Today's recipe is one that I got from my grandmother, at least I think that's where it comes from. She's the one I remember making it for me. If you're in the mood for seafood and don't want a complicated recipe, this is a good one to try: clam spaghetti.
First a little family history. When I was growing up, my grandmother lived in the small coastal town that Scooter and I now love to frequent when we want to get away on the weekend. Gramma had a house up on the hill near the school that some of the scenes from the Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Birds" was filmed. There used to be a wood and steel play structure at the school with a tire swing--absolutely the most fun to be had for an eight-year-old child (sadly it's not there anymore). Visiting Gramma was the best thing about the summer--well, that and the camping trips my parents took BD and I on. If my week with Gramma was timed right, I would be there during the lowest tides; we called them the minus tides. The water would get really low and all the sand in the harbor would be exposed except for in the deep channel that allows the boats to come in and out of the harbor even during the lowest possible tides. If the minus tides happened during my time there, it always meant that I would get to go clamming.
We would wake up very early in the morning when the harbor and the town were still enshrouded by fog. After a quick breakfast that consisted of coffee for the grandparents and juice and granola bar for me, we would pack up buckets and shovels and galoshes and drive down to the spot that was Gramma's favorite place to dig for clams. I always got to sit in the back bed of the truck--something that would never happen now since, as many people would say, times have changed. Inevitably, after going back to the house and having a good brunch, my fascination would spur me to help with shucking the clams (okay, more watching than helping). Gramma would then take all the pieces and store them in the freezer for clam chowder, clam spaghetti, and anything else she fancied putting clams in. Something I always found funny was all the water marks on the walls and floor around the clam bucket from the clams spitting (we would leave them while we ate brunch). Here's a tip: don't store a bucket of live clams in any location you wouldn't want to get wet. You will thank me.
Now the recipe.
What you'll need:
1/2 bunch of parsley with the stems removed
1 large handful of basil leaves
8-10 cloves of garlic
1/4 medium onion, slivered
2 cans chopped clams, 2 Tbs. juice reserved
1/2 cube butter or margarine
1/4 c. olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
What you'll need to do:
1. Chop the parsley, basil, garlic, and onion together until fine. You can use a wooden chopping bowl, or a food processor (for the lazy or the overworked).
2. In a medium skillet over medium heat, add the olive oil and the butter. Once the butter has melted, add the chopped herb mixture and saute for 10-15 minutes. Onion should be a little transparent.
3. Add the chopped clams and the reserved juice. Continue to saute until the juice has been mostly absorbed, then cover and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 35-45 minutes, stirring occasionally.
4. Remove from heat and pour over cooked pasta (angel hair, linguine, and spaghetti all work well). Serve hot.
You will want the amount of herbs listed in the ingredients because they will cook way down, so you'll be left with a lot less than you started with volume-wise. Also, it is important to cover the skillet once you've added the clams because they may pop as they cook (not sure exactly why they do that)--and you don't want to find bits of food on your walls. If you really want to impress, putting this over homemade pasta (which isn't as hard to make as you might think) will definitely create a wow factor.
Enjoy!
Friday, March 15, 2013
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Know Your Vocabulary
It is an interesting project that I find myself in the middle of. When I first began this internship and my site supervisor were discussing the tasks I should work on or start to think about, one of the things mentioned was to create a controlled vocabulary for the items on two of the pages on the staff intranet. For the first seven or so weeks, it was something I've kept in the back of my mind and a task my site supervisor said was low priority. Well, now that the pages have been updated and the ownership of the items is now posted, this project of creating a controlled vocabulary has moved to the top of my list. And while it's a bit tedious to record and organize the terminology currently in place, I'm finding myself really enjoying this particular project.
Controlled vocabulary is not a new concept for me. In fact, it was one I came to know and love during my second semester when I was taking a class on databases (one of the core classes for the program). Controlled vocabulary can be seen as metadata--data (information) about data--that can have a number of uses in a practical sense, particularly as an aid for creating more successful searches. The reason why it's "controlled" vocabulary is because it's a set of predefined terms that are adopted as the "correct" entries for the type of information considered. I know that may not make much sense, so here is an example. Think of a field where you are asked to enter a date. There are quite a lot of ways that you can do that: 2013-03-14; March 14, 2013; Mar 14, 2013; 3-14-13; 3-14-2013; 2013, March 14; and so on. All of them are correct, but perhaps the system reading the information can only understand one type of entry. The field may have a line of text under it, something along the lines of "Enter date as MM-DD-YYYY" so you know the required method of entry. A controlled vocabulary works in a similar way; there is a predetermined "right" way of stating a term or phrase, and you must use the controlled vocabulary when working within its perimeters.
Librarians, especially those who do cataloging, are very familiar with the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), a type of controlled vocabulary used to enter the subjects a library item is related to or addresses in its contents. The LCSH is quite extensive and covers every subject you can think of. If you want to see examples of these subject headings, go to your library's website and do a search of your choice. Click on one of the books in the results to look at its details, and you'll see entries for the item's "Subject." Tamora Pierce's book Mastiff shows subject entries for "Kings and rulers -- Juvenile fiction," "Police -- Fiction," and "Fantasy," among others. Each of these terms could be rewritten in different ways with different words and still get the same or similar meaning. Having a standard set of terms--a controlled vocabulary--means that the terms can also become useful for searching, since all items on the same subject have the same subject entry and can be found in one search. You don't have to worry about different people using different terminology because catalogers use the same subject heading rules.
Okay, I went off on a tangent a bit there. Back to my project. I had to approach it a bit differently than the projects I did in my database class and my cataloging class that used the idea of controlled vocabulary. On those, I was starting from scratch and coming up with controlled vocabulary terms with a blank slate (although in the cataloging class, I did have to use the LCSH rules). With this project, there are terms already entered for each item on the two pages I'm updating. Terms with no sense of organization or logic. So I first went through and recorded all the terms and the frequency of their use. Then I organized them into sub-classes based on general topic that they relate to (I'm still working on this piece of it). My next step will be to see if there are terms that can be combined into more general terms. The trick with controlled vocabulary is to get just specific enough--not too broad, and not too focused, but just right. One must be Goldilocks, except with words rather than porridge and beds. Lastly, I will designate terms/phrases for each of the old ones (or simply note them as needing to be deleted). This will be my controlled vocabulary.
I will have to post another recipe tomorrow. I made a quick and easy dinner last night and it was good--something I haven't had since my grandmother was alive. Stay tuned...
Controlled vocabulary is not a new concept for me. In fact, it was one I came to know and love during my second semester when I was taking a class on databases (one of the core classes for the program). Controlled vocabulary can be seen as metadata--data (information) about data--that can have a number of uses in a practical sense, particularly as an aid for creating more successful searches. The reason why it's "controlled" vocabulary is because it's a set of predefined terms that are adopted as the "correct" entries for the type of information considered. I know that may not make much sense, so here is an example. Think of a field where you are asked to enter a date. There are quite a lot of ways that you can do that: 2013-03-14; March 14, 2013; Mar 14, 2013; 3-14-13; 3-14-2013; 2013, March 14; and so on. All of them are correct, but perhaps the system reading the information can only understand one type of entry. The field may have a line of text under it, something along the lines of "Enter date as MM-DD-YYYY" so you know the required method of entry. A controlled vocabulary works in a similar way; there is a predetermined "right" way of stating a term or phrase, and you must use the controlled vocabulary when working within its perimeters.
Librarians, especially those who do cataloging, are very familiar with the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), a type of controlled vocabulary used to enter the subjects a library item is related to or addresses in its contents. The LCSH is quite extensive and covers every subject you can think of. If you want to see examples of these subject headings, go to your library's website and do a search of your choice. Click on one of the books in the results to look at its details, and you'll see entries for the item's "Subject." Tamora Pierce's book Mastiff shows subject entries for "Kings and rulers -- Juvenile fiction," "Police -- Fiction," and "Fantasy," among others. Each of these terms could be rewritten in different ways with different words and still get the same or similar meaning. Having a standard set of terms--a controlled vocabulary--means that the terms can also become useful for searching, since all items on the same subject have the same subject entry and can be found in one search. You don't have to worry about different people using different terminology because catalogers use the same subject heading rules.
Okay, I went off on a tangent a bit there. Back to my project. I had to approach it a bit differently than the projects I did in my database class and my cataloging class that used the idea of controlled vocabulary. On those, I was starting from scratch and coming up with controlled vocabulary terms with a blank slate (although in the cataloging class, I did have to use the LCSH rules). With this project, there are terms already entered for each item on the two pages I'm updating. Terms with no sense of organization or logic. So I first went through and recorded all the terms and the frequency of their use. Then I organized them into sub-classes based on general topic that they relate to (I'm still working on this piece of it). My next step will be to see if there are terms that can be combined into more general terms. The trick with controlled vocabulary is to get just specific enough--not too broad, and not too focused, but just right. One must be Goldilocks, except with words rather than porridge and beds. Lastly, I will designate terms/phrases for each of the old ones (or simply note them as needing to be deleted). This will be my controlled vocabulary.
I will have to post another recipe tomorrow. I made a quick and easy dinner last night and it was good--something I haven't had since my grandmother was alive. Stay tuned...
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Surveys
This week in my internship I get to delve into designing and creating a survey. Easy right? Just put together a bunch of questions and have some people answer them. Well, not exactly. Perhaps in the barest form, a survey could be described as such. But figuring out which questions to ask is not easy. My definition of a survey: a form that tries to get the wanted feedback
from the user without you knowing exactly what questions to ask. The user doesn't know what you want to hear, and you don't know how to get it. Brings new meaning to the phrase "double blind."
The goal of the survey I need to create is to determine what aspects of the staff site are favored and which aren't, and discover what features (if any) the staff would like to include on their site. Because of the problems that arise from too many open-ended questions (mainly problems understanding what respondents are trying to say), I've been given a limitation of only using multiple-choice questions with one open-ended question at the end. Certainly not an easy task, since I'm not in the staff's heads and can't divine what questions to ask to get the desired feedback (though wouldn't that be a useful talent to have?).
So my plan of attack has been to start with research--researching staff sites, commonly liked features, site best practices, etc. I do have a survey that was done to gather feedback for the public site that I can use as a template and a spring board for creating questions. To keep track of ideas that I or others think of, I've also created a spreadsheet of things to suggest adding to the site which will be posted for the rest of the webmasters team that works on the staff site to view and add to. It'll act as a record of ideas for site improvements that can be implemented over time (or tossed if the idea isn't a good fit for the site or the users).
About the research--there is an overwhelmingly large amount of information out there on intranets, intranet design, intranet features, and intranet best practices. I've spent about fours hours of my time this week just reading and learning about intranets, and I've barely conquered the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of blogs out there, written by professionals and non-professional alike, about how to create a good intranet. One in particular, The Treehouse, had a series of four posts titled The Essential Intranet. Even though the MCFL's intranet already exists, there was still a lot of valuable information from Parts 1-3 that I was able to take away and use as I thought about this survey. I was also able to find pieces of wheat among the chaff in places like forums and company websites that were trying to sell a product (but happened to also include articles about various aspects of intranets). As I was looking for information on intranet features (to see if some could be included in the survey to gauge interest), I found a free short e-book titled 101 Intranet Ideas. Not only that, but I was also able to get some information about a study called the Social Intranet Study done in 2011 that looked at many aspect of intranets and the companies that have and use them. And all this wasn't even a fifth of what I read through (which isn't even a thousandth of what's out there). Needless to say, you can definitely find a lot of literature on the subject.
So there was a lot to absorb and mull over. And since I had never created a survey before, I also looked at some sources that provided survey creation help, and found a couple that were specifically for intranet surveys. I even found an unlikely source in HowTo.gov on their page titled Basics of Survey and Question Design. It provided a lot of survey "basics," and I definitely used the information there while I was trying to create survey questions on Survey Monkey (the survey creator used by the MCFL). I'm fairly happy with what I've created so far--and I'm trying hard to stay away from any double-barreled questions, leading questions, questions with built-in assumptions, and questions that leave out a response choice (basically, all the pitfalls noted on the HowTo.gov page).
Hopefully, I'll get some feedback soon--with a survey like this, there's lots to learn!
The goal of the survey I need to create is to determine what aspects of the staff site are favored and which aren't, and discover what features (if any) the staff would like to include on their site. Because of the problems that arise from too many open-ended questions (mainly problems understanding what respondents are trying to say), I've been given a limitation of only using multiple-choice questions with one open-ended question at the end. Certainly not an easy task, since I'm not in the staff's heads and can't divine what questions to ask to get the desired feedback (though wouldn't that be a useful talent to have?).
So my plan of attack has been to start with research--researching staff sites, commonly liked features, site best practices, etc. I do have a survey that was done to gather feedback for the public site that I can use as a template and a spring board for creating questions. To keep track of ideas that I or others think of, I've also created a spreadsheet of things to suggest adding to the site which will be posted for the rest of the webmasters team that works on the staff site to view and add to. It'll act as a record of ideas for site improvements that can be implemented over time (or tossed if the idea isn't a good fit for the site or the users).
About the research--there is an overwhelmingly large amount of information out there on intranets, intranet design, intranet features, and intranet best practices. I've spent about fours hours of my time this week just reading and learning about intranets, and I've barely conquered the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of blogs out there, written by professionals and non-professional alike, about how to create a good intranet. One in particular, The Treehouse, had a series of four posts titled The Essential Intranet. Even though the MCFL's intranet already exists, there was still a lot of valuable information from Parts 1-3 that I was able to take away and use as I thought about this survey. I was also able to find pieces of wheat among the chaff in places like forums and company websites that were trying to sell a product (but happened to also include articles about various aspects of intranets). As I was looking for information on intranet features (to see if some could be included in the survey to gauge interest), I found a free short e-book titled 101 Intranet Ideas. Not only that, but I was also able to get some information about a study called the Social Intranet Study done in 2011 that looked at many aspect of intranets and the companies that have and use them. And all this wasn't even a fifth of what I read through (which isn't even a thousandth of what's out there). Needless to say, you can definitely find a lot of literature on the subject.
So there was a lot to absorb and mull over. And since I had never created a survey before, I also looked at some sources that provided survey creation help, and found a couple that were specifically for intranet surveys. I even found an unlikely source in HowTo.gov on their page titled Basics of Survey and Question Design. It provided a lot of survey "basics," and I definitely used the information there while I was trying to create survey questions on Survey Monkey (the survey creator used by the MCFL). I'm fairly happy with what I've created so far--and I'm trying hard to stay away from any double-barreled questions, leading questions, questions with built-in assumptions, and questions that leave out a response choice (basically, all the pitfalls noted on the HowTo.gov page).
Hopefully, I'll get some feedback soon--with a survey like this, there's lots to learn!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)