Author Archives: bluedepth

Fussy French Food

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Here’s something that I’ve noticed. When trying to explore French cuisine I’ve discovered something very important. No ingredient in France has anything to do with any ingredient in the New World. A leek in France is a tiny little wimpy thing, a leek in the New World can be used to defend your home. A chicken breast in France is exactly 1/4 inch thick, while a chicken breast in the New World is 4 inches thick.

What do we see here? Everything in the New World is bigger. Terragon can be attached to an axle and made into a house-sized fan. In France finding a chicken that is 2 pounds in total weight isn’t a problem, “mais oui!” but in the New World a two pound chicken was probably trampled by a baby New World chicken. The New World chickens start at 6 pounds.

A part of me wants to invite these French chefs to come to the New World, drop them in Meijers with their very own recipe books and watch them weep, then claw at their faces regretting the day they were born for putting pen to paper and insisting that a two pound chicken is a possibility. Chickens do not come in two pound sizes. They emerge from the egg, they rocket to 5 pounds in about 10 minutes and then if they are caught a little later after they hit 6 pounds, like the little bastard we have in the pot currently, we’re very lucky!

So, this cooking French thing is more a test of our instant-read thermometer than paying any attention to the actual recipe. If I can find a whole year to do nothing I can dwell in my kitchen and convert all these fussy french oddities into real New World foods. I don’t have a year, I have some rather silly French cookbooks, but above all else I have an entire rack of wine with which to cope with all this fussy French silliness.

Don’t get me started on their cows… That’s why they fear pickpockets so much. Cow theft. Really. Moo? Screw that. Mee.

 

Impressive Balls

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There is a company, whom I shall not name to protect the guilty, which just delivered unto us an invoice for a surprising sum for work not requested. It’s not really anywhere near my level of the Dark Ivory Tower where I have to contend with something like this, however, if this was a vendor I had to deal with, I would be in their office and my armor-tipped vendor-poking-finger would be in full effect.

This is ballsy. This is impressively ballsy. We’re talking gold-plated, titanium-ringed, plutonium-filled balls here. The amounts are all obnoxiously large and round, just like the balls, and the “work” done is more of a ripoff than anything really creatively done. If I were on a higher level of the Dark Ivory Tower I would investigate suing them for plagiarism, theft, and criminal obnoxiousness.

If this was my money I’d be up to their home office like a shot, letting all the air out of their tires and egging their houses, then covering their palatial estates (balls that big, estates for sure) with as much cheap flimsy toilet paper as I could get my hands on. This level of chain-yanking bull-shiat (higher class bullshit) demands nothing less.

The absolute audacity of this place is utterly shocking. But then again, they are marketing whores. Gaping holes on ’em so big if you yelled at them you’d hear an echo.

Stunning. Bullshit. Stunning Bullshit. Wow.

Painting, Drinking, Risotto

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Last night was a day and night of whats new, whats borrowed, and whats blue. What was new was my first attempt at Risotto, the classic italian preparation made “in the long and painful way” which I found actually to be quite enjoyable and not painful in the least. It was amazing to witness so few rice grains swell up with so much chicken stock! Scott has announced that if I make Risotto once a week he’d be a happy camper. At the end of this I’m going to have Popeye arms — toot toot!

Whats borrowed is the beer. I came across something I thought I’d never see in Michigan, a case of Labatt’s Ice Beer. The only negative thing about my find was that it was in canisters and not in bottles. I prefer beer in bottles but in a pinch aluminum canisters are minimally acceptable. It brought back memories, lots of them. Ice beer is college-kid beer. It has absolutely no character whatsoever, it’s just really alcohol for alcohols sake. It brought me back to nights in Toronto with friends and going out in Buffalo. In New York you can get Labatt’s Ice in bottles. It’s another reason why I HATE NEW YORK. They get the good stuff. 😉

As for whats blue, our hallway is. We spent all last night taping and priming the entire “room” and then this morning we laid down a delightful light shade of blue called “Cassiopeia” from Laura Ashley, which is just a color set on Valspar Paint from Lowes. And now you all know why yesterday we checked into Lowes on Foursquare. The hallway and the living room and the bathroom all carry various notes of a blue color. It’s light enough to not drag the house down into the murky deep, but not so light as to appear like a pastel factory exploded in my house. Once we’re done trimming and touching up I will share pictures. There is already a picture of the primed surfaces here.

Now we’ve got to go back to Lowes today and get a smaller mini-roller (the big full-size roller is too awkward to use on much of the surfaces in the hallway) and then get new switchplates and pulls for the cabinets because the ancient-bronze look that the house initially came with just won’t work with this hippy-happy-blue we’ve covered it with.

 

iPhone App Review

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In an earlier post I wrote about how I promised you all an iPhone App review, so without further waiting, here it is. In this review I will be skipping any apps that also appear on my iPad, as I’ve pretty much exhaustively covered those apps, unless the iPhone brings a fresh perspective that I didn’t have with my iPad. Just so that everyone is on the same page, my iPad is a 16GB Wifi only model, and the first generation. My iPhone is also a 16GB model and linked to Verizon, it’s fourth generation. On with the show…

iPhone 4 App Review

  1. Evernote – The recently updated Evernote app is without a doubt one of the single most awesome and compelling apps on my iPhone. The new interface works so much better than the previous iteration of the app on the iPhone device. I am patiently waiting for this kind of refreshing redesign to happen for the Evernote for iPad app as well. Every time I open Evernote, I can’t help but think back to struggling with the very same app on my old Blackberry. The difference? Night and Day.
  2. Photography Group
    1. Camera – The baked in Camera app for the iPhone 4 comes with the device. The controls are very easy and it was a definite pleasure to see that the app does stills and video, and can be configured for either camera, the front-facing or rear-facing.
    2. Camera+ – This app borrows a lot of structure from the plain Camera app. It has a different zoom feature, timed shutter, burst mode, advanced flash handling and a pretty neat focus-fixing gesture system which I’ve yet to really get into. The app also has it’s own “Camera Roll” beyond the plain system one, and this allows you to edit the photos, crop them and apply some pretty cool filters. You can of course export any photos you take from the apps “Camera Roll” to the system “Camera Roll”, so it’s quite handy.
    3. Panorama – I haven’t really gotten a chance to play around with this one, it was free, eventually I’ll get to trying it out.
    4. Instagram – The collision of social media and photography! This app is great. You can configure Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Flickr, Tumblr, and FourSquare all from the app itself. Take a picture, apply one of its old-timey filters if you want, and then send the photo at once to all the services or specific ones you choose. So far very happy with it.
    5. FoodSpotting – This is more niche than Instagram. It works a lot like Instagram but it’s for food in restaurants. You take a picture and you can share it. The only gripe I have about FoodSpotting is the setup for the social services aren’t very clear, it’s nothing like any other app I’ve used and I kept on hitting my head against a mysterious login box until I realized I had to put in my FoodSpotting.com username and password. Oops. Once it’s off the ground, it’s very handy.
  3. Utilities Group –
    1. Clock – The clock app is one of those baked-in apps that come with the device. I almost never review the baked in apps, except for this one case. There appears to be a gremlin that still lives in this app. I have a handful of alarms, and whether the alarm is on or off doesn’t matter. So far it doesn’t suffer from the previous problem of “alarm doesn’t fire”, but it’s odd in that alarms fire even if they are “Off”. I think this app is still a work-in-progress for Apple’s iOS team to work on.
    2. Voice Memos – This app still has a use for really long audio recordings. It’s lost a fair amount of power when Evernote redid their app and added audio recording – so you could technically audio-record right into your Evernote system. I suppose you could use this app and then email the audio into Evernote later, perhaps it’s six and one half-dozen kind of thing.
  4. Facebook – The Facebook app is odd. It’s there for the iPhone but not the iPad. I’ll never understand that. The app works well enough, it’s pretty straightforward and if you have a facebook account, you should get it. I don’t know many people who don’t have a facebook account any longer.
  5. Social Group
    1. Glympse – I wrote about Glympse when I had it on my iPad. The system really shines when you have a 3G network connection or if you insist on running it on the iPad, to have a 3G-to-Wifi bridge as you are mobile. I used Glympse with my mother and she loved it. She thought it was really neat. You send a “glympse” to an email addressee and they get a link they can click on and see your position, speed, and path in real-time. The only part of this app that irks me is the expiration to “glympses”. I would prefer to hand my mother a link that would always work if I was running “Glympse” on my iPhone, she would know where I am whenever she liked. Some people see this as an invasion of privacy, but really, what do you have to hide? Come on.
    2. Bump – I got this free app to share some pictures that Scott had on his iPhone. Bump works well when the datasets are small. If you want to share a LOT of data, like a bunch of pictures in a Camera Roll on the device, prepare for disappointment. Bump really didn’t work out for me. Another app, which I reviewed on my iPad, called Transfer works much better for moving big data sets between iOS devices.
  6. Travel Group –
    1. Trapster – Before the price of fuel went to obnoxiously high levels I used to have a relatively leaded foot when it came to driving. I regularly find myself pushing 76 in a 70 zone and I’ve been caught “Not Paying Full Attention” to speed zones in the past. This app allows you to share socially the presence of speed traps and other road hazards. Since I keep my speed now pretty much below 60MPH to save on gas costs most of the reason to use this app have gone out the window, but I keep it around, it’ll likely be really helpful on long-duration trips.
    2. StreetPilot – Garmin’s Nuvi interface designed for iOS. I can enter in an address or do a Google Location search and have yet to find something it can’t route me to. This app has vocal turn-by-turn directions and is as “helpful” as a Nuvi. One of the nicest things is that the maps will never go out of date as it downloads map data from Garmin automatically. When I start this app my mind goes back to the Sprint Navigation app on my Blackberry, powered by Telenav. This app, StreetPilot, blows that old Telenav application out of the water. Again it’s night and day. I would never use the Telenav junk because it never worked. So far StreetPilot has not let me down once. Again it’s because an iPhone is a supremely more advanced and better-equipped phone than the Blackberry could ever dream of being.
    3. TripIt – Making big trips, with airplanes and hotels usually is handled somewhat well using Evernote, but not any longer. TripIt is a free app and free web service that enables you to organize all your travel details through one very well designed app. What really blows my mind is the web service provides you with an email address that you can forward your confirmation emails to and the service will automatically extract the details from what you forwarded and populate your trip for you. Incredibly handy. The fact that it’s free blows my mind.
  7. 1Password – I have this app on my iPad, my iPhone and every Mac I own. Without a doubt the single BEST purchase and BEST investment I ever made, beyond buying into the Apple Digital Lifestyle. What makes it shine? Sync with Dropbox. Everything is the same on every device. Everyone should buy apps from 1Password, then use the app to change each site they have an account on with the random generator in 1Password and control them all from that suite of apps. When one site suffers a security breakdown, your loss is microscopic. You lost 1 of thousands of 16 digit random passwords. This app is worth its weight in GOLD. I’m so happy my mother pushed me towards it!
  8. Business Group
    1. DraftPad – If ever you needed just a quick place to jot down some text, this app does a pretty good job. It’s free, it’s very simple to use, and does one thing, taking quick temporary notes, very well.
    2. CamCard – I downloaded the Lite version of this app. It enables your phone to take a picture of a business card and then it scans in the details, does OCR, and populates your Contact List with the details from the card. Very useful. I got the Lite version because I almost never get business cards but when I do, it’s nice to have this as an option.
  9. Scanners Group
    1. Qrafter – This app from Kerem Erkan is free on the App Store and is the BEST QR Code scanner I’ve ever had the pleasure to use. It’s professional, free, and the way it scans, presents the contents of the scan and all the extended features that it can pick up from a QR code is wonderful! There are a few other QR scanners and they are okay, but this one is the top of my list without a doubt!
    2. QR Creator – Kerem Erkan, on his website, also has a QR creator page which has a special mobile rendering on iPhone devices. I browsed to it in Mobile Safari and then made an app-icon-bookmark. You can create custom QR codes and save them to your Camera Roll and print them using AirPrint or send them to someone else via email or even Evernote or Dropbox! Quite nice.
    3. PriceCheck – This app from Amazon.com is a great way to check on local stores profiteering. Just grab an object from the shelf, open this app, scan the bar code with the camera and Amazon will spit out it’s best prices for that item. I’ve yet to use it for more than simply checking on things to see how the scanner worked, but it does work. I’m pretty sure you can one-click order through the App if you set it up with your Amazon login information. That would be too-funny. Especially for Best Buy, Target, and Bed Bath and Beyond. Low prices my ass. 🙂
    4. RedLaser – This works a lot like PriceCheck but isn’t tied to Amazon.com. I have used this app and it’s saved both of us some money and aggravation. There is a scented candle that Scott really likes in the bathroom and it’s a big one, the price tag from BB&B was $22 bucks. He wanted another candle just like it for the bathroom but couldn’t remember what it was called or who made it. While I was in the bathroom I fished it out of the garbage and scanned it using RedLaser. Not only did it find the right make and scent but also found it online for HALF THE PRICE. I then tapped the option button in RedLaser and right there was “email this info” option, I sent it to Scott and minutes later he was thanking me. Don’t thank me, thank that app! 🙂
    5. Color ID – I have what I regard as accurate color vision. Scott on the other hand can from time to time run into trouble identifying colors. This free app is cute, you start it, point the camera at an object and press the shutter button. The phone will calculate the color, give you its “creative name”, its hex code for inclusion on websites, and it will read the color off via voice from the speaker. I spent half an hour identifying all the colors in my bathroom. For anyone challenged with color blindness, this app is a godsend. The only oddity with the app is that it doesn’t like being sent to the background. Once you put it in the background and then call it up again the scanning part doesn’t work. You have to quit the app and restart it. Even with this oddity it’s still quite useful.
  10. GroceryIQ – This app is sort of a scanner, sort of a listmaker, but it floats outside of other groups because it’s different. I like using this app more than ShopShop because the way it’s designed fits better with trips to the supermarket. I love it’s listmaking and check off features. The scanner is quite dumb, and while you can scan an item and put it on the list, it’s just as easy to type it in by hand.

So that’s that. Those are the apps on my iPhone that differ from my iPad apps. It’s nowhere near the exhaustive list of all the apps I have, but these are the ones I felt warranted the most discussion and I think other people would benefit from using. I’m open to reviewing other apps, if you are an app developer please feel free to drop me a line or make a comment and I’ll check out your app and give you my honest opinion or even a review. If you find something in my reviews that helps you, please comment and let me know!

If My Pets Could Talk…

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Cub and meat II

I always imagine my cats would have little kid voices and be singularly driven to repeat themselves in excitement. What would they say?

Owein would likely jump up on Scott and say something like “I’m going to lay on your hands and you will like it. It’ll likely be for the rest of the day, so deal with it. Petting begins now.” and it would likely be in a James Earl Jones-on-Helium voice.

Griffin’s personality is more of a kid after gobbling down a giant bowl of candy. He’d ramble on about how much he likes helping daddy put on his shoes in the morning, about how much he wishes the people in the corners of the house would stop mocking him. He’d likely touch on his fondness for acrylic blankets and stuffed animals and under his high chittering voice he’d admit that his addiction makes his tummy hurt but not enough to stop. Then he’d tell you about how wonderful it is when daddy sits in his chair and reclines and how perfect a warm lap feels.

Then the both of them would move on to dinner time. They’d both complain that daddy only feeds them when an odd little box that daddy has makes a screeching noise and that they are so very hungry and impatient to hear the phrase that sends them into fits of impatient begging. It would be Griffin who would say it, impulsively, “Who’s Hungry? Oh daddy! We are!” while Owein would just give him an impatient glare and a flap of the tail. Then they’d both describe in detail about how they are saying “Now! Now! Now!” but it comes out “Merow! Merow! Merow!”. Owein would then comment about how overrated breathing is when you are trying to eat as fast as felinely possible.

Then after that they’d demand that both daddies sit on the couch and provide ample lap-room for an after-meal konk-out. They would both, under their high voices, admit to really enjoying putting both daddies to sleep, and probably would comment on how easy it is especially if the giant lightbox was making noise and flickering.

That’s what my pets would say. I’m sure of it. 🙂

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iPad 2

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I caught up with Apple’s announcement of the iPad 2 after I got back from Comixlunch with Scott. It appears at least to me to be an evolutionary enhancement to the original iPad device. The A5 dual-core processor is a very good improvement and the cameras are certainly quite nice to have. In many ways it’s as if the iPhone 4 design team and the original iPad design team had a kegger and came out with a really great new design. It seems to be a forward-thinking blend of the two reference devices.

Along with the actual meat of the matter, the silly stuff is also front and center. People moaning and carrying on about “does it come in white?” will be happy. When I fielded some questions about the iPad 2 today one of my coworkers remarked on the devices lighter weight and thinner presentation than the original device. In response I laughingly referred to the original iPad as being made of neutronium and wondering over how we all coped with the agony of the first iPad. I see this next device to be an evolutionary step up from the original iPad. It’s not revolutionary, to do that would require a wholly new form-factor, a new design, a new OS, new everything. If it isn’t that, then it’s evolutionary. It’s impressively better, but it’s still an evolved form of the original device.

So, for those people who are seeking my advice about buying an iPad, here’s the skinny:

  • If the pricetag is the most important thing for you, then go for the now deprecated original iPad. Apple knocked $100 dollars off the price of the device and now it’s really quite compelling.
  • I would seriously avoid buying any refurbished device. I’m quite bearish on refurbished devices. If you can find the extra $50, you really owe it to yourself to get a factory-fresh model and not some repaired victim.
  • If money isn’t an issue then I strongly recommend buying the iPad 2. The speed, the cameras, the new software and the 1080p via cable is quite compelling.
  • If you already have an iPad and it’s working for you, I don’t see any reason to dump your current device and buy a new one. The only caveat to that is if you are planning on gifting your device to someone else, then feel free to buy the new iPad 2. The new iPad itself doesn’t have enough “Killer Features” to warrant the dropping of iPad 1 and rushing out to the Apple Store for iPad 2.

I forecast that the iPhone 5 will be even less of an evolutionary leap. What more could the device do? Get thinner? Transparency? What new technology could possibly be stuffed into the device to make everyone get all hot and bothered for it? Apple is running out of room to innovate. Saying that, I could be surprised, but it would take a lot to really get me to look at my current iPhone 4 with anything less than utter adoration.

Is Chivalry Dead?

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Fleur de Lis

Chivalry really has given way to a greater sense of common courtesy when it comes to the gender components of the word, and the golden rule when it comes to the general meaning of the word.

I think that the historical nature of the gender-based chivalrous behavior was pretty much disposed of when women insisted on absolute equality with men. The room for “proper Knightly conduct” almost demands some amount of pleasant inequality, but since women demand to be treated as men, the elimination of that difference has also disposed with those kinds of behaviors. Now it’s gender-neutral and has dropped to the more generalized sense of “common courtesy”. Now its common courtesy to open the door first and hold it open for everyone in your party, men and women both. That everyone gets a chance to be that helpful to everyone else. Women open doors for men, men open doors for women, so on and so forth. The bowing and flourishing, the old reliable notions that men open doors for ladies are really now quite hazardous. For many men it’s as hazardous no matter what you do. If you open a door for a lady, she may be pleased, or she may be angry because you are treating her like a lady and not as an equal. The reverse may also happen, and because the rules to classical chivalry were tossed out the window on the way to modernity, you either ignore the pleased-or-upset response or everyone opens their own doors.

As for the gender-neutral meaning in chivalry, that was pretty much subsumed by the golden rule. You can’t really extricate the gender components from chivalry and still use the word and be serious. There needs to be a new word. I like the idea of a golden rule, that you do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. That new word, that new gender-neutral sense really goes a long way and helps people avoid the land mines of awkwardness that are loaded into the word ‘chivalry’

So in a way, chivalry is dead and the sexual revolution and women’s liberation have killed it. Two different things grew out of that grave – common courtesy and the golden rule. I don’t know if things are better now than they were, but they are different. Different can be just as good.

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Reflections on a Broken Relationship

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Looking into the past

I question the whole notion of a ‘broken relationship’. Some people are meant to be in your lives, some not. If a relationship has ‘broken’ I see it more that it has ‘expired’ and it’s best that everyone involved not try to muck about with things and try to force the world to their designs – it never goes well.

I think it’s much more apt to think on these broken relationships and ask why did they break? Was it because your interests have changed? Was it something in your stars? Whatever it is, accepting what happens is the first step in not being trapped in the past.

There is a part of me that considers the past to be dumb. Not in the “stupid” sense, but rather in the “dull” sense. There is nothing the past can do other than provide a lesson, once you’ve learned the lesson it’s good enough to simply let the past drop away. You can’t change any of it, you can’t go back and do it any differently so fretting over it is just an exercise in wasting time and energy.

So I say let sleeping dogs lie, let the broken relationships fade away. Learn your lessons, move on with your life. Don’t dwell, it’s not good for you.

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Gasoline in Michigan

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I’ve been thinking about how the people in this state behave in relationship to their vehicles. Specifically how people in Michigan have idolized their cars and refuse to part with them no matter how expensive it is to operate them. This line of reasoning got me wondering about the price of automobile gasoline and how it affects behavior. Specifically at what stages do people in Michigan start to adapt their behaviors?

So far gas has reached $3.55 per gallon for regular unleaded gasoline. Here’s a continuum of adaptive behaviors that I think people could use if they really wanted to:

  • Drop maximum speed to 65 in a 70MPH zone
  • Drop maximum speed to 55 in a 70MPH zone
  • Consolidate trips, waiting until there is a reason to go out and chaining opportunities to make it all in one trip.
  • Carpool
  • Use public transportation
  • Bicycle riding
  • Walking

So far I’ve started to drop my maximum speed between 55 and 60 MPH even in 70MPH zones, I consolidate trips and as soon as the weather improves a bit more, I’ll be taking advantage of public transportation again.

I’ve polled some of my coworkers about their sentiments and from what I can gather, gasoline would have to be above $5 a gallon to force the people in this state to adapt their driving behaviors.

Here’s a question for all my readers, so please comment, what have you done in response to the higher price of gasoline to adapt or cope? Let us know, I look forward to a discussion and possibly more adaptations I haven’t thought about in this blog post. 🙂

eBooks & Public Libraries

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In earlier blog entries I went on at length about how eBooks were going to change the book business and I puzzled over the role of Libraries providing their users with a pseudo-socialized way to “steal” books, mostly under the comic jab that Barnes & Noble should seek to shut down libraries because they eat into sales.

I also still think that downloading an eBook is virtually indistinguishable from going to the Library and borrowing a book. The destination I reached was a new principle called the Preservation of Inconvenience. That publishers need to maintain a certain basic level of “Being a Pain In The Ass”. To which, the link below points. It appears as though HarperCollins, in an effort to retain their basic level of “Being a Pain In The Ass” will count how many times a library lends out an eBook, and if it goes beyond 26 times, they’ll sell the eBook to the library AGAIN. Over and over.

So once again the old battle is joined. Consumers versus Producers, and the weapon of choice for the producers is Digital Rights Management. The best way to de-fang DRM is to only consume content in open formats. Accept nothing else.

eBooks In the Public Library Under Fire! | Gear Diary.