Mmm... Cooking Is Good

Getting my head back on straight has been a fun little experience. I've been working from home today, and despite myself I actually got quite a bit done. At work I laid out a very precise to-do list, one of those true GTD "next possible action" lists and worked my way through it. It didn't matter that I got sidetracked about halfway through it, when the parallel server backup team announced a small change to the API that would put me back three or four days, because the serial server backup team had a spec change I could implement in four hours or so regarding the way logs were handled. No problems there.

After the girls came back from school, I set to work cooking steak sous-vide, along with two real baked potatoes, zucchini medallions sautee'd in butter, and home-made miso soup. The girls got pizza fresh from the oven, and they didn't complain. The real meal was for lisakit and I, because I don't get to cook for friends as often as I'd like. I managed the temperature even better this time than last, mostly by using a bigger pot and more water, which makes temperature variation slow and easy to compensate for. I seared the outside of the steak on a very hot iron skillet to make sure any exterior bacteria were dead and to carmelize the surface proteins which gives steak it's "meaty" flavor.

For the soup I used four cups of thin chicken broth, two tablespoons of real miso paste (bought from the Asian grocery hidden in a little strip mall), diced sautee'd mushrooms and fresh chopped scallions. Perfect. Mark Bittman has some great comments on cooking miso (and other stuff) that's a must-read.

After the girls were in bed and Lisa had gone back home, I settled down and hacked for another two hours or so on a coding problem that Omaha had set for me. It's in a language and framework I just do not know (ruby and rails), and yet by the time I was done I had a foreign database imported into the application parallel with the native one, had them talking to each other, had some interesting relationships going on, and even wrote one find_by_sql with an INNER JOIN that made me feel all dirty. Omaha's main coder is a pretty good guy, keeps a working subversion code repository, and knows what he's doing.

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I'm off to bed.

Spending an hour in web design HELL!

There's really only one guy out there behind Template Monster, Homestead Templates, Great Templates, Template Box, and goddess knows what else, isn't there?

I've just spent an hour looking through about a thousand different web templates offered by these services, mostly to see what other people did in situations similar to Omaha's, and I have to say that the competition sucks. I'm not the world's greatest designer by any stretch-- I'm more of a critic-- but every single one of these websites shows a complete lack of anything other than cookie-cutter sensibilities and by-the-book creativity, bolstered only by a rudimentary understanding of Photoshop and access to a reasonably deep commercial photograph library.

The style of these sites is absolutely uniform, each site with a palette that came right off the color wheel with no daring whatsover, leading me to conclude that there's one guy making all of these.

Could I do better? Probably not. But graphical design isn't my focus; I'm a web-based application developer with a strong industrial background and a deep knowledge of the demands of Internet appliances. But there's an absolute universe of difference between these off-the-shelf beginners and the people I admire, like Design Is Kinky and various CSS Galleries. I could spend all day learning from those people. I learned nothing from Template Monster other than that there's one hell of a business model for just stamping crap out of a mold.