ia play

Also on the Thinking Allowed ‘Hoodies’ episode that I mentioned a while back was a piece on city planning.The piece covers ‘the traditional and futuristic notions of what makes a good city’ and decisions that we now perceive to have been destructive but at the time were motivated by a desire to get rid of Victoriana, to build better roads etc.

It seems that one generation’s modernisation is often the next’s wanton destruction. The romanticism that my generation has for things from my grandparents time horrifies my parents. They see it as a retrograde attitude. They have none of the nostalgia for period properties & antique fittings, they merely associate them with the hardships and limitations of their childhoods (cold & drafty houses, filled with dark wood and laboursome devices). Their values are of the 60s, warm, clean, light modern houses, scandanavian furniture and labour-saving, electronic devices.

My mother-in-law was amused to see we have a manual coffee-grinder and politely inquired if we knew there were electric versions available. We got it partly because we’ve been looking at our electricity consumption and also trying to buy devices that last longer. I’ve been increasing shocked at how many electronic devices I end up chucking. But there’s also a kind of motivation that I call the From Scratch Diet i.e. you can eat as much as you like of anything that you make from scratch. Sod Atkins…bread can’t make you fat if you had to knead the bloody dough yourself. Not that coffee makes you fat but you get the idea.

Mum just thinks we’re on some weird puritanical kick.

It’s been a postively pastoral bank holiday weekend, in which I…

• skinned the bunny. Urgh. Not much choice about this as Pileswasp had killed it the day before and then broken his collarbone and two ribs, putting him out of bunny skinning action.
• made rabbit & leek pie. Our leeks and homepage pastry. Herculean effort but tasty.
• made bread. With old fashioned yeast rather than the speedy packet stuff. A faff but way more yeast smells in the house. And biscuits.
• made chicken of the woods pasta. Another picking up the baton for the injured husband. He brought the giant mushroom home from a pre-injury forage and it needed eating.
• harvested shed loads of herbs for cocktails and yoghurt sauce for burgers (lemon balm, borage, fennel, chives and mint, I think)
• made pork, leek & noodle hotpot. That’s the last of our leeks.

All gently satisfying in “I grew this/picked this” way. Or in a gruesomely satisfying way for the “I butchered this” bit.
Continued the pastoral theme with garden activities:

• potted on the morning glories, mina lobata and fuschias
• sowed late courgettes and pumpkins
• weeded lots (and then fed it all to the rabbits)
• moved some succulents around to try and defeat the blasted slugs

But it wasn’t all John Seymour. I did some 21st Century stuff too.

• wrote my FUMSI editorial for June
• started my latest OU course – Archaeology (going to be a challenge to get IA themes out of that one!). Admittedly the topic is a bit backward looking but the OU is all digital these days.
• wrote lots of blog posts
• started secret mission, inspired by big sis. More on that later…

Why so productive? Well three days feels like space to do stuff. And being around someone who is only really able to watch telly and surf the net made me really appreciate my ability to do practical stuff. And I guess the coffee was good.

Blatant conference-promoting-linkbait but there you go:

Women 4 times more likely than men to give passwords for chocolate

One of the 10 happiness principles put forward in Making Slough Happy was ‘plant something and nurture it’.

I’m halfway there this morning. I’ve planted basil, parsley, rocket, chard, lettuce, verbena and mina lobata. (Iain plants all the serious vegetables. I get the herbs and frivolous flowers)

Just got to get the nuturing bit right now.

Jared Spool, at the IA Summit, created human graphs of customer satisfaction with Starbucks, McDonalds, Microsoft & Apple.

I commented over lunch that I was a bit baffled at the extreme positive scores that Apple received. I mean I get the idea that Apple does some stuff very well. But the idea that there is nothing to complain about just doesn’t fit into my world view.

A fellow diner said “but surely as a user experience professional you should value ease-of-use”. Well actually this user values cheap, durable electronics with a long battery life. I’m trying to save for a farm, developing an Apple fetish would get in the way of that goal.

Now admittedly Macs are alot prettier than my PC. But I’m really not bothered by the Apple aesthetic. It is just too sleek. I want them to look like this.

As I got increasingly disaffected with newspapers I got to a stage when the main reason I bought weekend papers for the food section. No matter how predictable the news stories, infuriating the fashion pages and relentless new media bandwagoning (folksonomic zeitgeist anyone?) I always liked the recipes. But then I like recipes. At the time I also subscribed to a food magazine and bought cookbooks all the time.

It was an expensive way of getting something to eat. So these days I get cookbooks from the library and <a href=’http://www.swapshop.co.uk/default.aspx?referrerid=4c3b6e30-6031-4bde-bdc7-a57ae8f30baf’>swapshop.co.uk</a>

I’ve unsubscribed from the magazine until I’ve cooked all the recipes I’ve clipped from it (i.e never). And I’ve subscribed to loads of RSS feeds of recipes

The internet is a great thing for recipes. It’s also a terrible thing for recipes. There’s lots of noise… lots of dodgy recipes. Definitely a field where I welcome a bit of curatorship. It was always a bit frustrating that there were so many Ready, Steady, Cook recipes in the BBC recipe finder. I wanted great recipes not those ‘conjured’ up with whatever the contestant happened to bring.

The top food blogs are fine, sites like Nami-nami, Hooked on Heat, Zaiqa, What’s For Lunch Honey. These are the new curators. But my favourite source remains the weekend newspapers so I was very pleased with myself when I realised I could subscribe to food feeds from the newspapers.

I subscribed to the Guardian, Independent and Telegraph, all no problems. The Times doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed for the food section. And the Daily Mail, The Sun & The Mirror don’t seem to have recipes online.

For all the newspapers though there is a frustrating lack of information in the shortened feeds, making it hard to make a snap decision about which recipes to read. Which seems ill-thought out with recipes. I mean you could provide 95% of the article in the feed and a cook would still have to go to the site for the final 5% of the recipe. The bloggers win on this point.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

Oh, for (insert expletitve) sake.

Obsession and excess are bad for you. It doesn’t matter what the thing is. It could be carrots. Too many of them turns you orange. Ask Kim.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” – Cicero

But only because they eat whilst watching TV, apparently.

“Changes in energy intake, but not changes in physical activity, were differentially related to changes in the targeted sedentary behavior. Reducing television viewing could affect energy intake by minimizing cues to eat and by decreasing exposure to television advertising.”

A Randomized Trial of the Effects of Reducing Television Viewing and Computer Use on Body Mass Index in Young Children

I’ve just read John Naish’s Enough. It arrived on my desk at work with it’s dazzling tag-line “ever get the feeling that you’ve had enough?”. Rather apt timing.

At times Enough seemed like a greatest hits of the happiness & modernity movement, featuring Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow), Epicurus, Martin Seligman (Authentic Happiness), the jam experiment (also seen in Paradox of Choice), and Stephen Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You). I skipped quite a few bits as a result.

But I really liked the stuff about personal sabbaths. Mine seems to involved baking bread and sitting on top of the rabbit hutch.And it’s got a nice ending. I get very uppity if books don’t end well.