Categories
Food

A great little omelet pan

The Calphalon Commercial 10" Griddle / Crepe Pan

Calphalon 10″ Nonstick Crepe Pan

Our five-year-old Cuisinart non-stick pan finally started getting all peely and nasty, so it was time for a new pan. I like having a non-stick pan around for eggish things, omelets especially, so the hunt began. I read a few reviews in Cooks Illustrated and Alton Brown’s Gear For Your Kitchen, and both said the same basic thing: non-stick pans wear out, so there’s no reason to buy an expensive one.

CI really liked a certain model that’s apparently not made any more, but they also like some of the Calphalon stuff. With Calphalon in the middle of a new product launch, a good bit of their old fancy stuff is now available rather inexpensively, especially the old Commerical line. The Commercial line is really nice anodized aluminum with a wonderful non-stick coating and the pans carry a lifetime warranty so when the coating eventually flakes off, I can just send it back (to Ann Arbor no less!) and get a new one. We got ours last week and I’m loving it so far. If anything, it could be a touch bigger to make it a bit more general purpose, but for omelets, it’s just right.

Categories
Computers Food

Taking a Moment

I’ve been spending the last few nights reading Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef. I’ve enjoyed it immensely; I’d always wondered what it was like inside that campus after driving past it so many times in our weekend adventures northward from Tarrytown. Mandy and I never got the chance to eat at any of their restaurants while we lived downstate, but now we’re hopefully planning a trip south to sample the cuisine. Ruhlman is a pleasure to read and does a fantastic job conveying the passion and pressure of going through the Culinary’s course load. If you’re into cooking at all or want to know more about what it’s like to be inside the Culinary Institute of America (our other CIA), I heartily recommend the book.

Last night, as I was nearing the end of the book, I came across a scene that I’ve been replaying in my head all day. When you’re cooking in a professional kitchen, things move very fast and you have to come into it prepared and once there you have to be incredibly efficient to stay on top of all the orders coming in. When you get behind or overwhelmed, it’s called being “in the weeds.” While working at American Bounty, the premier restaurant at the Culinary and the last stop for the students before graduation, Ruhlman is working the grill station and another student is lost in the weeds. He’s getting behind and his station is getting messier and messier, enough so that the head chef asks him repeatedly to clean up his station. After a few such reminders, the instructor finally stops the student and tells him how he likes to get out of the weeds.

He takes a moment. He wipes down his station, getting it perfectly clean. He arranges everything he needs back into order, and this little restoration of order helps him clean up his mind as well. When you’re in the weeds, it’s as much a mental problem as it is a physical one. To perform quickly and efficiently, you have to be focused. The mess clouds your focus and that lack of clarity shows up in the final result.

This reminded me a lot of programming under a tight deadline. In the rush to get everything done and out the door, you tend to get messy. You don’t write tests, you don’t verify that code changes work in all the browsers, you check code in without actually compiling it first, and eventually the whole thing disintegrates. In your effort to go faster, you get sloppy and you end up slowing down.

So, a reminder to myself. When things get hairy, take a moment and clean everything up. You’ll probably get done sooner as a result.

Categories
Design

Exploring Colors

Gettysburg

A huge part of design is picking colors. One thing I’ve never been particularly good at is choosing a color palette. Thankfully, there are sites out there that do nothing but catalog and explore color palettes, and I thought I’d share my two favorites.

The first is Kuler from Adobe. It’s a Flash-based application that lets you build, share, search for and browse color palettes, all submitted by other users. It also has some really fun features, like pulling a color palette from a photo on Flickr (my favorite photo sharing site) and easy export into the various Adobe design apps, like Photoshop and Illustrator. The color palette at the top of this post is the highest ranked from the last 30 days.

My other favorite is a site and blog called Colour Lovers. The blog is fantastic and a great way to broaden your exposure to palettes and get a sense for where these things come from. It’s in my list of daily reads on Bloglines and I highly recommend following it if you’re interested in color (or colour).

Categories
Etc

A Fresh New Look

If you’re seeing this in a feed reader, come on by the site and check out the new look. I went for a simple, easy to maintain look with minimal graphics for a fairly speedy page load. I also pulled out a few things that were slowing down the site: a plugin that was inadvertently pulling in the YUI library, some supposedly fancy Amazon script that showed previews of products when you hovered over their links, and biggest of all, Google’s Adsense. I’m still pulling in Google Analytics, but it’s the last thing on the page and shouldn’t affect load times too much. I wanted something simple and clean and easy to read, and I think I’ve got that.

I also spent a fair bit of time trying to get the typography right. Fancy, no?. I really enjoy The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web and I wanted to try my hand at working within their framework. For example, the asides follow the sidenotes section. Getting the vertical rhythm right was more challenging than I expected, especially with photos and other non-text elements that are inherently pixel-sized. I was trying to get everything working on a em-based grid at first, but eventually caved in and ended up with a 50 by 50 pixel grid on which to base the layout. There’s always more things to learn…

This was my first WordPress theme from scratch and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to develop. I’m tracking WordPress’ SVN and the theme using Git. That too has been a fun learning experience; I’m getting much more comfortable with git, git-svn, and git-submodule as a result. If anyone is interested, I can write up a bit on how the whole development process fits together. In the meantime, here’s the code for the theme and my WordPress mirror with that theme as a submodule.

Git really scratches an itch I’ve had for a while with SCM systems. I started out with zip files, then Visual Source Safe, then CVS and Perforce, then Subversion. I liked Perforce quite a bit, especially the branch and merge support, and Subversion works just fine, but the branching and merging support in Git is just phenomenal. I’ve built up a little library of reading material on Git if you’re interesting in learning more; I’d start with Git from the bottom up by John Wiegley.

Going forward, I’d like to extend the blog a bit and add some features using Dojo. It only seems appropriate. Maybe Ajaxy inline-comment loading? Real-time search? Fancy graphs? We’ll see.

As always, feedback is welcome and the comments are open.

Categories
Etc

Update on the Obese Tax

My insurance & doctor story is finally coming to a close. After further investigation and a couple calls to the office and my insurance provider, it looks like my only real option is to pay the bill and move on.

The gist is that the visit was billed as a 99204 / 278.00, which is a medical office visit (in this case for new patient establishment) with a diagnosis of obese, which is excluded by my insurance contract. Future visits would be billed as physicals and would be covered, though I’m not sure what I want do at this point. It’s a bit of a rock and hard place, as if I want to move to another provider, I’ve got to go through another new establishment visit and possibly another diagnosis of obese and a rejected claim, so…

The office did give me a 25% discount on the bill, which helps a bit, but this whole thing just upsets me. This is the latest in a long line of headaches with health insurance since Jack was born, it’s no wonder to me that everything has gotten so expensive. The amount of red tape and confusion I’ve had to break through just to get to the bottom of a couple hundred dollar claim is mind-boggling.