Sunday, December 01, 2002

Mad William Flint: Gets Bagelicious. Well, I finally went and did it. After my coup of Thanksgiving with Potato Sourdough and Cheddar Cheese bread I decided to do something different, something I've wanted to do since I've started this freaky escapade of yeast baking. I decided to do bagels. I looked through four books for a recipe: "The Bread Bible" by Beth Hensperger How to be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson "Better than Store-Bought" by Hellen Witty and Elizabeth Schneider Colchie (a wonderful book that you probably won't find.) and "The Cook's Encyclopedia of Baking" by Carole Clements I ended up going with Nigella Lawson's recipe cause... well... 'cause she's cute. No no (well, maybe.) They're some of my favorite baking books. The real reason is that the other three didn't seem to have anything particular to the recipe that would make bagels as opposed to donut shaped bread. At least Nigella talked a bit about how dense the dough has to be and she went into some depth about the poaching process. The process is simple enough... make some bread dough, REALLY dense (lots more kneading and flour than you'd expect.) Let it rise once. Punch it down, and form into bagels. Then poach and bake at extrordinarily high tempratures (i.e. 500 degrees.) It wasn't until these delightful golden circles of glee came out of the oven that I remembered what happened the last time I tried a flour-based project from Nigella's book. It was scones, and I ended up with biscuits. Delicious ones, no doubt. But they were biscuits, not scones. Now admittedly I didn't take the warnings about the density of the dough to nearly the extent I should have. But I can't argue with the result. Pretzels. Wonderful, sticky, delicious, bready, bagel-shaped, pretzels. I'll experiment with this a bunch more (i.e. until I get perfect bagels.) So stay tuned. [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] 5:10:15 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Helen Hayes. "My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that 'achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.'" [Motivational Quotes of the Day] [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] 5:09:06 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Breadcrumbs and ThinkCycle. On the web, people can often lead you to interesting new places, even when they don't have a home page, just by virtue of leaving bread crumbs with their name on them here and there. Here's an illustration. Duane Milne has just poured a number of good tips on finding good movies to rent in the Know-how wiki (a general-purpose free advice exchange). Looking his name up in Google led me to ThinkCycle.org. ThinkCycle is an academic, non-profit initiative engaged in supporting distributed collaboration towards design challenges facing underserved communities and the environment. ThinkCycle seeks to create a culture of open source design innovation, with ongoing collaboration among individuals, communities and organizations around the world. ThinkCycle provides a shared online space for designers, engineers, domain experts and stakeholders to discuss, exchange and construct ideas towards sustainable design solutions in critical problem domains. Join the ThinkCycle Community and make a difference! The site looks pretty successful for such an ambitious initiative. 1746 members and counting. Lots of ideas in there; the design seems well-thought-out for facilitating productive open collaboration. I'll definitely have to dig deeper into this. [Seb's Open Research] 3:49:19 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Thanksgiving. OK, so I'm a little late to the party, but I thought it would be a good thing to express gratitude to the many people who share their insights with me and are so consistently and openly being themselves. It means a lot to me. So on this occasion I've started a Neighborhood Tour page where I try to acknowledge how the various people listed in my sidebar influence my thinking and actions. I'm only starting, so there are only seven people listed so far; I plan to fill this up over the coming weeks. If you don't already know some of these people, I hope it will be a good way for you to discover them. You can think of it as a blogroll on steroids. [Seb's Open Research] 3:46:05 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Reputation and you. State of the Art of Reputation. Matt Jones posted a Powerpoint presentation by Dan Dixon about the state of the art of reputation systems, along with a link to a Kuro5hin primer on reputation systems First of all, a reputation is not something that's internal to you. Yes, it's *your* reputation, but you don't have a reputation with yourself per-se. Reputations only really exist within the context of your interactions with others, and therefore, a reputation can be viewed as existing in the space between you and others. While a reputation can be thought of as distinct, separate and external to us all, it is inextricably linked to us. Reputation doesn't exist outside of the context of the owner to which it refers. In some instances, a reputation can become so independent from us that it 'takes on a life of its very own.' In these cases, reputations can actually drive how we act, rather than the normal case of how we act dictating our reputation. For example, sometimes we find ourselves acting in uncharacteristic ways, many times unconsciously, just to support an external perception of who we are amongst others that is no longer true to our being. A reputation is comprised in part of what we say and what we do, over some period of time in some particular context of an interaction with others. As an individual, I might never know all of the different facets of my reputation, just as others might also never know every aspect of my reputation. Needless to say, reputations are important to us all because they affect us in very tangible ways, serving to make our lives easier or more difficult, depending on whether they are positive or negative. [Smart Mobs via thomas n. burg | randgänge] [Seb's Open Research] 3:40:22 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Talk about replay value!. Long-term game replayability?. I was checking out one of these games nostalgia sites lately, and reading through tons of games I never heard about, I wondered which of these old games have, to this day, replay value -- not because of nostalgia, but because of their own playability merits. I certainly do know some games that fit to this description. Often these are games that many people I talk to never heard about. They also tell me about such "classics" that I have never heard about. It's quite logical to figure out, there must be a lot of great games out there hiding. [kuro5hin.org] This is a must-bookmark for me. You witness the power of community when you look at the nostalgic stories that pieces like this draw. Just reading the titles mentioned in the comments gives me the shivers. Games from two decades ago that people still remember have got to have a little magic about them. While we're at it, share tips on finding old computer games on Know-how Wiki. [Seb's Open Research] 3:28:36 PM    trackback []     Articulate []