last summer, i set out for southern california with the intention of setting down some semi-permanent roots in the san diego area by september. instead, i spent all my money on running a kitchen at burning man, and ran my energy bar down into the blinking red along the way.

the adventure was worth the risk, but i needed to recover, so i returned east to search for powerups, play some old mini-games i had already figured out pretty well, and develop my strategy a bit better. i learned a lot, and had a lot of fun, and felt very grateful for my friends.

i also thought quite a bit about the potential benefit of using games as a metaphor for life, and that may impact how i write for a while, so… fair warning.
:)

last wednesday i arrived in san diego with a carload of assorted possessions, a two-month sublease on a room that is two blocks from the ocean, and a relatively well-defined concept for a web project that erik has agreed to work on with me for a while.

these are all very good things, and i’ve spent this weekend taking many deep breaths while looking out the window at the palm trees, listening to the birds, and trying to just let my new surroundings sink in.

i love california, but right now, bouncing back and forth between time zones as much as i am, i can’t help but marvel at how different it feels from the rest of the country when it comes to the simple mechanics of daily life.

when abundance can be taken as a given in life, strategies change.

whenever i’m here i feel like i’ve just been dealt a really great hand of cards, and at first it’s really fun to play it out and get a lot of points, but after a while it starts to get boring, and i start to wonder if maybe someone forgot to shuffle the deck…

for now, here i am, and my hand excites me.
i am good, but tired, and there are many stories to tell.
over the next few weeks i will try to figure out where to begin.

i’m helping my dad set up a blog for his law office, and he’s decided to focus on a few main category areas and build up audiences for each.

i told him that we could use the category archives that wordpress generates to filter the posts. then we could link to these pages and style them however we want as we design the site as a whole, and people can subscribe to the rss feeds for only the categories they want.

i was not lying, but today when i actually set about to ask the category feeds to play nice with my dad’s theme, it was a little bit harder than it should have been, and i decided to blog about my solution.

the theme has a big friendly “subcribe to our feed!” link, that i like very much, and it uses a file that it calls ’subscribe.php’ to generate the link, which i also like. for those of you playing along at home, that means that you can just include ’subscribe.php’ anywhere you want an rss link to show up, and if you ever want to change the way the link works, you only have to update one file. hurray!

for my purposes, however, a different rss link needs to be generated when you are on a category page, and it has to be the right one. one way of doing this would be to make a custom category template for each page, which wordpress lets you do by making pages like ‘category-17.php’ in your theme folder. but that would be annoying, and it would take away the benefit of having only one piece of code to change, which would be even more annoying, not to mention bad practice.

the better way is to add a condition to the ’subscribe.php’ file that checks to see if the page you are on is a category archive, and then generates the appropriate rss link. that should be easy enough, but i couldn’t find a function that automatically retrieves category-specific rss feeds, and the otherwise convenient fact that there are several different ways to refer to rss feeds (but only one way to refer to a category-specific feed), was giving me trouble.

sigh.

i spent a while searching the wordpress codex to see if someone had already written the code or a plugin for me, because it seems like the kind of thing that would be a relatively common desire. sure enough, i found lots of people who wanted to do this, but only one who seemed to have succeeded, and his solution seemed really wonky to me and i wasn’t sure it would even work in the new version of wordpress.

in many ways, the strength of the wordpress community spoils me for times like this. i can almost always find answers to my codex questions in less than five minutes, so when i can’t, i just assume the answer isn’t out there, which probably isn’t true. in any case, if i can’t find the answer before i get tired of looking, other people probably can’t either, so it seemed like a good opportunity to increase the number of answers in the pool. :)

after a few frustrations with brackets and such that are par for the course, i made it work!

’subscribe.php’ now uses the following code to generate the RSS link:
<a href="<?php if (is_category()) {
$cur_cat_id = get_cat_id(single_cat_title("",false) );
echo 'http://brunettelawoffice.com/blog/wp-rss2.php?cat='.$cur_cat_id;
}
else {
bloginfo('rss2_url');}
?>" title="Subscribe to this Feed via RSS">Subscribe to our Feed via RSS

that’s a lot of babbling so i won’t say more unless there are questions.
good night and good luck!

OK, so, continuing with the “write for 15 minutes and then post” game that began yesterday (that’s what the “15 minutes:” at the beginning of the title means. I will try to stop commenting on it in the future unless I need ways to kill time. :), today I remembered a little rant that I had the other day that I thought it would be good to blog at some point.

Initially, I wanted to title the post “How non-stick pans are ruining a generation of home chefs”, but that seemed a bit harsh, so now I will just say this: if you ever want to make sauce or gravy - and really, if you are cooking with meat or onions on a regular basis and you don’t want to make sauce or gravy… why not? - please don’t use a non-stick pan.

The science behind this plea is quite simple, and I will let Wikipedia summarize it for me:

Deglazing is a cooking technique for removing bits of food from a pan in order to make a sauce with them. When a piece of meat is roasted, pan fried or prepared in a pan with another form of dry heat, a fond, or deposit is left at the bottom of the pan with any rendered fat. Usually, the meat is removed from the cooking vessel, the majority of the oil is poured off, leaving a small amount with the dried and caramelized meat juices. The pan is returned to the heat, and a liquid is added to act as a solvent. This liquid can be plain water, vegetable or meat stock, a spirit, some wine, verjuice or any other liquid. This allows the cook to scrape the dark spots from the bottom of the pan, and dissolve them creating a rich sauce. [1]

This method is the cornerstone of many well known sauces and gravies. The resulting liquid can be seasoned and served on its own (sometimes called a jus), or with the addition of aromatic vegetables such as onions or shallots. The sauce can also be thickened with a starch such as flour, cornstarch, or arrowroot, or reduced with a steady heat forming a richer concentrated sauce.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deglazing_(cooking)

You see, something really cool happens when you heat up sugar, and it is what we call caramelization. You know, like caramel. Caramel is sugar that has been cooked at a high enough temperature that it turns brown, which gives it that characteristic nutty sweet caramelly taste. If you just heat up sugar alone and then add butter and milk in appropriate proportions, you get caramel, or butterscotch, and you have a happy day before you.

When you heat up other foods that have sugar inside of them, however (and a lot of foods have sugar in them somewhere - yay energy!), those sugars start to caramelize after a while too, and the way the food tastes changes. Caramelized onions, as the most famous example, are just onions that have been cooked for a long time. No caramel is added. It comes out of the onion like magic and bunnies. Cooking is chemistry, people, and chemistry is fun. :)

If you use a nonstick pan, however, you miss out on a lot of this fun. The sugars brown best when they get to stick to something for a while and get crispy, but nonstick pans are built around the notion that sticking is terrible, and we want to avoid it at all costs. That makes home chefs who aren’t used to browning action freak out a bit when they start cooking something and the sugars begin to caramelize, and the innate reaction is to stir and scrape and curse at what suddenly seems like a pan that will be really hard to wash.

As wikipedia explains above, however, you should just chill. Wait a few minutes. And add water. Or brandy! The process of ‘deglazing’ is an entry level concept for sauciers everywhere, and I think it’s a shame that people might not be able to learn it just because they got tricked into thinking that non-stick coatings are the best thing to happen to home cooking since the microwave.

I’m a couple minutes over, so now I leave.
I might come back later or post again with pictures.
In the meantime, have fun! Deglaze something! Trust me! :)

i’ve been thinking a fair bit about ADHD lately. a good friend of mine has a son who was recently diagnosed and has begun medication, and in my own quest to understand my own scattered behaviors and bouts with anxiety and depression, i have started to humor the idea that i could probably pretty thoroughly convince myself, and at least one health care professional, that i ’suffer’ from the adult version that is currently making the rounds in the popular psychology press. this is a touchy subject and i have resisted writing about it in the past because i want to respect the people who sincerely believe that the recent trend towards medication in our culture has really helped them and/or the people they love. i will never, and i mean NEVER, deign to judge anyone for their personal decisions regarding self-medication, prescription or otherwise. there are a lot of weights to bear in this world, and very little that is known for certain about how to make them lighter. it is up to each of us to evaluate the evidence that we are given and make the best decisions that we can. that said, it is up to me to undertake that sort of evaluation for myself, and talking about what i see and feel seems like it could help others in their own quest for understanding, so i am trying to find the courage to be open and honest while still retaining a fundamental respect for others’ ability to do the same. so.
enough preface, eh?
what am i thinking?
as i see it, the rise in ADHD and other neurological diagnoses, both in our children and adults, can be explained in one of three ways:
1) we have always been crazy, but we didn’t have the tools to diagnose it until recently, so people either just died or found a way to deal, even though that often meant living with a great deal of pain;
2) we are being driven crazy by our society - too many lights, too many preservatives, too much reinforcement of predatory behavior in the media - and we need to change our lifestyles or drug ourselves in order to cope;
3) we are evolving - technology in our society is enabling us to think in new ways, work in new ways, relate to one another in new ways, and by and large this is a positive development, but there will be growing pains as our cultural structures evolve with us in ways that support our development rather than hold it back.

this last option is not one that has a great deal of support in the current medical literature, and less in the media that seeks to explain that literature to the rest of us.
but it is the option that resonates the most with me, and i am not alone, and i think it’s about time for me to start exploring the idea more publicly so that i can start figuring out what it means.

i wrote this post as part of a new experiment with my friend erik, and the experiment is: write about something you’re thinking about for 15 minutes and then post it. no looking back. so that’s all i have time for. here goes! :)

http://borntoexplore.org/evolve.htm
http://thehumanimprint.typepad.com/the_human_imprint/2008/06/adhd-gene-benef.html

um, the latest burningman newsletter announces that mcmurdo station is having a regional burn over thanksgiving weekend.
and they need us to send them toys.

heeheeheeheehee…

if i can’t find something to contribute to that cause then i need to rearrange my priorities.

http://www.youtube.com/user/AfterworldTV

it’s a computer-animated show about a guy who wakes up one day to find that 99.9% of the population gone, and all ‘technology’ that runs on anything more sophisticated than a DC battery is broken.

now he’s trying to figure out what happened and walk across the country in case some of his family survived.
adventures ensue.

it’s being posted in 3 minute installments on youtube.
there is a new one EVERY SINGLE DAY!

ack!

there are already more than 150 episodes, and i’m only on episode 45 so i guess it could all go to crap but so far it’s addictive.
they are pausing for a few weeks now to let people catch up and then spread crazy theories on message boards while simultaneously debunking the other crazy theories that all the STUPID people are coming up with because, srsly?! WTF are they thinking and why can’t they spell?
;)

so far i am abstaining from spreading my half-baked theories and complaining about plot twists because i would rather just laugh at the comments and eat popcorn.

though i will say that if I wake up tomorrow and the apocalypse came in my sleep and my car won’t start and i want to go 3,000 miles for kicks?
i’m making friends with a horse.

Powell endorses Obama and speaks out against the blatant bigotry inherent in the “I’m worried he might be Muslim” argument.

(March 22 - 25, 2008) K ATTENDS STARTUP WEEKEND IN BOULDER AND THEN SPENDS THREE DAYS WITH GOOD FRIENDS MB AND JB AND THEIR DARLING 8-MONTH OLD DAUGHTER, LB, DURING WHICH K AND JB CRAFT THREE BUDDING MICROBRANDS - JB’S LEIO DESIGNS, K’S DREAMFIELD COLLECTIVE, AND THE UNSPELLABLE CHAIN RESTAURANT K IS POTENTIALLY COFOUNDING AT BURNING MAN.

(March 26, 2008) K DRIVES FROM BOULDER TO LAS VEGAS AND CRASHES FOR THE NIGHT AT THE FOUR QUEENS HOTEL, WHICH WAS A BARGAIN ON ORBITZ. SHE STARES AT LIGHTS, SPENDS $10 OF HER OWN MONEY AND $4 OF FREE BONUS MONEY ON PULLING LEVERS, AND CONSUMES HASHBROWNS AND EGGS WITH A CHEAP MIMOSA FOR BREAKFAST.

(March 27, 2008) K LEARNS HOW RIDICULOUS THE LAX PARKING/PICKUP LAYOUT IS AS SHE RETRIEVES HER FRIEND JK SO HE CAN TIE UP STRINGS IN BAKERSFIELD AND PORTLAND BEFORE MOVING TO BRIGHTON FOR CHEMISTRY PROGRAMS OF BOTH THE PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC VARIETIES.

(March 28, 2008) K AND JK HANG OUT IN BAKERSFIELD, WHICH REMINDS K OF COLORADO SPRINGS + PALM TREES + IN N’ OUT - DR. DOBSON.

(March 29, 2008) K AND JK DRIVE TO ASHLAND, OREGON AND FALL ASLEEP.

(March 30, 2008) K AND JK STOP IN EUGENE FOR BREAKFAST WITH THE DEAR VHS AND CONTINUE ON TO PORTLAND WHERE THEY TAKE ADVANTAGE OF NO SALES TAX AT THE APPLE STORE AND THEN GET DRINKS WITH JK’S OLD HOUSEMATE G? AND HER FRIEND ??

(March 31 - April 1, 2008) JK CURSES AND SELLS POSSESSIONS ON CRAIGSLIST WHILE K TRIES NOT TO INHERIT TOO MUCH UNNECESSARY JUNK, LAUGHS AT THE PET TORTOISE, DOES AN UNEXPECTED BIOFEEDBACK EXPERIMENT AT THE NEIGHBORS’, AND MEETS TIF FOR SUSHI AND SP FOR PIE.

(April 2, 2008) K TAKES THE BUS TO EUGENE TO CONTINUE CONVERSATIONS WITH VHS AND MAKE PASTA AND GLUTEN FREE COOKIE BARS.

(April 3, 2008) JK PICKS K UP FROM EUGENE AND THEY DRIVE TO SAN FRANCISCO TO GIVE A CLOCK TO JK’S FRIEND R? AND HANG OUT WITH KYNTHIA’S FRIEND EG AND MUTUAL FRIEND PJ. PJ PROPOSES A VERY EXCITING PLAN FOR A FUNDRAISING PARTY FOR THE GOLDEN CAFE, AND K FINDS RANDOM SHOES ON THE STREET, WHICH GIVE HER A BLISTER.

(April 4 - 7, 2008) JK AND K CONTINUE TO LA WHERE THEY MEET UP WITH SATI, LUCIFER, TEZ, THOR, ATHENA, AND DR DAVE & CO TO PARTAKE IN AN OUTRAGEOUSLY PRICED HIGH-QUALITY SALAD BAR, A RANGE OF FINE COCKTAILS IN VARIOUS LOCATIONS, AND OTHER GENERALLY DEBAUCHEROUS ACTS CULMINATING IN A PHOTOGRAPH OF A LADYBUG AND CONCLUDING WITH DEAD BATTERIES AFTER DIM SUM AND AN AFTERNOON AT THE SPEAKEASY WITH ARES. PARTIAL SCHOLARSHIPS WERE AWARDED AND K ASSUMED THE ROLE OF KITCHEN MANAGER FOR THIS YEAR’S GOLDEN CAFE. FM’S DRAMATIC DEPARTURE LEAVES MANY STUNNED. K BUYS JK’S CAR ALL OFFICIAL-LIKE BEFORE LEAVING HIM TO HIS FINAL UK-BOUND PREPARATIONS.

(April 8 - 10, 2008) K HEADS TO SAN DIEGO TO SIT ON THE BEACH WITH ERIK AND HIS LOVELY NEW FRIEND L?, COLLAPSE ON A BEANBAG PILLOW FOR SEVERAL HOURS, AND DELIGHT IN THE DISCOVERY THAT K AND ERIK SEEM TO HAVE BROKEN THROUGH A RECENTLY CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONAL DIVIDE, WHICH COULD LEAD TO EXCITING COLLABORATIONS IN THE NEAR TO MID-TERM.

(April 11 - 12, 2008) K EATS BISCUITS AND GRAVY AT THE BIG KITCHEN ON HER WAY OUT OF TOWN AND THINKS OF CALLING /_\ TO MAKE AN ATLAS SHRUGGED REFERENCE. SHE FINALLY TURNS THE NOSE OF THE CAR EASTWARD AND DRIVES, WITH A FEW NAP STOPS, TO COLORADO SPRINGS, WHERE SHE HANGS OUT WITH HER DAD, LEARNS OF A POTENTIAL NEW BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, AND WONDERS IF SHE SHOULD COME BACK TO CO FOR HER BIRTHDAY.

(April 13, 2008) K FINALLY DRIVES BACK TO BLOOMINGTON, WHERE SHE ATONES WITH MVP’S CATS AND DISCOVERS THAT THE BATHTUB IS BEING REPLACED, WHICH IS EXCITING BUT RESULTS IN A DIVERSIONARY VISIT TO JN’S, WHOM SHE IS VERY HAPPY TO SEE NOT ONLY BECAUSE OF THE CHANCE TO SHOWER.

(April 14, 2008 - present) K SETTLES BACK INTO BLOOMINGTON, CLAMORS TO CATCH UP ON WORK FOR IMI, FIGURES OUT HOW TO HANG OUT WITH JN AND RR WITHOUT LIVING AT RR’S, BEFRIENDS AFOREMENTIONED CATS, DOES NOT GO TO PITTSBURGH AFTER ALL, WORRIES THAT ONE OF THE CATS HAS RUN AWAY BUT THEN HAS HER WORRIES RESOLVED, AND THINKS ABOUT HOW TO REALIZE THE PLANS THAT HAVE NOW BEEN SET IN MOTION. SHE PROCRASTINATES TOO MUCH WITH REGARD TO REGISTERING THE CAR AND ATTENDING TO THE WEEDS IN MVP’S YARD, AND OTHERWISE DELIGHTS IN THE SPRING WEATHER.

i was listening to marketplace the other day and there was this piece about these new apple ads starring “mac guy” and “pc guy”. story goes that they make mac users out to be all slick and savvy while showing pc users as geeky and frustrated. i don’t have a tv, so i haven’t actually seen these ads, and i should probably go watch one on youtube or something before writing this post, but whatever, because i’m not actually responding to the ads, i’m responding to the way they were covered on the radio.

the piece talked about how apple might be biting itself in the ass with the ad campaign because “mac guy” is so self-confident as to be annoying, and current mac users might not enjoy the association. marketplace quotes marissa gluck, a marketing analyst, as saying:

The character of the Mac guy is almost too perfectly cast. He is smug. He is condescending. He’s just that uber-hipster you love to hate. It just makes you want to slap him.

fair enough. condescension not always the best marketing strategy. noted.

but the piece goes on from there. after assessing “mac guy” in this manner and questioning apple’s wisdom in promoting itself through him, it cites a study by a media research group that surveyed 7,500 different computer users with regard to their lifestyle habits as well as their computer usage. the direct quote from a representative of the research group was:

This is a group that is not afraid to shout its accomplishments from the mountaintops. They’re happy and proud to talk about their successes and their accomplishments, and that can come across as possibly a bit conceited.

can and possibly being rather major keywords in that summary, imh?o…

but the Marketplace correspondent summarized this information thusly:

They found that Mac owners pretty much personify the Mac guy from the commercials. Among other things, they think they’re more extraordinary than the average Joe.

and at that point, i’m scratching me head a bit, guvna, because i thought we were talking about how this stereotype might not be the best to use for the PR division, but now we’re using our own NPR-special heads to decide that mac users have superiority complexes because –

The survey revealed that Mac users often describe themselves as perfectionists. They’re also more likely than PC users to whiten their teeth, drive hybrids, drink Starbucks coffee and eat organic food.

–?

i think that what i actually said aloud after the “they think they’re more extraordinary than the average Joe” nod was something like “or, um… their computers actually let them do stuff and then they are happy…”

now again, for clarity, i’m not talking about “mac guy” here at all, because i still haven’t seen the commercials, and i’m definitely not saying that there aren’t some annoying, conceited mac users out there, with myself on the ballot like everyone else.

i just found it striking that being “happy and proud to talk about their successes and their accomplishments” is apparently so closely synonymous with “being an arrogant arsehole” in our cultural vernacular that the two can be used interchangeably on a major evening radio program, not just without the commentator batting an eye, but with her apologizing for her own audacity in sometimes engaging in similar behaviors herself.

um… yah.

sent from my iBook, sure, but…

[begin sarcastic grunting voice]

me think things.
me say some things out loud.
me change mind sometimes.
you do whatever.
we grow.

[raised-eyebrow smile at world and self as transition from grunting voice]

onward with the week.

here i am in boulder, colorado, and you might start to get the suspicion that i only blog when i’m at startup weekends anymore. fair enough. there does indeed seem to be a trend developing. a commentary to my proximity to wireless access in the past few months, perhaps.

anyway, the boulder startup weekend is off and chugging along and it’s mixing things up a bit by not requiring the group to pick one idea, but instead breaking up into as many groups as can successfully recruit support for themselves. it’s like walking around a little startup factory, and i’ve decided to pimp myself out as a consultant rather than join any one group, and so far that’s lots of fun.

i got in late last night because i drove out from bloomington without really sleeping first, so i had to stop a few more times than i anticipated when i planned my very time-crunched driving schedule, a schedule which was further complicated by the fact that my car was in the shop for a day longer than i expected, so… pant, pant, pant…

now here i am.
and back into the flow i go.