Brent P. Newhall's Blog

Misc – Oct 2009

This is Brent P. Newhall's blog, where I write about my never-ending quest for knowledge and cool experiences. You're looking at misc posts.

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My projects:

• Your Online Life
  In-depth articles about the latest web tech and trends
• Giant Armors
  A series of fantasy adventure novels for kids
• Gunwave
  A tabletop role-playing system I designed for mecha gaming, in beta
• Otaku, No Video
  Anime reviews, on YouTube, that don't suck
• Heavenly Aromas Bakery
  Fresh-baked, hand-made artisanal bread, hand-delivered
• Cooking with CK
  Easy video recipes in under 10 minutes

14 Oct 09 – Social Inertia

Time for a rant.

I was struck recently by the number of pundits who confidently attempt to predict the future.

This is often in small ways: How Amazon's Kindle Will Kill the Paperback or Why Company X is Doomed. Most of us are savvy enough to cast a suspicious eye at big claims about the death or supremacy of any commonplace thing in life.

Even the smaller-scaled predictions have insufficient respect for social inertia.

Books are a great example. I love my Amazon Kindle, and I use it almost every day. But I don't believe books are going to go away any time soon. This is not a complaint about Kindle; it's an observation about how many books there are.

The rise of cell phones didn't cause everyone to rip out their landline phones. The internet hasn't killed physical libraries.

People, as a collective, are slow to change. That's just reality. And it's okay; it's good, in fact. Science fiction literature is praactically one big warning to slow down and think, so we don't en masse implement a disastrous change.

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11 Oct 09 – The Maryland Renaisssance Festival

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Maryland Renaissance Festival. It was an overcast day, which is never ideal for photos, but here they are:

The big excitement of the day: I had my first deep-fried Snickers bar. Sure enough, it was delicious: a melted chocolate bar surrounded by a donut.

Quite a few more photos on my Flickr photo stream for the festival.

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1 Oct 09 – But I Totally Could To Live By Bread Alone

I recently started a side business.

I love to bake. For some reason, I find it easy: you combine a few ingredients in a bowl, toss the results into an oven, and come back later to find something awesome.

Then I stumbled on a beautiful old book, Beard on Bread, a yellowed hardback with dozens of bread recipes and pencil sketches. I tried a few of the recipes. They were excellent. I gave out some bread. People loved it.

And thus I discovered that I'm good at baking bread.

To my surprise, folks to whom I gave that bread told me—repeatedly—that they'd pay good money for it, and that I should sell it. After enough of this prodding, I thought, why not?

It's not like I need to drop my life savings into opening a physical bakery. I can start small.

I made up some simple order forms, and recently created a simple web site for it. Folks can fill out the order form and email or hand it to me. That's enough for now.

To my further surprise, I've gotten a couple of orders. This is working, on a very small scale. And at that scale, I can easily fulfil orders in my spare time.

Where will it go? I've no idea, and frankly I don't care. This is a fun little experiment, and I'm happy to experiment.

If you want to order bread from me, go to bakery.brentnewhall.com. Note that I currently have no way to ship bread, so it'll have to be local delivery only for the time being. ;-)

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