We hope you’ll support us by donating $5-10 (or more) via our FirstGiving page (a secure way to send directly to Farm Sanctuary, and they’ll mail you a tax-deductible receipt).

We visited Farm Sanctuary’s California farm in Orland last weekend (they have one on NY, too). We stayed in the farm’s guest cabin and were able to spend a lot of time with all the animals (Aimee discovered I’m something of a turkey whisperer). It was fun to see them in action and we had a chance to volunteer a little by preparing food and feeding many of the animals and brushing the goats.

Aimee posted a set of photos (ad 2 vids) from our time at Farm Sanctuary on Flickr.

Also, if you vote in California, please join us in supporting Prop 2 (sponsored by Farm Sanctuary) with a “Yes” vote in November.

Prop 2 is a modest measure that would allow farm and food animals the ability to stand up, stretch and turn around. Through the reduction of these inhumane caging/crating practices (most commonly used by factory farms) will improve the health and safety of our food, support family farmers, and reduce the environmental degradation caused by these unnecessary practices. The NY Times has endorsed Prop 2 in a thoughtful and straightforward article.

We hope you enjoy our pictures and hope you’ll consider helping us raise money for this important organization.

Thanks and love,
nate & aimee

If you’re around, please come say hi.

On Monday I gave a presentation to our User Experience and Design group. I work in the Presentation Platform Engineering group, and part of my job is to help bridge between Design and Engineering. (Before joining the Platform Engineering team, I worked on the Platform Design team, so I can speak both languages to some extent.)

With so much changing in interface development this year, it’s important to coordinate the creation of a new vocabulary for rich internet interfaces. I’ll write more on this in the coming weeks, but you can check out Bill Scott’s blog post for his take on my talk, where he focuses on Storyboarding Interesting Moments, a part of what I talked about.

Though all the words didn’t flow as well as they do sometimes for me, the presentation was well received and generated some excellent discussion. Larry Tesler, our SVP of UED, was one of several that had some kind words for me afterward. I would be remiss if I didn’t pass most of the credit to Eric Miraglia, a colleague and great mind who’s been instrumental in developing our vision. (More on that from Eric, here.)

On Monday night, I joined Victor Tsaran (our Accessibility Product Manager) at a casual dinner of about a dozen Bay Area accessibility folks from Adobe, Macromedia, Apple, IBM and Sun. Over Italian in San Mateo, it was a great chance to meet others addressing the needs of accessibility community. This theme continued for the rest of the week.

On Wednesday, I went to the Mozilla Foundation, for a co-presentation between IBM’s Accessibility Architect Aaron Leventhal and Yahoo!’s Victor Tsaran. They discussed the IBM/Mozilla Accessible DHTML project, first supported in the new Firefox 1.5. It’s great stuff, and will be critical as the web moves to richer interfaces.

On Friday, Aaron presented a technical overview of the capabilities to a team of our engineers, answering questions and giving guidance to engineers investigating the “Accessible DHTML” approach.

Friday night I had dinner in Pac Heights at the beautiful home of a friend of a friend, a promenient SF lawyer. The prime rib was perfectly cooked, and we laughed quite a bit. The five-course meal and case of wine took the wind from my sails so I didn’t get around to packing at all last night. As soon as I finish typing this post I need to quickly pack — clothes are almost out of the dryer, and I need to leave for the airport in about 66 minutes.

Phew…

Can’t wait to be laying on the white sands of Culebra in two weeks, away from web and world. (We went last year too, and couldn’t resist going again. I don’t have a Ph.D., but it’s still suits me fine.)

It’s been many months now since I returned from my backpacking trip across Asia, and I’ve still got zillions of photos to post.

Here are 39 photos from the Tokyo Fish Market.

We took about 9000 during the three month trip, but tried to just post the best of the best in small, digestable sets. (15 of my 34 Flickr Sets are from the trip.)

The Fish Market in Tokyo is fantastic. I highly recommend a visit next time you’re there. Against the conventional wisdom, you don’t need to arrive at 4am. My brother and I overslept a bit, and didn’t down there til about 8am (right Pete?).

Massive. Bustling. Colorful. Beautiful. Unique.

My brother Peter, who works for The Onion attended the Press Club dinner at the White House earlier this year.

On Thursday night, Aimee invited a bunch of her friends over for dinner. The dinner was multi-purpose: celebrating her that-day completion of the last application to grad school; a housewarming party for her friends who hadn’t seen our home; and a going away party, as she’s leaving Monday night for about a month in South East Asia.

13 photos in Flickr set

…the intimate eating places that have sprung up in people’s homes and have become, for locals and those in the know, some of the best places to eat on the island. The speakeasies started several years ago when some Hong Kongese, gastronomes and cooks with limited means, decided to set up one or two tables in their sitting rooms and offer a fixed-price, multicourse menu of distinctive home-style dishes.

This New York Times article describes and recommends, and has some great photos.

Mouth watering already…

I just talked to this woman who knows everything about food everywhere,
and this is the Thai grocery store advice she gave me.

The best place in the city is Bangkok Center Grocery, 104 Mosco Street,
349-1979. Nong is the owner, and she’s nice. Mosco St. is a one-block
street between Mott and Mulberry. South of Pell, North of Chatham
Square. There’s a curry paste there that gets flown into the country
every Thursday that’s amazing.

There might be fresher produce at this other place, though, but the
fixins are less complete. Asia Market, 71 1/2 Mulberry, 962-2028

Also, the Bangkok Center Grocery web site linked to the Temple of Thai, templeofthai.com, which seems excellent.

The classes provided a great foundation. I learned all the main ingredients, the basic ways to work with them, and came away with a base set of recipes that I knew worked. Perhaps most important, I was beginning to understand the concept of harmonizing primary flavors.

One great aspect of the class is all the tasting we get to do. While making the curry, we initially tasted the base paste, then took incremental tastes as the sugar, salt and other core flavors were added. This approach gives an understanding of how all the elements fit together, instead of just learning color-by-numbers recipes.

In addition to the incremental tastings during cooking, we are also learning how to shop at the market. We examinded Fish Sauces and Coconut Milk last week. Kasma has about eight varieties of canned coconut milk. We opened them all as tasted. It was amazing how much variety there was from one to the next. Some were very light, others were nearly solid. There are two or more brands that look almost identical. One is the worst of the bunch, the other is the best available product. The good one has A OK in the middle of it’s name; the bad one ends with DOC. Remember, one is A-OK while the bad one will send you to the DOCtor. They are both pitured here: