nuzzaci - an online journal

Two weeks ago Willow and I flew down to Taranto, Italy, to attend my cuisine, Benedetta, and her fiancé’s, Angelo, wedding. (above illustration is an illustration of Benedetta and Angelo. It was illustrated by Willow and was part of the wedding gift.)

It was really nice. I don’t meet up with my italian side that often any more — when I was younger I stayed down there every summer for a few weeks, now that i’m older I manage to get a few days every other year — so when I’m down there it is extra special. They are all so lovely.

Due to the lack of time spent in Italy, my Italian isn’t really up to scratch. Normally it takes me a few days to get into it, so these short weekends aren’t long enough for my brain to re-adjust. Being Swedish and having an English girlfriend doesn’t make it any easier. My brain kind of spazzes out from time to time (excuses excuses excuses).

I also experienced my longest and largest dinner up to date. I think it was about 9 courses; over 6 hours!! It truly was something special. A funny anecdote from the dinner was when they told me during the starter that I shouldn’t eat too much since much more awaits on ‘il secondo piano’; which means ‘on the second floor’. Now I thought that ‘il secondo piano’ was a metaphor for going ‘to the next level’, so I was a bit amused when we were asked to actually go up to the second floor to continue the meal! Another funny anecdote: when we got home from this marathon of a dinner, Rita, my aunt, sat the table and started to bring out more food! Yeah It took me and Willow a few days in London before we had fully digested all the goodness.

As usual, during weddings, “wedding-talks” starts. And the big family question already on the same evening was: who’s next? Personally I feel no pressure (being the youngest and all) and am putting my money on Lucilla (Benedetta’s little sister).

Anyway. Just wanted to do a short digital congratulation to A and B!!

Through POKE I was given the lovely opportunity to work with the great people at Ottolenghi and help them to design and build their new website. When working for a medium-sized company such as POKE (approx. 50ppl), where larger clients take up the majority of studio time, these kind of smaller/independent clients and projects come as a long awaited breeze of fresh air on a hot summers day.

A few words on the design:

Working with the Ottolenghi brand was difficult — or maybe ‘challenging’ is the correct phrase. They are very minimalistic but still carry a personality. So the difficulty / challenge was to keep it very slimmed-down but still engaging.

The above screen is of the current homepage.

The design is based around a simple 8 column grid (show / hide grid). I decided to left align the page to give use of the browser edge for a “full bleed” photographic treatment. Another repeating photographic treatment is the overlaying and slightly anti-top-aligned treatment that can be seen on all top level pages (except the blog) and on recipes where images are in portrait instead of horizontal format.

A few words on the build:

I also did the front end build of the site, while the back-end was delivered by Nilesh Ashra. It was my first project using the jQuery javascript library and the first project i’ve been involved with that uses the “Death Star”, which is a Model-View-Controller approached PHP framework developed by Igor Clark and Nilesh.

If I knew what I know now, I would probably have used the MooTools 1.2 (currently in beta) javascript framework instead of jQuery 1.2.3. Not because jQuery didn’t get the job done or was hard to work with; at the time I hadn’t tried either of them, or given jQuery a chance. Since then I have worked on another project and given MooTools a chance and it turns out that MooTool suits me a bit better.

Working with Nilesh and the “Death Star” framework worked out great. It made me hungry for more Model-View-Controller approached PHP and I am now looking into what codeigniter can do to please that part of my brain.

So, wrapping up,

I’m pleased with the result and the project was a real pleasure to work on. No other client has offered me such good meeting snacks and lunches as Ottolenghi.

One of the few downsides about working on this project was that it kept me constantly hungry. I thought that working on the GoodFood website last year had made me immune to fooling my body that the glycogen level of the liver has fallen and activating the hunger feeling by looking at food photos on screen.

Thankfully, in a few weeks, their new cookbook will be out (which I have flipped through and can confirm looks amazing) so that Willow and I can cook all the dishes I have been drooling at for the last couple of months.

My new threadless t-shirt submission is up. It’s a present for someone, so click the link and give it your best vote. And if you’re so inclined, pass it on to your friends too.

Follow this link to vote on Willow’s nice t-shirt.

Almost back to back to my post about a USB MixTape Stick, here’s a post on online mixtapes. Recently two websites have reached the echo chamber known as the blogosphere; Mixwit.com and Muxtape.com. I don’t like many things about Mixwit (if any), but the simplicity of Muxtape struck a chord.

My first compilation, titled, ‘nuzzaci’s small compilation of compelling cover songs’, is a set of 12 cover songs from various artists. Listen to it on nuzzaci.muxtape.com. The playlist is:

1. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy - The World’s Greatest
2. Florence and the Machine (featuring Kid Harpoon) - I’m Goin’ Down
3. Mat Weddle - Hey Ya
4. Ben Gibbard - Complicated
5. Sinead O’Connor - All Apologies
6. Streets, The - Your Song
7. Sick Anchors, The - Whole Again
8. John Mayer - Kid A
9. Nick Cave - Disco 2000
10. Zwan - The Number of the Beast
11. Iron & Wine - Such Great Heights
12. Beck - True Love Will Find You in the End

During February and March, Willow and I have been flexing our DIY muscles and done some major flat renovations. It was a very intense period and mentally challenging. I think that the fact that we came out at the end of the tunnel with our mental health still intact is great achievement in itself.

So as a well deserved break from all the flat-renovation-madness, Willow and I decided to use the easter weekend and the following bank holiday to get away from the Do-It-Yourself battlefield of Flat 7 and go to Belgium.

London to Brussels with the Eurostar takes only 1hr 51 minutes from Kings Cross station. That’s about the same amount of time you need to be in advance at the airport if you’re flying somewhere. Yeah — trains rule, planes suck.

We decided to take our bikes with us. We have talked about doing a bike holiday for quite some time and thought that bringing them along would be a good initial test. The Eurostar website makes it sound so easy; cheap and accessible, but, unfortunately for us, it turned out being expensive and complicated.

When we arrived at the station on Thursday morning we found out that the Eurostar Dispatch doesn’t open until 6 a.m while we needed to board at 5:30am. This resulted to us taking a later train. A simular thing happened on our return; when we arrived back in London at 10:04pm on Tuesday and the Eurostar Dispatch had already closed at 10pm. So we had to revisit Kings Cross on Wednesday to collect our bikes. On top of this, if you have two bikes and want to send them return to Brussels, it will set you back around £80.

We stayed in Brussels at the lovely August’ INN, a bed and breakfast run by architect Geoffroy Lemaigre and his wife Sophie van der Dussen. It was really nice. This underlines that Willow does have an amazing gift on finding nice places to stay when on holiday, and that the Bed & Coffee we stayed at in New York was not a fluke.

Besides Brussels, Willow and I took the train to Antwerpen, Brugge, Gent and Amsterdam. Yeah, again — trains rule (except for the bike thing of course).

So, to summarise and wrap up this totally uninteresting post — I liked Belgium and was very impressed by Amsterdam. I’m now even more fond of Belgium beer and an Easter weekend in Belgium gets very chocolat’y.

Some photos can be found on willow’s flicker

From ‘The Engineer’ magazine 22 March 1968:

“Sir, —” I refer to you second leader “Is the Customer Getting Value for Money?” (1 March, 1968). In the text you refer to “designers and engineers”.

    It is almost forty years since i graduated as an engineer and I have still to meet a “designer”. This elusive gentleman occurs frequently in print, especially in newspapers, but where he comes from, how he is trained and what are his qualifications are matter which to me remain unresolved.

    I have met draughtsmen and engineers who designs; in fact, I thought the engineer’s primary function was to design, but it seems that there are few who think thus.

    Can you resolve this life-long mystery for me?

source, via hicksdesign.co.uk’s sidenotes

A while back Willow bought me the USB MixTape Stick from suckuk. It’s a small cardboard box that looks like an old cassette tape, and inside it it’s a 64MB USB memory stick. Having been a mix-tape-creator in my young days, I love this crossover from old to new formats. The “new way” does eliminate some of the beauty and craft required in making a good mix-tape but, never the less, it’s at least a physical object to hand over to someone.

Anyway, as the title implies, I would love if this little USB device could pop-up and be managed through iTunes. I have given Google quite a few queries but can’t seem to find an answer. Maybe it’s not possible…

The closest I’ve got is trying to fool iTunes into believing that the removable device is a compact disc by create a file named ‘ContentsDB.xml’ and place it on the device. I could live with that — a ‘read only’ device. But unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Does anyone have any ideas?

60 seconds per minute.
60 minutes per hour.
24 hours per day.
365.242216 days per year.

A year is based on the time it takes the earth to orbit around the Sun. But since that takes 365.242216 days, Mr Gregorian Calendar decided to round a year down to 365 days, save all those 0.242216 days as retainer and hand them out as an one-day-bonus to all his followers every four years. That bonus is the 29th of February, and today is one of those days.

So congratulations to all Mr Gregorian Calender followers.
Today is a day you work for free.

Ten days ago i posted a link to my bookmarks that i got through Nathan Coppers blog, Rubbishcorp.com/rubbishblog.

Description:

What is the Sound of Color? We put that question to 5 musicians. Dntel, MariÈ Digby, Swizz Beatz, The Blakes and The Raveonettes. We assigned each musician a different color. They Wrote 5 tracks. We gave the tracks, and the colors that inspired them, to 5 producers. What began as a question has resulted in 5 original pieces of music and 5 original music videos. Here they are. Hear the Sound of Color.

What have surprised me, and got me to write this entry, is the superb quality of the five songs. Top work. Top compilation.

1. Black/white by Raveonettes
2. Candy Green by Swizz Beatz
3. Magic by Blakes
4. Paint Me in Your Sunshine by Marié Digby
5. Turning Red by Dntel

I leave up to you to decide whether the music videos are up to the same standards. Visit soundofcolor.com and have a look.

Last week Willow bought me a new helmet. As seen in the photo above; it’s very nice. The model is called Trace and it’s made by R.E.D Protection.

Trace is to replace my vintage Brancale leather helmet (photo). With it’s optional ear pads, Trace is much warmer and suitable for the winter period. I’m also quite sure that it will protects my head a bit better than the vintage leather helmet.