotes Format?

    Time for a vNotes Format?

    A note sync format across devices & systems

    Today we have vCards for person & business contact data, and CardDAV for syncing and sharing. For calendar data we have vCal and CalDAV.

    This means that CRMs, for example, can link data to your calendar and your contacts. Any changes can get synced to the native contacts and calendar in your phone or calendar.

    But what about notes?

    Evernote, Google Keep, SimpleNote, Apple Notes. Never mind other systems that people use for note taking like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper.

    They don’t link to calendars for meeting notes, they don’t link to contacts that are mentioned.

    Your CRM has a notes field, but at best you can save it as part of a CSV export. You can’t just sync your notes to your phone or desktop, so at best you’re copy pasting.

    WebDAV is an existing protocol for sync / access, but is more complicated than “just” notes.

    And even with all of these systems, we don’t have support for linking objects – a person, a company, a meeting, another document.

    I’ve been using Dropbox Paper as my primary note taking tool, both for business and personally. It supports @-mentions for people and +-mentions for other Paper docs. It has a meeting template for your connected Google Calendar – but you can only connect one account, and it doesn’t write back to that cal event in any way. Also no mentions of cal events directly.

    I don’t want to slip down the slippery slope of semantic everything, but I do want to link, annotate, and preserve meaning and entity types as I build information.

    We’re seeing a flood of systems across Slack, upgraded wikis, and more. Markdown is prevalent as a good-enough rich text formatting syntax, plus embedding / unfurling of remote content.

    Somebody give me a sync / notes format that harmonizes notes and search for me!

    Pointers to existing thinking around these concepts appreciated!

    → 11:35 AM, Jun 11   •  Blog
  • Microsoft and the Open Source community

    My own usage of Microsoft

    I have a family license for Office which includes OneDrive storage space. The Outlook app on iOS is a great email client, although I really want them to bring back the full functionality of Sunrise Calendar, which was acquired and then killed.

    I don’t use Windows on a regular basis. I have been experimenting with LiquidSky, a streaming gaming service which gives me a Windows desktop on a high powered machine in the cloud that I can install my Steam account and other PC gaming services. I like the utility of an on-demand desktop in the cloud — especially when I don’t have to worry about maintaining it.

    (I’ve maintained my own Windows desktops before — they’ve always degraded in performance, never mind having to actively be concerned about virus scanners)

    I’ve written about considering what my next laptop might be — and it’s by no means certain that it will be a Mac. Microsoft is quite good at hardware — it’s the end-to-end user experience of Windows and apps that causes friction.

    As for Azure, I definitely would consider it on a case by case basis for projects. I’m interested in the Azure Bot Service. The Language Understanding Intelligence Service (LUIS) which provides NLP and other context services (like IBM’s Watson) is very interesting.

    But I’m not a working programmer, and I’m not familiar with Azure because I’ve used it only rarely. The last project I experimented with was their Ethereum blockchain deployment quickstart template, and they now have Azure Blockchain as a Service.

    For my hobbyist needs, I reach for Heroku most often. It’s the easiest and quickest way to get an open source app up and running and on the public internet for me. There are some new services such as Now or Glitch, and all of the cloud providers have some version of “cloud functions” where you can run a single function at a time. For Heroku, I don’t have to worry about maintaining an operating system or dealing with scaling, while easily being able to take a “traditionally” written chunk of application source code and get it going.

    I’ll experiment some more with Azure and try creating a “Deploy to Azure” template for one of the open source projects I contribute to, to see how it compares.

    But what I really want is a Heroku-like experience for my applications. I don’t want to deal with machines / operating systems, whether or not they are containerized.

    What should Microsoft do?

    I was impressed that Microsoft had taken the time to gather a group of employees and host us, to listen to feedback from the community. This alone is an activity that I don’t see other big companies doing, or at least I haven’t seen it in Vancouver before.

    One of the comments that I made in regards to Visual Studio Code (of which there was a lot of interest in discussing further), was that Microsoft didn’t need to make a special event and buy us dinner just to talk about stuff we found interesting anyway. Have a Visual Studio Code meetup, and we’ll come out and participate.

    If Satya Nadella does intend Microsoft to be the “most open” company, Microsoft can continue flying this community flag, actively participating in local events, and lead through their actions.

    We are moving into a time where the “open source” license of the code matters less than ever. Data, privacy, and the tuning of algorithms — the open-ness of data and decision making — is what matters most. Microsoft has already turned the corner on a lot of their old ways, but many scars from the last 15 years still remain.

    Welcome to the community, Microsoft. Let’s keep talking.

    → 4:01 AM, May 29   •  Blog
  • ​​Cully: We’re building a bot!

    ​​Cully: We’re building a bot!

    ​​Frontier Foundry partners with 20 Year Media, building messaging + machine learning engines

    ​​We’re excited to be announcing that we’re starting work on our first messaging + machine learning product at Frontier Foundry.

    We’re partnering with ​​20 Year Media to build a team to tackle a consumer facing messaging bot.

    ​​Cully will live on multiple messaging platforms and recommend great events

    We think of Cully as a cross between a knowledgeable concierge and your cool friend that has the scoop on new things to try out.
    Getting recommendations on where to meet friends later

    We’ll start by indexing Vancouver for evening events. All of us only have so many evening “slots” during the week or weekend to watch a movie, go to a community meetup, or see a dance performance. Some will be with coworkers, others with family, and of course with your friends. Cully will be exploring the concepts of the best events for you, but also when is best to go see them. That might mean pinging you about something tonight, or making sure you’ve got a good mix of work/family/fun booked in the next couple of weeks.

    Make sure to fit in some friend hang out time

    Conversational front ends

    One of the big challenges with bots is their interface – their “front end” – is very basic and lacks context. Users become frustrated when they ask a question and the bot doesn’t understand, or answers one question and doesn’t understand what seems to be a logical next question.

    Human: “What’s the weather in Boston?”
    Bot: “It’s raining”.
    Human: “Should I bring my umbrella?”
    Bot: “I don’t understand what you mean.”

    Natural Language Processing (NLP) and great conversational dialogue design are needed. We aren’t claiming we’re going to solve this, but we have some ideas about an opportunity for better design tools, much like front end frameworks led to richer web applications.

    Machine learning’s role in bot experiences

    ​​Many marketers have flooded into bots thinking about it as another push / broadcast channel. But instead we need to be thinking about these interfaces as personal agents that learn relevance, timing, and an individual’s taste over time. This means learning more about the user, remembering their past (and current!) context, all leading to more relevant recommendations.

    ​​This is where some of the machine learning comes in. We could be saying artificial intelligence (AI) but we very much agree with Katherine Bailey on this point:

    ​​What is Artificial Intelligence? It’s a meme; an impressively resilient and fecund meme. No sooner does it land in the brain of one unsuspecting human than countless new #ArtificialIntelligence tokens are spawned and sent out into the world. – Hashtag Artificial Intelligence

    So we’ll stay away from that hashtag meme from now, and just say that we’ll be working on better learning, feedback loops, and interactions to recommend great events for you, at the right time and place.

    Come on, let’s go have some fun!

    We’re hiring for three positions for the Cully team now: lead product designer, senior tech lead, and an intermediate developer. You’ll be working with the Frontier Foundry team out of our space in downtown Vancouver, building out messaging, machine learning, and conversational front ends.

    An early prototype of Cully with a basic web interface is live now and filled with Vancouver events. Check it out at Cully.io, feed us some event recommendations!

    → 11:44 AM, May 10   •  Blog
  • Setting out for the Frontier

    We’re also exploring working with existing startups in different ways. Adrian and I’ve always informally mentored & advised early stage startups. Frontier works with select founding teams in an advisory role, working on fundraising, hiring, or other special projects.

    I’ve written previously what a startup foundry is, but even that was a projection and ideal model. As an operating company Frontier Foundry has the flexibility to work with companies, organizations, and individuals in different ways which we will evolve over time. Existing companies need partners because of their physical location — Vancouver, in immigration friendly Canada, with easy access to the rest of the US west coast — and/or because of their capabilities: Frontier is an organization designed for innovation and company building.

    We’d be happy to chat more about what we’re doing. Check out the roles we’re hiring for now, or get in touch so we can sit down and talk further.

    See you on the frontier!

    → 12:31 AM, May 8   •  Blog
  • Nope! I’m using Capsule CRM as my personal CRM (which I mentioned in the article) which seems a…

    Nope! I’m using Capsule CRM as my personal CRM (which I mentioned in the article) which seems a better fit now. Really, everything I mentioned in the article are good apps, what you use is very context dependent.

    Recent article about Point Nine’s Tech Stack shows how they use ZenDesk as their CRM — which isn’t even designed as one!

    For my new company Frontier Foundry, we’re using Drift and Pipedrive. Drift has been a pleasant surprise, including things like meeting scheduling and team profiles. I think I’m almost ready to get rid of Pipedrive and use just Drift.

    → 4:28 PM, May 7   •  Blog
  • Comparison to Electron?

    Comparison to Electron?

    Will ReactXP extend support to run as desktop apps on Mac and Linux too?

    Because otherwise, as a desktop solution, I’m better off using “regular” React / React Native and combining with Electron to get multi-platform desktop support.

    Since Microsoft built and maintains VS Code on Electron, will be interesting to see which direction they go.

    → 1:09 PM, Apr 8   •  Blog
  • Frustrated with Google Docs

    Frustrated with Google Docs

    This is very close to the system I use. However, I’ve become really frustrated with Google Docs. It is (ironically) very difficult to find things, and (more importantly) the mobile app interface makes it hard to edit or review docs in anything smaller than a tablet.

    I still use Google Apps for Domains to run email and calendaring, but I only use Sheets for complex budget scenarios and other financial forecasting. Everything else is in Dropbox.

    And, specifically, we’ve been experimenting with using Dropbox Paper. It’s nice to be able to use one app that can @-mention people, link to other docs like a wiki, and has a great mobile client for quick note taking.

    The sharing model is like Dropbox itself, which means you can only share top level folders, but other than that I’m very happy with where the product is heading.

    → 8:53 AM, Apr 8   •  Blog
  • I just want more Lee, direct to the page.

    I just want more Lee, direct to the page. And yes, I should be doing more of this as well, although the bulk of it ends up on my wiki.

    Cocktails, politics, musings. Bring it!

    → 4:05 PM, Apr 1   •  Blog
  • Well that’s something we’re going to need to fix if we want the next 1 billion people coming online…

    Well that’s something we’re going to need to fix if we want the next 1 billion people coming online to participate.

    The age of desktop computing for anyone other than sophisticated professional users is coming to a close.

    Mobile-only is the scenario that we should be focusing on.

    → 11:00 PM, Mar 30   •  Blog
  • Not crazy at all.

    Not crazy at all. I think we have to train the next generation of investors today. What if we could get founders investing in other founders?

    Do they have $1000 to invest in the company of one of their peers? It means that all founders need to be able to learn to think with their investor hat on – which might very well give them better insight into their own company, or insight into how to present their company to other investors.

    The Crowdmatrix platform is one example that might make this possible today.

    → 3:08 PM, Mar 26   •  Blog
  • Great question. Sometimes I feel like a hoarder, just gathering stuff for no reason.

    How do you quantify the value of the time and money you invest in keeping organized like this?

    Great question. Sometimes I feel like a hoarder, just gathering stuff for no reason.

    But I have ~3,000 contacts with some level of tagging and information around them.

    I would argue with better tools this should only become a more valuable resource. If I ask you right now to find 6 people in your contacts that program in Ruby on Rails, could you find them quickly and easily?

    I think you need to have this become a habit. And a habit at a time investment / cycle that makes sense for you.

    So, maybe you review, tag, and clean up your contacts once a quarter, along with catching up with people.

    Maybe you do it weekly as part of your cycle of doing work, reflecting on the week ahead, and other communications.

    I think that you can’t have this be extra work. That’s why a tool that works for you, your work style, and your needs is so important. For sales teams and mainly direct leads, that’s why sales CRMs cost so much. The payoff is big. For me, I can’t quite quantify it, but I feel more organized and it helps me review and reflect on people I know and the communications I have with them.

    Hope that helps answer your question. Thanks for promoting me about it!

    → 10:16 PM, Feb 21   •  Blog
  • I tried the full res version of Google Photos.

    I tried the full res version of Google Photos. No direct linking to photos (not embedding a widget) is a deal breaker.

    If I was only concerned with backup, a Dropbox paid plan or the 1TB I have with OneDrive would be fine.

    But I want my photos – which are more documentary in nature – to live on the web and be addressable and findable. And my intent with this is my own domain, too, which is ownership and attribution in today’s web.

    I think that a decentralized solution for the entire archive of my Flickr photos will give me that: never having to worry about cost or space.

    For now, S3 is the next best thing.

    → 10:27 PM, Feb 19   •  Blog
  • It all comes down to what you want.

    It all comes down to what you want.

    I haven’t found anything that works really well for me to remind / prompt on stale contacts.

    Theoretically Contactually does this. I kicked the tires on it again recently. It’s just too complicated for what I want as a single user.

    I am not currently actively selling, but I do have a very large contact database. And really that’s what I want – a collection of facts about people & companies, with different ways to slice & dice & search.

    I’m over on CapsuleCRM now, which has “data tags” so you can create modified custom fields for different kind of contacts. So, if I tag a company with “startup” I can include other fields like “last raise”, “investors”, “AngelList link” etc. Or tag someone as “investor”, and add a field of “investment stage” or “investment interests”.

    I have used Nimble a long time ago. It really does pull in every single communications channel. I seem to remember it having pretty good stale features, but it’s been a while since I used it.

    Hope that helps. Let me know your experience!

    → 8:00 PM, Jan 31   •  Blog
  • Early Exits are a fit for Rising Acquisitions

    Early Exits are a fit for Rising Acquisitions

    Great to see you go through the math on this and paint it in black & white numbers.

    Basil Peters has written a book on Early Exits. There is strong alignment between this path and local angel investors.

    One of the challenges I have with broadly giving this advice is that I find it contributes to founders “aiming low”. That is, that they are building smaller businesses, which then don’t become something that anyone wants to acquire. This is subtle, since it assumes a lot of experience, and can be hard to explain to more junior founders. If you’re not careful, what ends up being heard is “go big” again in an unrealistic sense – eg I’m going to build the next Facebook.

    I believe that more acquisitions are coming as “tech” pervades all industries. Another thing to consider is the industry you are targeting. Without disruption happening already, there will be less impetus to purchase a startup to compete. So is your industry segment used to acquisition as a growth strategy, or will your startup need to teach the industry that as well?

    Final point: this might be an interesting path for foundries to follow. Making connections within an industry and then serving up purpose-built solutions made for acquisition.

    → 9:42 AM, Jan 15   •  Blog
  • I still love my MBAir 11".

    I still love my MBAir 11".

    I think an iPad Pro with keyboard would work, but I’ve decided I won’t buy new devices unless they have USB-C. The next gen of the iPad Pro is likely to have this.

    It will be interesting to see what the next gen of devices looks like.

    → 7:13 PM, Jan 4   •  Blog
  • There is no wand in the Explorer Edition – it is just the single button Bluetooth clicker.

    There is no wand in the Explorer Edition – it is just the single button Bluetooth clicker. The BRIDGET mixed reality app works with the clicker. You use the reticle in the middle of your vision to point. You can look at the robot and click to bring up a menu.

    Yes, this is not documented anywhere. We’re going to have to get a lot better at first run experiences.

    It’s also unfortunate that all of these controllers are so proprietary at the moment. Interoperability with the Daydream VR wands would make the most sense. There is already an article on reverse engineering the controller.

    → 9:12 PM, Dec 26   •  Blog
  • First Thoughts on the Occipital Bridge

    Anyone who programs for iOS today who wants to make the jump to the next gen should be buying this and trying to build apps and interactions.

    We are going to need to retrain an entire industry from 2D to 3D. A solution that sits on top of the existing mobile ecosystem is exactly what we need.

    Occipital supports Unity with a plugin for exciting VR content. But I’m excited about the opposite: a mobile Mixed Reality solution where you can program natively on iOS, rather than having to learn Unity first.

    As I pointed out in my VR will be Mobile article, there are roughly 200M iPhone sales annually. How many of those can we start prototyping Mixed Reality on top of today with this solution? What developer platforms will emerge that can bridge to next-gen hardware? What interactions and UX/UI lessons will we learn?

    Developers, developers, developers. You now have the capability and invitation to start working on mixed reality.

    → 12:20 PM, Dec 10   •  Blog
  • Web only Computer Usage

    Web only Computer Usage

    If I didn’t do development tinkering — local commandline and ability to install various UNIX tools — I could easily do web only usage.

    There are a couple of professional desktop apps that I would truly miss. Keynote is one of them (both Powerpoint and Google Slides work, they just don’t work as well / easily for me).

    OmniGraffle is the other. It is available for the iPad, and an iPad Pro is definitely another device I can see being a great fit for me, especially as more and more professional apps become available for it.

    I’m likely to get a super cheap ASUS Chromebook ($250CAD, new!) to see how it performs, and will put ElementaryOS on it as well.

    → 10:19 AM, Nov 2   •  Blog
  • Microsoft Surface Book and Surface 4 Options for my Next Laptop

    Microsoft Surface Book and Surface 4 Options for my Next Laptop

    Hey Jeff, thanks for the comment.

    As you know, I haven’t been a hater in a long time. I am worried about rot & driver issues (especially if I want to play a couple of games), but I’ve used Windows for long periods of time and know I could be productive. Linux? No idea!

    I took a quick look at both Surface Book and the pricing scared me off. Well, that and The Wirecutter didn’t list them at the top, and I was drowning in options without that as a guide.

    More than anything else, the actual experience of shopping / looking for details on Windows machines was the most frustrating.

    Surface Book

    I took a look at Surface Books just now:

    • The i5 13.5" with 256GB drive is $1699 (Microsoft Store)
    • The i7 version is $2099 (Microsoft Store)

    Of course, both are also the older 6th gen Intel chips. And, not to be discounted, they are full touchscreen + stylus tablets.

    Surface 4

    I am super intrigued by this. For me, it’s in the same class as the iPad Pro, but since it’s Windows everywhere, you do have a full professional desktop-class operating system.

    In my article I didn’t go down the “can I use an iPad Pro with a keyboard case” route, but Surface is a real option for me I think.

    • 12.3" touchscreen, Core i5 with 8GB memory and 256GB drive, $1299
    • Core i7 $1599

    Same link for both at Microsoft Store.

    Considering Microsoft

    I definitely would consider buying any of these. A MacBook Air 13" i7/256GB is $1349 and the MacBook Pro 13" TouchBar i5/256GB is $1799.

    Neither are completely fair apples to apples comparisons, but they’re close. I am mentally applying a tax to the switch to Windows, so on price alone the MBAir or MBPro are price competitive.

    The Surface 4 with the i5 would seem to be the closest for me in use case, (small) size, price, and performance. As a bonus, it really is a tablet.

    Thanks for the prompt, now I have this option diagrammed out as well!

    → 12:55 PM, Oct 31   •  Blog
  • I don’t think I was whining.

    I don’t think I was whining. I’m disappointed that my ideal trade off of the MBAir 11" doesn’t exist any more.

    And so, it’s time to explore other options. I thought I’d share these explorations out loud.

    I haven’t seriously run a Linux desktop in many years, so I look forward to experimenting with that. I might even invest in a low-cost Chromebook for that.

    → 8:01 AM, Oct 31   •  Blog
  • I think tablets are great.

    I think tablets are great.

    I didn’t really go into exploring whether I could do 80% of my work on an iPad Pro with a keyboard case.

    For a development environment, I haven’t seen any apps that support touch in a laptop screen configuration. More generally, I haven’t explored touch apps that work in this mode.

    I think the convertible configuration, where you can flip over the touch screen completely and use your laptop as a big tablet, is definitely interesting.

    Do you know of any apps that are built for “poke at your screen” mode of a traditional laptop?

    → 7:39 AM, Oct 31   •  Blog
  • Surveying my next laptop options

    There are a ton of articles flooding out about what people think of Apple’s latest machines, or what their focus on mass market computing means. I’d be interested in hearing what your current machine is, what apps or use cases keep you on the Mac (or drive you from it, in the case of VR!).

    → 12:05 AM, Oct 31   •  Blog
  • Product Metrics for Digital Companies

    About the NACO Academy

    NACO Academy is a newly launched investor education program designed to develop higher levels of knowledge and skill among Angel investors across Canada. With its specialized Canadian content, the Academy’s ultimate goal is to increase the efficacy of Angel investments in growing entrepreneurial firms. Angels will be able to reach higher levels of success and impact through a comprehensive curriculum of course modules covering the most important aspects of Angel investing activity.

    Contact the NACO team or Boris Mann to book this course.

    → 1:01 PM, Oct 29   •  Blog
  • All about Unfurling

    I’m just starting to think about interesting use cases for unfurling and embedding in unique ways. Have challenges getting unfurls to work the way you want? Have questions about getting your platform to do unfurling or embedding well? Do you have a fun unfurling hack to share? Tell me about it in a response!

    → 3:05 PM, Sep 30   •  Blog
  • Beer with Canadians at Hive Colab

    I know other attendees took pictures and video of the event, or might have thoughts to share on what they got out of the meeting. Please use #BeerWithCanadians on social media to help us find it, or tweet at @bmann. Ronald already posted a great piece about my mention of Kampala’s favorite street food, the ROLEX.

    → 1:05 AM, Sep 24   •  Blog
  • Uganda Medium Reading

    Are there other blogs, Twitter accounts, or other sources of Kampala / Uganda information that you can recommend? I’m especially interested if it intersects with tech, but really I’m looking to read and learn widely.

    → 9:11 PM, Sep 18   •  Blog
  • Kira Road Hike

    Yup, jet lag is hitting. Woke up in the middle of the night and doing photo editing and writing since I can’t sleep. An unedited stream of photos is up on Flickr. Not really working out for me, especially since the photos need editing. I’ve got Snapseed on my phone which is working well. But now all the blah unedited originals are on Flickr.

    I am intermittently using Swarm / Foursquare to check in to places. I’ll do more of that when I have data on my phone.

    → 8:57 PM, Sep 18   •  Blog
  • A building block. Which is my shorthand for an existing community, space, organization, etc.

    A building block. Which is my shorthand for an existing community, space, organization, etc.

    For instance, in Quebec City, I noticed how old everything was, and how much private & public money had been invested for hundreds of years in that city.

    (I don’t think I would put Quebec City on my short list)

    I don’t know where else I might move to or what criteria I would use to pick. Rachael prefers a temperate climate, but could deal with cold winters (not hot summers).

    Opportunity is a big word. But it might come from a low cost of living, so you can afford to invest in your own opportunities.

    More art & culture.

    Bigger companies dreaming bigger dreams.

    We’ll see.

    → 3:59 PM, Sep 14   •  Blog
  • 500 Words A Day: The Complicated Dance of Place And Self

    I thought I was going to go more straightforward into talking about Vancouver, but apparently I needed to detour through my childhood and teenage years first. That’s all for today, and an early night at that!

    → 9:07 PM, Sep 13   •  Blog
  • 500 Words A Day: Cooking as Jazz

    I had a lovely Persian meal at a friend’s place tonight, but I prepped a meal for later this week before going out. I was thinking about Persian flavours, but I’m not really familiar with that style of cooking yet so it was a bit all over the place. I made a piece of pork belly in a cast-iron Dutch oven. Carrots, cauliflower stalks, onions, chopped garlic, yellow mustard seed, ground coriander, coarse salt, chili pepper, kaffir lime leaves, and figs. Cooked covered for a couple of hours at 300. Everything seems to have melted together nicely, with rich sweet figs and soft onions. I’ll heat it up later this week, with a little finishing broil of the pork belly.

    → 12:25 AM, Sep 12   •  Blog
  • Connecting to Uganda

    Connecting to Uganda

    I’m going to Kampala, Uganda for a week, and will be connecting with the local tech community

    Next Friday, I’m getting on a plane and flying to Uganda. This will be my first time visiting anywhere on the African continent. I’ve done a little bit of research and tried to make connections with people ahead of time, but I feel like I really don’t know what to expect.

    The reason I’m going is actually for a consulting project. Ed Levinson, who I’ve worked with for many years, asked me to come and work with a company he has invested in, Ensibuuko. The story of how Ed has connections in Uganda and ended up making this investment is itself an interesting one.

    The crowned crane is the national bird of Uganda (Photo Luz D Montego Espuela, Flickr)

    A bit about Uganda

    As I said, my experience with Africa in general and Uganda in particular are basically zero.

    I started at the wikipedia page for Uganda: a landlocked country in East Africa, on the shores of the gigantic Lake Victoria. At 37 million people, “the world’s second most populous landlocked country after Ethiopia”. The official languages are Swahilli and English, with half a dozen other languages also widely spoken.

    There are seven telecommunications companies serving over 21 million subscribers in a population of over 34 million. More than 95% of internet connections are made using mobile phones. — Wikipedia

    Yes, mobile is big. But it’s not smartphones being widely used by the mass market today. Ensibuuko is building mobile banking for SACCO’s (a type of small credit union), and the primary end user interface is SMS on featurephones.

    Kampala, where I’ll be working, is the largest city, with a population just over 1.5 million people.

    I wasn’t sure how to fly there. Turns out, there are a lot of different options, including flying from Vancouver to China and onwards “the other way around” as I thought of it. But actually it’s pretty simple. My route takes me from Vancouver to Chicago, from Chicago to Brussels, and from Brussels direct to Entebbe, the airport outside of Kampala. Brussels Air has these direct flights, so it’s just a matter of making it from Vancouver to a city that Brussels Air services.

    Asking my network for Uganda connections

    I talked to a number of people ahead of time (FaceTime, Skype, and WhatsApp for a “voice” call, although virtually everyone there was also introduced / connected to me through WhatsApp), and got a number of insights about the state of things on the ground.

    The super-secret Canadian #ehlist connected me to Peter Park, whose company ConnectHealth is based in Nairobi, Kenya. Peter was accepted into the Y-Combinator Fellowship program to start ConnectHealth, which is building a mobile doctor booking & clinic management software.

    We had a great discussion about choice of tech and communications. For instance, while many new tech projects in North America are built on Ruby or NodeJS, in Africa PHP is prevalent. In part, because if you hope to hire engineers, that is the coding language that most people know. On email, Peter told me many people don’t check their inboxes at all regularly, because they are filled with spam and too much of a hassle to deal with unless someone tells you they are sending an email.

    Peter also told me about Africa’s Talking, a Twilio replacement, if we need to build more SMS-based services. I also saw that he was using Intercom on his website, which gives me confidence that we can use it for Ensibuuko as well. Peter had shared connections with folks based in Kampala and passed me on (while also letting me know that Ultimate Frisbee and tech have a strong cross over in Africa, just like here in Vancouver).

    Next, leading member of the Mosquito Mafia (aka people from Winnipeg) Mark Fromson of LocalSolo introduced me to Joel Bellenson. Joel was an early pioneer in bioinformatics with Pangea Systems, where one of his cofounders was an engineer from Uganda. He lived in Vancouver’s Commercial Drive neighbourhood for many years, and moved to Kampala, Uganda in 2012. Here’s Joel on Ugandan television. I’m looking forward to hearing more from Joel on the ground in Kampala.

    My last introduction into Uganda was introduced twice, through different connections, so I knew this was going to be good. One was global startup incubator 1776, the other was my friend Paschal (who is from Uganda and went to school here in Vancouver). Both connected me into HiveColab, a co-working and accelerator space right in Kampala. I had a great call with TMS Ruge, learning about HiveColab, a bit about the state of the tech startup ecosystem in Uganda, and his startup, Raintree Farms.

    Meeting the local tech community through HiveColab

    My week in Kampala will mainly be spent working with the Ensibuuko team. But whenever I travel for business, I do try and connect with the local tech community. I’ve run “Beers with Canadians” in San Francisco and Dublin, and in general try and run community events to see what kind of connections can get made.

    From the HiveColab About page

    The team at HiveColab graciously agreed to host an evening event on Thursday, September 22nd, from 4pm to 7pm at the HiveColab space. You can register on Eventbrite at Vancouver Canada Meets Kampala Tech. If you know someone in Kampala, please ask them to come — we’d love to meet them!

    Connecting Vancouver & Kampala

    I’ve reached out to a handful of local Vancouver companies to give me some classic startup company swag — stickers, t-shirts, anything else small and portable — to give out to the HiveColab crew.

    Thanks to Axiom Zen, Mobify, Buddybuild, and Unbounce for stepping up so far.

    Are you a Vancouver tech company and want to give me something to take along? Drop it off at the SFU VentureLabs front desk, Harbour Centre 12th Floor, 555 W Hastings, attention: Boris Mann / Open Angel (latest end of day Wednesday, Sept. 14th).

    Once I meet the team at HiveColab on the ground, I hope to make more connections. Code mentoring, peer sessions, exchanges — who knows what we might make happen when we learn about each others’ communities.

    I’m excited about connecting with Uganda, and I can’t wait to share what I’ll learn.

    → 12:19 PM, Sep 10   •  Blog
  • Email is a Team Sport

    Tell me about your email loves and hates. Tell me a sordid story about LinkedIn Messaging and the day they removed the reply-to which contained people’s real emails. This was a 500 Words a Day post that graduated to being a Real Blog Post™!

    → 10:51 PM, Sep 9   •  Blog
  • 500 Words A Day: Working on the Future of Work

    I missed 500 words yesterday. I looked at the clock at 11:45pm, and just couldn’t do it. It’s 11:10pm now, and I don’t want to miss another day. This post started out as a response to Stowe Boyd’s post on Work Processing, but I’m not focused enough to write about that right now, so it ended up being more of a short 500 Words post.

    My grand plan of morning writing hasn’t worked out. I am writing a LOT, just barely finding the time to squeeze in writing here. It helps when people leave comments and seem to be enjoying even these short little writings. Thank you!

    → 11:35 PM, Sep 8   •  Blog
  • I grew up on Bowen Island (my parents moved there when I was 4).

    I grew up on Bowen Island (my parents moved there when I was 4). I feel very lucky to have had a childhood there.

    I haven’t every really commuted from there. I’ve done it for a bit here and there, but it makes for long days.

    Like all of Greater Vancouver, housing prices are up, and there is a lack of rental stock.

    Thinking long term, I’d love to make remote working feasible, which could mean living even further away from Vancouver.

    Why is it your 10 (or 2!) year plan? What are you thinking about? Why Bowen?

    → 10:51 PM, Sep 6   •  Blog
  • 500 Words A Day: Should you move to Vancouver?

    End of day right before I go to bed really isn’t the best time for 500 Words. I’ve already written words in many many other places by this time. And pretty much I’m a cheaty-mccheaterson in not getting quite to 500, which really is the point. I’m going to try for a morning run tomorrow.

    → 10:44 PM, Sep 6   •  Blog
  • 500 Words A Day: September Rolls In

    Without a prompt, I got caught at the end of the day needing to write my 500 words. Is it cheating to write about dinner?

    → 8:19 PM, Sep 5   •  Blog
  • 500 Words A Day: Zooming in on Bowen

    When you get this message, stop wherever you are and describe your location in great details (500 words of it). Everything counts, people, furniture, smells, sounds!

    I’m giving Christina Wodtke’s daily writing prompts a try. You too can sign up for the email list »

    → 10:18 AM, Sep 4   •  Blog
  • Why cross-post to Medium?

    Why cross-post to Medium?

    Medium is both blogging interface and network. Just like Tumblr is. Any reason you don’t cross post to Tumblr? Or to Facebook Posts?

    I see your posts here, and sometimes like them. But I don’t think of them as real posts. I know you’re cross posting, and I know you don’t really engage here. I’ll go to your site directly and comment if I feel strongly about it. If I were to link to a post of yours, I’d link to the URL on your site.

    I enjoy Medium-the-blogging-interface and post my long form writing to a publication, with my own domain. I recommend it to people. Even without getting your own domain, if it makes people hit publish rather than not blogging, that’s great.

    There are various other interface features I like. Responses are better than comments for me-the-commenter. More like a reblog on Tumblr. I’d never write something this long in your comments. Highlights, Twitter and other embeds.

    I also enjoy Medium-the-network. I did see your post here and am responding to it. I use it a bit like an RSS reader of old, the discovery is pretty good, and I follow several tags. I don’t think a lot of people know about tag following, and I find good stuff from it. I can recommend something. I can highlight good passages.

    But all of these network features mean you need to hang out here.

    Do you want a few extra views? Do you consider it a service for Medium-the-network? Then maybe you should cross post.

    But it feels like more work for you, and it isn’t your real site.

    If I were to try and answer the question for some other random blogger who isn’t Brad Feld, who just wants to capture a few extra eyeballs and clicks, I’d say No! Please don’t cross-post. And I’d ask Medium to tweak their algorithm to down vote cross posts.

    It’s been fun after 15 years of blogging to have these types of meta discussions again.

    → 8:45 AM, Aug 27   •  Blog
  • An Idiot, Blogging

    An Idiot, Blogging

    There is a great little post floating around that tells us to Blog, You Idiots.

    Having recently setup a publication here on Medium where my proper writing goes, I can potentially feel freer to scribble things here that aren’t long, or well thought, or really about anything. Just a blog post.

    But then I think about how this post will be married to its Medium URL, so I don’t really own it. And having a Domain of One’s Own is something that I care about. Really care about, so much so that moving on to decentralized systems is actually what we should be doing.

    So maybe I’ll post on my little Tumblr, where I own the domain and small, personal things like my garden have a home.

    But really, if I’m going to experiment with decentralized systems, shouldn’t I be writing over on Steemit?

    Or maybe I’ll just hit post.

    → 8:27 AM, Aug 24   •  Blog
  • Activating great teams everywhere

    Accelerate in this context could mean a number of things: take an existing company and provide some operating capital, learn from best practices, or even as simple as executing on consulting work by plugging into a wider backbone of opportunities. A kind of in-sourcing or co-op. We don’t have good existing structures or explanations for this sort of thing, other than perhaps the concept of keiretsu — “a set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings” (Wikipedia).

    You may not think of Vancouver as a small or regional area, but it has challenges in starting a new consulting business. We’re a branch office town, with comparably small businesses. With a lack of larger enterprises, this means a lack of larger projects, and more generally smaller budgets and less interest in interesting, cutting-edge project.

    This means that a consulting company in Vancouver needs to invest in business development in Toronto, New York, London, Chicago, SF and beyond. With the high cost of living, and less access to clients, Vancouver companies have a disadvantage to larger markets and a disadvantage vs. more remote areas.

    Can business development be shared and streamlined? Can we break the one company model, the agency model, the freelancer model and put it together into a community of like-minded business owners that work together?

    Thanks to Bud Caddell for continuing to talk out loud about his ideas (read his whole tweetstorm) and evolution of his company, NOBL. NOBL’s Future of Work site is an example of some of the work they do consulting with larger organizations.

    Remote, distributed, and new types of business organizations are part of this #futureofwork.

    → 8:27 AM, Aug 1   •  Blog
  • New (& old) communications mechanisms in AR/MR

    New (& old) communications mechanisms in AR/MR

    Interesting to think we’re going to see new takes on email & messaging, where each hardware manufacturer builds their own client.

    Part of this is because each hardware device has divergent input & output mechanisms (as well as different SDKs), which leads to different UX optimizations.

    At the same time, the commonality of a 3D plane to design on should provide some similarities.

    One area of interest is the re-use of existing accounts. Users of AR/MR systems aren’t going to get new email accounts, so how to link or create settings for your IMAP, Google, or Exchange account will need to be done for all systems. It’s these unglorious areas of designing a setting or account linking interface which we’ll need to get right for good early experiences.

    Much like setting up a router or IoT device, perhaps we’ll use a companion mobile website and our smartphones to do initial setup, or for other tasks that are “settings page” intensive.

    We’ve already seen the rise of QR-code-like symbols in WeChat, Snapchat, and even FB Messenger, so this might be another mechanism to link between systems.

    → 7:25 AM, Jul 28   •  Blog
  • The other time “Head of” titles make sense is when you’re just getting started.

    The other time “Head of” titles make sense is when you’re just getting started.

    Other than CEO and in some cases CTO, other C-level titles don’t make a lot of sense. And VP titles definitely don’t make sense on an 8 person team.

    As you say, the “Head of” leaves room for the team to grow and shakeout, either graduating into a C-level or VP title, or hiring someone into that role that that person can learn from.

    → 8:41 AM, Jul 26   •  Blog
  • Ah Ha! at AngelFest 2016

    Boris Mann is a COO-for-hire that likes building products and businesses. He is a Founding Director of Open Angel, a non-profit society dedicated to connecting founders & funders. Find out more and subscribe to his fortnightly newsletter at bmannconsulting.com.

    → 2:01 PM, Jul 18   •  Blog
  • What is a Startup Foundry?

    Boris Mann is a COO-for-hire that likes building products and businesses. Signup for his fortnightly newsletter at bmannconsulting.com, or checkout the archive for past issues.

    → 8:07 AM, Jul 15   •  Blog
  • Hey Alan, this a good post topic that doesn’t get enough ink from a Canadian perspective — for both…

    Hey Alan, this a good post topic that doesn’t get enough ink from a Canadian perspective — for both founders & funders.

    On this point about SAFE — do you have any personal opinions on the SAFE? Or issues with particular terms in it?

    I’ve written extensively on Canadian Early Stage Term Sheets — like the fact that we don’t have any common terms at all in Canada, which means that there is a dearth of founder education on the topic. Whereas the US has multiple well documented term sheets.

    (yes, I understand that multiple standard docs aren’t ideal, but the US ones are all pretty similar with the same intent embedded in them)

    I don’t see anything wrong with the Canadian-ized SAFE, other than I’d like a canonical one that we can all talk about. Similarily, as 500 Startups 500CAN fund revs up, I assume they’ll be using a Canadian-ized version of their KISS documents.

    So far, I don’t see enough Canadian angel investors offering their own term sheet (waiting for the startup to offer them one), or I keep seeing various hand-rolled term sheets with wacky, bespoke terms that just cause legal wrangling and fees for everyone involved.

    What do you think? Should we have a broader discussion about both valuation and common terms in Canada?

    → 10:00 PM, Jul 12   •  Blog
  • A Follow-Up on Using Highrise CRM

    Boris Mann is a COO-for-hire that likes building products and businesses. Find out more and subscribe to his fortnightly newsletter at bmannconsulting.com.

    → 1:55 PM, Jun 28   •  Blog
  • Sample Consulting Agreement

    Have questions about contracting or consulting services? Contact Boris » (who is most definitely not a lawyer)

    → 11:11 AM, Jun 22   •  Blog
  • A Personal CRM

    Boris Mann is a COO-for-hire that likes building products and businesses. Find out more and subscribe to his fortnightly newsletter at bmannconsulting.com.

    → 11:32 AM, Jun 13   •  Blog
  • Google Makes it Clear: Mobile Will be Mass Market VR

    HUMAN
    Bringing you the parts of the future
    that are ready to work today.

    We’d love to talk to you: hello@ishuman.co | @IsHumanCo

    → 3:07 PM, May 18   •  Blog
  • From Flickr to Self-hosted Photos

    For the record, I think that Wikipedia or the Internet Archive would be much better homes than Adobe. Thinking about the Flickr Commons alone, never mind the people who set permissive licenses on their personal photos, we probably need to be thinking of these digital artifacts as legacies that should be part of a commons.

    → 5:03 PM, May 14   •  Blog
  • If you made this a publication instead of a user account, you could get people to contribute…

    If you made this a publication instead of a user account, you could get people to contribute articles.

    Publications are starting to get all sorts of other interesting features, too.

    → 11:52 PM, May 9   •  Blog
  • IDC Forecasts for VR/AR Hardware Units

    HUMAN
    Bringing you the parts of the future
    that are ready to work today.

    We’d love to talk to you: hello@ishuman.co | @IsHumanCo

    → 11:48 AM, Apr 25   •  Blog
  • If you poke around a bit, you’ll see that there is an existing AR market out there, used primarily…

    If you poke around a bit, you’ll see that there is an existing AR market out there, used primarily for business purposes.

    It is held back by older technology, but more importantly, by older distribution mechanisms: proprietary hardware and proprietary development platforms, with only custom deployment at high cost and high risk.

    Two interesting devices in the market today are the Epson Moverio and ODG R-7 glasses:

    Epson Moverio Next Generation Smart Eyewear - Epson America, Inc
    Discover the Epson Moverio Smart Eyewear product family, including the new Epson Moverio BT-300.www.epson.com
    ODG - System - Products - R-7 Smartglasses
    We are excited to make this groundbreaking device available to our customers with a Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 805 processor…www.osterhoutgroup.com

    The ODG glasses are what Microsoft licensed (plus patents) as the basis for HoloLens. They are stuck on Android 4.4, not exactly something that is current from a developer platform perspective.

    As far as I know, the Moverio is also on this old version of Android.

    So to your point, a lot of these platforms — both current and older — have the same issue: they need to focus on developer experience and developer adoption to make the apps, content, and experiences that will attract more businesses.

    Consumer AR? Yes, it’s definitely somewhere around 5 years off — or around the amount of time it will take to build sunglass sized / shaped smart glasses.

    Business AR? The Meta & HoloLens demos are ushering in the next wave, today. Given the price points and shipping projections, it’s a year to a year and a half behind where VR is, which is just starting to ship this year.

    Stay tuned!

    → 2:55 PM, Apr 4   •  Blog
  • VR will be Mobile

    HUMAN
    Bringing you the parts of the future
    that are ready to work today.

    We’d love to talk to you: hello@ishuman.co | @IsHumanCo

    → 7:01 PM, Mar 13   •  Blog
  • March 16th Event: There’s a Chip for That, presented by ARROW

    Interested in sponsoring? Email us info@wwyvr.com

    Organized by HUMAN in cooperation with Wearable IoT World.

    → 6:02 PM, Feb 26   •  Blog
  • Sample Confidentiality Agreement

    I am not a lawyer. Your lawyer will usually provide you a template such as this either for low cost or for free as part of their services.

    → 3:14 AM, Feb 16   •  Blog
  • Post Parse Prototyping

    I’m actually going to end with one more quote from Keith Horwood’s Hello Nodal intro post:

    I primarily view code as a form of communication with other developers. We don’t write code for computers. We write code for ourselves and each other. Computers read binary. Humans read JavaScript. Nodal is a product for humans.
    → 11:43 PM, Feb 14   •  Blog
  • Bots will speak English before they speak JSON

    Bots will speak English before they speak JSON

    AKA How do you know if two replicants are chatting?

    I responded to Dennis Mortensen’s tweet (he’s the founder of X.AI, a “personal assistant that schedules meetings for you”) on bots using English:

    I was pointing out that it depends on the transport mechanism — that is, how the two agents are “communicating”. A machine readable meta-element in the communications could indicate that there is a bot-to-bot format to use, e.g. a JSON endpoint.

    Dennis is right with this last comment, especially in the context of trying to bet or guess whether one bot is talking to another.

    But what if you weren’t guessing? I suggested that an X-header in email as a pseudo standard might be an interesting start for early leaders like X.AI.

    (I couldn’t find an authoritative link for learning more about X-headers in email. It’s an extension mechanism to put extra information in email messages, and Dyn has an article that talks about Meetup.com’s usage of some custom ones.)

    Having two bots “speak” to each other over email could lead to some strange things.

    For one, their internal systems would get trained on bot-to-bot interactions, when they should be optimized for bot-to-human. On the other hand, the efficiency of passing around chunks of machine readable code is, I think, desirable.

    Or at least, the two bots could expose their interfaces to each other — their API as it were. And then we’re pretty close to the holy grail of two systems passing back and forth data that they know what it is.

    Bot Literacy

    AI and chatbots is a topic we kick around a lot at the office.

    Job title of the future: Strong AI Groomer
    – Ryan Betts

    We ended up having a discussion about the wave of messaging-based interfaces — businesses talking to customers using Facebook Messenger, or LINE, or WeChat.

    Just like rudimentary canned responses in email, could bots be used to handle communications at scale? (yes)

    Imagine someone talking to a bot through a web chat interface getting suggestions on what to buy on an ecommerce site. Is the general public going to know the difference between a calm and helpful chat bot and a well-trained customer service agent?

    Will the bot suggest discounts if you say phrases indicating that you’re going to leave the site and shop elsewhere?

    And finally, will people pass around conversation logs that result in discounts? Can you “glitch” the bot into unlocking its inner workings, and game the system?

    Bot literacy is something for bots, but it’s something for people, too.

    Will some of us want the “command line interface” for the bot, because it’s faster and more efficient than having to walk through a conversational tree?

    Economics 2.0

    With bot communications and Ethereum-powered smart contracts, it’s time to brush up on our science-fiction reading to see what the future might have in store for us:

    “The crew upload their virtual states into new bodies, and find that they are all now bankrupt, unable to compete with the new Economics 2.0 model practised by the posthuman intelligences of the inner system”

    – Charles Stross, Accelerando (Wikipedia entry)

    And, of course, Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed very much comes to mind as well.

    Just like getting good at framing Google search queries lets you find information, having a certain literacy of interacting with bots (or understand that it is a bot you are communicating with) will become important.

    I totally want an AI bot that does nothing but reads all my past tweets, bookmarks, and blog posts and tells me what I mean!

    → 11:08 AM, Dec 6   •  Blog
  • Very interesting. We currently use Quip for documents / notes alongside Slack.

    Very interesting. We currently use Quip for documents / notes alongside Slack.

    Mainly this is because Slack Posts don’t yet support multi-user editing.

    For Howdy, posting to Slack Posts would be great.

    I’m also interested in Slack bots that help with things like staff onboarding. The new person could ask questions: if the answer already exists, the bot replies with the answer and a link to where the answer is.

    If the answer doesn’t exist, the bot asks a list of existing staff for the answer.

    This is where I see true power in building up long term persistent knowledge inside companies.

    For bonus points: harvest questions and answers by looking for Slack messages that end in ?, and collate the answers.

    Almost like a real time Quora.

    More bonus points: suggest answers from Quora!

    In any case – well done, Howdy! Meetings is not something we do a lot of in our small team, but we’ll give it a try for some of these new features.

    → 11:24 AM, Nov 15   •  Blog
  • Explaining Stock Options to Employees

    Explaining Stock Options to Employees

    Buffer describes how they do this, as part of their open / transparent work culture

    This is a very good description of how to explain stock options. Buffer’s basic option is $10K higher salary vs. 30% more equity.

    How We Explain Stock Options to Team Members & How Much Money They Would Make
    A while back Danielle Morill asked this question on Twitter: Explaining equity is something we try to do as best as we…open.buffer.com

    Buffer’s article is from the point of view of the company owner. As an employee, this post from Hunter Walk is good reading:

    Sorry Startup Employee #100, Your Equity Probably Won't Make You Rich
    Bloomberg's article about lower-than-expected financial gains from startup IPOs for midlevel employees stuck in craw…hunterwalk.com
    → 1:40 PM, Nov 5   •  Blog
  • NACO Summit 2015 Summary for Capital Investment Network

    Boris has been active in the Vancouver startup ecosystem for over a decade. He co-founded Bootup Labs, the first startup accelerator in Canada. Boris is also the co-founder of Full Stack, an experimental early stage investment fund.

    Boris is currently COO and Business Design Lead for HUMAN, a product design consultancy focusing on body-worn computing. He helps run the Open Angel, a non-profit angel group and investment pitch series.

    → 10:39 PM, Oct 18   •  Blog
  • Alan Cooper on the need for the independence of the external design consultancy

    Link: Alan Cooper on the need for the independence of the external design consultancy

    The entire relentless onslaught of digital technology needs to be shaped and designed to serve the needs of its users rather than the needs of its creators. The salient characteristic of design in the 21st century is that we need one whole hell of a lot of it.

    — Alan Cooper

    A UX Legend On The Much-Rumored Death Of The Design Firm
    Alan Cooper is a pioneer in the software world: In the 1970's, he created seminal business software for microcomputers…www.fastcodesign.com

    HUMAN
    Bringing you the parts of the future
    that are ready to work today.

    We’d love to talk to you: hello@ishuman.co | @IsHumanCo

    → 10:15 PM, Oct 9   •  Blog
  • This is exactly what I’ve seen.

    This is exactly what I’ve seen.

    Canadian founders who are pitching to local investors are getting the signal that true venture pitches aren’t realistic.

    So they are adjusting their “product” – their current investment round + pitch – to the “market” of Canadian investors. But that product is completely not a fit (as you’ve described) for the market of US investors.

    On the other hand, Waterloo based companies have a direct pipeline into YCombinator and US investors.

    So because Canadian investors at the earliest stages aren’t investing true venture capital, we are losing the biggest thinking deals to the US.

    And Canadian entrepreneurs – who get told they need to aim bigger – in reality are not getting funded locally when they do think big.

    The outcome is that the best “think big” founders are increasingly skipping the local market.

    → 2:31 PM, Oct 7   •  Blog
  • Welcome to Medium, NDP!

    Welcome to Medium, NDP!

    It’s great to see you embracing writing on here. With the animated GIFs, you’re a little confused, though. A lot of the readers come here for long form, nuanced writing.

    It’s great to be able to highlight important quotes, or dive right into a paragraph and make a comment or ask a question.

    And of course, the “responses” are not like comments on other platforms. You have to think about what you’re going to say, and it encourages (again) longer, more well thought out writing.

    I’d love to see an article with charts and facts. And for sure — throw in some quotable quotes that are about the length of a tweet, that works well, too.

    But cool it on the GIFs, please.

    → 1:19 PM, Sep 27   •  Blog
  • PhoneVR Cardboard Showcase at VR City Vancouver

    VR City is an organization supporting the growth of the VR industry. We connect cities with people working in VR across film, gaming, and interactive, as well as activating your local marketplace by showcasing regular VR Demo Nights. Follow along at @VRCityCo

    → 12:07 PM, Sep 15   •  Blog
  • Pro apps on iPad

    (the above written quickly on the Medium app on iPhone. A few more bits added below)

    I’m not saying the appstore is a perfect platform. Emanuel Sa from Bohemian Coding points this out in the same comment linked above:

    But the biggest problem is the platform. Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices due to the lack of trials.

    It will be interesting to see what — if anything — Apple does to support the development of a pro ecosystem.

    My perhaps somewhat flippant comment about moving beyond unit sales points directly at the opportunity. Sketch Mirror is another tiny little unit sale that doesn’t really do all of what people need. My company pays for Marvel every single month — but live in Sketch. Maybe Sketch should have a longer talk with their SaaS partners about some revenue sharing or affiliate models.

    → 10:00 PM, Sep 14   •  Blog
  • PhoneVR and Powered Headsets are still a useful way to think about the VR Headset landscape

    HUMAN
    Bringing you the parts of the future
    that are ready to work today.

    We’d love to talk to you: hello@ishuman.co | @IsHumanCo

    → 11:50 AM, Aug 26   •  Blog
  • Company Email Updates

    Keeping investors & advisors up to date with monthly email updates

    Any company that is serious about growing its business should be tracking some metrics and reporting to people outside the company. The very act of writing those updates are a good time for you to reflect and hold yourself — as one of the founders of the company — accountable.

    My belief is that you should get in the habit of sending an update like this as soon as you’re actually up and running as a business. It’s a must and will be required as soon as you have investors, so why not practice your update hygiene early.

    Who should I send this update to?

    If you haven’t taken any outside funding yet, advisors, prospective investors, and other close allies should be on your email update list. You might not include highly detailed KPIs, but rather focus on the written updates and the asks.

    When I meet with someone whose business I am truly interested in, I ask them to “keep me up to date on progress”. That’s code for “add me to your advisor update email”.

    What should I use to send this email?

    The simplest is to BCC a small group of people. Then it’s up to you to track whether you’re getting feedback and/or your linked information is being read.

    Your CRM (such as Streak, which plugs straight into Gmail) usually has a simple way to track opens and mail merge a group of people marked as investor / advisor.

    Mailchimp is a bit heavyweight for this sort of thing, but their other product TinyLetter is nice and simple, and you can receive replies directly or manage them inside of the TL interface.

    Templates

    The basic template of what you should send is simple. You want a repeatable format that people get

    • Metrics: the basic numbers that you use to track your business.
    • Good / Bad / Ugly: what are some things that happened this month? Be brief, include links if relevant.
    • Asks: this could be anything from sharing a recent blog post on Twitter, helping to fill an open position you’re hiring for, or an ask for an intro at a set of companies. Be direct on what you’re looking for.

    The articles below go into much more detail into what you should be including.

    Investor Update Email Template
    You just closed your $1m seed round four weeks ago, and investors are starting to contact you to see how things are…codingvc.com
    The Investor Update Template
    I always look forward to letters from my TechStars portfolio companies. They are short, informative, and to this eye…tydanco.com

    This last one has a one click button to open their template directly into a template in your Gmail.

    Update My VC
    Update My VC is a modern guide to keeping in touch with your investors. Use our Email Template to send your VCs a…updatemyvc.com

    → 4:31 PM, Jul 24   •  startup, Blog
  • Coffee Dictation: Voice in Public

    With watches and VR on the horizon, what does it mean to use voice as an input method?

    At HUMAN, we’re thinking about exploring things like bone conduction speakers and microphones, such as this Non-Audible Murmur Microphone:

    What have your experiences been with voice in public? Do you feel uncomfortable? How do you feel about overhearing other people commanding their computers?

    → 1:25 PM, Mar 4   •  Blog
  • EverWiki

    EverWiki is a wiki-like structure / interface built on top of Evernote. The goal is to provide an interface to organize and interlink your Evernote notes, as well as to provide a structure to manage permissions, notifications, and comments on those notes.

    Update July 5th, 2020: I have no idea where this little fragment of writing came from. Likely something with an interface to WordPress I was testing, and writing up something I would like to see. Today, we have tools like Roam.

    → 5:05 PM, Sep 9   •  Personal, Blog
  • Spot prawn dinner



    20130525-071732.jpg

    Helped make a delicious dinner with friends last night. We had spot prawns fresh from the dock and made them three ways.

    One was raw, and they were so sweet. Including some brain sucking.

    The second way was spicy with hot pepper paste, red onions, and fresh tomatoes sautéed in butter & olive oil.

    The last was in a cream sauce. We made a roux and then added prawn broth from boiling heads & shells, plus cream. We added Parmesan and green peas, and added in a handful of minced, browned garlic. The nuttiness of the garlic went well with the sweet peas and cream. We served this over fresh fettuccine.

    Hmm - I guess technically four ways. We took the boiled heads & tossed with hot chilli paste, garlic, red onion, peanut oil, sesame oil, and some more garlic and broiled them in the oven. Best when deep fried, but the shells do get softer & you crunch them & the lovely brains and they’re very good.

    (Photo by @mightyvanilla)

    → 7:17 AM, May 25   •  Food, Spot prawn, Blog
  • Wise Monkeys | Trinidad Garlic Pork

    Wise Monkeys | Trinidad Garlic Pork.

    I can’t wait to try this some time.

    Update July 5, 2020: link replaced with Internet Archive, and then I gave it a more permanent home on AllTheBest.Recipes.

    → 10:53 AM, Feb 6   •  AllTheBestRecipes, Food, pork, recipe, image, garlic, trinidad, Wise Monkeys, Blog
  • Leftover turkey curry

    Carrot, potato, turkey curry by bmann
    Carrot, potato, turkey curry, a photo by bmann on Flickr.

    After figuring out the “secret” of curry from the home style recipe I found, I tried again with turkey leftovers.

    The secret is 1) toasting spices in a bit of oil (cumin, peppercorns, etc.) and 2) pureeing an onion or two and sauteing it in the toasted spice oil until the onions brown a bit.

    The pureed onions add a solid backbone to the sauce, both in terms of flavour (sweet + caramelized) and texture (no flour or other thickening agents needed).

    This was served with roti that Rachael made, which also turned out the best yet.

    → 1:41 PM, Jan 1   •  Personal, Blog
  • Broiled pork neck / cheeks with ginger, miso, cilantro

     

    Pork neck + cheeks marinating

    The neck was via Big Lou’s Butcher from Sloping Hills, and the cheeks were some of the last pork from Cutter Ranch that we prepped at Pete’s Meats. I grilled some neck in the summer and it was delicious.

    Apparently, according to Roland, I came close to doing adobo.

    The marinade was roughly as follows:

    • 2 Tbsp minced fresh ginger
    • 1 clove minced garlic
    • ½ finely chopped onion
    • ½ cup chopped cilantro
    • 1 Tbsp sesame oil
    • 1 Tbsp miso in ¼ cup water
    • 1 Tbsp soy sauce
    • 1 Tbsp spicy vinegar
    • salt & pepper
    I drained the liquid bits of the marinade and broiled the meat in the oven until the top started browning, then flipped. Broiled again until brown on that side, then added in the liquid from the marinade and put a lid on it. Cooked for another 30min at 350 degrees, then added 1 ½ cups bean sprouts and ½ cup of water, and cooked for another 10min with the lid on.

    Served over rice.

    → 11:55 AM, Dec 29   •  Food, pork, recipe, image, ginger, adobo, cilantro, pork cheek, pork neck, Blog
  • Biscuits

    J.P.’s Big Daddy Biscuits Recipe - Allrecipes.com

    I made this biscuit recipe for the second time tonight (again as an accompaniment to tomato soup). I need to remember to not roll them out so thin, because they actually steam from the inside and puff up nicely when thicker.

    → 12:33 AM, Dec 19   •  baking, Food, recipe, Link, biscuit, Blog
  • Shrubs

    Cocktail 101: How to Make Shrub Syrups | Serious Eats: Drinks.

    Hanging out with Lee & Sachi in Seattle, we dove into the world of shrubs:

    In any case, the sugar, acid, and optional alcohol preserve the fruit juice, and in fact that was one original purpose of the shrub. Prior to the invention of refrigeration, a shrub syrup was a means of preserving fruit long past its picking. Shrubs were popular in Colonial America, mixed with cool water to provide a pick-me-up on hot summer days.

     

    A proper shrub has a flavor that’s both tart and sweet, so it stimulates the appetite while quenching thirst.

    I ordered one at The Walrus and the Carpenter, a pretty fantastic oyster bar in Ballard where we had dinner.

    This got me thinking about drinking vinegars, which is somewhat a name for the syrup + vinegar that you make shrubs from. We had some in Vancouver  at The Union which was fantastic.

    So, Lee and I concocted a shrub syrup from 2 oranges simmered in simple syrup and then added some sherry vinegar.

    Lee made up a drink with Averna in it and some soda. It was pretty delicious, especially when we kept amping up the amount of sherry vinegar.

    Yep, I’m a fan. And to think, it’s supposedly a summer drink.

    Update July 5, 2020: I’ve gone on to make many more shrubs / drinking vinegars. Browse the AllTheBest.Recipes shrub tag »

    → 12:04 AM, Dec 19   •  AllTheBestRecipes, Food, Lee Lefever, Seattle, Link, Averna, Ballard, cocktails, drinking vinegar, drinks, shrub, The Union, The Walrus and the Carpenter, Blog
  • Home-style chicken curry recipe

    Home-style chicken curry recipe - Recipes - BBC Good Food.

    Modified with tomato paste + carrots + celery instead of canned tomato.

    → 7:23 PM, Dec 12   •  Food, recipe, chicken, Link, curry, Blog
  • Writing Every So Often: The Personal Essay Makes A Comeback | John Battelle's Search Blog

    In the blog-only era of the early 2000s, folks like me had our personal site, and we also watched a set of sites that we truly followed. RSS was our Twitter, and we carefully pruned a list of other folks who we’d check each day. I let about 40 or so “voices into my brain” each day, and those voices mattered to me, a lot. Most of us even created “blogrolls” – links to folks we felt were worthy of attention (really – remember those?!). And when someone wrote something noteworthy, others in the network might write a response, always with a link back.

     

    This pattern still happens, of course – that’s what I’m doing now. But it happens far less regularly, and without the clear social network that used to define communities of blogs.

    via Writing Every So Often: The Personal Essay Makes A Comeback | John Battelle’s Search BlogJohn Battelle’s Search Blog.

    I am slowly diving back into Google Reader AND reblogging items. That brief spurt of G+ sharing got some nice conversations, but… I do want things on my own site.

    Still a bit of schizophrenia about when to post here vs. when to post at links.bmannconsulting.com.

    → 11:48 PM, Dec 5   •  quote, This is Awesome, reblog, blogging, John Batelle, Blog
  • Party Monster, the making of

    [vimeo www.vimeo.com/54495310 w=400&h=300]

    Making a funky app video - Allen Pike.

    Congrats to Allen & the entire Steamclock Software team on launching Party Monster, their music DJing app for iPad and iPhone.

    → 11:21 PM, Dec 5   •  video, This is Awesome, reblog, Allen Pike, Party Monster, Steamclock Software, Blog
  • Photowalk with Ross

    Photowalk with Ross - a set on Flickr

    Photowalk with Ross - a set on Flickr.

    I went for a walk around Gastown with Ross, who lent me his “old” Nikon D90 and a 50mm lens. I definitely want this sort of lens for my camera.

    Thanks, Ross, that was fun!

    → 10:03 PM, Dec 3   •  Personal, photography, image, Nikon D90, photowalk, rosshj, Blog
  • a selection of Hunanese delicacies from Lucky Noodle (via luckyfish)

    luckyfish posted a photo:

    a selection of Hunanese delicacies from Lucky Noodle friday; spicy shredded potatoes, spicy roasted chilies, spicy cumin lamb and onions, chicken gizzards with beans and garlic and

    via a selection of Hunanese delicacies from Lucky Noodle friday; spicy shredded potatoes with garcinia cambogia extract, spicy roasted chilies, spicy cumin lamb and onions, chicken gizzards with beans and garlic and “cooling” vegetables. So delish..

    This is the same Lucky Noodle that I went to. If you’re in Vancouver, you have to try this place.

    → 8:33 PM, Dec 3   •  Vancouver, Food, Hunan, Lucky Noodle, Link, reblog, Blog
  • Santa Cthulhu

    via Laughing Squid: Santa Cthulhu, A Needle Felted Wool Sculpture For 2012.

    I have a bit of a Cthulhu obsession (as does large parts of the Internet). Merry Festivus, and may the Elder Gods not eat your soul with instant green coffee!

    → 8:13 PM, Dec 3   •  image, Cthulhu, This is Awesome, Laughing Squid, Blog
  • Braised Turkey Breast

    20121125-201558.jpg

    Paprika + thyme, with onions, mushrooms, apple, chicken stock + white wine in the braise.

    → 9:17 PM, Nov 25   •  turkey, Food, image, Blog
  • Medina Cafe breakfast

    20121015-103702.jpg

    → 10:37 AM, Oct 15   •  bacon, Food, breakfast, eggs, image, Blog
  • Class Afloat talk at Interesting Vancouver

    Last night I gave a talk at Interesting Vancouver. This picture is the one I used to start the talk - me at 18, half a life time ago, on the S/V Concordia.

    I was really nervous about the talk. I’ve told the story of my Class Afloat trip many times, but it’s so long ago that it doesn’t often come up anymore. In fact, I’m kind of reluctant to bring it up - because it was so long ago.

    But it’s been nice thinking about the time and thinking about the experiences I had.

    I called the presentation Places on a Map. There are so many stories to tell, but with only 10 minutes, I ended up telling a general arc of not only the trip, but what the program is about. Calling it Places on a Map is to have you think about the fact that we have access today to a ton of information about far away places. Wikipedia has highly detailed facts that can let you go as deep as you wish.

    But unless you’ve actually been there, and experienced that place, that’s all they are: places on a map.

    I also talked about regret a bit at the end. Having done this voyage - however long ago - it is a part of me. I can’t go outside myself and think about what might have been if I hadn’t gone. And that’s how I mostly treat regret. You’re on the path you’re on, and you may think about paths not taken. But that’s a different path: the you that is in the here and now is the sum total of all those forks in the road, and only the forks ahead of you are ones you can change.

    One of the many stories I didn’t tell is how I made it on the trip. It’s all thanks to my parents. They supported me in doing this thing, this once in a life time experience, and ultimately supported me financially so I could go. I also fund raised from my local community of Bowen Island, but it’s my parents that I have to thank the most. They were in the audience tonight, so I was glad they got to see my talk, that that experience still resonates with me so many years later.

    Thanks to everyone that came to Interesting Vancouver. If you’re interested, I have  a handful of photos uploaded on Flickr, but I am going through all the photos and will be putting together a mini-site (that link is an older work in progress).

    I’ve also set up a Class Afloat 93 - 94 alumni group on Facebook - you’re welcome to join if you were an actual alumni or a friend or family of alumni.

    → 12:22 PM, Sep 29   •  Personal, Vancouver, Museum of Vancouver, Class Afloat, Events, Interesting Vancouver, IV12, presentation, speaking, Blog
  • Red & Green Cabbage Slaw with Tahini Lemon Dressing

    Having made this salad twice now, I wanted to make sure to keep track of the recipe.

    The salad is just shredded red & green cabbage. The dressing is tahini lemon garlic, the recipe for which I found over on ohsheglows.com »

    You can skip the nutritional yeast, and whipping everything with a fork is just fine, it doesn’t need to go through the blender.

    Using the tahini made me think of Na’ama, who gave it to me. She swears that Israeli tahini is the best, and it’s hard to find here in Vancouver.

    → 9:35 PM, Aug 4   •  cabbage, coleslaw, Foodists, Food, recipe, dressing, lemon, salad, slaw, tahini, Blog
  • powell street festival this weekend, Aug 4th & 5th 2012

    All this weekend in Oppenheimer Park. Starts at 11am both Saturday & Sunday. Lots of food vendors, cool demos, Bonsai demonstrations, and so on.

    via ::: powell street festival society :::.

    → 3:38 PM, Aug 3   •  Vancouver, Events, powell street festival, Blog
  • First meal at Lucky Noodle

    Just came back from my first meal at Lucky Noodle, which is a Hunan-style Chinese restaurant at 3377 Kingsway (a couple of blocks east of Joyce).

    I heard about it from reading Fernando’s blog review about it, plus Roland saw the same thing and has been wanting to try it.

    We missed Roland this time, but Rachael and I were joined by Mark and Andrea.

    We followed Fernando’s recommendations, but with only 4 of us had to order less.

    The “code” we remembered from the menu numbers was B, I, L, #73, #37, #64. The dishes were (not in the same order):

    • Squid & Chinese Mushroom Hot Plate
    • Lamb with Cumin
    • Boiled Chicken with Special Sauce
    • Grilled Green Peppers
    • Chopped Potatoes with Chili Oil
    • Chinese Bacon with Bamboo Shoots

    The bacon was house made Hunan style - smoky & spicy.

    We also had some rice on the side, to cool our mouths from the very spicy dishes.

    The meal was great, and we’ll definitely be back to try other dishes.



    20120630-204938.jpg

    20120701-212423.jpg

    20120701-212455.jpg

    20120701-212513.jpg

    20120701-212530.jpg

    20120701-212546.jpg

    → 9:25 PM, Jun 30   •  Vancouver, Food, Chinese, restaurant, Hunan, Blog
  • Vancity fraud lock means I can't trust Interac

    I’ve just had my Vancity Interac debit card blocked for ‘confirmed skimming’. The last time this happened was about 2 weeks ago.

    Before that, it was about 3 months ago. That last time, I got my card replaced with a new chip & pin version, being assured that it was much less susceptible to fraud.

    My card has been blocked for ‘fraud’ about once a quarter since I’ve been with Vancity. I simply can’t trust my Interac card to be available as a payment tool when I need it.

    I’ve asked for more information, both in person at the branch and on the phone. Front line bank clerks have been all over the place with their answers. When I press for more details, they realize I want actual answers, and fall back to saying they can’t say more because of security.

    Which store was it? We can’t say. Did my card trigger something? Not necessarily, you might have just used your card in the general area where fraud has happened. Which area is that? We can’t say.

    When I went in 2 weeks ago, the clerk told me his own personal story. That before chip & pin, his card got blocked every few DAYS. He said “It completely changed my purchasing patterns” and went on to explain how he switched to using his credit card.

    When I asked if that was what Vancity recommended - switching to credit card usage rather than using the bank’s debit card system - he back tracked, explaining it was just a personal story.

    The adoption of Interac in Canada has been near universal. But I no longer trust using it, or at least not the debit card & associated automatic fraud detection systems that Vancity uses.

    I’ve asked several times in person & on the phone for a manager from Vancity to follow up with me, and it never happened. I’d like an explanation on what Vancity is doing to improve my experience.

    Taking time off work to reset my card, having to make alternate payment agreements, and in general my anxiety every time I go to use my debit card - all of these have lead to a terrible Vancity experience for me.

    Vancity: let me know if I should give up on Interac & just use a credit card.

    → 1:20 PM, Jun 30   •  Personal, Vancouver, Standard, fraud, Interac, Vancity, Blog
  • Northern Voice 2012

    I really enjoyed my time on day 1 of the 2012 Northern Voice conference. The conference continues its mission of the personal, individual usage of the web around social media, and as such tends to focus on new users. There is a fantastic crew of people that come back every year, as well as up to 50% newcomers every year. My attendance and participation has been sporadic over the last couple of years, since I find the content to be very beginner focused with a few notable exceptions.

    This year I attended day 1, in large part to be there for Moose Camp, which is a block of time that is run unconference style. I really love these free form sessions, since everyone has to kind of get into a flow of what is even going to be talked about, and then (if all goes well), different participants start riffing off each others’ ideas. With the right people in the room, this “idea jazz” is exhilarating.

    The keynote by Reilly Yeo - Using the Internet to Save the Internet - was great. From a show of hands, attendees were optimistic about the beneficial uses of technology. But it’s been up to groups like Reilly’s Open Media to rally the troops and make sure that “bad” laws and regulations don’t get implemented.

    For me, this linked to a lot of thoughts I’ve been having - that the Internet does, in fact, need saving. In part, it needs more people to be educated and aware of how it works, and to become better participants. This goes back to the old consumption vs. creation topic - are the masses just mindlessly consuming the web? What about media literacy and critical thinking? What about web literacy?

    I’ve been mentioning the Mozilla Webmaker initiative as an example of the type of group and activity that is great, and is something that people who are web literate should get involved with.

    [caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“500”] Improv Me session at NV12 - Nancy White, Be Affected[/caption]

    Next I went to Improv Me, Baby with Nancy White, Alan Levine, and Rob Cottingham. My basic rule of thumb is “go to any session that Nancy White is involved with”. Of course Alan and Rob are no slouches either ;) Lots of interactivity and group activity in getting people to participate, and to understand what improv actually means. Rob closed things out talking about how the very best improv can in fact be the result of lots of preparation and practice ahead of time, while still using a “go with the flow” approach to tailor presentations & experiences to the people and energy in the room.

    The next slot lead me to coffee, catching up with some work, and chatting with Roland, Rob, Theo and others. The picnic tabels in the atrium of the SFU Woodwards space outside W2 were an awesome gathering spot, especially being semi-public with lots of curious onlookers wondering what these geeks were up to. Before I knew it, it was lunch time.

    Roland and I gathered Theo, Blaine, and Tim and set off to New Town Bakery. It was lovely sunny weather so it was nice to stretch our legs for a walk.

    [caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“320”] Maureen, Blaine, and Tim at New Town Bakery[/caption]

    [caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“240”] Roland at New Town Bakery[/caption]

    [caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“320”] Theo at New Town Bakery[/caption]

    After lunch, it was time for Moose Camp, with Nancy White as the un-organizer.

    Kay Slater led a session that was roughly about online advertising and monetization. Kay comes from a media / marketing / advertising background, and ultimately believes that marketers are using the wrong model for advertising online

    Here are a few rough notes I made.

    • If you are running an ad blocker and are, yourself, running ads on your blog, you’re a hypocrite.
    • Talked about what “free” means, check out the Wired Magazine issue on free (Chris Anderson)
    • Pinboard is an example of a set of websites / apps that are actively charging money, rather than relying on ads and lots of free users. See the Pinboard About page, the Pinboard “Don’t Be a Free User” blog post, and the Business of Bookmarking (PDF) for a longer discussion on business models and approaches to running services online, and the responsibilities of both the user and the service creators
    • Discussion about subtle differences between free, fremium, loss leader (e.g. free razor, buy the blades)
    • CPC (cost per click) model is broken. Clickers aren’t buyers.
    • Advertising focuses on 4As - awareness, attitude, action, annoyance – are online ads at the annoyance level for most of us?
    • Online media ad buying should go away - degrades the reading experience (hence Reading Lists, Readability). Are those services “stealing” content to make money from publishers?
    • HBO had content that people wanted to watch, so they paid for a cable TV subscription; but today, HBO isn’t letting people pay them for digital content
    • Media / content sites are there for a place to put ads - they aren’t in the content business, they are in the ad business
    • How do content creators make money?
    • Flattr given as an example - micro-transactions model, patronage model
    • Mike Monteiro says Fuck You, Pay Me
    • What about professionals vs. amateurs? Professionals need to get paid, struggle with loss of value from hourly model. Amateurs invest passion, love what they do – but some also get paid, but often charge much less than professionals.
    • Even if content sites are mainly built around ads, does cream rise to the top?
    • Tentacles vs. Chicken Fingers problem – best content for what type of user
    I have a separate post on the session I hosted about web literacy.

    Thanks to all the organizers, volunteers, and sponsors that make Northern Voice possible. Congrats on the 2012 edition.

    → 2:23 PM, Jun 16   •  Northern Voice, Events, nv12, Moose Camp, Mozilla, Mozilla Webmaker, Standard, Blog
  • Sustainable Shipping - on a sailboat

    The sail freighter Tres Hombres “sustainable shipping”

    Ambassador of the new fleet of sustainable hybrid sailing vessels ( fairtransport )

    The 32 meter brigantine Tres Hombres is in service since December 2009. She maintains a sustainable freight service between: Europe, the Atlantic islands, the Caribbean and America. Besides a cargo capacity of 35 tons, she has accommodation for 5 crew members and 10 trainees / passengers.

    via THE SAILING VESSEL AND CARGO SHIP BRIGANTINE TRES HOMBRES.

    And they even have their own brand of rum that they are importing.

    → 3:59 PM, Jun 13   •  This is Awesome, sailing, Blog
  • At Northern Voice 2012 on Friday

    Just bought my ticket for Friday. Looking forward to it! Especially MooseCamp.

    Northern Voice 2012 | Personal Blogging and Social Media Conference | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

     

    → 11:03 AM, Jun 11   •  Vancouver, Northern Voice, Events, MooseCamp, nv12, Blog
  • Wok fried spot prawns

    Modified from a recipe for Hong Kong-style ketchup prawns. Except I don’t keep ketchup in the house, so it’s a chili sauce + tomato paste + agave.

    20120610-181319.jpg

    Peanut oil in a wok, with 3 cloves garlic + some large chunks of ginger and a couple of kaffir lime leaves.

    20120610-181333.jpg

    A bunch of green onions, and a bunch of basil. These went in after the chili sauce.

    20120610-181341.jpg

    I brought back some arbol chilis from Mexico. Used a couple of tablespoons of it, then added a teaspoon of tomato paste plus a teaspon or so of agave syrup. After the prawns went into the hot oil, then I added this sauce. A couple of tablespoons of soy sauce were added at the same time as the greens went in.

    20120610-181350.jpg

    Prawns cooking.

    20120610-181358.jpg

    Finished product on the table. First time I’ve eaten a lot of shells, plus eaten the insides of the head. Next time, I should’ve used less peanut oil and gotten the shells even crispier before adding more sauce and greens.

    → 6:15 PM, Jun 10   •  Food, recipe, prawns, spot prawns, Blog
  • Homemade Pickled Ginger

    This is the pickled ginger recipe I used the other day (and that lots of people have asked about). I used organic turbinado sugar instead of white, and also added some slices of meyer lemons, but otherwise stuck with the recipe / quantities.

    8 ounces fresh young ginger root, peeled

    1 ½ teaspoons sea salt

    1 cup rice vinegar

    1/3 cup white sugar

    via Homemade Pickled Ginger (Gari) Recipe - Allrecipes.com.

    → 11:38 AM, Jun 8   •  Food, recipe, ginger, Blog
  • Wistia gift pack

    20120608-083519.jpg

    I got a really nice gift pack from the folks at Wistia. They do business video hosting, and are a great bunch of people.

    → 8:37 AM, Jun 8   •  Personal, video, image, video hosting, Wistia, Blog
  • The way WP.com supports domain names is messy.

    WordPress.com automatically removes the “www” from all URLs. Mapping the “www” subdomain is not supported.
    via Map a Subdomain — Support — WordPress.com.

    This is weird and messy. Either I can move my DNS / name servers to WP.com (which I am not comfortable doing - best practice is to keep your name servers separate from your hosting, so you can redirect if necessary).

    Or, I can choose a subdomain.

    So, this is now blog.bmann.ca. I will likely move bmann.ca to Octopress & an Amazon S3 bucket as well. Although I’m not sure that I need that top level domain doing anything, so for now, www and the root domain both redirect here.

    Tumblr and Posterous both support root A records (which is messy because it ties into a single IP) as well as subdomain CNAMEs including www. If WP.com supported ‘www’, this would be a non-issue.

    I guess this is another example of picking your use cases / target customers. Either host your full name servers with WP.com and they’ll handle everything, or be OK with the downsides of a non-www subdomain.

    → 11:29 PM, Jun 7   •  Personal, CNAME, DNS, hosting, Tech Rants, WordPress.com, Blog
  • Pancake Tuesday

    P1149 P1151 P1153 P1155

    German pancakes!

    → 8:10 PM, Feb 21   •  Food, German, pancakes, Blog
  • Note to self: make ginger beer

    Media_httphowtoeatand_phmux
    via howtoeatandlive.com

    This is easy to do, so I should do it.

    → 1:09 PM, Feb 20   •  recipes, Food, ginger beer, Blog
  • Action RPG - Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

    Kingdoms of Amalur on Steam

    If you like Action RPGs, then you’ll love Kingdoms of Amalur. I hadn’t heard about this game at all - it just sort of came out of nowhere.

    I guess because it’s mainly built as a console title, so there are SOME things on the PC that are a bit annoying.

    BUT - it’s hugely enjoyable. It most reminds me of Jade Empire - definite RPG with both combat and non-combat skills and so on, but you actually fight. Different skills, dodges, and so on.

    Highly recommended.

    → 10:34 AM, Feb 20   •  RPG, Action RPG, video game, Blog
  • Drupalcon clusters on Flickr

    Screen_shot_2012-01-31_at_1

    See the DrupalCon tag clusters on Flickr just made me tear up a little - there's a Boris cluster.

    Drupal will always be my "first love" when it comes to experiencing a large online community. I miss it a lot, sometimes.

    In any case, if you have more photos hiding somewhere of great Drupalcon experiences in the past, please get them to @pdjohnson. There are lots on Flickr, so creating some galleries of "best of" photos would also be something that anyone can do.

    → 2:34 PM, Jan 31   •  Personal, Flickr, Drupal, DrupalCon, Blog
  • Last of the meats: Dojo4 Porkchop

    P179

    This is the last of the Dojo4 meats: pork chops.

    These were tucked in the freezer and made a great winter meal. They weren't quite defrosted so I balanced them on the fat on the side in a cast iron pan in the oven. This melted away the lively fat on the side.

    Then smothered in Dizzy Pig Jamaican Firewalk rub and seared on each side, with final finishing in the oven.

    The sides were purple mashed potatoes and braised kale with mustard. Turns out Rachael doesn't like mashed potatoes when they are purple.

    That well in the potatoes? Pan drippings -- delicious!

    → 5:54 AM, Jan 9   •  Food, pork, Dojo4, porkchop, Blog
  • Finally bought an m43 camera: Olympus PEN E-PM1

    Media_httpwwwdpreview_gcgoi
    via dpreview.com

    Rachael and I wandered through London Drugs waiting for our movie to start the other night. Took a brief look at Micro Four Thirds (aka m43) cameras again.

    London Drugs had the Olympus PEN E-PM1 on sale for only $399. It's definitely a "lower end" camera. Rachael and I had talked about maybe buying a kit together. This one was cheap enough to just get going with an m43 system: we can still buy a different body and share lenses, or add more lenses.

    It was time to just pick something. I've done some experimenting yesterday and today, and I'm happy with the purchase.

    The image / link at the top goes to the dpreview entry for the E-PM1. If you go to the Conclusion page, you can compare to other cameras in the same class. Everything gets very close to the same rating, and the price I paid for the E-PM1 makes it the best price / performance.

    Here's to more mindful photography in 2012.

    → 9:45 PM, Jan 1   •  Personal, camera, Olympus, m43, dpreview, London Drugs, Olympus PEN E-PM1, Blog
  • Beautiful Dangerous Tigers

    Media_httpcdntheatlan_ecwjh
    via theatlantic.com

    Seen via dangerousmeta. Yes, the tigers ARE beautifully dangerous.

    → 5:20 AM, Dec 29   •  This is Awesome, tigers, Blog
  • Dirty Mermaid Martini

    Rinse a martini glass with Islay, then make a gin martini with kelp pickle ‘juice’. Garnish with a kelp pickle and a smoked oyster.

    Note: concept recipe only - no actual taste test performed.

    → 5:25 AM, Dec 24   •  Food, Blog
  • German Dinner Experience at the Vancouver Alpen Club

    via germandinner.eventbrite.com

    I had been trying to put together an "open house" on the 29th. Multiple friends & acquaintances had told me they had never been to the Vancouver Alpen Club before, so I thought I'd try putting together a "German Dinner Experience" there.

    It's all a bit short notice now, so I'm investigating putting on an event on February 21st (yes, that's the day before my birthday). The cost is a bit high ($50 / person), so I'm asking people to fill out a short survey to see what the interest is.

    Please order a "save me a seat" ticket at Eventbrite if you're interested in having a German dinner experience.

    → 5:05 PM, Dec 23   •  Personal, Vancouver, German, Blog
  • Starting beef stock

    P80

    Beef stock that will be used for other dishes later this weekend. White beans are soaking for cassoulet, too.

    → 3:54 PM, Dec 23   •  Personal, Blog
  • Eggnog Recipe Roundup

    Media_httpcf2foodista_gitgz
    via foodista.com

    I've never made from-scratch eggnog. Might try it this year.

    → 1:34 PM, Dec 23   •  Personal, recipe, eggnog, Blog
  • Christmas pulled pork

    P51

    Trying the Jamaican Firewalk rub - another rub I picked up on my last KC trip.

    → 12:10 PM, Dec 23   •  Personal, Blog
  • "The giving and receiving of presents…[is] no longer part of my culture" /via @Downes

    So, for me, the giving and receiving of presents has never since been a part of the Christmas season. Nor do I exchange gifts for birthdays or other events. It's no longer part of my culture. That's not to say I no longer give gifts; I have on occasion surprised people with my largesse. But I don't give gifts on a schedule; I don't give gifts because it's expected.
    via halfanhour.blogspot.com

    I like to give gifts. Like Downes, I like to give them at odd times, not at "expected" times. I would like to completely exit the gifts on the right occasion cycle.

    I also have a complicated relationship with gifts because there have been many years where money has been very tight. So there is often a high degree of guilt related to buying gifts, whether for myself or others. That it's a splurge (whether it is or not), that it is a bad thing that I am spending this money.

    I am also annoyed with the Coca Cola Christmas that we have in North America. I really enjoy some of the community Winter Solstice celebrations that happen, and I always look forward to Christmas as down time. It's a time to tinker with projects -- which for me is usually a mix of web / tech projects, plus experiments in the kitchen.

    In any case -- have a happy holiday. Enjoy your down time.

    → 3:24 PM, Dec 22   •  Personal, Christmas, gifts, Blog
  • Dojo4 Porkchetta

    P46

    This is the last of the Dojo4 meats (not counting the maple thyme breakfast sausages & remaining container of duck fat).

    Big Lou's Butcher is famous for their Porkchetta sandwiches. I bought a hunk of uncooked Porkchetta. I cooked it for 4 hours at 250, then added onions and parsnips and cooked it at 350 for another hour or so.

    The pork was dark meat and deliciously tender, with a nice selection of fatty bits. There were some hard indelible pieces of skin.

    Also pictured are traditional German red cabbage and boiled kale with garlic and mustard.

    Not pictured are home made perogies. Yes, definitely a winter meal.

    → 1:37 PM, Dec 21   •  Personal, Blog
  • Dojo4 Duck

    P163 P164
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Continuing the Dojo4 meat experience, last night I made duck legs.

    While I'm happy with the plating, not everything worked out as I would have liked.

    The duck legs I marinated in whiskey, orange juice, red wine vinegar, sugar, salt, and star anise. Unfortunately, I used way too much kosher salt.

    The spinach spaghetti I finished with olive oil, lemon zest, and fresh cracked pepper.

    I was most happy with the purée. I chopped parsnips & cauliflower and boiled them in lightly salted water until soft. I drained them, leaving behind a little of the cooking liquor. Using a hand blender, I puréed them, adding a Tbsp each of honey & Dijon mustard. I added duck jus until it was salty enough.

    The yellow peppers & onions were sautéed in a little olive oil.

    Oh right - duck preparation! Seared in duck fat in a cast iron pan. Separately I boiled the marinade with some additional orange juice. I added several Tbsp of marinade to the pan & placed the legs fat side up in a 350 oven.

    I do like duck medium rare, but had pulled pork-like consistency in mind. This was well cooked but not falling off the bone, and too salty (although the flavour was nice). I'll actually research duck techniques next time.

    → 9:32 AM, Dec 19   •  Personal, Blog
  • Clown Parade 2011

    P132 P133 P135 P134 P131 P136
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Rachael and I participated in David’s Clown Parade this year.

    → 9:17 AM, Dec 19   •  Personal, Blog
  • Dojo4 Steak

    P51

    I refer a lot of work. My friends at Dojo4 wanted to say thanks. So, they got me a Big Lou's Butcher gift certificate.

    (Saying thank you with meat is *definitely* encouraged)

    Today was the expiry date for the certificate, so I went on a meat buying spree.

    For the record: 1 container duck fat, 8 maple thyme breakfast sausages, 2 thick cut pork chops, a hefty hunk of porkchetta, 2 duck legs, and 2 Pemberton Meadows Dry-Aged Striploins.

    (don't worry - all the other meats had fancy farm sources, too)

    I don't usually buy super expensive steaks. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the most expensive meat I've ever bought.

    I'm more of a ferial* meat eater - give me a hunk of pork, I'll sauce it nicely, and various carbs to soak up the juices and stretch it out.

    In any case, this is me saying I don't cook steak like this very often. The photo is how it turned out - a very nice crust, even pink throughout, somewhere between medium / medium-rare.

    The guidelines I used were from this post: http://www.beyondsalmon.com/2006/09/perfect-steak-at-last.html

    The only change I did was to use butter and canola oil. The smoke and fire alarm going off tells me the pan was hot enough.

    I did use tongs, did cook the steaks one minute on each side, but also held the fatty side of the steak against the pan for about a minute to crisp the fat as well.

    The only change I would make would be to salt the meat more. This is easily fixed at the table - I need to get better at trusting my gut with that.

    Oh right - taste! The steaks were delicious ;)

    *there is a cook book / meditation on eating & cooking whose whole premise is festal (aka festival / special / rich people) vs. ferial (aka everyday / working man) cooking & eating. See my review of 'The Supper Of the Lamb' http://www.allconsuming.net/entry/view/39669

    → 12:05 AM, Dec 14   •  Personal, Blog
  • Panasonic DMC GX1 as newest potential m43 option

    Media_httpwwwdpreview_dscbh
    via dpreview.com

    This is the camera that Roland has shortlisted to buy.

    The last time I wrote about this was back in March, where I was really determined to get one with an electronic viewfinder (EVF). Now, I'm thinking I should suck it up and go for the most compact model I can find.

    Back when I was using Quora, I also spent some time gardening the Micro Four Thirds topic, which has lots of useful information.

    → 12:35 AM, Dec 1   •  Personal, camera, photography, m43, Panasonic DMC GX1, Roland Tanglao, Blog
  • I just helped fund Windowfarms

    http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/windowfarms/learn-to-grow-and-share-with-new-windowfarms/widget/video.html

    Windowfarms is a project to fund the commercial production of hydroponic gardening kits that hang in your window.

    You can read more about the project in an article on Fastco Design, or head straight over to the KickStarter page to help fund it yourself.

    One suggestion is funding at $10K or more for a custom Windowfarms installation for a restaurant or other venue. I would love to see something like this in Vancouver.

    → 11:31 AM, Nov 27   •  Personal, KickStarter, Windowfarms, Blog
  • Pulled pork with 'Butt Rub'

    P124 P126 P128 P130 P132 P133
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Bad Byron's 'Butt Rub', to be exact http://www.buttrub.com/ . I picked it up in Kansas City on my last trip, at a really great BBQ joint in a (functioning) gas station called Oklahoma Joe's.

    The pork butt was from J N Z Deli. To my shame, I don't actually know where they source their meat, so this is a reminder to go and ask.

    The pork marinated in the dry rub all day, then I cooked it for 5 hours at 300 degrees AKA the usual method. I'll see about experimenting with a whiskey based BBQ sauce in the next day or so.

    → 12:35 AM, Nov 22   •  Personal, Blog
  • Bowen relaxing

    P103

    We're finally on Bowen again. The Remembrance Day long weekend is a perfect little recharge before the Eastside Culture Crawl coming up next weekend.

    It's pouring rain, so it's not exactly pleasant to be outside, but I finally have a new rain jacket so I'm dry.

    Short walks between places of refuge are the way to go. My parents' place is always comfortable, with the wood stove throwing off a pleasant heat, unlimited mugs of coffee, and the special pleasure of being warm while the world outside is blustery.

    Rachael and I are at Artisan Eats, looking down the hill and across Howe Sound at a world lost in mist and rain. "that ferry looks like an iceberg", says Rachael. "all it's details lost, and just the bare white outline showing."

    I am sketching out tech designs on paper, writing this blog, and casting my mind forward across near- and long-term time horizons. Could-be's and what-if's swirling.

    → 2:51 PM, Nov 12   •  Personal, Blog
  • Cthulhu + Bunnies

    Media_httpsfarm7stati_afigh
    via whatever.scalzi.com

    Lord Snuggleston is his name. I'm not connected in any way, but I approve.

    → 3:16 PM, Oct 18   •  Personal, fun, Cthulhu, bunny, Blog
  • Yellow Point Lodge

    P441 P443 P445 P447 P449 P451 P453 P455
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    It’s been a fun and relaxing trip with Rachael. More to write when I am at a keyboard.

    → 7:01 AM, Sep 29   •  Personal, Blog
  • Current status

    P265

    Plus an afternoon coffee, headphones in listening to Andrew Vincent & the Pirates. Old indie music from my time in Ottawa. And writing in a (paper) notebook.

    And after setting up my link blog http://links.bmannconsulting.com, my first post here.

    → 5:05 PM, Sep 25   •  Personal, Blog
  • Intro to Class Afloat Yearbook (and GitHub pages)

    Do you remember sun-drenched Wotje, with the little girl who presses a pretty shell into your hand and laughs? Do you remember Typhoon Kyle, and furling sails in 50 knots of wind and 40 foot waves? Do you remember a week out of Honolulu, already part of the family, when friendly Roger sailes out from Palmyra, sharing his island paradise? Do you remember sailing under the Golden Gate bridge, seeing parents waiting, and having the family scatter across the country, around the world?

    Turn these pages, and remember the ports. Remember also the people. Your roommates, your watchmates, your teachers, the crew, your friends. Remember the ship, her tall masts towering above you. The sails filling with a snap and proud maple leaves billowing out as she leaps forward, dolphins and blue, blue waves her only companions.

    You scurry about on deck, acid-washing your fingers to the bone. Scuppers, deck scrubbing, rust-picking, priming, painting. Scrubbing pots and flipping stir-fry, serving tables and being the juice-person.

    Remember those endless nights on watch? Struggling to keep awake, keeping your eyes glued to the red glowing compass. Staring off at the horizon, watching the first faint rays of the sun creep up.

    It's all in here, so you'll never forget. The voyages of the S/V Concordia, 1993 - 1994.

    via beta.bmannconsulting.com

    I'm revamping bmannconsulting.com. Right now I'm experimenting with putting flat files up on Github pages.

    This is an example of me putting up my Class Afloat Yearbook, which I scanned in many years ago.

    This is a transcription from the scanned image of the first page. I was the yearbook editor, but through a series of mishaps, never ended up with my own copy of the yearbook, so I only have these scans.

    I obviously didn't have much room, so there are no line breaks. I've put some in for readability. And I'm pretty sure "rustpicking" isn't one word, so I added a hyphen.

    Casting a critical eye on this writing, which is now 17 years old, written by my 19 year old self, it's…OK. I'm not emotionally removed enough (still!) from the memory strings it's tugging. As with most of my writing, it's very conversational; and by that I mean, I use the same cadence when writing as when I'm speaking.

    I still haven't applied to speak at Raincity Chronicles, but if I do, it will be about some part of this Class Afloat voyage.

    Cue the switch to tech talk…

    Github pages? Well, it's a funny throw-back to be writing HTML directly in a lot of little index.html pages (never mind having a bunch of files all called the same thing open in your text editor). I need to learn Jekyll to actually build a site.

    It DOES feel great to be "crafting" a site, with the links and organization of naming, file structure, and links all selected, rather than auto-generated. And it feels like work, in a good way.

    → 11:28 AM, Sep 10   •  Personal, Class Afloat, Raincity Chronicles, GitHub, Blog
  • Tastes of summer

    P2602

    It's September and I'm talking about 'summer'. But the long weekend on Bowen has been lovely.

    This is a fresh tomato sauce that we're going to eat with radiatore. Nice and simple and so delicious with the fresh picked tomatoes.

    2 Tbsp butter
    1 Tbsp olive oil
    1/2 cup minced onions
    2/3 cup finely diced zucchini
    1 clove minced fresh garlic
    1 fresh bay leaf
    4 cups diced fresh tomatoes
    1/3 cup chopped fresh basil
    Salt and pepper

    Melt butter and olive oil and add onions, garlic, zucchini and basil. Sauté on low until onions are tender. Add diced tomatoes and turn up heat until bubbling, then reduce to low simmer, stirring in basil. Stir occasionally and cook until reduced.

    More details on a nice Sunday to be added...

    → 1:23 PM, Sep 5   •  Personal, Blog
  • Homemade Andouille sausage

    Media_httpthepaupered_okdez
    via thepauperedchef.com

    This recipe looks simple enough to make at home, without the hopefully-it-won't-go-mouldy dangers of hanging charcuterie in a closet somewhere.

    The one missing piece for me at home is the lack of a smoker. I have a small charcoal BBQ now, that I'm thinking could double as a smoker.

    Delicious experimentation awaits.

    → 8:19 AM, Aug 28   •  Personal, recipe, Andouille, sausage, smoker, Blog
  • Tickets to a restaurant /via @eastgate

    Next is a fascinating Chicago restaurant that serves a single, fixed menu that changes every three months. You don’t make reservations; you buy tickets. The current menu is titled “Tour of Thailand.” It’s full of fascinating ideas.

    …

    By selling tickets instead of taking reservations, for example, Next builds service into the charge and gets rid of tipping. Everyone is on salary, and servers and cooks both receive the service charge dividends.

    via markbernstein.org

    If you click through to Mark Bernstein's full post, you can read his description and reaction to the current Tour of Thailand menu at Next Restaurant (I'm linking to the FAQ, since the "home page" is literally just an invitation to create an account and buy tickets; and they're currently sold out).

    The food is fascinating, but I'm even more fascinated by the model of selling tickets.

    In Vancouver, you might check out the Irish Heather Long Table Series. I really should talk to Sean about switching to using Eventbrite directly, so people can self serve, and he can spend less time wrangling tickets.

    What happens when you start having more ticket buyers than space? That is, people who go to every event you put on? Do you get to be wilder, even more creative? Or do you just cater to the audience that you have? Sounds kind of like the concerns of a music artist.

    I've only done mass food delivery once. I got Mark Busse, Ben Garfinkel and the Industrial Brand gang (pre-Foodists) plus Robert Scales and myself to prepare / cook / serve 150 people for the Northern Voice 2007 pre-dinner / party. With live slide presentation of Lee & Sachi's world travel. Anyway, that was a crazy / fun experience, from which I learned many things, including that delivering food to 150 people without professional prep facilities is HARD.

    I've thought a lot about getting involved with a restaurant/cafe/food enterprise. But I've done it before (dishpig / prep cook a long time ago), and it's a LOT OF WORK. Which is mainly filled with uncertainty, since you have to lose a lot of money waiting for people to show up, then hope they like what you make, and rinse and repeat.

    A ticket / event based food experience is a different ball game. KickStarter for restaurants?

    → 2:03 PM, Aug 23   •  Personal, cooking, Food, restaurant, KickStarter, Industrial Brand, Irish Heather, Long Table Series, Next Restaurant, Northern Voice, nv07, Blog
  • Myth of the Marvelous Ingredient

    [I] remind everyone not to be too hung up upon the Myth of the Marvelous Ingredient. Sure, the fresher the better, and yes, starting out with marvelous ingredients helps, but...you still have to cook. It´s annoying and patronizing and plain stupid to convince people that unless the produce was harvested within a mile of them by vestal virgins they needen´t even bother to start.
    via lobstersquad.blogspot.com

    The hardest part of cooking good food (after you've done all you can to buy good ingredients) is … cooking.

    And there are two parts to that cooking. There is the "I've got extra time on the weekend, let's make something special cooking", and there is "I need to cook tasty meals every day of the week".

    I'm home sick for the second day. I made myself soup yesterday, and it didn't taste very good. A cooking screw up hurts even more when you don't have the energy for a do over.

    → 8:08 AM, Aug 23   •  Personal, cooking, Food, quote, Blog
  • Local Food Challenge Profile

    The team at Growing Chefs asked me to answer a few questions about why I'm participating. I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and turn it into a full blog post.

    Why did you decide to take the local challenge?

    I decided to take the local food challenge because food is one of my main life passions. The local challenge is really just an excuse to spend slightly more time documenting what I'm eating and drinking this week.

    Foodtree is a company that I advise which is trying to help people know more about their food (they have an iPhone app -- go download it). Getting involved with Foodtree and its founder Anthony Nicalo really opened my eyes another level. Once you start thinking about where food is from, who grew it, whether it's filled with pesticides or hormones … you can't unthink all of that.

    You've turned the corner, and you start asking more and more questions about food. This can lead into all sorts of depressing realizations, but I prefer to think of it as heading into delicious realizations. It becomes a challenge in the sense that a long mountain hike is a challenge - it's the journey along the way that's most interesting, and reaching the summit is just sort of the bonus.

    Now, my bigger challenge is to think about how we can encourage masses of people to think about their food, to try and make lasting changes to our food systems. And we can't do it by making people feel bad - we need to make them feel powerful, inspired, and hopeful!

    What will be the hardest part for you to do this challenge?

    Well, probably a toss up between finding the time and finding the ingredients. The week is busy with a conference and various activities, so we have to fit in more time for cooking or selecting what we're going to eat.

    For instance, I actually forgot that we were starting today (we just got back from a short vacation), so I had to figure out what to get for lunch. Luckily, the Fresh Local Wild food truck is not far from my office, so I had some delicious cod & chips. Now, I happen to know that his potatoes aren't local, because the wet weather has been terrible. But they did the next best thing and sourced some potatoes from Washington state. 

    But finding local ingredients is always hard. Heck, finding BC ingredients is hard. And it shouldn't be. But just this evening shopping at Donald's Market, the majority of the conventional fruits & vegetables were unlabeled (but many of them likely local), and virtually all of the organic ones were from far away (because organic labeling & pricing demands a level of "proof").

    Finding the time is probably a common excuse. I do the majority of cooking at home, and I tend to cook everything from scratch - that is, limited use of processed foods or prepared ingredients. It doesn't take significantly more time to do this than for prepared foods. But, like a diet, it's easy to "slip" when you get crunched for time. Because of where we shop, even the prepared food is often local and/or tends to be made of good for you ingredients.

    One last answer here pertains to how you define "local". Since I know how hard something like the 100 mile diet is, I don't get sticky about things like "if you buy bread, the wheat should also be local" (although I do have some Flour Peddler flour in my cupboards). Similarily, dried pasta that is local is going to be next to impossible - splurge on fresh pasta this week, Duso's on Granville Island is a good start.

    Food memories

    Salmon berries in Maple Ridge

    I think my memories from my childhood are all about food! I grew up on Bowen Island, which has lots of things for a kid growing up to forage. Salmon berries and huckle berries are something that you don't tend to see in stores at all - you need to stop and pick them when you see them.

    My heritage is German, so most of my other childhood memories are various German meat dishes and cakes. And jam. My mom still makes massive amounts of jam every year - she just posted her recipe for currant jelly.

    Shopping locally

    It's been 2 years since I put up a post on Foodists about shopping in Vancouver, which has a huge list of some of the more interesting/ethnic/novel places to shop around Vancouver.

    Today, we get a weekly order from SPUD.ca, visit the farmers market a couple of times a week (Wednesdays on Main, weekends at Trout Lake), buy most of our meat from Big Lous Butcher Shop, and round out the list with various stores along Commercial Drive (East End Coop, Daily Catch), and around Nanaimo at Hastings (Donald's Market, Ugo and Joe's). Famous Foods is a long time family favourite that should definitely be mentioned.

    I decided to call this section "shopping locally" rather than where to shop for local food, because that's how you should think about it. Find a butcher shop, a sausage maker, and a bakery. Find a farmer's market. All of these places have local food by default, for the most part.

    I confess that I find "traditional" grocery stores strange these days. I never go to them, and when I do happen to find myself in one, I just find all the packaged items disturbing. Whole Foods is a slightly better experience, but you just can't afford to shop there regularly, and even they aren't great in the fruits & veggies department (that is, lots of things from California, Mexico, etc.).

    Favourite recipes

    Recipes are tough for me. I tend to improvise a lot of the time, so a lot of my recipes tend to be documenting something that I've made once. And a lot of the very best tasting foods are very simple - asparagus broiled with olive oil, steak with salt and pepper, in season tomatoes popped straight in your mouth, and so on.

    I'll leave you with a basic ingredient list for spaghetti alla carbonara that I made the other day and Kim Werker ended up using for a post on Vancouver is Awesome: guanciale from Oyama Sausage on Granville Island, Rabbit River eggs, and parmesan from Ugo & Joe's. 


    Read the original post and updated gallery about #eatlocal, and you can follow along on my Twitter account where I'm using an #eatlocal hashtag.

    Donate to my Eating Local pledge »

    → 10:46 PM, Aug 15   •  Personal, Foodists, Famous Foods, Bowen Island, Big Lou's Butcher Shop, #eatlocal, Daily Catch, Donald's Market, East End Food Coop, Flour Peddler, Fresh Local Wild, Growing Chefs, SPUD.ca, Ugo and Joe's, Blog
  • Eating Local

    Img_0028 Img_0029 Img_0024 Img_0025 Img_0026
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Growing Chefs is a program that "gets kids excited about good, healthy food". Specifically also how to grow it and cook it.

    I am participating in their Going Local! Local Food Challenge. This means that I'll be eating local this week. I tend to do this in any case, but I'm very specifically going to be keeping track of my buying and eating habits, which is the whole point: to raise awareness of where your food is from and who makes it.

    I've actually got a donation page up where you can help to support Growing Chefs. In return, I'm going to document what I eat, where I buy it, and the occasional recipe. The Growing Chefs crew recommends the 100 Mile Diet as a starting point, but I find that too unrealistic: it's actually hard enough to just look for BC products, never mind 100 miles.

    Of course, Foodtree is another organization I've spent time supporting, and their iPhone app is meant to help solve the problem of knowing more about your food. The team is also participating in this Local Food Challenge Week - check the Foodtree blog for some great resources.


    You can follow along on my Twitter account where I'm using an #eatlocal hashtag, and this blog post is where I'm continuing to add to the gallery of food throughout the week.

    Donate to my Eating Local pledge »

    → 12:41 PM, Aug 15   •  Personal, Foodtree, #eatlocal, Growing Chefs, eating, local, Blog
  • Caramelized carrot rosemary pancetta risotto

    P2595

    Based on this recipe: http://t.co/8dDIM1s

    After pulling off this risotto recipe, I'm confident that I'll be cooking risotto more often.

    The recipe was mainly an inspiration to caramelize the carrots - I didn't purée any of them, or really follow the rest of the recipe. The flavour of the caramelized carrots really spread through the dish - rosemary was the other note that came through.

    Make sure you caramelize the carrots - I had put in a bit too much butter & oil and the carrots sweated out some liquid, so I had to spoon some of it out to get the carrots to brown. Reserve that liquid and add it later, it was deliciously sweet & carrot-y.

    The pancetta was very mild in flavour. The more pronounced smokiness of guanciale could have worked, but it would also have competed with the carrots. What was excellent from the pancetta was the fat, which added to the creamy consistency, as well as adding some nice toothsome texture.

    I used Better Than Bouillon vegetable stock paste, which worked well (and in general is my favourite prepared stock base).

    I briefly considered working in some of the other cheeses we had (eg a mild and creamy blue cheese) but was glad I stuck with 'just' a cup or so of grated Parmesan.

    → 4:40 PM, Aug 13   •  Personal, carrot, rosemary, recipe, pancetta, risotto, Blog
  • Pender Island

    Img_0015 Img_0016 Img_0017 Img_0019 Img_0020 Img_0023 Img_0021 Img_0022
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    → 8:55 AM, Aug 11   •  Personal, Blog
  • Weekends are cooking time

    P2580 P2586
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Weekends are time for me to do more elaborate / longer cooking. I'm the primary cook-er in the household, so I do cook most every day, but cooking is also relaxing downtime for me, especially when I get to try new things, or things that I don't cook very often.

    Yesterday was an errand day in general. We bought 10lbs of peaches and apricots coming back from the Okanagan (at the Mariposa fruit stand in Keremeos, to be exact -- recommended by Chris Rich amongst the sea of fruit stands there). By now, it was time to process them in bulk in some way. So I made peach jam and apricot jam.

    I've never made peach jam before. I used this Farmstand Peach Jam recipe, although as always, not exactly. I don't like using pectin, and I don't like to put in too much sugar. I ended up taking out a cup of cut up peaches at the last minute since I wanted to stick them in the freezer, and I think that was the error. Or, just that peaches are quite sweet to start with, and without pectin you can't skimp on the sugar. I had originally intended to also make some spicy peach chutney of some kind - I still have those peaches in the freezer, or I could even just use some of the jam and mix it with savoury ingredients to make it.

    Next I made apricot jam. My mom makes this all the time, so I was reasonably sure the no-pectin method would work, and it certainly did. It turned out nice and tart. It was a pleasant surprise to find and use Jens Alfke's apricot recipe - a long time blogger whose feed fell from my reader at some point. So, score 1 for a great recipe (since it uses a formula for fruit-to-sugar) and for re-finding a great writer.

    This morning I poached a couple of eggs for breakfast. Rachael is a fan of poached eggs, but I usually just find them too fiddly. I took it upon myself to actually look up some egg poaching instructions and they turned out nicely. In short: the water shouldn't be boiling, turn it off as soon as you put the eggs in, put a lid on it, and 3 minutes is about the right time length.

    Wandering up Commercial Drive, I decided today would be a seafood day. So, I've got some Qualicum Beach scallop and side stripe shrimp ceviche marinating in the fridge. Recipe in short:

    • 10 prawns, remove the shell and chop
    • 4 large scallops, chopped
    • 1/2 avocado, chopped
    • 1/3 cup red onion, minced
    • 1/3 cup fresh basil, chopped
    • 3 tomatillos, chopped
    • juice of 3 limes
    • fresh cracked pepper
    • small red chile, minced
    • 1/3 cup cucumber, chopped

    It's marinating now, it may end up gaining some other bits and pieces as I adjust seasonings when it comes out of the fridge.

    → 1:26 PM, Aug 7   •  Personal, cooking, recipe, apricot, ceviche, jam, peach, poached eggs, Blog
  • Super Dino Monsters

    P2525

    Bought at the Vancouver Night Market. I like the fact that he's supposed to be ferocious, but mainly looks like he wants to hug.

    Plus, look at the dinosaur images: they both (inexplicably) have blue Elvis hair.

    → 9:40 AM, Aug 6   •  Personal, dino, dinosaur, monster, Blog
  • Cthulhu face

    Media_httpimagesinsta_obvpk
    via instagr.am

    By Sam.

    Went to the night market in downtown Vancouver, rather than way out in Richmond. I'm a sucker for BBQd squid tentacles…

    → 10:56 PM, Aug 5   •  Personal, Cthulhu, boris, squid, tentacles, Blog
  • 404 sobriety not found error @trevoro

    Image

    → 8:12 PM, Jul 28   •  Personal, Blog
  • iPhone wallet

    Media_httpwwwtwelveso_biywx
    via twelvesouth.com

    We've heard talk about Google Wallet and other platforms wanting to make your phone your wallet.

    Well, this isn't that, but it does mean you can use your iPhone as a physical wallet.

    I already carry around "Wallet 2.0" as I call it - just a thin folding wallet that has room for ID and a couple of cards, and a money clip on the outside for bills. Coins jingle around in my pocket until they get dumped into a bucket of change back at home.

    I'm putting this on my wishlist.

    → 11:02 AM, Jul 28   •  Personal, Google Wallet, iPhone, wallet, Wallet 2.0, Blog
  • Scenes from Penticton: Vajazzling is big

    Image

    → 10:10 PM, Jul 24   •  Personal, Blog
  • Magic, science, and cryptocurrency; also, book reviews

    I just finished reading "Out of the Black". It's mainly responsible for the magic part of this title, although technically it is set in the far future. You don't really notice the far future part, since you already have to suspend disbelief for the magic bits. Actually, the one technology piece that was interesting (and probably won't age well) was the concept that everyone had a tablet. The unique thing about the tablet was that it could resize. You made it small and stuck it in your pocket, but then you could take it and expand it to some maximize size for mapping or image work or whatever.

    This book is a bit of a variant on The Matrix, in the sense that there is a lot of fighting and there is a "layer" underneath reality that can be accessed and manipulated (the magic bit, which is called the Loom). It has thriller pacing, plus some jumping forward and backward in timelines from different character points of view which doesn't _quite_ work (feels more like a movie script). Regardless, an enjoyable quick read.

    A 2-book series that I finished some time ago was Daemon and Freedom (TM) by Daniel Suarez. I really should be writing a lot more about them rather than tacking them on to review #1, but at least I'm posting something.

    Let's see, where to start. It takes place in present day / near future. An MMORPG game company CEO dies, which sets in motion a bunch of stuff involving a "daemon", or set of computer scripts that the CEO had set up. These set of computer scripts interact with the real world and people through lots of automation and scanning news feeds and bot nets and other fairly believable things (the author has a background in computers and security, which keeps things from getting too Hollywood, which I appreciated).

    And then self-sufficiency in food systems (including an anti-Monsanto interlude), cryptocurrency, and DIY technology making enter the picture. With eBay-style reputation assigned to personal interactions of all kinds, plus a gamification layer where everybody has levels and classes. See, the daemon has been set in motion to kind of shepherd the human race onto a new way of living. Or at least, a new way of socio-economic organizing.

    At the time I was reading the book, the following IRL things were happening:

    • Bitcoin was just hitting main stream media
    • I've been thinking a lot about local / direct food systems with Foodtree
    • our worldwide economic systems have been hitting the crapper
    • The Canadian Federal election put a robot prime minister in power

    So, I tore through the first book and made it straight through into the second. It also has thriller pacing, and I'm sure is in part designed to feed into the gamer / Internet professional brain.

    Fun read, makes you think. If you are at all interested in how technology-assisted collaboration, governance, and economics might work, read the book.

    Thanks to Sean for recommending these books.

    → 9:39 PM, Jul 16   •  Personal, book, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, Daemon, Daniel Suarez, Freedom (TM), Lee Doty, MMORPG, Out of the Black, review, Blog
  • Cookbook find: Cowboys and Chuckwagons

    I'm always on the lookout for regional / unique / church basement cookbooks. I found this Come 'n Get It - Cowboys and Chuckwagons at the "Share Shack" at the Deka Lake dump … sorry, I mean "land fill".

    The image below is the first page of the book. The quote says:

    "Bacon in the pan,
    Coffee in the pot;
    Get up an' get it
    Get it while it's hot."

    Come 'n Get It - Cowboys and Chuckwagons

    The recipes contain a lot of lard, flour, sugar, and beans. Here's the original recipe for Charlie's Doughnuts:

    Two tea cups sugar, 3 eggs, 1-1/2 tea cups buttermilk, 2 teaspoons saleratus, 1 teaspoon salt, 6 tablespoons melted lard, flour enough to roll nicely. Boil or fry in lard.

    To make things a little easier, I'll let you know that saleratus is baking soda. I never have buttermilk in the house, but apparently putting vinegar in regular milk gets you close.

    I'm going to leave the book here for my dad's cabin cookbook collection.

    → 9:19 PM, Jul 16   •  Personal, recipe, cookbook, cowboy, chuckwagon, Deka Lake, donuts, doughnuts, saleratus, Blog
  • Arriving at Deka Lake

    Arrival at the cabin

    I'm at the cabin with my dad for an extended long weekend. Our cabin is a couple of minutes walk from Deka Lake. Where is that? Well, it's on the Cariboo Plateau. Here's a picture of a map outside the next-closest grocery / liquor / everything store, Interlakes:

    The Cariboo is lake country

    Sometimes I also say "it's near 100 Mile House". OK, fine, here's a Google Map:

    http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=macabar+road,+Deka+Lake,+British+Columbia,+Canada&aq=&sll=51.609009,-120.853386&sspn=0.04099,0.07596&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Macabar+Rd,+Cariboo+L,+Cariboo+Regional+District,+British+Columbia+V0K+1E0,+Canada&ll=51.618017,-120.849609&spn=8.189808,13.183594&t=h&z=5&iwloc=A&output=embed
    View Larger Map

    As you can see, it's over 500km from Vancouver. It used to take much longer to get here. I know, because we came here all the time when growing up, and I could read up to two books during the trip here. This time, I read an ebook on my iPhone.

    I haven't been up here in quite a long time. I also realized that it's been almost a year since I've been working for iQmetrix. Did you know that when you have bosses and stuff, they give you vacation time? And you're supposed to take time off, like, more than a couple of extra days over Christmas?!?! Yeah, news to me as well. So I'm going to take a couple of long weekends over the summer for various trips and such.

    I'm up here over the weekend, and then my Dad and I drive back on Monday.

    Beer on the porch

    I've got more pictures on Flickr if you're interested.

    → 11:07 PM, Jul 15   •  Personal, Deka Lake, Blog
  • Disc Golf in Maple Ridge at the Thornhill Course

    Media_httpfs03teamopo_zkbqy
    via mapleridgeultimate.com

    Played this course on Sunday with Travis and some other fun folks. It's a highly technical course - you're playing in a forest, and there are trees everywhere. Reminds me of the old Juan de Fuaca course, except that that one was truly the extreme of technical courses (e.g. the cliff hole).

    I played the "C" tees and came away at 6 under par. Playing more often definitely helps - I played a couple of weeks ago, so didn't feel rusty when starting.

    More adventures to be detailed later. Including the 2 grilled cheeses + hamburger patty sandwich.

    → 12:25 AM, Jul 11   •  Personal, disc golf, Maple Ridge, Thornhill, Blog
  • Strawberry Rhubarb Jam

    Since it's red and my stove is white, this can stand in as a "How I spent my Canada Day 2011 weekend".

    It started on Friday with brunch. Then we headed out to Emma Lea farms on Westham Island, where the strawberries are from. Whenever we go to Westham Island, it also means a stop at the apiary. We now have fireweed honey and some pumpkin / purple loosestrife honey. I still have to figure out something to make that lets the unique honey taste shine through.

    Then off to Steveston, which initially seemed like a mistake, since it was filled with hordes of people for Canada Day. Well, in retrospect, it probably was a mistake, but the sun did come out. As we walked up to a packed Hogshack (which is a BBQ place that I had been hearing a lot about), there just happened to be a table opening up.

    The BBQ was good. I was even more pleasantly surprised by the awesome beer list that they have. I had a Hitachino Nest White Ale, and it was absolutely perfect for a summer day. In fact, my first sip had my face go through various transformations, after which I passed it around for everyone to taste. It's lemony fresh beer witbier that should be mandatory to drink when it is really hot out.

    Then, bellies full, a wander around Garry Point Park. There is a sculpture there called Wind Waves that is great to see in person. This it way off in the distance over open fields

    And then a drive back home, finally a little bit sun-kissed, and with a really full day behind us. Fireworks? Yeah, off in the distance somewhere :P

    Saturday & Sunday was Foodtree's launch of their iPhone app at Trout Lake and Kits Farmers Markets respectively, so Rachael was working for the first half of both days. I got to do a bit of a sleep in and some video game playing each morning, then went off to support the Foodtree team.

    On Saturday, the sun really came out for the first time. Spending just three hours in the sun just caused Rachael and I to really wilt. We came home and napped the afternoon away. Getting back up, I decided to start prepping the jam. Anthony traded some of his backyard rhubarb for strawberries, so I was able to make strawberry rhubarb jam. I like how it turned out, even though I never both measuring anything - 1 1/2 cups turbinado sugar, 1 1/2 brown sugar, and some number of cups of strawberries and rhubarb :P The jars all popped, so I'll be gifting them out this week.

    Then, to get out of the house for at least a bit, we experimented with my new car2go membership. We had actually used it on Thursday to get home and parked it outside our house, since we're inside the area where you can leave the cars anywhere. It kind of feels like stealing a car. In any case, the one out front had moved a couple of blocks down to Pender, so we jumped in and went for a drive to go for gelato at Bella Gelateria. From there we went up to Queen E park, just to be out and about and enjoy the view.

    Sunday morning was cleaning up the jam kitchen plus finishing off Dungeon Siege III, which some people mentioned I should never have bothered to buy in the first place. I don't know if I'll bother writing about it. Was fun to play, there is no replay value, and it pales in comparison to DS I & II. And, it was only 12 hours long. Yes, kind of like the contrast between Dragon Age and Dragon Age II. This joystiq review is pretty funny. I guess my id had fun playing.

    Ahem. But I really only played like an hour or so to finish the final game. Then I jumped into a car2go again and went over to the Kits market. This was a one way rental (so I don't have to pay while I'm at the market), and I just happened to park right behind another car2go car, so I was reasonably sure one of them would be available when I wanted it.

    It was another long day for Rachael, so after a short rest we biked over to the New Brighton Pool and went for a dip. It was great to be swimming, and yes, it feels like the west coast summer has arrived (even though it was raining and sunny this morning).

    After biking back I retired to the kitchen and made lots of things from the farmer's market: kale chips, roasted garlic scapes, bacon, bok choy, and some red potatoes. I also decided to make some more jam, so combined guavas with some of the remaining rhubarb. After I wrote that post about my past guava experience, I thought I'd aim for something like that. I've had a taste, and I think I put a bit too much sugar in AND the whole seeds in thing didn't really work out. I need a fine mesh sieve or china hat before I try something like that again. I also have this sense memory of my mom and grandma making rosehip jam which also has tons of seeds in it, so I'll need to try that again as well.

    So there you have it. Canada Day. And Strawberry Rhubarb jam. Hope you had a great weekend.

    → 9:02 PM, Jul 2   •  Personal, jam, Canada Day, car2go, Garry Point Park, Hitachino Nest White Ale, rhubarb, Steveston, strawberry, Westham Island, Blog
  • Guavas

    I bought guavas last night. When I bit into the first one, that flowery perfume flavour wafted out and teleported me back about almost 20 years.

    When I traveled around the South Pacific on a tallship as part of Class Afloat, we stopped in Suva, Fiji. There is an orphanage and school run by Canadian nuns there. We visited and brought some gifts - school supplies, books, etc. - as well as playing the muddiest game of soccer I have ever played in my life. The teachers asked the children to bring in something for us - fresh fruit! So, they gathered tons of fresh guavas. We ended up with giant plastic garbage containers filled with guavas. Nothing like these pale imitations I bought in the store yesterday, but just that little whiff of perfume hinted at that long ago time.

    Even for a boat filled with frsh fruit starved teenagers, we couldn't eat our way through all of the guavas. I spent a lot of time helping out in the galley, and I ended up making a kind of guava jam. I never did get sick of having it for breakfast pretty much every day until it ran out.

    → 9:21 AM, Jul 1   •  Personal, Class Afloat, Fiji, guavas, Blog
  • Awesome Feelings

    Screenshot Disasteradio - Awesome Feelings

    I found this via @awesome, of course.

    You can find other fine songs by Disasteradio, like "Gravy Rainbow", on the Bandcamp page.

    → 11:27 PM, Jun 23   •  video, awesome, music, Blog
  • Any cult of Cthulhu paleos out there?

    With all these threads on religion, I felt rather left out :( So anyone out there who follows the great Elder gods? How do you deal with the prohibition on eating cephalopods? I miss calamari :(

    What about the commandment to eat as many cute and cuddly animals as you possibly can? I have so much trouble with this one. Yesterday I ate 12 hamsters I stole from a crying preschooler and then devoured a small puppy, but then I remembered I also had a baby bunny wearing a polka dot bow to eat in the fridge. I just couldn't eat any more though.

    via paleohacks.com

    I used to have a Cthulhu obsession in University. Through a strange twist of fate, it has ended up as a codename / meme at work. Cthulhu diets came up, and of course Google found this.

    → 11:20 PM, Jun 8   •  Personal, fun, Cthulhu, paleo, Blog
  • Ballymaloe Brown Yeast Bread

    Ballymaloe brown yeast bread

    This bread has been made by hand every day at Ballymaloe House for more than 60 years – originally for the family, and then for the guests. The recipe is based on one for a nutritious loaf that Doris Grant developed at the request of the British government in the 1940s. I can't really stress enough what a favour you'll be doing your family by baking this bread. The main ingredients – wholemeal flour, treacle and yeast – are all highly nutritious. The ingredients and equipment should be at room temperature.

    Makes 1 loaf

    450g (1lb) strong (stone-ground) wholemeal flour OR 400g (14oz) strong (stoneground) wholemeal flour plus 50g (2oz) strong white flour
    1 teaspoon salt
    1 teaspoon black treacle
    425ml (3⁄4 pint) water, at blood heat
    20g (3⁄4) or more fresh non-GM
    Yeast
    Sesame seeds (optional)
    Sunflower oil
    1 loaf tin 12.5 x 20cm (5 x 8in)

    Preheat the oven to 230°C/450°F/ gas mark 8.

    Mix the flour with the salt in a mixing bowl. In a small bowl or Pyrex jug, mix the treacle with some of the water, 150ml (¼ pint) and crumble in the yeast. Leave to sit for a few minutes in a warm place to allow the yeast to start to work. Meanwhile, grease the bread tins with sunflower oil. Check to see if the yeast is rising. After about 4–5 minutes, it will have a creamy and slightly frothy appearance on top.

    When ready, stir and pour it, with all the remaining water (300ml/½ pint), into the flour to make a loose, wet dough. (Don't mix it until all the water is in; otherwise it tends to go lumpy.) The mixture should be too wet to knead. Put the mixture directly into the greased tin. Sprinkle the top of the loaves with sesame seeds, if you like. Cover the tin with a tea towel to prevent a skin from forming and leave the bread to rise. This will take anything from 10–20 minutes, depending on the temperature of your kitchen.

    Preheat the oven to 230°C/ 450°F/gas mark 8.

    When the dough has almost come to the top of the tin, remove the tea towel and pop the loaves into the oven. The bread will rise a little further in the oven; this is called 'oven spring'. If the bread rises to the top of the tin before you put it into the oven, it will continue to rise and will flow over the edges. Cook for 20 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 200°C/400°F/gas mark 6 and cook for a further 40–50 minutes, until your bread looks nicely browned and sounds hollow when tapped.

    We usually remove the loaves from the tin/tins about 10 minutes before the end of cooking and put them back into the oven to crisp all round, but if you like a softer crust there is no need for this

    via guardian.co.uk

    Even easier than no-knead bread.

    → 11:38 PM, May 29   •  Personal, no knead bread, recipe, bread, Blog
  • Boating with Alex

    Img_0012 Img_0013 Img_0014
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    → 8:19 AM, May 21   •  Personal, Blog
  • Orcas swim into Burrard Inlet

    Media_httpwwwtheprovi_gjceh
    via theprovince.com

    With this, plus the dolphins in Howe Sound, it feels like we're getting a second chance.

    That's Siwash Rock on the Stanley Park seawall in the background.

    → 9:35 AM, May 12   •  Personal, Vancouver, Burrard Inlet, Orcas, seawall, Siwash Rock, Stanley Park, The Province, Blog
  • Neverwinter running text-based RPG sessions on Facebook

    Tuesday Encounter: Your party has dared to venture to the Ruins of Zhentil Keep in search of lost artifacts, where you find a Temple to Bane, left strangely untouched. You cautiously enter the temple, hoping to plunder it's treasures, and instead find a group of undead Zhentarim in defensive positions, holding off the advances of a group of Shadar-Kai, led by Naramus himself. What do you do?
    via facebook.com

    There is a new Neverwinter video game coming out this year. The Facebook page for the brand is doing an awesome job running role playing "sessions" just by posting to their wall.

    → 1:41 PM, May 10   •  Personal, Neverwinter Nights, RPG, Facebook, Blog
  • "It is weird to know where your food comes from" /via @tonynicalo

    The only peace of mind that exists in our current food system seems a kind of Orwellian trick- it is weird to know where your food comes from. By making it normal to not know, you don’t have to worry about it too much. We are beginning to see cracks in the sarcophagus with the occasional beef or peanut butter recall, the fear of food from China and the rise of local food on the fringes. But it is still mainly out of sight out of mind. Foodtree envisions a solution to the ills of our runaway food system by eliminating information asymmetry. It only takes a couple of times for you to be able to choose something you know the provenance of to remind you that it is actually bizarre to NOT know the source of your food.
    via ceo.foodtree.com

    It's great to be working with Tony and the rest of the Foodtree team on this mission.

    While we joke about meeting the chicken that we're going to eat or joke about being "those people" that ask where stuff is from - it's important.

    If you want to hear more from Tony, he's going to be speaking at the Raincity Chronicles this Wednesday - tickets at Firehall Arts Centre.

    → 8:56 AM, May 9   •  Personal, Food, Foodtree, Raincity Chronicles, Blog
  • "They have the wings of a bear and their antlers are made of fangs!" #maplesyrupcurtain

    Media_httphijinksensu_qiwic
    via hijinksensue.com

    Yes, this is how expensive cellphone plans are in Canada.

    → 8:00 PM, May 7   •  Personal, funny, Canada, cellphone, comic, maplesyrupcurtain, Blog
  • "A Latvian magazine has enabled real birds to tweet on Twitter thanks to bacon" /via @wired

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juh7ZHNK7Fo]

    A Latvian magazine has enabled real birds to tweet on Twitter thanks to a system involving a pork fat keyboard rigged up to the microblogging platform.

    via wired.com

    This story must have been so much fun to write. Birds, bacon, Twitter - a match made in heaven.

    → 11:20 PM, Apr 27   •  Twitter, Personal, bacon, video, funny, Latvian, Blog
  • Easter weekend 2011 on Bowen

    Img_0001 Img_0011 Img_0009 Img_0008 Img_0002 Img_0006 Img_0005 Img_0004 Img_0003 Img_0007 Img_0010
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    → 10:52 AM, Apr 23   •  Personal, Blog
  • Cowboy Monkeys Riding Dogs Herding Goats /via @laughingsquid

    Media_httpfarm5static_tpigc
    via laughingsquid.com

    I could probably republish at least half of every Laughing Squid post - often funny, always interesting.

    → 10:19 AM, Apr 18   •  Personal, funny, cowboy, dog, monkey, Blog
  • Rainbow Chard Recipe

    Captured for posterity, although no picture.

    Chop 2 shallots and sauté in a bit of olive oil over medium-high heat.

    Grate half an apple and add to shallots.

    Cut tough stems from chard and roughly chop. Add to shallot apple mixture in pan and stir to mix.

    Juice half a Meyer lemon and add to pan. If using a regular lemon, reduce juice used and/or add a pinch of sugar.

    Stir to mix well and reduce heat. Simmer for 5 minutes or until chard is tender, stirring occasionally.

    Salt to taste.

    → 11:18 PM, Apr 17   •  Personal, recipe, chard, Meyer lemon, shallot, Blog
  • Dan Mangan's Smorgasbord

    I attended Dan Mangan's benefit for homeless youth initiatives, aka Smorgasbord, on Saturday night.

    I took my Flip video camera along and captured a handful of songs. The audio is pretty decent (the echo-y quality is because of the acoustics inside St. Andrews Wesleyan Church, I think) but the video is pretty terrible. You can find all the videos in this playlist on YouTube, or embedded below.

    http://www.youtube.com/p/2C0F511D32225835?hl=en_US&fs=1

    Performances are by The Crackling, Aidan Knight, and Dan Mangan. Plus Mayor Gregor on tuba, of course!

    Other than Dan Mangan himself, I was super impressed by Aidan Knight. You can find him on BandCamp.

    → 6:39 PM, Apr 17   •  Personal, Aidan Knight, Dan Mangan, Gregor Robertson, smorgasbord, The Crackling, tuba, Blog
  • Big Lou's Butcher Shop and Banh Mi Sandwich

    Img_0288 Img_0289 Img_0290

    This was my third shopping trip to Big Lou's Butcher Shop, on the corner of Powell Street at Gore. Their tagline is "bringing traditional nose-to-tail butchery to Vancouver".

    Pictured in the gallery is Karsten weighing out some freshly made ground beef. He is also the maker of the rouladen pictured in the next image. I've written about rouladen before. My mom told me in a call earlier in the day that she had been to visit Big Lou's and bought some rouladen just to see what they were like. She said they tasted great, and were about the same price as it would cost her to make them on her own. Duly noted the next time rouladen cravings strike.

    The last image is the iPad sitting on top of the old school cash register. It is, of course, a software only point-of-sale system running on the iPad as an app. Which nicely collides with my day job as I think about iPhones and iPads slowly replacing all manner of special purpose proprietary systems like point of sale machines.

    Below is a Banh Mi sandwich that Rachael and I shared. Big Lou's also makes sandwiches fresh to order. The bread is a giant crusty baguette, but the innards are flavourful enough to stand up to the hunk of bread. Half a sandwich was a good meal, so definitely good value for lunch. I'll be back during the week to try some of the other sandwiches.

    → 3:56 PM, Apr 17   •  Personal, Vancouver, meat, rouladen, banh mi, Big Lou's Butcher Shop, butcher, Downtown Eastside, sandwich, Blog
  • Me, dancing

    Boris
    In the spirit of making sure that I own the place where the conversation takes place, here is a ridiculous animated GIF of me, dancing. Put together oh so kindly by iQmetrix co-worker Tristan.

    → 2:06 PM, Apr 17   •  Personal, funny, Animated GIF, dancing, iQmetrix, Blog
  • Seattle Sounders game opening

    [wpvideo EjM5kk4y]

    <p>
    

    When I went to Seattle last weekend, Lee took me along to see the Seattle Sounders play. It was actually my first MLS game.

    Attached a short video that starts out focused on the Sounders super fan section, just as the game opening ceremonies are going on.

    Thanks for taking me Lee, it was a lot of fun. I’m a lot more interested in the company Whitecaps season tickets now…

    → 1:55 PM, Apr 17   •  Personal, video, Lee Lefever, MLS, Qwest Field, Seattle, Seattle Sounders, soccer, Whitecaps FC, Blog
  • Bacon Roses /via @laughingsquid

    Media_httpwwwinstruct_dmgrj
    via instructables.com

    Mother's Day is coming!

    → 12:04 PM, Apr 17   •  Personal, bacon, fun, bacon roses, Blog
  • Walking in Seattle

    P2309 P2325 P2323 P2321 P2319 P2317 P2315 P2313 P2345 P2343 P2341 P2339 P2337 P2335 P2333 P2331 P2329 P2311 P2327
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    I spent half a day on a Sunday in Seattle while Rachael was teaching her book arts course.

    I sat and blogged at the Tully's for a while, then did a walk around the neighbourhood and some parks nearby.

    I was relaxed and specifically had my eyes open looking for interesting things to capture. The fact that I found a plastic Sabretooth tiger toy placed in some rocks was a great bonus.

    I also had a bite to eat in a little mini Main Street down the road a bit. It reminded me a bit of Commercial Drive - lots of great restaurants and coffee shops.

    → 10:32 AM, Apr 17   •  Personal, Seattle, Blog
  • I found an artist in the window

    P2286

    Rachael was in the ‘Artist’s Window’ at Bird On A Wire.

    → 4:36 PM, Apr 16   •  Personal, rachael, Bird on a Wire, Blog
  • Zombie Bunnies

    Media_http30mediatumb_oucgl
    via yahooza.tumblr.com

    → 12:42 PM, Apr 15   •  Personal, funny, bunny, zombie, Blog
  • Why the dolphins are back [in Howe Sound] /via @chriscorrigan

    Scientists are trying to figure out why the Pacific white-sided dolphins are back. But there’s speculation it can be partly contributed to a small group of marine enthusiasts and a fish.
    via bowenislandjournal.blogspot.com

    Dolphins are incredible creatures. It just *feels* great that they are back in and around the waters off Bowen Island.

    I know Stewart Marshall has been seeing them a lot on his ferry commutes.

    → 12:12 PM, Apr 14   •  Personal, Bowen Island, dolphins, Howe Sound, Blog
  • Blossom shopping in Kits

    P2011 P2013 P2015 P2037 P2039 Img_0096
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Out for a walk around Kits, checking how far the blossoms are.

    → 12:39 PM, Mar 26   •  Personal, Vancouver, cherry blossoms, Kitsilano, Blog
  • Virtual items should enhance the core game, not BECOME the core game mechanic

    Social games and free to play games are, if not the future, a future. We can’t dismiss or ignore them. In fact, we should celebrate those of them, and those elements of them, that do approach things smartly, and in doing so bring worthy gaming to a gigantic audience. But we can make it quite clear that we expect to be treated better than this slovenly, cheating, cynical wolf in in RPG’s clothing. Especially when it’s clothing hundreds of thousands of us were very fond of.
    via rockpapershotgun.com

    Dragon Age II and Dragon Age Legends are a gigantic money grab. I haven't played DA:Legends on Facebook yet, but I have played a chunk of DAII.

    They removed a LOT of the RPG mechanics / depth from DAII. As in, only your main character is fully customizable. It really should have been a different game in the DA universe -- kind of like a DA Light.

    Yes, I like some of the enhanced fluidity of the visuals of the fights. But just make Diablo if that's what you're aiming to make.

    Oh, right, I'm supposed to be ranting on Facebook games :P On both smartphones and Facebook, I think you can make great games. Please focus on great games and content first, let me choose whether to invest time or money. And the invest time only experience should be *great*.

    Paying for virtual items should enhance or shortcut the core game, not BECOME the core game mechanic.

    → 11:34 PM, Mar 17   •  Personal, gaming, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age Legends, social games, Blog
  • I'm leaning towards an m43 camera that includes a view finder

    The Panasonic LVF-1 Electronic View Finder (EVF)  is awkward - The Panasonic GF1 is a beautiful compact camera and the add-on EVF makes it bulkier.  The EVF is useful, especially in bright light, but I did not care for it because of the additional bulk and its low resolution.  If I do use an EVF, it will be on another m43 body such as the Panasonic G2 or Panasonic GH2 which both have high resolution, built-in EVF's.
    via holyfstop.blogspot.com

    The Olympus looks cooler and is more compact, but only has an add on viewfinder.

    The Panasonic G2 / GF2 have a built-in viewfinder, which may just be the thing that tips the balance for me.

    → 10:05 PM, Mar 17   •  Personal, Micro Four Thirds, Panasonic, EVF, m43, Panasonic G2, Blog
  • Chicken and Waffles

    Photo

    This is my first experience with Chicken and Waffles. Probably too fancy for my "first time", but it was tasty.

    → 8:49 PM, Mar 14   •  Personal, chicken, waffles, Blog
  • Starting DAII but apparently I should be more excited by Neverwinter

    http://files.atari.com.s3.amazonaws.com/nno/rollover.swf
    via playneverwinter.com

    So, I'm just about to start playing some Dragon Age II, and people are already telling me that I'll probably be better off waiting for Neverwinter.

    I was a little worried playing the DAII demo, and yup, it looks like they turned it into a mainly action oriented game.

    I'm not happy with how Dawn of War II: Retribution got changed. I *loved* the previous two versions, now they've dialed the RPG down and dialed the RTS up, making it more suitable for online multiplayer, but less fun for me.

    Feels like the "app-ification" of everything...

    → 9:14 PM, Mar 12   •  Personal, gaming, Dragon Age II, Neverwinter Nights, RPG, Blog
  • First meal at Nick's Spaghetti House

    Diptic

    With Rachael and Kai

    → 8:20 PM, Mar 10   •  Personal, diptic, dipticapp, Blog
  • Eierpfannkuchen with mushroom asiago sauce

    Diptic

    For Shrove Tuesday. Even though I’m a heathen.

    → 8:14 PM, Mar 8   •  Personal, diptic, dipticapp, eierpfannkuchen, image, pancakes, Shrove Tuesday, Blog
  • Rango at the Dolphin Theatre in Burnaby

    Photo1

    This is, of course, not a screenshot from Rango. Which, by the way, is an awesome, awesome, awesome movie that you really should go see. Animated, filled with animals as characters in an old Western style. Lots of in jokes. Dark, and very funny.

    It's "the claw" machine at the Dolphin Theatre, which is in deepest darkest Burnaby. It also has $7 movies, and $2 movies on Tuesdays, and it's where we saw Rango on Saturday night.

    I'll definitely be back.

    → 4:47 PM, Mar 6   •  Personal, Burnaby, Dolphin Theatre, Rango, Blog
  • On pre-launch DLS in Dragon Age II: "The mistake is the appearance of greed, of swindling your initial customer. "

    The mistake is the appearance of greed, of swindling your initial customer. When additional content came out a few months after the release it at least gave the impression that the developers had just kept on making the game after it was finished out of sheer momentum. Revealing that entire chunks of plot, quests, characters and abilities are being deliberately designed in order to not include them in the game just seems like a “fuck you” to the customer. Before DLC was an option, such content would either be artificially held back until it was really too late for people to have it for their first play of the game, or more likely just be contained in the game. Now it’s dangled in front of us, with no other message than, “Sure, you can spend only the £35/$50 on this game, but look what you won’t have.”

    via rockpapershotgun.com

    I have to agree with this. I am a HUGE fan of DLC, especially in the way it has been done recently in the DA series.

    But, I want to see the core game come out with DLC over time that can extend the lifespan of the core game, rather than this nickel-and-diming.

    UPDATE: I had a comment from someone within Bioware get to me that says, in essence "the linked article is mistaken about how downloadable content gets made". It would be great to hear from Bioware directly, via, you know, a comment or something :P The message from me is, regardless of how the DLC is made (or the planning & resourcing for it), from a marketing / user experience perspective, I feel like I'm being nickel and dimed.

    → 12:04 PM, Mar 6   •  Personal, gaming, Dragon Age II, DLC, Blog
  • Waking Derek

    Media_httpfarm1static_gkhih
    via flickr.com

    Last night I attended Derek Miller's living wake.

    Coming home and thinking about it last night and today, this is the picture I've had in mind.

    Or rather, this is the moment in time that I had in mind. I thought for sure that Kris had taken the picture that I was seeing in my minds eye. (No, he took this one).

    What I had in my minds eye was the much cooler version of Derek that walked up moments before this photo was taken. Long hair, head phones. Some kind of musician? Pretty cool, pretty "hip" to be coming to this blogging conference.

    We make small talk, and I get him to pose, and he pulls this face. But it doesn't matter, because browsing all those old ("this photo was taken 73 months ago") photos, friends, those experiences at Northern Voice, I see the long haired cool guy in my minds eye.

    And that's the first time I met Derek. It's been a pleasure.

    → 12:27 AM, Mar 5   •  Personal, Derek Miller, penmachine, Blog
  • We need to make the FUTURE work, & the best way to do that is to be engaged in the present /via @chriscorrigan

    The most useful conversations to me have been the ones where we kick around ideas, blue sky, dream a little, roll our sleeves up and try and figure out numbers or options.  Not because we need to make a park work but because we need to make the FUTURE work, and the best way to do that is to be engaged in the present.
    via bowenislandjournal.blogspot.com

    I am so glad that Chris is part of my hometown (Bowen Island) social fabric.

    → 10:19 AM, Feb 22   •  Personal, quote, Bowen Island, Blog
  • Reawaken as Tie-thulu, the most well-dressed of all the Elder Gods.

    Media_http29mediatumb_havdg
    via fuckyeahdementia.com

    I love me some Cthulhu.

    → 10:11 PM, Feb 21   •  Personal, funny, Cthulhu, Lovecraft, Blog
  • Results of soft pretzel making

    These worked out quite well. Recipe found at Beantown Baker via Foodista search.

    The dough was very sticky. Maybe it needed more flour, maybe I needed to knead it a bit longer and work more flour into it. Then came the tricky part.

    The astute amongst you might notice that the items in the photo above don't, in fact, look like pretzels. Well, the recipe was on my iPhone and my hands were full of sticky dough, so I ended up with sort of pretzel, erm, "twists" at best.

    Rachael had requested some tomato soup and buns, and these were the "buns".

    The soup was a mix of a couple of roasted red peppers, celeriac aka celery root, leeks, shallots, a couple of pounds of ugly winter Mexican roma tomatoes (from SPUD, so organic, but still…) and then some ill advised dried chickpeas. That's the second time I've used those chickpeas - they REALLY do need to soak overnight. I made a broth out of simmered chickpeas and some veggie trimmings while I roasted the red peppers. I used the same cast iron pan to then saute the celery root, shallots, and leeks in some olive oil. This all got mixed together with the tomatoes and the broth and the peppers, added some dried basil, a splash of some port that I've decided is best used for cooking, and then simmered down.

    I then took a hand blender and blended the whole thing. Those dang chickpeas were still a little on the crunchy side, so the result was a little gritty, but the taste was really good -- the roasted red peppers came through nicely. This was a quick soap, so a table spoon full of Better Than Bouillon vegetable stock base went in instead of salt to round out the taste.

    I finished it with some flat Italian parsley, and I'm not too sure about that detail. The texture was wrong and the blended soap didn't need it -- I think I was sort of picturing an Italian minestrone with some flat parsley leaves floating in it.

    I am getting better at quantities. A bowlful each for dinner, one portion as leftovers, and froze the rest in a yoghurt container. As opposed to a vat of leftovers and 2 yoghurt containers that I might have made.

    → 8:13 PM, Jan 16   •  Personal, baking, soup, celeriac, celery root, pretzel, tomato soup, Blog
  • Finished cornbread slice

    Image

    → 10:38 AM, Dec 19   •  Personal, Blog
  • Vancouver Christmas Market

    Img_0004 Img_0005 Img_0006 Img_0007 Img_0008 Img_0009
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    This is the first time I ever used Groupon - to buy some 2 for 1 tickets to the Christmas Market. The things to buy aren’t very interesting, but the variety & quality of German food is excellent.

    → 12:50 PM, Dec 18   •  Personal, Blog
  • No one expects Super German (idea by @RachaelAshe)

    Image

    → 7:17 PM, Dec 14   •  Personal, Blog
  • Yuuki bathing

    Yuuki loves running / pouring water. Here he is right after dinner.

    Yuuki Bathing on Vimeo

    → 8:52 PM, Dec 6   •  Personal, video, Yuuki, Blog
  • Color Splash'd Rachael with fuzzy hat

    Img_0000

    → 1:13 AM, Dec 5   •  Personal, Blog
  • Check your physics books /cc @dshanahan

    What they should tell you is to check your physics books. Balance is not rest. It is not quietude. It is what happens when all of the shoving and tugging and swirling and twisting forces in your life are equally matched, and for a moment there is what seems like deep silence but is really the hush in the eye of the storm.

    via utata.org

    Rachael saw my post on balance and sent this to me and Derek. She’s right, competing forces are a kind of balance.

    And I guess that’s what I meant by finding out what balance means to me. I don’t quite know what forces should be pulling and pushing me.

    → 10:52 PM, Dec 3   •  Personal, balance, Blog
  • The lining is orange

    When your car looks like a car but the doors are gullwing, we notice them. When your suit looks like a suit but the lining is orange, we notice it. When you apply for a job and you don't have a resume, we notice it.
    via sethgodin.typepad.com

    I need to remind myself that fitting in all the way is not the goal. And to keep bringing the crazy.

    → 10:50 PM, Dec 3   •  Personal, Blog
  • Just One Word /via @dshan

    Balance
    via dshan.me

    My man @dshan is someone that I haven't spent nearly enough time with. He's an excellent writer, so I'm really looking forward to a month of posts from him. I really need to get back on the blogging horse. More specifically, the *personal* blogging horse.

    I snipped nothing but the word BALANCE from his post. I think I've said I'm going to do balance THIS YEAR....every year. And I suck at it. I really, really, really suck at balance.

    So maybe I need to reboot the word, the concept. Redefine what balance means, for me. And hold myself accountable to MY definition of it. I keep struggling with, maybe, other people's definition of balance.

    First, define it. Then, live it in the way that is meaningful for me.

    → 7:32 PM, Dec 2   •  Personal, Blog
  • Turtles all the way down

    The most widely known version appears in Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which starts:

    A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"[1]

    The origins of the turtle story are uncertain.

    via en.wikipedia.org

    Darren brought this up today - I've used this phrase a lot in the past, although I don't recall where I got it from. I did read and enjoy the Discworld series.

    Yak shaving is another personal favourite.

    → 6:29 PM, Oct 26   •  Personal, turtles all the way down, yak shaving, Blog
  • Super Meat Boy

    via supermeatboy.com

    Hooked Gamers review of Super Meat Boy. I had stumbled on this a while back, and Lauren reminded me that it, uh, was "made for me".

    Apparently I have a reputation regarding meat :P

    It looks fun, but I pretty much suck at platform games.

    → 9:56 PM, Oct 17   •  Personal, meat, game, Super Meat Boy, Blog
  • Why we need email training

    Media_https3amazonaws_ceieg
    via theoatmeal.com

    I should probably remove the Feedburner rotating image bling from my Gmail. I tested it with the new rich text and then just left it turned on.

    Also, I have a disclaimer box being appended by my new office email. It *might* be part of some arcane certification process that it is required, but I haven't figured that out yet.

    I was *just* talking to people about email training being required these days…

    → 2:11 PM, Oct 4   •  Personal, email, The Oatmeal, Blog
  • Delve Deeper

    via gamersgate.com

    I have been sink for 48 hours+. I wandered out of my sickie cave this afternoon to visit Rachael's show at the Granville Island Hotel, and to make a trip to Oyama for fortifying victuals. I am rounding the evening off with some mindless gaming. Fun, so far.

    → 9:53 PM, Oct 3   •  Personal, gaming, Oyama, Delve Deeper, Blog
  • Why Johnny Can't Program /via @rushkoff

    Amazingly, America - the birthplace of the Internet - is the only developed nation that does not teach programming in its public schools. Sure, some of our schools have elected to offer "computer" classes, but instead of teaching programming, these classes almost invariably teach programs: how to use Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, or any of the other commercial software packages used in the average workplace. We teach our kids how to get jobs in today's marketplace rather than how to innovate for tomorrow's.

    …snip…

    As we continue to look at programming as a menial skill to be outsourced to developing nations, we will lose our innovative superiority as well. While this may not hurt American corporations capable of sourcing its code from anywhere, it would certainly hurt Americans looking for a skill set to replace our manufacturing jobs.

    via huffingtonpost.com

    Great piece on digital literacy by @rushkoff. I'm sure a lot of people will be turned off by some of the economic and military references, but look beyond that and think of digital tools as… …well, as tools, rather than as consumption vectors.

    It's just part of the great math & science handwringing in North America: we need to have people actually care about these things, and know how they work. Digital literacy is *important*.

    It's the difference between sitting around a fire and knowing how to make one from scratch when it goes out…

    → 3:42 PM, Sep 30   •  Personal, digital literacy, education, Blog
  • China is investing in multiple "moon shots" - modern airports, high speed rail, bioscience & electric cars

    Kevin Czinger, Coda’s C.E.O., who drove me around Manhattan in his company’s soon-to-be-in-production electric car last week, laid out what is going on. The backbone of the modern U.S. economy was locally made cars powered by locally produced oil. It started us on a huge growth spurt. In recent decades, though, that industry was supplanted by foreign-made cars run on foreign oil, so “now every time we buy a car we’re exporting $15,000 of capital, paying for it with borrowed money and running it on foreign energy sources,” says Czinger. “We’ve gone from autos being a middle-class-making-machine to a middle-class-destroying-machine.” A U.S. electric car/battery industry would reverse that.
    via nytimes.com

    I recently read about a supercomputer that is being built in China as well, so call that moon shot number 5.

    This is targeted at a US audience, and says to bet on electric cars. What should Canada bet on?

    → 10:14 PM, Sep 27   •  Personal, China, electric car, Blog
  • Quick Veal Stock and Remouillage

    Another thing about stock generally: don't think that stock making must be a huge undertaking.  I got an email the other day from a home cook saying she didn’t have the right pots to make stock.  Please, listen to me: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO MAKE ENORMOUS QUANTITIES AND MONOPOLIZE YOUR KITCHEN FOR AN ENTIRE WEEKEND IN ORDER TO HAVE STOCK.

    Put two or three pounds of bones in a 2-quart pot, cover with water, bring it to a simmer, skim anything that looks unpleasant off the surface, and put it in the oven set to 190 degrees for as long as you wish, a few hours at least or for beef and veal 10 hours is good.  Add an onion, two carrots and a bay leaf for the last hour of cooking.  Strain (the finer the strainer, the better the stock—I strain through a cloth).  This will give you about a quart of stock.

    For veal stock, see if you can find a veal breast, which has a great mix of bone, cartilage and meat (I know some people have trouble finding bones—if you’re not worried about cost, osso bucco works).  Ask your butcher to cut it into 3 inch pieces for stock (I use a cleaver which does the same work).  Roast them in a 425 degree oven until they are beautifully golden brown and delicious looking.  Then follow the above instructions.  Also add a couple tablespoons of tomato paste and some garlic.  Other aromats that are great to use here and in other stocks are leeks, peppercorns (crack them first), parsley and thyme.

    via ruhlman.com

    I started looking at veal stock recipes (like this French Laundry at Home one by Carol) and my heart sunk. For one, I only bought 3 lbs of bones + meat from Cioffi's (Yelp entry), and for two ... it's Sunday afternoon and I want to use it in risotto this evening.

    Luckily, the quoted way of doing it is pretty much what I had planned anyway - roasted then cooked in the oven for a couple of hours with onions, celery, and carrots.

    We'll see if I'm up for doing the remouillage aferwards.

    → 3:07 PM, Sep 19   •  Personal, recipe, stock, Cioffi's, remouillage, veal, Blog
  • Stuffed Squash Blossom Recipe

    082220101859 082220101860 082220101861 082220101862 082220101863
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    These were bought too soon and languished in the fridge for some time, hence the wilted look.

    Filling was ricotta, crushed garlic clove, fresh black pepper, salt, minced & sauted onion and some of the zucchinis.

    Had the leftover stuffing just stirred into linguini the next day.

    → 6:59 PM, Sep 5   •  Personal, recipe, ricotta, squash blossom, Blog
  • My crab picture used in Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings

    The Stormlight Archive PortalBook List

    The Way of Kings

    Book One of the Stormlight Archive

    Purchase


    From Amazon
    From B&N
    From BookSense
    From Booksamillion
    From Powell's

    Content

    • The Way of Kings Sample Chapters
    • The Way of Kings Blog Posts
    • The Way of Kings Articles
    • Fake Twitter Reviews of the Way of Kings
    • The Way of Kings Release Events

    This book will be released August 31, 2010. Description coming soon.

    Brandon wrote an introduction for Tor.com here

    via brandonsanderson.com

    I got an email today that an image of a crab shell that I sold back in April is now in published form, in an EPIC FANTASY NOVEL:


    The book containing the map which uses your image as a partial rough base has now been released. The Way of Kings is an epic fantasy novel by Brandon Sanderson, and if you look on page 94, your crab picture was the basis for the map looking as if it was first scratched into a shell and then made into a charcoal rubbing.

    Very cool. Good excuse to go pick this book up.

    → 5:55 PM, Sep 1   •  Personal, book, fantasy, ClusterShot, epic fantasy, Blog
  • Irish Soda Bread Recipe

    Ingredients

    • 4 cups all-purpose flour
    • 4 tablespoons white sugar
    • 1 teaspoon baking soda
    • 1 tablespoon baking powder
    • 1/2 teaspoon salt
    • 1/2 cup margarine, softened
    • 1 cup buttermilk
    • 1 egg
    • 1/4 cup butter, melted
    • 1/4 cup buttermilk

     

    Directions

    1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Lightly grease a large baking sheet.
    2. In a large bowl, mix together flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt and margarine. Stir in 1 cup of buttermilk and egg. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead slightly. Form dough into a round and place on prepared baking sheet. In a small bowl, combine melted butter with 1/4 cup buttermilk; brush loaf with this mixture. Use a sharp knife to cut an 'X' into the top of the loaf.
    3. Bake in preheated oven for 45 to 50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean, about 30 to 50 minutes. You may continue to brush the loaf with the butter mixture while it bakes.

     

    via allrecipes.com

    Had this as a link on FoodLikeThat, which I will be ditching one of these days. Key things with this seems to be use of both baking soda and powder, and lots of buttermilk.

    Made originally for Christmas morning, 2008.

    → 7:58 PM, Aug 23   •  Personal, baking, buttermilk, recipe, bread, Irish, Blog
  • Rouladen

    I have watched my mom prepare rouladen many times, and I'm sure I've even helped in the past. But, this is the first time I made them on my own (aside from Rachael's thread wrapping help).

    080720101790

    Rouladen as I know it is made from beef. You can usually ask the butcher for rouladen cuts, and many butchers will already have it pre-cut (especially the Freybe Outlet Store on Hastings just off Victoria Drive). You don't pound it flat or anything - it comes cut as thin as you need it to be.

    The quantities I mention here are for 16 rouladen. You want to figure about 2 per person and/or to have lots of leftovers, because they are delicious. Aside from the 16 strips of beef for the rouladen, you'll also need:

    • 1 lb of bacon (get something nice, like double smoked European style, but any bacon will do)
    • 4 - 6 large dill pickles (or many smaller baby dills / gherkins)
    • 2 - 3 onions
    • ~8 Tbsp of Dijon or other hot mustard (about a quarter of a jar)
    • something to hold the rouladen together (butcher's string, toothpicks, or random thread from the bottom of your sewing kit)

    Mince the bacon and cook it over medium heat (or stick it in the oven) until it's nice and crispy. You'll want to drain the fat / juices as you go (save them!) to make sure it gets crispy. Mince the onions and saute them (perhaps with some of that delicious bacon juice) on low until translucent / tender. Mince the pickles. Once the bacon & onions are done, drain the fat / pat them to soak up some of the fat and let them cool. Once everything is no longer piping hot you can mix all of these things together.

    Lay out the rouladen on a counter / workspace and spread with mustard. Do a twist of cracked pepper and salt over each piece of meat as well. Spoon on 2 Tbsp or soon onto one end of the piece of meat. Roll up the meat and secure it. If you're using thread, it's easiest if you do all the rolls, and then have someone help you wrap and tie each bundle.

    Remember the bacon juice you saved? Put it in a pan and heat. Brown the rouladen on each side, doing them in batches until they are all browned. Place them in a dutch oven or casserole dish, sprinkling a little flour on them as you layer them in.

    Deglaze the pan with water (or beer or wine) and pour over the dish of rouladen. Stir in a Tbsp or so of mustard for a bit more "tang" to the sauce as well as any leftover minced bacon / onion / pickle bits. Add water / liquor as needed so that the rouladen are mostly submerged. Cover and cook at 350°F for 45 minutes or so.

    I made this for Lauren's birthday party. We ended up serving it as a "meatatizer" - it was lukewarm and we prepped it by cutting all the thread off and cutting it into slices. The cross section of the rolled meat with the stuffing looks nice on a plate.

    Traditionally, you'd have this with potatoes or spätzle, plus some sort of highly cooked vegetable like red cabbage or perhaps some sauerkraut.

    → 9:10 PM, Aug 9   •  Personal, recipe, German, rouladen, Blog
  • Toward a steady-state economy /via @sebpaquet

    I think it is. My view on the matter is that the era of economic growth is over, kaput, finished. If you stop for a minute to think about it, you must admit that we live on a finite planet, that we are rapidly using up the available resources, that we are adding ever more pollution to our air, water and land, and that the distance (in time) between the end of the production line and regional dump is growing ever shorter. This cannot continue. Nature shows us that nothing grows forever. What would it be like if children never stopped growing? What happens as insect or animal populations grow? They either level off or experience a catastrophic collapse.

    So, if we cannot expect the economy to return to what has been “normal” in our past, what can we expect? I believe that we must, and in fact are right now transitioning toward a steady-state economy, one in which overall quantitative growth is supplanted by qualitative development, i.e., an improvement in the conditions of life that really matter,

    via beyondmoney.net

    There are many good quotes, like "the Butterfly economy" or "Use value is becoming more important than market value".

    I learned from reading greaterfool.ca, which is mainly about real estate but also about investing in general, that buying shares in banks that pay dividends earns you more (like 5% more) than sticking that same money into that bank's savings accounts.

    Investing in "real" dividends -- CSAs (community supported agriculture) and other co-op models -- is one way to get value directly.

    One area that I would like to see some focus on, learned from many discussions with Anthony of Farmstead Wines and Foodtree, is that while production is always local, I believe it is important for us to reward / seek out "good" forms of production wherever they are. Carbon footprint aside, we need to link these global local producers.

    → 8:49 PM, Aug 9   •  Personal, co-op, investing, Blog
  • Rendering plant in East Van

    Screen_shot_2010-08-06_at_8
    Through the wonders of Google Maps, I learned that there is a rendering plant a couple of blocks from my house - West Coast Reduction Ltd.

    The picture above is a screenshot from a Flash movie explaining the rendering process. Apparently, rendering is recycling. Also, french fries are a 5th food group? Type of animal?

    I especially enjoyed being able to click through the separate parts of the rendering process, and how everything ends up as Fight Club-style soap or protein meal for "feed". Fun!

    → 8:33 PM, Aug 6   •  Personal, chicken, East Van, rendering plant, Blog
  • A long time ago, before psychiatry and rum /via @kevinmarks

    A long time ago, before psychiatry and rum, I seriously considered a job in intelligence.  Among other things I had some Russian, and I knew another guy who was fluent in Russian and was actively being recruited by the CIA.    He decided not to do it because... his Dad wouldn't let him.  At that time it struck me as curious that you'd be more worried about your dad than the Russians, but I have since understood: we were living in a time where there was no right and wrong, no objective truths, all things were relative except the inviolable Law of Growing Up American:  go to college, then get a job.  Your dad's sole purpose was to make sure you followed that rule.   If you raped a murder victim then your Dad would get you a good lawyer, but if you showed any proclivity towards anything other than a future 9 to 5 in a field he understood, it was your ass.

    I'll grant you up front that Scott probably suffers from a mixture of ennui and myopia and absolutely no chance of STDs, who apparently feels neither shame in nor fear about sabotaging his job prospects by appearing in these photographs, to the fury of every American other American who sees them:

    via thelastpsychiatrist.com

    This is commentary on an article in the NYT about a college grad that hasn't been able to find a job in 2 years since he graduated. Except, he hasn't started anything himself and he turned down the one he was offered.

    Read the whole thing.

    Yeah, I don't think that anyone that uses the Internet as part of job screening is going to be hiring Scott.

    → 9:02 PM, Aug 3   •  Personal, entrepreneurship, Blog
  • We've propped up zombie companies that create McJobs

    We've overinvested in yesterday's industries to the point that they're now the walking dead - but the cost, of course, has been failing to seed tomorrow's.

    We don't have awesome jobs because we've propped up zombie companies that create, largely, McJobs - when they create any at all. Conversely, the incentives for entrepreneurship are drying up, thanks to a broken ventureconomy.
    via bubblegeneration.com

    Feeling like there are connected threads between stuff like this and Dave Pollard's thinking on coop economies. Except, I agree with some of the comments over there. The step 1 of company creation by committee is damn hard.

    → 5:33 PM, Aug 1   •  Personal, Blog
  • Betty Baguette - fresh sandwiches delivered by bike in Vancouver

    Media_httpbettybaguet_irggb
    via bettybaguette.com

    Seen via @nickmolnar and others. Clicking through to the web page, there is only a phone number. No email / contact form makes me sad :(

    → 2:46 PM, Jul 26   •  Personal, Vancouver, Betty Baguette, Blog
  • Strathgartney Provincial Park - Disc Golf in PEI

    via dgcoursereview.com

    I'm hoping that I'll have time during my trip to play some disc golf. I brought a couple of my golf discs just in case.

    → 6:47 PM, Jul 20   •  Personal, disc golf, PEI, Blog
  • European Shopping Tour of Vancouver

    I posted this originally on Urban Vancouver, way back in December 2004. I thought I'd move a copy here to make sure I could keep a copy.

    About a year ago, I put together a collaborative map of places to buy great ingredients in Vancouver over on Foodists.ca. Here's the map:

    http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&source=embed&msa=0&msid=108403776136895878523.00046bf165f8fcf2408b4&ll=49.291993,-123.101807&spn=0.13435,0.273972&z=11&output=embed
    View Foodists Vancouver map of key foody locales in a larger map


    My parents are both originally from Germany. I grew up speaking German, and we originally lived just off "Robson Strasse" as it was then known because of all the Germans that lived there.

    Even today, living in Vancouver, most Europeans don't need to change their diet (i.e. lots of good bread, cheese, meat, sausages, chocolate, saurkraut, etc.) if you know where to shop.

    And that's where this post really starts. Read on for the tour of shops to fill your Euro-diet needs (and just really good stores/food in general)

    First up, the hidden treasures of European Specialty Importers. They're on 220 Prior Street, which is just off Main by the Georgia Viaduct. If you're coming over the viaduct from downtown, take the offramp as if you're going to Main. Instead of turning on Main, cross it (you're on Prior) and it's the warehouse directly on your right, with a big sign with their name. If it looks like you're pulling up at a loading dock, you're at the right place.

    What's there? Well, pretty much any canned or packaged European food -- coffee, tea, saurkraut, mustard (in a tube!), dumplings, etc., etc. There is a small selection of meats and cheeses as well, but we've got another spot for that. Oh yes...did I mention the chocolate? There is an entire cold room (under video surveillance) filled with chocolate (cue Simpson's reference here).

    Next stop, Andy's Bakery. A very small store front at 935 Commercial (at Venables) conceals the best "landbrot" (big, multi-pound loaves of German rye) in the city. Nice buns, and a really good dark multi-grain as well. No foamy insubstantial Wonderbread here! If you need a lot of bread, you can call ahead to order.

    You may have seen the name Freybe before -- they produce a lot of commercially packaged meat stuff. But, they also happen to have a factory outlet store at 716 East Hastings Street. It is sometimes so busy on Saturdays that they have to lock the doors and only let people in as others leave. Cold cuts, sausages, and fresh meat. Have you ever had meat salad? They have it, and it's delicious.

    OK, the car is getting pretty full at this point, but there are still a few bits and pieces we need. Famous Foods is at 1595 Kingsway at King Edward. They bill themselves as "The Original Bulk Food Store", but they have so much more. The "bulk" stuff is nicely packaged dry goods, from great spices to pastas, beans, flour, oats, etc. etc. They have a good selection of meat, seafood, cheese, and even vegetables. The last category is natural products -- environmentally friendly cleaning and hygiene products. Yes, the variety is incredible, and the prices are great, too.

    Now I'm going to throw in a couple of bonus links, both on the drive -- Santa Barbara, a store a bit like Famous Foods. Expect to spend as much as 20 minutes waiting at the deli counter for service, but it's worth it. The other one is Norman's Fruits and Vegetables. The owners have produce from local farms in the valley, and you can get masses of produce for really cheap -- e.g. $2 for a 5lb box of roma tomatoes.

    What are your favourite food shops in Vancouver? Anyone have pointers for shopping for Chinese, Indian, Thai, or other cuisine/ethnicity ingredients?

    → 6:59 PM, Jul 15   •  Personal, European, German, map, shopping, Blog
  • Loaves from the local baker vs. the local hypermarket

    Let me explain - and allow to me to over-generalize for a moment. Let's say you want a loaf of bread. How many of us will pay an extra 15-30% for a loaf from the local baker, versus a loaf from the local hypermarket? Yet, because we won't, the bakery - and its jobs - vanish.

    After all, why would you pay a slight premium, for goods that are substitutes? Except, of course, they're not - really. Your bakery has radically different incentives than your local hypermarket, and might just offer you a significantly higher level of artisanship, skill, service - and trust. Yet, it's exactly those we don't seem to value.

    via bubblegeneration.com

    Tuesday I attended an event at Joel Solomon's place hosting Woody Tasch, talking about the Slow Money Alliance.

    Thanks to Joel for opening his house so everyone could hear Woody share his views, and get some thought and discussion flowing as well.

    A question / comment I expressed to Woody is that I am uncomfortable with the label of investor applied to myself (and yes, with those that know my Bootup context, that is some what ironic). And for many, I think "investor" is not a good rallying cry.

    As per the quoted text above from Umair Haque, making that sort of local, personal _movement_ happen is something I feel more comfortable with.

    Supporter seems too weak a word. Yes, I would like to invest. I would like to invest my support, vs. the local hypermarket.

    → 12:24 AM, Jul 15   •  Personal, hypermarket, Joel Solomon, Slow Money Alliance, Woody Tasch, Blog
  • A sanctimonious diorama about the folly of late-period humanity /via @mezzoblue

    Later on I will stand in one of these stores in front of a pyramid of Coke Zero bottles and consider the fact that a whole infrastructure exists for bringing this substance of no nutritional value from wherever it's bottled in Europe up to a place like this. I happen to love Coke Zero and whatever cyclopyrimidines or butylated phenols give it its weird fake sweetness, but seeing it stacked in quantity after coming off an island where everything has to be carried in by hand gives me pause. I feel like the Burfjord grocery store will someday form part of a sanctimonious diorama about the folly of late-period humanity in someone's well-meaning, sustainably-built museum or alien terrarium, and the thought fills me with irritation in advance. I buy a large bottle of the stuff as my way of shaking a fist at the future.
    via idlewords.com

    Found via @mezzoblue, and wonderful reading.

    Reminds me of when I was on a small atoll that is part of the Marshall Islands. There was one cinderblock construction supply store for both visitors and locals. We all lined up to pay $1USD for… …a cold can of coke. It also seems that $1 is the universal price for a can of pop.

    → 12:54 PM, Jul 13   •  Personal, Class Afloat, Coke, Coke Zero, Blog
  • Damien Rice 9 Crimes (song from the end of tonight's #TrueBlood)

    via youtube.com

    The video is creepy. It's nice and haunting as a credit roll for True Blood.

    → 10:03 PM, Jul 11   •  Personal, video, Damien Rice, True Blood, Blog
  • The murder of nature upon your very soul

    What must it be like to have the murder of nature upon your very soul? To have sacrificed all the world’s creatures for your own kind, and thereby lost your souls more completely than by any evil magic?

    Storm Seed, by Janet & Chris Morris, p 194

    → 5:05 PM, Jul 10   •  Personal, book, quote, Thieves World, fantasy, Storm Seed, Blog
  • The altar that was the shore at the end of time

    The god had been looking for a heart in the city, a heart that was worthy, a heart that knew true worship. And the god had found such a heart, and a voice that called upon Him without greed or demand, without wheedling or whining.

    The heart of the prophecy did Enlil find in the stable while the storm raged, upon the altar that was the shore at the end of time.

    But though the prophecy was fulfilled upon that moment, the humbling of the city had just begun.

    “City at the Edge of Time”, by Janet & Chris Morris, p189

    → 4:58 PM, Jul 10   •  Personal, book, quote, Thieves World, fantasy, City at the Edge of Time, Blog
  • "Learn to do real things and how to create value for other people" /via @rushkoff

    In the meantime, learn to do real things and how to create value for other people. Make friends with your neighbors or, if necessary, neighbors out of your friends.

    This is not a nightmare scenario, no matter what “they” say it is. No need for apocalypse, regression, or guns. That’s all silliness.

    Good times ahead.

    via rushkoff.com

    Good advice. Seen via @jonhusband.

    Today's post has another great quote about the connection between "stuff" and how much we actually need to work to survive - "I believe we could take care of pretty much everyone’s needs – at least in America – with all of us being employed perhaps 10% of the time."

    Good times ahead indeed.

    → 11:29 AM, Jul 8   •  Personal, Blog
  • Woodland Park Disc Golf

    http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649
    via flickr.com

    Here's the natural object 9 hole disc golf course I came up with this morning.

    → 5:55 PM, Jul 6   •  Personal, disc golf, Woodland Park, Blog
  • Dinnner Rolls

  • 1 package active dry yeast
  • 1/4 cup warm water
  • 3/4 cup hot milk
  • 3 tablespoons shortening
  • 3 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 4 cups all-purpose flour, or enough to make stiff dough
  • melted butter
  • via southernfood.about.com

    I made these for our Canada Day apartment picnic. What's that? It's when you put out pillows and blankets on the floor of your apartment because it's too cloudy / rainy to have a picnic outside!

    On the second rise in the pan, they all just sort of rose into one large mass. Next time, put them farther apart in the pan.

    I also think I might have over-kneaded a bit and/or worked in a bit too much flour as part of kneading, but it turned out some really nice crumb, almost like a biscuit or something with corn meal in it. This is theoretically a Southern food recipe, so maybe that makes sense.

    → 7:45 PM, Jul 1   •  Personal, baking, recipe, Blog
  • I made a vegan German potato salad

    The key part of German potato salad for me is the lack of mayonnaise and eggs. I make this up from scratch whenever I make it, but my version always includes two essential ingredients: Dijon mustard as part of the vinaigrette (I like the flavour and tang that it adds) and finely chopped dill pickles (a satisfying crunch and burst of vinegary / salty goodness).

    I also usually put in bacon / guanciale / schinken speck, but this time around, knew that there were going to be a number of vegetarians present and skipped the meat products. Hence, I (*gasp*!) accidentally made a vegan potato salad - which I didn't even realize until someone asked what was in it, and it dawned on me that yes, it was indeed a vegan potato salad :P

    The full recipe is on Foodista:

    Vegan German Potato Salad

    → 4:06 PM, Jun 27   •  Personal, cooking, Foodista, recipe, German, potato salad, vegan, Blog
  • Monkey Pirate Robot Ninja: The Game /via @laughingsquid

    Media_httpmarkarayner_khgzb
    via markarayner.com

    I'm done with Rock Paper Scissors as of now.

    → 3:55 PM, Jun 27   •  Personal, fun, game, monkeys, Blog
  • Who wants to dinner swap? /via @trevoro

    A cooking co-op, or dinner swap, is simply an agreement by two or more individuals or households to provide prepared meals for each other, according to a schedule. The goal is to reduce the time spent in the kitchen while increasing the quality and variety of the food eaten.

    It’s not a new idea — dinner co-ops have been around for years — but it was new to me. Mine is based in my apartment building in Jackson Heights, Queens, which adds to the convenience. Members of our co-op, made up of four households, including two editors at the James Beard Foundation and Tony Liu, the executive chef of the Manhattan restaurant Morandi, exchange meals weekly.

    It works like this: Once a week, you cook a dish (chicken enchiladas, for instance), making enough to provide at least one serving for each adult member of the co-op. (Children can be assigned half or full portions, depending on ages and appetites.) Around the same time, your fellow co-op members are cooking large batches of their chosen dishes.

    via nytimes.com

    Saw Trevor post this earlier in the day. This well describes what I'd like to try – I find it easier to cook large portions in any case. Leave a comment if you're interested in participating.

    → 12:59 PM, Jun 24   •  Personal, cooking, co-op, cooking co-op, dinner swap, Blog
  • Making pork stock

    062120101586 062120101587 062120101588
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    I followed a combination of #2 and #3 from this site on Chinese soups. Specifically, I used a bunch of pork bones plus a pork hock. The hock had lots of skin and fat as well as bones, so I trimmed the the skin off and then broiled it in a cast iron pan with a couple of cloves of garlic until the skin was crisp and the garlic was nutty brown.

    → 9:00 PM, Jun 22   •  Personal, cooking, pork, Chinese, stock, Blog
  • Mover Dinner Menu

    OK, it's down to the wire, and I think I've figured out the menu for the Mover Dinner I'm putting on tomorrow. Mover Dinner? A thank you to all the folks that helped us move. When I'm short on cash, I pay in food!

    First Course: Laksa a la Boris

    I spent Monday making pork stock. This is going to be the basis for a Laksa-inspired soup - I'll add coconut milk, bean sprouts, noodles and likely some chicken. Fresh green onions and coriander will round it out.

    Second Course: Spinach salad with Guanciale

    I've talked about the beauty of guanciale before - I'll crisp up some cubes of it with garlic and make a honey / mustard dressing to go over spinach leaves and some tomatoes.

    Third Course: Pita Wraps with Chicken

    I'll marinate / grill the chicken in pieces, as well as have some roasted peppers, sautéed onions, a tomatillo-based salsa (maybe sort of like this one?), some fresh tzatsiki, and other fixings for people to make their own wraps.

    Dessert Course

    Some sort of white vanilla cake served with the strawberries & rhubarb that we got last weekend.

     

    → 8:48 PM, Jun 22   •  Personal, cooking, guanciale, laksa, tomatillo, Blog
  • The dark side of the farmers' market boom

    But what if there's a little-known dark side to the farmers' market boom? What if the ruddy man in overalls actually came from hours away, where local residents don't have access to the vegetables grown near their own backyards because farmers prefer selling their produce to city dwellers at nearly triple the price?

    Linda Aleci, a historian and co-founder of the Local Economy Center at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, undertook a three-year study of the farmers' market in her city. Her findings suggested that the local farmers' market -- serving a poor, food-insecure community -- was suffering from the growth of markets in the Philadelphia metro region and in Lancaster County.

    via salon.com

    So, the problem here is treating food / food growing as a purely economic endeavour. I can see "local" markets (in quotes, because the very phrase "local" is problematic -- it's not the only value that is important) needing to work with farmers AND buyers to encourage a great local ecosystem.

    Do we drive out and buy from the farmer's gate? Can local stores stock produce from local farmers? (I'm thinking, here, of a suburban / rural area that has farmers / farmland as part of the community).

    Or should farmers go full steam ahead, and sell in urban farmers markets if it means higher prices for them?

    → 2:42 PM, Jun 21   •  Personal, Food, farmer's market, farming, Blog
  • I realized the internet was stealing the reading of books away from me /via @ebertchicago

    For some days now I have physically left the room with the computer in it, and settled down somewhere to read. All the old joy came back, and I realized the internet was stealing the reading of books away from me. Reading is calming, absorbing, and refreshing for the mind after hectic surfing. Chaz and I have quiet chats where we sit close and she talks and waits for my reply and this is soothing after the online tumult. I like the internet, but I don't want to become its love slave.
    via blogs.suntimes.com

    You should definitely be reading Ebert's blog.

    And yes, I read less. Less BOOKS. In all likelihood, I read many more words. I try and fit in reading as well, as that calmness is necessary, and lets your unconscious do its work figuring stuff out in the background.

    Currently, I'm reading some Janet Morris / Thieves World fantasy stuff.

    → 12:47 AM, Jun 12   •  Personal, book, Janet Morris, reading, Roger Ebert, Thieves World, Blog
  • Micro Four Thirds

    I've been jonesing for a new camera. Specifically, while I take a handful of pictures with my Nokia N95 that is with me everywhere, it's just not the same (obviously) as a great camera.

    I've been quite happy over the years with my Canon PowerShoot "S" Series - I started with the S1, then ended up with the S5. The all in one, super zoom, great macro performance, and regular AA batteries are all great features. BUT. It's big and bulky, especially with the filter adapter that I always end up buying, and there is no upgrade path other than well, buying a newer model :P

    I've been really intrigued by the Micro Four Thirds system - small, compact cameras with small form factor interchangeable lenses. That last link is to Wikipedia, here is the Micro Four Thirds section of the Four Thirds website.

    Olympus and Panasonic came together and are using the same standard to make these cameras, and the lenses are interchangeable. I was initially attracted to the Olympus models, but after trying them out at London Drugs, the lower cost ones are made of plastic and feel cheap, and the metal body ones are more expensive and have less features than the equivalent Panasonic.

    The first third party (Noktor) is also announcing a lens for this standard, so it is likely that a nice healthy Micro Four Thirds ecosystem will spring up over time.

    So, yes, I'm scheming to get back into this game. The fact that R will (I'm sure) be glad to tote around a compact sized camera with DSLR quality doesn't hurt either.

    → 12:31 PM, Jun 5   •  Personal, camera, Micro Four Thirds, Olympus, Panasonic, photography, Blog
  • The "social cost" of renting in Vancouver has increased

    Even though rent-versus-purchase math has long worked strongly in favour of renters, even moreso in the last few years, renters are not looked upon as fiscally wise and prudent, but rather as disadvantaged and unfortunate. This is not to say that this is fair, or right, it simply is the truth of what has happened here through the bubble. A renter confessing to renting in company not uncommonly gets responses ranging from pained grimaces, to condolences, to pity, to thinly veiled scorn. And renters can only imagine the opinions expressed when they are out of earshot.

    Yes, there are places in the world where renting is the norm. And, yes, many of the superficially wealthy Vancouver owners have abused their RE-ATMs and have large invisible debt loads. But the fact of the matter remains that renters are seen as relatively disadvantaged compared to their owner peers.

    via vreaa.wordpress.com

    As I once again move to a rental apartment, this discussion has been coming up again and again. Do we need a "renting is great" information campaign? Or maybe just a "f*ck owning!" campaign…

    → 11:03 AM, May 26   •  Personal, real estate, renting, Blog
  • Come for the sloths, stay for the frogs

    http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11712103&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=&fullscreen=1
    via pinktreefrog.typepad.com

    This women in South America is trying to save amphibians - frogs and other creatures are dying because of a deadly fungus that's sweeping the planet.

    So, she went to a sloth orphanage and took cute sloth videos, hoping it would go viral so you would come to her site, and help save frogs. Pretty awesome (and the sloths are cute).

    → 10:37 PM, May 17   •  Personal, video, cute, frogs, sloths, Blog
  • GINK by DERRICK COMEDY

    via youtube.com

    I shared this on Twitter already, but it is very very very funny, and you should watch it for sure. We've been watching Community, which has Donald Glover from DERRICK COMEDY in it.

    → 4:39 PM, May 17   •  Personal, video, DERRICK COMEDY, Donald Glover, funny, Blog
  • In Vancouver, middle class people can't afford to live middle class lives

    It won’t surprise anyone who’s ever read this blog that I lay most of the blame for this state of affairs on the overheated real-state market. When the average couple – one without trust funds, inheritances, or seven-figure jobs – can’t afford to buy the average home, there’s a price to be paid. In the short-term, that price will be paid (in a cruel irony) by those very same average couples, who will leverage themselves into knots to get into the market. From there, only two things can happen, both of which will prove catastrophic for our average couple: the real estate market can either correct, in which case they’ll be sitting on negative equity and lifetime of crippling mortgage payments, or it won’t, and they’ll just be sitting on those equally debilitating mortgage payments.

    Eventually, though, those average couples will start to look elsewhere, to the Edmontons, the Saskatoons, and the Halifaxes of the country, places where middle class people – teachers, journalists, nurses, and tradespeople, for example – can afford to live middle class lives. They’ll move to places where they can afford to save money, to have children, and to plan for the future, rather than remaining on the economic hamster wheel of places like Vancouver and Toronto, where wages remain stagnant while prices shoot ever higher.

    They might even discover that they like these new cities, too. Certainly, from where I sit, Edmonton looks like a perfectly civilized place to spend some time, and I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll leave. But I do know this: until its economy returns to some semblance of normalcy, and until middle class people can afford to live middle class lives, I won’t go back to Vancouver.

    via maxfawcett.wordpress.com

    I think a lot of people are thinking about adjusting their cost structures – driven in Vancouver almost entirely by rent or mortgages – so that they can experiment and do things differently. "A chance to finally get ahead in life" as Max says earlier in his post.

    This article on Youngstown that I read in Inc. Magazine makes me think along the same lines. People moving back to places that are in rough shape, but where there is the opportunity to build new structures and new ways of doing things (because the old ways certainly haven't worked).

    → 8:59 PM, May 13   •  Personal, Vancouver, real estate, Blog
  • Giving feedback to small business

    050320101414

    Looks pretty good, doesn't it? There are a couple of problems with the meal (mainly the sandwich), and definite problems with the delivery. I tried this at a new cafe / eatery. I have a ton of thoughts on what is wrong with the business, and why they are most likely going to fail.

    My problem comes in providing this feedback. Obviously posting a review of all the stuff that went wrong and what I think could change isn't really that great. Posting about it, and mentioning the small business, won't really do them any good.

    Do I go and talk to them about it? All of this is of course just my opinion, so why should they listen to me? And of course, I'm not prepared to help them implement changes.

    So, do I just watch this small business fail from the sidelines?
    → 9:03 PM, May 11   •  Personal, feedback, small business, Blog
  • Moving to The Drive

    051020101439 051020101440 051020101441
    See the full gallery on Posterous
    Rachael and I are moving to a new place. After only a few rounds of crack-shack-or-mansion, we got accepted to a place at the northern end of Commercial Drive. I have a sad face about the electric stove, but the kitchen is bigger and open to the dining room / open plan living room, which is really nice. I'm looking forward to all the awesome food shopping along the drive (never mind the restaurants). For example, Andy's Bakery, a German / Italian bakery where my parents have been buying European style bread for over 30 years, is only 2 blocks away. Talking to Anthony, it sounds like there are some yardshare opportunities nearby as well, so perhaps we'll get some gardening in as well.

     

    → 8:53 PM, May 11   •  Personal, Commercial Drive, moving, The Drive, Blog
  • making things visible

    050820101422

    nancy white’s session

    → 1:43 PM, May 8   •  Personal, Blog
  • Unplugging on Galiano

    Media_httpfarm5static_kcvis
    via rachaelashe.com

    I'm in transition, so as part of that, Rachael and I headed over to Galiano Island for a short break away.

    The picture above is from the top of Mount Galiano, which we hiked right after getting to the island and having lunch. It's a steep climb, but only about an hour up, and views like this make it totally worth it. The link above leads to Rachael's write up of the trip, with more detail and lots more pictures. Here is my Galiano Flickr set.

    Christian was kind enough to be tour guide as well as lending his car so we could do a bit more exploring -- the island is really long and skinny and a car is basically required to go anywhere interesting (at least to non-long-distance bikers).

    It was a great unplug, although it did once again get me to thinking about knowledge workers and rural Internet usage - it's the only way we are going to make smaller, remoter areas economically self sustainable beyond "just" tourist services (and it can help with those, too).

    → 11:10 PM, May 5   •  Personal, Galiano Island, Blog
  • Recent Meatballs

    http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649
    via flickr.com

    Sharing recent meatballs for the #smprimer class.

    → 4:09 PM, Apr 29   •  Personal, Flickr, meatball, smprimer, Blog
  • Sharing Knife by Bujold cc @kellan @lloydbudd

    Media_httpecximagesam_ncsfy
    via goodreads.com

    I first picked up Bujold on recommendation from Kellan and devoured all the Vorkosigan series. I think I mostly dragged Lloyd into it as well.

    I saw Volumes 1 - 3 of the Sharing Knife series in the library, and here I am almost done Volume 2, and not wanting the series to end.

    The book is linked to GoodReads, a book sharing / recommendation thingie. I've still been using Allconsuming, but thought I'd give GR a try. Can't say as how I like it much better yet.

    → 8:58 PM, Apr 28   •  Personal, book, GoodReads.com, Lois McMaster Bujold, Sharing Knife, Blog
  • The Internet sucks at recipes

    I’d also like to point out that Google is now useless for information about cooking, because almost all Google search results now point to vacuous sites that offer mundane, simplified recipes – often the same recipe endlessly repackaged. Bing is no better. It’s cooks.com and the Food Network ’til the cows come home.

    My recent strategy has been to fool Google by combining the information I want with the name of a serious cook – Ruhlman or Keller or Bourdain – and then to look for results that are not written by that cook. This often gets you results from food blogs and other serious writers, not retreads from 1990’s supermarket magazines.

    via markbernstein.org

    I'd really really like to take this on. I've been dreaming about "the perfect recipe website" for many years. Hint: it involves APIs.

    → 11:15 AM, Apr 25   •  Personal, recipes, Blog
  • Killer Bunnies?

    Media_httpwwwkillerbu_unsfr
    via killerbunnies.com

    Played this last night for the first time, with 7 people that were over for dinner. It was …interesting. Definitely complex, didn't move very fast, and there are way too many different piles of cards and discard piles. Also needs a fairly large table so everyone can organize cards in front of themselves.

    Definitely need to play it with a smaller group to see if it moves more quickly, and thus makes it more fun.

    → 12:42 PM, Apr 21   •  Personal, board game, Blog
  • Cooking Octopus on @Foodists

    Media_httpfarm5static_peimi
    via foodists.ca

    Here's my write up on Foodists of how I cooked the octopus.

    → 11:05 PM, Apr 19   •  Personal, Foodists, octopus, Blog
  • About to broil an octopus

    Media_httpkalofagasca_poqad
    via kalofagas.ca

    I'm about to braise & broil an octopus - bought about a pound of tentacle down at Granville Island. Wish me luck, will have photos of the finished product.

    (Especially ironic because of the "cute" octopus video? Perhaps - they're still damn tasty)

    Update: OK, worked out pretty well. A little chewy, but delicious. Bought it at The Salmon Shoppe on Granville Island - had them hack off one big tentacle for Rachael and I (Rachael had fun taking some close up shots before I cooked it).

    Here's the picture of the finished product:

    Making Broiled Octopus - 6

    And the rest of the "making of" is on Flickr.

    → 3:28 PM, Apr 18   •  Personal, cooking, octopus, Blog
  • Video camera stealing octopus

    via youtube.com

    I really need to re certify in SCUBA and start building my gear again.

    → 12:19 PM, Apr 16   •  Personal, video, octopus, diving, youtube, Blog
  • What I did tonight

    I had an all hands meeting at work and discussed a bunch of upcoming stuff.

    I went home and relaxed by cooking dinner (braised cabbage in mustard cream sauce, boiled potatoes, and a beef / guanciale / mushroom mixture).

    Then the Internet started punching me in the face, and I helped write a quick blog post.

    Then I went off and played dodgeball, which was fun as always (the Internet kept punching over mobile).

    Then we went for team beers.

    Then I came home and tried to sift through all the face punching stuff on the Internet and write something in response.

    Turns out, I'm a real person, a lot like you. Please stop punching me in the face. Thanks.

    → 1:04 AM, Apr 15   •  Personal, Blog
  • I <3 taxes AKA government trapped by an ever-shrinking stream of revenue

    That’s why the push to repeal the HST is more dangerous than it might appear. It’s a Trojan Horse for more general forms of anti-tax sentiment, and if it is somehow successful it would establish a very dangerous precedent, a template that anti-tax groups would use to challenge any and all future tax increases. In such an environment future governments, regardless of their partisan orientation, would be hopelessly constrained, trapped by an ever-shrinking stream of revenue and forced to outsource, downsize, and otherwise remove itself from areas of enterprise and activity in which government currently acts. The danger in rallying against the HST is that it represents another rejection of taxation itself and of the idea that we as citizens have to pay for the services that we receive. From where I sit, in the long run that’s a far more significant threat to our prosperity as individuals, as British Columbians, and as Canadians than a few extra cents here and there in new taxes.
    via maxfawcett.wordpress.com

    No, really, I *do* love taxes. I'm not a huge fan of what various elected political parties do with them, but that's on us as the governed to fix and make better.

    But I'm a fan of the greater good, and a society that supports it. If I wasn't, I'd go live in the US.

    And really, if the 'Zalm is against it…

    /via @sillygwailo

    → 5:14 PM, Apr 13   •  Personal, BC, Canada, HST, politics, Blog
  • Startup drinks April 2010

    Photo

    I'm using Keynote to create a "Startup Drinks" presentation, with Danny looking on in the background. Photo by Weston Triemstra

    → 9:42 AM, Apr 7   •  Personal, me, photo, startup drinks, Blog
  • Dr Teeth tattoo

    Media_httpcraphoundco_gpfif
    via boingboing.net

    My long ago Ultimate team in Ottawa was called Dr. Teeth, and two of my favourite t-shirts feature Dr. Teeth front and center. Gotta love the gold tooth.

    → 2:56 PM, Mar 19   •  Personal, Dr. Teeth, Muppets, tattoo, Blog
  • Trotter Gear

    Trotter Gear

    Trotter Gear

    Trotter Gear

    Anthony and I made Trotter Gear this weekend. Which are, of course, pigs feet, and from Fergus Henderson's "Beyond Nose to Tail" cookbook (which Anthony gave to me for my birthday). Here's a version of the recipe.

    What does one do with trotter gear? Well, it features prominently as an ingredient in about a third of the recipes in that book. The pie described in the linked recipe is definitely something I want to try.

    → 11:09 PM, Mar 14   •  Personal, Anthony Nicalo, pork, trotter gear, Blog
  • Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising

    Media_httpcdnsteampow_ddxzu
    via store.steampowered.com

    Comes out this Thursday. I really enjoyed the first part of this, and replayed it a couple of times. The "Last Stand" multiplayer is super addictive - you ALWAYS get that "just one more game" feeling.

    → 2:26 PM, Mar 8   •  Personal, gaming, Chaos Rising, Dawn of War 2, Warhammer 40K, Blog
  • Roast Lamb Leg Dinner

    030720101214 030720101215 030720101216
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Last of the Cutter Ranch lamb. Marinated with preserved lemons with bay leaves from my parents' garden, plus turmeric, coriander, garlic, etc. Served with cous cous with grilled peppers.

    → 1:56 PM, Mar 8   •  Personal, cooking, photo, lamb, Blog
  • Spaghetti with Guanciale and Kale

    030620101210 030620101211 030620101212
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    More on the magic of guanciale in the previous post.

    → 1:04 PM, Mar 8   •  Personal, spaghetti, photo, guanciale, kale, recipe, Blog
  • Guanciale - magical pork jowls

    Now that the Olympics are over, Oyama again has guanciale. I picked some up to cook while on Bowen.

    The "traditional" recipes for guanciale are all pasta dishes (Bucatini alla Amatriciana, Spaghetti alla Gricia, Spaghetti alla Carbonara - here are recipes for all three plus instructions on how to cure your own guanciale).

    Here are some non-traditional recipes I found online:

    • Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Ponzu Fried Garlic, Guanciale, and Bonito Flakes - I have my own bacon + mustard recipe for brussels sprouts, so I know this would be yummy
    • Whole-wheat pasta with cabbage, mushrooms, and caraway seeds - I'm not a fan of caraway seeds, but I can see how the whole wheat pasta would mesh with the smokiness of the pork
    • Tiny potato dumplings with Tomato Onion Guanciale sauce - pretty similar to the pasta sauces, but done with potato dumplings aka gnochetti instead. Mashed potatoes with caramelized onions and guanciale would also be stellar, I think …
    • Seattle Shellfish Stew with Kale and Guanciale - there are a variety of recipes that mix mussels with guanciale. Lots of bacon + mussel recipes out there, so this makes sense. The kale has a bitterness to it that goes with the smokiness, which is what I'm hoping for with my recipe.
    • Sautéed Ramps in Guanciale - I've never had ramps, which are a sort of scallion/leek/onion/garlic - but are apparently wild leeks

    My recipe? I'm doing pasta with a bunch of Red Boar Kale.

    Spaghetti With Guanciale and Kale

    → 6:40 PM, Mar 6   •  Personal, recipes, Foodista, pork, guanciale, kale, Oyama, Blog
  • Living on Bowen

    The waters of Howe Sound and the ferry across it are not only a physical barrier, but also a psychological one. Of course, many people say this about islands. With Bowen, and the commuter culture - which starts with high school - there is on island, and off island mindsets. The gearing up and gearing down happens every day.

    You leave your home, make your way to the ferry to go to work or school. You step out the door, you watch the sun rise over the mountains crossing the Causeway. You are still on island. You make it to the ferry, wait with the "usual suspects" (those commuters on the same schedule as you), take your assigned seat with your regulars. The conversation shifts towards the morning radio tidbits, the wider news of the day. You are leaving the island, your home life, behind. On the commute, you become immersed in city and work.

    You look at your watch, gather your things, and calculate which combination of trains, planes, and automobiles will get you on "the next ferry". The gathering of things may include a few files or artifacts that you need to bring home, but you are mentally as well as physically packing them away. Your thoughts turn towards this "next ferry", and you think about the weather, and what's for dinner. Arriving at the ferry terminal, you mentally pack work and stress away. Whatever happens, you will be on the next ferry. Crossing the water, you are facing home. Are you being picked up? Are you looking for a ride? Are you walking home in the dark and rain? There is a warm home at the end of the journey, time for a few last chats about politics, or development, or whether it's time to plant a few radishes.

    via bowegover.ning.com

    I left a comment on a new online forum for Bowen Island, being setup and run by many people I respect, including the newly-moved-to-Bowen Dave Pollard.

    I guess I didn't really answer the part of what do I appreciate about Bowen, rather a feeling I have about it. I appreciate that it is "home", and it is a home I can go to.

    → 3:31 AM, Mar 2   •  Personal, Bowen Island, commuting, Blog
  • Setting up Rachael's show at Waterfront Theatre

    022820101185 022820101186 022820101189
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    The show is called "Trees I have Dreamed", and you can find out more on Rachael's site about it. It runs until April 11th, and there will be some sort of exhibition. In the mean time, make sure to come visit the Altered Books at Bootup this Thursday (Facebook - Little Stories: Transforming the Book).

    → 2:27 AM, Mar 2   •  Personal, photo, rachael, Waterfront Theatre, Blog
  • Ground Pork Ragout

    030120101194 030120101195 030120101196 030120101197
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Trying for something vaguely like Anthony's ragout. I remember it had carrots and pork, and the nutmeg seemed a good direction to go.

    Ground Pork Ragout on FoodistaGround Pork Ragout

    → 12:39 AM, Mar 2   •  Personal, Foodista, photo, pork, recipe, ragout, Blog
  • Brunch as a meal to have people over for is neglected

    Ingredients

    12

    eggs

    12

    ounces jar of salsa

    1 ½

    cups grated cheese

    Preparation

    Step 1

    Pre-heat oven to 400°F

    Step 2

    Grease a 12 cup muffin pan with a little oil

    Step 3

    Crack an egg into each muffin tin

    Step 4

    Spoon about a tablespoon or so of salsa over each egg (don't worry if it slides to one side or the other of the yolk)

    Step 5

    Top each egg / salsa mixture with grated cheese - cheddar, monterey jack, or other flavourful melty-cheese works (mozzarella is too bland)

    Step 6

    Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes - cheese should be melted and bubbly, and egg should be cooked through

    via foodista.com

    Huevos Rancheros a la Muffin Pan on FoodistaHuevos Rancheros a la Muffin Pan

    We had brunch today. I was browsing through my New York Times cookbook earlier in the week thinking of something fancy, and then went in the completely opposite direction and made this super simple version of huevos rancheros.

    Baked another no knead to go with this, which was 2 parts white, 1 part rye, 1 part rolled oats. The oats kind of just disappear after the kneading, second rise, and baking, but they definitely improve the crumb. Also put in a can of Rickards Red beer.

    Potatoes were boiled briefly last night, then sat in the fridge with fresh ground coriander, fennel, paprika, and olive oil, and then hung out in the oven on low heat for a couple of hours this morning.

    Lastly in this post, but firstly served, was a “fruit salad” made of grated pear, Granny Smith apple, Pink Lady apple, and zest + juice of one lime.

    Brunch as a meal to have people over for is neglected. I will do it more often.

    → 5:09 PM, Feb 27   •  Personal, Foodista, no knead bread, recipe, breakfast, brunch, eggs, huevos rancheros, Blog
  • Duck Tongues Dim Sum

    Media_httpfarm3static_eltyv
    via flickr.com

    Thanks for everyone that came out for my birthday dim sum today. It was fun to sit and eat amidst the hustle and bustle of Sun Sui Wah, and then to gambole along Main Street in the sunny weather.

    → 7:44 PM, Feb 21   •  Personal, birthday, dim sum, duck tongues, Sun Sui Wah, Blog
  • Spicy Coconut Tumeric Beef

    022020101165

    I was going for the Banana Leaf's Rendang Beef curry - which is a completely different dish, but I think I got the coconut right, as well as the sweet + tang + spice.

    Spicy Coconut Tumeric Beef on FoodistaSpicy Coconut Tumeric Beef

    → 9:41 PM, Feb 20   •  Personal, cooking, Foodista, recipe, beef, coconut, tumeric, Blog
  • Finished reading: The Last Light of the Sun (Guy Gavriel Kay)

    Media_httpecximagesam_weggf
    via amazon.com

    I've actually read this book before. I immediately devour any book that Kay releases.

    It was great to go back and read this one again. There is a lot of depth to Kay's books - glimpses of the fact that any minor character has a full history behind them.

    Many people feel that this is not as strong as some of Kay's other books. The pace / plot is a bit more sedate - like the sun going down, there is an inevitability on display as it rolls to conclusion.

    There is a bit of fantasy / magic thrown in, but the theme is in part about the end of paganism and superstition, so the whole thing can be read as historical fiction.

    → 2:52 PM, Feb 20   •  Personal, book, Guy Gavriel Kay, Blog
  • S/V Concordia sinks off Brazil

    The Canadian tall ship SV Concordia, a sailing school vessel, heads past downtown Halifax in this July 24, 2000 file photo.
 The Canadian tall ship SV Concordia, a sailing school vessel, heads past downtown Halifax in this July 24, 2000 file photo. (Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press)

    A Nova Scotia-based ship carrying dozens of students has sunk off Brazil, but everyone is safe and there were no serious injuries, officials say.

    The Brazilian navy said the tall ship SV Concordia went down about 550 kilometres southeast of Rio de Janeiro in rough seas.

    West Island College International of Lunenburg, which runs the Class Afloat program, said all 64 people aboard were rescued from four life-rafts by merchant vessels early Friday.

    The 48 students, eight teachers and eight crew had to abandon ship and spent the night in the life-rafts equipped with blankets and some food. A Brazilian navy helicopter spotted the rafts and dropped medical supplies.

    via cbc.ca

    I went on the Class Afloat program right after I graduated from high school, in 1993 / 94. I spent 11 months on board, starting from Vancouver and then sailing around the north and south Pacific Ocean.

    It was an incredible experience, and one I've always encouraged other people to take part in.

    The ship was custom built in Gdansk, Poland, specifically for this program. They're going to have to raise millions of dollars to try and replace it, if they intend to continue.

    → 5:24 PM, Feb 19   •  Personal, Class Afloat, Concordia, Blog
  • I made a video at Canada's Northern House

    via canadasnorthernhouse.sayshello.ca

    Looks like it may not support embeds, so you'll have to follow the link. Long live muk muk!

    → 11:28 AM, Feb 19   •  Personal, video, Canada's Northern House, muk muk, Olympics, Blog
  • Happy Valentine's Day!

    German Pancakes with stewed apple topping

    I don’t like Hallmark holidays. In fact, I don’t like ANY holidays / occasions that are musts. I like doing stuff at other, unexpected times of the year, just because.

    In any case, I did make German pancakes for breakfast. They were good, and it’s always nice to sit down and share a meal.

    originally via <www.flickr.com/photos/bo…>

    → 1:03 PM, Feb 14   •  Valentine's Day, Blog
  • Simple Ethiopian Berbere Kuri Squash Soup

    I had a large kuri squash, and used it over several days. The small amount of cubed squash that I had leftover ended up being this single serving soup.

    Monsoon Coast Spices on Salt Spring Island makes a wonderful Berbere: http://www.monsooncoast.com/spices/ethiopian_berbere.html

     

    Simple Ethiopian Berbere Kuri Squash Soup on FoodistaSimple Ethiopian Berbere Kuri Squash Soup

    → 9:21 PM, Feb 8   •  Personal, recipes, Foodista, Berbere, Ethiopian, kuri squash, Monsoon Coast, soup, spicy, squash, Blog
  • Refrigerator Pickles

    Media_httpawaytogarde_euqqi
    via awaytogarden.com

    Storing this recipe link so I can find it again. Someone else on Twitter pointed out that it was my recommendation for the best recipe for refrigerator pickles :P

    → 5:12 PM, Feb 8   •  Personal, recipes, pickles, Blog
  • Black and hairy, very small aka Boris the Spider by The Who /via @dbarefoot

    via youtube.com

    The Who were at the Superbowl today, so lots of their old songs got looked up again. Thanks, Darren.

    → 9:45 PM, Feb 7   •  Personal, video, Boris the Spider, Superbowl, The Who, Blog
  • Used Cookbook Haul

    Today I went to Thomas Haas.

    Mocha and Aztec Chocolate @ Thomas Haas

    The drinks were nice, as were the pastries, but it was incredibly loud, there was nowhere to sit, and the energy in the room was frantic / hectic. So R and I wandered the streets of Kits sipping our drinks and ended up at the Salvation Army.

    I always look for used cookbooks that are ethnic, or old, or from the women's auxiliary of some church in some county from a long time ago.

    British Columbia Heritage Cookbook

    This first book is interesting because the author gushes about BC regional cuisine. Many of the recipes have place or people names from around the province.

    Bowen Island Salmon Pie from BC Heritage Cookbook

    It had a Bowen Island (where I grew up, and where my parents still live) recipe, so I definitely had to get it.

    Lots of the recipes have canned goods of various kinds, even if they are things that can be sourced from BC (e.g. smoked oysters). I bet, back in the day, that lots of canned things were more local, so if you made something with a tin of tomatoes, it would taste different in BC because they were local BC varietals. Provenance for canned goods? Of course…

    Cooking in Switzerland

    Cookbooks that focus on regional cuisines are also of interest to me. This one is a hardcover, and the pages are a rough type of paper, and the whole book seems to be covered in grease spots. Well loved!

    I could eat this everyday from Cooking in Switzerland

    Also, there are little notes like this - "I could eat this everyday" - scattered throughout the book. Again, a must have because of this alone. That, and every recipe seems to call for potatoes and bacon - at least, the ones that aren't calling for whipping cream and butter!

    New York Times Cook Book (1961)

    The New York Time Cook Book was another no brainer. Why? Well, because of this next recipe photo…

    Roast Suckling Pig from New York Times Cook Book

    Why yes, that is a roast suckling pig! The book is great, with lots of multicultural recipes from around the world, as well as good versions of lots of "basics".

    I'm very pleased with my used cookbook haul.

    → 8:19 PM, Jan 30   •  Personal, cookbook, Salvation Army, Thomas Haas, Blog
  • Austrian (pig) Cuts /via @rtanglao

    Media_http4bpblogspot_kzbfz
    via woolypigs.blogspot.com

    I think it's about time to order a whole pig and schedule a butchery / charcuterie class again.

    → 2:10 PM, Jan 30   •  Personal, meat, pig, Blog
  • I accidentally bought the fourth in a series /via @akalsey

    No wonder this book is full of unexplained backstory. I accidentally bought the fourth in a series.
    via twitter.com

    → 10:25 PM, Jan 29   •  Personal, book, quote, Blog
  • A Winter WonderMEATland! /via @RachaelAshe

    Media_httpevenmoreleg_reytc
    via evenmorelegendary.com

    I'm sure Sarah will love this post, too.

    → 5:01 PM, Jan 29   •  Personal, bacon, meat, fun, Blog
  • I'd like to make blood sausage

    via charcuteriesundays.blogspot.com

    Also, the Charcuterie Sundays blog is amazing. It has kicked back into high gear. This alone is a good excuse to head east.

    → 12:26 PM, Jan 26   •  Personal, meat, blood sausage, Blog
  • flaky biscuits

    012320101031

    I've been continuing on the baking kick. Biscuits are great because
    they take only 20 - 30 minutes from start to finish.

    New Flaky Biscuits

    → 11:12 AM, Jan 23   •  Personal, Foodista, baking, biscuits, Blog
  • Ask the Internet about Pho in Vancouver, and get responses like @trevoro did

    Best Pho in Vancouver

    4 Au Petit Cafe
    3 Hanoi Pho (Hastings and Dunleavy)
    2 Pho Tang
    2 Thai Son (Chain)
    2 Pho Huang
    1 Le Do
    1 Sung Huong (Surrey so it doesn’t really count)
    1 Hai Phong
    1 Pho Thai Hoa

    via trevoro.ca

    I used to go for pho a lot more in Ottawa, where I lived a couple of blocks down from a "Little Vietnam" area of town. There are lots of pho shops in Vancouver, maybe I should pick a new place to live based on pho proximity?

    → 12:05 PM, Jan 21   •  Personal, Vancouver, pho, Blog
  • Missing days…

    I thought I might make it all the way through 2010 with one personal blog post per day. Nope!

    I can probably cheat and go back and show the picture of my second no knead experiment (which also turned great, even though I let it rise for way over 24 hours) for Monday.

    For yesterday? Nope.

    I won't stress about not posting every single day, but I am enjoying the better "flow" that I have here and on my asides.

    → 12:36 AM, Jan 21   •  Personal, Blog
  • No Knead Bread first result

    No Knead Bread (inside)

    No Knead Bread

    01/17/2010

    01/17/2010

    via flickr.com

    This is my first attempt at No Knead Bread (wrote about it previously with links to recipes).

    This was a bit of a mashup with something from Cooks Illustrated that recommends a *little* bit of kneading, and the addition of beer and vinegar.

    I didn't have any beer, but I did add the vinegar, and I did knead for about 10 minutes. I let it sit yesterday at 5pm, and started working with it at around 9am this morning, so it sat for 16 hours. The modified Cooks Illustrated plans on anywhere between 8 and 18 hours.

    1/3 whole wheat and 2/3 white (both unbleached organic all purpose from Spud). The crust is nice and substantial, the crumb is bit too light for me: will have to experiment with heavier grains, maybe some rye flour. Will have to see how it tastes when it's cold: fresh out of the oven all bread is fantastic.

    → 3:20 PM, Jan 17   •  Personal, cooking, baking, no knead bread, Blog
  • Cider Vinegar BBQ Sauce for Pulled Pork

    Cider Vinegar Barbecue Sauce:

    • 1 1/2 cups cider vinegar
    • 1 cup yellow or brown mustard
    • 1/2 cup ketchup
    • 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
    • 2 garlic cloves, smashed
    • 1 teaspoon salt
    • 1 teaspoon cayenne
    via foodnetwork.com

    This is a good basic recipe for pulled pork made in the oven. I pretty much wing the dry rub these days, but the cider vinegar BBQ sauce ingredients above are good proportions that I always forget.

    → 1:34 PM, Jan 16   •  Personal, recipes, BBQ, pulled pork, Blog
  • A stylist with hats

    Media_httpfarm5static_llpcd
    via flickr.com

    This smiling lady has been my hair stylist (aka cut it short when it gets unruly) for many years, and she has ended up cutting the hair of many friends, family, and even business colleagues. Her shop is Pome Studio.

    → 6:46 PM, Jan 15   •  Personal, hats, photo, smile, Blog
  • Happy Trogday to you! /via @haggaret

    Media_httpwwwtelltale_fyiui
    via telltalegames.com

    Apparently today is Trogday, celebrating the creation of the Strong Bad character Trogdor, way back in 2003. Click through to get a free Trogdor game.

    → 1:11 PM, Jan 13   •  Personal, Strong Bad, Trogday, Trogdor, Blog
  • Trying on hats

    Media_httpfarm3static_djahh
    via flickr.com

    Fur hats are fun!

    → 10:48 AM, Jan 12   •  Personal, hats, photo, Blog
  • Making Cheese

    Making Cheese is as easy as…pie…?

        <span class="date">September 2nd, 2009</span>
         <span class="edit"></span>  
    
    <p />
    
    <div class="entry">
        <p>A few months ago I read the wonderful book <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Animal-Vegetable-Miracle-Barbara-Kingsolver/dp/155468188X">Animal Vegetable Miracle</a> written by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s an entertaining and inspiring recounting of the year she and her family spent growing their own food. The book includes meal plans and recipes at the end of each chapter that are based on what is available by season. Some of these, like the asparagus and morel bread pudding, sound mouth-wateringly good.<br />
    

    Cheese making-4

    About three quarters of the way through the book there is a chapter where Barbara describes making her own cheese. And not only does she make her own mozzarella but she does it in just thirty minutes! Boris and I were really excited about this (Cheese in half an hour!! WE CAN MAKE OUR OWN CHEESE!!!!!) and I started to track down the ingredients. This ended up being the most complicated part because though the cheese is made with only three ingredients – milk, citric acid and rennet – I had no idea where to look for two of those three. In the end it was Anne who found everything for us and we owe her a cheese of her own in thanks.

    For future cheese makers based in Vancouver here’s where to get ‘em: citric acid can be found at most pharmacies and rennet is sold at Bosa Foods. After that it was easy-peasy and we ended up with delicious cheese, fresh and hot. The mozzarella was tasty and went beautifully with the heirloom tomatoes we’ve been picking up at the Farmers Market throughout the summer.

    Cheese making-2

    The 30-minute mozzarella recipe is available as a PDF download from the Animal Vegetable Miracle companion site. Boris and I have made the mozzarella twice now, the first time with friends and the second as a tag team effort. Two key things we discovered: resist the impulse to keep stirring the milk because it’ll separate into curds and whey faster when still, and add a bit more citric acid when the milk reaches the highest temperature mentioned in the recipe.

    Cheese making

    We’re still both AMAZED that cheese making can be this easy and this fast. And thanks to the recipes included within the box of rennet tablets there are more cheese experiments we’re hoping to try in the near future.

    Cheese making-3

    via rachaelashe.com

    Ready for editing and reposting on Foodists.

    → 12:22 AM, Jan 12   •  Personal, Foodists, cheese, Blog
  • Anything but elves and trolls /via @rtanglao

    the epic quests set in Tolkien-inspired fantasy universes have gotten really boring to me.  Give me sci fi, superheroes, or asian animism, anything but elves and trolls.
    via terranova.blogs.com

    A long post on looking for more new NEW in games. I think gaming is still catching up to the wild creativity of the web, and yes, some sort of Second Life-level piece of player interaction is going to be the more interesting space.

    All the comments about City of Heroes makes me want to kick the tires on it.

    Incidentally, gaming isn't going to go on my tech asides, it's going to go here.

    → 9:26 PM, Jan 11   •  Personal, quote, City of Heroes, gaming, Blog
  • If eaten, my body would taste like SPICY BEEF /via @RachaelAshe

    What would you taste like to a cannibal?

    Created by Recipe Star

    → 6:46 PM, Jan 11   •  Personal, fun, cannibalism, quiz, Blog
  • Make your own Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Beets, etc. /via @sarahfelicity

    Live Fermented Food & Organic Raw Dairy Making Workshops at The Urban Ashram - 2290 Saint George Street, Vancouver, BC V5T 3R2  604 708 9058 farmertomas@gmail.com

    Food is the new black. Everybody wants to connect to food again, whether in festivals like Fork in the Road, Taste of Health, Vancouver Health Show...or shopping at local farmers markets, growing their own food at home or in community gardens. Food is once again taking its primacy as what truly nourishes us and our Earth. Food also roots us and gives us a truly spiritual connection to our place here and now on Earth.

    Fermenting one’s own food at home is truly a wondrous and if alchemical experience produced by lactic acid bacteria, that exist all around us and within us. The process gives us a greater appreciation for all those beings we never see yet are reliant on: a lesson illustrated so beautifully by Dr. Seuss in Horton Hears a Who and Well(es) versions of War of the Worlds. Simply put, our sense of self is broadened and we appreciate and experience the interconnection that David Suzuki so frequently speaks of.

    Learn to make your own Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Beets and Fermented Fruits and go home with them! $40. Wednesday January 13 at 7 pm, at The Urban Ashram, 2290 Saint George Street.

    In this workshop you will learn how to work in harmony with some of these invisible friends while making Sauerkraut, Kimchi and fermented Fruits, along with the delicious fermented tea Kombucha. You will go home with your own vegetable and fruit ferments to continue at home, along with your own SCOBIE to make Kombucha.

    Lactic Acid Fermentation requires no energy other than ones own, for the production, fermentation and storage of the food: no heating, cooling in fridge, canning etc. LAF also adds many nutrients to our food, pre-digests it thus making the nutrients more absorbable and keeps the food alive, raw as it has not been cooked at all. In our era of rising consciousness of our energy usuage, LAF fits beautifully into the Kyoto Accord Ethic, sorely lacking at many governmental levels, so we can set the example in our own homes, bellies and lives!

    Wednesday January 20, 7 pm - Learn to make your own Yogurt, Butter, Buttermilk, Buttermilk Scones, Ghee, and Hard Cheese Curds using Vegetable Rennet, Whey Based Soup and enjoy chocolate ghee!
    This is a very hands on workshop and you will both have a meal around the foods and go home with many samples and yogurt starter. $40. At The Urban Ashram  2290 Saint George Street Organic RAW Whole Certified Organic Milk Used

    Get five people together for either a fruit/veg fermentation workshop or a dairy workshop and we can arrange a time and date that suites you. Please watch the YouTube video from a Dairy Making Workshop ~ [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTqdb8HlDmA?wmode=transparent]

    via urbanashram.ca

    This looks like something we could organize a group around. Anyone interested?

    → 4:55 PM, Jan 11   •  Personal, cooking, event, Urban Ashram, Blog
  • They're tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D!


    Halting State

    by <a href="http://www.allconsuming.net/item/view/3189644/search/query?product=book&amp;q=Charles+Stross">Charles Stross</a><br />
    

    → See this at Amazon.com

    via allconsuming.net

    “They’re tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D!” is one of the most amazing quotes I’ve ever read in a book. And the book is very good, covering ARGs and a future networked world very believably.

    → 9:12 AM, Jan 11   •  Personal, book, quote, Charles Stross, Halting State, Blog
  • Rosemary Tomato Soup

    1

    cup chopped onions

    ½

    cup finely chopped celery

    1

    tablespoon olive oil

    28

    ounces cans of canned tomatoes

    14

    ounces can of coconut milk

    1

    cube chicken bouillon

    1

    cup water

    1

    stalk of fresh rosemary

    1

    tablespoon brown sugar

    salt

    pepper

    edit Preparation

    Step 1

    Pour olive oil in a large soup pot and saute onions and celery until onions become translucent.

    Step 2

    Pour in tomatoes and coconut milk, dissolve the chicken bouillon cube in the cup of water and add it as well. Bring to a boil, then turn down heat.

    Step 3

    Add the stalk of rosemary and let simmer for 30 - 45 minutes.

    Step 4

    Remove the rosemary stalk and use a hand blender to puree the soup.

    Step 5

    Add the brown sugar and salt and pepper to taste.

    edit Tools

    • Hand blender

    edit About Rosemary Tomato Soup

    This was a very on-the-spot made up recipe. I was thinking that the stalk of rosemary would add some rosemary flavour, but I ended up simmering it quite a long time, so the resulting soup was

    If you substituted vegetable stock for the chicken stock, this would actually be a vegan recipe.

    via foodista.com

    I was configuring servers and it simmered a LOT longer than 30 minutes.

    → 12:33 AM, Jan 11   •  Personal, recipes, Foodista, rosemary, tomato, Blog
  • Me as a Lego chef /via @counti8

    Media_httpepyimgcomca_abavi
    via ep.yimg.com

    Karen thinks this is me.

    → 3:50 PM, Jan 10   •  Personal, LEGO, Blog
  • Parsnip and apple coleslaw

    Parsnip and apple coleslaw
    Serves 2 as a main meal, 4 as a small side dish

    2 tbsp cider vinegar
    1 tbsp good olive oil
    1 tsp clear honey
    1 tsp wholegrain mustard
    175g parsnips
    100g carrots
    100g red cabbage
    1 Cox’s apple, or your preferred eating apple, weighing approximately 150g
    Handful of fresh parsley leaves, roughly chopped
    25g walnuts, roughly chopped

    1 Place the vinegar, oil, honey and mustard in a small jar and season with a small pinch of salt and a good grinding of black pepper. Screw on the lid and give it a shake until it’s pale and combined. Taste, adjust the seasoning if necessary, and set aside.

    2 Peel the parsnip(s) and slice out the woody core – you’ll end up with about 100g parsnip. Coarsely grate and place in a large bowl. Peel and coarsely grate the carrot(s) and add to the parsnip. Very finely slice the red cabbage and add to the bowl.

    3 Quarter the apple and slice out the core. Coarsely grate the apple, discarding any large pieces of skin. Add to the vegetables with the parsley leaves and half the walnuts.

    4 If the dressing has started to separate, give it a shake again, then pour over the coleslaw. Toss the salad to coat in the dressing and then divide between two plates. Scatter over the remaining walnuts and serve. For a more filling meal, serve it with a chunk of blue cheese and warm crusty bread (it’s also good with a greasy pork chop and apple sauce if you’re not vegetarian).

    via ginandcrumpets.wordpress.com

    Used 2 parsnips and 4 small carrots. 1/4 of a small / medium head of green cabbage. 1 Tbsp honey, 1 Tbsp dijon, only a splash of cider vinegar. Zest from one lemon, plus used the fresh lemon juice from the whole lemon. No parsley, no walnuts (so it's very plain and orange / green looking).

    My version is definitely more of a side dish version.

    → 3:05 PM, Jan 9   •  Personal, apple, cabbage, carrot, coleslaw, cooking, mustard, parsnip, recipes, Blog
  • Spaghetti Carbonara with Bacon and Turkey

    &frac12;

    package of spaghetti

    &frac12;

    cup of bacon, chopped

    1

    tablespoon olive oil

    ⅓

    cup of minced shallots

    1

    clove minced garlic

    1

    cup diced cooked turkey

    &frac12;

    cup sour cream

    &frac12;

    cup water

    &frac12;

    cup of grated cheese

     

    black pepper

    2

    egg yolks

    2

    tablespoons cream

    &frac12;

    cup minced fresh parsley

    Preparation

    Step 1

    Cook about half a package of spaghetti until al dente, drain the water and set aside. If you have the pasta water boiling and add the spaghetti as you do the next steps, it should be ready at about the right time.

    Step 2

    Cook the bacon in a large saucepan (will need to fit all of the cooked spaghetti). Cook it over medium heat until it just starts to brown.

    Step 3

    Add the olive oil, shallots, garlic and turkey and continue to cook on medium until the shallots are translucent.

    Step 4

    Reduce heat to low and stir in the sour cream and water until evenly mixed. Add the grated cheese and stir until evenly melted. Add fresh cracked black pepper to taste (at least 1 tsp).

    Step 5

    Add the cooked spaghetti to sauce mixture and toss thoroughly.

    Step 6

    Beat the egg yolks with the cream and pour on top of the spaghetti, again mixing thoroughly. Now mix in the fresh parsley and serve immediately.

    via foodista.com

    As I saw in the comments on the recipe, I didn't like any of the carbonara recipes I saw, so I made my own. R doesn't like peas, but they would have gone well with this.

    We had this with the slaw on the side, which cut the heavyness of this dish.

    Spaghetti Carbonara With Bacon and Turkey on Foodista
    → 2:30 PM, Jan 9   •  Personal, recipes, bacon, carbonara, Foodista, spaghetti, turkey, Blog
  • Bloedel Conservatory is slated to be closed

    Bloedel Conservatory

    In spite of our efforts to save the Bloedel Conservatory, and despite the possible illegality of the decision to close or repurpose the Conservatory, it appears that the Vancouver Park Board is moving ahead with a decision to CLOSE the conservatory as of March 1, 2010. They will accept expressions of interest including business cases that allow for use of the Bloedel Conservatory in a new or similar capacity until April 30, 2010. If the Park Board accepts our proposal, Friends of the Bloedel Association will operate as a non-profit society with the following purposes:
    via friendsofthebloedel.ca

    It's been in operation for 40 years. It's been break even for all but the last 5 years of operation. You know, the last 5 years which have included sewer construction and Canada Line construction along Cambie, making the entire area around Queen E park / the Conservatory a giant pain to be around.

    The trees and the entire ecosystem have grown inside the dome, and would need to be cut down and dragged out in pieces. The birds and other animals have spent their entire life in captivity, and they have no idea what they're going to do with them. I've gone there several times -- it's a fantastic escape in our fall/winter/spring, to go inside and bask in the tropical warmth, take pictures, and enjoy the bird life and surroundings.

    They need to raise $250K to keep the conservatory open (that's their budget for an entire year), and they clearly need some help with their web presence & fund raising. This sounds like a job for Fundrazr…

    Here are photos I've taken at the conservatory in the past:

    http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

    → 11:57 AM, Jan 8   •  Personal, Bloedel Conservatory, Friends of the Bloedel, fundraising, Fundrazr, Vancouver, Blog
  • Me sawing off a pig's head /via @ecstaticist

    http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/watch-vfl139942.swf
    via youtube.com

    Also features James in the background.

    → 12:45 PM, Jan 7   •  Personal, cooking, Foodists, me, video, Blog
  • Social Crafting at MOV - Jan 21st

    Image001

    More info and tickets here.

    → 8:02 PM, Jan 6   •  Personal, Vancouver, event, MOV, Museum of Vancouver, social crafting, Blog
  • Burned down Slickity Jim's is going to be replaced by a Tim Horton's and a Wendy's /via @nep

    Restaurateur Mike Zalman, who lost Slickity Jim's Chat 'N Chew in November, is painfully aware that the cost of opening and operating a business in South Main will increase dramatically as the neighbourhood gentrifies.

    "I enquired about the building at the southwest corner of Main and Broadway and found out it's going to be a Tim Hortons and a Wendy's," he said. "It hurts. The gods of progress have started to smite Main Street."

    via vancouver.24hrs.ca

    Well, that sucks. Cambie at Broadway is already feeling pretty soul-less. Having the same thing happen to Main would be very sad.

    → 6:05 PM, Jan 5   •  Personal, Vancouver, Main Street, Blog
  • Granola bars

    Ingredients

    2

    cups shredded coconut

    1 &frac12;

    cups rolled oats

    1 &frac12;

    cups raisins

    2

    cups sunflower seeds

    &frac12;

    cup sesame seeds

    &frac34;

    cup chopped peanuts

    &frac12;

    cup chopped cried fruit, like apricots

    &frac14;

    cup mini chocolate or carob chips

    &frac12;

    teaspoon salt

    1

    cup honey

    1

    teaspoon vanilla

    1

    cup peanut butter

    Preparation

    Step 1

    Mix all the dry ingredients well in a large bowl. Blend honey, peanut butter and vanilla until smooth. Add to dry ingredients. Mix with your hands (grease hands first).

    Step 2

    Press firmly into a greased 9 x 13" pan. Bake at 275 F until golden brown. Time varies but anywhere from 8-16 minutes. Cool on a rack. Cut when cool.

    via foodista.com

    Healthy Granola Bars on Foodista

    Ending up making these tonight. I've had oats and shredded coconut haunting the cupboards for a while, and have been thinking about an on-the-go eat in the morning sort of thing. The Orange Ginger Granola bars look good, too.

    When I went to look for recipes, they're all very similar, and in fact don't seem to matter *what* you put in them.

    I left out sunflower and sesame seeds, and did crystallized ginger and some candied lemon peel for the fruit. The chocolate chips were white chocolate chunks. No honey, but half a cup of turbinado sugar and dark molasses. I like the dark, slightly bitter flavour of molasses, so we'll so how that turns out.

    The peanut butter was aged and sticky, so I added a bit of water to dissolve the sugar / molasses / peanut butter. No salt because I forgot about it.

    Needed to bake much longer (~30 minutes) and a little hotter than listed. Didn't stick together as well as I had hoped, but did end up being tasty.

    → 10:31 AM, Jan 5   •  Personal, recipes, Foodista, baking, granola bars, Blog
  • Proscuitto Egg Cups a la @ecstaticist

    Yield: 24

    Ingredients

    12

    slices proscuitto

    1

    cup cooked crab or lobster

    6

    eggs

    &frac14;

    cup cream

     

    salt

     

    pepper

    Preparation

    Step 1

    Preheat the oven to 400 degrees

    Step 2

    Get out a mini-cupcake pan with 24 cups

    Step 3

    Trim the top bit of fat from each slice of prosciutto

    Step 4

    Cut each slice in half, and fold it into the cupcake pan

    Step 5

    Place a bit of crab / lobster in each cup

    Step 6

    Beat the eggs with the cream and add salt & pepper to taste

    Step 7

    Pour the egg into each cup until it reaches the rim of each cup. It doesn't matter if the crab / lobster pokes out a bit

    Step 8

    Bake for 10 - 15 minutes or until the eggs are set

    via foodista.com

    This is Evan's recipe - he'll need to edit to correct. Ben asked about it today, and I hadn't uploaded my picture yet, so I thought I'd add it.

    On Foodista, anyone can edit / improve the recipe, so go ahead and change it if you have improvements.

    → 12:51 AM, Jan 3   •  cooking, recipes, Foodista, appetizer, crab, decadent dinner, egg, Food, lobster, proscuitto, Blog
  • Annals of mistaken voicemail, part 1

    msg_d4ae89a0-d827-4df8-a96e-45db0ccf99ba.mp3 Listen on Posterous

    I have a variety of phone numbers and automatic voicemail-to-email recording items setup. This one involves a trucking company with a 1,032 pieces of something heading for Des Moines, Iowa.

    → 6:30 PM, Jan 2   •  Personal, Des Moines, Iowa, voicemail, Blog
  • No Knead Bread

    Media_httpwwwartisanb_fzmkq
    via artisanbreadinfive.com

    My mom has been making No Knead bread for years -- she makes a basic white and then a dark that has all sorts of seeds and grains. The original original recipe was published in the New York Times in 2006. Breadtopia has some videos and a basic method that's worth looking at as well

    I saw the Artisan Bread in 5 book above at the Phoenix on Bowen, where they take the base recipe and expand it many different ways.

    I have yet to make one of these myself, but it's something I'm going to be experimenting with this year..

    → 5:28 AM, Jan 2   •  baking, Food, no knead bread, Blog
  • The Happiness Project: How To Be Happier – in Four Easy Lessons.

    First Splendid Truth
    To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

    Second Splendid Truth
    One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy;
    One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.

    Third Splendid Truth
    The days are long, but the years are short. (click the link to see my one-minute movie)

    Fourth Splendid Truth
    You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.
    corollary: You’re happy if you think you’re happy.

    via happiness-project.com

    Actually seen on Fred Wilson's blog. I'm usually pretty good about these things. I need to focus on not getting trapped in a downward spiral - often times a sign of a) not enough 'me' time and/or b) not enough friend time. But some times I confuse (b) with (a) and spend too much time locked in my own head.

    → 7:14 PM, Jan 1   •  Personal, happiness, Blog
  • Buttermilk Scones

    • 1 1/2 cups All purpose flour
    • 1 teaspoon Salt
    • 1 teaspoon Baking powder
    • 1/2 teaspoon Baking soda
    • 6 fluid oz Buttermilk
    • 3 tablespoon Butter room temp

    Preparation

    Oven temp: 425F / 220C / Gas Mark 7

    1. Preheat the oven to 425. Grease a baking sheet.

    2. Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl. Rub in the butter or margarine with your fingertips until the mixture resembles bread crumbs.

    3. Gradually pour in the buttermilk, stirring with a fork to form a soft dough.

    4. Roll out the dough until 1/2 inch thick. (I often make mine thicker and roll it into one large circle). Cut into wedges with a sharp knife.

    5. Place on the baking sheet and bake until golden, 12-15 minutes.

    via bigoven.com

    One of the things I've been on a roll with over the holidays is baking. I do lots of cooking, but generally little baking. Oh-ten will contain more baking.

    UPDATE: this is very much a savoury recipe -- mine ended up being a bit salty / soda-y because I wasn't very careful at measuring. The texture was very nice and flaky, not sure what adding sugar would do.

    Buttermilk Scones

    → 6:19 PM, Jan 1   •  cooking, recipes, baking, Food, bigoven.com, buttermilk, scones, Blog
  • Evan prepping Napoleons of utter joy

    12292009950
    → 10:06 PM, Dec 31   •  Foodists, decadent dinner, Food, ecstaticist, Evan Leeson, Blog
  • Foodists: Much Ado About Recipes

    Posted on Foodists: Much Ado About Recipes - http://foodists.ca/2009/12/29/much-ado-about-recipes.html

    Chicken Marsala Recipe on Rouxbe Screenshot

    Chicken Marsala Recipe from Rouxbe.com

    I’m facing a dilemma I’ve faced several times before. What to do about recipes?

    I'm facing a dilemma I've faced several times before. What to do about recipes? We don't focus on churning out lots of start-to-finish recipes here on Foodists, mainly because it's more about sharing food experiences rather than "just" recipes. But we do share our recipes, and try and tag the blog entries with ingredient hints to help find them. Still, it's not ideal for sharing lots of recipes.

    Most of my cooking using recipes falls into the "inspired by", "adapted from", or "I'm sure it'll be fine if I substitute half the ingredients" categories. But I'd like to keep track of those sources, whether it be from just the right Google search or from a physical cookbook.

    And yes, I've got lots of cookbooks. At the one end I've got basics like Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer, and at the other end I've got various cookbooks from second hand or thrift stores, plus a smattering of regional cuisines purchased while traveling. While I like nothing better to sit down with piles of cookbooks all around me, engrossed in reading and dreaming of food, it's not very practical to a) easily find a recipe amongst dozens of cookbooks or b) to share that recipe. Where's my digital index for my physical cookbooks?!

    I tried to solve my dilemma a while back by building my own recipe website. It does a passable of sharing links to recipes I've found elsewhere, and a pretty terrible job at inputting recipes with full ingredients and instructions. And, I really don't need to be maintaining yet-another-website.

    So over the holidays, I again began looking for a great place to make my "digital recipe home".

    My first stop was at Foodista. It's a startup out of Seattle that's just barely a year old, run by a friend of a friend. Foodista is unique in being a kind of Wikipedia of cooking. You can set recipes to be public, which means that anyone can edit and evolve them, whether that means fixing mistakes, clarifying the directions, or adding a note that Brand X flour needs to be used differently. I love this feature, and I love the concept of seeing the history or changes of recipes over time.

    They also have a widget that links blogs to recipes and vice versa (similar to Urbanspoon). Here's an example of a Foodista widget for my favourite Czechoslovakian Cabbage Soup recipe: Czechoslovakian Cabbage Soup (Nutbread & Nostalgia) on Foodista

    Foodista is still relatively new and will be evolving more features (check out my taste profile). I've already left a comment about making it easy to link in my own photos from Flickr.

    Next stop was our own local recipe / learning website, Rouxbe. I've got an account from ages ago, and couldn't recall if they actually let you enter in your own recipes. They do, so I started work on entering in Shredded Short Ribs with BBQ sauce that I made over the holidays. At first, I was excited by the interface, which lets you upload a photo for each step. Ultimately, I gave up before completing and publishing the recipe, because there were too many fields and too much to fill out.

    I think Rouxbe has a great interface for longer recipes, especially those with unfamiliar or complicated techniques (many of which they have video tutorials for that you can link in), and I would definitely use it for that kind of recipe. They even have a "Save as Draft" feature to make it easier to finish inputting those long recipes. Here's the embed for the Chicken Marsala that I used a screenshot of at the beginning of this post - the embed is gorgeous, but at the same time doesn't show the ingredients (which is what *I* would want out of a widget) and busts out of this blog layout: http://rouxbe.com/embedded_player.swf

    Rouxbe Online Cooking School & Video Recipes

     

    So, Foodists, help me with my recipe dilemma: What recipe sites do you frequent? How do you share / keep track of recipes that you find online? What features do you want out of an ultimate recipe website? And yes, I'm still contemplating building my own -- recipes.foodists.ca anyone? :P

    → 9:10 PM, Dec 31   •  cooking, recipes, Foodista, Foodists, Food, Rouxbe, Blog
  • Sunday Cooking: From corn bread to yogurt cake, with some beef in between

     

    So, I did a whole bunch of "experimental" baking today. Experimental mainly because a) I don't bake a lot and b) I tried tweaking a bunch of baking recipes. And by "tweaking" and "bunch", I mean not quite having all the ingredients for one recipe, so vaguely scavenging a few other recipes trying to see if I could come up with a Franken-recipe.

    First up was corn bread for breakfast. Corn bread is, as far as baking goes, NOT HARD. However, I was faced with no flour, and the need for no dairy. The soy milk worked just fine. But spelt flour...

    ...OK, so spelt flour and me are done. I didn't really like it before, and yeah, stuff made with it is usually denser / coarser, which you have to watch for. But the main thing is, spelt flour makes stuff taste bad! Yes, it's true: I was relatively happy with how the slightly coarser, slightly crumblier corn bread turned out. Except it was infected with yucky spelt taste. *sigh*

    At dinner (or rather, in the midst of cooking 2 things at the same time), I found out that all those yogurt containers in my fridge needed to have the yogurt used up so that I could use the empty containers (that, and so that fur wouldn't grow on the yogurt). The thought "yogurt cake" popped into my head, and so I looked at Lemon Yogurt Cake, Wonderful Yogurt Cake, and Simple Yogurt Cake. I also looked into my pantry after seeing that last entry about cake mixes and found chocolate pudding mix / pie filling. So that got combined with the yogurt...but a double-plus amount of yogurt...and off I went, creating a Franken-recipe for Chocolate Yogurt Cake.

    I may post it for posterity as a full recipe later, as I did note it down. But, after baking, it's clear that I made a medium-rare cake. Medium rare is great for steak. It is not good for cake. Flavour is pretty good, but gooey...

    Ah well, it was still fun. And I made two meat dishes to stock my freezer with, as well. Prime rib bones roasted on a mirepoix, and then simmered to make a nice and rich beef stock. 3 large empty yogurt containers for the freezer, plus a small bowl of soup for "first dinner".

    Aside: how do you cool things before they go in the freezer? My apartment is small, and usually quite warm after I've been cooking and baking and such. I have a window in the kitchen, so I usually stick things to cool on the window sill. I haven't had a pigeon steal anything yet...

    The other meaty item was beef stew, simmered for hours in the slow cooker. Another 5 or 6 meals worth, and all good hearty winter time stuff.

    Source of all this good stuff? Famous Foods on Kingsway. An excellent, excellent store, heartily recommended for meats, bulk staples, and everything in between.

     

     

    → 8:15 AM, Dec 9   •  cooking, Food, Famous Foods, foodlikethat, spelt flour, Blog
  • Ianiv's stuff works for WP

    Joining us at the OSCMS Summit? You can meet people like the developer behind the new, cross-platform version of Qumana -- Ianiv Schweber.

    Powered by Qumana

    → 3:54 PM, Jan 10   •  Personal, Blog
  • Nabbed it!

    Here is Boris on WordPress. If I haven’t said it enough before, I really do recommend WordPress if you just need a solid blogging tool.

    → 11:12 AM, Aug 17   •  Personal, Blog
  • RSS
  • JSON Feed
  • ActivityPub