On the like side, usability is important and there are a lot of systems and apps I have used that have terrible usability *cough*Rock Band 3*cough*. usability is a critical part of making a good product.

But on the dislike side, Nielsen seems to give short shrift to the presentation side. Case in point, have you seen their site? And then they have these suggestions and reviews that I always seem to find disagreement with.

The most recent one talks about Amazon’s Windowshop. Saying it is too confusing. (I link to the Ars article due to laziness to find it in the full report. Lazy Powers Activate!) I could not disagree more. The app is awesome. It is so much better than the website. So much so that I go to it to do a purchase instead of the website using my computer. Sadly it has made buying stuff to friction free that I think I have spent more since I got that app.

I realize I am not giving any concrete examples of why it is better. Shame on me. But it is late and time for bed. Try it out and decide for yourself which is a better shopping experience.

Well, I can’t. Linked in gives me two options. Everyone or connections only. There is no way to make a group or tag that I want the message to be targeted to.

Facebook, of course, does the same type of thing, and that is one of the reasons I hate it so much.

Dear social systems… not everyone wants to talk to everyone all the time.

There were a few items that really stood out.

First, is Dolce Bella Chocolates which I had last year, but didn’t write their name down. But I did remember them. They made a divine mint ganache that is made with fresh mint leaves that you can really taste. The flavor is a really strong mint with an amazingly fresh taste to it. They grow their own mint and the flavor really shows.

A new find this year is Landru Chocolates which had quite a few stand out chocolates. The cognac-rum caramel was great but the real standout is the salt and pepper caramel. Imagine a salt caramel with a little spice from the pepper. One of my favorites of the whole show!

The big winner for me this year is J Truffles. Everything about these is Win. First, I love the molds. They are all custom designed and the pyramids work really great. The size of one of these is perfect for a chocolate fix, and the designs are just awesome. I would love to create something like these. Beyond that the flavors are great. The limoncello and the salt water caramel were great. The caramel had a nice chewiness to it. Not too soft and not too hard. Finally, the packaging for a gift is great. Given the unique molds they even had to make their own supports for the boxes. Total win!

Finally I just have to mention Neo Cocoa again. I just love their ganache only approach. The presentation is great and the ganaches are really good. I have been inspired by them to do some of my ganaches this way, and I love the result I am getting. Next up to try is the round truffle using this approach. I saw it this year and really like the idea of it. I find enrobing the basic truffles to be okay at best. The pure ganache seems like a better way to go.

Yesterday, I tried using the finder to copy a file to my iDisk. It sat there and spinner for about 5 minutes just to return a list of about 5 files in a folder. After getting bored waiting for this I tried a third party transfer app and everything went fast and smooth like it should.

So, the first big knock against iDisk is it’s unusability in the Finder.

Second, while a slight tangent, file access on the iPad sucks. It’s pretty much unusable. The iTunes approach Apple provides for copying files in and out of a specific app is crazy bad. Many folks have written about and documented the steps involved. It’s a very un-Apple solution.

So, you want to get files on and off your iPad… How about using iDisk? Seems like a great idea at first blush, and Apple even offers it with the iPad version of iWork. But once you want to get those files back on to your mac you have to use the Finder to access your iDisk to copy the files, which brings me right back to the initial problem. That of course being, how much Finder iDisk access sucks, and thus how much that makes iDisk suck my extension.

Is there something better? Yes, Dropbox. For all the areas iDisk blows Dropbox rocks. Plus it offers the much more easy to use solution of maintaining a sync of all your files across all your devices. (Yes, I realize iDisk has this too, and I even tried using it in a production setting. It was so bad and useless I started looking for another solution within 24 hours. Which is how I found Dropbox.)

So, the point of this badly written and rambling post (made while waiting for my wife to finish clothes shopping in Baby the Stars Shine Bright) is that Apple should buy Dropbox for their fancy new data center. It’s awesome and very Apple-like, in that it just works, and it would serve their users much better than iDisk. Especially their users who try to do work both on the iPad and desktop.

And if Apple did buy them they could integrate it right into the iOS so that syncing could happen for data whether a specific app was open or not. A feature that is sorely missing from even the good Dropbox using iPad apps.

Not being a fan of twitter I read this hoping that his arguments might make me see value in the system. Then I came across this line:

I miss 99% of them (do the maths, the chances of my seeing any given tweet are very, very small) but some do get through.

Which really seems to nail one of the main issues I have with twitter. You either have to spend a huge amount of time, and probably endure constant interruptions/distractions, keeping up on every tweet. Or you miss the vast majority. In which case, what is the point of it? To get a random snippet of thoughts from people?

It’s like gambling with your time… Any time spent on twitter might yield an interesting post or be a complete waste with drivel about how great someone, of limited importance to you, is enjoying their sandwich. My brief experience using it led to a lot of information about how much people liked sandwiches, a few links (of which the interesting ones percolated up to the blogosphere), and little else that was interesting or useful in the least.

Why would I want to waste time doing that?

First, as an aside… Dear Food Network, if you show some fancy recipes on TV just before Thanksgiving please make the video available online so we can use it for reference. I found what I believed was the right video on iTunes and bought it, but it turned out to be last year’s episode. Really annoying.

Hmm… I guess the above isn’t really “an aside” as a lot of this post is about trying to remember what I saw on TV that wasn’t covered in enough detail in the written instructions and figuring it out as I went along.

Duck fat… Amazingly, (not really) I was not able to find any at the local market. So last week I roasted a duck, which was very tasty, to get some duck fat. I ended up with about 1/2 cup that way. So I made up the rest with butter. Mmmm… Butter….

“Deconstructing” the Turkey proved to be pretty straightforward. Cooking went noticeably faster in the deconstructed state.

For the brining the night before I found the instructions to be a little sparse on what the brine should be. I knew there was some liquid involved, because I saw it on TV, but I couldn’t remember anything about it beyond that. So I whipped up some of Alton’s brine and used that. Since I didn’t have a large enough pot I put everything in one of those large roasting bags and tied the top.

After the turkey is done I removed the turkey from the pan, leaving in the veggies, added in the giblets, separated the neck and backbone meat from the bones and cooked down to make a gravy. I put 2 tablespoons flour into half a cup port and mixed until lumps were gone and added that to the gravy. For presentation I presented it as “rustic” gravy in a big bowl with a ladle with everything included in it (small neck bones, giblets, the veggies, etc…). It was very well received.

All in all the turkey came out amazingly well. The breast was really juicy and the leg meat was falling off the bone. One of the best turkeys I have ever done.

Update: Definitely the best turkey I have yet made.

Maybe I just don’t have the imagination (or upper body strength) but holding a 7″ or 10″ device up to take a picture just seems really clumsy and bound to create less than useful shots.

I love the camera in my iPhone because it works with that form factor.

All the recipes I have found call for cooking and fermenting the juice with a simple syrup for a few days. Meh, too much work and long term planning for when I want to drink something the same day.

So here is what I came up with.

1/2 cup ginger root
3 lemons peeled and with the seeds removed
1/2 cup honey
4 quarts water

Chop up the Ginger and lemons and blend until they make a nice slurry. Put the slurry in a nut milk bag (or cheesecloth if you don’t have nut milk bags, which you should have, because they are awesome). Put this giant “tea bag” in a pot with the boiled water and let steep on low for 10 minutes. Remove and drain juice from bag. Add the honey. Then cool, put in the fridge and enjoy. If you are feeling sick keep it hot and it’s great for a sore throat.

Last nights combination was tomato, cucumber, carrot, Italian parsley, red chard, cabbage and kale. Mmmmm. Good!

For those who have never juiced, the energy and feeling of well being you get from a nice glass of juice is really great.

Regarding equipment, I sprung for a BlendTec blender (with the 4″ blade) earlier this year. It has been working out great. Compared to my VitaMix it does a much better job of breaking up the veggies and creating more juice per pound of fruit. Compared to my old Champion prep and cleanup is faster. And compared to the Norwalk I had everything is easier except the pressing of the juice out of the nut milk bag (though that is a handy workout for the hands and only takes a few minutes).

Here is a rather unappetizing picture of the pulp in the blender.

After my last attempt, from Alton Brown whose recipes usually come out excellent on the first try, I began to figure it out.

With my creamy caramels I always just eyeball the sugar by color and added the cream and then I was done. With the chewy ones I have to cook the mixture after combining. For temperature I have been using a laser probe, instead of the old fashioned mercury thermometer in the pot. Thinking about this I realized that the temperature on the outside, where the laser probe makes its reading, must be a lot less than the interior temperature. Tonight I tested this and found a difference as great as 50 degrees Fahrenheit!

Mystery solved, caramel success achieved.