Braised Beef Ribs with Wine à la awesome

I think I just outdid myself.  Tonight’s meal was a reward for a difficult week.  The butcher twisted my rubber arm into buying some gorgeous beef ribs.  They were cut Flaken-style and were the size of my head so it was pretty hard to resist.

After browning the ribs I sweated off some traditional aromatics (celery, carrots, onion and garlic).  The braising liquid was composed of some beef stock, red wine and a can of diced tomatoes.  I added some paprika, thyme, oregano and bay leaves as well.

After a couple of hours the meat was falling apart so out it came.  I strained out the solids and thickened up the liquid with a splash of balsamic vinegar.  Absolutely incredible.  Unfortunately, in my food lust I neglected to take a picture.  I’m not going to lie, I’ll be thinking about this meal for a long time.

To top it all off, I decided to open up arguably the best bottle of wine I’ve had in years – Dry Creek Vineyards 2000 cabernet sauvignon.  Apparently holding on to a wine for 10 years leads to awesomeness.

Anyhow, another great meal in the bag.  I really do love seasonal cooking.

Thoughts on being an Engaged Citizen

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to be one of 240 attendees at ChangeCampTO.  The intent of the conference was to bring creative people together to create a grassroots movement to improve citizen engagement.  The event attracted an incredible diversity of people from seemingly all walks of life.

As Mark Kuznicki commented in his opening remarks, the recent explosion of social networking tools and touchpoints is unprecedented.  Our ability to converse and connect with each other has taken a leap not seen since the invention of the printing press.  The collective objective of the people in the conference was to find a way to use these tools to transform civic apathy into action.

The deliverable from the conference was meant to be a “ChangeCamp-in-a-Box” – basically a recipe book that anyone could use to begin the conversations around civic engagement in their community.  The ideas for these recipes were segmented around issues of time and space (same time/same place, different time/same place, etc).

My group was tasked with devising a mechanism for getting people together and engaged in the same time and same place.  Despite the fact that this is the most “traditional” of meeting styles and that a lively discussion ensued we still struggled to decide what our kit would contain.  How do you get people to the meeting?  Do you want to attract everyone or a discrete group?  What do you do with everyone once they’re there?  How do you measure progress?

I’ll save the substance of our idea for another post.  The issue I was left thinking about was that while our idea was interesting I’m not clear on how it can be translated into action.  Am I really going to run around my community engaging my neighbours in a discourse about the upcoming municipal election?  Perhaps I should – but somehow that approach doesn’t sit well with me.  My dislike of “going it alone” is what drove me to go to ChangeCamp in the first place.

So the central issue that ChangeCamp then highlights is: how do you tap into the energy of all the creative people that were assembled and enable them to succeed?  I think it’s unfair to leave the burden of answering this question solely on Kuznicki’s shoulders.  Why should he be responsible for working out the next step?  If we claim to be engaged then that’s how we should act – not simply wait on the sidelines for someone else to have a good idea.  Nevertheless, the challenge remains to maintain and grow some of the cohesiveness that was found at yesterday’s conference.  I, for one, am looking forward to the challenge.

Quick Bite at Madras Pantry

Thought I’d go check out the new hot spot near Trinity Bellwoods on my way home from softball last week.  Having never even conceived of eating a dosa in burrito-form I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect.

The space itself has a warm, informal and welcoming feel to it.  Beyond the food there are sales of a variety Indian spices, foods and products (even, amazingly, Neem toothpaste).  The communal table welcomes groups of friends to have a seat and socialize while eating.  Unfortunately, we were in the mood for ordering and leaving which was the main reason for wanting to try the dosa-to-go.

We picked up a butter chicken and a masala dosa.  The masala dosa was the better of the two with a great balance of savoury potatoes and crisp watercress.  The slightly bitter, toothsome feel of the dosa itself provided great context and mouthfeel for the whole dish.

The butter chicken dosa, while reasonable, tasted a bit out of kilter.  The butter chicken seemed to create a slightly bitter forenote that was extenuated by the dosa throwing off the overall flavour balance.  Again, the textures and combination of the watercress worked very well but the butter chicken seemed to be lacking, well, butter.

Either way, a return visit is definitely warranted.  Next time, perhaps, it will be the jerk chicken.  The szechuan beef seems like a bit of a reach for me but only time will tell.  When you’re in the mood for food to go and you happen to be in West Queen West, Madras Pantry certainly is worth giving a whirl.

Writing Software for the Keyboard

Over at Punished by Rewards, Pete’s thrown out some ideas on how to improve the Remember the Milk web user interface.  Actually, maybe it’s not so much how to improve it as it is complaints about how it is currently designed.

Either way it is interesting to see how one’s personal preferences around the use of software in general colour one’s opinions about how software is designed in particular.  I don’t pretend to know what the RTM design team is thinking but one thing that is relatively clear to me is that they’ve designed the website to be manipulated using the keyboard, not the mouse.  This is a particularly interesting design choice given that web design typically favours mouse-based navigation and interaction.  Also, for people who use OSX regularly (which basically treats the keyboard as an optional accessory) it is easy to see why the mental model of RTM does not suit their typical usage patterns.

That being said, does this mean that RTM is designed with a particular set of users in mind?  Again, without being privy to the design decisions of the development team it’s hard to say conclusively.  What I have noticed is that the RTM user experience does seem to be geared towards the power user.  Using the Windows metaphor as a guide, we see that novice users begin with the mouse and progress increasingly to shortcut keys and keyboard interactions as their familiarity and speed increases with experience.  The concept here is that the hand movement from keyboard to mouse is an expensive operation and with experience can be avoided to make for a more efficient sequence of use.

The design of RTM asserts that, since text has to be typed for the substance of the task, the UI should attempt to keep the user at the keyboard for as much of the experience as possible.  This can be a huge irritant for new users but incredibly efficient for power users.  It’s hard to say if this is the right or wrong decision since it really boils down to usage.  But as Pete has said before “good software is opinionated”.  The design team at RTM has made a decision about who their target market is and (since I feel I’m part of that group) it really does work well for them (us?).

On the other hand, there are some odd/poor choices in the way the UI provides feedback to the user.  What is that arrow on the first task of each list?  If multi-edit mode is not enabled, why allow the user to select multiple tasks?  Why is task sorting exclusively by priority and date? Why are there no keyboard shortcuts to move tasks from one list to another?

It is tough to write truly useful, inclusive software.  I would be hard pressed to hold up RTM as a shining example of a universally appealing success.  Nevertheless, for my usage scenarios, it does what I need it to do brilliantly.  Like all good software, it lets me do what I want (manage my tasks) and gets out of the way.