From BoingBoing…

Link

Tags: ipod // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)

It was a beautiful Saturday this weekend. Clear and pretty warm, but still cool in the shade. It is still spring after all. But nonetheless perfect weather to fire up the grill and have an American classic. And judging by the empty spot in the refrigerated case at the Giant, I wasn’t the only one who had a hankering for fresh, juicy hamburgers this weekend.

I learned a lot of things from my Dad, including some tips on making a good burger. His biggest tip: make them thick. There is nothing like biting into a burger that barely fits into your mouth. If I wanted a thin burger, I would just go to McDonalds. Now what really helps me make a good thick burger is my Tupperware burger press that my Mother got for me. I looked at the Tupperware site, and I couldn’t find it, so they may not make them any more. But take a look here and you can see what I’m talking about. It’s basically a form that you put the meat in and a handle to press it into the form. The Tupperware set is really nice because they also come with lids so you can make your burgers up ahead of time and store them in forms until ready to use. But I prefer to make mine fresh.

With the help of Margaret, I’ve developed a special twist for my burgers. I add Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce to my meat before forming them. You can add it to taste, but I usually use like 1/4 cup per pound. I also like to toss in some freshly chopped garlic if we have it, and always toss in some freshly chopped onion.

Now you can’t just toss these onto the grill. Make sure to pre-heat your grill on high to get the grates very hot. When just about ready to put your burgers on, turn it down a shade to about medium or medium high. What the pre-heating does is get the grates really hot so they will sear the burgers and leave nice lines on them. That is usually much easier to do with steaks, but (if you are good) it can be done with burgers as well. Once on the grill, take your time cooking them. You want to make sure they are cooked all the way through, but take care not to burn them. I used to like mine nice and medium, but after all the warnings on eating not fully cooked meat, I always cook my burgers until the juice comes out clear when pressed on.

Just before taking off the grill, I like to put some cheese on mine and let it melt. It just makes the burgers so much better…

You can also optionally toast your buns. I usually don’t do this as it can be a bit more work. Just butter up the insides of the bun (that’s the work part…) and throw them on an open part of the grill for like a minute or two until they are nice and toasty. Adds that “profession burger joint” flair to your service.

Now everyone has their own way of topping their burger. This is a very personal choice and you should let people do what they want. You’re best bet is to just prepare some toppings and set them out for people to pick. Some things to have on hand would include: lettuce, tomato (thick slices), onion (thick slices), ketchup, (yellow) mustard, Mayo, salt, pepper, and pickles. All pretty standard toppings and you are sure to please any crowd with those choices. If you wanted to go more gourmet, you can get things like bacon (cooked, of course), crumbled blue cheese, barbecue sauce, guacamole, jalapenos, or even onion rings.

Now if you want a nice summer side to go with you burgers, grab some ears of corn. Husk them and remove the silks so all you have left are the ears. Following the same pre-heating instructions as for the burgers, but turn the heat way down after pre-heated. And just place the ears right on the grates. In about 10 minutes you will have the most delicious (and easy!) corn you have ever had. One word of caution: it is really easy to burn the corn, so make sure to turn it every 2 minutes or so to keep that from happening. A light, spotty char on the corn is what you are looking for. Serve it up with some butter, salt and pepper and you are ready to go!

Tags: food, recipes // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)

I was doing some googling looking for a way to have some US Airways flight status information messaged (SMS) out to my phone like United offers. Short answer: I couldn’t find one, but United service rocks.

But more importantly, I stumbled across this thread from Treo Central where the were talking about an application for your SMS enabled Treo phone to request SMS information from Voicestream (T-Mobile). Doing some further looking reveals that the app they are talking about is one that I wrote! Clicking on the VS Alerts link lead me to the palmgear.com page I setup for the program. Talk about a little bit of serendipitous nostalgia…

Tags: google, serendipity // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)

So I finally bit the bullet and got tickets for the 12:01 AM (that’s midnight!) showing of “Star Wars: Episode III” on the morning of 5/19. I’m going to be one of the crazies lined up at the theater to see it before everyone else. But I’m not going alone, I’ve suckered some of my coworkers into going with me. It’s going to be an interesting day at Hillcrest as a group of the engineering staff is asleep on their feet from staying up late to watch Episode III. Damn you George Lucas for ruining our productivity!

Tags: None // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)

So I signed up for yet another Customer Loyalty Card. And unlike my Best Buy Reward Zone card that actually does something for me, my brand new PetSmart loyalty card doesn’t actually do anything for me.

“But wait”, you may ask. “Doesn’t it get you a discount on things you purchased?” Let me let you in on a little secret. If they didn’t have those loyalty cards, they would find some other way of giving you the discount. Think back to the days before Loyalty Cards became popular. You would just get the discount for doing nothing more than shopping there. But today you have to carry around a whole handful of cards for whatever stores you may go into. I kid you not, I one saw a woman who had more loyalty cards on her key chain than actual keys…

I am less bothered about the loss of privacy aspects of having a loyalty card. Really, the retailer doesn’t need to know that information about me except to mail targeted ads to my homee. Most retailers allow you to opt-out of getting those mailings (which is what I usually select). Otherwise, they just get to figure out what food I like, which I don’t think is really that bad a thing.

So why do retailers want you to sign up and use these loyalty cards? Easy, because information is power (or money). Retailers have always tracked inventory so they would know how popular things are and because to keep them in stock and be able to drop un-popular items. As computers became more prevalent, this whole process became computerized. The computerized cash register systems keeps track of how much people are buying. No more counting things on the shelf to see what your inventory is, you can know up to the second!

Retailers who track this information over time were able to analyze their data to find out information about their customers purchasing habits. This lead to the infamous Beer and Diapers phenomenon (Some of my research indicates that this may be an urban legend, but it sounds good…). Stores found out that they would get a lot of people purchasing those two items at the same time. The theory behind this off linking of items is that Dads would have to go out to the market to get diapers instead of heading off to the pub. So they would pick up a six-pack for the road. Retailers can then use this information to make sure to locate the two items together, and also put a jar of peanuts for purchase near-by.

Loyalty cards take this kind of data analysis to a higher level, as they are now able to do more than just track information on a single visit to the store. They are able to track purchasing habits across multiple visits. Who knows what kind of information they will be able to mine with this additional information.

Tags: None // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)

As you may have heard, Apple shipped their newest version of OS X, codenamed Tiger, this weekend. To help hype the release, Apple held big events at all their stores where they were giving away prizes and stuff and were also opened late (until midnight!). Margaret and I went on Friday evening and got a copy of Tiger.

She installed it herself on Friday night without any help from me at all. She said it was a breeze. And then she played around with some of the features. During the day I had started reading a review of Tiger from Ars Technica, but hadn’t gotten through to the end of it. The first part of that article only covers a lot of the low level details that are interesting to people like me, but aren’t that noticeable most of their users.

Some of the more noticeable features include:

Spotlight

This is the unified search tool available in Tiger. It is quite a bit like Google desktop on the PC (which I strongly recommend all PC users to install so you can actually find things like documents and e-mail on your computer…). One of the cooler features I read about Spotlight is the ability to have “Smart Folders”. Basically, you run a search query and Spotlight gives you the ability to save that query as a Folder. And the best part is that every time you go into that folder, you get the latest results on that query.

Dashboard

Dashboard allows you to have cool, easily accessible widgets at your finger tips. Things like a calculator, your calendar, time, weather, etc. Just push a button and up pops Dashboard with all these useful things. And the API to develop new widgets is also available. Apparently you use HTML and JavaScript to program these things, so it should be pretty easy for people to whip out new Dashboard widgets.

Apple lists over 200 new features in Tiger.

Tags: apple, osx // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)

And loved it! It had its moments of laugh out loud funniness (mostly physical comedy) and its usual moments of just funniness. My only concerns with it are that those people unfamiliar with the story will get easily lost. Being very familiar with it, I didn’t have any problems following the story. But to make it fit into the 2 hour movie slot, obviously things had to be cut. And I think in some cases they were a little aggressive with the cuts to the detriment of the understanding. But I’m hopeful for an extended edition DVD. And I’m very hopeful for a sequel…

And at least at the theater we were at, they had some awesome trailers before the movie. The “Serenity” trailer (which came out online on Tuesday) opened the trailers. Quickly followed by episode 3. And then some crap trailers. And then my favorite trailer for a movie I won’t see: Chicken Little. They openly copied the H2G2 trailers, including a “Don’t Panic” reference. Just very fitting to appear before the movie…

Tags: h2g2, movies // Comments (0) // Trackbacks (0)