I had lunch with Susan Mernit today. She found Kaimuki Grill in San Mateo, 104 S. El Camino, via Chowhound. Well prepared, unusual menu items, ambience comfortable, great service.

Some things I now know about Susan:

She's lived in New Jersey and New York. (I lived in New York)

She knows David Weinberger's brother. (I know David)

She's a foodie. (I'm a foodie newbie)

She's wise enough to value colleagues unlike herself.

She asks good questions well. And listens.

We share an interest in educational blogging. Question of the day: How do we design, package and sell blogging to teachers (not the early adopters)?

She's an alum of Scholastic Magazine, Netscape, and AOL. Keen interest in product strategy, marketing management.

And she's a born blogger. Only four months into it and she's on her second blog, written up by the New York Times, and comped to BloggerCon.

I brought some of my favorite examples of business cookbooks for show and tell (I'm such an entertainer).

• CIO Insight Magazine's Whiteboards. Comprehensive project plans.
• Optimize Magazine uses a real world case in each issue. The author drafts a 90-Day Plan. Lots of text charts and graphs suitable for PowerPoint.
• Web Redesign: Workflow That Works, a step by step project process expanded to book lenght 
• The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization
• The Company Culture Cookbook: How to Change the Way We Do Things Around Here

btw, some of the first and best foodie bloggers: Barb and Roland Tanglao's VanEats.

I loved Susan's "if only subway cars could blog" idea.

[a klog apart]