I've been run off the island of Jost Van Dyke! Not by pirates nor the infamous locals, who I've heard can be just as difficult as pirates. No, I was run off by the internet connection, or lack there of. I didn't want to leave, but the days of dial up connections are a few years behind us and that kind of connection speed just doesn't cut it anymore. I call it the microwave effect - our need for instant results. As lovely as it was to sit under a palm tree, yards from the beach in my bare feet (and it really was lovely!), I need to be able to watch the SEO training videos for the course I'm taking, and search answers with some speed. Instead I found myself hitting 'enter', and going to find a coconut to crack while the page loaded.
So I've found a new apartment to stay at. Its a sublet from Mark, a guy I couchsurfed with when I first arrived on Tortola. He's left for the Cayman Islands with work and his apartment was going to be empty for a couple months. It will hopefully work out well for both of us; I get an affordable place to live, and he gets a bit back on his rent. I didn't really leave paradise though, just modernized it. The internet connection is much better and the view is ok too.
Yesterday I went grocery shopping with my new neighbor Mark (the two Marks are friends). I knew I wanted to do a bigger shop than him so I figured I should make a list to expedite the process. Left by myself, I am terrible for spending several hours pouring over prices and nutritional info to find the best value. I analyze to price per gram, even price per gram of protein. It's a bad habit, almost an addiction but I won't get into the cheap vs frugal debate today.
So I decided to create a shopping list, but since I now have a proper kitchen, I also wanted some recipe ideas. I figured I would do a search online for some sort of shopping list with corresponding recipes. Since spending so much time trying to understand the internet, I'm becoming more conscious of my own search behaviour. It was interesting to see the pattern of search, click, back, click, click, back, back, new search, click back and realized the split second decisions people make on judging a sites usefulness. The clues I was looking for Bryan Eisenberg refers to as scent. I knew to a degree what I was looking for, but perhaps more importantly I knew what I didn't want. I ended up moving from the organic results to the paid results and never made it past the fold. I thought I was a more methodical searcher than that, but apparently not in that situation.
I had hoped to 'recreate' the search pattern later but alas, Google's new personalization tainted the results and I gave up trying to piece it together more organically. That's perhaps a good topic for my next post... And as for the results, I found a website that takes what ingredients you already have, and searches for recipes using those ingredients. That's perfect for me because now I can shop according to best price rather than what's on my shopping list, and worry about what the heck to make with it when I'm done.
