Dan Gordon blog has moved...

Future posts will appear at www.dangordontech.com

Please come visit me there.

My Talk at MakerCon

I'm giving a talk at MakerCon on 5/13.



The topic is "A Strategy for Getting QS Apps to Interoperate".

Ok.  It's not the best title.  It used to be even worse: "Disruptive Standards as a tool to facilitate data interoperability in the quantified self app ecosystem".  Longer than the 20 minutes of the talk...

But it's an interesting idea, or at least I think so.

It drafts off a thought I blogged about in this post some years ago.  Gist of the argument is that a certain kind of standard -- which I call "disruptive", after Clay Christensen's "disruptive technologies" meme -- actually aid in ecosystem coalescence.  The standards need to be not-too-strict, but strict-enough.

I'm a big Quantified Self junkie, and it seems like an ecosystem in need of assistance coalescing, so I wanted to workshop my ideas with (hopefully) sympatico minds in the room.

Room 202/203, 3:30 PM PDT

If you're around and so minded, please join me.

Cauliflower, Swiss Chard, and Chicken Soup

I’ve shared my conclusions about dieting, right?  I can benefit from diets, but only by picking a new diet gimmick every six months or so.

It makes sense: the motor of a diet is your zeal, and zeal, let’s face it, wears out over time.  Nothing to re-hone that zeal like a new gimmick: “the 3 don’ts”, “the seven heavenly foods,” whatever.

Latest gimmick: Happy Body diet and workout, the brainchild of a Silicon Valley couple.  Props to an old friend Kem Smith for letting me know about it.

The diet part of it calls for two big meals and three small snacks a day, spaced out at three-hour intervals.  All are supposed to be “balanced” and “wholesome” (although, perversely, Clif bars are considered a balanced and wholesome snack, and perhaps they are).  The meals feature protein and vegetables for satiety, minimizing cereal-style carbs and certainly “refined” carbs.

All a long preamble to last night’s Crummy Sortie, a soup made with cubed chicken breast, cauliflower, and chard.

Sorry, no picture.

Very simple, kind of tasty, Happy Body Adherent.

Criticism/Self-Criticism

None.  It came out fine, but mainly due to few moving parts.

Oh, and I was the only eater.  Debbie out of town again.

Trying Out Something New on CrummyCook

I'm working with a startup who is trying to enable tipping on blogs as a monetary way of saying "thank you" for content that you've enjoyed.

I've put a sample TipJar on my site, which will appear (once you have signed up) next to each post.  If you like what you've read, just hit the TipJar button and you will be encouraged to leave a small token of your esteem.

Nothing will appear for a little bit while I test to make sure it kinda works, and then I'll put out instructions about how to do it.

We could be changing Internet history (in a modest way!) together.

Corn Custard with Chorizo and Mushrooms

With Debbie late coming home from work and probably stressed, I sat and watched the chicken chorizo sausages I had had her leave out of the fridge that morning, and wondered what the h**l I would do with them.  Talk about having to eat your words.

We had had a week of chili, sausage and pasta, and other sausage and bean vehicles, but it seemed as if all the chorizo recipes involved either pasta or legumes.  Sigh.

Then I found this one.  In Epicurious, of course.  And, as it happened, we had mushrooms.  And Debbie loves corn.

Above is their picture of it.

Sadly, I didn’t have quite enough mushrooms (and I could believe the quantities they were asking for).  And the chorizo didn’t get quite crispy enough, and didn’t seem to fill the baking dish.

We had a tasty dinner, but not spectacular.  Too corny, if you know what I mean.  Or too custardy.  Not enough savory oomph.

Here’s mine.  You can just see the yellow-ness of the filling, as opposed to the savory darkness of theirs.

Anyhow, a noble pitching-in.  Reasonably tasty.

Criticism/Self-Criticism:

Follow the recipe the first time

Respect the proportions.

Osso Buco (again)

Had the yen to slow cook something on Saturday, and Debbie signed up to eat Osso Buco if I made it.

(It turns out that a lot of those slow-cooking things squeam her out.  Like oxtail stew, or even lamb shanks.  I was surprised.  I guess you can know someone for a long time and still find out things about them.)

Debbie loves Marcella Hazan, so I found this recipe for osso buco online.

Only thing is it calls for 2 hours cooking, and I wanted to put it in the slow cooker for like 6 hours.  After some dithering and fretting, I did just that.

It turned out fine.  The meat was tender and falling off the bone.  The marrow was satisfactory (and, because of squeam, I got Debbie’s marrow as well).

Criticism/Self-Criticism: I was afraid to brown the shanks too long and burn the pot/use up the oil.  You can’t brown stuff too long.

“Pharaoh's Magicians” and the Business Case Presentation

My last entry was about a character you run across in the business-case pitch setting: Dr. No.

“Pharaoh’s Magicians” are another beast in the menagerie.

Most of us know the story of the Exodus, where Moses led the Hebrew slaves to freedom in the Promised Land.  Great story.

But when Moses first pitched liberation to Pharaoh, he tried to impress Pharaoh with his technology.  He threw down his staff and his staff turned into a snake.

Pharaoh turned to his house magicians, and they said, “Oh, that’s nothing.  We can do that.  In fact we already have.”  And they threw down their staves, which also turned into snakes.

That’s the enemy: an in-house group who not only can do what you can, but have done it already or could do so in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

What Pharaoh in our business world wants to entrust a new project to an untested outsider when the in-house crew, whose warts, after all, one knows, says they can do the same thing?

That is the basic pitch of Pharaoh’s Magicians: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

Unfortunately, it might not be true.  The devil you know may well be worse than the devil you don’t, particularly if the situation calls for agility, nimbleness, or speed.  The in-house magic shop absorbs quite a bit of resources and has a long latency.  Just think of the application backlog in your IT organization.

The Bible tells us the proper response to Pharaoh’s Magicians: Moses’ snake ate the magicians’ snakes.

Best thing: a key benefit that the business organization needs which can only be delivered by your stuff.