We had a vegetarian friend coming over for dinner, so I had to quickly throw some stuff together. This is a variation of a Salsa Verde. If I was making it again (and not catering for a vegetarian), I would probably include the more traditional ingredient of a few anchovies.
Bag of new/baby potatoes (6 potatoes per person)
Jar of Pickled Gherkins (3 gherkins or so)
Handful of Parsley
Jar of capers (a small handful of capers)
Zest & Juice of 1 Lemon
Salt & Pepper
Olive oil
Red wine vinegar
Preparation:
Bring a pot of salted water to the boil.
Cut the new potatoes into reasonably small chunks, about the thickness of your thumb, put them into the water.
Chop the parsley really fine
Chop the gherkins really fine
Put the parsley, gherkins and lemon into a bowl and mash them (use a pestle and mortar or even food processor if you want)
Pour in a good dash of red wine vinegar
Pour in enough olive oil to make the paste runny but still thick
When the potatoes are cooked, drain most of the water (leaving a little bit in there to be soaked up). Keep the potatoes in the pot with the leftover water.
Pour in the paste and shake the pot, making the potatoes slightly fluffy at the edges. This helps the potatoes collect and absorb the sauce.
Since moving apartment, I’ve had to change my route to work. Now, I walk down the road beside the Guinness Brewery - Watling Street, which takes me onto Thomas Street.
In a city full of foul-smelling streets, I would like to nominate Watling Street as the foulest. Imagine the smell of a pub at closing time. That smell of spilled beer starting to congeal and sour. Now imagine that condensed to the point where it causes you to gag. And throw in some sewage gas for good measure. That’s what Watling Street smells like.
It’s so bad that I’m considering changing my route to work - going five minutes out of the way just to avoid going down this street. I just can’t put up with the flash headaches and nausea caused by that awful smell.
Or am I wrong? Could there possibly be a worse-smelling street?
Koyaanisqatsi is the most amazing movie I’ve ever seen, a perfect marriage of visuals and sound. It’s single-handedly responsible for the Philip Glass wing of my CD collection
I crossed a humped bridge and came into an abandoned carnival which was being dismantled. As I wandered around checking everything out, I came across a second-hand book stall and sitting there, selling books by some guy called Eugene Stanford1 (who looked remarkably like Jerry Garcia) was Steve Jobs.
I was overwhelmed, and shook his hand enthusiastically. He was polite and chatted for a bit. I decided to press a little further, beyond the normal smalltalk of a starstruck fan.
‘“How did you do it, Steve? You were 20 when you started Apple. You were in the prime of your life, and you were devoting 18 hours a day to your dream. How did you maintain that focus? How did you maintain relationships with those around you?2 I mean… I’m spending my time worrying about shelves and varnishing and things like that. I’m not pursuing any of my dreams. I haven’t accomplished anything. How did you do it?”
of course, having read The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, I know that he didn’t really manage to maintain relationships with those around him during the start of Apple ↩︎
There’s an old saying in software development that says that “Every application expands to the point where it can read mail” - even if the software started as a way to get away from reading mail.
When it was first introduced by Merlin Mann, the Hipster PDA was a bit of an anomoly. Its analog, low-tech approach to task management and organisation was something unexpected and interesting. It ditched all of the fancy padding we put around our personal productivity and stripped it right down to the bare minimum. Perhaps that’s why it caught on so well.
For the uninitiated, the Hipster PDA is simply a stack of 3"x5" index cards held together with a binder clip which functions as a notebook, to-do list, calendar, shopping list, whatever you need. Breathtakingly simple.
Over at a million monkeys typing, Douglas Johnson has released a “Hipster PDA edition” of his popular “DIY Planner” pages. In this, he includes
GTD quick reference card
Covey Planning quick reference card
calendar of the next two years
few month planner cards
weekly planner card
a few “day keeper” card
“GTD all-in-one” card
next actions/agendas/waiting for
a shopping list
a “finances” list
and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Now, maybe I’m completely missing the point (and let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be the first time), but this is looking more like my packed, hardback diary/planner than the Hipster PDA as Merlin originally described it. It has, in effect, returned a lot of the padding that the Hipster PDA took away. It has, in effect, expanded to be able to read mail.
I’m not trying to say that the DIY Planner isn’t a good idea, because it most certainly is. All of its blank lines and empty tickboxes made me shiver with excitement at being able to fill them in. But it lacks the beautiful simplicity of the Hipster PDA – the very thing that, for me, made the Hipster PDA unique.
“I imagine someone told the writers that they needed to give us some of Boone, God’s Friggin’ Gift to Humanity’s backstory, so they used a random number generator to determine the moment in the show where’d they’d throw that information in.”
johnke.me