“Obama’s Push for Health Care Cuts Faces Daunting Odds”

Thanks, Meg!

(Screen grab from nytimes.com, hilarious speech bubble added)

You can sign up to attend on the NewsInnovation DC wiki page.

The meetup will be held BarCamp style, which means that all of the presentations will be given by participants on a schedule decided by consensus on the day of the event. If you have a success story or strategy that you want to share, a prototype that you want to demonstrate, a discussion that you want to have, or a big question that you want to ask, this is the place to do it.

No special expertise is required to present, just a passion for what you’re doing and a willingness to share. For more background on BarCamps and how they work, see the Wikipedia page on BarCamp.

Similar events are happening in Chicago, Portland and other cities, leading up to a national meetup in Philadelphia on April 25th, 2009. For more information, have a look at the BarCamp announcement page on newsinnovation.com.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at wamitchell (at) washingtoncitypaper (dot) com. If you’re interested in helping out or sponsoring (sponsors usually provide food or pay for things), let me know. (I’ll take care of providing free pizza for lunch).

Please share this with anyone you know who might be interested. I don’t have very many contacts in DC media, so I can use plenty of help spreading the word.

I think it’s great when the TV has ads for places that I can’t actually get to, like Shoney’s and Wawa, and especially Sonic. It used to be that way with Checkers, too. There seem to be a reasonable number of Checkerses around now, they just haven’t migrated west of North Capitol yet.

As for Bob Evans, it’s almost like the Beltway is a force field keeping them out:

When I walked into the Virginia Square Giant supermarket this evening, there was a guy waiting by the entrance to introduce me to their new way of shopping for food: Handheld scanners that you carry with you in the store, checking out items as you go. He did a pretty good job with his pitch, but he didn’t really have to sell me on it. I think I fit squarely in their Early Adopter demographic.

These things are pretty sweet gadgets:

The concept is simple: You put in your phone number or “bonus card” number at a kiosk, and it activates a barcode scanner for you. Then you trot through the store scanning items as you put them in your basket.

You can do all the CRUD operations that you expect to be able to do, such as removing an item from your cart by selecting “Remove” and re-scanning it to confirm.

If you come across something with no barcode, like fresh produce, they’ve installed some electronic scales that can weigh the item and print a custom barcode for it. I wasn’t too worried about that anyway, since I don’t eat vegetables.

The scanner works well, at least compared to the barcode scanners I had to troubleshoot when I worked for Fairfax County Public Libraries many years ago. Time will tell how it fares against the barcodes on crappy product packaging (stretchable plastics, for example). It rang up my “Giant All Purpose Flour” as “Stop & Shop All Purpose Flour”—a little window into black box of our national food chain.

Part of the implicit contract that you accept by using one of these scanners is that it will periodically make a “Cha-Ching” sound and display a coupon on the screen. The idea is clearly to motivate impulse buying by suggesting enticing deals that the shopper might otherwise have passed up. All the offers I got were in coupon form. I’m both a coupon clipper and staunchly anti-impulse buying, so this aspect of the experience made me a little tense.

I would imagine that the people who wrote the software have big plans for future versions. The store now has access to a complete record of your shopping history—not only what you bought, but also what you almost bought and reconsidered.

However, that means you get to have a handy list of what you’re about to buy, with a running total of how much you’ll be spending. Owing to the kinds of foods I like to eat, I’m far from being a frugal grocery shopper. But having an itemized price list does help me think more clearly about wants versus needs.

Today I fulfilled two needs and two wants (both planned, rah rah), and that was a reasonable balance for my weekly food budget.

Of course, the real payoff comes at the register. Wasting one’s life in the grocery store is one of the most poignant existential dilemmas we face. By the time you get the queue, you’re really done and ready to get the hell out. Tonight, the combination of self-checkout and the new scanner workflow (scan in, confirm, pay, bag) got me out in about a minute. YMMV.

Overall, I was impressed. It felt more like playing than shopping, which is precisely the game they’re running, I’m sure.

A few other folks have written about the scan-as-you-go experience:

• Josh Greene notes his first impressions, with a few interesting points in the comments.
• Dave Fine conducts a point-based feature evaluation, FAILing it by one point (or maybe two, depending on how many zeroes his number system has) on some metrics I didn’t consider.
• Hiawatha Bray gives a full rundown of the Scan It system at Stop & Shop in Boston, in a review much more thorough (though in some places puffier) than this one.
• IBM has a marketing whitepaper on the grocery store’s motivation for doing this. I believe this paper refers to an earlier incarnation of the program referenced in Bray’s article.

A few weeks ago my coworker Jule interviewed me about why I like to bake, and the question turned to cookies:

JULE: Chocolate chip cookie: recipe on the Tollhouse bag or something more sinister?

WAM: A bag of mix, one clover, and one bee. I rarely make cookies from scratch. I like the Tollhouse recipe but usually I’m missing something basic like brown sugar or vanilla, and then I go to buy vanilla and there’s no vanilla left. Ridiculous. On Tuesday I had to buy cinnamon for pumpkin pie, and there was ONE container of cinnamon on the shelf, and it was huge. So now I have enough cinnamon to last until 2012.

Since then I’ve acquired a bottle of vanilla and I’ve been making an effort to truly grok the chocolate chip cookie, America’s Test Kitchen-style. I started by following the Toll House recipe to the letter every 2-3 days for a week. (Well, almost to the letter: I don’t like nuts.)  The results have been excellent and have brought small measures of joy into my coworkers’ lives, and large measures of unbaked cookie dough into my face.

Next week I’m going to try some limited variations on the Tollhouse standard. What makes a cookie chewier? Sweeter? Thinner or thicker? Then on to some fringe stuff, like pushing the chocolate content way beyond a reasonable limit. Both popular versions of the story hold that the first chocolate chip cookies were created by accident. In the one I always heard, the creator had expected the chocolate chips to melt and dissolve into the cookie batter. I believe I can cause that to happen.

At the very least, I want to follow in Jule’s footsteps toward cookie perfection, trying out different kinds of chocolate, adding sea salt, and maybe even changing up the butter if I can find some kind of high quality butter. One of my previous experiments was with homemade peanut butter cups, and trying different varieties of chocolate did yield a measurable improvement: the bittersweet peanut butter cups disappeared twice as fast as the semisweet variation.

The quest may lead back to the available ingredients and the Tollhouse recipe, as Jule found out. At least I’ll learn something about baking fundamentals. If do find a “more sinister” recipe, though, I’ll mention it here.

I’m also taking suggestions.

XML-RPC services are disabled on this blog.  An admin user can enable them at http://www.hostname.com/blogname/wp-admin/options-writing.php

I had checked the setting in the blog in question, and XML-RPC appeared to be enabled. It turned out that XML-RPC was disabled on the WPMU default blog. After I enabled it there as well, the connection started working.

1. Eat every pizza in the District of Columbia.
2. Write about it.

Possible bonuses: code, comics, cooking