Zipping up the Internet

Here’s the thing: I keep all my photos in Google’s Picasa. Picasa synchs and publishes to Blogger beautifully but I have been using Wordpress and had wanted to switch to Tumblr, which plays beautifully with Twitter, but not with Wordpress or Vox. I’m writing this on MacJournal, which publishes to Blogger and Wordpress easily, but not to Tumblr, Twitter, or Vox. And getting photos from Picasa to MacJournal is a lot harder than it ought to be. Not to mention the fact that I like to put all my photos on the web using Flickr which is just a pain in the ass to get photos to anyway.

I like to play music in Songbird, which, while not without flaws, has a number of features that I really like. Like publishing to Last.fm and Twitter. Doesn’t play as well with Blogger and Wordpress, however.

These days, I surf the internet in Flock - great with Blogger, not so great with Vox, Wordpress, and Tumblr. I’ve thought about switching to Chrome because it’s fast and small, but it doesn’t work very well with Diigo or StumbleUpon or Evernote. Evernote is great for keeping notes in, but not great for archiving and I prefer Yojimbo’s tag system anyway, with the result that half my notes are in Yojimbo, half in Evernote and none of them get to and from MacJournal, Picasa, or Songbird as easily as I like.

Let’s just not even mention trying to post to Facebook.

And this is all on a Mac, which makes the seams smaller, tighter, and more automated, and using Quicksilver, which strives to reduce the seams to nothingness. And does nothing to erase my frustration over knowing that there are several suites of software that work incredibly well together (Google, Mariner, BareBones) but also realizing that none of them play nearly as well with software from other companies as they do with their siblings.

So.

What the internet needs now is zippers. If you have several pieces of cloth, cut into squares, and with zippers on all side, the possible combinations you can make are endless. And easy. And fast. I want my software to work like those pieces of cloth. I want to choose the programs I want to use and know that they are going to synch and integrate my data with a minimum of fuss and hassle.

To be fair, people are working on it. The emergence of frameworks (like Adobe Air) and the increasing number of open APIs is helping, but there is still a lot of work to be done. So get to it, internets. Get me some zippers and let me put it all together in the way that best suits me.

Takoyaki, hold the tako.

Here's the thing: I really don't like takoyaki (octopus fritters) but my wife does. And, more importantly, she likes having everyone sit around the kitchen table, cooking them together. A while back, a friend of hers suggested that she substitute sausages for the octopus as an alternative. So she did and I ate them and they weren't bad. But it was when I added ketchup instead of takoyaki sauce that the dish really became something enjoyable for me. Many of my Japanese friends regard this as the vilest blasphemy, but I really don't care. It tastes better this way.

1 Tequila, 2 Tequila, 3 Tequila, Cake?

Here's the thing: My wife is a much, much better cook than I am. Seriously, she doesn't need tons of cookbooks or tips or people shouting at her from the t.v. But my family hasn't quite figured out what to do for her yet in terms of gifts. So she received this "Arizona Margarita Tequila-Lime Cake Mix" in her stocking this past X-mas.

Mix the dry ingredients with an egg, a little oil, some water, and yes, tequila and you're ready to make a cake. Yes, I used Patron. It may be criminal but it was the only tequila in the house and I'll be dammed if I'll buy a bottle of Cuervo just to make a cake.

It came out beautifully. While it cooled, we made a quick lime juice and sugar icing to drizzle over the top of it.

It was a seriously good cake. Much better than we had expected; the tequila and lime flavors were strong, but not over-powering and tasted good. We want more. Now.

Buttermilk & Beer Makes Good Biscuits

Here's the thing: I like biscuits. Always have, always will. But I'm a lousy, horrible, terrible, oh my god get him out of the kitchen, cook. However, as I got this bottle of "Buttermilk Biscuit Mix In a Bottle" as a Christmas present, I felt obligated to try it. After all, the bottle says all one need do is "just add beer" so it can't be that hard, right?

Actually, that's just about right. The hardest part was getting the mix out of the bottle and into the mixing bowl. In the end, it took a knife, repeated pounding, and, finally, a super-long cooking chopstick to get it all out.

Dump in one can of warm Kirin that had been sitting in the pantry for a while...

...stick the biscuits in the oven on high for a few minutes, and, voila, really good, tasty biscuits that even I could cook.

Here's the Thing...

Here's the thing: No matter how many times I've seen it, a picture taken sometime in the afternoon at Mission Beach in San Diego is a good thing.