My husband and I live in a town that doesn't recognize Veteran's Day the way it was recognized in the one where we grew up. Here, the kids are all in school, learning to read and write and enjoy freedoms that soldiers fought so hard to protect. There isn't a parade and many porches are bare of stars and stripes.

We spoke to five people before 9am who were surprised to see my husband home from work today: they didn't realize it was Veteran's Day.

It's surprising and it isn't at the same time. They say that the "squeaky wheel gets the oil"-- none of the soldiers I know, enlisted and Veteran, squeak about much. They don't ask for recognition and plenty don't even begrudge the rest of us who take our freedoms for granted. But that doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't go out of our way to give it. In what we say and how we live.

Yesterday I was disappointed because the corner Starbucks was closed unexpectedly. I had to walk four blocks before I found another. What an inconvenience.

Until I realized how ridiculous I sounded. When did I start to expect so much?

I know I certainly have a lot to learn about humility and sacrifice from men and women who gave up lots of conveniences to serve our great great country.

In an article I read yesterday, a woman was thanking a soldier who saved her son's life in combat. She thanked him for his courage. He respectfully replied, "Courage had nothing to do with it ma'am. Love did."

I guess I could learn some things about love, too.

Thank you, Veterans. Every day, thank you.
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Hello From Long Lane Honey Bee Farms...

Sheri and I greet you from Central Illinois and from our family honey bee farm where now we do most of our work inside as we move closer to winter. Our bees have now clustered within their hives and they will be like that for the next few months.

I attended the Illinois State Beekeepers Association a week ago Saturday in Springfield, Illinois. At our state meeting we heard reports from our state's bee inspection program on the types and severity of diseases and pests. It seems that we are seeing less and less of disease and pests. This is a good sign for bees and beekeepers. There are now 19,556 bee hives in my state of Illinois. 1,366 beekeepers keep those 19,556 hives.

Our special speaker was Robin Mountain, originally from South Africa and now is Apiculture Extension Associate at Kentucky State University. He spoke on the importance of screen bottom boards, no medications in the hive and queen rearing, some of my favorite topics! The Illinois State Beekeepers Association now has 678 members. I was elected to serve as Central Region Direction with ISBA and look forward to my work with this group.

Last week, Sheri and I launched Studio Bee Live! We have produced our first 5 programs and they can be found at:

www.honeybeesonline.com/studiobeelive.html We are producing one program each weekday, so this should prove to be an enjoyable past time for you as you twiddle your thumbs during winter in hopes of a great spring

Click here to hear today's broadcast.

Studio Bee Live invites you to call in and speak on our program. Please consider calling in and speaking to our answering machine, telling us your name and where you are calling from and ask a question or leave a comment and we'll play it and answer your comment or question on one of our upcoming programs. Our question line is: 217-427-2430 We had a great question which will air on Monday or Tuesday asking what is meant by checkerboarding. My oldest son, David, and I had a blast answering that good question. It will probably be answered in Monday's program. So do call in with your questions or comments! 217-427-2430. We live in the country so to put in this extra question and answer line, my phone company had to bury 1, 300 feet of new phone cable to my house, so let's put that to good work :)

Also, Studio Bee Live invites advertisers and sponsors. Give us a call to consider advertising on Studio Bee Live. You can also underwrite portions of our broadcasts in memory or in honor of someone special in your life. Call us at: 217-427-2678 if you'd like to know more.

You can download the files from the website: www.honeybeesonline.com/studiobeelive.html and right click on the MP3 file. Save it to your computer, then upload it to your favorite MP3 device. For those who are more computer advance our program is all rss friendly as well as a Widget if you run the Springbox.

Lesson 43: How To Make Whipped Honey

This week I have been experimenting with making whipped honey. I never know what to call it, whether to call it whipped honey, spun honey, creamed honey or spreadable honey. I looked at the National Honey Board website and they called it whipped honey. I like that definition the best.

Notice in this picture of some of my whipped honey how stiff it is. It will hang to a spoon at room temperature. Some people think that whipped honey is honey with something added to it, or that it has been spun. That is not the case. Whenever I describe what whipped honey is and how to make it, it seems that people are so surprised they almost don't believe me. See if you have the same reaction.

Whipped or spreadable honey is nothing more than honey that has crystallized. Surprised?

Almost all honey crystallizes over time. Remember, honey never spoils and it is best left out at room temperature. Even though honey doesn't spoil it often does crystallize or turns hard. Some honey is faster than others to crystallize base on the individual type of nectar the honey was made from by the bees . The more sugar within the honey, the greater the chance is that it will eventually crystallized. However, it is very easy to liquefy crystallized honey by placing it in hot water or in a very warm room or in a window where the sun can warm it up. Remember, all honey crystallizes and this does not hurt the quality of honey.

Now if your honey does crystallize, you will notice that it is not the same as whipped honey, even though both are crystallized. The reason is that natural crystallization of honey has larger crystals than whipped honey, crystals close to what we find in table sugar size. However, what we do to make whipped honey is to grind up the crystals into much, much smaller crystals, so tiny that the honey feels whipped, smooth, creamy and spreadable.

Before I complicate the matter, about grinding crystals, let me tell you the easy way to make whipped honey.

1. Take a jar of liquid honey

2. Buy some spreadable or whipped honey

3. Remove 1/10 of a jar of honey and replace it with the whipped honey

4. Stir it up and let it stand in a room around 56 degrees (F) for a week.

What happens is that the whipped honey you placed in the jar, duplicates itself and keeps the original size of the crystals that were introduced. That's how you keep the crystals small.

It is really fun to make and what a great family activity on a cold winter day. My basement remains 56 degrees all year long and is the ideal location to allow the crystallization process to be complete. This thermometer is GREAT! I buy these at Wal-mart for around $9. This particular model is every beekeeper's friend. I like it because it only has two readings: Temperature and humidity. These are the two bits of information beekeepers need the most. It is made by Acurite and I think I have given the model number in previous lessons. I use these in my queen incubator, honey processing room and now for making sure my whipped honey area is around 56 degrees (F). This one also records the high and low temperatures and high and low humidity level. Can't beat the price for what you get.

Here's an example of a quart jar filled with whipped honey. This was a regular jar of liquid honey and I removed 1/10 of the honey to make room for the starter, which is just already whipped honey, sometimes called "seed". I added the seed starter, and placed it in my basement for 1 week. It worked perfectly. If you are having trouble selling your honey, then diversify and make whipped honey. People really love it.

The process of making whipped honey was developed and patented by Elton J. Dyce in 1935. He provides us with much more details on how to make a perfect batch, but my batches have been perfect as followed above. Dyce suggested heating the honey first to destroy any previously formed crystals.

In fact, here's the link to the Nation Honey Board's website .pdf file for more specifics about making whipped honey.

Enjoy! It is so good.

It's time to order your hive boxes, known as wooden ware. Call today and get your order in! 217-427-2678. Or order from our website at: www.honeybeesonline.com

Remember to BEE-Have yourself!

David & Sheri Burns

Long Lane Honey Bee Farms

www.honeybeesonline.com

EMAIL: david@honeybeesonline.com

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When we build products, we use a methodology. For software, we have many - you can enjoy a nice long list on Wikipedia. But too often when it's time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way. We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. We're easily convinced by the argument that all we need to do is "build it and they will come." And when they don't come, well, we just try, try, again.

What's wrong with this picture?

Steve Blank has devoted many years now to trying to answer that question, with a theory he calls Customer Development. This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development.

You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steve's book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I highly recommend this book for all entrepreneurs, in startups as well as in big companies. Here's the catch. This is a self-published book, originally designed as a companion to Steve's class at Berkeley's Haas school of business. And Steve is the first to admit that it's a "turgid" read, without a great deal of narrative flow. It's part workbook, part war story compendium, part theoretical treatise, and part manifesto. It's trying to do way too many things at once. On the plus side, that means it's a great deal. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.

Some notable bloggers have made efforts to overcome these obstacles. VentureHacks did a great summary, which includes slides and video. Marc Andreeson also took a stab, calling it "a very practical how-to manual for startups ... a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." The theory of Product/Market Fit is one key component of customer development, and I highly recommend Marc's essay on that topic.

Still, I feel the need to add my two cents. There's so much crammed into The Four Steps to the Epiphany that I want to distill out what I see as the key points:

1. Get out of the building. Very few startups fail for lack of technology. They almost always fail for lack of customers. Yet surprisingly few companies take the basic step of attempting to learn about their customers (or potential customers) until it is too late. I've been guilty of this many times in my career - it's just so easy to focus on product and technology instead. True, there are the rare products that have literally no market risk; they are all about technology risk ("cure for cancer"). For the rest of us, we need to get some facts to inform and qualify our hypotheses ("fancy word for guesses") about what kind of product customers will ultimately buy.
   
   And this is where we find Steve's maxim that “In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” Most likely, your business plan is loaded with opinions and guesses, sprinkled with a dash of vision and hope. Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you don't have to give up on your dream. We just want you to get out of the building, and start finding out whether your dream is a vision or a delusion. Surprisingly early, you can start to get a sense for who the customer of your product might be, how you'll reach them, and what they will ultimately need. Customer development is emphatically not an excuse to slow down or change the plan every day. It's an attempt to minimize the risk of total failure by checking your theories against reality.
   
   
2. Theory of market types. Layered on top of all of this is a theory that helps explain why different startups face wildly different challenges and time horizons. There are three fundamental situations that change what your company needs to do: creating a new market (the original Palm), bringing a new product to an existing market (Handspring), and resegmenting an existing market (niche, like In-n-Out Burger; or low-cost, like Southwest Airlines). If you're entering an existing market, be prepared for fast and furious competition from the incumbent players, but enjoy the ability to fail (or succeed) fast. When creating a new market, expect to spend as long as two years before you manage to get traction with early customers, but enjoy the utter lack of competition. What kind of market are you in? The Four Steps to the Epiphany contains a detailed approach to help you find out.
   
   
3. Finding a market for the product as specified. When I first got the "listening to customers" religion, my plan was to talk to as many customer as possible, and build them as many features as they asked as possible. This is a common mistake. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. In order to do this, we have our customer development team work hard to find a market, any market, for the product as currently specified. We don't just abandon the vision of the company at every turn. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders' belief.
   
   The nice thing about this paradigm is it sets the company up for a rational discussion when the task of finding customers fails. You can start to think through the consequences of this information before it's too late. You might still decide to press ahead building the original product, but you can do so with eyes open, knowing that it's going to be a tough, uphill battle. Or, you might start to iterate the concept, each time testing it against the set of facts that you've been collecting about potential customers. You don't have to wait to iterate until after the splashy high-burn launch.
   
   
4. Phases of product & company growth. The book takes its name from Steve's theory of the four stages of growth any startup goes through. He calls these steps Customer Discovery (when you're just trying to figure out if there are any customers who might want your product), Customer Validation (when you make your first revenue by selling your early product), Customer Creation (akin to a traditional startup launch, only with strategy involved), and Company Building (where you gear up to Cross the Chasm). Having lived through a startup that went through all four phases, I can attest to how useful it is to have a roadmap that can orient you to what's going on as your job and company changes.
   
   As an aside, here's my experience: you don't get a memo that tells you that things have changed. If you did, it would read something like this: "Dear Eric, thank you for your service to this company. Unfortunately, the job you have been doing is no longer available, and the company you used to work for no longer exists. However, we are pleased to offer you a new job at an entirely new company, that happens to contain all the same people as before. This new job began months ago, and you are already failing at it. Luckily, all the strategies you've developed that made you successful at the old company are entirely obsolete. Best of luck!"
   
   
5. Learning and iterating vs. linear execution. I won't go through all four steps in detail (buy the book already). I'll just focus on the paradigm shift represented by the first two steps and the last two steps. In the beginning, startups are focused on figuring out which way is up. They really don't have a clue what they should be doing, and everything is guesses. In the old model, they would probably launch during this phase, failing or succeeding spectacularly. Only after a major, public, and expensive failure would they try a new iteration. Most people can't sustain more than a few of these iterations, and the founders rarely get to be involved in the later tries.
   
   The root of that mistake is premature execution. The major insight of The Four Steps to the Epiphany is that startups need time spent in a mindset of learning and iterating, before they try to launch. During that time, they can collect facts and change direction in private, without dramatic and public embarrassment for their founders and investors. The book lays out a disciplined approach to make sure this period doesn't last forever, and clear criteria for when you know it's time to move to an execution footing: when you have a repeatable and scalable sales process, as evidenced by early customers paying you money for your early product.
   

It slices, it dices. It's also a great introduction to selling and positioning a product for non-marketeers, a workbook for developing product hypotheses, and a compendium of incredibly useful tactics for startups young and old.

When I first encountered this book, my first impulse was as follows. I bought a bunch of copies, gave them out to my co-founders and early employees, and then expected the whole company's behavior would radically change the next day. That doesn't work (you can stop laughing now). This is not a book for everyone. I've only had luck sharing it with other entrepreneurs who are actually struggling with their product or company. If you already know all the answers, you can skip this one. But if you find some aspect of the situation your in confusing, maybe this will provide some clarity. Or at least some techniques for finding clarity soon.

My final suggestion is that you buy the book and skim it. Try and find sections that apply to the startup you're in (or are thinking of building). Make a note of the stuff that doesn't seem to make sense. Then put it on your shelf and forget about it. If your experience is anything like mine, here's what will happen. One day, you'll be banging your head against the wall, trying to make progress on some seemingly intractable problem (like, how the hell do I know if this random customer is an early adopter who I should spend time listening to, or a mainstream customer who won't buy my product for years). That's when I would get that light bulb moment: this problem sounds familiar. Go to your shelf. Get down the book, and be amazed that you are not the first person to tackle this problem in the history of the world.

I have been continually surprised at how many times I could go back to that same well for wisdom and advice. I hope you will be too.
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If you want to build an online service, and you don't test it with a fake AdWords campaign ahead of time, you're crazy. That's the conclusion I've come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. So I thought I would walk you through exactly how to run a "fake landing page" test using cheap tools that require no technical skills whatsoever.

Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. If you're worried about disappointing some potential customers - don't be. Most of the time, the experiments you run will have a zero percent conversion rate - meaning no customers were harmed during the making of this experiment. And if you do get a handful of people taking you up on the offer, you'll be able to send them a nice personal apology. And if you get tons of people trying to take you up on your offer - congratulations. You probably have a business. Hopefully that will take some of the sting out of the fact that you had to engage in a little trickery.

To motivate you to give this a try, let me tell you a story from the early days of IMVU. It was fall 2004, and the presidential election was in full swing. One day, we became convinced that a killer app for IMVU would be to sell a presidential debate bundle, where our customers could put on a Bush or Kerry avatar, and then engage in mock debates with each other. It was one of those brilliant startup brainstorms that comes to the team in a flash, with a giant thunderclap. We spent weeks working on this new product, racing the clock so it would be done in time for the real presidential debates. We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. We finally settled on a $1.99 price point, figuring that we wouldn't make much money, but at least we wouldn't get in the way of achieving scale. Finally the day came, we unleashed the landing page, emailed our existing customers, and started advertising online.

The net result: we sold exactly zero presidential debate avatars. None. Nada. We tried different price points, different ad copy, different landing pages. Nothing made any difference. Turns out, there was aboslutely no demand whatsoever for that particular product. And we could have found it out quite easily, if we'd used the simple five step process below. Oops - there went several precious weeks of development effort down the drain.

So, if you're interested in helping avoid mistakes like that, here are the steps:

1. Get a domain name. It doesn't have to be the world's catchiest name, just pick something reasonably descriptive. If you're concerned about sullying your eventual brand name, don't use your "really good" name, pick a code name. Make sure your domain registrar offers free "website forwarding" if you don't use a hosting service that lets you use a custom domain name in step 2.
   
   
2. Setup a simple website. I recommend using a hosted service like SnapPages. You basically want to create two pages: a landing page that says what your product does, and a signup page that people can use to register for it. If you're feeling charitable, you can add a third page that lets people know that the product isn't available right now, and that you'll get back to them when it is.
   
   
3. Enable Google Analytics tracking. The nice thing about services like SnapPages is that they offer this built-in. You just have to sign up for Google Analytics, get your account number, and plug it into your site.
   
   
4. Start an AdWords campaign. Google AdWords has no minimum buy required, so you can easily run a campaign for five dollars a day, or even less. Just put in your credit card. I recommend using their Keyword Tool to setup your initial list of ad targets. Don't worry about selecting particularly good keywords, if you're new to SEM. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05, but you might want to go as high as $.25 or $.50. Just make sure you choose a maximum daily budget that is affordable for you to run the campaign for a few weeks with. I would aim to get no more than 1o0 clicks per day - over the course of a week or two, you'll get pretty good conversion data.
   
   
5. Measure conversion rates. Use Google's built-in Analytics/AdWords integration, to track the effectiveness of each ad you run. Then set up "goal tracking" in Analytics to see how many people actually sign up using your registration page. Here are the stats you want to pay particular attention to: the overall conversion % of customers from landing page to completed registration, the click-through-rate for your ads on different keywords, and the bounce rate of your landing page for different keywords.
   

Armed with that data, you will know a lot about what your business will look like when you finally do build the product you're imagining. At the very least, you can plug those assumptions into your financial model, now that you have a sense for what the cost of acquiring new customers might look like.

Even more importantly, you can start to experiment with feature set, positioning, and marketing - all without building a product. Use Google Optimizer to try different landing pages (even radically different landing pages) to see if any particular way of talking about your product makes a difference to your conversion rates. And if you're getting conversion rates that you feel good about, try asking for a credit card or other method of payment. If that takes your conversion rate to zero, that doesn't necessarily mean you don't have a business, but I'd give it some serious thought. Products that truly solve a severe pain for early adopters can usually find some visionary customers who will pre-order, just based on the vision that you're selling. If you can't find any, maybe that means you haven't figured out who your customer is yet.

And if you don't know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order?

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Last Sunday (Nov 2, 2008), an interesting Internet experiment occurred. Berkeley Breathed, creator of the comic strip "Opus", tried to cross mediums. In his final entry in the strip, which appeared in Sunday papers all across the country, he made readers go to www.humanesociety.org/opus to see the final panel.So the obvious question is: How many people made the jump? The answer can be found on
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I thought I'd share an interesting post from someone with a decidedly anti-agile point of view.

Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile: "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company I've even heard about. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way. The result: the whole code base looks the same, so switching teams and sharing code are both far easier than they are at other places."

I think you can safely ignore the rantings about "bad agile" and the bad people who promote it. But it's helpful to take a detailed look inside the highly agile process used by Google to ship software. Three concepts I found particularly helpful:

1. Process = discipline. Agile is not an excuse for random execution or lack of standards. They have an extreme focus on unit tests and code standards, which is highly recommended.
   
   
2. Dates are irrelevant. Use a priority work queue instead of scheduling and estimating. As I've written previously:
   

   I think agile team-building practices make scheduling per se much less important. In many startup situations, ask yourself "Do I really need to accurately know when this project will be done?" When the answer is no, we can cancel all the effort that goes into building schedules and focus on making progress evident.
   

3. Focus on launching. All of the incentives described in the article focus on making it easy and highly desirable to launch your product:
   

   [He] claimed that launching projects is the natural state that Google's internal ecosystem tends towards, and it's because they pump so much energy into pointing people in that direction. ...
   
   So launches become an emergent property of the system.
   
   This eliminates the need for a bunch of standard project management ideas and methods: all the ones concerned with dealing with slackers, calling bluffs on estimates, forcing people to come to consensus on shared design issues, and so on. You don't need "war team meetings," and you don't need status reports

   I even believe in doing launches on a continuous basis (see continuous ship).
   

Anyway, thanks Stevey for your thoughtful post. And sorry about those horrible Bad Agile charlatans that have been apparently torturing you with their salesmanship and dumb ideas.

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• 12 Unit Testing Tips for Software Engineers
• Using Continuous Integration to Reduce Project Friction

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I had the privilege of volunteering for the Obama campaign in swing states for a few weekends during the final push towards victory. I'm quite confident I got more out of the experience than the campaign got from me. Zillions of stories are being written about why Barack Obama won, and I will try and avoid repeating the obvious. But nothing I've read so far really does justice to what I witnessed in Colorado and Nevada.

I believe that part of the reason for Barack Obama's victory was his superior understanding of how to build an organization that could learn, discover and execute and at speed so fast that it looked like a blur to the McCain camp. In other words, he better applied the principles of maneuver warfare to his campaign. Startups and larger companies alike can learn a lot from the organization I observed.

Here's some of what I learned from the experience. Obama understood the two concepts that are essential for building a high-performance, highly adaptable, agile organization: 1) rapid iteration and 2) clear values-based objectives.

Following this approach, an organization can act with incredible speed, constantly updating its strategy before an opponent can even figure out what's happening. But instead of looking erratic, the many units of your organization act in concert to produce a coherent whole. In other words: you look like a blur to your enemies. Boyd called this concept the OODA loop, for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. He believed that the speed at which you can move through the loop determines victory. I believe John Boyd would have been impressed by Barack Obama's campaign.

Speed of iteration
I was impressed by the speed at which the campaign executed its OODA loop, at many levels of the organization. In the small field office that I volunteered at in Colorado, here was the rhythm of our daily existence.

Observe
At the end of each day, we'd laboriously enter data, updating the campaign's voter database with information about every voter contact we accomplished that day. That voter database was accessible to staff at every level of the campaign.

Orient
And then the voter data would be crunched, by someone at statewide HQ, and each night we'd start the process of creating new packets of instructions for the next day. The packets were created from targeted lists of voters, based on all the data the campaign was able to gather from its multi-pronged collection efforts.

Decide
Each day we'd be directed to use specific lists with specific scripts, all created by the campaign. We'd also learn what our overall goals were, and we'd report on how well we'd accomplished those goals at the end of each day.

Act
Each morning, volunteers would arrive and be handed packets with instructions. We'd train them on-demand as they came in, and send them into the world (or onto the phones) with written instructions and voter contact data. Over the course of the day, we'd take their feedback about how it was going into account, revising the script occasionally (back to the Orient step) to try and maximize the goal for that day (voter contacts, persuasion, get out the vote, signing up new volunteers, etc).

The whole loop took only one day.

I have to assume that this structure allowed the campaign to experiment freely and rapidly on their data mining and script-building techniques. It also must have allowed them to assess the effectiveness of each field organizer, team leader, and even each volunteer day-by-day. I didn't witness this first-hand, but they must have been able to diagnose problems pretty quickly and take corrective action whenever necessary. This allowed them very wide discretion when it came to decentralizing the whole organization. The risk of incorporating a bunch of brand-new volunteers is much lower if you have good analytics about their performance.


Mission synchronization
If an organization is changing on a daily basis how is it that it doesn't look "erratic" yet feels "agile." The key is mission synchronization. Every day, up and down the organization we all shared consistent values and sense of common purpose. I want to quote a little bit from the "Organizing Principles" section of the briefing packet I was issued by the Colorado Border States Team when I agreed to come volunteer:

"Respect. Empower. Include" guides everything we do. [it] is the mantra for our campaign and our organizing. Our army of volunteers has been our core advantage on the ground. This army will serve as the foudnation of our general election organization. Our campaign must maximize this strength.

To do so, we must live this mantra on a daily basis. We must be respectful of our coworkers and our supporters; of our own daily projects; of the voters in the state we work; of our opponent and his supporters. We must go beyond engaging volunteers with tasks. Respecting, empowering, and including supporters in our campaign in a meaningful way requires a committment to volunteer leadership, development, training, and accountability. ...

In exchange for that ownership, we will hold them, each otehr, and ourselves accountable to shared goals and expectations.

Now, I had never volunteered in a campaign before. In fact, my political philosophy is considered pretty conservative by many of my friends, and I'd never engaged with the Democratic Party in any way before. So I was pretty nervous about how I'd be treated, and pretty skeptical of the words written in that briefing packet. My experience totally blew me away. Every worker - volunteer and paid staffer alike - that I interacted with from the campaign lived these values every day. Everyone understood the campaign's values, as well as its high-level strategy. And I was always given the opportunity to do meaningful work for the campaign, as long as I was willing to be held accountable for accomplishing its goals.

I think modern companies have a lot they can learn from that experience. In today's world, knowledge workers (and especially those who thrive in startups!) are basically volunteers. They don't have to work for you - they can always get another job. They aren't primarily motivated by money, anyway. Instead, they seek meaningful work where their abilities can make a difference. If you give them that opportunity, and hold them accountable for the results of their efforts, they will move mountains for you. But if you make the mistake of telling them what to do, you'll probably be disappointed.

The benefit to the campaign of having everyone understand its mission and its strategy was immense. As the days wound down to election day, the polls showed Obama with a clear and decisive lead. It would have been pretty easy for the volunteers and supporters to slow down, confident in victory. But everyone understood that the campaign's goal was not just to win an election, but to build a movement. We were building a community, open to anyone who shared its values, and that mission inspired volunteers and staff to try and reach out to as many people as possible. And so the organization ran full-force across the finish line, delivering a healthy mandate for the President-Elect.


Putting it together: maneuver warfare
Let me try and show how all that theory came together in a concrete example. It was three days before the election, and we got word that the McCain campaign was about to unleash its vaunted 72 hour strategy in our county, making it the centerpiece of their get-out-the-vote efforts. We got that news on a conference call at midnight the night before. The statewide office had crunched the numbers and realized we'd be well short of McCain's total in the final days. So we were instructed to rip up the packets for the next day, and create an entirely new set, focused on the objective of signing up new volunteers. Although it was late, we had no problem accomplishing this goal. We knew that as long as we showed up at 9AM the next day with new instructions, scripts, and voter lists, our volunteers would be able to execute. The next day, the campaign used our new data to figure out how many additional volunteers and staff it still needed to send. The whole loop took less than 24 hours. And the volunteers took up the call that morning with the kind of passion and zeal that comes with truly understanding the situation and what the mission requires.

Our opponents seemed to be fighting and old style of ground war, while we were engaged in maneuver warfare. Their strategy was static, and there was no opportunity, as far as I could tell, for them to react to what we were doing. On the other hand, we could match them strength-for-strength as soon as we knew where to go.

What I found particularly interesting, looking back, is that the McCain campaign had superior technology, voter lists, and numbers on their side. Our campaign's software tools were pretty poor (don't let the fancy website fool you, the volunteers are working from an antiquated system). Democrats didn't have a great voter database to start with, because Colorado had only recently become part of their electoral strategy. And the "72 hour strategy" had previously proven decisive in many key counties, blitzkrieg style. Yet, I believe it was Obama's superior agility that led to a decisive 12-point margin in Arapahoe County, CO:




I want to say thanks to everyone on the campaign, from the candidate on down to the paid staff and volunteers that I got to work with. Not only did they create a superb organization and win a decisive victory in a critical election, they also taught many of us some incredible lessons. I'm truly grateful.

The Marine Corps adopted Boyd's ideas as the basis of their maneuver warfare doctrine. The irony is that McCain, a true war hero, might have been undone by the first pristine execution of maneuver warfare in a political campaign.

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I see lots of startups whose business plans revolve around selling high-value ad space to brand advertisers. At first glance, this makes a lot of sense. Everyone knows that millions of dollars that are currently spent on television need to eventually migrate online, as TV viewership declines and overall media attention is fragmented. So many startups hope to benefit from that seismic trend.

Unfortunately, it's a lot easier said than done. Big-time media buying is a complex ecosystem that includes many entrenched players. If you want a piece of that very big pie, you need to know who the actors are, how they work with each other, and how they all get paid. You also need to know what each one cares about, which metrics they look at (or studiously ignore). What are the job titles of the people you need to convince? Should you focus on brand managers or agency buyers?

And once you understand who to talk to, you'll also need to know how to convince them to do what you want. You'd better be able to speak their language and translate what your product does into benefits that they understand. The lifeless husks of many startups lie in waste around these dangerous shores.

Luckily, the guys at 750 Industries turned me on to a great presentation that provides a primer on the whole advertising industry. It's particularly focused on the pre-digital part of the business, where most of the money is still spent. Do you know the difference between Client Briefing, Strategic Planning, Media Buying, and Post Monitoring? If not, you might want to take a look.

Education Guideline Book (1st Edition) Sep 2006

View SlideShare document or Upload your own.

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Image via WikipediaSteve Blank and I had the opportunity to create a presentation about lean startups for Maples Investments. Maples Investments is the only venture investor I know who has oriented their entire strategy to lean startups. They've invested in many great companies, including IMVU, Digg, Kongregate, Twitter... you get the idea. I really enjoy working with them and their companies.

Steve and I worked to find a metaphor that would help explain the power of lean startups, and why they have a serious competitive advantage, especially in these challenging economic times. We borrowed John Boyd's OODA loop, a concept from military strategy. Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one's opponent." We think this same principle applies to startups, which have the same problems of maneuvering on unknown or confusing terrain.

As I've written previously, lean startups are built upon three main trends:

• Technology commoditization. It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software, cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market.
  
  
• Agile software development. Agile allows companies to build higher quality software faster. This speeds up the Ideas-Code-Data feedback loop. Combined with the technology trends above, it also enables rapid deployment strategies like just-in-time scalability.
  
  
• Customer development. It's not enough just to build a product with great features - you have to figure out if there is a market for it. The only way to do this is to get out of the building and test your hypotheses against reality. The biggest source of cost/time advantage that all lean companies have is avoiding building features that customers don't want.

In this presentation, we tried to summarize those trends, show how they give startups an advantage in good economic times as well as bad, and explain why they enable a new and better investment strategy. Hopefully others will find it useful as well.

For those interested in getting started with agile or customer development, I thought I'd include a few links. My path to lean startups began with Kent Beck and extreme programming. The best resources there are his book Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change and the gentle introduction at extremeprogramming.org. For customer development, start with Steve's book The Four Steps to the Epiphany or take a look at his recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture.

Lean Startup presentation for Maples Investments by Steve Blank and Eric Ries

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: lean startup)

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Lunch time at the table. Mena, Poppy (Grandma and Grandpa), Mommy, Daddy, and little one (AF) are eating pizza that Mena and Poppy brought with them from New York.

AF: Mmmmm this pizza is good. Thank you for making this for me, mommy.

Mommy: Thanks, Ava. But I didn't make the pizza, I just heated it up.

Mena: We got it from a pizzeria in town that mommy and daddy lived in before they were married.

AF: I want to go there when I get married.

Laughter

AF: Actually, I won't get married, I'll just go there.

Louder laugher

Daddy: What did she say?

Mommy: She said, "Actually, I won't get married, I'll just go there instead."

Ava: No mommy, I didn't say "instead." I didn't say that word.

Extra loud laughter.

A Splurge of Mint:

Candy hasn't appealed much to me lately, but when I came across these mini's in the store, I couldn't resist.

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We now have our first program online. Most operating programs will be able to play our program today. If not, you'll need Windows Media Player. We are still working out the MP3 edition and podcasts, so be patient. Let us know what you think, and remember, we need for you to call in with beekeeping questions and we really need some underwriters.

Give us a call at 217-427-2678

Here's the link to our Studio Bee Live:
http://www.honeybeesonline.com/studiobeelive.html

David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
www.honeybeesonline.com
217-427-2678
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Hello from David & Sheri Burns!

In our blog/lesson today we'll take a look at the following:
1. An update on Studio Bee LIVE! Going online this Saturday.
a. We'd love to have sponsors.
b. We'd like to answer some of your email questions or call inquestion for our first show.
2. A personal note about our family. Get to know us!
3. Lesson 42 on Protective Clothing
STUDIO BEE LIVE coming online this Saturday. I love to listen to beekeeping audio files when I'm traveling or working, but there just isn't that much available. That's why we decided to start Studio Bee Live, to be a place where you can listen, be entertained and learn more and more about keeping bees. We will have these broadcast available to listen to online or you can download them in MP3 format to enjoy in your MP3 player or as podcasts.
Each day we will produce a one hour broadcast on beekeeping, Monday through Friday. Each broadcast will have one main segment as the main topic of the day along with six daily smaller segments: Honey & Honey Receipts, Equipment, Bee Trivia, Bees In The News, A Look Back At Beekeepers and a Question & Answer segment.
We need your help. We are looking for sponsors or advertisers who want to underwrite these six smaller segments. "An now for today's Bee Trivia, brought to you by Clue's Cheverolet..." Each of these spots are available for $20 and does not have to be bee related. In addition, your company or business will be posted for that day on our web site with a link to your business as well. Call us if you'd like to be an underwriter in our first show this Saturday! 217-427-2678
You can even underwrite a segment in memory or in honor of someone special. Maybe Grandpa used to be a beekeeper and you want to dedicate a segment in memory of him. Give us a call. 217-427-2678. We are allowing our answering machine to pick up today to receive questions, but we'll call you back if you leave your name and number
We also need your voice in our shows. We need you to send in your beekeeping questions via E-mail or call in your questions. Just give us a call today and our answering machine will record your question and then we'll play it with our answer on our show. For example, "Hi this is Chad from Ohio and I have a hive that did good this year, but I'm wondering if they have enough honey for the winter. How I can be sure and is it too late to open them up and look and see?" Questions like that.
We will play your question and answer your question on the show. When you call in with your question, our answer will not only help you but so many others who were wondering the same thing. So call in today, Friday, day or night 217-427-2678. And, if you just want to call in and say, "Hi David & Sheri, love your website and good luck on your new bee program", that will be fun too! You can email us your question, but it would be so much better to have your voice on our show. But if you would rather email your question than call, out email is: david@honeybeesonline.com
A Personal Note:
We operated Long Lane Honey Bee Farms from our home in Central Illinois. Here's what we do: We keep bees, sell honey, sell bees (both packages & nucs), raise and sell queens, make and sell hive wooden ware, sell all kinds of beekeeping equipment and accessories, give beekeeping courses from our farm. Bees have become our business, our family business. Today let me fill you in on protective beekeeping gear. But before I do, I want to give you a personal note about our family (after all this is a blog you know)

Sheri is my high school sweet heart. I met her when I was 16 and she was 14. On that day in 1976 I knew that Sheri was the girl for me! Her dad was very protective of his only daughter, and though I don't remember the exact details of a rule that he had, it was something like if I went to church on Sunday, then I was able to spend a little time with his daughter.

Needless to say I became a Christian about a year later, not to win the pretty girl, but to repent and trust in Jesus. But then I did get the pretty girl. God is kinda like that. Sheri and I dated four years before we were married on August 3, 1980. Over the next 28 years we would both receive our college degrees from Lincoln Christian College, and find time to have 6 children (and now we have 4 grandchildren and another one on the way).
I began pastoring my first church, and living in the parsonage when I was 21. We already had our oldest daughter, Jennifer then and had Jill 16 months later. Then we had our first son, David in 1985, our third daughter, Karee in 1991, Seth in 1993 and our newest edition to our family, Christian in 2007. We had our last two sons at home. Over the last 28 years of our marriage I have pastored churches in Illinois, Missouri, Ohio and for the last 13 years, back in Illinois.
I have preached the gospel in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, India, Africa and on 5 teaching trips to Israel. The church I have pastored for the last 13 years now meets each Sunday on our honey bee farm, in our honey store. We are a home church that simply goes by the Bible. I preach each Sunday from our honey bee farm, and you are welcome to join us any Sunday at 10:30am Central Time.
I share all of that with you so that you can get to know us a bit more, but also to let you know that it is a good feeling to have traveled the world and yet find the greatest joy in working on our family farm with honey bees. I guess you might say we are just good ole, down home country folks. Right now, Karee, Seth and Christian are our only Children living at home with us, and they are a huge help with our honey bee business.
Seth started building frames in our business back in 2005 at just twelve years old. Now he's 15 and along with me builds every component in the hives we make. He exclusively builds all of the bottom boards, inner covers, top covers and frames. Seth holds the farm record for the fastest to build frames. He holds the record at assembling a frame (8 staples) in 16 seconds. In a pinch, Karee steps in and builds inner covers, frames and top covers. Last spring, during our busy season Karee really put in some long hours. Now, we have found a way to free up Karee so that she can continue to work only in the queen rearing operation on our farm. She knows the inside of a hive better than anyone! She can find young nurse bees to be used as a queen attendants quicker than anyone! Almost every day this summer she was out in hives picking out queens and young nurse bees and loading them up in their little shipping containers. She rarely was stung and a few times I fussed at her for not wearing a hat and veil. She is great!
Sheri, my high school sweet heart, does it all, but mostly the paper work, online orders, phone calls, and usually single-handedly is the shipping department. Most days she is the one packing the boxes and labeling them too. When it is really busy, we all stop and become the shipping department around 3 p.m. and work feverishly to try and beat the arrival of the UPS truck around 4 p.m. Sheri also feeds my kids, feeds me, my dogs, my helpers and she feeds my bees when they need it. She's a wonderful cook!
Dustin, my son-in-law, (Jennifer's husband) now helps us with our web site and data entry. The poor guy...I sorta dump a bunch on him at once, kinda like numbering books in a full library. But we are trying to get our data base updated so when you call, we can easily look you up. Finally, there's Callie and April, our two hound dogs. They are our long lane alarm system. As soon as anyone turns into our 1/4 mile drive, they bark and let us know we have a customer. They are respectful of all the hives on our property. That's us...On now to protective clothing.
PROTECTIVE CLOTHING
No one likes to get stung. It hurts. By the way, the odds of dying from a bee sting are almost equal to dying from a lightning strike, according to the US National Safety Council:

Odds Of Dying From lightning 81,949/1
Odds Of Dying From A Bee/Wasp sting 72,494/1

Even though bee stings aren't as deadly as some think, it still hurts and you'll turn red, itch and swell up. This happens to almost everyone. Wearing protective gear can prevent most stings. The first defense against being stung is to always use a smoker! Blowing cool smoke into a hive and onto the bees prior to working them is your best protection. I can work bees without any protective clothing if I smoke them first, but not if I do not.

The second defense against being stung is to keep gentle bees. There is no reason to keep a hive that is aggressive. Re-queen a hive that is mean with a more gentle queen and in 30 days the eggs that she lays will emerge to be gentle too! Near the end of this year's bee season, I had requeened all of my hives and because we raise our own queens, I was working my bees with limited protection and no aggressive tendencies from my bees.

But let's say you don't want to worry about requeening and you just want to wear some protective gear to keep from being stung.

Sometimes, especially when removing hives from homes, more protection is necessary.

We always recommend you wear a hat and veil. A hat and veil together will run you between 30-40 bucks. But, it is a very wise investment. No one wants to get stung on the face or head. Most beekeepers use the cheap plastic pith helmet with a veil. The helmets are pretty common but the veils can be different. Some have square screens in the front, as in this picture, while others don't. Some veils only come down just to the neck, while others come all the way down to the chest. The style that you choose for the hat and veil is up to you.

The next level of protection is a jacket with the hat and veil built in. These are nice, and are often referred to as an inspector's jacket. They look kinda like a parka jacket. You can unzip your veil and the hat/veil drops behind you and stays attached, as in the picture. I've unzipped the hat and veil and have laid them back out of the way.

The next level of protection is a complete bee suit. Generally it is like the jacket but includes the pants. Bee suits are not totally sting proof. Though it is very rare, it is possible to be stung through a bee suit. Again, it is almost impossible, but can happen and did happen to my son once when we were removing a hive from a house.
So whether you wear a hat and veil, a jacket or a suit, you'll probably change what you wear after you work your bees a few weeks.
Suits and jackets are very hot in mid summer, so do keep that in mind. It is best to choose a fabric blend such as cotton/polyester blend that is cool. You may want to get one size larger than you normally wear because suits and jackets go over your regular clothes. In this picture, you can see that among a group of beekeepers, there are many different configurations.
A low budget idea is to buy a real inexpensive painter's suit from Menards or Lowes. These are made of material that does not last for every, but probably at least one bee season. I've used them. They can tear easily, but they are white, very thin painter's suits. They do not have a hat or veil, and a bee could sting through it, but they are white and bees just do not like to land on white. I always wear a very light colored shirt and bees stay off. Bees have an instinct to attack black.
To make sure queens are gentle, breeders wave a black cloth over the top of a hive and then counts the stingers on that cloth. The hive with the fewest stings are the more gentle hive. Bees are "wired" to defend their hive against black bears so wearing a white painter's suit can be a low budget solution.
If you are afraid of being stung on your hands, there are many different types of bee gloves with longer sleeves to tuck beneath your suit. Most are sting resistant, meaning a bee might be able to sting through the glove, and others are sting proof which means a stinger cannot penetrate your gloves. But, as you would imagine, the gloves that are sting proof are not the easiest gloves to work a hive with. They are big and clumsy and you look like a Haz-Mat worker. When gloves this awkward, you accidently smash more bees and that makes them more aggressive. When I have to wear gloves I wear a pair of leather work gloves and duct tape the space between my gloves and my suit. I've never taken a sting through a leather work glove.
We sell hats, veils, jackets, suits and gloves so feel free to give us a call.

It was nice to be with you today, and thank you for checking in.
Bee-have yourselves!
David & Sheri Burns
217-427-2678
www.honeybeesonline.com
EMAIL: david@honeybeesonline.com

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Our hosts for October were Rayrena of Happy Cows and Belita of Culinary Adventures. (The pictures through out this post are from Rayrena of Happy Cows, Liz of Bits 'N Bites and Maybelle's Mom of Feeding Maybelle.) Here is Rayrena's post.

Since this is my birthday month, I figured what better gift than being able to choose the recipe for our October challenge

Almost two years ago I listened to a podcast on The Splendid Table that featured James Oseland, who is now the Editor in Chief of Saveur magazine. The recipe he described and shared with them was for Beef Rendang. I've been haunted by this dish and was excited to give it a try.

I received permission from the author to reprint this recipe and an accompanying pickle recipe. I am also posting a vegetarian/vegan option just to this forum but we do not have his permission to post it publicly. I am looking forward to trying the vegetarian option since it sounds delicious!

If you are interested, you can listen to the author's interview at The Splendid Table and view the recipe there as well.

Excerpted from Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore by James Oseland (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006) Copyright 2006 by James Oseland.

Beef Rendang (Rendang Daging Sapi)
Makes 4 to 6 servings

This extravagantly rich, dry-braised beef curry is a signature dish of the Minangkabau highlands of West Sumatra, Indonesia. It's a triumph of flavor, with lime leaves, nutmeg, and cloves. The dish is cooked by a process that inverts normal braising. The beef is slowly simmered in a spiced coconut-milk broth until the broth evaporates and the meat is left to sauté in the intensely flavored rendered coconut and beef oils left in the pot.

This recipe comes from Rohati, my cooking guru in Padang, West Sumatra. She offered me a few sage words of advice when she gave it to me. First, she said, allow plenty of time to make it. Rendang has its own lethargic cooking rhythm, so that the more you try to rush it, the longer it seems to take. I know what she means. I've often underestimated how long it takes to cook and have left hungry dinner guests waiting while it continued slowly to simmer away. Second, she said, use a shallow, wide pan, such as a skillet, rather than a deep soup pot. The less enclosed the cooking space, the easier it will be for the liquid to evaporate—in other words, the opposite of how you want to cook a curry. And third, Rohati advised me always to use the best-quality beef I can get. In America this means avoiding precut stewing beef, which is of inconsistent quality. Instead, choose boneless chuck or bottom round laced through with bright white fat and cut it into cubes yourself.

"Rendang is sacred food in West Sumatra," Rohati said. "If you skimp on ingredients, you risk upsetting Allah."

If you decide to use the maximum number of chiles this recipe calls for, you may need to use a standard-sized food processor, rather than a small one. An excellent garnish for this dish is a tablespoon of very finely sliced fresh or thawed, frozen kaffir lime leaves. Be sure to remove the center stem of each leaf before slicing it.

For the Flavoring Paste:

* 1 whole nutmeg, cracked open with a nutcracker or a heavy, blunt object such as the bottom of a glass measuring cup
* 5 whole cloves
* 6 shallots (about 5 ounces), coarsely chopped
* 3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
* 5 to 20 fresh red Holland chiles or other fresh long, red chiles such as Fresno or cayenne, stemmed and coarsely chopped
* 1 piece fresh or thawed, frozen turmeric, 2 inches long, peeled and coarsely chopped (about 2 teaspoons), or 1 1/2 teaspoons ground turmeric
* 1 piece fresh ginger, 2 inches long, peeled and thinly sliced against the grain (about 2 tablespoons)
* 1 piece fresh or thawed, frozen galangal, 2 inches long, peeled and thinly sliced against the grain (about 2 tablespoons; optional)
* 5 candlenuts or unsalted macadamia nuts

For the remainder of the dish:

* 2 pounds well-marbled boneless beef chuck or bottom round, cut into 2- to 2 1/2-inch cubes
* 2 1/2 cups unsweetened coconut milk
* 3 thick stalks fresh lemongrass, each tied into a knot
* 1 piece cinnamon stick, 4 inches long
* 7 whole fresh or thawed, frozen kaffir lime leaves
* 5 whole daun salam leaves (optional)
* 1 teaspoon kosher salt
* 1 tablespoon very finely shredded fresh or thawed, frozen kaffir lime leaves (optional)

1. To make the flavoring paste, place the nutmeg and cloves in a small food processor and pulse until ground to a dusty powder, about 2 minutes.

2. Add the shallots, garlic, chiles, turmeric, ginger, galangal (if using), and candlenuts to the ground spices. Pulse until you have a chunky-smooth paste the consistency of cooked oatmeal.

3. In a 12-inch skillet (nonstick works best), mix the beef and the flavoring paste until well combined. Add the coconut milk, lemongrass, cinnamon, whole lime leaves, daun salam leaves (if using), and salt. Stir well to combine and bring to a gentle boil over medium heat. Immediately reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer uncovered at a slow, steady bubble, stirring every 10 to 20 minutes with a spatula to prevent the meat and coconut milk from sticking and scorching. You'll probably need to adjust the heat periodically to maintain an even simmer.

4. The meat, coconut milk, and flavoring paste will now go on a fascinating journey. At first, the broth will be thin and gorgeously bright orange. As it cooks, the coconut milk will reduce, its fats (as well as the fat the meat renders) separating from the solids. It will become progressively thicker and darker, eventually turning brown. Continue to simmer gently until the liquid has reduced by about 95 percent, stirring every 15 minutes or so to prevent sticking. Only the meat, oils, and a bit of very thick sauce will remain in the pot. This will take anywhere from 2 to 3 hours, depending on the skillet that you use, how hot the fire is, and the richness of the coconut milk. Test the meat; it should be tender enough to poke easily with a fork. Taste some of the liquid for salt, and add a pinch more if needed.

5. When all the liquid has evaporated, reduce the heat to low (the meat and the remaining sauce are prone to burning) and allow the beef to brown slowly in the rendered fat. (The fat may be foamy at this point, but it will settle down when the cooking stops.) Stir every 5 minutes or so to prevent sticking and scorching, being careful not to break the beef apart. Continue sautéing the beef until it's the color of roasted coffee beans, 5 to 10 minutes longer. The surface of the beef should be barely moist and have an appetizing oily sheen. (If there is too much oil in the pan for your liking, skim some of it off with a spoon and set aside for later use; it's wonderful for sautéing potatoes.)

6. Remove and discard the cinnamon, lemongrass, lime leaves, and daun salam leaves (if used), and then transfer the beef to a serving dish. (Alternatively, serve this dish with all the aromatics, for a more rustic presentation.) Garnish with the shredded lime leaves, if using. Allow the beef to rest for at least 30 minutes before serving. Slightly warm room temperature will best show off its intensely aromatic flavors. This dish will taste even better the next day.


My testing notes:

1) For the nutmeg and cloves, I pounded in a small mortar. The threw the remaining paste ingredients in a food blender. I used some of the coconut milk to get it all moving, then poured it all over the meat before cooking.
2) For the lemongrass, remove the first couple outer leaves, trim away the dry tips and pound the stalk with the handle of your knife or a meat mallet, then tie into a knot.
3) The first time I used dried turmeric, didn't use the galangal or lime leaves and it was very good.
4) One time I used 8 cayenne chiles and it was fairly spicy, the next time I used 6 Fresno chiles and there wasn't much heat.
5) Both times I had a hard time getting the meat tender. Both times I ended up adding a can of chicken stock towards the last 1/2 hour and cooking until tender, then cranking up the heat until it evaporated.
6) Definitely use a nonstick pan. And be watchful towards the end, the resulting paste can brown quickly!

Following is the recipe for the accompanying pickle dish:

Javanese Cucumber and Carrot Pickle (Acar Timun)
Makes 4 servings.

* 3 small Kirby (pickling) cucumbers (about 10 ounces), unpeeled, stemmed, cut into matchsticks about 2" long and 1/4" wide
* 1 large carrot (about 5 ounces), peeled and cut into matchsticks about 2" long and 1/4" wide
* 3 shallots (about 2 1/2 ounces), thinly sliced lengthwise
* 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
* 2 cups boiling water
* 2 heaping tablespoons sugar
* 2 tablespoonspalm, cider, or rice vinegar
* 2 fresh green Thai chiles, stemmed and cut on the diagonal into slices 1/4" thick

1. Combine the cucumbers, carrots, shallots, and salt in a heatproof, nonreactive bowl. Pour the boiling water over the vegetables and stir well. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or aluminum foil and let the vegetables rest for 15 minutes.

2. Drain the vegetables in a colander, gently squeezing out excess water with your hands. They should be fairly dry, but they need not be bone-dry.

3. Transfer the vegetables to a nonreactive bowl. Add the sugar, vinegar, and chiles and stir well to combine. Taste a cucumber. It should have a balance of saltiness, sourness, and sweetness. Keep in mind that it is a condiment and should be fairly strongly flavored. Adjust the seasonings, including the salt, accordingly.

4. Allow the dish to rest at least 15 minutes, to give the flavors time to settle. Serve the pickle at room temperature, never cold, which would mute the flavor. This pickle should be eaten within hours of making it. If left longer, it will lose its perkiness and robustly sweet-tart flavor.

My testing notes:

1) I just used a plate to cover the bowl while the pickle and hot water mixture.
2) I forgot to add the Thai chiles and it was still good.
3) Play with it, I preferred a more sour pickle so added more vinegar.

Quotes From the Forum:

I made it for dinner tomorrow but had a few bites tonight. delicious. and the smell was heavenly. Maybelle's Mom of Feeding Maybelle

The pickles were really nice. Such an easy recipe too. I can't wait to try it next summer with vegetables from my garden Liz of Bits 'N Bites

I made it today Rayrena. We loved it. The flavor was amazing. As I was adding all the spices I was thinking oh my will this be good all together. Lori of Lori's Lipsmacking Goodness

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