The coldest winter I ever spent
Reuben Margolin is a Bay Area kinetic artist. He designed and built Nebula with the help of many people including my friend Michael Prados, who is a licensed mechanical engineer. Here is the first of a 4 part video on the design and construction of this beautiful and huge kinetic sculpture.
Where will Real Bread in 10 Minutes be taught? Click me!
I’ll be doing a brief 30 minute version of my “Real Bread in 10 Minutes” class at Maker Faire on both Saturday and Sunday!
Find me at the Maker Square Demo Tent (located in the Homegrown Village, West Lot)
Saturday, noon to 12:30pm
Sunday, noon to 12:30pm
Real Bread in 10 Minutes Lee Sonko
Making bread is easier, faster and more flexible than you thought. You can make fantastic bread every day inexpensively with less than 10 minutes effort, including cleanup! Lee will talk about and demonstrate techniques minimizing the ordinary and maximize the extraordinary parts of making bread at home. We’ll talk about: instant yeast vs sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb, shaping, amendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit!
Real Bread in 10 Minutes on the Calendar
See My Maker Profile
Last night I taught my “Real Bread in 10 Minutes” class at the Institute of Urban Homesteading. It went splendidly. At the beginning, not one of the 9 students felt comfortable baking bread. At the end Ruby, the owner of the school asked, “Do you think you can bake bread now?” There was a rousing, smiling “YES!” from every student!
If you use WPBook to push your WordPress posts to Facebook, this is for you.
I followed these instructions and it worked in no time.
But just to be brief, here is what I did:
I added the following text to the functions.php file of my WordPress theme:
add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );
set_post_thumbnail_size( 50, 50 ); // 50 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall, box resize mode
Then, whenever I upload an image, there is a little button next to the “Insert Post” button that is labelled “Use as featured image”. I click that on the image I want to show as the thumbnail in Facebook.
:-)
It would be nice if it just automatically selected the first image in the post as the Featured Image, but it doesn’t. I have to do it manually. If I forget, it uses an image from the sidebar of my post. :-(
There are no limits to what you can accomplish when you are supposed to be doing something else.
– Words to live by – stolen from Someecards.com when I should have been working on something else.
I wrote and sent this off today:
Mystic Pizza Food Company
PO Box 427
Mystic CT 06355
Dear Pizzapeople,
Fantasy
I bought a Mystic Pizza 3 Pack Mediterranean Style from Costco in San Francisco on about May 1st, 2011. It reads “Best if used by Dec 24 11 12:40”
I wanted to enjoy your pizza, but I’m sad to say it was very disappointing.
The directions say to bake for 10-12 minutes at 450. Clearly a pie this thick won’t be done in 10 minutes. We were further surprised that the pie still wasn’t cooked through after 24 minutes. After all that time, the bottom still wasn’t brown or crisp, and the center of the pie was still gummy and underdone. My oven is well calibrated, it was cooked on the middle rack with no cookie sheet under it.
Reality
The toppings were spread very poorly. The comments from my roommate say it well, “The vegetables are all lumped in a frozen pile in the middle. Who wants lumps of soggy spinach on their pizza?” One slice had a pile of peppers, another slice had a pile of olives that should have been chopped more. None of the toppings were mixed in with the pizza, they sat on top in great heaps. My roommate and I differed about the feta cheese; she enjoyed it but I thought it tasted and had the mouth feel of cream cheese, which does not belong on a pizza.
Maybe it was just the poor toppings, but after a few bites, I wanted to go out and buy some real pizza to wash the taste out of my mouth.
Keep trying!
Lee Sonko
San Francisco, CA 94110
Here’s my current go-to list of finding fun activities in the Bay Area.
To keep up with the kids, I’ve been pushing my blog to my facebook page. WPBook worked well for a while. Then Facebook updated their something or another and WPBook didn’t work anymore. NetworkedBlogs works well, but everything gets syndicated through their site. For example, if you look at one of my Facebook posts, it’ll say, “Click here to link to my site” and it’ll actually be a shortlink to my site via NetworkedBlogs.
Well, I got WPBook working again, so… well, that is all.
