Prior to this semester, the term "miscellaneous" heralded ideas of things "left over," things that don't really have a place in which they belong. A particular book required by one of my classes has brought new meaning to the term and really changed my previous world-view (perhaps "refined" is the better term) of information.
Online information has exploded. New content is being created every day. There is no way to organize it all--too much information is out there for any concerned cataloging effort to ever catch up. However, David Weinberger's book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder is showing me that organizing it really isn't necessary. Part of the power of how interconnected things are is being able to start on a page about a food item's nutrition facts, bounce to pages of recipes, and end up at a restaurant at a vacation destination that specializes in dishes of that food. We become our own gateways into the vastness of available knowledge.
One thing Weinberger talks about is a third-order organization. This particular organization seems best explained through examples of sites that allow users to place tags on digital objects--like Flcker. The third-order introduces the idea that digital items, because of their lack of limitations with physical space, can be classified and located in an infinite number of places. A picture of a sunset in Hawaii could be labeled as "Hawaiian sunset," "Hawaii," "sunset," "tropical locations," "romantic beaches," "2007 summer memories," "wedding destination," "ocean view," etc. There is no limit to the number of tags that can be put onto a picture, which makes it meaningful and more accessible to more people--since not everyone would classify it as the same thing. That one picture could then be used in just as many collections with pictures of similar tags. A user could make a collection of "2007 Summer Memories" including that picture and a number of other pictures from the rest of the vacation; or the user could create a "Romanic Places" collection that includes that picture and a number of other pictures that are all tagged with "romanic." The possibilities are now endless. Information has truly become miscellaneous, but in doing so its accessibility has infinitely increased.
I know that I owe a recipe post, but unfortunately I haven't been doing a lot of experimenting lately. Class has required a large amount of reading, and I've been using every spare minute for keeping on top of all the reading I need to do. As a result, I've been sticking to well-known and quickly-made recipes, most of which I've already posted. I will however take some time for a couple of tips for things I discovered in the past couple of weeks.
1) If you need shredded chicken for any recipe (I use it for making enchiladas), cooking it in a crock pot with chicken broth, onions, and spices (and a can/bottle of beer if you're feeling really adventurous) is a good way to add flavor. Just put everything in the crock pot in the morning, set the crock pot on the low setting, and it'll be ready by the time you have to make dinner. For an added bonus, you can save the broth to use for making soup later. Just freeze in a container until you need it.
2) Add a surprise to your cupcakes by adding candy. You can chop up chocolate mints and mix in to chocolate batter or add candy-bar minis to cupcakes before you bake them for a yummy little something extra.
3) For frosting details on cakes or cupcakes, ziplocks are a easy replacement for professional icing bags.
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