At my pizza store job we have to make our own dough each day. Once a batch is mixed it comes out as a single fairlylarge lump which needs to be cut into smaller lumps that are the correct weight for the style of pizza base you’re trying to make at the time, and each of these lumps is then rolled into a ball so that it will come out round when we put it through another machine which is essentially a glorified automated set of rolling pins. When you’re done cutting up and balling a batch of dough to make classic-crust bases you ideally end up with 52 dough-balls, so there are quite a lot of lumps to be cut and balled.
There are a couple of approaches to this task. You can either cut off and then roll each lump into a ball as you go, or you can cut the whole batch into lumps and then roll them all into balls. If you wanted to you could take the middle ground and cut off a few lumps before balling till the whole batch is done. As it turns out however, the most efficient way is to cut the whole batch into lumps first and then roll them into balls, because changing between the two tasks involves a slight delay each time that quickly adds up if you do it more than once.
If you’re carrying out a task with multiple steps — or even carrying out multiple discrete tasks — you can save some serious time over the long run by making sure each step or sub-task is complete before moving on to the next.
Check it out!
Additionally, the band Gotthard rock.
…if you’re looking for information on an overly broad or specific topic.
Online tutorials can be a great source of information on a topic (they can also be terrible, as many are out-of-date, incomplete or written by unqualified people who shouldn’t be writing tutorials) especially if you’re just looking for a quick reference to get you started in a certain subject. A good tutorial — or even a bad one as long as you take it for what it is and do further research — gives you a foundation to build on by teaching you about a particular topic, usually by demonstrating one possible solution to the problem at hand.
This is both the strength and weakness of an online tutorial; it will usually cover a single approach to solving a problem, only in rare cases pointing you in the direction of resources to study alternatives. The single approach will hopefully be covered in detail and will allow you to very quickly get up and running. It will not however generally educate you particularly well on why the approach was chosen over possible alternatives and will very rarely go over weaknesses of the chosen method. It will also be entirely up to the reader to adapt the technique as necessary if they’re trying to achieve something slightly different from the covered subject. This has two consequences for those seeking tutorials:
- You’re unlikely to find a tutorial covering a broad topic, although you may in some cases find a series that attempts to do so. Tutorials cover a specific solution to a specific problem, so rather than looking for one that covers the entirety of your project (”building a house”, or “developing a multi-player game”) you will have better luck if you look for resources covering smaller steps involved in getting the project done (”building a brick wall”, or “creating a network connection”). If you really need a resource that covers a broad topic in detail then you’re almost certainly not looking for a tutorial; you should instead look for books or classes.
- You may not be able to find a tutorial covering exactly what you want to do, especially if the subject is particularly specific (”replacing the ink in <blah> model of printer”, or “animating a werewolf-shaman”). Instead you need to generalise your problem somewhat (”changing the ink in printers”, or “animating a character”) and then look for resources you can get started with; they won’t tell you exactly what to do, but they can give you a good starting point which you can then experiment from in order to solve your own problem.
Lastly, if you have managed to find a tutorial that covers the problem you’re trying to solve (or a similar one that you think can give you a good starting point) you should always check with other resources to see if there are alternative approaches that may be better suited to your particular case. You may well find that the first tutorial you found is completely incorrect, or is correct but that there is a much easier way to solve the problem. In some cases you might be better of with a book or a class in your local area.
Alrighty, Bluenote’s end of year concert will be on the 13th and 14th (that’s a Saturday and Sunday; the second weekend) of December. Unless things are for some reason changed up drastically (which is extremely unlikely) there will be a Saturday afternoon show which tends to have most of the younger kids, solo acts, etc.; a Saturday evening show which tends to have most of the big band acts; and a Sunday arvo concert which has all the leftover stuff.
Come along for a look if you wanna see William, Shazzie and I performing, tickets are cheap and we’d appreciate the support.
Managing a pizza store - not for me. I wouldn’t mind the longer hours if they were timed better rather than taking up all my evenings and pretty much killing the weekend, but rostering like that doesn’t really seem achievable so I’ve decided I shan’t be signing the contract.
Nothing else of interest to report right now.
Anyone who was particularly interested by my previous entry should probably also check out The Casual Games Manifesto.
Anyone who is active within the games industry will recognise that there are still many creative titles being produced. It is firmly within this niche that I wish to establish my own business. I wish to sell to those who do not wish for but desire an excellent product, and who do not neccesarily need what I sell, but will none-the-less pay for it because they desire products of such a level of quality.
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