Stream

I went ahead and tried a variant of my normal pizza dough recipe over the weekend. Went with a 40% bread flour, 60% 00 flour instead of my usual 100% 00 flour (which is just a Neapolitan style, although I add olive oil, so it’s not really Neapolitan). I think it’s super-promising. I lowered the temperature — about 675 degrees. I was able to still get some leopard spotting on the crust (not as good as straight Neapolitan), but was also able to get more of a crunch on the bottom of the pizza.

Lost another of the covid-era outdoor dining patios that took over a couple of street parking spots. I’ve seen a couple disappear over the past couple of months, which fills me with a little bit of dread that we’ll lose more. So now, instead of a nice spot for people to eat and to heighten the overall street atmosphere, we have space for two more cars to sit, taking up space.

A Few San Diego Bakeries to Try: Wayfarer (Bird Rock), Izola (Downtown), Bonjour Patisserie (Little Italy), Secret Sister (South Park)

It’s always just been a part of capitalism, basically the notion that if I run a company with employees, I’m potentially profiting quite a bit off their work. Sure, they’re being compensated, but as the employer, I’ll take my cut — sometimes a very large cut. It’s always on some level, bugged me a little. Perhaps a bright spot of AI is that there is a potential to move beyond that necessary bit of exploitation.

I keep forgetting that May and June in San Diego, with the gray skies and drizzle, is the time of year for soups, chili, pot pies, and other fall meals.

Got that hit of caffeine this morning and now the ideas are running wild in my head. Must move faster on things. Maybe AI can help.

Are there any cool dashboards that I could design that (a) people would visit and want to see, and (b) have some societal good? I’m thinking of stuff like how city budgets are used and allocated (or federal and state), or even just some sort of a “humanity dashboard”, that tracks things in technology and health discoveries. It just needs to have cool graphs and charts and stuff.

Was thinking about playing with a mix of 00 flour and bread flour. Originally I was thinking that this would just result in something around all-purpose flour, but it sounds like there are some advantages to it.

One such recommendation from the web:
00 flour (60%) brings extensibility and tenderness — easier to stretch, silky feel. Bread flour (40%) adds strength and chew — prevents it from becoming too soft or fragile. This mix gives you a dough that’s: Easy to handle, crisp on the bottom, tender in the middle, and with a bit of that classic pizza “chew.”

A lot of people are worried that AI is making us dumber. I’m not convinced; often times I find that it will show me a better way of doing something (like a coding problem), and generally I’m smart enough to adopt that better way of doing it into my own coding. I’m learning…

Today’s kind of a “knock off a whole bunch of small things” kind of a day….

I learned today that up until the 1920s, nobody really knew of other galaxies — they thought the Milky Way was about it. That’s fascinating to me, that it’s just a fairly recent thing. Every once in a while I want to make a giant timeline of historical things like this, perhaps with different “rails” for various disciplines — art, science, technology, war, etc.. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been more curious in how events from various disciplines were happening at the same time.

Lots of small commits really make me feel more productive.

Just sitting here working with my helmet on, hoping someone will get the hint that we should go out and skateboard.

Loving me some midcentury futurism this morning.

I wonder how much of our current issues as a society are tied to the terrible platforms we have for online discussion. I don’t think online discussion is necessarily a problem, it’s just the mechanisms that are in place — moderation, upvoting, downvoting, etc… Could we solve some of our problems if the tools we have for online discussion were designed better?

I really want vector graphic design software to function more like CAD software. I just want to remove a line segment between two other intersecting lines. It of course can be done in Affinity Designer, but it’s more complicated than it needs to be. It could be trivial, like it is CAD, just select the two cutting lines, then cut click on the segment to remove — easy. Same thing with snapping to tangents on circles, fillets, etc…

It doesn’t happen often, but I do think it’s possible to overdo it with imagery on a webpage.