As a Gluten Free Busy Person, I’ve learned a lot of tricks about how to eat delicious (vegetarian, and often vegan) gluten free meals on the go. (and by “on the go” I mean “from your office kitchenette.”)

The first thing you will need is an epic rice cooker. One with a digital timer, so you can have your little rice-cooking robot start your lunch (or for that matter, dinner and midnight snacks) while you’re still hard at work. Because, why do work that a robot can do for you?

I recommend this one, mostly because it can bake you a cake. (I’ve tried the “cake” setting — it really works!) (And yes, that’s me shamelessly giving you an Amazon Affiliate link.)

The next thing you’ll need are some grains and beans (complete protein, of course) or perhaps just some fair-trade quinoa (complete protein, too).

Once you have all the supplies, you can heat ghee or coconut oil (higher smoke point than your average vegetarian cooking oils) and add spices to the oil. You can heat the oil by turning on “Cooking” mode in the rice cooker for a few minutes. Once you reach optimal heat and aroma (usually 2-5 min), you can add your grains and beans (so far everything has been fine on the regular “rice” setting), the required amount of water and even add chopped vegetables or tofu. (the vegetables will steam as the grains/beans cook. It’s magical!) I’ve found that to steam the vegetables, there is no need to add extra water, as steam occurs while the grains/beans cook.

That covers lunch and dinner, but what about breakfast?

There’s a gluten-free solution for that, too. It’s Raw Meal, a delicious, nutritious mix best when added to smoothies or just in milk or milk substitute. (Be mindful about whether your milk substitute is organic — sometimes the non-organic milk substitues can be made with intense pesticides.) In addition to having a lot of protein, each scoop is about equivalent to 1/2 a food-based multivitamin daily dose.

What about bread, or chocolate cake?

The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread has fantastic bread recipes. The breads can be turned into “dinner rolls” which, in addition to being tasty, drastically shortens the baking time.

Another favorite is this focaccia recipe, and this carob/chocolate cupcake/cake recipe.

And of course, don’t forget collapsible BPA-free containers and a titanium spork for your leftovers.

Looking at cognition through neuroscience, there is a cognitive tax on switching tasks — an unavoidable cost of time and oh-so-precious cognition. (For you academics out there, track down these sources — for you non-neuroscientists and non-academics, try reading about this in Brain Rules.)

Even as we become more efficient at switching between tasks, the transition still is not seamless. It’s the brain’s equivalent of opening Photoshop (or any other program that loads with a splash screen. It just takes a little while to get started. This all happens so fast we barely notice, but it is nonetheless subtly tiring.

I’m halfway through Nick Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains and he uses every opportunity possible to tell the reader just how much more skilled we are becoming at shallow, cursory thinking and reading. Additionally, he focuses on to how our abilities to focus on any one topic or task — really focus on it — are diminishing, while our abilities to do many shallow tasks at once are increasing. This type of “shallow” reading and engagement is exactly what neuroscientists describe as multitasking.

OK, but back to e-mail. E-mail inherently deals with multitasking, unless you are some lucky e-mail-freak-of-nature who only receives emails about one task, and that task always requires the same action.

For me, e-mail is stressful, but it used to be much worse. Previously, when I looked in my inbox, I had a vast number of emails staring back at me. They were all the unfinished action items accumulated in an inbox. Some needed real response and these timely ones were starred and taken care of immediately, while the inbox piled up with non-urgent messages, often from myself.

When I would check my email, I would show physical signs of nervousness, procrastinate and let non-urgent e-mails fall by the, albeit (haphazardly GTD Inbox) “action-item” stamped, wayside.

Things had to change.

I decided to take this “cognitive task” thing seriously and re-work my inbox around it. I thought through the types of things I did in a day, related to my inbox. At the time it was scheduling, reading (for class), writing (papers for class) and other action items (basically anything not for a class). On a sunny winter afternoon in the Cronkhite Dorm my first draft of categories was born: Calendar, To print, Writing and Action items.

I’ve adapted it continuously since then, removing and adding new things I’m doing repeatedly, and adding new labels for new projects. This is how better, more relevant folders or “inboxes” are born. I also recommend keeping one “catch-all” action item folder in place for the things that don’t fit. Yes, this breaks the individual-cognitive-task-for-everything idea, but that stuff has got to go somewhere. Did I mention that Gmail only allows 5 multiple inboxes?

This is what my inbox looks like on a typical day.

And this is the magic that makes it happen:

You can subtract labels from inboxes, in addition to using them standalone or using many to filter.

The most useful example of how to use this tool effectively is the “calendar” section. Each day as I receive invites to and alerts about talks, parties and meetings, I put them in the calendar folder. Once a day, I open my calendar, go in that folder in my inbox and do the usual availability checking/rsvp-ing. It’s incredibly liberating to do just once a day (or twice if there is *one* urgent meeting that really needs a reply). This way I never have to schedule something when I’m in the middle of writing or reading or doing something else productive and I don’t have to spend the time and energy switching between tasks.

There are potential perks of actively *choosing* to multitask such as switching tasks when you run out of ideas, taking a break from a document to have a “fresh look” at it after a diversion elsewhere or going to Twitter for creative inspiration and comedic relief. These types of perks do not exist when a user is *not* multitasking on purpose, but is forced to through the sequential nature of an inbox.

Gmail’s Priority Inbox does not allow me to divide up the “priority” messages into 4 or 5 discrete cognitive tasks. I tried it, but found it more stressful to have all the types of tasks in one place, than it is to filter my e-mail myself with these distinctions in place. I understand that this is a bit of a super-user conundrum, but it shouldn’t have to be. Email should become less stressful not only through automatic sorting, but also research about usability from the standpoint of cognition.

Drumbeat Boston was fantastic! Thanks to everyone who came, and for those who didn’t, here is a short summary to incentivise you to attend other Drumbeat events.

We were fortunate to have the Venture Café host the event, with the help of Carrie Stalder, Elizabeth Peyton and many members of the CIC team. They have a nice recap of the event on their blog. We also worked with Rudi Seitz, and used Whimwords to facilitate conversation among strangers and friends alike.

The event itself was a collaboration between the Center for Future Civic Media, the Awesome Foundation, and of course Mozilla’s new open web initiative, Drumbeat.

The evening opened with a classic Drumbeat exercise, the spectrogram. No, not a graph (well at least not a traditional one), a social exercise involving standing along a line of tape so that our “end users” could publicly proclaim a point of view and thus we could precipitate conversation. Users stood to one end to “agree” and another to “disagree,” left with lots of space for movement and agreement percentages in between.

Some hits were “I feel remorse when I use Facebook,” “I know what Mozilla Drumbeat is,” and “the web is totally open.”

The evening continued with the announcement of the Awesome Foundation’s July Fellow, Paul Gardner-Stephen, a post-doctoral fellow at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia and founder of the Serval Project. He received funding for a decentralized P2P phone networks using Android handsets and the VillageTelco’s “Mesh Potato,” a lightweight, cheap building block for mesh networks. The project aims to aide in disaster relief situations, especially in rural areas without many cell phone towers.

The announcement was preceded by a short talk by Jonathan Zittrain on the principles of “awesome” and the benefits of openness.

The Erhardt Graeff from the Awesome Foundation presents their “signature” giant check to Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen, developer of The Serval Project, their July fellow.

All photos by Reed Sturtevant and are CC-sa 2.0. For more photos check out this album by E Derek Smith, and the rest of Reed’s photos here.

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I’m an advocate for openness. This DOES mean that I think people should have access to information that they need, and have the ability to innovate in new ways, and built off of old systems (eg. Zittrain’s generativity or the idea of “remix” or “view source.”)

This DOES NOT mean I’d want to use an open-source version of paypal (an example where ‘closed’ is a bit of a necessity, or would require some SERIOUS innovation to be open in the FSF/GPL sense of the word), nor does it mean that I think people shouldn’t be able to charge for content/services/goods — whether or not it’s always a good *idea* to charge for those things is another story.

I think that good, clean, design, and simplification are NECESSITIES of technology — not afterthoughts or options to add in later. This DOES mean that I think things like ergonomics of physical devices and user experience of media are valuable assets that should *never* be subject to death-by-committee, being pushed back to version 2.0 or any excuses for lacking legitimate research in this area.

This DOES NOT mean that everyone need be using Helvetica (the canonical “simple, clean” font, for all you non-design snobs out there), agree on the same design aesthetic, or meet every end user’s needs, nor does it mean that because I value this, (despite my degree in design) I want to design it for you.

Social is important. I mean this in many, many ways. From a future-online-business-model discussion, people are always going to value content they find from their friends, online and off. Now that it’s moved online, we finally have word-of-mouth, quantified. Companies and brands are just now beginning to realize the value of this

Also, getting people together face-to-face is an invaluable way to communicate, brainstorm and build. I don’t know if any video-chat-second-life-online-VOIP will ever replace good human eye contact, and the truth is, it doesn’t have to. Meetups, Hackathons, Bar Camps and Parties can’t be replaced by a “killer app.”

Technologies can enhance the ways we connect to one another, and anyone making “social media” should embrace the fact that it’s an enhancement, not a replacement or replica. The companies (and quirky projects in people’s basements) that design systems around this will succeed, and those that don’t will fade away as clutter. Systems that allow users to build off of existing connections, and make signifigant, valuable new ones (‘IRL’ as they say) will remain relevant to people’s real lives. There are also niche markets in this space, because one person’s “media overload” is another’s “media zen.”

These aren’t all of my “guiding principles” but it’s a good list of the ones that have been on my mind lately as I’m shaping the projects I take on for the summer and the next year.

I’m trying to capture the essence of the open web movement so that it’s accessible to non-web people. I think, with the help of @msurman, @moltke, Geoffrey Macdougall, @herhighnessness, @openmatt, @alina_mierlus,@gameguy43 and many others, I’ve gotten pretty close.

What follows is a snapshot of the current Mozilla Drumbeat description on the site. I didn’t describe it *too much* in my intro because I’d like to see if my description works. Would love your feedback and thoughts.

Mozilla Drumbeat is keeping the web open.

We want to spark a movement. We want to keep the web open for the next 100 years. The first step: inviting you to do and make things that help the web. That’s what Drumbeat is — practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas, solving problems and building the open web.

We all benefit from the open web.

The open web is the most powerful communication tool in the history of humanity. It’s the nervous system of trade, education, governance, activism and play. It allows a single idea to achieve global impact. At its core the open web is participatory, transparent, decentralized and generative. Existing content and software can easily be spun into something new. All without needing to ask for someone else’s approval or permission.

But we can’t take the freedom of the web for granted.

There are many who would neuter or control the web we have built. Imagine an internet filled with devices you can’t tinker with and walled gardens. What’s at risk? Access. Privacy. The freedom to create and innovate.

We need to protect it. Improve it. Grow it.

Mozilla’s mission is to guard the open nature of the internet. 20,000 of us did this when we built Firefox. We took back the web. We’ve been continuing this work ever since. And it’s exactly why we’re starting Drumbeat.

Drumbeat is your chance to keep the web open and free.

Drumbeat is for anyone who wants to lend their skills and creativity to the cause of keeping the internet open. It’s a chance to for everyone — not just software developers and testers — to get involved in keeping the web open. Who? Teachers. Lawyers. Artists. Accountants. Plumbers. Web Developers. Anyone who uses and cares about the internet.

You can get involved online or face-to-face.

With Drumbeat, we’ve planted a flag. A place to gather. A place for you to find collaborators. You can start a project, or join one that’s already rolling. If your project gets traction, we’ll shout from the top of the mountain so everyone knows about it. And we’ll even fund a handful of the very best projects. You can also attend — or start — an event in your city. Events offer a place to work on projects with neighbors, and a chance to paint a picture of what you want the open web to look like in 100 years. Check out featured projects and upcoming events. Get involved now!

You’re probably also familiar with the 2006 News Feed fiasco, the Facebook Beacon fail and the fact that Facebook wasn’t profitable as quickly they’d like to have been (for those of you not in-the-know, it took til they reached 300 million users to be cash flow positive).

The News Feed and Beacon taught Facebook to push the limits of privacy to gain pageviews (and thus relevance and perchance $$) and taught users, for the first time to be wary of Facebook, regarding their privacy.

From the standpoint of “online business models,” (which is somewhat of an oxymoron) this is an interesting crossroads. To what degree can users’ data be used without violating their (own social norms of) privacy? Is (total, clear and absolute) transparency about user data usage enough to maintain users? Is policy the correct intervention? What do users want from the social web? When and why do dissatisfied users leave a service?

I don’t think the open web should have to get a day job to underwrite and support its values–so how does a company make money *online,* maintain relevance, and not infringe on user’s privacy? Will Facebook figure this out before more and more users leave?

…and to think, I sometimes claim to be the ‘only Dharmishta on the internet’

The ACLU of Northern California (and originators of http://www.dotrights.org/) released a primer on privacy and free speech entitled Privacy and Free Speech: It’s Good for Business, detailing instances where privacy has affected the conversation around a brand, both in positive and negative ways. The report advocates for notifications of privacy policy changes, transparency about the collection and storage of user data, and limits on data-retention periods. They hope that privacy will become a concern closely related to a company’s reputation. I wonder how many companies currently shaping privacy norms through their policies and actions read such research, and how to get it to the forefront of the privacy conversation.

Netflix is canceling its Netflix Prize Sequel due to user privacy concerns. According to their blog:

In the past few months, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked us how a Netflix Prize sequel might affect Netflix members’ privacy, and a lawsuit was filed by KamberLaw LLC pertaining to the sequel. With both the FTC and the plaintiffs’ lawyers, we’ve had very productive discussions centered on our commitment to protecting our members’ privacy.

We have reached an understanding with the FTC and have settled the lawsuit with plaintiffs. The resolution to both matters involves certain parameters for how we use Netflix data in any future research programs.

Facebook will be funding a $6 million “digital trust fund” as a result of the Beacon class action lawsuit. According to Business Insider,

The foundation will be chaired by UC Berkeley’s Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Facebook’s public policy director Tim Sparapani, and privacy advocate Larry Magid.

Infochimps, on the other hand, is selling user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes from MySpace.