Month: July 2007

WordCamp Day 1

I’m settled in at WordCamp and feeling like there’s a big red “L” for loser on my forehead, because I’m using my clunky old Windows laptop instead of a nice sleek Mac, plus of course I’m typing this into MovableType.

Other than that, I’m stoked for the day. I’ll upload some photos later.

UPDATE 10:40 AM: Well, someone else already has photos online. I’m in this one.

UPDATE 11:15AM: Next up, Om Malik and John Dvorak. Funny opening:

Om: I’m a Mac, you’re a PC.
John: Yeah, whatever.

Although to be fair, Dvorak is much less of a ranty old guy in person than he is in his columns.

UPDATE 11:45AM:
This is an interesting discussion. Here’s a few more tidbits:

Om: Comments are what makes blogging. It is the biggest crucial difference from mainstream media. You have to engage (except for the morons). Moderating is the key to success.

(Me: In other words – FU Dave Winer!)

Om: You are responsible for the tone at your site. If you keep the discourse polite the readers will response. You have to go on the assumption that people are inherently nice.

John (to NY Times guy): if you can’t filter out profanity but filter in ‘Dick Cheney’ then your filters suck.

John: Rating comments is useless. unless you’re looking at restaurant reviews.

John: A writing tip – it’s really an old newspaper trick – read your piece out loud before you send it out. Really out loud, not just pretend. You’ll be amazed at the number of errors you’ll catch.

Plus, a really funny discussion of why it’s OK to call someone a douchebag but not a crook.

Update 2:45PM:

I didn’t post any notes from Lorelle VanFossen’s session, and now Jeremy Wright of b5media is up. Jeremy invited some audience members to join him, so now Eric from ICHC is up as well. Neat!

Got to be honest, so far this afternoon I am not hearing anything earth shattering, certainly not to someone who’s been blogging for a while. I’m also in need of more caffeine, which may account for my flagging interest level.

The side conversations have been fun though. I had a nice chat with Stormy of bargaintravel.com.

Update 5:15PM
Robert Hoekman’s presentation was quite good and I took a bunch of notes, but I’m hitting info overload in a big way, and Matt Cutts is talking. I’ll see if I can get some of the notes on later.

Is The Fix In?

Sports gambling — and the NBA in general — isn’t something that normally crosses my radar screen. However, if this NY Post column is accurate, even I know that an accusation of fixed games in the NBA is a very big deal indeed. The last thing any professional sports league needs is allegations of fixed games.

That said, the article makes it pretty clear than only one referee is under investigation, and if that’s the case, then one bad ref should not tank the whole system.

Notes from the Kitchen

Two quick food & cooking related notes from the past weekend:

1) We’ve made the Roasted Tomato & Fennel soup recipe we came up with several times over the past few months, always to great acclaim. As a follow-up, Scott decided to try a new version of the recipe with a medley of roasted root vegetables (carrot, parsnip, and turnip, plus a leek and some garlic cloves). We weren’t sure whether beef of chicken stock would go better in this version, so we did a split-test and did half-batches in separate pots with the different stocks. The result was tasty, but not quite as successful as the tomato-fennel version. We’ll try again with some other combinations in the not too distant future.

2) We saw Ratatouille. I share Ruhlman’s highly positive take on the piece — with one caveat. My feminist funnybone got dinged by the fact that the movie was set up so that Remy the rat ALWAYS knew better than Colette when it came to food. She’s presented as a highly talented line cook who worked her butt off to get where she was. Couldn’t she be right at least once?