Okonomiyaki

Last weekend, the four of us ventured out to an okonomiyaki restaurant called Gaja in LA. The beauty of okonomiyaki is that it is truly what you make it. Apparently, the Japanese translation is something to the effect of "cook it like you like it." The adventure revolves around a smoking hot griddle in the middle of your table and a truckload of condiments. The servers bring bowls of meat, veggies, seafood, noodles, and batter, along with a barely decipherable set of directions that instruct you to essentially dump everything onto the griddle, make a giant pancake, and finish it off with any or all of the sauces and toppings. While they do provide you with instructions, it is noted by an asterisk at the bottom that these are the Gaja ways of cooking. Basically, if you know a better way to cook your food, you are free to do so and with reckless abandon.

This whole philosophy of "cooking like you like it" is really quite akin to our approach to traveling. A trip to the U.K. might be fine with a tour group, but there is something really empowering about picking and choosing the castles and the pubs you want to visit and putting it all together exactly as you like it. This is what led us to create Knapsack, our flagship travel planning app for the Mac. We found that we really needed a tool that would let us organize all of our research in one place and then remember the details of these carefully crafted adventures the next time someone asked for a hotel recommendation in Thailand or a good gelato spot in Rome. We designed Knapsack to be flexible enough to plan any trip exactly the way we wanted.

So this blog is meant to be a place not just for ramblings about Knapsack, but also a place to muse about traveling and digress on the technical side of creating software. We intend to chat about whatever happens to be on our minds and more or less just blog as we like it.