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Best Episode of Top Chef All-Stars

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This might have been the best Top Chef All-Stars episode from the entire season. Episode 12, Give Me Your Huddled Masses, had the remaining five chefs creating Quick Fire dishes from a snack bar on-board a tour boat. Then for the main challenge, each chef prepared a dish representative of his family’s heritage. And every chef absolutely killed it. Carla, Antonia, Tiffany, Mike, and Richard cooked from their souls and gave the judges an impossible task of eliminating one more contender.

In the end, the judges simply couldn’t decide who to send packing. So instead of a Final Four, Top Chef has five finalists dueling for the All-Stars title.

Not only was the cooking great, but the reunion of chefs and their families was touching. But the best part of the show had to be the punking of Richard Blais. He got punk’d twice – once for his alright dish and secondly at Judges Table. Take a look…

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Read what Gail Simmons had to say about Richard’s reaction then keep up with Richard Blais on Twitter.

Sitting in the Dark

After a windy, rainy night, I’m sitting in the dark. Amazingly the network is running, not sure how long my UPS and laptop battery will last.

Using Storify to Tell the Unconferenz 2011 Story

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While attending the recent Unconferenz 2011, I saw many tweets and pics related to the #UNZ11 event. I was thinking these words from the participants themselves would make a great synopsis of the event. Luckily Storify allows you to build such a story. Check out the results after some Storify commentary.

Storify is still in beta and there are some rough edges. Your “state” isn’t saved so when you save a draft or switch from Twitter to Facebook inputs for example, you have to start at the “beginning.” I don’t mean the beginning of your story but the beginning of your research. The #UNZ11 hashtag has several pages of results but each time I left the Twitter input screen, I would have to redo my #UNZ11 search and scroll down pages of results to find my place. And dragging items from the left column to the right column can be tricky at times. You really have to place your locations in each column properly for drag and drop to work ideally (try it and you’ll see what I mean). For the Flickr input, I thought I could add in a Flickr photo set, and it seemed to work the first time. Trying it a second time didn’t work so instead, I used the link input to add additional Flickr sets to the story.

Still though, if you’re thinking of building a story from social media inputs, give Storify a try.

And now, on to the Unconferenz 2011 Storify.

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Unconferenz Is About Passion

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Plain and simple, what can I say but the Unconferenz gatherings are about passion. It’s passion that brought together individuals with different backgrounds and interests to discuss their different backgrounds and interests at Unconferenz 2011. This past weekend at Windward Community College, you could have joined other passionate people to talk about topics like:

  • productivity tips
  • design
  • innovation
  • travel
  • Hackerspace (coming soon)
  • food
  • personal informatics
  • outsourcing your cooking and cleaning
  • virtual assistants
  • gadgets

My Takeaways

Innovation in any business is needed but is very difficult to grasp and hence foster. Need to check out Innovation Hawaii.

Mac OS X Spaces and virtual desktops. Several vouched for virtual desktops (Spaces in Mac OS X) to boost productivity. The main key is to assign apps to specific spaces to segment your work and mind set.

PogoPlug. Yeah, I got one but there’s so much this tiny server can do. Thanks to @ryankanno for the show and tell of his hacked PogoPlug.

The Android Nook. You can mod the Barnes and Noble Nook Color into a low cost Android-based tablet.

Yubico and YubiKey. Ryan Kanno provided a strong case when describing the YubiKey security key and Yubico password management system. For around $40, this security system is worth the hassles of dealing with bogus online charges and purchases. My YubiKey is on order.

Parrot AR Drone. Possibly the coolest toy ever. This “helicopter” is remote controlled by the accelerometer in the iPad and iPhone.

And just a few pics of the passion at Unconferenz 2011.

Thanks again to Burt Lum for a great event!

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