Stubbornella - Nicole Sullivan

If you follow my tweets, you will have noticed that I’ve been obsessively trying to learn to cook poached eggs — and eating a lot of not-quite-poached eggs in the process. My results were much improved by an awesome YouTube video showing a poaching technique that uses a bowl and vinegar. What is an egg poacher? And how does albumin in the egg white cause it to coagulate? I’m still not sure, but I’m now eating properly poached egg in ramen and on english muffins. Yay!

So, with that success, I decided it was time to make hollandaise sauce. Crazy for a girl who doesn’t cook, but I’m on a roll. My friend John suggested a recipe that requires a blender, so with my birthday coming up, I decided to order one.

I looked in a few stores and finally ordered a Kitchenaide from Amazon. I was a little afraid to get one sight unseen because it is hard to judge quality from a photo, but it came today and it looks like the iphone of blenders. It is a sexy blender. W00t!

I also got a slotted spoon, because I was in a kitchen gizmos kind of mood, and, it really is difficult making poached eggs without one.

Surprised to see me posting about non-tech stuff? Check out my post about being shy and being myself on the internets. When the blender came in the mail today, I was inspired to write my first non-tech post in a long time.

A little over a year ago Ajaxian published a piece on my CSS techniques. Fortuitously, this forced me to start talking to people about my ideas, to create an open source project, and to speak at conferences. I’m shy, so I might not have taken the leap on my own.

For the first time, people followed me on twitter that I hadn’t met before. My blog posts got actual, interesting comments — along with some trolls, of course. Immediately, I stopped posting anything non-techie. I shouldn’t bother people with the delight I felt at eating corn flakes for breakfast, right? The truth is, I was terrified. I’m a lurker. I rarely even comment on blogs. For about a month, I stopped tweeting. Then, slowly, I became less shy and more spontaneous. A year has passed, and I’ve learned a lot about not taking things personally, how to deal with trolls, and how to be myself and be on the internets.