From Mashable.com: Are We Too Obsessed With Facebook? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Sure, everyone is impressed by IBM’s Watson computer on Jeopardy, but what about the Heinz Automato 4!

I highly recommend this Pesto Vinaigrette recipe from Canadian Living. I used it with beef brochettes tonight, but really you can use it with lots and lots of things. For this recipe, from my Canadian Living’s Best Barbecue book,  you will need:

• 1 lb / 500 g of sirloin steak (although any cut that does not requiring simmering will do)
• 1 red onion (or regular or spanish, though red grills up nicely)
• 2 peppers (e.g. 1 red and 1 green)
• 1 small eggplant
• 12 mushroom caps
• olive oil
• and of course the pesto vinaigrette

1. Now with the steak and the vegetables you are going to make your brochettes. Cut the beef into cubes and then cut the vegetables so they are roughly the same size.
2. Thread the meat and veggies on skewers, alternating them any way you like.
3. Brush the brochettes with some oil and let sit for 30 minutes outside your fridge. You don’t have to, but the result will be better if you do.
4. In the meantime, fire up your grill to a high heat.
5. After the 30 minutes is up, brush the vinaigrette over the brochettes and grill them for 12 to 14 minutes until the beef is medium rare and the veggies are tender crisp.
6. All the while you are grilling them, brush more vinaigrette over them to intensify the  flavour and prevent them from drying out.
7. Take them off the grill, let them stand for 5 minutes until a foil covered plate, then salt and pepper them and serve.

So that’s the recipe. You don’t have to use steak: all kinds of meat will work with this. Perhaps even salmon or a full flavoured, steak-like fish. Or veggie only would be great too. Likewise, if you don’t like eggplant, replace it with zucchini or more mushrooms, etc. Try to pick something that grills well with those other vegetables. Or if you live for steak, add more steak.

If you can get fresh basil, then you are in business. However, it is not always easy to get in winter. In a pinch, you can fall back on dried basil and you will still get that basil flavour. (If after you make it with the dried basil, you find it isn’t strong enough, slowly add more dried basil to taste.)

I boiled some fingerling potatoes while this was going and drained them when they had softened but weren’t mushy, roughly 10 minutes or so. (Test them with a fork to see they are done). I had some left over vinaigrette which I mixed into some mayo, then I tossed the pesto-mayo combo with the potatoes and some bite sized pieces of romaine lettuce  bef0re serving them on them side. Other waxy potatoes, chunks of tomato (not too wet), cooked green beans, cooked peas, are also vegetables that would work. You could also have rice or couscous or a side salad, too and stir some of the pesto in to your taste. Or remove the pieces from the skewers and serve in a warm pita. Likewise you could chop up some lettuce and wrap everything in a warmed tortilla.

This dish has alot of flavour. The recipe is called provencal beef brochettes, so a good sturdy and rustic red like a Côtes du Rhône or Côtes du Rhône Villages would work well, as would a Côtes de Provence. I’m a big fan of wines from the Minervois appellation and I think that would also work. Canadian winemakers use alot of baco noir, and I think that would be great. Chianti or sangiovese or any hearty Italian red would hit the spot, as would rich reds from warm climates like Spain, Southern California or Australia. Beer and steak also are a great match, and “red” beers I think would go well with this, as would any beer with some bite. Finally, a great sparkling water or an acidic cola would be a refreshing drink for those who prefer not to have alcohol.

If you are lucky and you have some vinaigrette left, you could also toss them with recently cooked pasta to make a tasty pasta salad. Even better, if you have some leftover veggies and steak, add that to it.

There are lots of great BBQ sauces and salsas to add to grilled food. This pesto vinaigrette is a nice break from all that, and the short amount of time it takes to make — it took me around 5 minutes — is very much worth it.

P.S. Make sure you add 3 (or 4 or 5!) cloves of garlic to this. It makes a big difference. Same for the tsp of salt.
P.S.S. You don’t need a food processor: I used an old blender and it worked great. And if you are good with chopping and don’t mind it chunky, you could get by with just a knife and a bowl to blend it in.
P.S.S.S. If you are going with steak, sirloin is a good choice. It is relatively not too expensive, and the pesto will overwhelm better cuts. Save the better cuts for a simple preparation (e.g. a light dusting of pepper and salt at the end, or perhaps a flavoured butter).

Whenever I stare at the snow falling past my window at night, I think of this deceptively powerful finale scene from John Huston’s The Dead, adapted from James Joyce. I say deceptive, because when the film came out, some critics faintly criticized Huston for lifting the words directly from Joyce for the final voiceover. But I think this was brilliant on the part of Huston. The words are a masterpiece, of course, but by having the voiceover, Huston is able to assemble a brilliant montage of impressionistic scenes of snowfall at night. The voiceover allows him to escape the narrative and weave together beautiful imagery that melds beautiully with the words. It is masterful in its own right.

See for yourself.

Can be see here, located by a  Forgotten Sign in Times Square at the great blog Scouting NY. How bad is it? Well, this is a hint:

But you need to read the post to get a sense of just how bad it is. Cheap, but bad.

Can be found here: So you want to be a chef? Do your homework (ArtsLife – TheChronicleHerald.ca)

A group of Obama supporters in the UK was recently monitoring Sarah Palin’s Facebook page and observed some Inexplicable Edits.
It is interesting to see it in action. Keep in mind these are Obama supporters, but still, assuming this is true, it seems that there is alot of active monitoring of her page.

I came across this in twitter: Maternity Confinement in China « Jenny Zhu. It’s fasscinating what women who just had a baby have to do for the first month after delivery: no going out, no showers, no hair washing or teeth brushing. And more! Read the article on this 2000 year old tradition.

Read this:Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior – WSJ.com. And then read this: George Orwell: Such, Such Were The Joys. You might be inclined to agree with the first approach to teaching and disagree with the second. (I disagree with both.)

Both of them make me think of Wilde’s quote about cynics: “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” People who have these educational approaches know all about the costs/benefits of education, but not the value of it, it seems.

Can be found in this well written article in the Washington Post: Five myths about why the South seceded.

The myths are:

1. The South seceded over states’ rights.
2. Secession was about tariffs and taxes.
3. Most white Southerners didn’t own slaves, so they wouldn’t secede for slavery.
4. Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.
5. The South couldn’t have made it long as a slave society.

Some of them are well documented (#1), but others are true but debatable (#5). The article provides the details.

In this blog post, Still Life Without Man – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan, there is a quote mentioned

Robert Musil said that “all still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!” This is precisely right, as I think Eric’s photo demonstrates it

(Eric is Eric Mencher, the artist who photographed this still life.)

I would argue that it is pastoral work and not still life work are “paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation”. Man/people are all over still life paintings and art works. Look at the work above. The main objects are handmade. You can imagine who lives there. Indeed, as you look at many still life paintings, there is always the shadow of the artist over them in the arrangement and selection of objects in the still life. While with pastoral paintings, even if there is someone embedded in the image, it is less about them and more about what surrounds them.

Not only is technology rapidly changing, it is rapidly dying too. Witness modern day French students trying to figure out technologies from the 1980s! They do well with some things, but the 8 track stumps them!

Via my IBM colleague Eric Andersen (eric_andersen) on Twitter.  If you only want to follow a few people on twitter, Eric should be one of those people. I learn alot from his twitter feed each and every day.

There is a great documentary here on the photographer and blogger, Scott Shumann, who is responsible for one of the best blogs on the Internet: The Sartorialist.

I had the pleasure of meeting him in Toronto recently when he was here promoting his book that featured work from his blog. He was very gracious and stayed for along time to meet and be photographed with everyone who came out to meet him, including me (one of the last ones). For anyone who appreciates photography or fashion or social media, I highly recommend his book and his blog.

You can find his blog here: The Sartorialist. And you can find his book on Amazon here: The Sartorialist (9780143116370): Scott Schuman.

(Found via Kottke.org)

From the superb YouTube Channel: thealternateside907.

Check out that channel: there’s dozens of great live performances from a wide variety of bands.

John Cassidy has two (and likely more to follow) posts on this deal. First there’s this one: Facebook-Goldman: Where Is the S.E.C.?
and this one Facebook-Goldman: The Plot Thickens.

Both are worth reading.

As the WSJ says, you Decide: Goldman’s Facebook Pitch or Nigerian Email ‘Opportunity’?

From the article:

As a first step to drum up investor interest in Facebook stock, Goldman Sachs shot missives to clients with the opaque subject line, “Private Investment,” according to an email reviewed by Deal Journal. We couldn’t help compare it to another solicitation for money, from an anonymous Nigerian who assures you of a giant payout if you help him get back to his home country.

Of course, unlike Nigerian email scams, the solicitation came from a Goldman money manager rather than a random stranger. … But we couldn’t help note some similar language used by Goldman and purported Nigerian princes. Read and compare!

Exactly! Go to the WSJ blog post and compare the spam with the Goldman letter. The WSJ is not exaggerating when it says they are similar.

I think this latest play by Goldman is a good idea for them and a bad idea for everyone else. I also think they are testing the waters with the SEC. If the SEC gives them a pass on this, they will likely set up many private/unregulated IPOs like this, the next bubble will occur, and eventually we will have any financial meltdown similar like we just had.

BlogTO has a great set of photo essays showing some of the visual history of Toronto. I liked this one of Toronto of the 1890s. I was amazed by this photo:

University Avenue, now lined with large buildings and hospitals, is lined with trees back then.

Here’s the view from the other end of the Avenue:

Amazing.

Go to BlogTO and at the bottom of that post you can get the photo essays by decade.

Why? Because you will get alot more out of the Internet if you do, as Seth Godin very well explains in his post: In defense of RSS. If you are looking for a feed to test it out on, may I recommend my own? It’s http://smartPeopleIKnow.wordpress.com/feed And while you are at it, add Seth’s too. You will be glad you did.

Indeed, for any blog on WordPress.com, you can get the feed for it by tacking on “/feed” to the end of the blog’s URL. Relatedly, most online news sources have lots of RSS feeds you can use. Once you start looking, you will see them everywhere.

And if you have a Gmail account, you can use http://reader.google.com as your RSS feed reader, though in truth, there are many such tools out there. Ask your friends and co-workers what they use and go with what you think will work best for you.

It’s a good New Year’s resolution, but the next question is: how? Well, check out this blog: The Daily Post at WordPress.com | Post something every day. WordPress.com put it together to help inspire to blog more. It’s already off to a flying start. If you want to keep up with it, you can also follow WordPress Daily Post (postaday) on Twitter. Or if you want, you can put it in your feed reader, too. Lots of choices. Good luck!

(From the flickr photostream of poka0059, Paul Oka, who has some great photos of typewriters. See the link for rights.)

Anyone who doesn’t cook or feels their cooking is poor owes it to themselves to read this article: Sustainable Food – Three Recipes by Mark Bittman – NYTimes.com. It’s more a manifesto than an article, but it is very practical and something even good cooks should read.

Bittman does two things in this article: 1) demolishes the notion you should eat junk beause you don’t have time or you can’t cook or you can’t afford to cook good meals for yourself. 2) Presents three recipes which are more like three lessons on how to cook dozens of meals cheaply, easily, and simply.

It doesn’t matter if you are an omnivore, vegetarian or vegan: these recipes will work and provide you with lots of variety. Plus they are  “nutritionally sound and environmentally friendly”. Just as important: these meals are low cost. Rice, beans, lentils, cabbage, carrots, and onions can be some of the cheapest ingredients in a grocery store. If you are really tight on cash (e.g. a college student), look for vegetables being sold off in your green grocer or supermarket. You might find peppers, zucchini, greens, or squash being sold off, and while they might go off in a few days, if you prepare them that day, you can have a good and tasty and cheap meal.

If you only need to cook for one or two servings, the recipes are easy to cut back from the 4-6 servings listed. Cook one serving for yourself tonight, and put a second serving in your fridge for lunch the next day. Better yet, why not invite a friend or neighbor over for dinner?

(Great photo of lentils from photobunny’s photostream on Flickr. Creative Commons license: see photo for details)

You might think that is mad, but as this article show, The $100 New York City Weekend – Frugal Traveler – NYTimes.com, you can do it and have a wonderful time. The trick is all in the planning. But if you plan well, then you can see some amazing sites, eat in some cool places, and generally have a fabulous trip. Indeed, even if you did not want to go to NYC, I think you could use this article as a template for how you could visit other big cities cheaply, be that city Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco. If you do that, please let us know what you did and how you did it!

Don’t forget to read this acompanying article: My $100 Weekend in New York: Where the Money Went – NYTimes.com. The comments are also very good. s

This will be old hat to the pros who do this for a living, but for the rest of us,this post: Before & After(s): 1 Bedroom, 5 Different IKEA Makeovers | Apartment Therapy Chicago, really shows how changing a few things in a room can make a big difference. Here’s just two of the five:

and

You can make it a game: spot the differences from one room to the next. As you do, you can see how changing bed covers, pillows, curtains, to name a few, can make a dramatic change. (Of course painting the walls could make a huge change as well.)

Sometimes one of the best way to change for the better is to change your environment for the better.

I was always a fan of the Flash. Not sure why he hasn’t gotten a movie deal yet. 🙂

Found at ArtBest of 2010: April – July | Apartment Therapy Ohdeedoh

Can be seen in this superb article, India’s New Generation of Caste Busters – NYTimes.com. It reads more like the digest of a sweeping novel and less like a magazine article. Indeed, as the NYTimes states, the author, “Anand Giridharadas is an online columnist for The Times and the author of “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking,” out this week, from which this article is adapted.” It is a very personal story set against and embedding the changes occurring in India. A must read.

My former colleague and all around smart guy, Adam Schwabe, has written a great iPhone app for riders of the TTC in Toronto. It’s called Rocket Radar, and you can find out more about it in this blogTO interview with Adam, here: Rocket Radar is the new must-have TTC iPhone app.

Great idea, and a great use of open data from the city of Toronto. Smart stuff indeed.

If you are looking for resolutions beyond the usual one, why not try that one. You can get lots of gifts for $20 at
20×200, including this great print called Vogue May 2010:pg 70 (List of Contributors), by Lauren DiCioccio. It would be perfect for the fashion (or magazine) lover. The 10″ X 8″ version is only $20! You can pick up a frame for a few bucks more (think IKEA or even a dollar store if money is tight) and you have a beautiful gift.

For crafts, there’s Etsy, of course (“Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies“) and in Canada, why not try  Art Interiors?

What makes this camera exceptional? Many things to a trained photographer, I have no doubt. But to me, what makes it exceptional is this, the “Yashica D had a long production run of 16 years with no changes”.

That is amazing to me. Is there anything these days that is a consumer product that hasn’t been redesigned in 16 years? 10 years, even.

There are some specialized sites on the web I just love. One are interior decor site (yes, there are many, including alot featuring bookshelves) and the other is food sites. There are lots of great ones out there. I like in particular this one, gourmande in the kitchen, which is just getting started. I hope it continues. It’s well designed, has good content, and really good photographs, like this one:

It looks better on that site. Go visit and feast your eyes.

Then check out this tumblr site and follow the instructions here: Never said about restaurant websites – How to make a less horrible restaurant website. The site itself has mockingly compliments restaurants sites, very likely born out of suffering through existing sites.

It boils down to keeping it simple.

Thanks to @adamschwabe on twitter for pointing this site out.

Reading this, Inaction and Delays by New York as Storm Bore Down – NYTimes.com, the one thing that no one brings up is that of the cost of having workers work at that time of year. Cities have a “snow” budget that they want to stretch over the entire winter, and if possible, you want to not spend it all at once. I wonder if that didn’t enter into the calculations of the city. That, and not wanting to call people in at Christmas are two reasons why New York failed to deal with things as well as they should have.

To monitor the situation there and to help move the cameras off of him and on to the people of Sudan in an attempt to prevent more atrocities from occurring. For more information, turn to George Clooney in Sudan – Photo Essays – TIME – StumbleUpon, and other sources.

Can be found in this good article: Behind-the-scene of Inception: Movie Locations – Associated Content from Yahoo! – associatedcontent.com

No doubt making it an expensive film to film!

Bruce Sterling was asked his thoughts on Wikileaks and he wrote a very strong piece on it, published here: The Blast Shack. While it is very intelligent and well written, it is also very neat. Too neat, I thought; almost fictional in how it is written. Gabriella Coleman has written a very good response to it here: Hacker Culture: A Response to Bruce Sterling on WikiLeaks – Gabriella Coleman – Technology – The Atlantic. If you read Sterling, I strongly recommend you read Coleman to give you a better perspective.

Made from a few basic electronic parts:

An abstract christmas tree made out of LEDs on Flickr. And here’s the schematic:

From the Flickr photostream of Omer Kilic

is this: Home Alone With Zombies

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip, but I think I will stick with The Nightmare Before Christmas

There was a good article in the New York Times about the decline in web based email, but this chart from the blog  Contrarian sums it up well:

It’s quite astounding to me. I can recall the affects and the switch to email in the mid 90s when more people started getting email at work and from services provided by ISPs. Then web based email came along from sites like Yahoo! Gmail itself only came out in 2004. During that time mail carriers suffered in adjusting to the loss of personal mail. I would have thought that email would have lasted at least another decade. But looking at this chart, I’d be surprised if it too was around in 5 years.