Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

I’m reading Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests and found this quote in it. I would recommend this book to any developer, I’m learning much from it and I’ve only read five chapters so far!

Ingredients (for 3):

• A little vegetable oil (I use sunflower)
• A teaspoon of sesame oil
• 2 Celery sticks
• 1 Carrot
• 1 Head of broccoli
• Miso paste
• Ginger
• Sesame seeds
• A dash of tabasco or tiny bit of chili in some other form

Recipe:

• Slice the celery thinly so you get moon shaped slices.
• Peel and slice the carrot into half centimetre circles.
• Put some vegetable oil and the sesame oil in a large saucepan.
• Once the oil is hot, drop in the celery and carrot and saute for 5 minutes.
• Separate the broccoli into florets and add to the pan.
• let it all saute for a few more minutes while stirring regularly to ensure all the brocoli gets mixed in.
• slice some ginger as thin as you can and add to the pan. I would say 5 or so thin slices should do it.
• Boil some water separately in an electric kettle and then add it to the pan. About half a liter of water, enough to generously cover the rest of the vegetables.
•  Add Miso paste to taste. 2-3 tablespoons should do the trick.
• Turn the soup off and toast some sesame seeds to sprinkle on top.
• Enjoy!

I just added my picture to the header of the site. I really like how it turned out. Here are before and after shots:

Thanks to Ruth for taking the picture. :)

I have been contemplating redesigning my website. Recently however wordpress updated and now there is a new default theme which comes with it (twenty eleven). I rather like this new theme and can’t convince myself (yet) if I still should redesign…

Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

I would like to redesign it so that it doesn’t look like the stock wordpress theme but should I?

Ingredients (for 2)

For the rice

• A little oil (personally I like sunflower oil for this)
• 1 large Clove of Garlic (Crushed)
• 1 cup of Basmati Rice (You may not need this much - I do love rice)
• 1.5 cups of Water
• salt to taste (~1/3 tsb)

For the Beans

• A little oil
• 1 medium onion (chopped)
• 1/2 tsb Cumin Seeds
• ~15 Cherry Tomatoes
• 1 tin of Butter Beans
• 1 tbsp Vegetable Stock
• 1/2 cup of Water
• salt to taste
• Yogurt (Personally I like greek yogurt but any plain yogurt will do)

Recipe

For the rice

• Boil some water
• Heat the oil and add the crushed garlic and stir
• Once the garlic is golden (this will be very quick) add the water and the salt
• Add the rice and cover
• Once it starts boiling turn down the heat as low as possible and leave to cook for ~20 minutes. After 20 minutes taste the rice to see if it is cooked. If the water dries up before the rice is cooked then add a small amount more. Note: you want the water to dry up completely at the same time as the rice becomes cooked!

For the Beans

Once the rice is on start the beans.

• Heat the oil and add the chopped onion
• Let the onion simmer stirring occasionally until golden
• Add the cumin seeds and stir for 30 seconds or so
• Add the cherry tomatoes (whole!)
• Drain and rinse the tin of butter beans and then add to the pot.
• Add a little water (~1/2 a cup)
• Add the vegetable stock and salt
• Leave to cook on a medium heat stirring occasionally until the cherry tomatoes have exploded and made the beans tasty.

Hopefully by now the rice is just about done and you can eat it :) Serve with the yogurt which although you might not think would go that well with the tomatoey beans it works a treat. Enjoy!
Note: The measurements might be a tad off as I usually measure to eye.

I’ve wanted to learn the basics of graphic design for a long time. I even bought The Graphic Design School as I thought it would help me get on my way.

After letting it sit on the shelf for a long time and gather dust I have finally taken it down and plan to use it alongside the vast amount of resources available around the web. (I will link to some which I have found useful/interesting below.)

• Lifehacker - Learn the basics of Design

• Meet Your Type I found this to be a good introduction to typography. It gives an overview of its main aspects, although there is not much detail in the descriptions.

• Creative mornings - A series of half hour talks given by designers about anything. I’ve been really enjoying these - I’m finding them inspirational and generally thought provoking.

I think the process of learning more about design in general is going to be a slow one but I’m glad I’ve made a start. I hope (and think) that it will prove to be a valuable skill to have as it can influence most of the choices I make thought my life. I will post more thoughts on design when they occur to me but for now I leave you with the following question which is a rephrasing of something I heard. Do you think it is possible to design/make/produce anything that everybody really loves or is it a case of if no one hates it no one is likely to love it either?

I know you are all thinking “this is the second post, not the first” but I have decided to call it post one for a number of reasons.

Firstly. The geeky reason: we all know (or do we) that indices start at zero therefore this post has the index one.

Secondly. The non-geeky reason: The first post was automatically generated and not actually created by me so this is in actual fact my first post.

Personally, I prefer the geeky reason.

Before I ramble on too much I would like to talk a little about how I intend to use this site.

I plan to use this site to post thoughts, rambles and perhaps the occasional recipe. I don’t expect to post very often, in fact I expect my posts will be few and far between. The posts on here will be as much for my own reference as anyone else’s, however if you stumble across one of my posts then I hope you have enjoyed reading.

Thats all for now,

Inti

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!