Idea day!

So yesterday I had what I've decided to call an "idea day". It's a day where my creative juices are flowing, and I have a far above average number of crazy ideas, 99.97% will never go anywhere beyond the idea stage.

It seems there are a few factors that go into having an idea day. Based on yesterday's experiences, I've attempted to distill it down into the most basic components:

1. Low stress levels
2. Well rested
3. Inspirational reading material
4. A feeling of excitement about the future

I wish I could say these things came together for me on a regular basis, but it's a semi-rare occurance these days. I wonder if I had idea days more often if they would be as fast and furious as they are now. Am I actually generating the ideas right then or just releasing the ideas that have been building up in my head?

One of my ideas from idea day was an effective way of capturing the ideas. Even though I know most of them will never come to fruition, I want to know what they are. I have a mini-voice recorder I use for this sometimes, although I hate having to hear my recorded voice when I play them back. Being a nerd, there's going to be a database involved. Boo yeah!

Another idea that came out of idea day is a webmaster group at the University to provide the kind of collegial support I was longing for yesterday. It looks like this one is actually going to happen - I have a meeting next week to get the process started.

Industry Conferences and the Daily Grind

So when I'm not making mojitos and playing World of Warcraft, I am a web developer for University of Arizona. My boss considers "keeping abreast of industry developments" to be one of my primary duties, so I read lots of industry news, including a decent number of blogs. (I keep meaning to post a blogroll, but I'm sooooo lazy.)

This past weekend was BloggerCon, and the folks over at Monkey Bites were in attendence. Yet another industry conference in I have no chance of going to, because I don't actually work in the industry. (Actually, BloggerCon is actually more of an un-industry un-conference, but the point of this post is conferences.)

Most of the time, I don't mind the differences between the education sector and the private sector. I've learned to swallow the crappy pay, the fact that I'm a single webmaster with a single site rather than part of a team, and the total lack of anything resembling a "development budget". But conferences, especially the big ones like SXSW and Web 2.0, remind me of the divide between people who work "in the industry" and me. They have money for conferences and training, we don't. In industry, there is a constant push for innovation and excellence, in education many times the goal is just getting by.

I am a passionate web designer and developer. I'm opinionated about user interface design, web standards, and accessibility. When I first started working on websites for a living, I soaked up information about how to do the best job possible like a sponge. I could literally tell you every supported and non-supported CSS property in all the major browsers at the time. Now my days are mostly spent doing updates and day-to-day maintenence. I feel like my enthusiasm for web technologies has waned, and I'm burnt out and jaded.

So I guess this is really a post about the daily grind. Conferences are a break from the daily grind. I suppose vacations and the more flexible schedule that I get from working in education are too. Mostly I miss the opportunity to talk to other people who are passionate about the things that I am passionate about - to hear their ideas and bounce my ideas off of them. Surely there must be some way for me to get that here at the University. In the meantime, I'll live vicariously through conference blogging.

The Perfect Mojito

So a while ago, Dave and I were talking about how fast mint grows, and what one does with all that mint. I said "Mojitos! They're so 2001!". But apparently mojitos are still trendy, because they're featured on Bacardi commercials right now.

My first mojito recipe came from a May 2002 issue of Cooking Light, and is the one I've been using. Ten mint leaves, 2 tsp sugar, 2 oz. light rum, 2 tbsp. fresh lime juice, and 6 oz. club soda. All in all, I'm happy with this version of the mojito. Dave's is slightly sweeter and has less lime juice, and he's happy with his too. We've both working on the mint squishing so that we don't break up the leaves too much.

So I looked online to see if there was a general consensus on mojito making. There isn't. Lots of the recipes I found were much sweeter, some used less lime, some used a sugar syrup instead of granulated sugar. Some recipes have lots less club soda, and it seems that adding more soda has been part of the "Americanization" of the drink. And then to make it more confusing, someone who claimed he knew what he was doing said that you should actually start with lime slices and muddle them in the glass with the mint and sugar to release lime essential oils, and forget about lime juice entirely. Someone else said it's actually better with dark rum instead of light.

Now it pays to bear in mind that neither Dave nor I have ever had a mojito made for us at any bar, or in Cuba, or anywhere else. We're going on our innate gringo mojito instinct, which probably is about as strong in us as say, The Force.

So tonight the mojito experiments begin. I don't know what'll be going down at Dave's house, but I have grand plans to refine my mojito into the perfect (for me) drink.

Just Stuff

I've been trying to write a new post for a while now, but they always seem to get stalled part way through. I'm not sure why.

Things her have been pretty medium for a while now. James is out of school, I decided not to take a class this summer, I went to DC for Sarah's graduation, Gracie came to visit, and I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my summer. I think I'm going to to to a yoga class tonight. Also, it's a bazillion degrees in Tucson. I mean, 101.