In this episode, I’m joined by Ashely Rodriguez of Not Without Salt, an absolutely gorgeous website where she expertly combines three of my favorite subjects: food, family and photography.
Ashley and I discuss the importance of creativity in the kitchen, her food photography techniques, some great sources of inspiration for developing recipes, and finding joy in cooking for your family.
In this episode, I’m joined by Shawn Blanc, a full time technology blogger and barbecue enthusiast who currently resides in Kansas City; a city renowned for it’s unique form of barbecue.
Shawn and I cover the fundamentals of great smoked barbecue, how to hack your own smoker, and uncover the mystery that is “burnt ends”.
Public speaking is an area that I’ve always considered myself to be a bit lacking. I’ve never taken one of those personality tests, but I’m pretty confident that I’d land on the mildly introverted side of the spectrum. Left to my own devices, I can very easily spend an entire workday without interacting with anyone verbally.
In an effort to break out of this self-built shell, I’ve been forcing myself to step outside my comfort zone and participate in several speaking engagements over the past year. Among these included a few presentations at my local CocoaHeads chapter and multiple guest appearances with Jim Metzendorf on The Comic Shack podcast. And even though I still haven’t quite conquered the pre-flight jitters I feel before each of these talks, once they’re over I’m always happy I participated and contributed.
An unintended side effect of these speaking engagements is that they’ve lead to some additional opportunities and projects I never would have considered a year ago. I’m very happy to announce two upcoming projects I’m extremely excited about:
Am I nervous about being listed alongside some of the most well know Apple developers in the industry? You bet.
Do I realize that despite being pretty accomplished in the kitchen, I’m a complete newbie when it comes to producing a podcast? Absolutely.
It’s still not easy for me to completely ignore all my lizard brain reservations, but thanks to a conversation I had with a very smart Mann, I realized I don’t have to. By setting them aside, ever so briefly, some pretty amazing things can happen.
Based on my post-meeting conversations, my Unburdened ViewControllers presentation for the August Meetup of the Triangle CocoaHeads seemed to have hit a nerve — which is good! Some of the large-scale iOS apps I’ve worked on have usually contained overly complex ViewControllers. This talk described a couple of strategies for delegating that complexity and so that your ViewControllers can focus on their original purpose of coordinating the flow of the application.
Other presentations from this month’s meeting included Collections in Foundation by Kevin Conner and an Multithreaded Drawing by Eric Lanz.
As I’m never one to pass on an opportunity to talk about Batman, I happily accepted Jim’s invitation to join him on Episode 13 of The Comic Shack to discuss the parallels between The Dark Knight Rises movie and The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel.
Sometimes we can think ourselves into doing pretty much nothing.
Why?
Because we think there are so many things to do, that we can’t do one thing. There are so many things we’re doing badly, that we can’t do one thing well. There are so many things we’ve failed at in the past, there’s no chance in the world we’re ever going to do anything cool again.
So what do you do? You MOVE. Almost any kind of movement is better than doing nothing.
Merlin Mann, Back to Work Episode 78
As episode 6 of The Comic Shack was wrapping up, Jim announced that the guest for the next episode would be none other than 5by5 host and Internet legend Merlin Mann. Later in the week, I jokingly mentioned to Jim via twitter that I’d be willing to forego a princely sum of money to simply sit in on the live recording.
What I wasn’t expecting at all was that Jim would invite me back to be a second guest alongside Merlin. Once I regained consciousness and pulled myself off the floor, I immediately accepted his offer.
The result of our conversation can be heard in the aptly named “Snakt!” where we discussed the X-Men, Lee vs. Kirby, Merlin’s public affections for Jean Grey, and our shared opinion that Kurt Wagner, aka Nightcrawler, would be a cool guy to hang out with.
As a recovering comic book collector and long time listener of the 5by5 Network, I was excited and honored when Jim Metzendorf invited me to join him on this week’s episode of The Comic Shack. In this episode, we covered my comic book collecting “origin story”, how I wandered away from comics, and the series of events that got me interested in collecting again.
Despite this being my first time participating in a podcast (please excuse all the “umms”, “you-knows”, and referring to Joss Whedon as “Josh”), Jim did a great job of making me feel comfortable and guiding the conversation.
For the May Meetup of the Triangle CocoaHeads I presented on the topic of Taming Xcode Behaviors. This presentation was heavily influenced by a recent blog post by Brian Webster which explained how you can improved your Xcode proficiency by combining Behaviors and Tabs.
Other presentations from this month’s meeting included Got Accessibility? by Marty Cullen and an Overview of Bonjour by Kevin Conner.
Just hold the ⌘-Key a bit longer to get a list of all active short cuts of the current application. It’s as simple as that.
Quite a simple, yet incredibly useful utility. Hat tip to Ben Brooks