Medill Reports wrote an article about us called Tech consulting firm does well by eating well. The article gives a background of who we are and what we do, but the highlight is the video of Ellen putting on a cooking demonstration.
Speaking of cooking, yesterday Ellen made for us Tortilla Espagnola with Spanish potato, caramelized onion, and piquillo pepper omelet. The salad had sherry-mustard vinaigrette, and the dates were stuffed with manchego and wrapped with serrano ham.
Ridiculous, no?
We’re still working on collecting pictures from everyone and putting them online. In the meantime, here are some videos.
Playa Grande
Playa Grande means “Big Beach”.
Katie Gore, John’s wife, swung by the Table XI office today. She is getting a masters in speech pathology at Northwestern and as part of her studies needs guinea pigs on which to perform “Oral Mechanism Exams”.
Part of the exam includes measuring diadochokinetic rates. This is a measurement of how fast one can articulate distinct sounds like “puh”, “tuh”, “kuh” and the combination of the three.
Okay, so not all of Ellen’s kitchen exploits turn out so well.
Alinea serves a dish called “Black Truffle Explosion“. This is Ellen’s variation on that theme:
Broadly speaking, Table XI makes its living solving organizational problems. Here is “the management” applying those talents to our own internal challenges:
The opinions expressed in this post are the sole opinions of its author and are not representative of Table XI as a whole.
That’s because I seem to be the only one around here excited by the iPad. Most of the time (well, all of the time) when I’m in disagreement with everyone at Table XI over a technology issue, I’m wrong. But it was an article from Paul Buchheit, creator and lead developer of Gmail, that finally gave me the courage to go public with my beliefs.
His post, entitled When your product is great, it doesn’t have to be good, argues that the iPad’s success will be because of it’s limited functionality, not in spite of it:
I believe this “more features = better” mindset is at the root of the misjudgment, and is also the reason why so many otherwise smart people are bad at product design… What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise.
I realize the irony of this post immediately following one on fighting obesity.
