influences

Get Better

October 15, 2009
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Merlin Mann is one of my favorite bloggers. He had me hooked years ago with 43 Folders, when I was obsessed (along with the rest of my geek circle) with Getting Things Done. Today, I found this talk  — How To Blog — on Kung Fu Grippe, his personal blog, and the slide shown above. [...]

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Whip It

October 6, 2009
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Jell-O® put me through college. I wasn’t a door-to-door Jell-O® salesman, but I was the son of a General Foods (GF) employee – Dad programed IBM 370 mainframes for the warehouse inventory systems in assembly language – which made me eligible for a corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship. All I had to do in return was [...]

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In Which I Confess to Being the Last Food Blogger in the U.S. to See Julie and Julia

October 1, 2009
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I feel like a traitor. I have declared here that Julia Child is the reason I can cook today, but I waited more than two months to see Julie and Julia. Part of the delay can be attributed to finding someone to watch He Who Will Not Be Ignored (difficult in the summer when all [...]

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Mahlon Hoagland: 1921-2009

September 25, 2009
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He worked with James Watson and Francis Crick. He discovered transfer RNA and amino acid activation. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. His name was Mahlon Hoagland, he passed away last week, and you have never heard of him. I had never heard of him until a series of unlikely circumstances brought us [...]

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Meet a Real Scientist

September 15, 2009
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Before my career path diverged toward web design, multimedia, and other computer-related geekery, I was a biologist. It was something I knew I wanted to be from an early age. When I read about the discovery of the genetic code at MIT, I knew where I wanted to go to college to learn biology. And [...]

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With the Beatles

September 11, 2009
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That’s how I’ve spent the last three days, with the Beatles. (I didn’t Meet the Beatles, that was a Capitol records construct.) I mentioned back in July that I had pre-ordered The Beatles Rock Band; it finally arrived on Wednesday. Needless to say, I spent five hours playing through all of the songs in solo [...]

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Galileo’s Telescope

August 25, 2009
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I didn’t need to see the Google home page to remember that today is the 400th anniversary of Galileo constructing his first telescope. That date has been burned into my brain since the sixth grade, and, like many things remembered from grade school, there was a certain amount of suffering involved. I was already a [...]

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St. Julia’s Day, Part 2: Mousseline au Chocolat

August 23, 2009
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If you’re serving coq au vin for dinner on St. Julia’s Day, then it follows that you should serve chocolate mousse for dessert. The recipe in Mastering is the second chocolate mousse recipe I learned; the first was taught to me by a college friend. It involved a bag of toll house morsels, whipping cream, [...]

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St. Julia’s Day, Part 1: Coq au Vin

August 21, 2009
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I used to refer to Julia Child as Saint Julia. She was revered by millions, was responsible for the miraculous daily transsubstantiation of base ingredients into delicious meals, and was certainly prayed to in an effort to avert uncountable kitchen disasters. If that doesn’t qualify one for sainthood these days, I don’t know what does. [...]

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Kind of Blue

August 17, 2009
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Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what is widely considered the greatest jazz album ever recorded: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Although the record didn’t spring Athena-like out of Miles’ head, there was precious little warning that preceded it. In 1953, composer/arranger George Russell (who passed away just a few weeks [...]

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