Presenting my latest project, the Gillery. In a nutshell, the Gillery is a place where fungophiles can come together to show off and discuss their encounters with wild mushrooms through the creation what I term “Sightings.”

The Gillery has been my labor of love for the past three months. It started out as a project for the Ruby on Rails web development class I took this past semester, but it’s turned into so much more. It’s my very first Rails project (and also my first web project period), and although it’s still very much a work in progress, I got it to a point where I felt it had enough functionality and was stable enough to release as a public beta. 

So if you like mushrooms, please indulge me. Sign up and start creating sightings!

And if you’re not that into mushrooms, don’t fret. Armed with my newly-polished knowledge of Rails, I’m planning to release a group of sister sites focused on specific categories of wildlife in the near future (say by the end of the year). 

ingredients:

small handful fresh chanterelles or black trumpets (~5 oz)

2-3 tablespoons fresh butter

0.25 cup grated semi-hard melting cheese (I used Pedrozo Dairy Northern Gold)

Salt + fresh cracked pepper to taste

2 slices rustic bread

Dry sautée the mushrooms by placing them in an ungreased skillet over high heat. Add salt and cook until all of their juices have been released and evaporated (about 5-7 minutes). Lower the heat to medium and add 1 tablespoon olive oil or butter and pepper. Continue cooking for an additional 3 minutes. 

Combine warm mushrooms and cheese in a small bowl.

Grill the bread by placing slices on pan over medium heat greased 2 tablespoons of melted butter. Sandwich the mushroom/cheese mixture between the two slices and continue cooking on both sides until the sandwich is sufficiently browned.

Serve with an orange.

—

I used fresh forest mushrooms that I foraged in Sea Ranch.

Right now the Bay Area is experiencing the worst possible conditions for foraging wild mushrooms that one could possibly imagine in December. The ground that usually squishes and oozes water when stepped on is bone dry, and the small creeks that rage through ravines rife with froth are empty. I guess the third driest December in recorded history will do that.

Nevertheless, I decided to go foraging in the hills on the northern edge of the San Geronimo Valley (Marin) to test my luck. Once I climbed about 600 feet, I noticed hoards of dried-out mushrooms. There were, however, to my delight and surprise, some stray [fresh] milk caps that had been able to crack through the dry soil.

So I have this spot for black trumpets (C. cornucopioides). When I got there, my heart jumped when my eyes met up with three clusters of the tiny gems. That was the only significant find of the day—but it made the whole trip worthwhile, especially given the tough conditions.

I only picked the most mature bunch, leaving the other two clusters to nature. I sautéed the bulk of them in a little olive oil and placed them atop slices of mushroom-gruyère pizza from Arizmendi. And here’s the best part: I soaked the remaining two fresh trumpets in some Husch Sauvignon Blanc overnight to impart their delicate apricoty aroma. If you ever come across black trumpets, it’s something you must try…

Foraging for mushrooms is a mental game. It’s actually more of a dance. The fungi are always there—it’s their fruiting bodies that are elusive. In the summer, the parched lanscape offers nothing but dust and shade and anticipation. But in the wintertime, ahh, the wintertime, plump mushrooms, nourished by the wet soil and rain, lie tucked away between the crests of their hills and fringes of their forests. Their hills and their forests. Their landscape. But they call me, invite me in. They want to be found, to be marveled at during their short existence. They challenge me to look closely and look again, to travel deep into the forest to seek them out.

So I enter, enter their domain. There are little ones, big ones, ones whose times have come and gone, ones who’ve given themselves to the worms instead. And best, little gems that require persistance, some work to be found…the ones who’ve never been gazed upon by another creature. And of course, the ones that have yet to sprout. And the new ones, those for next year. 

People (myself included) are attracted to Freeman’s Blue Bottle Coffee the product, more so than the beverage itself. When you hand over your $4, you’re actually buying into an aesthetic and a philosophy. The aesthetic and philosophy of doing it 100% right. The comfort of knowing you’re getting the best product in its class with absolutely no uncertainty.

For me, Blue Bottle has reduced the vast coffee marketplace from the set of all [decent] coffee vendors to merely {Blue Bottle}. I long for the day when there’s a Blue Bottle in every product category—it will make decision-making considerably less difficult.

Ten years ago, the eleven-year-old me had an idea.  It was nothing more than an idea, and, well, would never be nurtured into anything grander.  At least not by me.  The idea was very simple.  The GPS navigation system had *just* become a standard feature on most luxury cars (remember, this was 2001). I imagined a service that would allow you to keep track of the location of your close friends and family at all times via the GPS in their cars.  

This seemed to me like a very futuristic idea—but at the same time, one that was perfectly achievable with the technology of the time.  So why did it take nearly a decade for anyone to implement this idea in any legitimate, sensible format?  Most importantly, I believe, because the concept of sharing intensely personal information through a lasting, far-reaching, and potentially public outlet took some time to develop.  Sure, email is a potentially far-reaching means of sharing personal information, and people have been using email en masse since the 80s or 90s.  But email conversations are comfortable.  Information is shared with and only with the people we input into the to field, and we pick and choose what to include in the message and when to send it. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook undoubtedly had the largest impact on breaking down our fear of sharing personal information openly and paved the way for services like Latitude.  Of course, one could argue that the knowledge of one’s location in space at any point in time is so invasively personal that comparing its acceptance to our comfort with a mere public status update or photo isn’t fair. The point I am trying to make is that the social networking phenomenon made personal information sharing between acquaintances ubiquitous and lead the majority of people to entrust corporations with their sensitive personal data—to the point where a service like Latitude could exist.

Now for the more exciting part of this post: Google Latitude the product.

As I mentioned, Latitude is a product I’ve literally dreamed of for years.  It serves two main functions for me.

Meet My Personal Recordkeeper

Latitude keeps a fabulous chronicle of my daily life without any work whatsoever on my part. We’re in an age in which data is overflowing to the point where the old past time of keeping a personal journal is practically redundant.  Think about it.  If I want to know what I did on March 12 of 2008…I can search through my email, text messages, phone call history or what have you to piece together most of my life at the time.  Location history logging (why not call it geologging?) is a powerful addendum to this vast assemblage of data about “you”—especially if you’re like me and find this kind of stuff nostalgic and entertaining.  It’s one heck of a data set to sift through. 

Consider this. One of my favorite parts of computerized games is reviewing the statistics of my performance. Latitude turns my life into a video game. I can see how many hours I’ve spent at home, work, or out last week (see the above image), and pinpoint what time of the week and how often I tend to visit certain neighborhoods (see the image below). I can even view a log of trips I’ve taken by airplane, which Latitude automatically determines and records in a section devoted to air travel.  I could go on an on about how much I love each and every way in which my data is visualized in History, so I urge you to check out the feature for yourself if you haven’t already.  

Note that this location history service is opt-in only, and you can delete your data selectively or completely at any time.  And as if that’s not enough to tackle the issue of privacy, Google sends monthly reminders that your location data is being shared with “Google Location History.”  It’s all very transparent.  To me, Google’s efforts are more than enough to quell any potential privacy concerns.  But honestly, visualizing my location data is so exciting that I’d probably use this service even if they didn’t handle privacy so delicately.  

Now onto its second use.

Presenting The Ultimate Efficiency Tool?

Latitude vastly simplifies the logistics of meeting up with friends.  How so, you ask? Let’s dive into an example.  Imagine you’re driving home from work one evening to meet a close friend at Philz Coffee in San Francisco at 6:30 pm.  You’re coming from Marin, she’s coming from the South Bay—and there’s traffic.  The odds that both of you will arrive at the coffeehouse at the same time are virtually nil. In a world without Latitude, you’d probably call or text her to find out where she is once you arrive, or if you’re wiser, as you near your destination. But that’s inefficient for a number of reasons. First, it requires action from both of you. Second, it only gives discrete blips of data, which aren’t that precise and take time to receive. If you need to make a split second decision whether or not you have time to run a quick errand before the meeting because your friend may be running a tad late, this system won’t cut it. 

You can probably already see how Latitude is a solution to this problem.  With Latitude, I simply check my phone before I leave or am on my way to meet a friend.  If I see that I’m going to get to our meeting point in advance of her, I’ll either leave later or run an errand (like getting gas) to make use of the time that I would have otherwise spent idling. 

In a nutshell, Latitude improves the efficiency of my daily life.

This is a fairly substantial claim, but is one that I stand by. I use Latitude for the purpose I just described nearly every day, and every day I become more and more convinced that it really does make my life more efficient. 

Again, Google has done an excellent job making your sharing preferences extremely transparent.   The user has complete control over with whom they share their location data.  I only share with extremely close friends and family, which I feel is probably the most sensible option for everyone. At the risk of sounding patronizing, remember that this data is quite revealing, so be selective of with whom you share it.  

Another privacy feature that I’m quite keen on is that you can customize your sharing preferences for each of your friends.  With some, you may choose to share only city-level data.  With others, no sharing.  And with your closest friends, exact coordinates. And of course, you can quickly halt all sharing at any time with the slide of a virtual switch.  

Turning Cool into Really Cool

The potential uses of the data that Latitude collects are astonishing.  For example, if Google knows which neighborhoods and destinations you frequent, as well as when and how often you visit them, the sky is the limit for the quality of targeted advertisements they could deliver.  They could very well disrupt the advertising industry for the second time.  Granted, Google might want to ease into this level of targeted advertising very slowly, as many will undoubtedly be quite averse to it.  I’m all for it though.  If you’re the kind of person who would go out of your way to allow Google to keep your location history, you’d probably look past the privacy implications and embrace the utility of such customized ads.  

Latitude could also improve the efficiency of your everyday life even further.  For example, imagine receiving a notification telling you that you could shave 3 minutes a day off your commute to work by taking Exit B as opposed to Exit A.  The list could go on and on.  

That said, here’s a list of features I’d like to see that would be fairly easy to implement:

{1} Integration with calendars.  If you and and a friend have an event set up that includes a location, Latitude could send you a push notification if one of your friends is running late, which it could determine automatically.  

{2} Quick calculation of travel time between friends.  Latitude sort of has this feature, but it could be improved.  Currently, if I want to find out how long it will take my friend to reach me (with traffic considerations), I click the “Get Directions” button that Latitude has on my friend’s profile. This takes me to the Maps application on my iPhone, where I have to reverse the starting point and destination.  This process is sort of clunky. It would be extremely useful for logistics purposes if Latitude could include travel times between friends in both directions as a part of the data they provide for quick reference.

Let’s Be Realistic

It’s probably going to take some time for the majority of people to parse the utility of Latitude amid the swirl of perceived privacy issues that surround it.  All I can say is that I’m embracing it. And loving it.  

Every summer, I like to have a little project to occupy my spare time.  I like to choose something that develops over the course of the summer into a tangible end so I have something to look forward to throughout the season.  Nothing too involved…just a little diversion to occupy a few minutes a day.  The previous two years, I reared wild silk moths.

This year, I cloned mushrooms.  

It all started back on June 2nd, when I picked up a few scant ounces of the finest blue oyster mushrooms from my favorite mushroom shop in San Francisco (I actually bought abalone mushrooms too…but they haven’t fruited yet, so I’m confining this post to the oysters).  Lacking a sterile laminar flow hood, I wiped down the kitchen counter with diluted isopropanol and sliced off a wee bit of tissue from the sterile interior of one of the mushrooms and placed it on a petri dish of potato dextrose agar.  Hey, my experience with mammalian cell culture actually came in handy here!

I’m not going to go into all the other details of the process right now, but know that it actually wasn’t *that* complicated. I’m planning to create *the definitive tutorial* on DIY mushroom culture soon so stay tuned, as most of the guides out there now leave much to be desired.  I hacked together most of the aseptic conditions and sterilization processes of which one *should* be extremely mindful, and to my surprise, only ended up with two minor contamination events.  

Fast-forward two months.  I have a large white cuboid mass wrapped in a plastic bag on the windowsill.  It’s wet newspaper that’s been colonized with the oyster mushroom mycelia.  And ah yes, it’s been fertilized with a nourishing heap of Blue Bottle Coffee grounds (what’d you expect?  Only the finest coffee for my mushrooms; and for those who are curious…I think it was Ethiopia Yirgacheffe KOKE).

Last week, when I had the log in a dark room, small white mushroom-looking pinheads began appearing.  They seemed to be growing well at first, but then started forming weird fractal-like coral protrusions, which, I later found, results from lack of sunlight.  So, on Friday, I popped them on the windowsill and went away for the weekend.  I came back tonight (Monday night) and found this:

Success.  A huge success.  It blows my mind that I was able to coerce a tiny cm-wide scrap of mushroom tissue to multiply into this…

just by providing the right conditions.  Blows my mind…

I’ll leave you with one more pic:

Expect another post on how I end up cooking ‘em up!

I’ll admit it. I’m a sucker for food trends. Salted carmel is no exception. Once you try these salted caramel brownies, you’ll never view salted caramel (or brownies) the same way. These might just be the best brownies ever created…but you’ll have to make them for yourself to weigh in.

Adapted from Dulce de Leche Brownie Recipe, David Lebowitz

8 tablespoons (115g) salted or unsalted butter, cut into pieces
6 ounces (170g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, finely chopped
1/4 cup (25g) unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
3 large eggs
1 cup (200g) sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup (140g) flour
optional, but recommended: 1 cup (100 g) toasted pecans or walnuts, coarsely chopped

salted caramel (recipe follows)

1) Preheat oven to 350°F

2) Line an 8”x8” pan with a sheet of aluminum foil. Grease the bottom and sides with butter or nonstick spray.

3) Melt butter in a medium saucepan. Add chocolate and stir constantly over low heat until completely melted.  Remove from heat and whisk in cocoa powder, followed by eggs, one at a time, sugar and vanilla. Next, stir in the flour. Add the nuts.

4) Pour the brownie batter into the prepared pan. Top with the caramel and swirl in with a knife.

5) Bake for 30-45 minutes. The brownies are done when the center feels slightly firm.

salted caramel recipe:

1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon sea salt
3 tablespoons cream cheese

Heat sugar, corn syrup, and water over medium heat until it takes on a nice brown color (about 5-6 minutes). Remove from heat and immediately stir in cream, followed by salt and cream cheese.

I had the chance to attend an awesome and inspiring talk at work today about something I’d never heard of: sigmoid curve theory.  The talk was given by Dan Maher, Senior VP of Product Development at BioMarin.

The essence of the sigmoid curve is as follows: as you progress through your career,  your level of satisfaction with your career is going to adhere to a predictable pattern for each position you hold. When you first start your new job, you’re most likely very motivated.  However, as with anything new, you must first go through a transitional period in which you’re likely to make mistakes, which can be discouraging, before you can really flourish.  This transition is the first region of the sigmoid curve (which should actually be called a sine function windowed from 0-2π, as the curve shown above is not technically sigmoidal).  Hopefully, after this initial bump, you begin to excel in your position.  You take on (and are given) more responsibility, you learn new things, and you may even pick up a promotion or two along the way.  Most importantly, you’re growing: adding value to your skill-set by doing increasingly more challenging, fulfilling things.  Right now you’re on the upswing of the curve, say Point A.  

At this point, you might want to step back and reflect on where you’ve come.  Ask yourself this: is there room to grow in this position?  Dan used a personal example to give insight into when you’ve peaked.  He had risen through the ranks at Genentech (he was actually their first employee with a college degree!) to become the number one at one of their manufacturing facilities with 200+ direct reports.  Even more impressive, he helped pioneer the product development guidelines of one of the founding companies of the biotech industry.  But after a few years as Product Manager, Dan found that he was doing the same thing day in and day out; he had already dealt with the problems he might encounter in prior years.  The days of discovering new things, tackling challenges, and learning were behind him at Genentech.  He knew he was nearing his peak at the company, and decided to resign for fear of descending to Point B on the curve, dissatisfaction.  He had no room to grow on his current curve, so he jumped to another higher-reaching curve.

Dan emphasized that it is far better to make a move at Point A (when decline is imminent), when you have the momentum of your performance at current position to carry you through the difficult task of finding and settling into a new job.  Don’t wait until you’ve already peaked, or the task becomes exceedingly difficult.  Furthermore, “changing curves” within the same company is preferable, as it is much less risky.

In summary: sigmoid curve theory = changing or upgrading your job before stagnation or decline is imminent.  Another important point about sigmoid theory is that it makes resigning from a position a positive thing.  In sigmoid theory, resigning is not an expression of dissatisfaction with your current position.  It’s actually the opposite.  When you resign from a position, you’re essentially telling your shareholders/company/employer, “hey, we’ve both gained a great deal from my experience here, in fact probably as much as both of us are going to gain. So I’m ready to step out to make waves in some other capacity (either within the same company or elsewhere) and allow someone else who will make more waves than I would here step in.” At least that’s my (positive) take on it.

I’m curious to know if anyone has any other ideas on what it means to “grow” in your career.  Discussing what growth in this sense is will help others determine whether they should stay at their current positions (i.e. they have room to grow) or look for alternatives (they’re heading towards Point B, no growth). 

Here is a link to text of the original article on sigmoid curve theory, written by Charles Handy.