Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Easy Meatballs for Fun and Profit

    I made meatballs tonight. I made them once before and made way too big a deal out of them. They’re frightfully easy to make (shhh, don’t tell anyone), and will impress your spouse, date, friends, boss, or whoever you have to cook for. Here’s my quick and easy recipe that leaves lots and lots of room for substitutions, replacements and deletions. There are only a couple required elements: ground meat of some kind (sausage, ground beef, veal or turkey or some combination thereof), an egg, and some fairly dry shredded cheese (parmesan, dry mozzarella, etc).

    The Directions:

    1. In a mixing bowl, add one egg, garlic to taste (1/4 teaspoon to start), a healthy dash of pepper and two shakes of salt. Whisk until egg is scrambled, but good.

    2. Now, I have a food processor, and like throwing a little veggie matter in my meatballs. For example, tonight I took some mushroom pieces and half a vidalia onion and threw them in the food processor until they were in itty bitty chunks, and then added them to the bowl. I’ve tried green peppers, but their high water content kinda screwed up the consistency o’ de balls. Play around and see what you see. If you come up with something really good, let me know.

    3. Now, add about a pound of your ground meat to the bowl, along with a handful of your cheese (tonight it was the four-cheese Italian blend from the grocery store. Last time, I did a nice mix of freshly grated parmesan and pecorino. Fancy, boring, it’s up to you.

    4. Before you mix everything up (which is coming, don’t worry), throw a large skillet on the stove and turn the fire on somewhere between medium and medium high. Dump a couple tablespoons of olive oil in the pan and let it heat up (this isn’t an exact science… should be enough to put a thin coating on the bottom of the skillet).

    5. While the pan is heating up wash your hands, then go over to your bowl o’ stuff and dig in. Mix up everything so it’s of pretty even consistency throughout and everything’s mixed in nicely.

    6. Next, take your bowl of mess over to the stove. It’s time to make meatballs!! My meatballs usually end up about the size of ping-pong balls, but hey, your balls may be larger or smaller. It’s really up to you.

    7. Fill the skillet with your balls, and let them brown almost completely on the side you put them on. Be sure to flip them over a few times to get each side of your eventually slightly lop-sided pyramids cooked. It usually takes about 15 minutes (five minutes between flippings) to finish the whole pan.

    Meatballs freeze really well but we usually make just enough for one meal. After they’re cooked all the way through and we’ve sampled one or two, we dump in our favorite tomato-based sauce (Jen makes a great one), let it simmer while the pasta cooks and then fall into a meatball-induced stupor. For something so easy to make, they’re heavenly. If you’ve got any meatball-related suggestions, I’d love to hear ’em.

  • Another Confession… Big Brother

    It’s a day of confessions. Here’s confession number two. I love Big Brother. I haven’t watched Survivor since season 2. I don’t normally like network TV reality shows. There is just something about Big Brother that makes me watch. It’s so evil, and like the MTV series The Real World and Road Rules, is an interesting look into the collision of the private and public persona. I know I’m putting way too thought into this, but I can’t help it. It’s great fun watching people try to play each other.

    The losers are those people who aren’t honest with themselves. It doesn’t matter if they’re dishonest with other people. If they’re honest with themselves, they can handle the game and the pressure. If they can’t handle themselves, they lose.

    The other great morality lesson from these shows is gossip. Everything you say in these cramped quarters could come back to haunt you. Every catty thing you say behind someone’s back is overheard by someone else, and will eventually make it back. It’s funny to see that season after season, people get caught doing it, and are shocked when things they say come back to doom their chances of winning anything.

    It’s not too late to jump in! It’s only day three! Join in my guilty pleasure! It’s not bad, it’s just silly.

  • Harry Potter Gets Picked On

    I have an admission to make. I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I’ve read the four other books too. I enjoyed all of them. I am no ashamed. I’m a little by all the rancor over adults liking the books. They’re books. Yes, they’re written simply, but the story is a lot of fun, and the characters are very engaging. What’s wrong with enjoying that? Simple stories well told are nothing to be ashamed of enjoying. Why do you think people like Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz? There’s nothing terribly complex or hard to understand in either story, yet they’re considered classics.

    Now that I’m done defending my appreciation for the series… let’s talk about the latest one. It’s dark. It’s pretty depressing, especially for a “children’s book”. One of my favorite things about the books is that they’re written for the age group equivalent to Harry’s age in the book. The author did a great job capturing the failings of fifteen year-old boys perfectly. Harry was uncouth, akward and everything else boys are at that age – trying to be manly while still being childish, exploring their limits and rebelling against authority (although that’s been a theme throughout the series). As I was reading this one, I kept thinking to myself that Ms. Rowling should just leave the poor kid alone for a chapter. Let something good happen to him. This book is obviously the ominous third act in the series.

    I enjoyed it though. Even though I kind of got tired in the third quarter of the book with all the things that happened to Harry, I kept going because the pace of the writing demanded it. It was a great ride… and better written than most “thrillers in paperback” on the market. It’s nothing to be ashamed of if you liked the books. They’re good stories. I wish there were more good stories out there.

  • Style My RSS, Please

    I suggested this on the NetNewsWire bug report list, but it really doesn’t belong there. I was poking around the RSS 2.0 spec today and saw a weird little optional tag with <item> called <enclosure>. Enclosure takes length, type and url as arguments, and says it’s for “media” files. But, like the script tag, you can pass it any MIME type and url. Here’s where the lightening struck. Why not pass in a stylesheet? Just like you use <link> to pull in your external stylesheet, why not have an RSS feed stylesheet. Why? One of the big complaints about RSS Readers is that the post is displayed outside its intended context – the designed page it originated on. If we were able to pass in a stylesheet, we could style the properties of the objects in a post to make it look more like the original page. Wouldn’t that be cool?

    Now, Brent doesn’t think enclosure’s the right place to put it, but I really didn’t see anything else in 2.0, or in the infant Echo specs about style information. I think giving designers some control over how their content is display in an aggregator would go a long way to driving acceptance of using syndication as a method of distribution of content, and not just the notification tool a lot of sites offer today.

  • Beer Nuts and Genius

  • These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

    A few of my favorite things today:

    • jEdit: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you can’t afford BBEdit, use jEdit. It’s open source, has a ton of plug-ins, does a great job with all kinds of code (works really well with AOLserver’s ADP’s even), automatically closes HTML tags for you, can be trained and tweaked beyond all recognition and just plain works in every platform I’ve tried it on so far (RedHat 8, OS X, Windows XP). It supports anti-aliased text even, so I can edit in the sublime Lucida Grande and have it look mah-vel-ous.

    • TypePad: I love some of the new features (which I’m not going to tell you about, because I agreed not to), especially the mobile stuff. I may stick around after the beta just for that (and then find a way to include them on this site). The photo album design is very nice (and very configurable)

    • My Color Sidekick: I’ve had it for a little over a week now, and I love it. It’s easy to use. The controls and interface are very well designed and easy to master. The keystroke shortcuts are easy to pick up and remember, and the camera is just fun. AIM is very nice, and the e-mail’s solid (I love being able to get new comments on my site on my handheld). The auto-correction in typing is great (auto-capitalizes lone i’s, and fixes a lot of contractions so you don’t really need to shift or alt as much as I did on my old pager). The only problem so far is the vibration when muted isn’t very strong. With the case that came with it clipped to my belt, I can barely feel it. If I’m driving or watching a movie, I don’t even notice it.

    • AOLserver: So flexible. It really is the contortionist of webservers. Yes, Tcl’s a little weird and can be hard to pick up, but once you’ve got it, you can do pretty much anything with it. Give me AOLserver and PostreSQL, and I can build almost anything. That’s not braggin’ if it’s the truth, baby.

    • The Wire: This show gets better and better. It’s the best cop show since Homicide, and they’ve got the time and freedom to do the stories with the depth and power they could never do on network TV. If you have HBO and haven’t been watching it, don’t start. Wait until HBO replays the whole series later in the year (they always do it, so I’m assuming they’ll do it again). It’s too far along to try to catch up now.

    There are more, but being an instant internet celebrity keeps me really busy. For those of you who are new here – that was a joke.

  • Why Do It?

    Why do it? Why tell the world about a new product your company is launching? It’s a perfectly reasonable question I’ve been asking myself since Thursday night. Over 450 people came by just yesterday (on top of the almost two hundred on Friday, and over a hundred on Thursday in the three hours between 9 and midnight. Today, it’s 2:30, and it’s close to 300).

    So, why do it? What’s in it for me? Other than the awe of watching the traffic and trackbacks roll in, not much. Maybe some more people start coming to my humble little blog, or subscribe to my RSS feeds. And maybe after this blows over I drop back down to my perfectly comfortable and managable 70 – 80 unique visitors a day (as measured by SiteMeter), maybe lower. Does it really matter? Nope, not really. I’ll still be here posting my nonsensical prose and photos. I’ll still be here thinking the same thoughts I thought before.

    You know why I think I did it? I never get to talk about work here. I work on a lot of stuff that’s confidential, yet I think is interesting, and I would love to talk about. For example, I worked on several big deals at AOL from a technical perspective. Of course, I couldn’t tell anyone about them, and only accidentally let one of them slip to my wife (that was a funny moment – “Dear, I didn’t say that, really.” “You didn’t say what?” “Oh, nevermind, just don’t say ‘google’ to anyone you know.”). Most people I talk to outside of my little group at work have no idea what it means to build search products, or the complexities that happen behind the scenes that bring you your results. So, I never talk about it. I definitely can’t talk about it here. You see, I like my job and would like to keep it.

    Having the chance to meet the folks in New York, and then the double bonus of being able to share that experience here – it was something I couldn’t pass up. Although I didn’t write a line of code for the Journals product, I sat in a lot of meetings early on explaining blogging, trying to communicate that the post is the unit of measurement in the blogging world, and then trying to help figure out the best way to search posts – how do you weight things? What’s more important, the title or body? Should we weight by recency? It was the most fun I’ve had in a work meeting. I got to expound on two things I love – blogging and search (yeah, I’m weird, freely admitted, thanks). Now that I’ve played with the product, after being out of the loop while I got back to urgent search things, I see that people actually listened to me and now some of those things I suggested will be out there for AOL members to use and you all to see.

    I’m a little worried about the ethics of promoting a company product in my personal space. It’s not that I don’t think the product is good. I do. It’s not that I feel cheap or used in doing it. Honestly, it was my idea. There’s something gnawing in the back of my head. Now that I’ve done it once, how do I go back to what I did before? I know none of you care about this, but this is the first time I’ve done this, and wrestling with it in my own puny human brain is giving me a headache, on top of this rash of hayfever. You know, these judgements would be really easy if I was self-employed. I could talk about whatever I wanted and only ever have to answer to myself. These “to post or not to post” self-conversations are no fun.

    So, there you go, hopefully that explains it somewhat (more for me than for you, but hey, you’ve already read this far…). Don’t expect this to turn into As the Triangle Turns. Unless I go to any more demos, I probably won’t mention AOL Journals again, and then, I’ll probably just talk about the people I met, since I’ve already talked about the product. Oh, and it’s really weird to see my crap quoted on other blogs. Weirds me out, let me tell you.

  • Super Secret Agent Revealed!

    I went to New York City today. I’m back home now, almost twelve hours after I left. It’s been a long day. As long as it’s been, it’s been a lot of fun. The top secret meeting is now something I can talk about. I went to New York with the AOL Journals team to talk about the new AOL Journals product with some influential folks in the blogging world. Who? Well, I’ll tell you: Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, Nick Denton, Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky. I was amazed that Gait invited me to come along with them. I didn’t work on the Journals product. I helped with a lot of the concept stuff, explaining to people who have never blogged or really knew about blogging, what it was all about and providing a “real blogger’s” perpective on the whole thing. I hope I didn’t lead them astray.

    Let’s start at the beginning though… I woke up too early, at 5:30 for an 8:45 flight. I got to the airport at 7, expecting a long wait at security. There were three people in the line when I got there. I pulled into the parking garage at Dulles airport at 6:50 and was at my gate at 7:05. I had a lot of time to kill, as you’ll see in the pictures. Gait, Andrea and El Jefe made it to the airport with much less time to spare. Oh yeah, characters. I worked with Gait a long (four years) time ago on the first version of AOL Search. Andrea the product manager for the Journals thing, and El Jefe is Gait and Andrea’s boss (but he’s not the boss o’ me!!). We made it to New York, with an hour till the meeting. We made it into the building with about ten minutes before the demo was supposed to start. I gallantly got my laptop setup, hooked up to the TV, connected to the VPN, logged in and ready to go, and… we were in the wrong building. Yeah, all the people with stacks of books and puzzled looks on their faces should have clued us in, but… hey, we were in a hurry. So, a run across the street and around the block and we made it only a couple minutes late. I, in record time, got the demo back up and running and we were off.

    The meeting… it was way too much fun. Why are influential bloggers influential? They have ideas, and aren’t shy about expressing them. They had all kinds of suggestions, all kinds of comments, and overall, I think the consensus is that AOL Journals is headed in the right direction. Now, let me explain something. AOL Journals is different. No one thinks of blogging as a new “space” to conquer. Most of the people involved in the project realize that AOL’s coming into an established meta-community who are wary of any large corporate involvement in their space. I think we did a good job of explaining to the folks there, and explaining to people at AOL, that we’re here with a great measure of humility (I know, it’s rare for AOL, but it’s true). We’re trying to play nice with the larger blogging community by supporting open standards like RSS feeds for blogs. We’re trying to talk to folks in the community to see where we should work with them. It’s unique in my involvement in AOL products, which is a great step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.

    When the product does come out later this year, bear in mind that it’s a 1.0, there are other new features on the way, and it’s built for the AOL user in mind. That said, I’m not one who shies away from speaking my mind. There are some really cool features in the product at launch. RSS support will be in 1.0, along with a bunch of other stuff that I’m not going to tell you about. Ok, I’ll tell you one… you can send an IM to a bot and have it post to your blog with rich text support and other cool stuff (like add titles, etc). That really blew a couple people away, even though I know bloggerbot kind of did the same thing in a limited (as I remember, flakey). How cool is that?

    It was a great trip. I hope Jefe, Andrea and Gait take me along on their next trip (I vote for Sedona, or Alaska. I’m sure there are influential Alaskan bloggers, aren’t there?).

  • Top Secret Super Agent

    I can only run on anger for so long. Being angry wears me out. I’m going to listen to True Dreams of Wichita and Screenwriter’s Blues before I go get my hair cut at 6:30 at night after an eleven hour day at work. Why am I getting my hair cut? I’m going on my first real business trip tomorrow. It’s a short trip, leaving Dulles at 8:45am and leaving LaGuardia at 4:30pm. I don’t expect to even have time to get a NY street pretzel or an authentic piece of NY Pizza. I’ll hopefully be able to tell you all about it after it’s over. And if I can’t, you’re welcome to guess.

    Did you know it’s 5am and you are listening to Los Angeles?

  • Mary Chen is Cooler Than Me

    Mary Chen is cool. She is cooler than you, cooler than me and probably anyone you know. I only met her once or twice while she worked here. A mutual friend tipped me off to her old blog, and I was hooked. She’s funny. She’s funnier than most. How do I know she’s cooler than you or me and funny to? She said, “Yo, I didn’t just stimulate the economy, i stuck a butt plug in it.” The prosecution rests, your honor.