Author Archives: donturn

About donturn

Don Turnbull, Ph.D. is a consultant specializing in software research and development focusing on search systems, information analytics, user experience design, semantic and knowledge management technologies as well as intellectual property analysis.

You don't need to look outside to know Austin is getting some Winter today

Austin is getting lots of ice and even some snow today, but even if you haven’t read, seen or heard about it you could tell one other way:

Almost everyone I know in Austin is logged on to AOL Instant Messenger, GoogleTalk and Microsoft Messenger.

Ah, internet people, weather does affect us.

(I predict a winter-related rise in Austin blogging today.)

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Attack of the Ginger Creatures!

Of course, the holidays mean many things to us, but it definitely means cookies.

I looked over dozens of recipes and ended up taking ideas from several, but the core recipe was from (of all places) Martha Stewart Living web site. (Keep your “jail house cookies” comments to yourselves.)

Here’s what I came up with for a final recipe, including some post-facto edits that I would do next time:

  • 6 cups sifted all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
  • 1 cup dark-brown sugar, packed
  • 6 teaspoons ground ginger
  • 1 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 6 teaspoons ground cinnamon
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
  • 1/2 teaspoon finely ground black pepper
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 cup unsulfured molasses.

Supposedly, this makes 16 large cookies, but we did a double batch and made cookies of various sizes so I can’t verify that. I edited the recipe to add nutmeg, more cinnamon and ginger as I wanted even more flavor in the cookies. I also changed to a smaller amount of black pepper (it gives a nice after taste to each cookie bite). The dough turned out to be very dry so I think we cheated and added about two tablespoons of milk near the end of the mixing.

I whipped up (literally) some standard buttercream-like icing:

  • 1 stick of unstalted butter
  • one small box of powdered sugar
  • vanilla to taste.

As you can see, we also divided up the icing and added food coloring. With some hastily-fashioned wax paper icing bags we were in business. Here are the results:

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Not pictured was the favorite, literature-themed cookie. The white whale. As you can see, creativity reigned, but we also kept the original goal in mind: get as much icing as possible on many cookies. (Mmmm, icing.)

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What am I doing with a whale, bunny, elephant and zebra cookie cutter? Like you don’t have some?

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Some cookies had a personality of their own and these three jumped out at me. Note the resemblances to Zoidberg at the Beach, a funky, hypnotized Santa and Sluggo (respectively).

Zoidberg at the Beach Cookie Funky Santa Cookie Gingerbread Sluggo

Don’t bother asking, they’re all gone.

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Home Made Pizza 2007

Another round (ahem) of home made pizza, this time with an ace, guest pie-maker at my place.

The dough was courtesy of the now famous “no knead” bread recipe:

No-Knead Bread
Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1 1/2 hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
3. Apply your pizza shaping skills to lay out the dough.

We used two kinds of pizza stones, a store-made pizza stone and some unglazed tiles from your favorite home supply store. (Yes, we went to your favorite home supply store, where were you?) Even better – I used my new, wooden pizza peel to drop the pies right onto the hot, waiting stones. (Lessons learned: it’s quite possible that the metal peel would be better, certainly less likely to warp after cleaning. I’m going to get one and try it out. Also, be sure and have some cornmeal handy to put on the peel before placing the dough on it to enable easy sliding into the oven.)

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As you can see, they turned out great. We went for mozzarella and fresh tomatoes and basil on the first one. The second pie was thinly sliced parmesan, more fresh roma tomatoes, red onions and some spices (pepper flakes next time too).

Delicious.

Amazon's secret price guarantee

Timothy Noah for Slate Magazine has a great post-holiday spending article about Amazon’s secret price guarantee.

If you have purchased anything from Amazon.com in the last 30 days (Amazon themselves, not an affiliated merchant) and the price is now lower, they’ll refund that amount to you. Call Amazon at 1-800-201-7575 and dial 7 right away to get to an operator. Ask her about Amazon’s 30-day price guarantee. Have your Amazon order number handy too. If you get an uncooperative (or hard to understand) operator, just hang up and call right back.

The two best TV shows this week were really games

In the past, I haven’t played video games very much, but I’m thinking more about games as tools for learning and socialization (social computing games?).

Maybe that’s why this week the two most interesting (which means “best” by my own definition) TV shows have been Daybreak and The Lost Room.

In Daybreak, the main character is a police detective, who much like the movie Groundhog Day, is repeating the same day over and over – presumably until he gets it “right”. There are a number of contingencies and clues the detective must solve to make progress. Each week, the plot changes as some issues get “solved” and the detective isn’t plagued by them on the next version of his day. We gradually learn more about the detective’s world, his past and how everything fits into place.

In The Lost Room, the main character is also a police detective and needs to unravel a mystery based around understanding, collecting and using a set of magical objects. He must discover objects, negotiate with their owners and determine the object’s proper uses. In an attempt to go meta about the issues in the plot, several of the characters are written to seem very much like I’d assume people that are deeply involved in a social game (MMORPG or the like) might be as to forming clubs (even cults in show) around studying, finding and advancing skills in the use of the objects and making alliances. It seems like they’re truly playing a game about the objects within the episodes as independent characters, but overlapping with the main detective’s role in the show/game.

Obviously, these concepts: working through a game level, a quest, negotiating with characters and finding objects of power are common to many video games of the last few decades. Adding in the social interaction and high quality rendered environment (studio sets with actual actors) and it’s a bit like watching a someone work their way through a game. Is this a new trend in scriptwriting that will bring in the gamer demographic? (Am I only noticing this because these examples are more obvious than past shows?)

(Note: do people really say “video games” anymore? I’d think the people that design all the audio would start feeling left out.)

(Double extra bonus note: I just bought a Nintendo DS Lite – got any game or gear recommendations?)

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Austin Creative Technologists Mixer this Thursday at 6:30

This Thursday I’ll be at the Creative Technologists Mixer, the very special Holiday Version.

We’ll be at Opal Divine’s on 6th Street from 6:30-8 PM this Thursday, Dec 14th 2006.

From the invitation:

We had such a great time at the last one, we thought we’d do it again.

Come join us for an informal creative technologist mixer. This time we
can look forward to a presentation from a fellow creative technologist
right here in Austin.

We are looking for energetic, passionate people from any discipline
who want to talk about making stuff with the Internet and other
networked technologies.

We welcome designers and developers, students and entrepreneurs,
futurists, pixelists, and pointillists, user researchers, product
designers, Web publishers, podcasters, video bloggers, graphic
designers, people interested in UX, IA, HCI, PHP, and MySQL, and any
other acronyms out there.

Come on out to talk shop or just meet people with similar interests.
Please pass this invitation to others who might be interested.

Direct any questions to creativetechnologists@gmail.com

I’ll see you there.

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Sprinkles

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This is really just a test to see if Ecto is uploading photos now into WordPress. As you can see, it is – with sprinkly goodness! Thanks to all who made suggestions. The winning tip was to change the image upload settings in WordPress>Options>Miscellaneous for the Store uploads in this folder setting to leave it as it’s default of wp-content/uploads and to uncheck the Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders option.