simoncoles.org   Simon Coles Personal Blog

The view from my office at home, taken and posted using the WordPress iPhone app.

No hope of getting in to the office today and even if we did I suspect it would be lonely!

An amusing and thought provoking TED talk.

So… I am cooking occasionally. Which is of course no big deal, unless you realise how much this isn’t my thing! One tries etc.

Anyway, naturally I want all those pesky paper recipes somewhere electronic, so I can search them (and paper is *so* old fashioned!

I also want to be able to spit out a shopping list. Ideally, I want to be able to do a weekly meal plan, produce a weekly shopping list, and have it all work out nicely.

SousChef for the Mac does this… quite nicely in fact. but…

I have multiple machines, and I want to be able to do this from whatever machine I’m on. I also want to share the database with the rest of the family because this is a collaborative endeavour.

All this points to a web-enabled SousChef. Or at least, SousChef with a database which is shared in the Cloud.

Oh, I need something with UK units, and Weight Watchers aware.

A few minutes Googling tells me there’s nothing out there… which sucks.

BTW, SousChef is really impressive, lots of nice touches. But I need the “Any machine, any one” bit…

Bit frustrating really, stuff’s out there but not quite. The geek in me wants to write my own, but I don’t have time. Would love to find a solution. Perhaps there’s a business here?

I’m finding Twitter is making the world feel a lot smaller. Because I work with people in different countries most of the time, and travel a lot, it already felt small. But with Twitter I can really see the rhythmn of life around the world.

I’ve just recently discovered two really interesting web sites. The first is Twistori which shows Tweets mentioning various different emotions. Simple, and quite entrancing.

From that site, I found WeFeelFine which is a really funky visualisation of similar data (but weblogs, not Tweets), but you can focus on specific demographics (sex, age range etc.).This is their Mission:

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

How lovely.

People are fascinating!

Found an tnteresting presentation on how Chemical Engineering can help solve the very real problems we’re facing – get it here.

Not sure where I found this – probably somewhere in the Twitter stream… apologies for no direct attribution, I’m a bit behind on reading and it’s all just ended up as loads of Windows open in OmniWeb.