This month’s cocktail is the Cosmopolitan Martini. Its been a while since I’ve made a vodka drink and realized that I’ve never really learned how to make one. This is a fairly simple recipe that includes vodka, cranberry and lime.

The shopping list is:

• Vodka (Greygoose 750ml, $25)
• Triple Sec (Hiram Walker, $9)
• Rose’s Lime Juice ($4)
• Cranberry Juice (Ocean’s Spray 46 oz., $5)
• Lime ($0.25)

You may have most of this around the house already, with the exception being the lime juice. Substituting the lime juice is fine, but keep in mind that Rose’s Lime Juice is sweetened, so imitating may be a bit difficult.

When making drinks for two, mix 2 ounces of vodka, 1 ounce of triple sec, 1 ounce of cranberry juice and 1 ounce of lime juice in a shaker with ice. You want to quickly mix and shake vigorously to flash freeze the mixture before pouring.

Carolyn felt that it was too heavy on the lime and too light on the cranberry. I find that if you half the triple sec (0.5 oz.) and lime juice (0.5 oz.) and then double the cranberry juice (2 oz.) then it turns out pretty good and slightly more red in color.

I’ve always been a 37 Signals fan and have used their products for a few years now. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an excuse to try out Basecamp Next.

There are a few things that I really like about it:

• It is super easy to switch between projects. When I go from one project to another, I want my full attention and my screen real estate to be focused on the project that I selected. Getting between projects is quick and easy without having references to what is going on in other projects.
• Everything has been broken down into 3 types of things: lists, discussions and files. I say 3 because there is a 4th type, text file, that is essentially a file on the site that is editable. I really like the minimal approach to organizing data and it works really well for me.
• The permission system is simple and effective. I can add people, organize them by company and team and quickly view who can do what.
• The daily progress view is really nice for a quick way to answer the questions “What did I do?”, “What am I doing next?” and “What is could potentially get in my way?”.

There are a few ways it could be improved though, although in my opinion, these are pretty minor:

• To change the sort or priority of todo lists items, you’ve got to click around a few times and can only make changes while on the sub sub page for that specific todo list.
• It isn’t obvious that you can undelete things if you accidentally delete something.
• I wish the text documents were more like backpack pages and supported some type of structured markup.