Update 1/11/2014

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You may have noticed an affiliate bar at the top.  That’s because a group of friends and I decided to work together as an alliance of sites, Crossroads Alpha.  The idea is to pool talent and knowledge, network sites, and work together in a way that compliments each other.

We’d been discussing ways we could support each other for awhile.  Each of us had our own sites (comics, games, creativity and careers), and we’d also experienced running websites.  So the idea is to team up, share knowledge, build an alliance, and help people connect to useful sites.

In the case of MuseHack, of course, this is the career/applied geekery part of our alliance.  It’ll be useful for other careerists and hopeful careerists to have a place to come to, and those that can share career advice have a place to post.

As for regular MuseHack users, it means sites that can help with your careers – in this case comics and indie games, but there’s going to be more coming I’m sure.  Both Comics Bulletin and Indie Haven have their professional elements – of and they may need people to post and work with too . . . great for your career . . .

It’s actually yielded a lot already – on my end it’s let me dive back into some technical areas and plan to recruit for MuseHack here.  So stay tuned . . .

– Steven Savage

 

Catalan-Style Beans

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This is a recipe for a basic spanish/Catalonian-type bean dish, a variant of one I saw in a cookbook and did my own version of (mostly to make it simpler and easier).  It’s not perfect, but it came out darn good the first time – more below.

Catalan-Style Beans

  • 2 tbsp Olive oil
  • 4 large tomatoes, diced
  • 1 bell pepper, dices
  • 1 1/2 tbsp crushed garlic (about 4 big cloves)
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/4 tsp ground black pepper
  • 1/4 tsp ground thyme
  • generous pinch cinnamon
  • 3 cups (2 cans) of white beans or garbanzos, low-sodium
  1. Preheat oven to 375.
  2. Mix all ingredients except beans in a skillet.  Sautee for 3 minutes to allow blend, cover, lower heat.  Cook 10 minutes, simmering.
  3. Place beans on bottom of a 2 quart baking dish, spread out evenly.
  4. Cover beans with tomato mixture.
  5. Place in oven, cook uncovered for 1 hour, stirring every 20 minutes.
  6. Serve.

This freeze and reheats well – in fact the flavor may improve after a bit of reheating – don’t overdo reheating it, the beans can get a bit soft if you use navy beans.

This recipe was pretty good the first time, with a simple flavor, nice fragrance, a bit of a zippy kick from the tomatoes and garlic.  A nice, light main course.  It needs some tweaking – the flavor could use a bit of depth and I think there may have been a bit much liquid – but it’s one of those recipes where the first time showed there’s something to this.

Improvement-wise I’m thinking of: less olive oil, uncovering the mix during the simmer phase to reduce fluid, and cooking at a slightly lower temperature.  I have also tried it with paprika (not sure) and some red pepper (which was good).

Also it’s easy to make after the initial sautee-and-simmer, since it basically sits in the oven for an hour with an occasional stir!

Serving-wise I’ve had it with polenta, steamed garlic, and vinegared turnips.  Despite its kick, it works with vinegared food and other sours, and I think it goes good with greens.  The polenta worked due to sweetness, so it’d also probably go good with corn, peas, rice, and bread.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Geek As Citizen: Omnicompetence And It’s Discontents

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Heroic Rider

(Note, an earlier draft of this essay was published inappropriately.  This is the edited version.  Enjoy the irony of an essay on competence having mistakes in it 😉 )

I first heard the term “Omnicompetence” in reference to Elon Musk of Tesla and his proposal for the Hyperloop, back when it made a splash in the news. The term was applied to how some people viewed Mr. Musk; being successful, smart, and moving electric cars forward, there were those that imbued him with an aura of Omnicompetence – that his successes in one area meant he would be successful in other areas or indeed all areas. This of course is not to single out Mr. Musk because I’m sure we’ve all seen similar breathless assumptions, and I rather like what he’s done with Tesla.

I love the term “Omnicompetence” because it defines something I see way too often; the idea that a person good at one thing must be good in other things or many things. We often see it, where people who are famous are asked their opinions on medicine, politicians opine on theology, and writers of fiction are asked about technology. In a way we’re quite used to it.

Yet, when we look at the idea of Omnicopmetence logically, it falls apart. Few people are truly good at a broad swatch of things, many are good at only a few things, and some just aren’t that hot anything but got lucky. We also know that some people’s “success” is really irrelevant to who they are; rich due to inheritance, famous due to a sex tape, and so forth.

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