Better living through search

...and following on from that very sad post, here's a nice cheerful piece about using search technology to make life a bit better.

My husband and I, we're trying to solve a problem.

We like food. We can *almost* cook well. But we keep cooking the same meals all the time. It's the default setting - look in the fridge, see the usual ingredients, make that same damn thing you made last time (I'm looking at you, vegetarian risotto).

Here's the thing - we actually try new recipes regularly, really regularly. We just forget what they were. I'll say 'hm, should we make this again?' and he'll say 'it's tasty - yes!' and then we will immediately forget what the recipe was, and which cookbook it was in, and the end result is always the same - more vegetarian risotto.

So my husband invented - and implemented - the solution: dinnerblog. It's not pretty, it's purely practical and for our own personal use, but you're welcome to look around if you like:

http://bit.ly/zoedougdinner

How we're using search to improve dinner

Each meal - even the boring ones - gets a post on dinnerblog.

Each post gets a photo, cooking notes, and - most importantly - it gets tagged with the ingredients in the meal.

It also gets categorised by the cookbook it came from (or 'uncategorised' if we just made it up).

So when we open the fridge and see, for example, capsicums, we can search the dinnerblog tags for 'capsicum'. Lo and behold - there are all the meals we've eaten with capsicums in, and the recipe source.

What with the wordpress iphone app, maintaining dinnerblog takes about two minutes a night, but it's already proved a pretty powerful tool for that most under-rated of search behaviours, re-finding (which I'll admit is a personal favourite).

In the space of a month, I think it's already improved our cooking. (As has Jamie's 30 minute meals, which I can't praise highly enough, even if it takes us double the time he estimates!)

Now here's hoping we can keep it up...

In memoriam

Dear Bonnie,

A little while ago, I had a meeting with the HR staff at my work. Right at the end, the HR lady (smart cookie, that one) asked me this question:

"Out of all the people you know here, whose career would you most like to have?"

It's a pretty simple question, but - I'll be honest - it blindsided me.

I couldn't think of anyone. I work in a company with over 800 staff members, and I couldn't think of a single person there whose career I really wanted - not a single one.

You wouldn't believe the amount of introspection I went through over the next week or so, or the amount my husband was subjected to. What am I doing? What do I want to do? What should I be aiming for? What do I want to be? What does that even look like?

Whose career would I most like to have?

Finally my husband said to me 'well, what about that lady you were telling me about? The American one. She's pretty cool, isn't she?'

And I thought it through.

Doing interesting work. Working in an interesting field. Being the boss. Savvy enough to move into new fields when old fields are crumbling. On top of new developments at a career stage where a lot of people have kind of ossified. Learning new stuff, using new stuff, meeting new people. Helping people out. Having fun with it. Respected.

Yeah, I thought. Doug's right.

I want to be like Bonnie.