Dyepot, Teapot

Wednesday I attended the inaugural Portland Lunch 2.0. Jake Kuramoto had the idea to try this locally, and AboutUs hosted. I really enjoy how each new event seems to bring out a slightly different group of people, which got me wondering: why don’t we have more daytime events? Obviously, most people have to work, but usually we get some kind of lunch break, and it seems easier than evenings for people with kids.

Coincidently enough, earlier in the week I had an interesting conversation with Jeff Schwaber about the function that Friday symposiums serve for academic communities, and how something like that might work for our local user groups. Linux groups have traditionally been the one place people working with different open source technologies all come together, but these days we’re as likely to be using Macs, and the LUG just isn’t our starting point anymore. So what about some kind of brown bag lunch symposium? User groups could take turns presenting their best talks from past meetings, and we’d all learn something.

Another type of daytime event I’m interested in are the Jelly-style rotating coworking meetups. I’d love to spend half a day every couple of weeks working from the same space with other local geeks. It would not be a bad thing for me to get out of my apartment while it’s light out.

Portland has a lot of cool things going on right now, and I’m eager for even more. But we shouldn’t wait for a good idea to import from San Francisco or Seattle. This is a place with it’s own unique characteristics, and most of the time no one worries about whether we’re as cool as Location X. In the tech sphere we can fall into that trap because there’s just so much noise coming from other geek hubs. Ask “what would help me get my work done or meet interesting people or have more fun?”—that’s the important part.

I’m a little obsessed with yeast and bacteria right now. They’re responsible for tangy butters, bread, yogurt, cheeses, and all sorts of other delectable foods. I’m a little disappointed at how much of the info about this on the web is just a cut & paste repeat from one site to the next, so here’s my attempt to add a little more usefulness.

Butter: I’ve been doing cultured butter from the directions at The Traveler’s Lunchbox for a couple of months. If you have any kind of electric mixer, it’s not much work, and the result is rich and yellow. Commercial butter seems anemic in comparison.

Bread: I had a sourdough starter in college, one I did from scratch in my own kitchen. The bread it made was tasty, but very dense. I forget what happened to it, maybe died from neglect? I’m trying again, this time using buttermilk along with flour and water to give it a kick-start. I found recipes for this online, but nothing else along the lines of “I tried the recipe and [stuff] happened.” I’ll try to remember to report back later in the week, when I see if it’ll properly leaven bread. If it doesn’t work, maybe I’ll try a potato water version. Or I could ask around for a batch of starter, but it seems more fun to make my own.

Cheese: I really like paneer and other fresh cheeses, so with all the buttermilk I have on hand I’ve been making batches of my own. You take milk (I do a half gallon) and a glop of buttermilk (I don’t measure—probably 1/3 to 1/2 cup) and heat the mixture until it curdles. It’s a little slower than vinegar cheeses, and creates a softer curd. This is delicious mixed with jam in crepes, or with pasta. I wonder if I could inoculate it with blue cheese mold… that might be an upcoming experiment too.

Yogurt: I can’t walk into a Lebanese restaurant without ordering the labneh, aka yogurt cheese. It’s one of the best foods ever. It’s also really easy to make as long as you have real yogurt (milk + ‘active cultures’, with no sugar, gelatin, flavorings, or other crud). Put a coffee filter in a funnel, dump the yogurt in, and let it drain overnight in the fridge. Next I’m going to try making my own yogurt from scratch. What I really want to experiment with, though, is different regional yogurt cultures. Like with sourdough, yogurt-making bacterias exist in a variety of different sub-strains, with various effects on the yogurt’s taste and texture. Sourdoughs International provides a wide range of cultures for breadmaking, but I haven’t found the yogurt equivalent.

You could get really worked up about food safety with these kinds of experiments, but if you’re using pasteurized milk, clean dishes and utensils, etc. and not letting goop sit around without your friendly bacteria in there working, it’s pretty reliable. Use smell, taste, and texture to keep an eye on what’s happening. Healthy cultures are tangy and bubbly.

We’ve set a date for the next Portland BarCamp. It’ll be held May 2-4 at CubeSpace. If you’d like to participate or help, check the link above or contact Dawn Foster or myself.

Corvallis is staging their own as well. BeaverBarCamp will be on March 1st, at Oregon State. Topic ideas from their wiki include rockets, kinetic sculpture, and a tour of the OSU Open Source Labs.

I’ve been meaning to write about my personal technology toolkit for a few weeks. Reading about executive dashboards at Jive reminded me again.

My main goals are to be able to connect with people, keep track of what friends and colleagues are up to, and spot emerging patterns in my areas of interest as they’re happening.

Component A: Google Reader

Recently I reorganized my feeds to be sorted by XFN tags, plus a few other categories. I stretched the definitions a bit.

• “Neighbor” is anyone in the Portland metro area.
• “Colleague” refers to anyone working on something I consider related to my own professional interests, whether they’re technically in the same field or not.
• “Contact” includes feeds from my contacts on Flickr, Ma.gnolia, and del.icio.us.
• “Muse” is any blog not in one of those categories that I’m excited or inspired to see. It creates some interesting emergent behaviors.

I can tell when my mom posts because suddenly I have new items under “parent”, “neighbor”, “met”. It creates an interesting subconscious motivation to read the posts by the people I have the most connection with first, because the game of using a feed reader is to make the numbers (unread post counts) all move toward zero, and what does that faster than reading items that are counted in more than one category?

I also have a few tags that have nothing to do with my relationship with the feeds’ writers.

• “News” encompasses both traditional news sources, and the blogs of companies whose services I use.
• “Fun” is my daily comics, plus a couple of low-volume sites like The Food Whore.
• “Research” is for search feeds on my name, projects I’m working on, and other things where I want to know if there’s new mentions somewhere.
• “Bucket” is the category for everything else. I’m interested enough to subscribe, but not enough that it’s in another category. I skim it when I’m bored or procrastinating (which are often the same thing).

This is already pretty long, so I’ll save the other pieces for other posts.

I’m reading Everyware, by Adam Greenfield, and finding it perfect timing with the discussion of Google’s new social graph API (see Marshall K.’s summary if you need a primer).

This is Thesis 35 in Everyware: “Everyware surfaces and makes explicit information that has always been latent in our lives, and this will frequently be incommensurate with social or psychological comfort.” Sounds like a pretty good description of the current conversation. It might be okay to expose that information. It might not. Maybe it’s inevitable. Regardless, if the decision is made solely by technologists, other people lose.

This isn’t information that people know they’re creating, like posting a picture or emailing someone. Google is mapping the network of connections between people, created as they go about other tasks. And it’s information that we consider very personal. I already feel awkward if someone adds me as their friend on Facebook and I don’t want to add them back.

I’m increasingly aware of the privilege I experience because I know how to write software. I understand how the tech works. I’m also in a position where nothing Google could expose would irreparably harm my career or personal life. I am not typical.

One of the things we’re trying to do with Calagator is to create software for and by people. Not developers. Maybe not even technologists. How can we know whether our project will meet the needs of the community it intends to serve, without inviting everyone to participate in its development? I want to see the social graph movement take this on as well. Open the conversation and explain what’s at stake.