UCD cookie jar

This was definitely one of my better ideas: the UCD cookie jar. UCD stands for 'User Centered Design', and it's the name of the group if been working for at a project for quite some time: Scopus.

[ with 'quite some', I mean the past three year... ]



I really like to eat candy, so I decided to provide a cookie jar that everybody in the team could use.

[ people outside our team have discoverd it as well... ]



The principle of the cookie jar is simple: everyone can take from it he or she likes, as long as you fill it up again once in a while.

	Candy frogs on the left, ddutch licorice on the right...

The filling it up part of the bargain is kept pretty well: there's always something exciting in the jar. Cookies, licorice, chocolate, pollies, donuts, wierd Japanese wasabi-sweets, artificial flavoured (and colored) candy, now and laters, fluffy stuff, there is nothing I can think of that hasn't been in our jar before.



[ UCD Cookie Jar: U Can Donate! ]

Free couch

I imagine one of my neighbours was done watching at this couch. It is now standing at the side of the road, waiting for someone to give it a new home. Maybe it will blend in perfectly with the rest of your furniture...



[ I don't believe my eyes, some people are checking it out already... ]

	Spotted: a designer couch

Update: the seemingly interested couch-checkers have un-screwed the small metallic legs from underneath the couch. They've left the rest of the couch though...

[ maybe it wasn't a really comfortable sit..? ]

Neat bundle

One of the interesting side effects of kendo is the folding of your clothes after the training. And Japanese being Japanese, there is a special (origami like) way to do this right...

	A folded pile of hakama

It takes a fair bit of practise, but the finished product looks very organized...

Chop chop

I saw him lying in a small back ally store that sells the left over stock of businesses that have gone backrupt. He's a bit big, but I'm sure I can chop my spices very, very small now...

	It's sharp and shiny...

Chocolate cake (2)

As promised to myself, I bought a new, fresh, mould-free chocolate cake today.

	Shelved for later use...

The problem is that after yesterdays episode, I'm not really in the mood for cake...

[ I sincerly hope that I will get into the mood before it is too late... ]

Chocolate cake...

Wanting to eat something sweet and having a chocolate cake in one of my kitchen cupboards I quickly put two and two together...



Having the excuse that the cake needed to fit into a round cookie jar (and chocolate belongs to one of those essential things you must eat), I started by cutting off a big piece.

[ I think is was about 4 cm. thick... ]

The taste of the cake was rather disappointing. A bit dry, but that wouldn't stop me desperately trying to enjoy the chocolat bits hidden in the cake. I realized that the thing had been lying in my cupboard for some time, and things dry out...

After taken off (and eating) the first piece, the cake fitted in the cookie jar. But I figured that taking only a single piece would be like insulting the cake, so I started cutting my second piece.

[ this time of a more normale thickness... ]

This piece again taste like ...err... like you wouldn't expect a nice chocolate cake to taste like...

	See, the cake fitts the jar nicely...

But hey, chocolate is chocolate, so I started cutted myself a third piece. When I was getting the (nicely reduced) cake back in the jar, I made an unpleasant surprise. Still doing my upmost best to like the cake, and having taken out a big bite from piece no. 3, I saw the bottom of the cake for the first time. Wait a minute: chocolate cake should be brown and spons-like, not greenish-white and hairy..!



You might have guessed: the cake was way past its sell-by-date, and was trying to make this clear to me by growing a nice and mouldy patch at the bottom. If you take a close look at the above image, you can see that the third piece is slightly dis-colored at the middle...

It's a waste, now I must throw out the remainder of the cake, it still is chocolate...



[ mental note: must get another -fresh- one tomorrow... ]