My wife and I first really got into cooking through Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. We loved their scientific approach to refining recipes: get a variety of existing variations, try them out, figure out what works and what doesn’t work, and converge on the best recipe. In fact, their primary cookbook is called The Best Recipe (and is something every burgeoning cook should own). We subscribed to the magazine for years, and we regularly draw on it when planning out meals for the week.
But the last few years we’ve used the more recent issues of the magazine less and less. That’s mostly because they’ve been around long enough that they started to repeat recipes, and they weren’t really pushing the envelope with new types of cuisines. We started thinking about cancelling our subscription, in part because we weren’t get as much value from it, but also because they seemed to have started to focus more on cutting costs; the quality of the paper in the magazine decreased noticeably. When Chris Kimball left (or was forced out), we decided to go ahead and let our subscription lapse.
When we heard that Chris was starting a new venture, Milk Street Magazine, we thought we’d give it a try. Clearly Chris had a good track record, and we were intrigued by his expanding much more aggressively beyond more European-centric fare. We’re now in our second year of subscribing, and it’s been fantastic. We regularly find a few new recipes to try in each magazine, and a number of them have become favorites that are now part of our standard repertoire. We’re particular fans of their Tuesday Nights section, which offers several recipes that are easy to make on a week night. This week we’re making the Orange-Guajillo Chili Pulled Chicken (the recipe is currently free on their website for a limited time, so grab it!) for the second time, since we made it a couple of weeks ago and everyone loved it.
If you’re a fan of tasty food and like cooking, I’d strongly recommend subscribing. It’s only $20 a year for 6 issues.
I really enjoyed role-playing computer games when I was young: Baldur’s Gate, The Bard’s Tale, Planescape Torment, Ultima, Wasteland, etc. I’ve never gotten into the online playing game trend, though; I tend to prefer my computer games solo. So I’ve enjoyed the trend the last few years of using Kickstarter to crowd-fund games that allow those of us who grew with those games to re-experience a bit of our youth (but with much better computers available). I (and so many other people) helped kickstart Pillars of Eternity, and I just finished playing through the sequel. I backed Wasteland 2 (which was fun) and Wasteland 3 (which should be released next year). I backed Torment: Tides of Numenera, since Planescape Torment was an amazing game and I wanted to see what they could with a sequel (although I must confess that I haven’t made the time to play it yet). And I backed Bard’s Tale 4, which should come out this year. It wasn’t kickstarted, but I also enjoyed Obsidian’s Tyranny; it was a refreshing different take on the genre.
One thing that has changed since my youth is the amount of my free time; sadly I can’t dive into games like I used to. I still need to find time to play Tides, and with both Bard’s Tale 4 and Wasteland 3 on the horizon I’ll probably have to take a break from kickstarting new games for awhile. Unless they bring back Quest for Glory or a single-player Ultima; I’d be all over those.
This week we had a team outing to the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. It was both fun and educational; they’d pulled out materials ranging from hand-drawn religious texts (a pair of Book of Hours), both hand-drawn and printed (Gutenberg) bible pages, early printed materials, and more modern magazines and books. I personally found some of the early printed materials the most interesting, particularly an early specimen page and book. They’re roughly the equivalent of a modern font book; you looked through a printer’s specimen book to choose a type for your printer materials.
I used the trip to the Archive to also check out Google’s San Francisco offices (we visited the Archive in the morning, and I worked from the SF offices in the afternoon). I only visited the Spear Street building (there are a handful of others), but it seemed pretty nice (it does seem like all of the peripheral locations are nicer than the main campus, possibly because they’re newer). They clearly have lots of folks that visit; a variety of spaces were marked as for use by visitors. And the location is nice: near the Bay Bridge and not too far from the Ferry Building.
When I first started blogging I used ecto, but it didn’t really keep up with the times so I switched to MarsEdit. It’s regularly updated, and I’ve stuck with it through the latest version (granted there was a long hiatus in there where I mostly stopped blogging). But I’ve also been playing with WordPress’ desktop app, which is based on Electron, and I have to say that it’s quite nice. It’s not as powerful as MarsEdit, but since it’s custom built to work for WordPress it aligns more closely to the base WordPress UI, which has its advantages. And it is lightweight and fast. Right now I’m still going back and forth between the two, picking which to use mainly by whim, but I could see potentially switching to using just the WordPress app if it continues to meet my needs.
I got back into running several years ago through Zombies Run (which, if you’ve never tried it, is a great way to make it fun to start getting in shape). After a few years of listening to its episodes every time I went running, I switched to mostly listening to music instead. For the last week and change, though, I’ve been experimenting with listening to nothing at all. No headphones, no phone, just tracking my run with my watch.
I’m not sure if I’ll choose to stick with it (particularly as the weather heats up music can make it easier to keep going, and I’ve been running a bit slower without music to help set a fast pace), but there are some things I like about it. It’s easier to keep track of my breathing, so I can better judge whether to push or ease off. I find that I run a bit lighter too; I notice when my feet are starting to pound the pavement a bit too much and can work to switch to a lighter stride. And it’s obviously easier to pay attention and listen to your surroundings without headphones in. So at least as a short-term shake-up to my running routine it’s been a nice change. Longer-term is an open question.
My daughter is prepping for finals this weekend, and she wanted to spend some time studying outside (it’s lovely in the Bay Area today; around 80, slight breeze, bright blue sky). That served as the forcing function for me to uncover and clean off our patio table and chairs (which, let me be blunt, totally needed it). It took a bit of time and effort, but the payoff was worth the effort. I’m currently kicking back in a comfy chair with a cold glass of water, goofing around on the Internet while she studies. I’m ready for summer.
I mentioned in a previous post that attending Talks at Google was one of my favorite perks of working there, and that I was disappointed that I’d had to miss QT Luong’s talk “Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey Through America’s National Parks”. It finally appeared on YouTube, so I sat down to watch it today. The talk was very enjoyable; his photos are amazing, and he talked a bit about his process and equipment as well. Having bought his book (which, if you’re interested in the National Parks and/or nature photography, you should definitely buy; it’s a steal at $45 on Amazon), I also found it interesting to hear a bit about the history behind it and how he worked to get it published. With the warm weather this weekend it’s making me wish we were visiting a Park this weekend (although they’re generally insane on national holiday weekends).
Bike to Work Day in Silicon Valley was May 10, and by the numbers it was a success with over 44,000 participants (a new record). I bike in early, but even so I saw noticeably more people than usual (and a passed a couple of “bike trains” of people biking together). But there didn’t seem to be a lot more people when I left work; I wonder if all of the bike commuters left early? Or late? Or perhaps they were all attending one of several “bike away from work” parties.
IBM and Samsung never did much in the way of swag for BTWD; a frisbee or cheap plastic sunglasses was about the limit. Google had a small celebration for participants, with amusing Google BTWD 2018 socks (I’m sure they’ll be a collector’s item in the future). Granted the free food would have been more impressive if, you know, the food weren’t always free.
I enjoy participating in BTWD, but I’ll confess it doesn’t feel nearly as epic as when I would bike down to IBM Research’s Almaden lab and surmount the hill at the end. That was an impressive 25 mile trek. Nowadays it’s just my usual 5 mile ride. Still, I’m much rather have a low-key BTWD that blends into my daily commute, rather than an impressive ride that’s very much the exception rather than the rule.
My first Google I/O as a Google employee was interesting; it was a chance to learn more about what’s going on (even though Google is relatively open there’s so much happening that it’s essentially impossible to keep track of it all) and to contrast the internal and external perceptions of announced technologies. It was also amusing to see the increase in tourists at the Googleplex; the Shoreline Amphitheater is close enough that we had I/O attendees wandering over to take pictures and look around.
Here are some of my favorite things Google showed off at I/O:
- Android P. But then I’m biased.
- Multiple devices from multiple OEMs offering the P beta (Project Treble starting to pay off).
- Cleaning up the support library madness (v4! v7! v13! The design library!) into the androidx namespace and the Jetpack library.
- Improved Kotlin support. I’ve been holding off switching over to Kotlin since it’ll temporarily slow me down while I learn the language, but with the KTX extensions and developer documentation I’m thinking about finally investing the cycles to do it.
- Material Theming and the Material Theme Editor. If you’re a Sketch user, the latter provides really nice support for designing Android applications.
- Support for running Linux applications on Chrome. The Pixelbook is a nice machine, but the inability to run Android Studio is a showstopper. It’d be nice to potentially be able to use a Chrome OS device for work (plus living with a Pixelbook would make it easier to explore user experiences that leverage both Chrome OS and Android on a single device).
I’m looking forward to Google I/O this week. I’ve been to I/O in the past as an attendee, but this is my first time seeing it from the other side of the fence. There’s obviously a lot of prep work that goes into it; colleagues have been heads down recently getting things ready and applying the last bit of polish. As you might be able to tell from the announced session line-up Google has some interesting things to share; I’m very curious to see how things are perceived and received.
It’s also to see some of the logistics of holding I/O at Shoreline. Google’s Mountain View campus and Shoreline are stick in a bit of a cul-de-sac; there are limited ways in and out, so things can go to hell when there’s a lot of traffic. We actually got email this week asking folks not to drive in before 10 to help alleviate some of the morning (and pre-conference) rush. I bike to work, so it won’t affect me (and Bike to Work Day in the Bay Area is Thursday, so that should help too), but it’ll be interesting to see how the roads look (as I breeze by in the bike lane). I will note that there will be bike parking at I/O, so if you’re attending you might consider biking too (the Stevens Creek Trail makes it really easy to get to Shoreline, the weather is supposed to be lovely this week).
I’m also curious to see what traffic on campus is going to be like. The Shoreline Amphitheater is actually a bit away from campus, but I’m sure we’re going to get a fair number of people wandering over to look around. We get a fair number of tourists who stop by to take pictures of the buildings, the Android statues, and themselves riding the Google bikes (which drives security nuts; I suspect it’s a liability issue). Will we get an order of magnitude more this week? It’ll be interesting to find out.
The fun kicks off on Tuesday.
jeff pierce 