Alinea Image Gallery - Cuisine

Food has been around as long as humans. Restaurants date back to somewhere around the French revolution, when the sudden lack of royalty motivated chefs to convince ordinary folks to eat somewhere other than home. Cuisine was invented, and codified and Escoffier wrote it down. There were rules, and you were either good at it, or bad. Michelin could score it, because they knew where the points were won and lost.

But from El Bulli near Barcelona to WD-50 in New York to Alinea in Chicago, what and how we eat is being taken apart and reinvented, aided mightily by technology. Wylie Dufrense's signature dish is "Pickled Beef Tongue with Fried Mayonnaise and Carrot-Coconut Sunnyside-Up," if that helps illustrate the shift.

We that live in the Silicon Valley pride ourselves in living innovation, but it doesn't take much courage to be different in a place that "thinks different." To have the courage to embrace science in a profession that typically refuses the label art for craft, that times a process with gut and nose and measures with palms and fingers takes balls. To do so in Evanston, Illinois as Grant Achatz does, and still pack the house takes big talent. To make beauty and taste so elevated that even those who declare "it's not cooking" have to pause, as Anthony Bourdain did at the end of Decoding Ferran Adria, takes more than just creativity.

You have to prove there is a point to doing things differently. You have to prove it's valuable. And you have to prove it thoroughly. And every night. Consistently. Imagine being wacky and creative with impeccable technique and style 24-100 times a night, seven nights a week.

Molecular Gastronomy is slowly gaining respect. We of the valley should embrace it, for it is an edible manifestation of all be believe in: the urge to play and explore. Even if the thing doesn't need to be reinvented, we do so. Because we have got to know what could happen if...
if you could make a false caviar from eucalyptus tea, if you could make a ravioli not only stuffed with peas and encased in peas, if foie gras as a foam or ice chips.

Not because we are bored, but because we are curious. Not because we are jaded, but because we are hungry from stomach to brain.

I was hurt to hear Grant Achatz of Alinea announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth. If John Cage went tone deaf or Steve Jobs went mute you might know what it means.

Go look at the gallery of his dishes, and know you are only getting a tiny, tiny part of the story. Remember if you never eat there, you will never know what all the fuss was about. You can listen to a Cage record on an iPod but you can't eat Achatz's applewood ice cream unless you go there. In fact, due to the performance-nature of cooking, you may never know it. It can change with produce quality, the chef's boredom, or simply get replaced. More than any other art form, every meal is a precious moment shared between you and the chef, not to come again.

So let's applaud these chefs who live our values Then, please please please, go out and invent a way to record taste.

Wired article on Alinea

Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

"In addition to the three main design elements that occasionally attract fixations in online ads, we discovered a fourth approach that breaks one of publishing's main ethical principles by making the ad look like content:

* The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look at it.
* Not only should the ad look like the site's other design elements, it should appear to be part of the specific page section in which it's displayed.

This overtly violates publishing's principle of separating "church and state" -- that is, the distinction between editorial content and paid advertisements should always be clear.

I think this has been known for some time, though it's always nice to get a third party with data to support it.

What I find more interesting is how few designers are able to absorb the opposite lesson: i.e. if you make something look different than the rest of the page, it becomes invisible, not noticeable.

Let's say you have a search result, and you want to make the message that the user has misspelled a word visibile. Do you

Interface Scalability -- CMS Watch

Interface bottlenecks typically result in creeping inefficiencies in editorial processes. Maybe it takes too long to find content because, while the system response time is fine, there’s simply too much stuff to wade through. Perhaps some operations you would like to make in bulk can only be conducted one at a time. Or maybe there isn’t an easy way to see who is working on what, so sorting out the week’s responsibilities takes editors several rounds of the kind of off-system emails and face-to-face meetings that the CMS was meant to obviate in the first place.

Where is the icanhascheezeburger for babies??

(yes, this is proof parenthood rots your mind.)

It's that time of year again-- time for all us hopeful panelists to bag for votes. The field is more crowded each year, I swear. This year is no exception: 700 offerings!!!

BUT I think I've got some offerings that will inspire you to click through and vote yes, I can't live without seeing Christina's panel on X, Y AND Z!!!!!

Designing Social Media: Interface Tricks and Tips
We all know the core concepts -- Identity, Presence, Relationships, etc -- but how do these manifest themselves in our design choices? From avatars or log-in pages, a million tiny choices make the difference between lively community and crickets chirping. We'll teach you how to make social software social!
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/323?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F2%2Fq%3Awodtke

From Designer to Founder: Starting Your Own Company!
We've all dreamed of starting our own company, where design would matter and things would be done right. Christina Wodtke discovered nothing was as it seemed. She made usability blunders, launched bad designs and felt utterly helpless -- and loved every minute of it. Get the real skinny on the start-up life!
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/324?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F2%2Fq%3Awodtke

Barbarians at the Gate: User Generated Content and Traditional Media
Digg, Facebook, MySpace and Blogs are on the rise, and traditional newspapers and magazines are in trouble. Yet attempts are citizen journalism have yet to provide real competitions. Will tomorrow bring a revolution in media, or are the established players untouchable? And if there is a revolution, what will it look like (and who gets lined up against the wall?)
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/322?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F2%2Fq%3Awodtke

Get thee to a voting booth!

Jeremiah is such an uber SN geeks, he doesn't realize that his little summary is valuable even to the non-SN novice.

Digest of the Social Networking Space: August 15th, 2007

Summary Adoption rates continue to grow, an excessive amount of white label vendors, many which are receiving funding of questionable amounts, savvy corporations are deploying either in existing networks, or building their own. Data and privacy continue to be a primary concern for users. Unless your audience does not share online, I recommend that corporations develop a strategy for this market quickly, and budget for 2008.

Reading Astonishing! Spock, a New People-Search Engine, Thinks You're a Pedophile I can only imagine that Spock is so dumb (or potentially cleaver in a P.T. Barnum sort of way) they'll be successful if they can ever provide a valuable service. Or they'll drive a ton of traffic while their results are still crap, and those folks will never return. Hard to know, but with epically entertaining guffs like this, I'd consider a return visit.

though I suspect the overhead of running Yahoo Photos isn't that back-breaking to recently beleaguered Yahoo, I understand the wisdom of not supporting two competing photo sites. What I'm impressed by is this fine deal they made with their rivals, allowing folks who aren't quite ready for a 2.0 world to retire their personal works to the secluded safety of a private family photo sharing site. Bravo, Yahoo. You could have dumped us all in Flickr, but ya did the right thing.

I tried moving my photos too ALL the services, out fo curiosity,a nd found that I was able to, with a little back-buttoning.

Flickr did the right thing by respecting that not everyone is ready to make their entire life public

This is just a little note to say hi, and to confirm that you've decided to move all your photos from Yahoo! Photos to Flickr. This is fabulous!

It could take a little while for the import process to
finish, so when it's finished we'll send you another email
to let you know.

We've marked all your photos from Yahoo! as private,
because we didn't want to assume that you're comfortable
with making everything public until you've had a chance to
look things over. If you're happy to make things public,
we've written a one-time batch tool you can use to set your
photos public (or for friends or family) all at once.

We'll be in touch again soon to let you know it's all done.

In the mean time, why not explore Flickr?
http://www.flickr.com/

Regards, The Flickreenos

Compare this note to the Shutterfly note

Thanks for selecting Shutterfly

We are now transferring your pictures from Yahoo! Photos to Shutterfly and will send you another email when all of your pictures have been uploaded.

Bleah. Brand, much?

Snapfish provided a server error, Kodak couldn't find my old account (I suspect they closed it, and I didn't want to sign up again because I seem to remember they spam you every five seconds.

Photo bucket insulted me:

Gender? Required? BITE ME. Worse, a full birthday was required as well, not just proof I was over 13. And after that, my photos were not moved over, even when I tried a second time. Buh-Bye photobucket. Buh-bye, chance to get a ton of users from curious Yahoos.

Anyhow, irrespective of expected confusion between multiple service sign-ins, which all photo sites except Flickr had to suffer from (sign up/sign in, etc), Flickr still provided the most pleasant, the most positive experience. Yahoo was twice a mensch today. They did the right thing AND they did it well.

At Tuesday, August 14, 2007: Monthly Program (BayCHI), Guy Kawasaki calls out Don Norman is in the audience It was a 10 minutes drive, and I drove past thoroughbreds frolicking in the late afternoon sun on the golden palo alto hills. I couldn't tell you how cinematic and incredible and unreal the view was as I pulled into the Parc parking lot. Those who say location doesn't matter need to make that drive. Beauty and the brain are together off Pagemill road.

Guy is demoing Treumors to a packed auditorium. It's a me-to application, nothing interesting or new about it except Guy has the marketing punch... he may make it work, because like all the rest, it depends on enough people using it. How important is technology anyhow?

since I've been all entrepreneur-y, try Dan Willis's new effort, UX Crank

If you work with Engineers, and these days who doesn't? then you ought to read The Fishbowl: Understanding Engineers: Feasibility

An ex-Google non-engineer described 'non-trivial' thus in the Xooglers blog:

It means impossible. Since no engineer is going to admit something is impossible, they use this word instead.