Belated friend-blogging

My New Year's resolution to post to my blog more often was quickly challenged by my ongoing battle royale with the office cold, which has been epic. Thus I didn't have a chance to post a timely link to Clive Thompson's terrific piece on the problems with computerized voting machines - luckily, now the NYT archive is free, and Clive handily posted the piece to his blog. It was a typically Clivean excellent piece - full of great details, good explanations, and terrific quotes. No one who works with computers could have failed to have a chill run up their spine reading this:

When a county buys touch-screen voting machines, its elections director becomes, as Warren Parish, a voting activist in Florida, told me, "the head of the largest I.T. department in their entire government, in charge of hundreds or thousands of new computer systems, without any training at all."

My one disappointment with the piece is that he didn't mention the other way people are working to ensure that votes are counted correctly -- through design. The Design for Democracy project of AIGA, which featured among other contributors the work of my friend and neighbor Mary Quandt, has created best practices for polling place and ballot design, from a visual and information design standpoint. Their work has been accepted as official guidelines by the federal Elections Assistance Committee, and AIGA continues to work with individual states (including, yes, Florida), to make their ballots and polling place instructions easier to read and understand. Reliable voting machines are important, but a butterfly ballot could still screw up even the most technologically perfect election.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to my niecelets, who are three years old today, and not so small anymore. I spoke to them on the phone today, and they both wished me a happy birthday too, so we're even. (Also, my sister related back the best comment ever, when she took her always-up hair down: "Mommy, you have hair like Aunt Michele!" Those girls understand a trademark look when they see one.)

Vacation culinaria

Vacation culinaria
Originally uploaded by michelet.
Over the past week, I've been mostly hanging out at home, getting reacquainted with my apartment after a long and stressful last quarter of last year. When I spend time at home, taking care of the place, the urge to cook mostly just shows up by itself, and the last few days I have been cooking up a storm -- my freezer now has oatmeal breakfast clafoutis, French lentil soup, and mini leatloaves made entirely with farmer's market and other locally grown meat (so, so good.) A few of the dishes that never made the freezer were a white chili that improved markedly once it had sat in the fridge overnight, and this "pizza" on a whole wheat pita.

Riffing off of a cookbook recipe and my favorite pizza at Amorina, I caramelized half a thinly-sliced onion with some dried thyme, and at the very end added one chunked-up cremini mushroom to soften it. I put those on the pita with some mozzarella, a couple of pitted olives, and some marinated artichoke heart pieces. Ten minutes in the oven and it was delicious -- and, I thought, lovely. Here's hoping 2008 stays so satisfying.

Weekend reading

For myself, I'll be continuing to read The Arsonists's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, which is, fear not, a novel. But if you're looking for some Awesome Design reading, you could do worse than Five Reasons Why The iPhone Is Older Than You Think, which was written by my boss and makes reference to some findings from a research project I led. I also recently had my mind blown by The Sound of Interaction Design, which manages to combine principles for good design for interactive products with The Sound of Music. Goddamn clever British people. For those of you observing Yom Kippur, an easy fast, and a happy and a healthy New Year. Everyone else, have a great weekend, and eat something really fattening and greasy for me!

At the intermission of King Lear, Brooklyn Academy of Music

Dramatis Personae: Me and Lisa, who have had tickets since February, and Max, who delightfully was available to step in when Lisa's mother couldn't use her ticket. Max: I... I just saw Ian McKellen's bits. Me: You really didn't read any coverage of this play, did you? Max: You mean, you knew? Lisa: It's been in all the articles. Max: Was that why you bought the tickets?