Serious Eats covers some amazing sounding fries:
The duck fat fries served at JG Domestic are indeed something special. Skin-on potatoes are sliced moderately thick, fried to a brilliant golden hue, and then coated with a light dusting of salt. In a slightly odd comparison, the flavor is reminiscent of mashed potatoes wrapped in fried chicken skins. If that doesn’t sound glorious to you, I don’t know what else to say.
via Philadelphia: Inconsistent Burgers and Duck Fat Fries at JG Domestic.
Tired of hunting for recipes on sketchball sites? Google’s new Recipe Search might be the answer. Example, just did a search for Spicy Ahi Pokē and found some promising results..
I eat Clif Bars for breakfast – they are good for you, easy to eat, and can be had for fairly cheap (under $1/bar). Usually I buy the variety pack at Costco, which runs about $21-22 dollars for 24 bars – the cheapest anywhere. Until I found the same box on Amazon. It costs about the same on Amazon, however, if you sign up for their “subscribe and save” model – you get a 15% discount, bringing the bars well below Costco pricing, shipped free (and that’s 2-day, since I’m Prime).
Here’s the math on those Clif Bars:
Item Subtotal: $22.20
Shipping and Handling: $0.00
Subscription Discount: $-3.33
Shipment Total: $18.87
Click to see the Subscribe and Save options
Subscribe and Save has no strings – you can select your delivery frequency and change that model at any time. You can use it for all kinds of things - from soap to dog food.
Another example on some Neutrogena Deep Clean Invigorating Foaming Scrub
Serious Eats: “A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, so I’m not going to blab too much here.”
So.. I’m a Google Reader fanatic – and figured, why not see if I can send some Reader content right to a blog, rather than spamming Facebook? Turns out it’s quite easy.
And thus DFF is re-born.
Interesting read from Lifehacker..
The moment you’re semi-sure you’re getting a cold, get some zinc lozenges. That’s the result of a meta-analysis of 15 different scientific studies of the mineral, and cut the length of coughing and sneezing days by 40 percent.
via Zinc is Probably the Most Effective Cold Treatment Known to Medicine [Illness].
Shortly after writing the last entry, I lost all patience and decided to try upgrading the phone to an official release of the latest operating system. Not official by Verizon’s standards, of course – but official from RIM at least. Worst case scenario, I’d revert to 4.7 and reinstall everything from scratch – which should have fixed some issues.
Well, 5.0 installed in under an hour – and another hour later I had all of my apps and restored .. running the latest and greatest! I must say, RIM slipped some really nice improvements in – and it certainly runs much better than 4.7. I’m very pleased. The phone is not crashing anymore, seems to be holding its RAM better, and is definitely more responsive.
Some of the niceties -
Not so great:
Overall I am much happier with the phone. It is stable, which is quite comforting. It still has the god awful long boot time – which isnt a big deal anymore since the phone has stopped rebooting itself – and the signal is still very ‘flighty’ – as I sit on the couch I can watch it go from full 1XEV down to no bars on 1X.. and back again. Running Google Maps is still painful – I am thinking now that it has to do with the Latitude feature – but very irritating when it hangs the phone with a ‘stop watch’ icon.. making the whole thing unusable.
Its been a solid 5 months or so with what until very recently was being called the “best Blackberry yet”. Now the new Curve, Bold and Storm2 have come out, with a new Pearl on the way. Oh.. and.. the Tour2. Yeah, that’s right.. good old RIM is pulling an Apple on us early adopters! Why, one might ask? Likely because the Tour(1) is NOT the best BB ever. In fact.. Its kinda crappy and I’m pretty fed up with it.
Sure, it looks great, takes very good pictures, and has an amazing display.. but my Tour is becoming increasingly unstable and laggy. Both of these situations have a simple fix – reboot – which sadly takes 7+ minutes on the device. Yeah – SEVEN minutes – sometimes creeping up to TEN. Its absolutely unbelievable, considering how “powerful” it is supposed to be – lots of memory and a fast processor – yet it can’t load its own OS nearly as fast as Blackberries with much lesser stats? Huh? My old Pearl (see the earliest posts) could out-boot the Tour by 5 minutes, easily.
Stability wise, its great, as long as I don’t use any 3rd party apps. The latest version of Facebook has a nice bug that literally reboots the device when I exit the app. What? I guess we’ll call that “memory cleaning” or something. Ridic. Running Google Maps works quite well.. as long as you have alot of time. My lovely Tour has a little hourglass problem.. where nearly everytime I try to USE Gmaps, it loads quickly, then hangs for a solid 30 seconds. The phone is completely unusable during this period. And it likely will repeat this behavior several times during the Gmaps session.
Signal quality is abysmal. I am still dropping out of 1XEV constantly, down to 1X, and sometimes losing signal altogether. Its not Verizon’s issue, as I’ve mentioned before – its this goddamn phone. Kim’s old Curve is still a champ at holding a signal. Fortunately this signal crap does not drop too many calls.. but it still does now and then – though not as many as the good old iPhone.
It’s been said, since this phone came out, that the new “OS5.0″ would be coming out “soon”. 5 months later, its still not out, thanks to Verizon.. however there are some leaks out there. I hope I hope I hope the new OS will fix the issues I list above.. namely the booting and signal quality issues. I suspect any “fresh install” of an OS will fix some of the instabilities .. much like any device. I am not banking on the new OS to come out anytime soon, however – nor do I really expect it to actually fix the issues. I am almost certain, in fact – especially since the Tour2 is coming out (with features like Wifi, trackpad and a truthfully faster processor). If the Tour(1) were so great – would there be any need to build a better version of it immediately after release? Nope.
So.. as I sort of suspected some time ago.. the Tour is simply my “right now” phone. Thinking about day-to-day frustration, it is still less (but not much less!) infuriating than my iPhone experience- probably because the camera is relatively awesome, and it still does a great job at email.
Now that Motorola released the Droid, and Google has its Nexus One out (soon to be on Verizon).. I’m starting to get more interested in Android – but I am going to wait it out a bit longer.
I returned the first Tour, second one is a winner. All issues I had with the first are fixed – heck even the battery door is tight. GPS is reliable, though signal is still a bit flaky now and then. Kim’s old Curve still gets a better signal at times. But the speed and capability is just what I wanted out of the device. Forgot to finish this saga, since the device has been great so far.
We’ve got some issues here. I love the Tour – alot. The speed, camera, the multitasking, GPS, 3G, keys, rubbery grip, and incredible screen.. however all is not well.
My GPS craps out. Alot. So much that nearly every time I want to use it (for awesome apps like GPSlogger), I have to reboot the phone to get the GPS chip to wake up. Not cool. It takes ages to reboot, too – like 7 minutes or more. My old Pearl did it in half the time..
Further GPS crap – even when it is working.. it occasionally reports INSANE data. You can see it in action in these images.. two are from a round of golf I logged, where I apparently broke the sound barrier, and another is from a run – where I broke 80mph on foot. Right.
To ice this cake, the signal reception has issues as well. I can be sitting on the couch here and watch the signal drop from full 1XEV to no bars, to just 1X (which I think is like ATT Edge vs 3G).. then lose data connectivity altogether.. then it bounces right back. Meanwhile, Kim’s Curve, also on VZW, right next to my phone, maintains a strong signal consistently. WTF, RIM?
So this Tour is over – going to swap for a new one at the VZW store. And apparently, the newer “batches” of Tours are much better built, so say other folks on the internets. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. We’ll see. So far I am not happy – at all – about these shortcomings.
Update.. timed a reboot: 6.5 minutes before it was “awake” and then almost another minute before it was useable. and… it is on 1X vs 1XEV – unreal. I’ve had enough of this. And today’s lesson for CDMA networks:
1X: Connected to the cellular network on 1xRTT as well as connected to RIM’s servers
1XEV: Connected to the cellular network on EVDO as well as connected to RIM’s servers
So compared to GSM, 1X is like EDGE, 1XEV is like 3G.
