mission: impossible, the cupcake version

Ana is turning two soon, and we're having a birthday party her with cupcakes. It would be nice if she could eat a cupcake at her birthday party, so I'm trying to find a good cupcake recipe for her that she can eat. Hence the challenge... she has celiac disease, and appears to also be allergic to corn, dairy, and eggs. I can find plenty of vegan cupcake recipes (which would cover the dairy & eggs part) but they use a lot of soy milk, which usually has gluten added to it, and regular flour. And there are plenty of gluten-free cupcake recipes... which use dairy or eggs.

Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World claims to have a few wheat-free vegan cupcake recipes. I'll probably be ordering it soon and giving it a whirl. Otherwise, it's going to be major kitchen experimentation time.

Verizon EVDO = 5 GB/month, now officially

Well, this certainly took long enough for Verizon to admit to.

Verizon forced to stop calling limited cell data plans "unlimited" - story on boing boing. EVDO is my only internet access, so I always keep in the back of my mind that I should be going to the library to use their wifi when I start doing a lot of downloading or uploading to flickr. I can't believe it took them this long to admit what most EVDO users have known for months.

October 21 NYC Breast Cancer walk in Central Park

I'm joining some coworkers to do the NYC Breast Cancer walk this month. Esther's mom had breast cancer when we were in college, and I've known a few other women who had it. If you'd like to make a donation to my team, here is the donation page, or you can find a walk near you.

lucy's ears

lucy's ears
Originally uploaded by wck

end of the summer fun... kids and rabbits playing in the vegetable garden. Kate and Ana have 2 rabbits, Lucy and Lenny, who are the softest, sweetest little snuggly things ever. Their dad decided that the thing to do on a sunny afternoon was to toss all 4 of them out into the vegetable garden. It has a fence all the way around it... good for keeping rabbits and kids inside.

pintucks

It was rainy out here this afternoon, and really muggy all day. I was home sick today with a headache. Not so fun. So to take my mind off it I made two shirts for Kate and and one and a half dresses for Ana. (The second one will be finished tomorrow probably.) I wasn't really in a good state to take pictures of what I made, so here is a dress from last weekend. It's hard to see from the close up, but the skirt is a 6 panel trumpet shape, which looks too cute on a 4 year old. Hopefully I'll get a "live action shot" on her soon. And yes, I went ribbon crazy on the skirt. I need to replenish my ribbon stock really soon since every dress lately has had a ribbon hem.

sunset

sunset
Originally uploaded by wck

If that isn't a "move to seattle" ad, I don't know what is.

erector set jr

erector set jr
Originally uploaded by wck

That's Kate playing with her erector set, making a little truck. She made a great discovery last week. She was making some brownies from a mix that I'd bought, and she turned to her mom and announced, "Aunts buy more brownie mix than moms do." That's right, she's 4, and she's discovered correlation. I've long maintained that successful software testers need to understand two things: that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, and how to make and test a hypothesis. So since Kate has correlation down she's on her way to being a nerd.

AB Testing

37 signals just did a blog post on "Secrets to Amazon's Success. Here are my favorite three points:

Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad. I’ve been to several presentations by ex-Amazoners and this is the aspect of Amazon that strikes me as uniquely different and interesting from other companies. Their deep seated ethic is to expose real customers to a choice and see which one works best and to make decisions based on those tests.

Getting rid of the influence of the HiPPO’s, the highest paid people in the room. This is done with techniques like A/B testing and Web Analytics. If you have a question about what you should do code it up, let people use it, and see which alternative gives you the results you want.

Have a way to rollback if an update doesn’t work. Write the tools if necessary.

- http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/600-secrets-to-amazons-success

That matches up to two of the biggest things that I learned at amazon- you don't know what your customers will do, so you shouldn't guess, you should A/B test. And you're going to screw up unbelievably, and constantly, so you need instant rollbacks. Here's the thing. Amazon was my first job out of college, so I really didn't know any other way to do things. One of my first testing jobs there was to test the very first automated A/B mechanism on the retail site (a version that had died long before I ended up leaving the company- like all features I worked on my first few years, it was re-done a few times to be better than the first version). Testing it wasn't all that fancy, we just checked that visitors were dropped into buckets, saw the treatments tied to those buckets, and reporting worked correctly. The bigger impact on me was the lesson that this was the most important way that new features were going to be launched. It's an incredible testament to the success of A/B testing in the company culture that when I left 7 years later, nearly every new update (and even little tweaky things) to the site was launched initially as an A/B test. Russell used to have all of his launch plaques up on the desk over his wall, with a couple flipped upside down. The upside down plaques were- yes- the projects that bombed in the launch A/B testing phase.

I couldn't even begin to describe the number of rollbacks we did over the years. If you can think of it, we screwed it up. The important part was that we could recover quickly by backing out the change, and that we had a culture of learning from the screwups. In the retail world, there was a tradition of writing "How I broke the website" emails. I will admit to writing a couple- they went out to all the engineers, and carefully analyzed how you had, well, broken the website. You discussed how the problem should have been caught, and what you were going to do differently going forward to prevent that from happening again. Now that I've been at some other companies, I can see how critical the emails were. Breaking things was bad, but more important was sharing how you messed up, and taking the time to do a post mortem of the mistake, and then freely circulating the information. It wasn't the mea culpa that mattered- although accepting responsibility was a big part of it. Larger, really, was the learning you shared with the teams, and the environment where you learned how to recover gracefully from large messes.

37 signals mentions the 'just do it' awards that Jeff handed out. Less known outside of amazon are the 'door desk awards'. I'm not sure that they're still given out, but they used to be handed out at every All Hands meeting. A door desk award was similar to a 'just do it' award, but it was given to an individual who tried something- without their manager's approval- and failed. Their feature bombed in an A/B test, their code blew up, the project never launched, whatever. It was another piece of making an engineering culture where you should just go for it, because failure wasn't the end of the world.

declan's blog

What I've been up to in the last month since I posted here: going to the beach with Kate & Ana, starting a blog for declan, riding the PATH and the ferry to work and enjoying a mostly-Penn-Station-free month, visiting the midwest for a wedding, and watching Thomas grow even bigger. Farewell summer!

Hey, my biggest daily annoyance inspired a PopGadget post! I've had a 3M privacy screen on my laptop for ages because of all the people who would blatantly lean over on the train to see what was on my laptop's screen. Since I have EVDO, it was often work related, which was not so much something that I really want random people on NJT to see. Chrissie saw my screen a few weeks ago when I had to take it off to show her photos of declan, and now she has a post up on PopGadget about it. Neat. I really think they should come standard on laptops.

headphones & apple

Andrej's post on Apple design details reminded me of two Apple details that I recently discovered. They are great little detail-obsessive easter eggs. I noticed the first one at work a day ago- my macbook was muted, then I plugged in my headphones and went to change the sound level and noticed that it had updated to the level that I'd had it at last time I'd had headphones in it. Amazing! When I showed that to a coworker, he showed me how the ipod will pause your music if your headphones come unplugged. Those are such small details, but they're exactly the sort of tweaks that make a great product, ones which show that designers really use and play with their products when creating them.

A new icon for the city

The Eagle
Originally uploaded by wck

I walked across the new Olympic sculpture park in Seattle again this evening, watching everyone taking photos of the Eagle sculpture. It's been so fascinating to see how this one particular piece is really almost emerging as a new iconic image of Seattle. Flickr (which has tons of images of it) and the proliferation of digital cameras have certainly led to the ability of a new view of a city to crystalize. It's a gorgeously captivating piece, on its own, and mesmerizing in its location. Experiencing it person makes a strong impression, especially at sunset.

visiting seattle 101

I haven't had a great family vacation in a few years, so this past weekend when my cousins and aunt and uncle visited Seattle was tons of fun. I'm still out here for a while longer, hanging around Belltown, but they were only in town for 4 days. So my cousin and I took them all around to see the city, and I figured I'd list our itinerary here, since it's a decent list of things to see in one of my favorite cities.

Day One Arrive at Seatac, travel to Belltown to drop off luggage. Walk to Pike Place Market, make sure to pick up some good food at places like Piroshky Piroshky and Daily Dozen Doughnuts. Walk down First Ave to Harbor Steps. Walk halfway down Harbor Steps to Post Alley, head down to Pioneer Square. Stop in at lots of galleries, make your way to Cafe Umbria for an affrogato (espresso poured over gelato) and eat it on the chairs in the courtyard area. Then either catch a free route 99 bus up to Belltown, or walk back. Cook what you got from the market, eat dinner on a deck with a view of Elliott Bay.

Day Two If you're here on the right weekend, travel to Bellevue for the Bellevue Arts Fair. Marvel at all the crafts. Duck into Nordstroms. Eat some ice cream for lunch. Head home to Belltown, walk around the neighborhood a bit, then go up to Golden Gardens Park for the sunset. The beach is great in the evening, even if the water is freezing. If the art fair isn't around, you could go to Woodland Park Zoo or Volunteer Park.

Day Three If it's Sunday, go to Fremont for the Sunday Market and brunch and shopping. If you're feeling ambitious, you could also head over to Ballard. Head home after lunch, walk around downtown, then cook up some more food from Pike Place Market and watch a movie.

Day Four Tour the Olympic Sculpture Park and the Space Needle. Head up to the Japanese Garden in the Arboreteum, then go out for some Thai food. Afterwards, you could fit in a ferry ride.

There, that's the perfect four day visit to Seattle! The most important piece is huge dinners every night with everything from Pike Place market- squash soup, big salads, green beans, olive bread, skagit mud brownies, fruit pies and tarts, and lots of family.

My Best Friend's Wedding

This past weekend was busy busy busy, but one of the best ones I've ever had in my life. I'm out in Seattle, where my best friend just got married yesterday!

Brian & Josalyn are incredibly lucky to have found each other. I've had the chance to see how great they are together for the last couple years. Finally meeting so many members of Brian's family who I've talked to on the phone and heard stories about for years was a great experience, as was seeing so many Amazonians gathered for the party. There will be photos soon- I shot using my Canon EOS 7 (I believe I went through 10 rolls of 35mm with it) and Brian's Nikon DSLR that I used until the batteries ran out. Yes, I ran around the whole wedding with two huge cameras around my neck. Now I wish I could pull some pictures off the DSLR this morning but the battery charger is on the other side of Seattle's downtown. Considering the logistics involved in the wedding, having something small like that be the biggest problem is a great state to be in!

My two wedding jobs were to get Brian, his best man, and the groomsmen into the car and to the wedding on time- we accomplished that- and take lots of pictures. That left lots of time to have fun at the wedding and get to talk to Brian's family, so many "It's great to finally get to meet you after all these years!" were exchanged.

After brunch on Saturday, of course, I got my Harry Potter book from amazon. I snapped a few pictures of the great custom box before I tore into it. As the wedding started on Sunday, I'd managed to get all the way to the last 100 pages. I'd been cramming it in between the rehearsal dinner, the pre-wedding pictures, a few pages here and there. When I got home after the wedding last night I sat down & finished it up. It was very well done, and I enjoyed it a lot, quite a bit more than the previous one which I'd felt was a little weak. I'm not giving away any spoilers, but it's a fantastic read. I will admit I yelled at the couple a few months ago for planning the wedding on the Harry Potter release weekend, but it was fun sneaking in reading a few chapters in the middle of our parties & picture taking.

awww baby

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