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The most amazing thing about the butternut squash is not that it's delicious; pineapple and cantaloupe (from the same family as the squash) will easily rival it on that front. No, the amazing thing about the butternut squash is that it's both delicious and shelf stable. It will stay good for weeks and it will do so as room temperature, not hidden in the bottom drawer of your fridge.

There you are, week after week, with this squash sitting on your counter, nagging you every time you enter your kitchen. "Look how delicious I would be if you cooked me, " it's reminding you, "all of have to do is get off your lazy ass and prepare a meal with flesh." For most of the delicious things in your kitchen, you can either eat them or forget about them because they stop being delicious after a while but the butternut squash is not like that. You can't just slice it and enjoy it nor can you ignore it. The butternut squash coerces you into cooking.

There I was taking a walk around Union Square and even though I was doing my best to focus on finding a Swiss timepiece that would allow me to get into Twenty Five Lusk without wearing a suit, I could only think of cooking. And so I went into Williams-Sonoma to re-equip my kitchen, probably saving a few thousand dollars in the process.

You have to prepare the butternut squash before you can enjoy it but you have many options. I like it in soups because it provides a rich texture, making other thickening agents completely irrelevant. Preparing the butternut squash for a soup is easy: you can just peel it then boil it or, my favourite, you can bake it.

What do you put in a good butternut squash soup? Pretty much anything that you have in the bottom drawer of your fridge and that is still considered edible. A few tomatoes, some green onion, cauliflower, and celery; that's a good start. Top it up with several handfuls of fresh herbs and a tiny bit of curry powder and you're on a collision path with enlightenment.

If you always mean to cook but end up never doing it, put a butternut squash on your counter. Its constant nagging is going to do more to your motivation than hours of watching the Food Network.

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 It's been a little over a month since I left Montréal and a lot has happened since then. The search for a new home took some time but was not nearly as painful as I was expecting it to be. I got a lovely one bedroom apartment on the corner of the building, which gives me lots of natural light. There's a lot to do and see in San Francisco but this will all have to wait because the first thing that I did once I was sure that I would eventually have a bed to sleep on, was to brew a batch of beer.

I left most of my brewing equipment in Montréal. Most of the bulky stuff is simply too affordable to justify packing having it moved across the continent. I had a pretty good stash of hops that I ended up giving away because I was more interested in seeing used for brewing than going stale in a big unrefrigerated cardboard box somewhere between Montréal and San Francisco.

I did not buy everything that I had in Montréal but fortunately, brewing does not require much. I ordered a carboy, some malt, hops, a packet of yeast, and I was ready to go.

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The word is already out but in case you don't know yet, I'm moving to San Francisco to join Facebook. This news will be a surprise to some of you, especially since I've never been a big Facebook fan. I've always willingly shared lots of personal information about myself on this Website; the lack of privacy has never been a show stopper to me. When I stopped using Facebook, it was not on moral grounds, it was because I did not see myself as a part of their target market.

But I have only a few days left in Montréal and I can write about my reasons for moving to California at a later time. At this point, I find it urgent to mention that I've had a great time with many of you here in Montréal and that I would not want to go without drinking one more beer with all of you.

Mark the date, on Wednesday, November 16th, I invite you to join me for a 5-à-7 at Benelux, a long-time sponsor of Montréal-Python and probably the hottest pub in the tech community these days. It gets even better because Benelux likes cool people and by definition, if you know me, you certainly are very cool. This is why Benelux will give you a free beer next Wednesday; just ask me for a coupon. See you there!

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Ajah, our Python powered interactive directory of funders for Canadian non-profits, was recently featured in Don Magazine. We've been in the local news before but the previous mentions were all were by the tech community. Don Magazine is a publication for non profits and it's rewarding to see that beyond the cool tech, the non-profit sector sees a real value in the service that we developed.

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Last week, we had the Mondial de la bière, Montréal's international beer festival. This is a great expo-like event with over 40 craft brewers coming in town to show their creations.

The new venue is a refreshing change. The old one was getting way too crowded and it was a major challenge to move from one kiosk to the other during peek hours. With the larger venue, you have very large hallways and you can get a sense of who's on the floor by walking between the booth while drinking and having a conversation. Unfortunately, the new venue feels like a bunker: you access it from the underground city by passing a maze of up and down staircases then you arrive in this enormous hall with bare concrete walls and not a window in sight. If you think of a grey yellow-lit hallway in Quake, you are not too far from the reality.

It's OK to do a event indoor, but if you do so, do it during the winter. When I drink a beer in June, I think of a terrace and if you are not after very exclusive beers, you will get a much nicer experience on the terrace of a craft brewerie, which were all featuring some guest beers anyway.

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We just released theSector.ca, a tool to explore the Canadian charitable sector. In a nutshell, it's an interactive directory of charities that one can use to gain insight on individual charities as well as trends such as fundraising, staffing, and expenditures across the charitable sector.

We've already covered why we believe that it's going to shake the charitable sector and now I want to take a moment to celebrate the cool tech that allowed us to make it happen.

Both Fundtracker and theSector are TurboGears 2 applications running on top of a Postgres database. In Fundtracker, we achieved very good performance through fine tuning of Postgres and sprinkling bits of denormalized data here and there. Since you need a subscription to use Fundtracker, we can keep an eye on the growth and we feel safe from overnight scalability problems but theSector being a freely accessible tool, we had to make sure that it could handle a Twitter storm and our main tool to do that is systematic denormalization into a star schema.

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I'll be presenting at PyCon 2011. For most of my life, public speaking inspired some kind of dread in me but Montréal-Python offered me many opportunities to jump on the stage and to survive so I feel like then is hope that I will come out of this presentation alive as well. In fact, I will be talking about Montréal-Python and, among other things, how we teach members of our community through progressive acclimation that presenting your ideas to your peers is fun, stimulating, and very rarely fatal.

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Brewing comes with many benefits. It's true that having over 60 liters of beer on tap means that you can party all night long then some more but really, what I like about it is that you get to drink beer styles that you'd have a hard time to get your hands on otherwise. Drinking good beer and hanging around people who know a lot about turning malt into a delightful brew broadens your knowledge of beer and allows you to taste every beer, commercial or homebrew, with a magnified perspective.

When I taste a craft beer, either from a fellow homebrewer or from a micro brewery, I experience the story someone who cares to conceive a great drink, a beer with attitude. Not a drink that is meant to please everyone, but a bold drink that punches you in the face with an intense shockwave of flavors and aromas.

Next Monday, Cinema Politica will feature Beer Wars, a documentary by Anat Baron about the struggle of craft-brewers to bring tasteful beer to the masses despite the marketing assault of the corporate mass breweries. More infos on the Cinema Politica Website.

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Ajah, the startup I'm building with Mike, Nick, and Dan, is now online. Check it out: ajah.ca.

We spent a crazy evening proofreading and tuning the web-server to make sure that everything would be running smoothly for the launch. That was fun.

Only the static part of the site is public for now but the Fundtracker application is there in the same Paster instance and we have a group of analysts using it to copy edit our data and making sure that everything will be top-notch for the big launch.

Ajah Fundtracker is a TurboGears 2.1 application, our templating engine is Mako and even though we played with a few form generators, we ended preferring the raw Formencode encode approach. As long a you have a good text editor, it's really straight forward to code your forms by hand to we did just that.

In the back-end, we have a Postgres database and a Xapian full text search engine. The site runs inside a Paster instance behind mod_proxy, all running on a Linode VM.

We will open a limited beta in the coming week then soon after that, it's the big launch. I'm excited.

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Better Brainstorming

Last Sunday, Mike and I had to prepare a 10 minutes presentation that we wanted to give on Monday to a group of entrepreneurs. The presentation was on the market research that we did for Ajah, our project to help Canadian non-profits to find sources of funding.

For such a short presentation, we did not expect many problems, which is probably why we waited until the last minute to prepare the whole thing. We were sitting at the table with paper pads and printouts of published research, both of us having a pretty good idea on what we wanted to talk about, but we could not quite communicate effectively the outline that we wanted. Indeed, by writing down and striking out items that we wanted in there, we ended-up with messy notebooks in no time but the outline certainly did not standout.

That's when I recalled an interesting approach to brainstorming that Erik Wright from Akoha had told me about: use post-it notes on a large wall. You start by dumping a bunch of ideas, each on their own post it note and you stick them all on the wall in no particular order. Then you try to form groups with what goes together, and finally, in the case of a presentation, you re-order them to represent the chronological order of the talk.

I really like this idea because it gives a visual representation of what the presentation is going to look like and it allows every participant to have his own stack of post-it notes and to contribute new ideas in parallel. We gave the presentation yesterday and we got very good feedback from it so I presume that the post-it brainstorming was useful. Why don't you give it a try and let me know how it goes for you?

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You won't need a blow off tube until you do. With 19L batches you'll be fine with an airlock most of the time but as mentioned it depends on the specifics of the batch. Anyway, as Denis says, you're not a real home brewer until you have cleaned the ceiling with a mop. Down the track, make sure to post the inevitably hilarious pictures of the batch where your airlock blocked up and in hindsight you should have used a large diameter blow off tube instead.

Anthony Wilson, on the MontreAlers mailing list

Brewing is full of challenges. Among other things, you have to deal with organic ingredients with relatively short shelf life and with qualities that varies from one harvest to the other, you need to move large volumes of hot liquid, and you have to handle sticky fluids under high pressure.

While patience is a virtue when brewing, it happens that you have to rush a batch a bit because you want it ready for a particular event. That's when being part of a club is very helpful. Experienced brewers know tricks that are not written in books and they will readily share then when you ask the right questions.

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I'm a brewer. I like to brew beer, I like to share the results, and I like to incorporate the feed back that I receive in order to improve. I am fortunate because we have a great brewing club here in Montréal and it's a very effective source of informed feedback.

Being part of a club means that you have a bunch of brewers of different levels who can give you advice. Once in a while, we meet and samples each others brew and comment on what could push these brews a little further on the greatness scale.

Senior members of the MontreAlers also team up with the Canadian Amateur Brewers Association to organize a yearly brewing competition and for the first time, I decided to submit an entry.

Daniel Haran is the former lead organizer of the Montreal.rb ruby user group, I am the lead organizer of Montréal-Python, but when I met him for the first time, instead of talking about user groups, we ended up talking about food. It turns out that Daniel is also a chocolate home roasters. He is very knowledgeable in the different quality of various cocoa beans and we agreed to work on a project together: Vénus Noire, an Imperial Chocolate Stout.

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What I'm about to write will seem remarkably obvious to many but incredidly strange to others. Furthermore, I beleive that those who will find it obvious will still find it strange that it took so long for me to write it.

I closed my Facebook account.

I've never been a Facebook heavy user; I opened an account just to see what it was all about without looking to get in touch with anyone. For a time, it was all good, not terribly useful but peacefully pleasant, just like a barren snow field. Then I started to have Facebook "friends".

One big problem is the low barrier of entry to send a friend request. On Facebook, you get friend requests from people who could not care less about you and whom we've not talked to for more then a decade, from people whom you've only exchanged a glance with. On retrospect, the best thing to do is to ignore those, but that won't solve the root of the problem.

Most people suck at Facebook. It's not that they have bad intensions or that they are dumb -- I've seen incredibly smart persons suck at Facebook -- it's that Facebook rewards annoying behaviors. I won't say much about games, because it should be obvious to anyone that there is no way in hell that I should find it interesting that you've established and imaginary drug cartel on some imaginary island in the middle of an imaginary nowhere. If you think otherwise, imagine me calling you every time I solve the Rubik's Cube.

And then there's the status update. In the best case, it's used to broadcast irrelevant trivia about someone's life, which is annoying but not particularly harmful. But it does not stop there because the status update is a poweful tool to reach instantly a broad audience, and that's the root of the problem. As soon as someone in a particular network starts to use the status update to promote stuff, where stuff can be anything, and not necessarily stuff for sale, others see that opportunity and the wave goes on. From there, the noisy TV turns into a blinking billboard.

I decided that it was too much for me when I realized that I was doing the same. When you reach that point, it's clear that whatever benefit there is to Facebook certainly cannot outweight the damage that it does to you.

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It's conference time once again. In two weeks, I'll be attending PyCon, a conference that no Pythonistas should miss, then one week later, I will be at ConFoo, a conference that we are organizing at Montréal-Python along with other local user groups.

If you've been to a multi-track conference, you know the drill. As the speaker wraps up for his conclusion, instead of paying attention, you rush to unplug your laptop and to reach for your annotated program. Indeed, you've got only a moment to find out in what room the next talk that you planned to see is.

But this year is different.

One week ago, PyCon unveiled a very nice track selector application. It's very nice because it allows you to select in advance the tracks that you don't want to miss, to add them to you calendar application or to share your schedule with friends. That way, no more last minute rush to find where you go next.

I was really happy to see that so I shared the word with the ConFoo team, mentioning that it's the kind of things that we should develop for ConFoo 2011 next year. Well, it turned out that Anna, the ConFoo webmaster, really liked the idea and she came up with a schedule builder for ConFoo after only 48 hours. Both selectors have their own strengths and weaknesses but at least they get the job done. Hopefully more conferences will follow the trend of implementing track selectors; this is the kind of simple features that really improve the user experience.

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