At first I was a bit worried because the dough started to show some bubbles on the surface (see photo), but the results were excellent, the pizzas had a light, airy crust and nicely charred exterior while still being chewy and wet inside, just the way I like it. In fact I’m so happy that I will update the recipe to use 70% instead of 65% hydration.

Handling the dough was a bit more difficult but still manageable, I had to take care of using a lot of flour on the working surface and pizza peel, because a dough this wet tends to stick pretty quickly. I also tried to work fast to keep the time on the peel at a minimum, shaking the peel very often to make sure the dough wasn’t getting stuck.

While I was at it, I also tried some new pizza toppings. I figured that after having spent so much effort on the dough, some amount of thought should be put also on what goes on top of it. Here is what I tried:

Spinach and pine seeds

I had some leftover spinach in the fridge, and what better use for them than to throw them on the pizza? I drained and tore to pieces some canned peeled tomatoes, mixed them with oil, basil, salt, a pinch of sugar and one garlic clove, and let it rest for about an hour. I shaped the pizza, spread the tomato sauce and put in the oven for about 5 minutes. I took it out, added the spinach (that I had previously fried in the pan with some oil for a few minutes), pine seed and mozzarella and returned to the oven until the mozzarella had melted. Although it was thrown together to use some leftovers, it turned out to be the best pizza of the set. I think the tomato mixture had something to do with it.

Potatoes, thyme and rosemary

This one is from Jamie Oliver, see the original recipe here. It was nice but not great, I don’t think I’ll do it again.

Artichokes, prosciutto, olives and egg (Capricciosa à la Jamie Oliver)

Another one from Jamie, recipe here. This would have been great except that the artichoke was a bit chewy, I think it should have been cooked a bit rather than put raw on the pizza. Still, it was good (and look at that charred crust! Heaven!)

Another thing I realized today is that the best way to prepare the mozzarella is to shred it to pieces with your hands and let it dry on a colander for an hour or so.

Encouraged by a particularly successful week of pizza making, I decided to share my recipe. Here it is!

Was it worth it? Hell yeah.

P.S.: Coming next: Flexo for N9…

American magazine Newsweek published a list of the best countries in the world, and Finland ranked first (article here). If Italy would have achieved such a result, we would hear about it for the next two or three generations. What do you think the Finnish press did instead? Rather than boasting about it, they pointed out that the calculation was wrong, and Switzerland should have been first! (to which Newsweek replied that the calculation was indeed correct)

Humbleness is one of the things I like about the Finnish character, but you should really let yourself be proud for something sometimes, people!

Oh, and there was indeed an italian reaction (link in italian) to the news, a journalist recommending Newsweek to move their HQ to Helsinki if they liked it so much, and generally complaining that while we think these charts are irrelevant, we are still pissed off for not being at the top.

]]> http://www.balenet.com/2010/08/finland-best-country-in-the-world-and-ashamed-of-it/feed/ 0 http://www.balenet.com/2010/08/new-life-resolution-start-a-family/ http://www.balenet.com/2010/08/new-life-resolution-start-a-family/#comments Sun, 22 Aug 2010 21:43:50 +0000 bale http://www.balenet.com/?p=595

Well, he’s finally here: our baby boy was born on August 9th and (following Finnish tradition) is as yet unnamed!

OK, my first new year resolution didn’t go very far, and partly the reason is that for the last few months I moved my attention to “resolution #2: start an open source project”.

The project is called “Flexo” and is a time tracker application for N900 written in C++/Qt, you can read more about it here. I started it to learn something about the environment in which I work every day (and where I hardly have the chance to get anything concrete done), and also to reacquaint myself with that old passion of mine, programming. It’s been lots of fun and working on it reminded me why I got in this business in the first place.

I was also quite pleased with the tools offered by Nokia for the purpose, although still a bit rough around the edges they are very usable and well designed (and they work on Mac, although you need to jump through a few hoops to set everything up). There is plenty of links and blog posts out there in case you are interested, so I won’t get started here.

I wish I could work on it more, but “new year resolution #3″ (more like “new decade resolution”) is approaching fast and won’t leave me much time to do anything else…

I spent a rainy and grey weekend hacking a small application to help me keep track of time at work. I tend to exceed the regular office hours more often than I should, and I’m not always disciplined enough to mark down all the extra hours I do (which I’m supposed to claim as free time at some point, though that moment never seems to arrive).

The idea is simple: I want to “punch in” when I arrive to work, be aware of how much time I have spent in the day and how much overtime I have collected. I can check out and check in again multiple times during the same day, for example if I go to lunch or continue working from home in the evening (which is sadly the case sometimes)

I mainly did it to learn a bit of Qt, the cross-platform application framework owned by Nokia. It was a pleasant experience, starting from scratch and with my rusty C++ skills it took me two afternoons to put it together. The next step is, of course, getting this to run on the N900.

(note: I lost the screenshots thanks to my sloppy webmastering)

I’m not publishing the code here because it’s, ahem, rather ugly, but I’ll do it at some point.

P.S.: after I started doing this, I realized that Stefan had created a somewhat similar application for the iPhone called FlexTool. Stefan, if you are reading this: I didn’t copy your idea! Although I did add the “checked in” and “checked out” texts after seeing a screenshot of FlexTool.

Inspired by this post on Digital Photography School, I decided to start a “project 365″ this year. In short, I will be posting a photo a day on Flickr in the hope of improving my photographic skills. Let’s see how long I last!

I was drawn to computers in the early 80s, when my father introduced in our household a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. All of my friends had a Commodore 64, and we endlessly debated about which one was better (I can admit it now: it was the C64). Later I moved to the Commodore Amiga. Then like now, most of the attraction was the ability to play videogames.

Unlike today’s overbloated videogames industry, most games at the time were made by single individuals, two at most. Thanks to magazines like Zzap64! (known in Italy as Zzap!) I knew them by name and worshipped them like rockstars.

I think that Andrew Braybrook’s 1987 journal chronicling the development of his game “Morpheus” is what made me want to become a professional programmer (you can still read it on-line here). My cousin Massimo, aside from making his own snowboard, had his share of success writing a soccer game for Amiga and Atari ST called “Football Simulation“. It contains one of my two contributions to the videogame world, a box of balls in the options menu (top left corner in the image below).

Here is a list of my favourite game creators from back then, with some links. None of these people, in spite of their talent, seem to have made it big in the multi-billion videogame industry, which is a testament to either their anarchic genius or their inability to adapt.

• Matthew Smith, author of Manic Miner, one of the first computer games I ever played. After his early success he disappeared, apparently to live in a commune in Amsterdam.
• David Crane, co-founder of Activision and creator of the Pitfall! series, Ghostbusters and Little Computer People (inspiration for today’s The Sims!). His current company makes such iPhone games as Arcade Hoops Basketball.
• Andrew Braybrook, author of such classics as Paradroid, Uridium and the aforementioned diary. Nowadays works as a software developer for an insurance company.
• Jeff Minter, whose innovative and psychedelic shoot’em ups never failed to include references to llamas an yaks. His company, Llamasoft, is still active and just recently released a new version of the classic Gridrunner.
• The Bitmap Brothers, with mirrorshades and tons of attitude developed some of the best early Amiga games, like Gods and Speedball. After disbanding in 2003, two of them went on to found Tower Studios, but judging from the website they haven’t produced much since.
• Team 17, still active with the same name and best known for the Worms videogames series. Their Amiga games were impressive both technically and design-wise. Alien Breed was my favourite.

In retrospect, I wonder why I didn’t even try to become a game programmer. I suppose it didn’t look like a “serious enough” job, and by the time I reached employment age there were so many other interesting things to work with, the internet above all. In the end I liked playing games more than writing them.

P.S.: In case you were wondering, my other contribution to the videogame industry is the italian voice acting for Combat Mission – Afrika Korps