It was a gorgeous day in San Francisco, almost too nice a day to spend indoors.
Luckily the time indoors was spent listening to engaged and engaging people talk about interesting things. How to build support for right-to-left languages when coding themes for WordPress, or how an exploratory learning model can be a better approach to software design.
WordPress 3 is going to be the bomb, no doubt.
The Cook’s Illustrated team came up with a very effective bagel recipe for the home kitchen. When I use it, I deviate from the instructions in two ways. I knead the dough by hand since I don’t have a KitchenAid mixer, and I don’t use high gluten flour, instead concocting my own by adding some Bob’s Red Mill vital wheat gluten to King Arthur’s bread flour.
Eight bagels doesn’t seem like a huge reward for the effort involved, but once you have been through the process two or three times, it is fairly simple. A mixer would help, since the dough is very stiff.
Since the formed bagels are refrigerated for eight hours before the boiling and baking, the work is divided into two short sessions. That means you can have freshly baked bagels for breakfast in about thirty minutes.
Dagmar Krause is simply one of the best. I do like her earlier work with Slapp Happy, Henry Cow, and the Art Bears, but albums like Supply and Demand or Babble (a collaboration with Kevin Coyne) are more to my taste now.
This video is from 1984 according to the notes on youtube. I haven’t heard anyone perform a finer version of the song.
I like this because:
1. It’s a nice example of how form is emphasized when color is uniform
2. The robot has four eyes.
His photostream has more like this one.
Due to some last minute changes, we had to postpone our going-out-of-California vacation, replacing it with a stay-at-home vacation. Today was the free day (3rd Wednesday of the month) at the California Academy of Sciences, so we drove to Golden Gate Park to finally see the new building. There is a lot to like, certainly. Though it was filled to capacity, it was comfortable.
I took the photo above with my iPhone, using the Pano application for stitching together panoramic photos. I enjoy using Pano for building these quirky, bent-perspective montages. The ghosts of people add a nice touch too, I think. This links to the full size, 6929 pixels wide image.
Over eight thousand checks an hour!
Another gem from archive.org.
The East Bay Nursery is a great place to shop for Christmas tree ornaments.
A Saturday afternoon walk up a muddy and steep trail.
It takes a community. Like The Fresh Loaf
Jorge Colombo’s art got a fair amount of attention last May when the painting shown in this video was published on the cover of The New Yorker. His work was highlighted again last week, in the short segment featuring Brushes for the iPad during the Apple announcement event. You can see more of his work here: Jorge Colombo.
I hope Layers and Autodesk’s Sketchbook Mobile will be ready for the iPad by the time it is released, but two factors make Brushes my “almost always” drawing app. First, the simplicity. Both Layers and Sketchbook are certainly well designed and easy to work with, but Brushes just seems more immediate. For me at least, it is better at getting out of my way.
The second thing Brushes has that the others don’t is the recording of the painting process. I know it seems like a novelty – after all, the finished product is what really matters, right? But the video recording has a lot to offer. I think it is helpful to see the process, and I love to watch other people’s drawing “grow.”
The New Yorker has a few more of Colombo’s painting videos you can watch.
