Ferriss

I cannot highly enough recommend the Four Hour Workweek book. It's full of wonderful ideas on breaking away from the day to dayness of life if you're up to the challenge. Tim Ferriss has an incredible ability to get outside of the world's workings and live his own life.

He also has a website, a blog, for lack of a better term. The site has been equally full of good information both in the posts themselves and in reference areas around the site.

On each of the posts (near as I can tell, having spot-checked it a bit in retrospect) there exists a byline:

"Written by Tim Ferriss"

Well today there's a post written by Tim Ferriss (possibly) confessing that the last year of posts have indeed not been written by him, that he's outsourced pretty much the whole thing. I've been had.

And herein lies the problem.

97% of what Ferriss has to say is plain old great out of the box, innovative lifestyle thinking. But he crosses a line I simply can not abide.

I've wondered on this and other occasions about that motivation. Why should I care after all?

When push comes to shove, I get to pick the qualities I value in people I respect and look up to, and while he's flirted with this line more than once, this pushes him over the edge for me.

I can't trash him or his work. It's innovative and wonderful.

But I won't be back to the site. I don't care if you're going to teach me to fly, be honest about it.

I'll not be made a patsy.

Beijing 2008

Awesome...

Fannie Farmer Cookbook (full text)

The Fannie Farmer cookbook is awesome. Check it out:

This classic American cooking reference includes 1,849 recipes, including everything from “after-dinner coffee”—which Farmer notes is beneficial for a stomach “overtaxed by a hearty meal”—to “Zigaras à la Russe,” an elegant puff-pastry dish. Bartleby.com chose the 1918 edition because it was the last edition of the cookbook authored completely by Farmer.

I know I know, I need a hobby

One of the things that I think way too much about is the sort of disposable culture problem that's grown out of advances in industrial and economic progress. We don't make things any more. We don't FIX things any more and it saddens me a bit.

So Friday night (that would be yesterday) I decided to try my hand at making butter. Not a big deal, just get some heavy cream, a smidge of salt, put it in the kitchen-aid and go for a bit, right?

Actually yeah. It's the weirdest thing. I let it go for a bit (20 mintues?) and all of a sudden the sound the thing changed and it was making this weird sloshy noise.

I walked over to it and damned if there wasn't a big wop of butter sitting in a pool of what turns out to be buttermilk (neat! who knew?)

You have to work the butter a bit to get the rest of the water out of it, but that was easily accomplished with a big zip-lock freezer bag. (Kneading butter's not my idea of a good time. Though I have to say I could really see where it would be part of one. >;-)

So now, for two pints of organic heavy cream (I tend towards organic milk products. I'm not an environmentalist. I just think it tastes better enough to pay more.) I have about a pound of butter and two cups of buttermilk, which is rather more than I expected.

I did the math and realized that, not only do I have a better result than store bought. It's an interesting novelty and, get this...

IT'S FUCKING CHEAPER TO MAKE BUTTER YOURSELF THAN IT IS TO BUY IT!

Yes. Even with the "organic" premium compared to plain old non-organic butter. Add in the price of buttermilk (which I use in baking ALL the damn time) and this is just win/win/win.

You're welcome.

I'll amend this post with more details if anyone's interested.

Memelet of the day

"Good Intentions are the easiest thing in the world to fake because you don't ever have to show results."

- Me

Me again

I'm having weird DNS issues again, so I think I'm coming back to this site for a while.

I'm actually in the midst of writing a piece of blogging software. I can't believe I'm actually going to do this after all this crap. But I'm so sick of NOTHING doing quite what I want.

When push comes to shove, the real feature set I'm interested in is almost entirely in the generation of the post html itself, which was a big "a ha!" for me. This means that what I'm really creating is a rich blog posting tool; but one that has deep knowledge of the full site itself and can do some interesting cross-referencing tricks.

Like Radio Userland but without the suck.

Stay tuned!