Category: Blog

For some time now I have been thinking that I need to become a better cook. There are a few things I know how to make very well: fried potatoes, polish-kielbasa soup — but there are many times I’ve tried to cook something new and it has just not come out the way I want. During my bachelor years, the solution was to just add a bunch of salt and a few other spices to mask the mistake, but I realize that’s an easy way out. What I’d really like is to take a cooking class that teaches me how to use spices better, namely which spices to use with which foods and how much.

I’ve been looking online at some of the cooking classes offered in NYC, and they all seem pretty expensive. I’m also not having much luck finding a class that only deals with how to use spices properly.

I know that cooking is a lot lot dancing: practice makes perfect, but I’m hoping that I can take a few classes to learn more of the basics of mixing flavors and spices and then use that as a foundation for everything I cook in the future.

What are your favorite sources for cooking information? I’m not really looking for recipes, unless they are very specific about spices and flavor. Also, if you know of any culinary classes in NYC that teach what i’m looking for, then leave a note in the comments. My research has not resulted in much information.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at November 23, 2005 11:40 AM

Every few months I’ll put up a new post consisting of nothing but links from my browser’s bookmarks. Here you go:

• Esquire: Greetings From idiot America
• Ebook: Take Control of Digital TV
• NY Review of Books: The End of News?
• CNet: All the news that’s fit to blog
• Mike Davidson: How to Snatch an Expiring Domain
• Housing Tracker
• BusinessWeek: Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard
• Flickr: 19th Century Circus & Magic Posters
• NY Times: Brand Blogs Capture the Attention of Some Companies
• The Long Tail: Business Blogging != Executive Blogging
• Wharton: Brand Rehab: How Companies Can Restore a Tarnished Image

Posted by Cameron Barrett at November 15, 2005 02:49 PM

Last summer I was in talks with Seed Magazine about building an online community site for their magazine. The magazine, if you’re not familiar with it, is an interesting mix of science and culture. Their mission is “to help nurture a science-savvy global citizenry by increasing public interest in science and public understanding of science.”

Today, they took the password off their beta version of the SeedMagazine.com site, designed to support the print magazine and nurture online community. It’s set to officially launch November 21. I’m especially intrigued by the amount of MovableType wrangling they appear to have done. This just shows that MT is not just a blogging tool but can also successfully be used as a CMS. The forums part of SeedMagazine.com is running on top of Vanilla, an up-and-coming forums package that is gaining a lot of momentum.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at November 15, 2005 03:13 PM

I was digging through my swag bag of goodies from last month’s BlogOn Conference and came across a new magazine that had been included. Thumbing through it, I came across a great article about the corporate culture within Southwest Airlines, headed up by one Colleen Barrett (no relation).

I was intrigued to see that both Halley Suitt and David Weinberger, two long-time bloggers, are senior editors — yet Worthwhile Magazine does not put any of their featured articles on their web site. While I love some of the magazine’s content, I find it interesting that they choose to keep their content off the web. For a new magazine trying to build subscriptions and mindshare, they should be putting at least some of their content online for other bloggers to find and promote.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at November 14, 2005 03:41 PM

My four-year old Canon Powershot S100 is on its last legs. It’s corrupted 3 different compact flash cards in the past few months, so it’s time to get a new digital camera. I am definitely looking at one of the new pro-sumer SLR cameras, but do not know which one to get. My budget, including a single lens, is around $1000.

I’ve been very impressed by the Canon Rebel and some of the Nikon SLR’s, but don’t really know what to get. I’ll probably end up with the Canon EOS 350D/Digital Rebel XT, since it gets consistently high ratings and is within my budget. But what digital SLR do you have and why do you like it?

My goal is to start taking more photos. I know how to take good photography, so I don’t need one of those point-and-shoot cameras that does everything for me. Most of the pocket-sized digital cameras are like this, which is what I want to get away from so I can start experimenting more with long exposures, different light settings, etc.

Bonnie and I are getting married in January in St. Croix, Virgin islands so I’m looking to buy in the next week or two so I can have time to learn the camera.

I also do not mind buying second-hand, so if you are looking to unload a digital SLR that is less than two years old, let me know.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at November 12, 2005 02:34 PM

At long last I have finally launched my blog consultancy called BlogCorp, Inc.

This business grew out of my independent consulting projects over the past few years. I found that my corporate clients felt more comfortable working with a group of people instead of an individual, so I changed the name of my existing New York coproration from BlogLabs, Inc. to BlogCorp, Inc, folded my independent consulting into a client list, built the web site, and now I’m at BlogOn 2005 in New York City.

BlogCorp is a full-service consultancy designed to help companies understand how to use blogs and online community in the most efective way. We help businesses large and small build integrate blogs into their marketing plans, their intranets, and their corporate communications. We specialize in building online community, whether it is for consumers or a closed community within your corporation.

Check out the site, which is about 90% complete, and feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at October 17, 2005 09:05 AM
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At long last I have finally launched my blog consultancy called BlogCorp, Inc.

This business grew out of my independent consulting projects over the past few years. I found that my corporate clients felt more comfortable working with a group of people instead of an individual, so I changed the name of my existing New York coproration from BlogLabs, Inc. to BlogCorp, Inc, folded my independent consulting into a client list, built the web site, and now I’m at BlogOn 2005 in New York City.

BlogCorp is a full-service consultancy designed to help companies understand how to use blogs and online community in the most effective way. We help businesses large and small build integrate blogs into their marketing plans, their intranets, and their corporate communications. We specialize in building online community, whether it is for consumers or a closed community within your corporation.

Check out the site, which is about 90% complete, and feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at October 17, 2005 09:05 AM

I was reading this article today about a woman who got booted off a Southwest flight from L.A. to Portland because some passengers complained about her t-shirt which had a picture of Bush, Cheney, Conoleeza Rice and the words “Meet the Fockers”. She comments:

“I have cousins in Iraq and other relatives going to war,” she said. “Here we are trying to free another country and I have to get off an airplane in midflight over a T-shirt. That’s not freedom.”

Reading further, it is clear that the problem is not her t-shirt but rather the boneheaded people on the plane who found her shirt offensive. Have we really come to this? Are we really to a point in this country where all it takes to get kicked off a plane is to wear something that might offend someone else? I find the whole incident highly ridiculous and a little bit disturbing.

The next time I fly, the cynic in me will want to complain about the people wearing crucifixes or religious propaganda — not because it offends me but because I want to show how ridiculous it is to have such convictions about someone else’s choice of clothing or accoutrement, whether it be political, religious or whatever.

Update: Is there some kind of underground campaign going on to ban this t-shirt from stores? Here’s an article from a newspaper in Wisconsin that talks about a local political activist group called Tosans for Responsible Government trying to get this shirt and Victoria’s Secret clothing removed from a local mall’s stores.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at October 6, 2005 04:01 PM

Sorry about the downtime. Last week, while I was on vacation out west, a hacker once again got into my rack server and installed software that was trying to exploit other servers. My bandwidth provider received notice within minutes from several sources that my box was compromised and shut down all services except for mail processing. When I got back to NYC I proceeded to move 21 sites (55 domains) to a hosting account at Pair.com, where I’ve pre-paid for a year’s worth of service. I’ve decommissioned my rack server and am selling it to a colleague who has other machines in the same rack. I’m hanging up my sysadmin hat and am going back to using a realiable hosting provider. It has its limitations (CPU cycle quotas, disk quotas, etc.) but at least I can be confident the machine is secure and if/when it ever does get compromised it is not my mess to clean up.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at October 3, 2005 04:15 PM

I’m getting married. I know, I can’t believe it either, but it’s true. While on vacation out west last week I proposed to my girlfriend, Bonnie, who I met last August right after moving back to NYC from D.C.

Our vacation consisted of flying into Phoenix and then driving to the Grand Canyon, up to Yellowstone Park and then back to Phoenix – stopping along the way for Zion National Park and Grand Teton National Park. For days I’d been trying to come up with a unique way to pop the question and about half-way through the trip it came to me. We both like to play Scrabble and had recently bought a travel-sized edition of the game (the board folds in half and the pieces snap into place). I snuck into the hotel bathroom in Wyoming one night while Bonnie was sleeping and created something like this (the original photos are lost as the Compact Flash card in my camera went bad):

It took me three more days of asking Bonnie if she wanted to play a game of Scrabble before she finally came up with the idea late one night of playing a game of “Dirty Scrabble” where you can only play using swear words and sexual slang (the rules are also much looser; make up your own). I pulled out the Scrabble board and opened it up. Before she could even comprehend what was happening I had the ring out and she was acknowledging that yes she would marry me.

As far as proposals go, I guess it was a good one. I’m still trying to figure out the score, but I know that somewhere in there I scored a Triple Word Score and we both ended up winning.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at October 3, 2005 04:21 PM
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