Technically quote of the day a few days ago, but I just read it:

“So the most creative people don’t have higher hit rates. They just make more stuff.”

This courtesy of the ever-fascinating Bob Sutton in his article The Power of the Prototyping Mind-Set.

I’ve been reading bits and pieces of the Design Observer archives all day, and expect to continue doing so for quite a while. Good stuff.

According to Heather Hopkins, a Hitwise Intelligence Analyst, it seems that those aged 55+, so-called silver surfers, are set to overtake 35-44 year olds as the demographic age group representing the largest share of UK Internet visits. Those aged 55+ represented 22.0% of UK visits to all categories of websites in the four weeks to 12th May 2007, up 54% since 2005 and 40% since 2006. This compares to 23.5% of Internet visits from 35-44 year olds.

Link

Who is Mozilla? You are Mozilla.

Two weeks ago we started getting Bryson Farms organic produce baskets delivered to our condo. They deliver all-year ’round, and while we’re just at the beginning of the serious growing season the produce has been fantastic. Leeks, fiddleheads, red potatoes, sweet potatoes, salad greens, microgreens, zucchini, daikon radish (a first for me), shell peas, green beans, kale, chives (they do herbs, too), etc etc.

Naturally the greens go straight into salads, and I’ve been preparing most everything else as simply as possible. Peas and green beans are simply steamed and served with salt, pepper, and a hint of butter. Leeks and potatoes made for an incredible leek + potato soup. Sweet potatoes will be going into a curried sweet potato soup tomorrow. Kale is sauted with a hint of garlic and olive oil. And so on. The quality and quantity is fantastic, and I’m seriously looking forward to tomato season since Bryson is all about crazy heirloom tomato varieties. I’ve also got my fingers crossed for beets and asparagus soon, but we’ll see. The fun part is that it’s a random selection of produce every week — I’ve never had daikon radish or fiddleheads before, so it’s a fun way to try new things.

Tonight’s menu finished off the week’s potatoes and peas:

• Pan-roasted thick cut lamb chops, simply prepared with fresh rosemary
• Steamed peas
• Greek-style pan-fried potato wedges (rosemary, olive oil, salt + pepper, topped with a squeeze of lemon)

The nice part about the Bryson Farms delivery, in addition to it being very high quality produce, is that it’s all certified organic and locally grown, the farm being roughly 50 miles away in Quebec. So — excellent quality, reasonable prices, healthier, fun, and helps reduce our carbon footprint. There’s really no downside at all.

So after researching and reading and agonizing over which little point&shoot camera I wanted to pick up, I finally settled on the new Nikon P5000.

Major feature rundown:

• Weighs around 280g with battery and memory card. Super light.
• It’s 3.9 x 2.5 x 1.6 in. Tiny, but not so tiny that it’s awkward to hold/use.
• Excellent ergonomics/design. Controls are intuitively laid out, easy to access and use, and the menu system is very nice.
• 10 megapixel.
• Kick ass macro mode.
• Automatic, semi-automatic (Shutter priority and Aperture priority), and full manual mode. I used full manual mode for all the pictures I took this morning, and it’s dead simple to use.
• Drawback: no RAW support. This is a bit of a drag, but is the only drawback I’ve found so far.

All that aside, here are the shots I took while walking home from my doctor’s appointment this morning: May 11 walk.

Random note: turns out using the “Rotate picture” feature on Flickr completely hoses the EXIF data for those images. I’ll have to re-upload the ones that need to be rotated.

On Download History — It might be cool if my browser history also indicated from which sites I’ve downloaded files so I could find those sources again. How separate should Download History be from History?

On Smart Agents — Are services like StumbleUpon a rudimentary sort of “SmartAgent” where, instead of developing machine intelligence, we harness the “wisdom of crowds” to find new undiscovered content that fits into patterns of interest we develop over time?

Over the last while I’ve put together a few more mockups and thoughts about browser UI and features. These are, of course, just personal brainstorms and in no way should be construed as anything more than that, but I figured I’d throw them out into the world just in case someone finds them useful.

• On Tabs
• Download Manager ideas
• On Tagging II (follow up to On Tagging).

Feel free to comment here or on the wiki Discuss pages, if you like.

Chris Messina.

Tara’s reaction.

Aaron Schwartz (Scroll down to the “On misogyny” section).

If you’re wondering, I’m posting these because they have clearly struck some sort of nerve for me, I’m just not exactly sure what that nerve is at the moment, or what it means. These are just interesting to me. Thought provoking, if nothing else.

The local health-food shop stocks some seriously tasty organic short-grain brown rice. This recipe makes enough for 3-4 meals, easy.

Ingredients

• 2 1/3 cups short grain brown rice
• 4 cups water
• 1 tbsp oil (peanut, whatever)

Method

• Rince uncooked rice three times and drain well.
• Put the 4c water on to boil in the kettle. This will boil separately from the rice to start.
• Heat oil over med high heat in a lidded sauce pan. Saute uncooked rice for a few mins, stirring constantly.
• Pour boiling water over rice. Give a quick stir, then cover and turn heat to low (I just put it on minimum). Cook for 45 mins undisturbed.
• After 45 mins, turn off heat and let sit for 5-10 mins.

I’m not a huge fan of regular white rice, but this stuff is great. Sauteing the uncooked rice in the oil for a few mins brings out a nice rich, nutty flavour.