You want Duck Lard with that Steak?

Bacar


San Francisco, CA


From: Maxim's August 2008 Magazine.

What separates executive chef Robbie Lewis' prime rib from the meaty pack? A nice, long relaxing bath..... in duck blubber. The mesquite grilled rib eye steak ($34) is first slow-cooked in a low-temperature pool of herbal-scented Daffy lard. It's yanked from the puddle as the steak reaches rare, and is quickly finished off on a mesquite grill. "You get the best of both worlds," says Chef Lewis. "The flavor of slow-cooked meat, charred and grilled over smoky mesquite." And he's not just blowing smoke, friends.

It's located 448 Brannan Street in San Francisco.



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What song is that playing on the radio?

How many times have you been listening to the radio and a song comes on and you don't know who it is? You wait for the DJ to tell you, but he is more interested in plugging some product to earn a few bucks.

If you have a newer car radio, they scroll the artist and song on some of them, but not all stations provide that data with their broadcast signal. Or you might be riding in your friends piece of shit Vega with an AM radio.

Anyway there is a cool new application for the iPhone that does this for you called Shazam. You can get it from the Apps Store by searching on the name and it's free! Or you can click this link to go right to it.

You hold your iPhone up to the radio for five seconds or so and then it vibrates to tell you it's done and there you go -- artist, song, album, links to videos in youTube, etc.

I am not sure of the database it draws on, but it says it searches four million songs. It's VERY cool!

Waiting for FedEx

I am sitting here in my home office waiting for the FedEx truck to show up with my new iPhone. This pisses me off that I cannot go out for lunch because if I miss him he won't leave it in the door.

It's not that bad since it's a 3G iPhone.

But this has me thinking, why can't they set it up that they have a better window than "sometime today up till 6:00pm" -- they know the route they are going to follow. They don't just drive around and drop off a package, go in the back and grab another box, drive somewhere else. They have a preplanned route so that they can be as efficient as possible.

They could even come up with something that sends a text to your cell phone when they get close. They know the packages that they need to deliver and the order they are delivering them in. They could page me with 5 homes to go, or they can even look at their GPS and calculate the time left to get to my house.

Maybe i'll send my ideas to the CIO of FedEx.

Can't even pick your own sauce.

The family decided to spend Saturday night out at Dave & Busters for some dinner and an evening out with the kids. I was having trouble picking something from the menu and was holding up the whole order. One last look and the fried shrimp seemed to jump off the menu at me, so there you go, fried shrimp it is.

The drinks and the kids food came first to keep them happy and then came my shrimp platter. This is where the issue came up. The shrimp came with some crappy Chipotle-honey sauce that they must have thought was good since they were including it with the shrimp vs. traditional cocktail sauce. The sauce did not even look good with some off orange color and some green flecks.

I called over our waitress to ask for some cocktail sauce or maybe even the hot sauce they put on the chicken wings if they did not have any cocktail sauce. She was ready to help for $0.50! What's up with that? How many times have you ordered shrimp and had to pay for the cocktail sauce? I asked to give back the shitty sauce for a $0.50 refund to apply to the $0.50 for the cocktail sauce.

As you can guess I was not able to get through to the waitress my issue and asked to talk to the manager. Now $0.50 is not that big of a deal as I was going to walk over to a game and spend a buck for a couple minutes on a game. It was the point. I dropped $75 on average quality food and drinks for four people and had to pay for the damn sauce!

They are pretty much the only game in town so it's hard to say we won't go back, but you can bet that the next time we will stop and eat on the way.

Consolidated Financial Statement

I originally started down the path of looking for a way to keep track of frequent flyer points and frequent hotel award points. I'm not sure what search words I used in google, but ended up finding a site called Yodlee.

This sight allows you to select one of over 5,000 partners that they work with to consolidate and report out on all of your accounts on one dashboard. The dashboard can show a view of frequent flyer/stay points, net worth, and even credit card charges and investment account trades, divedneds, etc.

I have been using this site for a few years now and it is pretty much straight forward with a more functional front end than one that looks good.

While on an airplane this week I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal that talked about a new site www.mint.com and is "powered" by the yodlee engine. Since I already use the yodlee engine and it has all the security in place I decided to give the mint site a try.

The first thing that amazed me was how much nice the user interface is compared to the yodlee site. It also has an easy feature to bucket all your credit cards into budget categories and you can then see how your month over month spending is trending. I wish I had it in place for the past few years to see how the gas prices have been impacting my budget.


Anyway if you want to see all your financial accounts on one dashboard, give www.mint.com a try. If you want the frequent flyer/stat programs you need to go to www.yodlee.com.

Alabama vs. Mississippi

Lawyer runs a stop sign with his new Corvette in Mississippi and gets pulled over by a sheriff's deputy. He thinks that he is smarter than the deputy because he is a lawyer from Alabama and is certain that he has a better education than any Mississippi cop. He decides to prove this to himself and have some fun at the officer's expense!!

*****
Officer says,' License and registration, please.'

Lawyer says, 'What for?'

Officer says, 'You didn't come to a complete stop at the stop sign.'

Lawyer says, 'I slowed down, and no one was coming.'

Officer says, 'You still didn't come to a complete stop. License and registration, please.'

Lawyer says, 'What's the difference?'

Officer says, 'The difference is, you have to come to complete stop, that's the law. License and registration, please!'

Lawyer says, 'If you can show me the legal difference between slow down and stop, I'll give you my license and registration and you give me the ticket. If not, you let me go and don't give me the ticket.'

Officer says, 'Sounds fair. Exit your vehicle, sir.'

The officer takes out his night stick and starts beating the ever-loving shit out of the lawyer and says, 'Do you want me to stop, or just slow down?'

He must have really pissed someone off!

Who's Gonna Wash My Shirt?

Are the Flyers Fans that Dumb?

I was watching the Flyers play the Penguins and they decided to take a page out of the Penguins book and dress their fans all in the same color. You see the Penguins do a thing they call a "white out" where they give every fan a white tee shirt to ware and along with that they all wave white towels. It can really get the team going.

Well, some dumb ass in Philadelphia decided to dress their fans in orange shirts. The big problem with that is in the arena the Penguins play in the seats are orange, so it looked like they were playing in their home arena with a few fans watching. The Flyer fans are so lazy, they just sat there and added to the "I'm a seat" effect.

Well I guess the series standing of 3-0 in favor of the Penguins speaks for it's self, and we will see if the Pens can take them out 4-0 tonight.

UAW Strikes GM

I don't get it, how much should you earn to put a nut on a bolt?

A local restaurant near me has a chef that puts out some very good food, manages the wait staff, creates and updates the menu, and does it all for $28,000 a year.

So someone is telling me that we need to pay a UAW member $60,000 to work on an assembly line?

Mad World

Hill Crest Country Club

I just saw that Hill Crest Country Club in Lower Burrell is having a special membership. I played the club a few weeks ago and it is one of the best courses in the area. I was talking to the pro and they put in a new sprinkler system a few years ago and reseeded the fairways last year and boy did it pay off.

The day I played was very quiet and we played our round in about 3 1/2 hours. With the special they are offering, it looks like a hidden bargin for those of you that are looking to join a golf club or thinking of switching from your current club.

They also have pool and tennis and it looked like a full social calandar too.

Click here to see the Special Offer!

Pissed at your neighbor?

Do you have one of those neighbors that are a pain in the ass? Here is a way that you can tell them every day. The only problem is that you need to either have a bush in the right place, or you need to plant one and it could take a while to get your point, or should I say ass, across!

High Speed Internet My Ass

High Speed Internet my ass. As I sit here at the Marriott Courtyard in Greenville North Carolina, I am waiting for a call back from a tech service person at Golden Tree Communications. I checked in last night and used the internet connection and it seemed to work OK, not super fast, but I was looking at sites in Mexico for some hotel reservations so I assumed that it might have been the hosts that I was going after. This morning the connection was OK in the early morning and around 9:00am or so it went to crap. Ping times were some of the worst that I have seen in a long time:

C:\Documents and Settings>ping my.yahoo.com
Pinging my.yahoo.com [148.87.120.15] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3067ms TTL=240
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3241ms TTL=240
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3173ms TTL=240
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3303ms TTL=240

If I am not getting in the 3000+ ms range it times out. Occasionally I get down in the 600 to 700 range, but it does not last long.

Anyway, back to the reason for the posting. In talking to the technical support person, I asked what kind of connection they had? She indicated that they should have 684kbs which is the equivalent of a $29/month DSL line. How can they call that "high speed internet" for a hotel that has a 100 rooms? One ass downloading an .mpeg of Star Wars will chew that up for hours.

I doubt that they have any type of traffic shaping or any type of filtering for Bit Torrent or any of the other type of traffic hogs.

I guess the lesson is that it's high speed internet until the second guest shows up.

How long for that table?

Last night on the way to the Outter Banks for vacation we stopped over for the night in Greenville North Carolina. Pretty good trip and it was around 6:30pm and we were going to get a bite to eat.

The local magazine called Impressions listed a restaurant called Finelli's Cafe that was Italian and that was what we were hungry for after a 5 hour car ride and no lunch. When we pulled into the parking lot, it was rather full and the place was not that large, so I send in my wife to see how long for a table given that our five year old was getting a little restless after the car ride. The young and as we came to find out, "not that bright" hostess said it would be 20 minutes. This was after a couple minute survey of the tables.

We assumed that she knew her restaurant and had looked to see how many people were finishing up. Not the case. After an hour and 20 minutes we ended up getting seated and they only thing that she was able to muster was that a lot of people came in and they had reservations.

Now I would think that she had that part figured out when she did the survey of tables before telling us 20 minutes. I can see an extra 30 minutes, but missing your estimate by an hour is not acceptable.

They food seemed pretty good although we were not as hungry after five beers in the bar waiting for an hour and a half, but I would try it again with a reservation.

A Blast From The Past

This is a little old, but with today being primary day in my state, I thought that I would put this up for everyone to see. I can't believe it has been six years since that debacle of an election.

Got a dog that shits Ho-Ho's all over the yard?

Running to get the paper in your bare feet and step in a shit pile?

Now for the person that has everything, you can hire someone to come to your house and pick up dog shit in the yard.

Since it is only in PA and NJ, I guess that the rest of you are out of luck and will need that pooper scooper.

Cynthia McKinney

I just sat down and flicked the TV on and they are talking about the McKinney incident on CNN. This lady does not get it -- they spent 5 minutes asking what happened and all she would do was deflect the question and dig up old issues about racial profiling.

Why is she hiding behind race? I think this going to backfire on her.....

From a post on her web site it looks like she is trying to hide behind the constitution. If she would just fess up I think people would get over it.

Automatic Tips

Woke up this morning a little late since I was at the casino until 4:00am last night, but it was a good night – up $250. Anyway, as I make my way to the bathroom to get a drink and take a leak, I grab the bill they put under my door to expedite my checkout at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Spa and Resort.

I glance at the charges and they are a few “extras” that are not normally there. One is a $4 charge for maid tips. I don’t mind; since I don’t usually leave a tip on a one or two night stay, so let it ride.

The next one is a charge for $12 for the bellman. Bellman? Is that a beer that I had from the mini bar? I never saw a bellman. I checked in at around 10:00pm and have a suitcase on wheels, so I dragged it in and to my room. When I was ready to check out I did the same thing.

What a rip-off, some guy that I never saw just put $12 into his pocket. I’ll have to talk to someone on this one.

Indian Casinos

Last night I went to an Indian Casino -- Gila River, in Phoenix Arizona. I was a nice enough place and it was a free shuttle ride from he hotel I was staying at -- the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass. Very nice hotel by he way, no Hyatt resort, but nice pool, décor, and he pool bar staff is great.

Anyway, I get there with two friends and we sit down at a blackjack table since they don't have craps or roulette. Toss they guy a $100 and get some chips. We are betting $10 to $20 and the server comes by and we order two beers between us. Now it is midnight or so, and they are not real busy, so they should be glad to get a few guys willing to drop a few bucks. When the server comes to drop of the beers, she asks for $6.50 for two Budweiser’s.

What the crap is that! I'm not sitting at the penny slot machines and trying to drink for free. We pay the lady and just chalk it up to the F'in Indians. Must still be pissed at the white man for stealing their land. Hey, we gave them some beads, not my fault.

We played a few more hands and again the waitress comes around and not only is she looking for cash for the beers, but she is calling last call? You have to be kidding me, now I need to sit in a crappy casino and not get drunk!

Ends up a bad move for them, I turned my $100 into $350, my buddy turned $60 into $400, and my other friend we are not sure about -- he hit the cash machine more than once, but got $300 at the cage. My guess is that he ended up even.
That should teach the Indians, don't mess with the white man's drinks. If they had gave me free beer and did not call last call I am sure they would have taken me for $500 by the time we left at 4:00am.

Printing from a MAC to a printer connected to a WIndows PC

Last night I tried to print from my MAC to a printer that is attached to my PC across the network. How hard can this be?

My main concern is that I needed to get a driver for the MAC that would support my printer, which is a Canon i560 and was purchased within the past year or two. Off to the Canon web site and there was a driver for the printer, so I downloaded it.

To make sure I was not chasing more than one problem at a time, I connected the printer to the MAC and installed the printer driver. I then added a printer and selected the Canon drivers and then the specific one for the i560 that I just installed. The sample document printed fine.

One step to go, reconnect the printer to the PC and then just add another printer and this time select a network printer and the same i560 driver I just installed.

When adding the network printer, I could only see the drivers that came installed with the operating system and not the one that I just installed. I spent about two hours trying to find the driver and there was even an option to go out and point to the driver file directly, much like Windows. No luck, could just not find it.

Called the Canon support line and they said the driver is not "network" compatible. What does that mean? What has to be different with the driver? I have been doing computers and networks for 20 years -- you take the output from the driver and instead of sending it to a USB attached printer, you send it to a queue on the MAC, send it across the network to a queue on the PC, and then to the printer.

So for now I am stuck with not being able to print, but I have not given up the fight. You can see a thread on the issue here -- MACFIXIT.COM

E*Trade Bank

I have an account at E*Trade that my ESPP shares and stock options are deposited into by my employer. Their interface is clean and quick, so I decided to click on the banner ad that they have for E*Trade Bank. Free ATM withdrawls, on-line check payments, etc., so it looked like something I would try and if it worked out drop my local bank.

I went through the sign up process and was given what I thought was my account number and set up my direct deposit to start with $500 each pay into the account to get started. When I could not see the deposit, I called them and found out that they had not "opened" the account and that to do that I needed to wire them money.

Now my paycheck is $500 short and the money is in cyberspace somewhere..... I understand the fact that the account was not opened and expected them to open it so my next deposit would go right in and I could clean up the missing deposit with my employeer.

Here is the kicker, they would not open an account and give me an account number so I could just start sending money each pay. They required me to wire them some money in order to open the account. What type of crap is that? Just open the accont and then in two weeks they would start by getting $500 and potentially a good long term customer.

Dr. Phil in New Orleans

It's been a while since I posted, but I have been a little busy. HOWEVER, tonight put me over the top! Dr. Phil who I think is a crackpot from the get go is reporting from New Orleans. Now I know these people have been through something that I cannot imagine, but having this wack-hump showing up has to make it even worse!

He is as bad as Charles Groden back in the OJ trial days. Remember him? All he could say was "The blood, the blood......" -- he had no other journalistic value.

Groden was a "hump" in all the sence of the word and so is Dr. Phil. I could only watch Groden for two minutes in the old days because he used to piss me off so bad..., and now this.

Dr. Phil needs to get a grip and get the hell out of New Orleans. Is there not a guy with two brests, lives in a trailer, likes his sister, screwed a cousin, and a weird rash on his ass available to talk?

On Time My Ass

So this one is not that new to many of you that fly... I get to the airport about 50 minutes from the departure of my flight, check in at the kiosk, and everything looks fine. I grab my ticket and as I walk by the depatures board I give a quick glance to my flight and everything is on time at 3:40pm. What caught my eye was the fact that the Delta flight to Atlanta was delayed 60 minutes, and my USAirways flight to Atlanta at the same time was showing right on time.

I went through security and took off my shoes for those of you that read my previous post. As my bag was going through the x-ray, I heard my phone start ringing and when I grabbed it on the other side, a person that I was meeting in Atlanta was calling to tell me that he was on a two hour ground hold in DC on his way to meet me in Atlanta. OK, now I have a Delta flight from Pittsburgh delayed an hour and his flight delayed two hours, so I check the board agian... mine is right on time.

I grab a piece of pizza and head to the gate. Yep, the board says that I am on time at 3:40. I walk up to the counter, and ask if we are delayed -- they ask why I ask that and I give them the facts above. They ask that I "keep quiet" while they are checking with the pilot, and I am fine with that. After about 15 minutes they do confirm that we will be delayed, and post 4:00pm departure time on the board at the gate.

Now I don’t know the data the pilot had, but if other flights are being delayed for 2 hours, what makes him think that he is going to get us out of there in 20 minutes. About 15 minutes later they push the time back to 5:30pm, which is what they should have done the first time.

I don’t know what they are trying to acomplish from delaying the flight a couple of times, when they could just say we believe that we will be leaving at the time they have clearence for or a time that is more reasonable. They always put the caveat on the delay annonucemnet anyway, “Please stay close to the gate because if we get an eariler clearence we will board quickley.” Are they afraid that if the put the truth out there you are going to go rent a car and drive te 500 miles?

Airport Security

My job takes me across somewhere via airplane each week. Ever since the creation of the TSA back in 2001, I am amazed at the inconsistencies across the country each week. Take a simple example -- shoes. I decided to keep track of where they require shoes to be taken off, and where you can go through the airport with them on.

Being that I live in Pittsburgh I go through the Pittsburgh Airport each week, so that was my benchmark. Since Pittsburgh is not a real high profile place, I was not surprised that you could keep your shoes on when you go through security there, but at Washington National you must take them off.

So a few weeks ago they told me at Pittsburgh that you need to take the off as part of new rules that went into effect, so I figured that now I need to do it on the way out of town and the way back, and chalked up the "free passes" that I was getting in Pittsburgh to a thing of the past.

However, I just went through the Philadelphia Airport and the Chicago Ohare in the past week, and they both let me through with my shoes on. What gives? How hard is it to set a policy for all airports and enforce it?

Don't even get me started on the people that seem to take 20 minutes to put there shoes back on while they stand by the X-Ray machine holding up the line...

One last thought, there is free WiFi access at the Pittsburgh Airport -- saves you $9.95 vs. Cingular.

Pizza Hut - Ordering over the Web

I was sitting in the living room watching the NCAA Tournament and wanted to get something to eat. My wife wanted wings and I wanted a pizza. The local bar down the street has good wings, but that required getting in the car and going out in the rain, so it looked like pizza.

The next challenge was which pizza place to call. We have about 5 or 6 that deliver and then it occured to me that Pizza Hut was now offering delivery and I could put together an order on the web.

I went to the PC and went to the Pizza Hut site and found out that I already had an account that I created before. It pulled up my default local store, and I selectd it and went off to create my order. It took a while to create the odrer since ther were many options and I was new to the site.

When I was all done, it turned out that the location that I was ordering from was not delivering that night. Now why did it not tell me that before I went through all the steps to create the order? My guess is that once I had all the time invested they thought that I would just jump in the car and go pick it up.

Wrong – I ended up not getting the pizza and don’t know when I will go through the effort on their website again.

Paying my MCI bill

I get an automated call from MCI today asking me to call in to verify my account. Turns out that they are looking for a payment and it's their fault that they did not get it.

A few months ago, they sent me a payment reminder and part of the reminder was that I could pay my phone bill via credit card by checking box 1 and hitting "go". There was also a box 2 that I could click to set it up so that I could pay it going forward via credit card each month automatically.

The problem came in where I was given the two options. When I selected the second option, I would have expected that it would have paid the current bill, and then set up the automatic payment process going forward.

Not at MCI. I was set up for the automatic payments, but it did not pay the current amount that the reminder was sent to me for in the first place.

What a pain in my.......

Windows XP CD required to add Windows options

I tried to send a fax from my laptop today to the IRS of all people. When I selected the "Set Up Faxing" within the Faxes and Printers section of the control panel, it came back asking for the Windows XP CD. When is the last time you actually got the XP CD's with you laptop. They always include some form of OEM software that supposedly has all the stuff you need, but I could not get it to work.

I don't understand why microsoft does not allow you to go to their web site to add a component like this. If they are worried about you stealing their software, then the horse is already out of the barn, because you you have windows installed.

They need to really safeguard their core component of the operating system and then allow you to install all the others that you need. They allow you to upgrade and download the media players..... I guess that they want you in that space to sell you something else.

Matrix Marathon

I was watching TV last night and at 10:00pm flipped the channel to HBO and one of the Matrix movies was on. I tuned in a few minutes late and was not able to tell which one of the movies it was and hoped it was the III one since I had not see that one. After a few minutes I figured out that it was the first one, but since I had not sat a watched it in a few years and never really watched it start to finish I decided to watch it.

After about hour I noticed the HBO guide beside me on the nightstand and picked it up to see when the third one was on and to my delight it was on later that night. After the first one, came the second one, and finally the third one starting at 2:40am. Since I was in a hotel there was no way to TiVo it, so I was screwed.
Ended up staying up to watch the second one, but could not convince myself to stay up to watch the third one since I needed to get up at 7:00am.

Pisses me off that they started the three movie set at 10:00pm – had the done it at 8:00pm, I could have justified watching the third movie starting at 12:40.

So bottom line I still don’t know how the Matrix ended.

FM Radio Stations Used for Sirius Radio

So there is another thing that pisses me off on this XM and Sirius Radio thing. If a radio does not have any input jacks you can have the unit broadcast to an unused FM station of your choice and play the music through your radio that way. Pretty simple, pick a low frequency and away you go.

The issue arises when you are traveling and the unused radio stations vary and you have to change the frequency that the unit uses every hour or so. Can't the government say "wait a minute, lets pick one frequency and not use it so that any proximity device that wants to use it can." This is not the first time a device was invented that broadcasts over the radio. I seem to remember this method being used since the first portable CD players.

Also how hard would it be to put a quarter inch stereo plug in the front of a stereo for input, the things cost $500 from the dealer anyway.

XM Radio Antenna Pointing

I got a Sirius satellite radio for Christmas this year. I had been looking at them for a few months and my wife put one under the tree. It was not that hard to set it up and get it activated, took more time to crawl behind the stereo and move around a bunch of wires that needed cleaned up for months anyway.

I next pointed the antenna out the window and started to get the "standard" station that you get before you activate. Everything's going good so far, so I log in and activate the service. I listened to it for about an hour or so and then off I went for the day.

Now the next day I am listening to it and it keeps cutting in and out -- having trouble getting the signal. The antenna has not moved, pointed out the same window. It will work for about 10 minutes then go "searching for signal" for a few minutes and then it plays again. Now the antenna is not moving and the satellite is not moving, so what gives.

Now I have to go down the path of figuring out if it's the direction I am pointing it, rain, sun, heat, or who knows what the hell else...... pisses me off!