| Flavor tripping! |
[Aug. 5th, 2008|08:24 am] |
Flavor tripping!
After waiting in a line with a palpable buzz, we were handed little purple packets with a telling bulge in the middle. The six of us who'd managed to find each other found a table in the slightly-too-hip club and popped the Miracle Berry. It was about the size of an olive, with a pit in the middle (do berries have pits? maybe this was a misnomer, then), a smooth texture on the outside which gave way to a slightly mushy, blueberry-like goop that tasted weird, sour-ish, but not repulsive. We diligently chewed and swished for about two minutes, spit it out once it turned nasty, and made our way to the food table.
Lemons? Shockingly delicious. Limes? Pretty good. Grapefruit? Like the best you ever tasted. Buttermilk, balsamic? No longer sour, but still not that great. Olives, pickles? Not very different. Oysters? Hard to tell. But they were really good oysters.
For the record, the food table was about the least sanitary thing I've seen in a public venue. They didn't give out plates, so everyone was just chomping down right at the table, grabbing at what-all with their lemon-slobber-covered hands. Oh well.
As for drinks, Guinness tasted emasculated but refreshing, while Corona tasted like a scrumptious, beer-flavored bitch beer. Gin and tonic was disgusting (more like gin with sugar water -- remember, the berry kills your bitter sense), margarita scrumptious, wine not very good.
The best part was Tabasco and worcestershire sauces. They're both very complex flavors that are overpowered by their vinegar nature. With your sour senses dulled, the cavalcade of flavors comes through. It was when I was holding a bottle of Lea & Perrins that the Eyewitness News guy found me and asked a bunch of questions (although my two seconds of fame have me talking about goat cheese being like ice cream).
It all sounds fun, and for sure it was, but I have to admit that the flavor warp wasn't as intense as I'd hoped; several times we kept doubting whether it was working, although another taste of lemon restored our faith. I wish they'd had some prepared foods — tacos, sushi, what have you — in addition to the individual flavors. And, as you could imagine, we all got pretty sour stomachs after chomping down on all that acidic food.
The net net: a fun experience, worth trying, but not a complete life-changer. |
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| Cookies for building a Facebook app! |
[Jul. 9th, 2008|02:29 pm] |
I've got a simple idea for a Facebook app, and I'll bake a batch of cookies for whoever builds it.
This app will analyze all my friends' phone numbers and tell me which ones spell interesting things (à la Phonespell.org). Of course, it's relatively easy to see what will match dictionary words; the harder part is telling me what's interesting :)
That's it! Any takers? |
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| $1000 reward for referring my replacement |
[Jun. 30th, 2008|06:23 pm] |
Let's align your incentives with mine: if you refer a qualified admin candidate to me, and he/she gets hired and takes my role, I will pay you a $1000 bounty.
Parsing the language above:
Refer. You or the candidate should send their resume to jessef(at)google(dot)com. If the candidate emails me directly, they should mention your name.
Qualified. For my role, we are looking for someone with at least two years' experience, preferably as an admin, but we'll also consider a background in sales, advertising, or some other fast-paced, frequently shifting environment. The role is based at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. Further general details on the job description (but ignore the 4 years requirement).
Takes my role. To qualify for the bounty, the candidate must take the position I'm leaving behind, so that after a short transition period I can move on to my next role as an Associate Product Marketing Manager. If the candidate takes another position, whether as an admin (perhaps a role where experience is less of an issue) or otherwise, I'll still be grateful and take you out to a pretty nice dinner or the long-distance equivalent.
$1000 bounty. Cash, check, or in-kind goods or services, whatever you prefer. Why $1000? That's roughly what my referral bonus becomes after taxes and whatnot.
Further questions? Leave a comment or contact me directly as appropriate.
Thanks in advance for your help. I hope you don't find this little contest to be crass; it's just that it's so hard to find the right candidate, and I have substantial financial and personal interest in transitioning to my new role sooner rather than later, so I'm willing to try something new! |
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| Now comes the hard part |
[Jun. 9th, 2008|06:43 pm] |
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The offer letter in my hand makes it official: I'm going to be an Associate Product Marketing Manager at Google, just as soon as I find my replacement. Let me know if you or someone you know wants to be a admin for a diverse, international team in a thrilling department at the headquarters of best large workplace in the world! |
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| Burn it! |
[May. 30th, 2008|04:46 pm] |
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What's more wasteful than Chrysler's "$2.99 gas" campaign? A billboard-truck rolling down Mission advertising it! COME ON. |
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| Ice cream |
[May. 29th, 2008|08:11 pm] |
When I bought a Kitchenaid ice cream attachment from Fry's with the gift card Deep gave me months ago, I was had more than half resigned it to a fate of living in a dark corner of a cupboard along with the metaphorical electric knives of the kitchen world. A failed first attempt at making ice cream, wherein I dumped cut strawberries into a French vanilla batter way too early and ended up with frozen strawberries and soupy custard, made a sad fate even more likely.
But hark! We have pushed on, and oh, the rewards. I gathered the gumption to make a triple chocolate ice cream straight out of the pamphlet that came with the unit: I figured that in the worst case, super-rich chocolate soup wouldn't be so bad. But man, it worked! Unsweetened and semisweet baker's chocolate, cocoa powder, and Scharffenberger bittersweet chunks, in concert with Straus cream and half-and-half, created something way on the right side of awesome.
John's new gal Monica lent us an ice cream cookbook, and our horizons are further expanded. We first tried chartreuese ice cream, with whole milk and crema mexicana; it's got a nice, light texture, not too sweet, and tastes subtlely of that crazy herbal liqueur. (A bit too subtle, perhaps.) Right now John's waiting on the cherries he stewed with brandy, sugar, and lemon juice to cool as he sets up some cheesecloth to strain some yogurt. If you're in the neighborhood the next few days, you just might want to to stop by and try the best froyo this side of FloMo. |
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| Even fiercer urgency |
[Feb. 7th, 2008|01:11 pm] |
While it was a bit of a bummer hanging out in the grand ballroom of the Fairmont and seeing the projection of Hillary's victory in California splayed across a huge screen, I'm coming out of Tuesday with a ton of inspiration, a huge pile of laundry, and $50 less in my bank account.
Even before David Plouffe asked us to give a little more money to counter Hill and Bill's $5M loan to their campaign, I knew we were on our way, and by mid-morning we hit $7.5M after polls closed on Tuesday. Money's sure helpful in running a campaign and getting out the message, but even more valuable to me is the injection of energy and enthusiasm that tens of thousands of people giving even a little bit to a cause they believe it. The most inspirational thing I've read today is a comment on a politico.com article: "I'm a college student with virtually no money to spare. I didn't go out last weekend but instead donated $15 to Obama. These are the ones that matter the most."
Much as I'd like to go on to other states and share my energy and experience, my work misses me and there's a lot I've been neglecting here. However, anyone, anywhere can help in the next battleground states -- you can log in to our network from home and make calls to targeted voters in upcoming states. If anyone would like a login, please leave a comment or send me a note privately. Every state, every delegate matters. |
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| The Fierce Urgency of Now |
[Jan. 27th, 2008|10:44 am] |
Work has held its share of challenges and opportunities. Most importantly, I'm nervously thrilled about my "apprenticeship" to the mobile user experience design team. Over the next few months I'll be beefing up my graphics and interaction design skills while working on a design project from conception through research, prototyping, testing, iteration, and delivery. It's pretty crazy how I've ended up down this path: my good buddy Charles at work likes the way I think and has been grooming me as an ideas-man; add the ability to draw some shapes and flows, and if everything goes well, I'll be having a hand in some Google products you'll be using in the future. Wow!
Even more exciting, at the moment, has been my involvement with the Obama campaign. As the Mission district's team leader, I'm shepherding a group of precinct captains, Latino community leaders, and volunteers of widely differing levels of commitment and talent to identifying voters, persuading the undecideds, and making sure that our neighborhood votes in nine days.
Yesterday, the state campaign set the goal of making a record-setting 100,000 phone calls; in San Francisco we set the goal of making 10,000 calls with 40 people each in four three-hour shifts. We ended up with about double that number of volunteers, with a couple hundred people contributing toward over 15,000 calls to independent voters (many of whom don't know that they can vote in the Democratic primary in California), and also making the long and poorly ventilated office very warm and stuffy. So many moments from the day were inspiring: every ring of the bell when another supporter was identified, the guy who walked in off the street declaring that he'd switched from Edwards yesterday and wanted to become an Obama precinct captain today, the precinct captains who said, "I'm done calling my own list, who else can I help?," the private citizen who spent $500 of his own money to print signs for distribution (the campaign's done a poor job of distributing materials, to say the least). Of course, the best moment was watching Barack's victory speech from South Carolina with two of the highest-ups in the SF for Obama organization flanking me, and then listening to Congressman George Miller, DA Kamala Harris, and the former president of Chicago NOW (who until three weeks ago was a Hillary supporter) all give poignant speeches about the importance of the work that we as volunteers are doing.
It's been thrilling to work with such a dedicated, friendly, generous group of people -- in the nearly two months now that I've been working with the campaign, I've felt time and again that our grassroots organization is creating exactly the sort of civicmindedness that Obama is hoping to inspire in America as President. This is my first political activity, and possibly my only, but right now I'm so glad to be working to elect the best strongly viable candidate I've ever seen in one of the most thrilling elections in our country's history. |
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| Horn Please |
[Dec. 28th, 2007|07:34 pm] |
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Of course there's a ton to observe about India, but what immediately rushes to mind when thinking of this five-thousand year old civilization is the traffic. It's madness out there: traffic lights provide little more than a suggestion of who should stop and go, it's not uncommon to see a goat hauling a refrigerator the wrong way on a divided multi-lane highway, and it seems to be the only instruction of driving school that all unoccupied space on the road must be filled up immediately. The auto-rickshaws (similar to the tuk-tuks of Thailand, in other words, a passenger lawnmower) and many commercial vehicles have hand-painted recommendations to fellow drivers: "Horn Please" and "Keep Distance" seem to be the favorite -- I can affirm from three days of first-hand experience in Delhi that of those two requests, the first is very dutifully followed and the second blissfully ignored.
Modern Delhi is pretty damn ugly. Ramshackle goat stables in the median of a busy road, piles of gravel spilling two lanes into the street in front of abandoned construction projects, and skyscrapers so ugly they make Soviet apartment blocks look like objets d'art. The latter we took in from a revolving restaurant on the 25th floor in the heart of New Delhi, atop one of the worst sinners in this category -- unfortunately, the beautiful temples, forts, and tombs were all a bit too far to be distinctly visible through the smog. To that end, the old monuments here make quite the contrast. The Red Fort, the old mosque, Humayam's Tomb: so much beautiful, well-proportioned, stately architecture that's somehow survived the ravages of time but had little to no influence on the architecture of today.
I'm pleased to report that our stomachs are holding up like champs. We've eased into non-cooked cuisine slowly, starting yesterday with some irresistable deep-fried spinach leaves that were coated in the most delicious yogurt I've ever imagined. Today we munched on a raw cucumber. Tomorrow, who knows what culinary adventure awaits! In any event, the food here has been wonderful so far: the richness of the flavor, the subtlety of spices are just at a different level.
Gotta run to dinner, but I will make a last note about having a big dollar sign on my forehead. It's sure nice to be able to afford anything you can want, and in some ways, like having a dedicated driver for the whole day, it's a shocking luxury. On the other hand, at a bathroom in a hotel today, a man squirted soap into my hands and then had a cloth towel at the ready. Worse, in Connaught Circle yesterday, in the heart of New Delhi, a few dozen people came up to us within the space of about an hour asking where we were from and if we knew where we were going, obviously trying to lead us to some shop or taxi or hotel. I'm just not sure if I'm comfortable with obsequious service -- I'm more than mindful of India's colonial history -- but I guess I'd rather toss a bit of change at a guy who stands in a broom closet in the gents' restroom than swat away touts. Ah, travel.
Tomorrow: Taj Mahal, then onto Jaipur, where we've got to figure out what to do for New Years. |
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| Backing up LJ |
[Dec. 21st, 2007|05:47 pm] |
This month marks my 48th as an LJer, and god bless it for sticking around virtually unchanged for all these years. Now I'd like to go about figuring out how to preserve this chronicling of my life, should something happen to LJ unexpectedly. I was starting to go through and save each page, but then I realized that wouldn't capture the comments.
Does anyone know how I'd go about preserving the entirety of cataplum.livejournal.com? Since it would need to include the locked portions, I think I'd have to run this thing off of my own computer. Thanks in advance for the suggetions! |
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