Life & Research Notes

My favorite easy standby comfort food recipe is turkey chili. It’s really hearty and filling, but super healthy too, low fat and low carb, etc. It also keeps and reheats well for a few days after you make it, so it’s great for leftovers. It’s simple to make. A few easy ingredients:

• 1 lb ground turkey
• 1 large can stewed tomatoes
• 1 can kidney beans
• 1 onion, chopped up
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, chopped or pressed
• 3 tbsp chili powder
• 1-2 tbsp ground coriander/cilantro
• 1-2 tbsp cumin
• 2-3 tbsp oregano
• a beer or three (for you; preferably an ale)
• salt and pepper to taste
• red chili flakes (optional)
• grated cheddar cheese and/or sour cream (optional)

In a pot that will fit everything, coat the bottom with a thin layer of olive oil, then saute the onions on high heat, stirring until they’re somewhat tender, maybe even a little browned. Add the garlic, maybe some salt and pepper too, and stir it in and continue sauteing until the whole mixture is fragrant. I like a wooden spoon for all this, but whatever you’ve got around. Sometimes I add in some beer during this step, though I have no real reason to think it matters. I just like pouring in a little of the beer I’m drinking. For the dead turkeys.

Add in the ground turkey meat, chopping and mixing up with the spoon and stirring in with the onion/garlic goodness. Stir regularly until white and kinda cooked, but still with bits of pink so that it’s not quite something you’d feel comfortable eating. Add in the cans of kidney beans and tomatoes. Stir it all up into a big soupiness.

Now add in the chili powder. Then the herbs. Stir around, letting it come back to a low boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for a while until you’re confident all the salmonella nasties are dead. Taste it. Something is missing! Add a little bit of whatever it needs most. It probably needs some salt and pepper. Maybe a pinch or two of chili flakes. It definitely needs more chili powder, and probably a smidge of cumin. Put in a little at a time, but don’t be scared. Trust your taste and smell. You’ll figure it out, and if I told you exactly what to do, you wouldn’t have quite the sense of accomplishment afterward.

When it tastes good, leave it simmering without too much stirring. Some of the liquid will boil off, and if you did it all right a nice thin filmy coating will form at the top. That’s the special chili way of sealing in the yumminess.

At some point it will all be a nice even, rich deep red-brown color, and you and your companions will be achingly hungry. This is when you should eat. I like some grated cheese on top. Crackers can be nice too, especially if you’re eating it for lunch. Some people like sour cream, especially if it’s spicy. If you don’t manage to eat all of it, let it cool a bit then store it in the fridge. It heats up really well in the microwave or on the stovetop.

Eat it with a nice beer, maybe watch some TV or a movie, read the paper, look at Facebook, whatever. It doesn’t actually matter what you do, because you’re so stoked on how awesome your freakin’ chili turned out. Nice work.

It starts out as a concept, honed through conversation and whiteboard discussions, then dispersed among the team as tasks. Each person creates their piece, and we have a collection of items, little seeds, each fragile and weak, undependable. But we follow the plan, and we keep building layer upon layer, and the stack grows, sometimes collapses in on itself, but new growth comes out of it. Attention flows to the weak spots, and they expand and become stronger, and the parts begin to unify, and to connect and complement one another. It’s a process of continual creation, critique, and adaptation, all happening simply by intellect alone, by collectively willing those little bits to dance in just the right way.

Lately I’ve been drawing most rss enjoyment from two blogs that are very spare, and both starting with repetitions of some letter. Oh VVORK and FFFFOUND, you are both so superb.

And it seems there are others like this popping up, maybe not following the same spelling pattern, but definitely the stripped, single-purpose approach to their specific content (like tastespotting’s food, or Monoscope’s visual art and design, or even pixs’s, er, stuff). What prompted this recent trend in lightweight user-contributed collections of delectable visual miscellani? I love the weird simplicity, the anonymity, no pretense or trying to be anything other than a collection of things that people find and enjoy on this wonderful world wide web. (the WWWWEB?)

Thank you Anita.

Update: days later this thing is still making me intensely happy.

Evidently some new secret stuff is in the works. Looks hot, yet also makes me wistful thinking about all the great stuff I could be learning with those guys if I was still there. For more, see Luis’s post, and screenshots (1, 2, 3) and videos (1, 2) on PLWire.

The 15 minute redesign, in emacs, on live css. Not good practices for production work, but for my own site it’s ok. So for posterity here’s the old one, which was cramped and dark and gross:

And here is the new one, which is not perfect, but is lighter, wider, more legible, and importantly, doesn’t have any more crappy green:

It’s amazing how you can just so badly want to make a change, but it seems so involved and like such a huge project, and it just never happens. Months ago I had a full on freaking rails project for my new blog and portfolio. It had pink and yellow, and was absolute overkill. Now I realize how nice it is just to keep making incremental changes. There’s enough epic stuff to deal with already, and web design doesn’t always need to be one of them.

My information life feels horribly disorganized. At any given time I have many tabs open in my browser, maybe even a few windows, plus tabbed terminals and text editors, and then basic stuff like chat and music.

It’s essentially a visual representation of unsettled mental threads. Somehow I manage to navigate it, but I find it is a constant expansion and branching, with periodic maintenance periods when I try to quell my information anxiety by closing things that I don’t actually need.

I’m continually impressed how clean some people keep their digital workspace, with perfectly aligned vim windows and pristine virtual desktops each assigned to different tasks. I think I was like this at one point as well, much more fastidious about what needed to be out and what should be hidden. But the past few years I’ve gotten used to the visual noise, and maybe I’ve become a little lazy, so instead of keeping things neat I rely on quick switching between applications, just a few command tabs to cycle through, or a few keystrokes with quicksilver. So now I have lots hanging out, and it feels messy, and sometimes I get uncomfortable.

Only occasionally do I think to do this:

For a moment it isn’t actually so bad, and there isn’t too much, and I feel ok. But tragically it’s so temporary, more a sleight of hand than a reality, and selecting one of these windows I’m swooshed back shoulder deep in my own mess. Ugh.