Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that Atlanta’s in the middle of a pretty serious drought these days. Following are a couple mildly humorous takes on the situation…
A friend of mine recently posted the following IM away message:
Freeze Warning: Please leave faucets dripping.
Drought Warning: Please conserve water.
AirTran is advertising their Atlanta departures with the tagline:
Save water. Shower in another city!
There’s two big words for you. Chose that title because the root word for “god, deity” is in both of them, and there’s something a little bit transcendent about these two chocolate bars I recently picked up. I guarantee, in either case, that you’ve never had anything like them before, and that they are very tasty . As follows:
Vosges Haut-Chocolat Macha Bar. A glorious blend of Japanese macha green tea and “deep” milk chocolate. What could be a better complement for dark chocolate than another bitterly buttery, rich and aromatic sort of flavor? It really shocks me that I haven’t seen this combination before. Regardless, Vosges executes it perfectly. At first, you only taste the milk chocolate… which is surprisingly intense for milk. Just as the initial wave of chocolate is beginning to dissipate, the lush green tea flavor takes over. It’s spectacular.
3400 Phinney Bread & Chocolate Bar. This arrived in my Christmas stocking chiefly because it had a cat on the label, and my mom picked it out. Only later did we read the label and find it to be “Bread & Chocolate.” A mind-boggling prospect that was. “Surely, they meant cookie, or cracker,” I thought to myself. But when I at last unwrapped it and snapped off a piece, I found mind-bogglingly smooth superdark (83%) chocolate. Excellent superdark chocolate, in fact — sweet, not too bitter. Then, a subtle crunch, and the beginning of a buttery, yeasty flavor unrolling after a short delay. The bread was real: a good flavorful French bread, dried and ground finely, so as not to disrupt the texture. Outright impressive. And nothing like a chocolate croissant, in case you were wondering, but equally satisfying.
Next, I must try Mo’s Bacon Bar and the d’Oliva Bar from Vosges. Just to say I have, you know.
“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.”
From the Notebooks of Mr. Ibis, in American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
It has been pointed out to me by friends that I seem to have left off blogging, in the midst of travel and other distractions. However, I just spent the weekend in Savannah, which at least gives me some fresh posting material — that is, once I finish the great annual sending of holiday cards. Be back in January!
I learned something important about lemons this weekend. They taste completely different — and wonderful — when you grill them. It had never before occurred to me that there would be any difference between squeezing a grilled lemon on top of my salmon and using fresh juice. Instead of puckery-sour, grilled lemons have a rich and aromatic flavor, the perfect complement to meat and fish. I’m sure this holds for baked or sauteed lemon, as well. The previous night, it happens that we’d eaten at Rumi’s Kitchen, a Persian restaurant in Sandy Springs, and I had ordered a chicken dish that featured the same lovely rich lemon flavor. It was excellent. Clearly, lemons are meant to be grilled. You can bet I’m going to be cooking my lemons whenever possible in the future.
Last week I started thinking about booking my plane tickets for Reunions. My usual thought behind airline purchase decisions is, “Here’s the lowest available price. For that amount, do you really want to go?” The tacit assumption is that prices will only go up, and a last-minute getaway fare sale to your exact destination is too much to hope for.
For the last couple personal trips I’ve taken, I’ve been consulting a new website called FareCast. It leverages the power of historical price data to predict whether fares for a particular date and destination are falling, or on the rise. Every time I’d used it before, the route I was considering showed stable fares, nothing to alter a purchase decision. But on Sunday, I noticed that fares had taken a sudden jump, and felt a pang of dismay that I might have missed my chance to fly for under $250. Then, I noticed a ray of hope springing from the page:
Very well, then. I resolved to wait. Then I discovered that I needn’t make a note to check back specifically — FareCast supports RSS! Instead of entering all of my flight preferences again, I could throw a single link into my blogreader to check daily. Today, I saw exactly what I’d been looking for:
As you can see, the site has good information design… the arrow and chart concisely convey everything you need to know about the route pricing in a ten-second glance. See the big bump toward the right end of the history graph? That’s when I originally looked for tickets. That’s when you don’t want to buy tickets. Without FareCast, that’s when I probably would have. In the end, Farecast probably saved me about $20, given that I’m picky about which airlines I fly for mileage purposes.
It’s not enough savings to convince me to buy their $10 “fare insurance,” because while I might at least come out even, I doubt I’d ever be up more than a trivial amount. However, if I’m ever forced to buy a really expensive ticket to a destination that seems likely to produce last-minute weekend specials, I’ll consider it, because the methodology certainly works!
Now that I have an audience again, I’m going to stand up on my soapbox and make you read the following article: Pearls Before Breakfast, in which Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten stages a marvelous stunt to determine what would happen if one of the world’s best violinists were to spend a rush hour playing a Stradivarius for spare change in the DC Metro. An audience of thousands, to be sure, would hear him. But would they listen?
Even if you have a hunch as to the results of this grand experiment, it is very much worth reading the entire piece. Much of interest can be gleaned from the short interviews gathered after-the-fact with those who stopped to listen and those who passed by. Whether you’re confident that you would have paused, pleased, to drop a few dollars into his case, or quite certain the music would have skipped across the surface of your mind, unable to breach the tension of schedules and task-lists and other minutia, you’ll find the article at once poignant and inspiring. I’ve talked to some who find it depressing, but how can you not come away from it newly determined to focus on the present moment, to catch every instance of fleeting beauty?
My favorite observation was the irony of customers in the nearby lottery ticket line failing to recognize a priceless performance going on in the same room. The article includes a short video clip. (I’m disappointed that it’s not available in its entirety, but that’d be a bit much to expect.) For those of you who’ve already come across this, be sure to check out the additional details and reactions on today’s moderated chat log.
[Incidentally, the title of this post sounds exactly like it ought to be the name of an emo song, but it’s actually from a movie. Bonus points to the guesser. It’s a fairly emo movie, come to think of it, but wrong era entirely.]
The foodies that hang around Atlanta Cuisine know what they’re talking about! Even though I’ve been within a hundred yards of both on occasions innumerable, I’d never noticed the kebab shop (Dalia’s Grill) where I grabbed dinner last night or the barbecue place (Swallow at the Hollow) where I had lunch today. I found both of them recommended on the Atlanta Cuisine forum.
Like most forums, this one definitely has its own jargon… it took me about twenty minutes to deduce the translation of the acronym SATH, a puzzle made infinitely more difficult by not having heard the restaurant’s name previously. They call the area where I live BOA, either for “Beyond Old Alabama (Road)” or “Bloomin’ Onion Acres,” depending on how much you feel like disparaging suburbia. But I haven’t consumed any onion-flora since moving here.
Wow, is Jott ever useful. At least, if you don’t already have a Crackberry. Jott lets you call a toll-free number to record a fifteen-second message that will be transcribed using speech-to-text software and e-mailed to a contact of your choice. So far, it’s understood everything I’ve tried to tell it, and the sound file is archived just in case.
This would be nifty on its own, for capturing inspirations and reminders while out shopping or stuck in traffic. Then I realized what can happen when you combine it with other Web 2.0 services. Now I can throw new items on my to-do list at Remember the Milk from any telephone — without breaking my thumbs trying to write a text! Awesome!
I am especially curious to see how Jott might work with Twitter. Right now, Twitter can receive updates via the web, text/SMS, and instant messaging. However, only the mobile phone can connect anywhere, and texting is cumbersome. Imagine if you could press a speed-dial button and just state what you’re up to? That makes Twitter sound like fun, rather than something that will ultimately eat your soul (see also Asymptotic Twitter Curve).
What are your favorite uses for Jott?
While I love using my Covey paper calendar with its abundant note-taking space, I’ve found paper to-do lists lacking in the past. With my physical planner and brain both overflowing, I’ve been testing out free online task management software suites recently. Finally settled on Remember The Milk because it offers a lot of personal flexibility through tagging, though it can also be kept very streamlined for simplicity. However, I’m not perfectly enamoured, for lack of one key feature…
Dealing With Contingency
I haven’t been able to find a task manager that deals with contingent tasks in a meaningful way. Without an implementation of contingency, the user is limited to only the most basic single-step operations, and must seek another piece of software for the planning of large projects. While fully-featured software like Zoho Projects exists to fill this niche, it tends to be business- and team-oriented — too complex for the individual user who’s just trying to manage their daily household tasks, commitments, and hobbies. It’s true that Gantt charts are all about contingency. All the same, I don’t see soccer-moms sticking them on the kitchen fridge.
GTD implementations have a few methods of dealing with contingencies, but all are somewhat limited. There is the Calendar and/or Tickler File, for tasks not possible until a certain predetermined date. There is the Waiting For list, for actions dependent on responses from others. Then there are Contexts, for situational contingencies like needing a phone or printer available in order to complete a task. This is a great basic framework, perhaps one of the more unique features of GTD that has made it so popular.
However, more complex groups of tasks seem to be relegated to an amorphous thought-space called Project Planning, in which larger goals are brainstormed and broken down into more easily accomplished chunks. I’ve always thought this was the weakest aspect of GTD, lacking guidance on the specifics. Supposedly everything comes together during the Weekly Review, in which one consults a file of project planning notes to determine the appropriate Next Actions. Straightforward in theory, perhaps, but…
If you burn energy hacking out the necessary order of actions during your Weekly Review, why not use the magic of software to capture this information and capitalize on it?It ought to be a trivial thing to link tasks together, displaying only those with all their prerequisites fulfilled.
An Example
Suppose I am planning a vacation. I have to request vacation at my office before booking travel arrangements. That’d be three tasks, which would show up on most planners like so:
This is nearly useless, because only the first item in the list can be acted upon presently. Non-actionable items #2 and #3 are distracting if not confusing. Furthermore, the presence of too many items on the list makes it seem endless, sapping precious motivation.
GTD provides a slight improvement. The main to-do list according to GTD is comprised only of Next Actions. (In this case, that’s “get my vacation request approved.”) The two subsequent tasks would have been captured elsewhere, on a Waiting For list or Project Planning sheet. Upon completion of item #1, one would need either the presence of mind to consult the lists or the patience to wait for the Weekly Review. Subsequent tasks would be transferred over to Next Actions manually. Not quite ideal.
Imagine if… moments after checking item #1 to indicate completion, item #2 materializes on the list! At any given time, only the actionable tasks would be out in front of me, but finding my next task would always be instant and effortless. Wasteful context-switching from “doing mode” to “planning mode” would be greatly diminished, and — best of all — projects would continue moving forward even in the absence of a Weekly Review.
Brilliant, no?
If anybody’s aware of a good software implementation that uses similar functionality, let me know!
