Archive for the 'Life' Category

I cancelled our Netflix subscription today.

In answering their “why terminate service?” survey, it really came down to several reasons.

The Apple TV has spoiled us. Even with its currently limited (though growing) selection, we can make a decision about what we want to watch less than 5 minutes before we want to start watching it.

Too often, we would look at the three Netflix envelopes and say “No… Nah… Uh uh…” and then either watch some stupid TV (back when we still had Direct TV) or grab something via Apple TV.

Given the 50,000 movies delivered per day to Apple TV and iTunes users, it is clear that we aren’t the only ones seeking immediate gratification.

Sadly, the once nimble Netflix doesn’t seem to really get it.

Their “primary reasons for canceling” selections do not include Apple TV, Amazon’s Unboxed, or any other “the market has evolved beyond physical media” selections. And their “what will be your new primary source?” question has “I will download movies over the internet” as the only appropriate answer. Hopefully, Netflix won’t dump that list on the MPAA as I’m sure they would interpret it as evidence of further supposed infringement!

I was really hoping that Netflix’s online delivery play with Roku would be compelling.

Not to be. The diskless set-top box does not have the space to fully download any given piece of content. Thus, the box requires that the internet connection provide a stable, consistently high bandwidth, connection. In the face of lower bandwidth connections, it compensates by dropping back to fairly low quality bit rates.

My experience with all of the broadband internet connections I have ever had is that they tend to get very bursty in the evening hours as the whole neighborhood takes to their internet connections.

The last thing I want is to deal with an angry family when the quality of some movie drops to crap or drops out completely in the middle of playback.

With the Apple TV, we frequently had playback of an HD movie catch up to the download because available bandwidth dropped off during playback. Of course, the Apple TV has built in storage capable of storing the full movie and, thus, fixing this is as simple as starting the download of the movie before taking the ten minutes to make a bowl of popcorn!

None of this is to say that Netflix is a failure. It isn’t. If you are really into movies are like to watch lots of TV Shows, Netflix’s selection is unparalleled and the price can’t be beat.

I’ll revisit their service if they release a device that offers reliable playback compatible with realities of US broadband service. We do watch enough movies that Netflix’s monthly rates combined with such a device would be fiscally attractive.

In any case, farewell for now, Netflix, it was sometimes fun, but mostly disappointing.

This weblog post is at least a decade in the making. Seriously. I wrote the original version of this sometime in the late ’90s as a mailing list post, then revised it again when someone at Apple asked for tequila recommendations. Likely forwarded it a dozen times or so in the interim years.

Every time I forward it, I said “I should weblog this thing”. So, here it is — with some additional edits, too. Like my “So you wanna buy a big green egg” post, I’ll likely edit this over the coming years, too.

I’m going to break this into two separate posts; one about tequila and one about margaritas. Eventually, I’ll make a third post about cooking, agave, and tequila.

First, Cuervo Gold is not good tequila. It is actually a really terrible product, quality wise, backed by some brilliant market. Sadly, most of the tequila consumed in the United States is Cuervo Gold or something equally as bad. And by “bad”, I mean bad taste and vicious hangover.

Good tequila is almost always a tequila that is made from alcohol distilled from 100% blue agave. Specifically, the species Agave Weber Tequilana. This plant of the class Liliopsida (Lilies) has nothing to do with cactus. Blue agave is grown primarily in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

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Things have been a bit quiet around here. I have been a bit distracted over the last week.

Today was spent doing a mass amount of yard work; trimming, cleaning, weeding, mowing, watering and all kinds of other yard activities that require no thought.

However, I did make it out to a friend’s birthday party where his girlfriend brought him something like 2 lbs of freshly picked Morel Mushrooms. We made — I volunteered to man the stove — morel fondue, morel cream sauce on pasta, and pan fried smoked pork with morels.

The smoked pork, not surprisingly, was of my own making. I had a frozen butt that I had reheated earlier and, thus, it was best served with a bit of saucing.

To wit:

• Heat 1/2 cup of butter in metal pan until it just starts to brown.
• Add diced onions, diced peppers, and morel mushrooms (halve or quarter any large ones). Simmer until tender.
• While simmering, spice veggies with a bit of salt, pepper, cayenne, and whatever strikes your fancy. I added a bit of dried lemon (really, it was a “jamaican spice” but it was mostly dried citrus, salt, and pepper).
• Shred smoked pork into pan.
• Continuing mixing ingredients over low heat until pork is warm through.
• Add a splash of white wine and mix in some melty cheese– mozzarella works just fine.
• Stir until cheese is thoroughly melted and wine is somewhat reduced– you don’t want it too soupy!
• Sprinkle corn meal lightly over the pork and then stir in. No more than 1/4 cup.
• Increase heat and sauce with a decent BBQ sauce. Whereby “decent” means that it is sweetened primarily with fruit and cane sugars. No HFCS!
• Stir for a couple of more minutes to let the sugars caramelize slightly.

In our case, we served it with pita bread and most folks made quarter-pita tacos. It was delicious. The morels added an earthy essence to an otherwise relatively traditional pan fried pork.

If apples or pears were available, I would diced same and simmered it with the onions/peppers/morels.

The photo has nothing to do with anything (it isn’t a morel). It looks like a little laughing mushroom cyclops dude and, thus, captures the rather relaxed mood I’m in after a totally awesome WWDC.

While out and about today, Christine picked up a Turbo Bubble Machine.

We tossed the bubble solution into it and set it up on a pot in the middle of the backyard.

Roger and Ruby had a blast chasing bubbles, popping bubbles, eating bubbles….

Ruby is obsessed with anything that refracts light. To the point where she will ignore food if there is a shadow, point of light, or something shiny to chase.

So, of course, she was completely enamored with bubbles.

She needed a good long drink of water after playing to get all the bubbles out.




“Mmmmm.. bubbles are tasty!”

For mother’s day, one of my wonderful wife’s requests was to have a bit of a Ms. PacMan marathon.

So, out came the ghetto arcade controller and, a bit longer than expected later, a Ms. PacMan marathon she had! (A bit longer because a nasty latency bug has cropped up in MAME OS X somewhere along the way. I found a workaround. But, yuck.)

Now, MAME is full screen and pausing the game just to deal with iTunes shuffle play song selection suckage (since iTunes on the MAME machine sends tunage to the garage workspace) is not considered good gaming etiquette.

Clearly, I need a shell script to control iTunes. Remote Buddy is cool, but it is too slow, requires too much configuration, and, after much use, has proven a bit flaky. A simple, straightforward, shell script is sufficient and, certainly, I cannot have been the first too think of this.

I wasn’t! I found this ancient hint on MacOSXHints.com.

David Schlosnagle — who seems to have disappeared — wrote a very useful little shell script that can play, pause, go to the next track, and set the output volume. The script, as posted, doesn’t quite work all the time due to (I presume) shell changes between 10.0(?) and Leopard.

So, I grabbed a copy of the script, dropped it in my hacques repository, and have updated it for Leopard. I also added the ability to set ratings from the command line (and the status command will show the currently playing track’s rating). Minor changes, really.

The latest version can always be had at http://svn.red-bean.com/bbum/trunk/hacques/itunes.sh.

Thanks to David for doing this in the first place!!

Quite a while ago, I wrote about fatblogging and, as of about a year ago, that my attempts to get myself below my then 240+ (247 peak in years past) lbs. Not a healthy weight for a 38 year old, even at a relatively tall 6 foot+ in height.

Well… I did. I dropped below 230 briefly and have since climbed back to 238. Why? Not keeping track of my weight on a daily basis diligently enough, not responding appropriately when my weight was heading in the wrong direction, and not exercising with any consistency.

I had been using Google 15 to track my weight. Neat. Basic. Flash. Yuck.

Now? I’ll be using a Wii Fit to, at the least, track my weight. Not only is it a fun little set of mini games that are focused on various dimensions — strength, flexibility, balance, endurance — of exercise, but it has a great user interface for tracking your weight over time.

But I’ll also be using to track much more than my weight. It actually has an awesome set of random exercises that appear to be really well suited to keeping on top of flexibility, balance, and basic strength training.

Does the Wii Fit replace going to a gym? Hell, no. But I never go to a gym. I hate gyms. And, if statistics are any indication, most of the population hates gyms, too. I’ll hike and bike instead, thanks.

We did find a few bugs in the Wii Fit’s “health quantification” algorithms. The Wii Fit assigns a “Wii Fit age” to each user based on performance, age, and BMI.

The initial set of tests don’t so much capture your initial physical condition as they do your ability to comprehend instructions for a wildly foreign user interface quickly.

My wife (who is nearly the same age as me) ended up with a Wii Fit age of 54 and my 7 year old son, Roger, turned up a 23.

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Hey! Today is 5/19.

Five years ago today, I was sitting in Apple’s employee orientation with a big glass o’ the kool-id in front of me.

Still having fun and making cool stuff.

I coined a word today — perpendicunormal. I was trying to describe some of my friends in NYC as “definitely perpendicular to normal” on twitter and I ran out of characters.

A bit of deletion yielded perpendicunormal, which is a far more apt description than originally intended.

One such friend is DJ Bojan, who lays down some awesome NYC trance beats.

I picked up Boom Blox for the Wii today.

Even in playing it for only a bit, it is truly an awesome game. The physics are just flat out fantastic.

Basically, you throw a baseball like thing at towers of blocks into which various colored glass blocks are integrated. To pass a level, you have to knock all the glass blocks to the ground within a certain number of throws. Fewer throws than the goal yields more bonus points, etc…

Throws are accomplished by flicking the controller. The controls are quite intuitive without any frustration.

Simple premise. Brilliantly executed.

The graphics are solid, but the interaction between the bits of the tower are just patently brilliant. You can move the camera about and it is quite amazing to watch this balanced tower teeter back and forth with some of the blocks moving just a bit differently than others.

In any case, I have barely scratched the surface of the game and it is a lot of fun. I’m just cranking through single player. There is also two player competitive and cooperative modes along with the ability to create and share new levels!

Great game.

The Bay Area Vegetarians linked to my Maker Faire 2008 post in their summary of their presence at the Maker Faire.

Specifically:

And then there were those who looked from a distance at our model of battery caged hens, read our sign about WHY VEGAN, but didn’t approach. As one blogger frankly posted in a reference to Bay Area Vegetarians “various ‘activist’ vendors pushing everything from a vegan lifestyle (been avoiding that booth)”.

What I said in my original post was:

Gone are the generic arts-and-crafts vendors from the years before, replaced with various “activist” vendors pushing everything from a vegan lifestyle (been avoiding that booth) to awesome chocolates to composting toilets to amazing beer.

Their site seems to be having some stability issues. My response, in case it is lost (in all of its unedited wordpress submission form glory):

That particular quote is just ever so slightly out of context; beyond the “avoid” part, it was meant as a compliment to the organizers of the Faire in that they opened up what had been a cheesy vendor area to a group of people that were passionate to selling their causes in such a venue.

But let me take a moment to explain the “avoiding that booth” part.

You might not be surprised to find that the image of the chickens in cages offended me, but you might find it interesting why.

I find industrialized meat production to be an extreme offense to nature and to the health of the human race. It is unnatural. It is poisoning our land and us.

Of that, I think we all agree. You might be surprised to learn that I also shun the “organic” products of the likes of Whole Foods, many of which are flown in from far away places (thus consuming mass quantities of fossil fuels) or have been made with such oddities as “organic high fructose corn syrup”. No thanks, if I’m gonna be “green” like all the hipsters, I know that asparagus in August is unnatural.

My avoidance of the booth was more because my initial impression was that your stance is fundamentalist. That Bay Area Vegans were there to sway opinion and gain supporters through sensationalist headlines and viscerally unpleasant imagery.

I have little patience for fundamentalism, regardless of form, and I had no energy or interest in confronting fundamentalism in the otherwise open forum of ideas that is the Maker Faire.

With that said, I am the first to admit that I have no experience with this organization and am looking forward to learning more. In particular, I would like to understand how an entirely animal free method of food production is compatible with the various species of commonly eaten domesticated vegetables that have been selected to best survive in conjunction with domesticated animals as their source of fertilizer.

Thousands of years of symbiotic, human perpetuated, evolution is awfully hard to overcome. The industrialized meat and vegetable complexes made a hell of a success at such denial in the last 50 years. I would like to see us not make a similar set of mistakes in the next 50.

The pendulum swings wide and the answer to sustainable perpetuation of species typically lies somewhere in the middle.

Regardless of anything else, the Bay Area Vegetarians have quite a collection of what look to be very yummy recipes.