Last weekend, I was asked to come help a few friends set up a photo shoot. They were charged with preparing and then shooting photos of about ten dishes that would be featured online and in an upcoming book on the Zone Diet.

The food ranged from breakfast waffles, which you might see pictured here, a cold beef salad, a delectable grilled tilapia, chicken with baked avocado, and a few others. I know the food was indeed good because, as compensation for my role as photo assistant, I sampled each dish. It was the equivalent of a Zone Diet Tasting Menu, if a Zone restaurant were ever to open. (If you know me, you know what a big fan I am of the tasting menu.)

The entire process was fascinating because it was all done on a shoestring orchestrated by some very talented persons. Each dish was prepared by a good friend who works as a restaurant cook, although any can make these recipes just as easily. However, when it comes to plating the dish, he’s a master. I could never get my food to look as photogenic as he had done. Kudos!

Another friend used a relatively simple setup to photograph each dish. You can see him here using a Canon 7D with a 50mm f/1.4 prime lens. He did have a good tripod, but it was truly his eye for photography that made each dish look just as good as it tasted.

Food photography can be tricky. We’ve all heard about some of the tricks used to make food camera-ready, but ultimately inedible. It’s extraordinary to see that convention go by the wayside on certain food blogs and on this particular shoot.

I hope some of my students from fall’s New Technologies class can attend. RSVPs are required.

The Penguin Press Presents: Together Alone: “The Penguin Press Presents celebrated public intellectual Eric Klinenberg, author of the forthcoming GOING SOLO: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, and Clay Shirky, author of the seminal HERE COMES EVERYBODY: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, coming together to discuss what it all means and where we’re all heading.”

Earlier today, one of my teammates from the Ball Busters sent me a video of me getting a base hit through the right side (the 3.5 hole, no less). It’s not that the hit was unusual—I regularly hit the ball that way—but in late January, softball seems so foreign. It was nice to remember seeing a sunny day in New York, my wearing shorts, and of course, playing softball in Central Park.

Thankfully, softball is only about 10 weeks away.

About a year ago, I received as a Christmas gift a vacuum coffee maker. I was very excited about brewing coffee with it, except that I could not figure out a set of instructions or best practices. For one thing, there are too many variables to create a definitive step-by-step process. Some of these variables included:

• the coarseness of the coffee grounds
• whether to start with ice cold water
• whether to place the coffee ground chamber on as I heat the water
  • if not, the water temperature I place the coffee ground chamber
• the duration that I leave the coffee maker on the heat source

In any case, you have to start with freshly drawn, filtered water, and you have to grind your coffee just before you brew the coffee. You can’t make good coffee without good water and without freshly ground beans.

After several weeks of experimenting, I came up with a pretty good solution, and it involves the following steps:

• Grind the beans to a medium-coarse ground, just a bit more find than the press-pot grind
• Use room-temperature water
• Add the coffee-ground chamber after the water reaches a rolling boil (95° C and 185° F)
• Brew on the stove for about three minutes

You can see this process in the video I made last winter.

I’m glad I documented the process because I broke the carafe a few months ago. I have since reverted to brewing coffee with a press because I didn’t want to buy a $60 replacement. Should I ever bite the bullet and get a replacement, it’s unlikely that I would remember how to brew coffee without the video.

The first significant snowfall since late October brought a relatively minor amount of accumulation, but here in the city, the snow went through an accelerated pace through its usual steps. First it snowed, leaving a thin blanket of powder, which was quickly turned to slush. Now, it looks like it snowed three days ago and the grey sidewalk slush is going to make crossing streets an adventure.

Winter is here. Groundhog Day is about two weeks away. But for now, we got slush.

As someone who has bought several of these “daily deals,” and more than a few offered by Groupon, I can say that I have been reluctant to buy a Groupon deal simply because their deals are not very good. When I first used the service in 2010, Groupon regularly offered deals that were 50% off at places that I would like to go. In a one-month period, for example, no fewer than four restaurants in my nook of Long Island City offered excellent 50%-off deals. But in the last year or so, the deals have been less impressive. They deals are at places that I wouldn’t want to go, in neighborhoods I never travel to, and the discounts aren’t very good. The problem seems even worse when for their Groupon Now deals.

In the morning, when the deluge of “daily deal” emails arrive, I don’t pay much attention to the Groupon offers. It’s not because I have anything against them per se, but it’s really the deal that is going to make me take action. The same goes for Gilt City, Travelzoo, Living Social, and Thrillist.

However, Groupon has insisted that one of the things that sets it apart from its competitors is the “Groupon Voice,” the punchy blurb included with each deal. I’ve considered these little else than poor attempts at humor, filled with a lot of impenetrable references. Take for example today’s featured New York deal at the Village Pourhouse:

Microbrews are lauded for their craftsmanship and distinguished by the tiny medals draped from their every molecule. Sample the finest of particles with today’s Groupon to Village Pourhouse

Where’s the humor?

The joke is supposed to link beer with chemistry. I get it, but I don’t see how it’s funny. Is it because medals are bigger than molecules? Is it, because since it would presumably take a lot of molecules to make a glass of beer, that there would be medals everywhere? These blurbs would be better if they explained how a friend and I can taste good beer, not just yellow, American-style corn swill, for cheap. And that they wash down all kinds of savory snacks.

60 Minutes devoted a ninety-second web extra clip to the “Groupon Voice,” without posing any skepticism. Instead, we just let Editor-in-Chief Aaron With insist that the “distinct, unusual, unique” voice is a competitive advantage for the company. This was the same subject in a May 2010 New York Times article about how Groupon’s “funny” words set it apart from its competitors. When I read this article, it was the first time I had thought about those blurbs because I deliberately ignore them. No one I know ever mentions those blurbs, and I doubt that any in my peer groups reads them or looks forward to reading them in the daily email.

Nope! We just all want a good deal.

As I come to Bobst Library during the intersession period, the lower level study area looks wonderfully deserted. During the last week of the semester, there were people in these seats throughout the entire day. Some were studying, but a good number of them were sleeping.

Bobst Library will remain calm for another week, until classes begin in the third week of the month. At that point, the spring semester will begin again and the bustle will return.

Remember when I thought that I recognized the house in the 1959 film The House on Haunted Hill? It turns out that the house is famous for a few reasons. Although it has appeared in a ton of films, including Bladerunner and L.A. Confidential to name but two, I “recognized” it because it looks like the Hollyhock House, which I toured with Sarah and my mom in May 2010. The Hollyhock House and Ennis House, the house from Haunted Hill, were both designed by Frank Lloyd Wright are both sited in Hollywood.

Since seeing House on Haunted Hill, I made visiting Ennis House one of my priorities when visiting Los Angeles. On the day after Christmas, my parents, Sarah, and I drove to the Hollywood Hills to see the house. Regrettably, one cannot tour the house. It was sold to a private owner in July 2011. The house needs a lot of work, but it’s not clear when the house will be open to the public once the new owner takes possession.

Visiting the house is easy with a car. Take Vermont Avenue north past Los Feliz Boulevard. Turn left on Cromwell Ave, then a quick right onto Glendower Ave. Follow the winding road up, up, and up, and then after about a quarter mile you will see the house. Mind the parking signs and take a walk around the house and, obviously, don’t disturb the adjacent properties.

After gawking at Ennis House, we drove back down the hill and stopped at Barnsdall Park to show my dad Hollyhock House because he had not seen it.

A day after we visited the Ennis and Hollyhock Houses, we stumbled on another Frank Lloyd Wright property. This was the Kundert Medical Clinic in San Luis Obispo. Unlike the other two properties, this was still in full operation. It sits along a creek on Santa Rosa Avenue, which was a main road connecting some important towns in San Luis Obispo County. After running around Hollywood looking at two (of many, many) Frank Lloyd Wright homes in Los Angeles, it was nice to find one by accident en route to our next destination.

One of the novel things about this trip was that we took the train instead of driving. We surprised everyone when we told people we met at the inn that we got there by just taking two buses. You can do it, too.

We took the 7:45 AM Pacific Surfliner from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo. The train arrived just before 1:00 PM. We walked to the transit center, which is about five blocks away. If you take Santa Rosa Road, you can see a Frank Lloyd Wright house along the way. We had about an hour layover between our arrival in San Luis Obispo and ate lunch at Luna Red in town.

At the Transit Center, you can take the 12 bus to Morro Bay’s transit center, which takes about 20 minutes. From there, connect to the 13 bus that goes to Los Osos. The stop on Santa Maria Ave and 2nd St stops about two blocks from the inn.

Getting back is just as easy. You have to catch the 11 bus from Los Osos, which becomes the 12 bus and continues to San Luis Obispo. From there, we caught the northbound Coast Starlight. We had about an hour layover and ate lunch in town. Also, if your train is late, you can go to Meze, a wine and cheese shop, that is about a five-minute walk if you follow the rail tracks in the southbound direction.

This was my first time taking this trip with the train, and you can count me as a convert. Yes, the schedules are limited and it takes a lot more time to ride than it does to drive, but I’m on vacation. I’m not in a hurry.

It was supposed to be a pretty straightforward trip to Paducah, Kentucky, originating in Newark with a long connection in Chicago.

We started the day in New York as we do every day, but we had to cross the Hudson River, into New Jersey, for our flight departing Newark. A classic “I-95″ rainstorm, running up the entire eastern seaboard, delayed the incoming aircraft by over two hours. That, in turn, delayed our Continental Airlines flight to Chicago and our long two-hour-plus layover turned into a very risky connection. Although we ran from our arriving gate to the Paducah gate, we missed our United Express flight. We were automatically rebooked on the last flight of the following day, which would put us into Kentucky a full day after than we had planned.

Sarah insisted that we not lose the entire day so we asked if we could be rerouted on a United flight to Nashville, and Sarah’s family would pick us up and drive to Kentucky. The agent promptly rebooked us and issued boarding passes for a flight to Nashville.

The new flight required an overnight stay so we asked if we could get vouchers for a hotel. Since it was the Continental flight that caused the misconnect, we had to ask them for accommodation. Continental doesn’t have much of a presence at O’Hare so it was a bit of a challenge to find someone, but we eventually found someone at the baggage claim office. The Continental agent obliged us and handed us complimentary hotel and meal vouchers. Thanks!

My experience with weather delays and missed connections is pretty limited. It only happened once before, when I flew on a different airline, and I was offered a discounted room, which is an airline’s standard practice. I am fairly certain that because our Newark-Chicago flight was late due to weather, we were not entitled to the hotel and meal vouchers, but I suspect that elite status might have helped in this case.

In either case, Sarah and I made the best of it. We used our meal vouchers for the Tortas Frontera at the B terminal at O’Hare and had one of the best breakfast tortas east of the Colorado River. (Note, if you have one of these $12 vouchers, get a breakfast torta and a coffee.) It also worked out because while we were at O’Hare, a reasonable one-way fare from Chicago to Los Angeles became available. Since I was using some travel credit certificates I received in September for giving up my seat, I had to redeem them in person at the airport. It would have been very difficult to redeem had we not been at O’Hare.

Although it was unfortunate that our plans turned out a bit different from we had originally planned, it helped to keep our cool and ask politely for help. I hope everyone remembers that this holiday season before screaming at an agent.