Opinionated

At our first Ignite Cincinnati I talked about my journey from bread-machine pizza dough neophyte to confused yeast chemistry padawan to mastery of the simplest way you can possibly manage to get great bread and pizza on the table.

I can only show you the path, you must walk the path…

Others with more time and baking authority on their hands have actually done a great job of explaining the main technique I use.  I am going to point you to them as the place you should start.  Firstly Mark Bittman, food writer extraordinaire for the NY Times was the first to really put “no-knead” bread on the map.  He has a great article on it.  So start with the simplest version.

This has evolved since then.

Water is important, and I’m sorry I neglected to mention this.  You need to use great tasting water, so if your tap water isn’t great tasting to you, use filtered.  I just use the cold water straight out of the filter built into my fridge, consistent taste and temperature, no surprises.

While I was searching for extra images (11pm the night before) I was momentarily surprised to find someone has a book out with almost the exact title I originally used for my topic.  I haven’t had a chance to look at it but the premise is sound and their journey probably similar, with the benefit of having put a bunch of time into to to put a book out.  So check it out.

The King Arthur Flour company is a bakers best friend, whether you are making serious bread, pseudo bread or cookies and muffins.  Check out these recipes and blog entries that fall into this school of breadmaking.

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/no-knead-crusty-white-bread-recipe
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2009/12/01/the-crunchiest-crackliest-chewiest-lightest-easiest-bread-youll-ever-bake/

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/the-almost-no-knead-baguette-recipe
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2009/08/06/baguettes-redux-an-easy-almost-no-knead-recipe-for-the-kneading-challenged/

Enjoy, and if you get happy results please share back to the IgniteCincinnati crowd!

At this point we have almost 200 people ticketed, not a bad start for Ignite in Cincinnati! 

We have a lot of creative, investment, cultural and tech events in the city, but none that try to combine all these crowds and get some drinks in them.  Your mission tonight: Have fun and get some creative juices flowing, and mix with new people and see what happens.

Note that we’ve lost a couple speakers due to uncontrollable events, like Google getting hacked by China.  We have room for a couple last minute speakers and a challenge for anyone with the guts to give it a try: Powerpoint Karaoke.  We have a number of decks that are essentially random hipster, biz, and cultural references and text, even slides from real presentations.  You get up without knowing what will come up and freestyle.

Many of the cool ideas that have been brought everyday use by the computer industry over the last several decades were first contemplated at Xerox Parc. In particular many of the ideas that led directly to the Mac. One of the visions at Parc involved computing devices existing in three formats; tabs, pads and boards. (Think pda/phone, light tablet computers, and compute servers built into building with large interactive wall-mounted displays).

The ways we use computing do seem to be evolving in this direction.  It seems like everyone I know carries a Tab (iPhone, Pre, Blackberry, Android), and we’re starting to see the promise of blackboards with Surface and wall-mounted analogs.

We are likely to receive a bastard hybrid of a tab and a pad from Apple some time soon.  Certainly the rumor mill/slash pent up desire is all clamoring for such a thing; basically a jumbo iPhone/iTouch (duct-tape three iTouches together to get a sense).  It will be another good step in the right direction.  Still too heavy and a little small, and the battery life will suck, but everything else may be what we need.

Continue reading Xerox PARC, Apple, and Dead Newspapers

Aaron Patzer was in Cincinnati to speak to the GCVA earlier this year, and since then he sold his startup Mint for $170m. I thought his presentation to GCVA was excellent and he gives a nice outline of his real life experiences with costs at various stages here:

Juice Pitcher Aaron Patzer

Everyone seems to have noticed over the past few months just how twisted some of the decisions Apple is making are.  They chose a faulty carrier for the US market so they could line their pockets with kickbacks on the monthly fees, they rejected the Google Voice app, the Apple legal team seems to want to make jailbreaking your phone an act of terrorism, they held up information about single-payer healthcare,

But if you only ever learn one thing about interpreting human behavior it should be this: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

The idea that Macs were somehow immune to malware because of superior engineering never held any water.  (It was observed that they were not as interesting of a target because of their lower percentage of the population.  Though really my gut tells me it was because people who tend to write malware tend not to be people who own Macs and therefore had nothing to develop Mac malware on.)  Apple isn’t a superior engineering company, it is a superior marketing company. And down that road lies trouble.

Large companies are by their nature schizophrenic.  Being made up of many autonomous parts they will make contradictory and hypocritical decisions (a major benefit of startups is the lack of vested interests and turf to protect).  At the very least the competing forces of protecting the market share they have while knowing (in smart companies anyway) that they need to constantly re-invent themselves to keep someone else from stealing their lunch causes problems.

Take the app store for example.  Brilliant.  Stupid.  Evil.  Brilliant because it creates a tightly controlled way to get apps onto the precious device.  In theory this protects apple from the bad PR of a rogue app that starts crashing phones, as Microsoft took grief for years over ‘blue screen of death’ crashes that were caused by device drivers they had nothing to do with.  Stupid because over time it has become too much of a good thing, we had a wave of pioneers who hit big, followed by a wave of fortune-seekers.  That was all fine but now we’re entering the settled phase and in this phase innovation has to come back into the picture or the app store and the iPhone will stagnate.  Evil because Apple wants to own all the choice territory and so they will make decisions to keep out apps that people really want because they impinge on their prime real estate.

Aside from decisions made to protect turf, I think we are seeing signs of the impending divorce between Apple and Google.  This is going to be messy.  The most visible aspect of Google on the iPhone is of course the maps app, and Apple has recently taken steps that could lead to their own app.

But the root cause of any perception of evil is due to secrecy.  The reasons for deep secrecy around Apple products are to protect its magical image.  If we had visibility into more at Apple there wouldn’t be nearly as much excitement around launches, it would be much harder for them to keep the high level of quality they do manage to achieve because it would make killing not-fully-baked devices harder (just imagine the suck if Apple shipped hardware the way it ships software, shudder).  Perhaps most importantly the press wouldn’t work themselves up into a lather over every tiny scrap of rumor they come across, unfounded or not. 

This secrecy comes at a cost, people assume dark motives are hidden by dark rooms.  We can’t see the stupid, so we assume brilliant but twisted motives.  And paranoia creeps in.  There was a lot of noise generated by someone posting pictures of their job offer from apple, evenly divided between “whoa cool!” and “dude you’re going to be fired for posting that.”  One gets the sense working at apple is like serving in a really hip dictatorship.  Kim Jong Il with a marketing budget.

Apple may have already lost the PR battle for awhile.  Public opinion tides turn in ways that seem to seldom be based on objective reality. App authors will certainly be exploring building apps for Android and the newly freed WebOS platform. And I suspect Microsoft has something very sexy in store for WinMoble 7 (native Silverlight 4.0 apps on a dual-core arm processor anyone?).

Eventually Apple will figure out as Microsoft did that open is better.  They’ll get smarter about what they keep secret.  They’ll realize that adopting an interoperable stance works out better for them in the long run.  Let’s hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took Microsoft to adapt.

I made the switch to using gmail through a web browser exclusively almost five years ago, and I’ve never looked back.  For a brief period of time I was forced to use Outlook for calendaring only at a company that was still tied to Exchange, and I resented it every time I had to open it.  Since it became available I’ve also been using Google Apps for my family domain and multiple company domains.  If you are in a startup there is no reason for you to be stuck with legacy technology and self-hosted email.  You can be up in running in under an hour.  So if you aren’t already using it here is a list of just a few reasons why you need to be;

1. You shouldn’t be spending money on anything that you don’t absolutely have to.  That includes email hosting! Are you generating your own electricity?  Writing your own development tools?  And yes, it is still free for most purposes.  The page tries to hide that fact now by emphasizing a big button for the paid version, but what you want is the standard version which is free for up to 200 (!) users.  (If you have email to move see my note below.)

2. You shouldn’t be spending any time on anything that isn’t core to your business either!  Unless your business is running mail servers (and if it is, sorry brother your days are numbered) you have no business being busy administering a mail server, and your IT folk should be working on things that add value to your customers.

3. Hosting of email from places that throw it in with your web site hosting typically sucks.  It is awkward to administer, web mail if they have it is inferior, and the spam filtering? Forget about it.

4. Move to Google, say bye to spam.  I went from nearly a thousand a day to a dozen a week.  And that’s with multiple publicly available email addresses pointing to me.  I’ll take it.

5. Recent improvements make it much simpler to manage multiple email addresses from a single login.  After many years they finally got rid of the darned “on behalf of” headers that used to show up for Outlook users.

6. Dump Outlook.  For reasons known only to the Office team Outlook continues to be a huge resource pig.  Lots of threads, lots of memory, mysterious CPU load.  Offload all that to a server and get back the resources better used for development tools, design tools, etc.

7. Stop the interrupt driven day.  In case you didn’t get the memo: you can’t multi-task.  Getting little pop-up messages when an email arrived was cool, about 10 years ago.  Today it is a disaster.  Turn off notifications of email arrival on your desktop, turn them off on your phone.  Only check mail at fixed intervals.  No wonder you aren’t getting anything done!

8. Don’t be tied to one computer.  Or worse, don’t be trying to keep multiple copies of Outlook or any other email/calendar client in synch.  Don’t ever hook your phone up to synch.  With your mail and your calendar ‘in the cloud’ life is greatly simplified.  Suddenly every computer in the world that is connected to the internet is a place you could potentially handle email.

9. The best back-end for mail and calendaring for your mobile phone.  Period.  If you use a phone that supports sync properly (just get an iPhone already) new calendar items appear on your phone or in the cloud within seconds of being created from the phone or in the browser.

10. Multiple calendars will save your sanity.  Create calendars that are shared between team members (or between family members!).  I have my calendar, my wife’s, shared company events, shared family events and ‘info’ (notes about people being on vacation etc.).  I can see everything that is going on at a glance and avoid schedule conflicts.

Note: If you have lots of email archived that you want to upload to have access for searches you should go for it.  There are multiple ways to accomplish this depending upon where you are moving from.  Local client tools will enable you to upload from a local store (like your old Outlook files).  If you have a mail server that you are migrating from you can suck all this email across for free; the feature needed to accomplish this is only available to paid domain accounts, but you can get a free one-month trial.  The transfer will take a day.  You do the math.

Have you made the switch?  Happy?  If you haven’t what is holding you back?

If your web site makes use of any of the more popular javascript libraries, including jQuery, that are used for AJAX operations you may be able to benefit from a new free service. 

This new service from Microsoft makes use of their thousands of geographically distributed servers.  By pointing to their servers instead of yours for these script inclusions you benefit twice; your pages load faster because the ‘weight’ of that download is shifted onto a server that is likely faster and closer to the viewer, and you get to skip that amount of bandwidth being incurred.

Depending upon the speed and location of your server and the visitor, the improvement can be quite noticeable.

Read more and see code snippets at http://www.asp.net/ajax/cdn/

Elizabeth Edwards and Noel Gauthier did a live interview on Cincinnati’s channel 9.  Noel was at the In One Weekend event a couple weeks ago and I really enjoyed his being there.  Elizabeth is the driving force between IOW and Cincinnati Innovates.  If Noel wins you’ll know why .