Author: Joey deVilla

Today’s predicted temperatures for Accordion City are:

• –3 C (27 F) in the morning
• -1 C (30 F) in the afternoon
• -7 C (19 F) tonight

Bundle up!

If you work in an office with a microwave in the break room, there’s a chance you’ll catch a strong chocolate aroma during break time. That’s because the “Cake in a Mug” recipe, which requires a coffee mug, a microwave oven, hot chocolate mix and a few other easy-to-get ingredients has been making the rounds on the forwarded-email circuit.

The Recipe

There are a few variants of the recipe floating around the ‘net. This is the simplest one and comes from Wired’s “How-To” wiki.

Ingredients

• Egg: 1
• Flour: 4 tablespoons
• Hot chocolate mix: 9 tablespoons
• Non-stick cooking spray
• Oil: 3 tablespoons
• Water: 3 tablespoons

The Steps

1. Spray the non-stick cooking spray into the mug.
2. Add the flour and hot chocolate mix to the mug and store them together.
3. Add the egg and stir.
4. Add the water and oil and stir until you have a cake batter-like mixture. Be sure to scrape the bottom of the mug so there aren’t any pockets of dry ingredients left.
5. Microwave the mixture at high for 3 minutes. As it makes, a cylinder of cake will rise from the mug. It’ll shrink slightly after the baking is done.
6. When the 3 minutes are done, take the mug from the microwave and tip the cake cylinder out of the mug into a dish. Use a fork to break the cake into quarters, which will allow steam to escape from the center.
7. Let the cake cool a little, then dig in!

I Want to Believe, But Can’t

The problem with the recipe is that it uses a microwave for baking.

Microwave ovens work by bathing the food in low-energy microwave radiation, which creates an alternating electrical field in the oven. Water molecules, thanks to their shape, are more positively charged at one end and more negatively charged at the other. Because of these charges, they will align themselves with an electrical field, and if you constantly alternate this field, they will constantly realign themselves with the field, which creates molecular motion, which creates heat.

The practical upshot of all this is that microwaving is essentially boiling without the immersion. As long as the kind of cooking you’re doing is steaming or boiling (or their kissing cousins, thawing and reheating), a microwave oven will do the job, and more quickly than conventional boiling. However, if you want to get the complex flavours that come from the breaking down of proteins and the caramelization of sugars, you need temperatures higher than the boiling point of water. That’s why boiled food is bland and why chefs have long scoffed at microwave ovens.

That’s also why I think Cake in a Mug won’t be any good – it’s essentially a boiled cake.

Some folks at the SomethingAwful forums gave the recipe a try, and the general consensus is that while it smells great, the taste and texture of the cake are terrible. One particularly curious person replaced the chocolate mix with Strawberry Quik and ended up with this pink horror:

 

I don’t think I’ll bother trying out the recipe.

The bar for "Crazy Cat Owner" is higher than I thought:

More Notes from Startup Empire

For those of you who read yesterday’s post containing my notes from Hugh MacLeod’s presentation at the Startup Empire conference and were wondering if there were more, they’re all at my tech blog Global Nerdy, and I’ve linked to them below:

• Don Dodge: Starting a Company in Difficult Times
• Austin Hill: Slow Down and Speed Up
• Howard Lindzon: Why Now is a Good Time to Start Your Startup
• Rick Segal’s Advice at Startup Empire
• David Cohen: Boulder and TechStars

How You Can Get Such Near-Obsessive Note-Taking at Your Conference

If you’re wondering how you can get this level of note-taking and subsequent blogging at a conference you’re planning or organizing, it’s easy: invite me, and better still, give me a seat with as decent view of the speaker and slides near a power outlet (I take notes on a laptop and lately, I’ve been using OneNote as my note-taking tool). I’ll even bring the accordion for apres-conference fun. The “About” page of this blog has my contact information.

The Fred “Equal Measure” Measuring Cup not only provides imperial and metric measurements, but some equivalents measures for a sense of perspective. For example, the “100 mL” mark is accompanied by "volume of the brain of a Tyrannosaurus Rex” and the “two-and-half-cup” mark is captioned with “as many grains of flour as people on the planet (6.8 billion).”

At $12.50 from Amazon.com, it might make a good stocking stuffer for the science or math geek on your gift list:

 

The cup was designed by Harry White Design, who created these other two designs – first, the “Numbers” measuring cup:

 

and the “Abitrary” measuring cup:

I spent yesterday at the Startup Empire conference, whose purpose was to provide people information, advice and contacts to people in the area who are either starting their own startups or considering taking the plunge.

One of the speakers at the event was Hugh MacLeod, who’s best know for his comics drawn on the back of business cards and his blog, Gaping Void. Back in 2004, he wrote a long and rambling but excellent and enjoyable article titled How to be Creative. His presentation yesterday was a more distilled version of that essay, and while I’d already read it several times, I enjoyed hearing the live, aged-four-years version.

Although the presentation was given at a conference for techies starting their own startups, Hugh’s advice applies to anyone who is creative, and if you asked him what that meant, I’m sure he’d say “everybody”. Hence I present my notes on his presentation in this blog as well as in my tech blog, Global Nerdy.

Intro

• It’s easy for an advertising career to tank, especially if you live in New York and drink too much
• I started drawing comics at bars, on the paper that just happened to conveniently be around: the backs of business cards
• I’m not in the VC business, nor am I in the tech business
• I’m greedy — who here’s greedy? [Many hands go up]
• What really drives us? The "C" word: creativity
• The reason we work in this field is that we want to build stuff — fun stuff
• If it pays the bills, so much the better
• The "we’re so fucked" thing is pretty long term
• What will get us out of the hole? Creativity. People like yourself, doing and building cool things
• I’m in my 40s — what motivates me now is seeing bright ambitious kids coming out of the colleges
• When I was a kid, there was no internet — not even computers! I had to write my term papers on typewriters
• I want to talk about creativity to the young
• I now present 12 little tips for you people just getting started

1. Ignore everybody.

• When you come up with a really great idea and show it, people won’t get it
• You yourself might not even get it
• Imagine the early days of search: “Why would you want to do that?”
• “Good ideas have lonely childhoods”
• If you’ve had a good idea, you were probably called a fruitcake at the start
• Good ideas alter power balances in relationships, which is why many people resist them
• Your boss doesn’t want you to have a good idea that makes you richer than him
• Good ideas will meet resistance – not because of the idea, but because of power and hierarchy

2. The idea you have doesn’t have to be that big.

• Jewish proverb: “A rich man is one who can satisfy his wants”
• I grew up on TV, watching shows about people who had more than us
• Fast-forward 20 years later, I get to do what I want every day:
• Haven’t had to set my alarm clock in years
• Just me and a couple of pens
• And yeah, I read Fast Company, BusinessWeek — “business porn magazines” – they feed greed
• Anyone seen No Country for Old Men? I live in that town!
• One of the locals is Harry, the master brewer, who moved out there and opened his own bar. He makes $500 a day and is the best businessman I know. He does what he wants and everything he does has some meaning to him.
• Meaning scales!
• We owe it to the generations to come to find meaning

3. Put the hours in.

• Nothing happens overnight
• People look at what I do "Aren’t you worried about people ripping you off?" or taking my idea and doing the same thing
• My response: "I’ve already done 10000 cartoons and 7 years blogging"
• Inertia stops a lot of people. Know anyone in a dead-end job? Ever been in one? They say "One day, I’m going to open that cheese shop. But right now, I have to write a report…"
• I have a book coming up. Didn’t quit my job to write it; just woke up an hour earlier every day to write it and posted it on my blog. Penguin eventually contacted me. All I did was put the hours in.

4. If your business plan relies on you being discovered by a big-shot, you will fail.

• I once got a book contract offer. The terms in the contract were terrible and I turned it down
• The publisher, it turned out, was in the business of finding people so desperate to have their moment in the spotlight that they would sign anything
• We now live in an era of cheap, easy, global media — we don’t need middlemen
• I’m friends with Rick Segal…but probably because I don’t need venture capital!
• Where I live in Texas, you can live really cheaply. Part of this is because you run out of things to spend on
• When I hear about people talking about VCs, I think of people looking to have their sorry asses saved
• Don’t get me wrong: it’s great to have VC, but it’s even easier when you get one because you don’t really need one
• "If you’re looking for advice, ask for money; if you’re looking for money, ask for advice.”

5. Do it anyway.

• You don’t know that your idea is the right one at the right time – no one does!
• Do it anyway — that’s how great ideas start out
• Seco0nd-rate ideas are all about the immediate "yes!" response because it keeps them alive longer

6. Everybody is born creative.

• “Everybody gets a box of crayons when they’re young .”
• We turn adolescent and for many of us, somehoe, “our colour gets turned off”
• Suddenly, it’s not about coloring anymore, but concerns like “Got to get a 3.5 GPA, got to get that job…”
• Then you get an idea that you can’t turn off
• It makes you start avoiding your poker buddies
• Most people get scared off by that idea. Doubt creeps in: "What if I get a bad publisher? What if nobody likes my idea?"
• That’s not your idea, that’s your grown up boring self fighting that idea
• Your idea came to you because your soul needs it
• If you don’t nurture that idea, it dies. It also takes a lot of you with it.

7. The “Sex and Cash” theory.

• If you have a creative life and you make money doing it: you generally bounce between two kinds of jobs:
1. The sexy creative job
2. The one that pays the bills
• In movie stars’ cases, that means alternating between parts in popular hit movies and critically-acclaimed art films
• For a photographer, that means alternating between doing work for indie art mages and paying the bills with photo shoots for catalogs
• Consider Martin Amis: he writes critically acclaimed novels and supplements his income by teaching courses and writing newspaper and magazine articles
• As for me: I do comics on the back of business cards, and I do work for Microsoft and Dell
• It’s a balance of artistic sovereignty and making a living
• “The moment you accept this is when you take off .”

8. Remain frugal.

• This particular lesson took me the longest to learn
• Living in New York City, I was in the top income bracket, for all the good it did. I had so much outgoing cash in rent and other expenses.
• You can live like a king where I do, in Alpine, Texas quite cheaply
• I now have “West Texas expenses, New York wages”
• This is hard to do if you want to be seen in “all the right places”
• Remember: we become creatives because we want freedom, and that includes freedom from avarice

9. I’m going to skip this one.

• It’s too corny!
• [He capitulated later; see the end of this article.]

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need props.

• At any advertising agency, it’s always the second-rate art director who’s the first to get the newest model Mac
• If you go to any magazine office, it’s the second-rate writer keeps an old Remington typewriter on display
• You see this at startups too: the loft office in the hip neighbourhood with the foosball table
• Remember: the Gettyburg address was written on borrowed stationery!
• We use props to hide behind or mask our inadequacies
• I know a woman who recently IPO’d — she didn’t start in a fancy office, but on her dining room table
• It’s not the props, it’s the good idea and the effort

11. The best way is not to stand out from the crowd, but avoid the crowd altogether.

• Bartenders are the great social enablers of New York City
• No under-50 bartender is really a bartender: they’re actors, musicians, whatever
• They have plan to become famous photographers, musicians, whatever
• The thing about the arts to me: what often drives people isn’t just the money or business, but the prestige: “I want to be like that guy, because he’s really privileged”.
• Ever noticed how few really good writers have blogs? You don’t see literature, you see shit like what I write
• A lot of authors are enamored of books and the prestige attached to them
• The worst thing you can do as a creative is fall in love with a privilege model

12. If you can accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

• When my sister was born and my mom was in labour, the pain was unbearable — "Why is this happening to me?" she asked
• The midwife replied: "You’re giving birth to a baby. It’s supposed to be painful."
• Mom accepted that and got on with the birth
• Trying to do something worthwhile and creative is really hard
• As you get older, you realize that pain is part of the process

9. Okay, here’s point number 9, since you asked: We will fail, but we will be forgiven.

• Failure is part of the process
• The important thing really isn’t about reaching the summit, but setting out for it.

Presenting Batman’s Smart Car:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.