The Whole Foods tater tots are gone. This is a great tragedy in the area of foods formed from shredded potatoes. For some reason the Whole Foods ones had just the right balance of starch, oil and salt so if you roasted them at 400F for 20 minutes or so they were little cylindrical bundles of crunchy joy.
But they’ve been gone for a couple of months. I think this bodes ill. What am I going to do for lazy potatoes now?
Today I made a perfect stir fry. This doesn’t happen often, I usually get some small detail wrong that throws the whole enterprise off. I thought I would celebrate by imparting upon you, my dear readers, the rules you need to keep in mind to make the perfect stir fry happen more often. As is usual with my recipe advice, it will do you no good at all.
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This story is about World of Warcraft.
I say that up front so that you can bail early if you like. There seems to be a pattern where an otherwise interesting writer will develop a World of Warcraft addiction and decide that everyone in the world wants to hear the details of his character’s armor. (This happened to Joi Ito, for instance, who tried to bring to WoW the same insufferable gravitas that he brings to everything. It didn’t work.)
There are a few things that prevent me from developing this addiction (most notably my attention deficit disorder to anything that doesn’t make me money), but I have been enjoying the free 10-day trial of the game. And in the process, I have some observations to make about the game design that I hope are interesting to those of us who play games that don’t require a monthly fee. (more…)
Coffee is perhaps the most mysterious of all the hot drinks. Sure tea comes from the Far East and can at times be shrouded in ceremony and complicated cultural codes. But as a drink it’s simple. You take leaves, you put them in water that’s not too hot. After a while, you remove the leaves and enjoy your tea.
While coffee works on this same principle, I think what makes it an endless puzzle is the literally thousands of devices that man has thought up to do the job of soaking ground coffee beans in water.
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If there is something that photographers like to do more than shop for cameras it is this: photographers love to tell you why a given machine is not good enough for what they do. Cameras are too small, or too big, or too slow or too loud, or too “plasticky”. The flash system might be no good. Or the lens system might be missing that one critical lens, usually an expensive fast prime. Another popular reason not to buy a camera is that it’s not a Leica.
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One of the many ways in which I’ve had a lucky life is that I grew up with Moore’s law. I became aware of computing hardware just about the time the integrated circuit came on the scene. From high school to college to graduate school and into my work life I have for the most part ridden the curve that the hardware people have so generously provided for those of us who work in software.
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Long time readers will remember that a couple of years ago I worked my way through the first half of Planescape:Torment using a Windows emulator on my Mac. Since then I’ve dabbled in the game every once in a while, and then over this past Christmas break I decided to finish it off for good. Since my previous article on the game covered most of what I liked about it, now I get to complain.
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