Fender Bender

Last night as I was walking to my car, I noticed that there were flashing lights and cops all over the place. Just half a block from our building was this over-turned car sitting at the intersection. It kind of freaked me out since it's the same model and color as my car! I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw it was missing my liberal sticker on the back window.

Miraculously, no one was seriously injured in this mishap. The driver of the car was standing there talking on her cell phone, although she did look a little stressed.

The View from The Allrecipes Headquarters

One of the perks of working at Allrecipes is the amazing view of the space needle we have from our office windows. We're located directly across the street from the Seattle Center, an expansive area for concerts, festivals, sporting events, etc. and is the former grounds of the 1962 World's Fair, which I actually attended as a small child. Because I'm older than dirt, I'm the only Allrecipes employee that can make that claim. The center is a great place to take a lunchtime walk, especially in the summer when people are both relaxing and playing around the international fountain. After working for ten years in an industrial park in Redmond, it's nice to be in a urban setting like this.

Manifold Stew

Yann and I were looking at a user submitted photo for Salmon in the Dishwasher last week. A recipe that involves wrapping a piece of Salmon in foil and popping it into the dishwasher either alone or with your regular load of dishes where it miraculously cooks from the intense heat radiated from the machine.

I remembered that I once came across a recipe for cooking chicken under the hood of your car. It was in this great book called "How to Keep Your Honda Alive" which is the most offbeat car repair manual I've ever encountered. Full of funky cartoons and humorous stuff, but still very useful. I overhauled my engine using this book having no knowledge of auto mechanics whatsoever. They also made one for the VW Bug. I wish I could find that recipe again so that I could post it to the site.

We then began searching the site for all of the recipes that use "alternative heating methods". The one that really stood out is Manifold Stew, a recipe that can be prepared inside your car manifold. The main ingredient of this little gem happens to be "2 squirrels - skinned, gutted, and cut into pieces". Be sure to read all of the reviews. They're even funnier than the recipe itself.

Now I want to create a list which I intend to title "Recipes for when your gas is shut off". If anyone has come across more of these types of recipes, please leave a comment along with urls. I'm thinking that someone must have come up with one that can be made in your heat duct.

On the lookout for cool rich media ads

I'm working on an online media kit to show advertisers what sorts of effects we can do. I remember once seeing a rich media ad where the page it resided on appeared to tear, exposing the ad underneath the portion of the page that ripped. I'd like to emulate that, but I can't find anything like it now. If anyone runs into something similar, or any other cool effect, please post the url.

Arctic Blast 05!!

Glad to see that all of my coworkers braved the massively hyped "Arctic Blast" and made it to work today. Last night I was flipping channels, watching all the "point to point" coverage of the huge blizzard that is ravaging the pacific northwest. People from other parts of the country that actually do get snow must think that we're all completely insane here. When the predicted snow doesn't show up (which is 99% of the time) the local channels show us archived clips from past snow storms. Or if the snow only falls in a tiny area far away from Seattle, they send half of their reporters there to stand in the snow, looking cold and warning us of the dangers of tripping on snow covered curbs or slipping on the icy manhole covers.

Oh yeah. This is supposed to be work related. Um... I made some new banners today.

Testing, 1, 2, 3

Hello? Is this thing on?