| — | Jeff Bezos in WSJ (via TechCrunch) |
And it begins… TeachStreet’s weight loss challenge. We as a team plan to lose 125 pounds (all together) in the next 52 weeks. And boy do I need to get on this again. Here’s my plan:
Two things our cat likes: playing with his mouse and metal. Here he’s playing with his new pink mouse and listening to some Slayer. I have to “attack” his belly so he thinks the mouse is fighting back.
Most startups have been there – you have a simple site, and you want to have users upload photos of themselves or something else to share. We were there as well just a few years ago, when building out the very first versions of TeachStreet. While previously working at Amazon, I worked on a few image hosting solutions and already knew some of the pitfalls and challenges of building out a system to scale…
Goodsie looks really fun. (From the guys who made flavors.me)
Dear Chrome,
Please stop “Aw Snappin” while the inspector is open. It makes my head hurt and want to throw my monitor across the room. Please don’t make me go back to Firefox. She’s broken my heart far too many times, and eats memory like a hog.
Salt & peppered
Browned
Sautéed onions & sage
Sautéing apples
Place pork back in skillet, then in oven
Reduce sauce
Served w/ garlic mash
Goes well with Éphémère
I got a chance to get some Wooly Pig last Sunday and made some amazing food. Mangalitsa pig, if you’ve never heard of it, is much fattier and tougher than normal pork, but it’s amazingly rich and wonderful. I got two shoulder chops from Bill the Butcher over on Madison for about $10. Pretty good price from what I’ve heard from buying from other sources (wooly pig can get expensive because it’s hard to find).
I found a great recipe on the Seattle PI Blog and changed it up slightly.
Here’s what I came up with for my adaptation on the recipe:
Cooking Notes:
I increased the cooking time, and had to keep the chops in the pan when reducing to cook them all the way through. This was most likely because I had some seriously thick chops to cook though. I also picked granny smith apples because of their tartness, but sweetened them back up with maple syrup (which I love that combination). I could have served the pork a bit pink, but I’m always uneasy with doing that with pork.
Overall, I’d say this was really amazing - I can’t wait to try some of the wooly pig bacon Bill’s curing right now. I think the only thing I’d do different is take some of that wooly pig fat and whip it into the potatoes instead of milk/butter. Jane and I both ended up with leftover pig fat on our plates when we were done (trust me, we did get lots in the marbling, it’s sooo good).
I’ve been a rapid Getting Real, Rework, Ruby On Rails, and overall 37 Signals fanboy for a long time. But I’ll tell you something — I’ve never used their products (other than rails) until now.
Recently, I’ve been working with a project with a couple of overseas teams, and the project manager uses Basecamp. There are a number of things it does well: it organizes for you, handles email updates to tasks, handles attachments well. But there are a shocking number of things that it doesn’t do, or does poorly. Maybe the product is better suited for designers or a design shop (me being a developer and all), but it just seems like there are holes here. I understand the 37-signals philosophy (and trust me, if you work in my office, you’ve heard me spout it enough), but these are a few things that I just don’t get.
No time estimates
There is no place for adding a time estimate for a task, only a due date. This doesn’t work at all for any complex project - dates are meaningless, especially since stuff is always late, and the dates are always shifting. Time estimates (or points or jelly beans or whatever in the SCRUM world) are also going to be wrong, but at least they allow you to communicate that this work is more expensive (will take longer) than this other work. Pretty important communication point for Task-owners and Task-definers.
Tasks have no correlation to Milestones
Maybe I’m missing something here, but if tasks can’t be assigned to a Milestone, then how do you know your progress on reaching that Milestone. I might just be missing how to do this, but I’m not sure.
You can’t change To-Do details on the Comment page
This is more of an interface miss to be, but I find that after discussing that item, I sometimes need to change the details. Not having a way to change the details on this page (or even a direct link), means I have to go back and visually search the To-do list. This can take a bit of time, and get frustrating if you do this a lot.
Too much Drag & Drop
This is a bit more of a usability nit, but I find that drag and drop can sometimes be difficult to use. If you start re-ordering items you have to drag and hold and it can be time consuming. It’s good in some cases, but it would be easier in many cases to have “Move up/Move down” arrows (since those tend to be common use cases). Also, the entire bar should be draggable (rather than just a “handle”). The hover-handle usually means a bunch of extra mouse movements to make it show up, then you have to move back to get it to move, then drag. That’s a lot of work for a quick change.
Why 6 categories of messages?
The six categories of messages are “Assets”, “Copywriting”, “Design”, “Development”, “Miscellaneous”, and “Transcripts”. This might be because I’m not an admin, but why these six? What if I was a construction company? Or a lawyer? Or an accountant? I’m not saying that you should let users go hog wild and create 100 categories, but at least letting them rename them or customize them, they might be more useful to non-design shop (or even different design-shops).
Yeah, I’m one of those people that posts videos of their cat online.
L: Ok, now it’s open for everyone.
D: (whispering) That’s what she said.
