The Worst Thing in the World ...worst practices...

Here's a punchlist of stuff I saw at SXSW (which, by the way, is an awesome film festival where it's easy to see almost everything you want to see, and you can see 6 movies in a day if you're really motivated).

Some foods, force-ranked

BBQ

1. Louie Mueller BBQ. Perfect beef ribs (IMO the hardest thing to get right), and really great sweet jalapeño sauce.
2. Snow's BBQ. Best brisket.
3. Two Bros. Amazing coffee BBQ sauce. Great beans (no one else has interesting beans at all)
4. Salt Lick (catered). All around high quality, good beef ribs, very dry.
5. Opie's. Great pork ribs, falling apart, unusual and tasty sides.
6. Iron Works. All around pretty good. Great hot links. Good portions, nice place.

Fab has this jolly nose-shaped pepper grinder, and SF suggested that the pepper should actually come out of a butt.

The next natural step was to twist the balls to get the pepper out. And finally salt comes out the penis. How could this not sell?

It's a very old joke so I probably only need to tell you the punchline.

The Ndleton design-pattern

Oy! I made an app thing!

JIRA Add-on for Splunk

I made a little library to watch for things, search for a keyword in those things, and then notify some people that the keyword was found in a thing.

Currently you can watch a twitter account for new tweets, or a web page for changes (only the diff between old and new page is searched)

The motivation was to watch for mentions of 'pliny' in certain feeds and pages for some friends of mine who are playing the pliny scavenger hunt SF Beer Week.

Filling!

You bought a bottle of molasses 5 or 10 years ago for some recipe (You were making BBQ sauce from scratch maybe? Gingerbread men?). You used 0.5 cups. Here's how to get rid of the rest!

This dough freezes great, so make 8 or 9 batches and don't buy molasses any more!

Adapted from this Saveur recipe.

My company bought me a ticket to the Edward Tufte one-day course. It feels like something that someone in my position should have attended a long time ago. Not that I do that much data visualisation, but I do a little, and Tufte has had a lot of influence on the UI/X world which is parallel to my work.

A haggis is a sausage with the following special features

• Contains lamb and lamb offal (heart, lungs, kidneys, tongue, liver, suet)
• Contains oatmeal
• Uses a lamb stomach as a casing
• Is steamed

But people often skip a number of these features and still call the result a haggis. Most often, the stomach is swapped for a normal sausage casing. The most extreme case is a "vegan haggis", which is usually a baked casserole.