Author Archives: bluedepth

I Hope I Never Lose…

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Passion flower

It’s laser-etched on the back of my iPod Nano that I received as a gift for Christmas 2010. “Be a Jackass”. Specifically speaking to the passion of life and willingness to do apparently crazy things in respect to the deeper structures of order in life. I get criticized quite often in my work life and my private life for being outspoken and dangerous. It’s shocking to me that something so fundamental should be so remarkable. What is the point of life if you aren’t outspoken? Why hide the truth, hide your feelings? If you bottle them all up and shove them under the carpet of your life eventually they’ll start to wear their shapes into the carpet and eventually the carpet will break apart for their presence. It’s far better to share what you feel when you feel it, to say what you think, to speak from the heart and to respect your instincts. If something is wrong, take a stand, even if it leads figuratively down the drain. Living this way is the only authentic way to live, any other way is self-deception and self-defeat.

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How I’m Liking 2011 So Far

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big bang

I made a resolution for 2011, to address my temper and try to quell what seemed to be a constant barrage of angry feelings. So far I’m doing quite well, I’ve only lapsed a handful of times. I’ve given myself permission to lapse, that way it doesn’t become a catastrophe if I respond angrily to a situation in my life. One can’t live in a steel-framed world for very long without aching.

I’ve started to collect quotes that mean things to me. There are many famous historical figures that have said very good things that speak to how I’m living my life. Specifically:

“Nothing external to you has any power over you.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Along with the quotes that help me get over my anger, I’ve also found quite a few that reassure me that my passionate approach to my life, my “outspoken dangerous ways” are something that I could never live without. In this regard this answer also addresses the other Plinky prompt about what intangible thing I couldn’t live without. It’s my passion that I can’t live without. Here’s some quotes that make me absolutely giddy:

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius & it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” ~ Marylin Monroe

“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.” ~ Willy Wonka

“Be who you are & say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter & those who matter don’t mind.” ~ Dr. Suess

“Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli

– and last but not least –

“I do not think much of a man who does not know more today then he did yesterday.” ~Abraham Lincoln

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iPad Apps #4

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Continuing the series…

  1. Telephone – Gizmo and GV Mobile + – These two apps function together as a pair. GV Mobile + operates as a Google Voice client, playing the middleman between the POTS phone system and wherever Google Voice can route calls to. Gizmo project is a routing target for Google Voice. I can initiate a call with GV Mobile + and route it to Gizmo and use my iPad as a telephone, free. The quality isn’t very good, but it is free.
  2. Weather
    1. TWC Max+ – The Weather Channel app lost it’s place on my home screen because it was sluggish and crashed a lot. It hasn’t really earned the respect it lost back and so it languishes in this group.
    2. WeatherStation – A very simple app that displays basic weather details for a place. Haven’t had much use of it since I picked it up.
  3. Navigation
    1. Trapster – A great free application for the iPhone/iPad that enables you to socially share the location of speed controls and speed traps on the open road. It isn’t a guarantee that you’ll be able to avoid cops, but it helps give away their location so you can prevent them from ruining someone elses day.
    2. Glympse – An app that supposedly shares your location and travel details with others socially, however the security model bolted onto this app really prevents it from being useful.

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And that concludes my app choices that are all valid up until the end of January 2011. Several of these apps will likely be deleted in the days to come, not because I need the space, but because they are clogging up my menus. I hope some of these were helpful to people, if there are any apps you think I should check out, please leave me a comment! Thanks!

iPad Apps #3

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Series continued…

  1. ComicZeal4 – This app proves that the iPad can be a home for open-source non-DRM comic books. This app can read CBR and CBZ file types which are just ZIP or RAR compressed groups of JPG images with their extensions renamed. The filing system for ComicZeal4 is quite good and it’s trivial to establish a connection between Dropbox and ComicZeal4. Not only can you import comics over the iTunes File Sharing setup, but you could also copy your books into Dropbox and then open them one at a time using Dropbox and ComicZeal4. This app is one of the few that I have running constantly in the background. I’ve written at length about how comic books should adapt to the new device or perish, so we’ll save everyone the arguments which have been made before.
  2. Food Apps
    1. Epicurious – A pretty well fleshed out collection of recipes. I’ve only used it from time to time. There is a display glitch last I checked for the “Back” button, and the only way to fix it is to unlock rotation lock and fiddle until it comes back. Not enough to stop using the app, but enough to stop using it for other apps.
    2. Lose It! – A great calorie tracking app with only one glaring problem. If you are like me, your food intake is principally novel with little dependable repeatability and creating new foods reliably is a headache. It’s the principal reason why I haven’t used this app, after a while it runs off the rails and you just don’t have the time or interest to bang-in dishes I have once and never try again. The program could benefit from a meal-guess entry “I think I ate 650 calories”. *shrug*
    3. ShopShop – A shopping list app that on first glance is very good, but on extended use you eventually find that the logic used to construct the app is not the same logic that someone would use when trying to use the app in real life. The app just languishes because it’s not really convenient or usable.
    4. Urbanspoon – Answering the question “Where can we eat?” this app does a great job. The only glitch with this app is no way to pre-define your login to the web portion of Urbanspoon, so you have to scrabble at the login screen, crash the app, and try it again and hope that you catch the website with its pants sagging, enough to “get it on”.
    5. Cookbook by Betty Crocker – Quite a number of “American Standards” but I haven’t explored it enough to form an opinion.
    6. Yelp – A social reviewing site, I suppose it’s useful but haven’t gotten it to work locally enough to see how useful or not it is.
    7. GoMealsHD – This app resembles LoseIt! in functionality but it’s usability isn’t enough to have it out of a folder or feature it on the front screen. I haven’t used it since the start and will likely delete it for space.
    8. Convert Units – This is an overdone unit converter. It’s “minimally useful” and will likely be replaced with another app when I get around to shopping for a replacement.
    9. Meijer Find-it – I was so surprised to see this in the App Store that I had to get it. It only works for supermarkets in Grand Rapids, but I have hope that they’ll expand the program. For the time being it’s just a conversation starter.
    10. AllRecipes – Supposedly a bigger repository of recipes but I haven’t used it enough to feel confident that I have a good enough opinion of how it works.
  3. Comics
    1. DC Comics … and…
    2. Marvel Comics – are both powered by Comixology’s basic app functionality. These apps fail because their host companies don’t take digital comic books seriously enough. So instead of going to these apps to read my comic books I go to ComicZeal4. The people who defend Comixology love to chat up the panel-by-panel enhancements which I agree are very nice, but until DC and Marvel take digital comics seriously, I’ll be on the periphery looking in. I would love to spend money, but if they don’t take it seriously, I can’t either.
  4. Arcade
    1. Pinball HD – Super fun and a great conversation starter
    2. Labyrinth 2 HD – Incredibly fun and addicting game. Worth every penny
    3. Sudoku Tablet – I wouldn’t play Sudoku without this app.
    4. Bubbles – I found this floating around from my old iPod Touch before it died. I discovered quite to my shock that this app is surprisingly Universal.
    5. Pocket Pond – Good to relax to and a good conversation starter.
    6. Words HD – It took a while to realize that the only way to win is to play dirty with a Scrabble dictionary. I haven’t played in a very long while.
    7. Words – Not very good as an iPhone-only app, but it’s got the Scrabble dictionary in it and helps you come up with words when you don’t have all the letters.
    8. Game Table – Another conversation starter. I’ve yet to find anyone who wants to play the old board games using the iPad.
    9. Dice HD – Silly little toy, mostly a conversation starter.
    10. iMahjong – If you like Solitaire and/or Mahjong you’ll like this app. It’s a great way to burn time.
    11. Osmos HD – Antother addictive game, this immersive one is very clever and the best way to enjoy it is to dive head first into it.
    12. JirboBreak – A ball-breaker game, nice way to waste time.
    13. uzu – Not really a game, more of an interesting way to provide a workout to the graphics and touch processing subsystems in the iPad. 🙂
    14. UNO – Love playing this game to just piss away the time. Lots of features and sounds and multiplayer mode, which is nice.
    15. Clinometer – Makes the iPad a balance bubble using its internal sensors. Cute.
    16. MagnetMeter – A display interface for the iPad’s internal compass, I suppose it’s useful, but I haven’t figured out how.
    17. WordSearch – Find the words game, easy.
    18. Planets – In the summer I’m looking forward to using this with my telescope.
    19. Mixology – I’m a drunk. Come on.
    20. Solitaire HD – If you like Solitaire games this works nicely.
  5. Streaming Media
    1. StreamToMe & ZumoCast – These two apps do very similar things. They have a server component and a client that sits on the iPad. You can then call up your home computer from anywhere on the Internet and bring up your library of music or video stored there. In design this makes living with 16GB of storage on my iPad a non-issue. In practice however these apps don’t really work that well. Mostly the calling-home feature works if you are lucky.
    2. Pandora – A great app to run when you need background music for dinner or entertaining.
    3. Boxee – Remote control for Boxee. This would be more useful if Boxee wasn’t a fragile pile of broken glass.
    4. Netflix – Good for what it does.
    5. TuneIn Radio – A great way to get streaming radio stations over the Internet on your iPad. For all those stations that don’t have agreements with TuneIn Radio, you’re pretty much left in the cold. Not enough to keep me from using it.
  6. Time
    1. Night Stand – A great app to have displaying the time during meetings. Keeps people from asking “What time is it” questions. Also a great way to throw a fake alarm to get out of an awkward situation.
    2. ZazenLite – A nice little meditation timer.
    3. WhiteNoisePro – I can’t fall asleep unless there is a random white noise in the background. This app fits every little “background sound” niche there might ever be wonderfully.
    4. Chronology – Best cooking timers and “take a break” timers EVER are in this app. It sucked terribly before iOS 4.2.1 because the timers would never work properly while the app “wasn’t working” but now that it does work in the background, it’s everything you’d want in multi-timers.
    5. Observatory – I don’t understand much of this app, but it’s a pretty conversation piece.
    6. Clock Radio – TuneIn Radio has replaced this one, it’s heading for the dustbin.
  7. Cloud Services (Networking)
    1. Box.net – Ever since Drop.io sold out to Facebook and left us high-and-dry we switched to Box for our needs. This app works adequately.
    2. Dropbox – Everyone needs to get a free account and install this on their iPad right now. Stop reading, get it. Come back, resume reading. 🙂
    3. Air Sharing – I thought I’d get more out of this app, but with all the other storage options out there, it never really wound up to be much and not enough to purchase.
    4. VNC – A quick and dirty VNC client for remote access. The mousing feature is broken or not-even-written so I only use it when I don’t have access to my MacBook or any other computer when I need to do a remote control operation.
    5. Offline Pages – At first this seemed really neat, but I never really used it much, so it languishes.
    6. Speed Test – Basic network test, great way to catch cablesystem sales people with their pants down.
    7. Transfer – At first this was useful, but only had a few uses before it lapsed into uselessness. It languishes.
    8. Shazam – Everyone gets this app for the cool-neat-whizbang when it works. It doesn’t work well and fails quite a bit. It is a good conversation starter especially when it behaves.
    9. Boxcar – Notifications for everything. This app is great and I would install it on any iPad. The notifications are a little too much, but I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer to see them and have them interrupt me than not. Each to their own.
    10. Google Earth – It could be in Arcade, but I only use it for conversation starters and Gee-Whiz-Look-At-This demo stuff.
    11. Find iPhone – Now that I’m managing a batch of other iPads for work, this app has become more useful.
    12. Junos Pulse – Our organizational VPN system requires this app, that’s the only reason it’s loaded. A necessary evil.
    13. StumbleUpon – For those that enjoy StumbleUpon, it’s a great app. I never really end up using it much, but not because of the design, but mostly because of time.
    14. Picbox – Mass uploading of pictures to Dropbox. At first it seemed a great idea, but the file-at-a-time slowness really is quite draggy and there are usually better ways to get photos off my iPad, even if I have to wait until I can get to a computer with a USB port.
    15. FIleBrowser – At first this was a mistake purchase, but after I realized that my institutions wireless system was the culprit I can endorse using this app. It allows for SMB access to whatever servers you have on the Internet. It was one of those missing features that my coworkers asked for and the app does it’s job well, as long as the network path is plain and untroubled.
  8. Arts
    1. Brushes – Wowed by an ad. Realized that drawing is not for me. 🙂
    2. iDraft
    3. Comic-Con
    4. Voice Memos – Quite neat if you ever need to record voice memos, otherwise not so much usefulness.
    5. Eyewitness – Pretty pictures from the news.
    6. Galleries from Reuters – Same as Eyewitness.
  9. Entertainment
    1. ABC Player – I used it to watch an episode of Lost and then lost interest.
    2. Flixster – Works very well to find new movies that are playing and works very well for our local Rave Theater to buy tickets.
    3. Phases – Knowing the phase of the moon is important for a Cancerian! 🙂
    4. VLC – I got it before they removed it from the App Store. It plays lots of different file types and is good for Windows Media files.
    5. U-Verse – If we spent more money on U300 this app would be kickass, since we don’t, it doesn’t.
    6. Choices – Random selection app, don’t use it much.
    7. Compass – Supposedly is useful, haven’t found an application for it yet.
    8. Tally Counter – A neat little iPhone app for counting. Eventually may find it useful, not yet.
    9. iTranslate – Good for when you need to bang out some text in a foreign language, but otherwise it languishes.
    10. IMDb – Great to resolve movie questions and “God that person seems familiar” questions
    11. Brain Wave – Quite fun little app that has proven to me at least to help me nap, sleep, and sometimes stay awake at work.
    12. BinauralBeat – Mostly pre-canned programs, not as useful or as adjustable as Brain Wave, it languishes.
    13. redbox – An iPhone app for accessing the Redbox system. I suppose it’ll come in handy when we need to make some serious use of the Redbox system.
  10. Finance
    1. eBay
    2. PayPal
    3. Calculator – The iPad needs this very badly, however this replacement one I don’t use very much.
    4. WindowShop – I wish I could use this Amazon.com app to manage other Wishlists and maybe buy gifts through it, but currently it only works for your own lists and getting things for yourself. Not as useful as it could be.
    5. Bloomberg – Answering questions about Gold or Stocks despite not really caring.
    6. Deliveries – An app that maps and tracks delivery service details. Great for FedEx, DHL, and UPS – utterly useless for USPS.
    7. Calculator XL – Better calculator than I’ve found in a long while.
    8. PNC Mobile – Access to my PNC accounts. Works well, but can’t take background existence in iOS 4.2.1. *Shrug*
    9. CheckPlease – Way more useful on iPhone than iPad, only because I usually don’t have my iPad with me when I go out to dinner.
    10. Alice – This site sells grocery type items such as cleaners and air fragrances and toothpaste. I was curious enough to download the app, but not really to use it after that.
    11. PNC VirtualWallet – Much like the other PNC app, I wish it had an iPad version that would display more *shrug*


The Most Difficult Recipe I’ve Mastered

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Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon

Without a doubt in my mind the most difficult and taxing recipe that I’ve ever tried was the Beef Bourguignon recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking from Julia Child. I have to admit at first to really enjoying how the MAFC presents recipes and I wish more recipes followed that design. Following this one was only really challenging in that there are quite a number of call-outs to other recipes that you have to master first in order to build the primary recipe. From individually patting-dry each chunk of beef to getting just the right color on the pearl onions and NOT CROWDING THE MUSHROOMS it’s nearly a whole day cooking affair. The reward at the end is definitely worth all the labor and it was important for me to master it so that I could build up my culinary confidence. Now when I botch a dish I can at least lean back and say “But I *can* pull off a kick-ass Beef Bourguignon.”

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iPad Apps #2

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The continuation of the series…

  1. QRANK – This rather fun trivia game has some good social competition aspects to it and is quite fun to play. The only thing I wish for this app would be a QRANK HD, so I wouldn’t have to scale it up from iPhone-App size to iPad size.
  2. Checkbook – Probably the most indispensable app I have on my iPad. I manage my budget of $260 a week with this app. As I spend I mark it in the app and it tells me how much of my budget remains and makes balancing my books on Sunday mornings very easy. I just look at the top line, add or subtract from 260, and that’s what I pay for my weekly expenditures. Very nice.
  3. 1Password – Without a doubt my number two go-to app. The heroin for this app is how it syncs with Dropbox, so I can have my 1Password database updated and ready for me to use on every single machine I use. My machines at home, my machines at work, my iPad, all together. This app I am sure has saved me tons of worry and kept my online life secure.
  4. News Apps – These apps are lumped together, there isn’t much to rave about here and I barely use them.
    1. NPR
    2. ABC News
    3. NASA
    4. Mashable
    5. NYTimes
    6. NewsRack
    7. MacLife
    8. Huff Post
    9. BBC News
    10. 3D Sun
    11. USA Today
    12. CNN
  5. Notable but little used News apps include:
    1. River of News – Lost out to Reeder due to Reeders interface design.
    2. Sandpit – I downloaded it, but never really used it. (huh)
    3. FeeddlerRSS – Useful in that you can save images from Google Reader Feeds. The interface is sluggish. If Reeder would have a way to save pictures this app would go out the window.
  6. Social Apps
    1. foursquare – iPhone-only App, silly game, I play but I don’t know why. I suspect it’s more knee-jerk than for fun anymore.
    2. Wikihood – Cute but limited. I used it a few times, it didn’t piss me off enough to earn a deletion, so it just sits around.
    3. BirdEye – Great for people with photo-heavy Twitter feeds.
    4. Scruff – Another gay chat talker. This one supposedly caters to Bears, but so far it’s just another litterbox.
    5. Grindr – Tounge-in-Cheek gay chat talker. Everyone is looking for sex but can’t say anything sexual. It’s where the frustrated and masochistic go. Another litterbox.
    6. FBF_Albums – Facebook Photo app. I can’t remember the last time I used it, probably should delete it.
    7. IM+ – Links up a bunch of instant messaging systems and has a neat push feature so the app can let you know there are incoming chats even if it’s in the background.
    8. VisibleVote – Cute and fluffy, but ultimately meaningless. Should delete this one as well.
    9. Jack’d – Again another gay chat talker. Much like Grindr it tries to be something that the Apple App Store categorically refuses to vend. I keep it around because it doesn’t take up much space.
    10. HootSuite – Annoying Twitter and Facebook app. It’s only claim to fame is that you can post to both Twitter and Facebook with one posting. It’s not enough of a feature to actually use the app.
    11. Kik – Doomed to failure because it is not ubiquitous. Perhaps it will gain traction sometime in the future.
    12. Tree To Go – Applet from Ancestry.com. Allows you to rattle off names and relationships but doesn’t really have much more to offer than that.
    13. Groupon – Coupons reinvented for Generation X and Y.
    14. Facepad – Behaves like the Twitter app does for Twitter, only for Facebook. Originally was oddly out-of-focus and a little annoying to use, so it’s relegated to the internment camp of the Social folder.
    15. Twitteriffic – Used to be my go-to app for Twitter before the Twitter app came along. Lacks some key features that the native Twitter app has, so it hangs out in la-la-land.
  7. Books
    1. nook – I don’t use it, but I have it!
    2. Kindle – Again, I don’t use it, but I have it.
    3. Discover – Turns Wikipedia articles into magazine-formatted booklets. Cute.
    4. Dictionary – Actually use this a lot to get new words, clarify meanings, and get pronunciation help.
    5. GoodReader – Has a lot of file features and is very manageable, however it collides functionality-wise with iBooks, so not a lot of use.
    6. Google Books – I don’t use it, but I have it. It’s not very good.
  8. iLife / Productivity
    1. Pages – I bought it for my iPad and my MacBook. So far, it’s quite a competent word processing app. It’s got all the polish and refinement that you’d expect from a native Apple app.
    2. Numbers – I bought this in a crunch because I didn’t have a good spreadsheet program on my iPad, and I needed to use a spreadsheet program that could understand Excel. Numbers fit the bill, the interface is a little annoying, but it does work.
    3. Dictation – I trot this out to display the how-cool-is-that feature of the app, but I don’t use it. I find I type far better than I dictate.
    4. iThoughtsHD – Once I got started using XMind I found myself with brainstorming sessions and all I had handy was my iPad. This app fits the bill quite nicely. I’ve done some very good work with this app and it really helps. It’s well worth the money.
    5. PlainText – This simple notebook editor syncs with Dropbox. It’s principal power is that synergy. Otherwise it’s very plain jane.
  9. Mercury Web Browser Pro – As a replacement for Safari it does quite well. Unfortunately the system is fixed to open websites with Safari, so this app doesn’t get the kind of use it really ought to. There are some clever settings it as, like the User Agent String adjustment, which is kinky. The only down-note to this app is that it can’t automatically pick up all of Safari’s bookmarks. You have to manually herd them yourself.
  10. Toodledo – My go-to app for tasks and one of the apps that I run a lot and almost always have in the background on my iPad. It syncs online, has a full-fledged iPad app, a nice website, and keeps me alerted to tasks that I need to accomplish at home and at work. Add in that I can email to my Toodledo and it creates tasks based on the emails and it’s damn near perfect for task management. I can’t recommend this app strongly enough!

iPad Apps Series

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Over the next few blog posts I will be listing about ten iOS Apps that I find worthy to be on my iPad. I’ve written about my iPad before, how the device has changed my life and it appears from what I can see in the incoming Google Searches that hit this blog, that people might find some of these interesting. One short note to add however, I will not be including the apps that come with iOS 4.2.1 by default, since we all have those and can appreciate them. Since iBooks is pushed when you first touch the App store, that too will be left off the list, as everyone should already have looked into it to see if it fits their needs.

So, without further ado, here’s the first ten:

  1. Evernote – The app has a crashing problem and a display glitch. That being said, having your Evernote library handy even off-network is worth it’s weight in gold.
  2. Wx – Excellent short-and-sweet weather app. NWS is changing some key XML files which might break the app, but maybe the author will cope in time.
  3. Flipboard – The ultimate browser for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader. It received a huge shot of adrenaline in the arm recently, but the biggest feature, multiple accounts for everything, is very much overdue.
  4. WordPress – The WordPress App. It’s an okay way to blog and it works natively with the WordPress interface. I’m never quite sure whether my blog posts get in properly or not and I’m always wary that the entire app could crash at any moment. It hasn’t done so yet, but I definitely get the sense that failure is just over the next river bend.
  5. Reeder – My Go-To App for browsing Google Reader RSS feeds. It is very clean and very slick, with shortcuts for Instapaper and Twitter/Facebook. The only thing I would like to see with this app is a “Clip to Evernote” feature. Perhaps it’s coming.
  6. Instapaper – Buy this app, enjoy the service. Nothing brings on the Instapaper love more than sitting at work at 5pm, knowing you have to go, seeing a flurry of unread tabs in Safari and with a few clicks, saving each page to Instapaper, saving it for later… very useful indeed.
  7. Wikipanion+ – Great app to query Wikipedia and keep page details offline when you can’t reach the network. Some people get bent out of shape when they discover that the information in Wikipedia isn’t curated by some scholar. I think they are spending too much time with very nit-picky academics. Sometimes Wikipedia is “Good Enough”
  8. Twitter – The home Twitter client is probably the best of all the Twitter apps out there. I can’t quite make up my mind between Twitteriffic or Twitter. Currently Twitter is on the home screen and Twitteriffic is stuck in a folder.
  9. Friendly – I bought this Facebook app when it was paid and I’ve found it steadily getting better with time. It might as well just be picked up by Facebook as their official iPad app. I don’t think that will happen until Facebook realizes that the iPad is just as useful as a computer or an iPhone to access its services.
  10. GetGlue – At first I thought this app was going to be another lame Foursquare ripoff, but the ability to check in to shows, movies, wine, or a host of other topics really works surprisingly well. The first thing I noticed about GetGlue was that it socialized popular media. You could see who watches Primeval for example and develop new social contacts based on that kind of lead-in.

If I Could Work from Anywhere, I’d Live in…

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River turning near pine forest

Months ago while I was driving from Buffalo New York to Port Huron Michigan I noticed a certain river bend as Highway 401 turns west. The land was undeveloped and the trees ran right up to the river. The bank was mostly pebbles and gravel. I just saw it that once, but it was enough to inspire me. I imagined carving an acre out and building a house about 200 yards from the river. The part of me that finds Wintertime romantic found that mental image utterly captivating. The area is likely too far away from any civilized services and it is in Ontario Canada, so quite unlikely that it would ever amount to anything, but at least there it is.

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State Burger Review

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Earlier today we did lunch at State Burger in Portage Michigan. We were already progressing down Westnedge Avenue doing other errands and while trying to figure out where to go to lunch we remembered seeing this place from our earlier stop at Kumo’s Hibachi Restaurant which is just around the corner of the same strip-mall building.

State Burger, which has a facebook page serves burgers, chicken, fish, and competently good Hot Dogs. The arrangement is a pretty standard burger joint and today they had three people manning the store. The order person, the cook, and someone we both pegged as the owner. Everyone was doing their job very well and our food took not-longer-than-we-expected time wise. This place has a really great thing going and we both agreed that their formula makes it damn near impossible to screw up, that food made with fresh real ingredients by people who are doing their best is a sure-fire way to succeed. Even if you botch everything and burn the food, it’s still quite good.

We were both pleased by the food, the service and you certainly can’t beat the price. Scott was so impressed that he thinks he could make it a regular lunch place when he’s free from Barnes & Nobles since it’s well within walking distance, about two hundred yards from his usual stop, the Pizza Hut. We both commented that skipping out on PIzza Hut for this place was probably the best idea when it comes to healthier food. Between the Pizza Hut and State Burger is Taco Bell. We were laughing at the recent misfortune that Taco Bell had been on the business end of, that people were questioning the notion that Taco Bells meat actually has any meat in it. For all that kerfuffle, it’s pretty much clear to us that you can skip both frankenfood destinations and find better food just a few yards away.

Making Commercials

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Almost every night we sit down and watch The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Right at the start I have to take time out to comment that The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson is some of the best television being made. We look forward to watching it every night. Beyond the program we have started to see a very beloved advertising campaign, the one for Aflac. It’s very strange to even think of affection and advertising in the same sentence, but this particular company has keyed in on what has to be the most subtly funny animal-based advertising campaign. Here it is.

We have been laughing so hard at this that it has not only become a catch-phrase for us, but we always stop the DVR and play this companies advertisements each time they come on. This is how commercials should be made.