Josh Gomez

This year I decided to take on the dinner from a different angle. Cooking. What a piece of cake.

I was really surprised how easy it was to cook a Thanksgiving meal. Of course I didn’t try anything fancy, since my primary goal was just to avoid failure. Recipes are easy to find online, but the real help came from my family. Like any project, visualizing your outcome is a good place to start.

My sister gave me some good advice by telling me to sketch a drawing of what will be going on the plate. First, you want to make sure everything is going to fit nicely. Second, you should make the food look pretty. I actually decided to add corn as a side, not to eat, but only to add some more color.

When it came to the bird, everything seemed straight-forward. Wash it down, tie it up and rub it down. The only gray area was deciding whether or not to cover it up. Some recipes said you should have a roasting pan with a lid, others said to use foil, and some people used turkey bags, and some didn’t mention anything about covering the turkey. All I had was foil, so that’s what I used. A tight seal around the roasting pan works fine.

Timing is probably the most difficult thing. Immediately after the bird came out (3.5 hours later), the green bean casserole and mashed potatoes went in to bake for 30 minutes. On the stove top I made the turkey gravy, using the drippings from the roasting pan, and warmed some canned corn. Towards the end of the baking, we slid some biscuits in the oven and prepared the stuffing. It was a miracle that everything was ready all at once.

Everything turned out wonderful and must have been pretty good, since everyone had two plates. Maybe next year I will give a shot at baking my own desserts? I was also thinking about trying a grilled or deep-fried turkey. One thing is for sure, it was so much fun that I might be in the kitchen during every Thanksgiving.

Where will you be this New Year’s Eve? Would you rather be somewhere else?

The last couple of weeks, I have been tempted to fly to San Francisco for The Mars Volta show on New Year’s Eve. I am amazed that the show has not sold out.

No one is able to go with me. What should I do?

Last week was very exciting at work. I made lots of progress on the new AMBER Alert website in such a short amount of time. I kind of started over last Monday with the layout and HTML structure, just because I wasn’t feeling my first shot at it. That’s how it usually goes. This week has started out slow, but I hope to pick it up here in the middle.

Most of the work to be done is part of the Child ID Kit section. I plan on overhauling the existing page template I have for this section and developing a new foundation so it has a custom look. I am trying to get more space for pretty photos of the software interface and the actual USB device. I will also be adding a secondary horizontal navigation bar for the Child ID Kit section.

By the end of the week, I am hoping to have a soft launch of the website.

Working on the new AMBER Alert site has drained my motivation to complete this blog. However, this weekend will give me the time I need.

I’ve been keeping a steady pace with the maintenance of this here blog. However, when I move forward with content and design, I end up slacking in the code department. I need to tighten up my page templates and get the most out of my sidebar. Most importantly I need to get a list of plugins together and get them running smoothly.

Page Templates

Besides the default Wordpress templates I need to configure, I also need to create custom templates for each of the sections of my website. I have some ideas for my About section involving a personal timeline and maybe some integration with the handful of social networking groups I belong to.

The two other templates I have been working on (sketching out) since the beginning are my Projects  and Topics sections. I would like to have a nice section for each project I worked on with sketches, drafts and finished product screenshots. That would be nice to have, just for my personal archive. Topics should be fairly easy to create, once I get on the ball and start blogging about shit worth reading. Right?

Sidebar

What’s the sidebar all about? I don’t know, but everyone keeps raving about how cool sidebars are, so I decided to just do it. So far, well, you see what I got. Maybe a photo of a fake office fern?

Plugins

Finding plugins that are worth a damn is always fun. After going on so many hunts, I’ve created a nice library of surefire killers. Now I finally have a reason to organize it, dip it into subversion and share it with you. Later.

I’m finally getting somewhere with the  new design of AMBERAlert.com, so it feels good to show some of the progress I have made with the homepage in the last two days. I will be making some small changes to the layout and filling the gaps today before opening the flood gates of criticism at the office. In the meantime, comments on what you see now are welcome here.