trying to fix some code, i managed to blow up the blog. so here is a new design. more tech detail later, but this comes from the brilliant k2-inspired theme by dean robinson, redoable. i hope you like it. i’ll work on some more customization soon.
Results
Update Monday, May 7th: Well, a night in the fridge did nothing to help out the strawberry jam. We have a solid block of a deep purple substance I can only describe as being somewhat akin to hard candy. I’ll try again soon, but this time I’ll do some more research!
With all those berries, I had to cook something up. Above, you can see the good – a yummy strawberry buckle, a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated I modified from it’s origins as a blueberry buckle for the wonderful fruit just picked yesterday I had on hand. Below is the bad. I thought it would be great to try making jam – strawberries have so much natural pectin that it’s easier than most fruit. The allrecipes.com instructions didn’t highlight how carefully I’d have to watch this – and while chasing Sam around the house I managed to let the bottom stick and burn, essentially ruining the flavor of the whole batch. I’ll test it in the morning to see how it turned out, but I do not have high hopes. But the buckle goes into the recipe book as one to keep.
Picking a Winner
With Amy pulling seven gigs in three days, I 
was Mr. Mom, and looking for things to entertain Sammy. On Saturday, we headed out with Sam’s future wife and his parents to a ‘u-pick-’em’ strawberry farm near McDonough, GA. With flavor you just don’t get from supermarket specimens, and at $8.50 a bucket (around 5 pounds worth), it was well worth it. And Sammy and Sophie had an absolute blast. There is a great website (Atlanta-area farms here) that catalogs all these self-picking farms across the country – we plan to hit the blueberry and fig farms later this summer. And maybe then Sam will get to see Old McDonald – he kept asking for him! We finished the day with a wonderful lunch (shrimp and grits, mmm) at a cute place in McDonough called Truman’s – well worth the visit. More photos of the outing are here. (Photo at right of Sam’s hand with a strawberry by my friend Joel Silverman, photographer extraordinaire. See his site here).
GameTap Opens the Spigot
So the news broke earlier this week that everyone’s favorite broadband gaming site, Turner’s very own GameTap is expanding their offering to include free-to-play games in an ad-supported environment. You can guess that my team has been actively working on this project for a while. It’s pretty exciting. Much like the varying levels of ‘membership’ on services like Xbox Live, GameTap will offer non-paying, non-registered users access to some games, playable from a light-weight version of their ‘grandaddy’ client. General Manager Stu Snyder (who was just promoted yesterday to a new role as executive vice president and chief operating officer of animation, young adults & kids media in addition to his GameTap role) said it this way in the Business Week story:
“With 2 to 3 million uniques per month, we realized we weren’t monetizing that many uniques to our website,” he says. “We kind of looked back and said, ‘gee, we should [offer an ad-supported version].’ Also, our demographic was looking for an easy way to play games without making a huge time commitment or financial commitment. So we figured why not have all options for all gamers?”
Other content becomes available with a free registration, and users can graduate to the full product and 800+ games with a full subscription. We have also been working to support an ad-supported version of the large range of video content previously only available in the full client known as Gametap TV. I think this ad-supported model has some real legs! Coverage of the project has been widespread, from Business Week, Ars Technica, Kotaku, and the San Jose Mercury News.