Adam's Blog

Sunday night was steak night at our house, and I decided to go with an old favorite and a new experiment. On the right, Jenn was served as silly-sized black angus ribeye, supposedly from a noted black angus farm, cooked a blissful medium rare. We are big ribeye fans in our house, as we generally agree the ribeye is the most flavorful steak in the steer, with its marbling and tenderness. Although I rarely cook the cut, I coated a Flintstones-sized porterhouse with chimichurri and grilled it. As always, it re-affirmed my belief that the porterhouse is far from "king of the steaks," largely because as good as the filet can be - as tender and juicy as possible - the strip is never as good as I imagine it could be under other circumstances. I consider myself pretty particular when it comes to beef, and I believe that short of preparing it over wood smoke on some 1100 degree grill, I don't think the strip can be prepared to taste as good as several other steaks. Like many cuts of sirloin, it really requires marinade or a rub of some sort to bring out any powerful flavor, and with...

I love my jailbroken iPhone, and I am always looking for a new "game of the week." I've been through several, at first, it was LightsOff, but that ends at 225 levels or so. Then it was Five Dice. Then 4 Balls, Domino, and finally PuzzleManiak. I was so happy recently when someone decided to port Dope Wars to the iPhone in the form of "iDope." iDope currently has a lot of bugs. Mainly, your jacket storage is irrelevant, you can actually store unlimited items, you just can't buy unlimited items unless you hit "buy all." You can't store money in a bank. It never ends until you die. You are mugged or fight the cops maybe 80% of the time you travel. But most importantly, this: Notice my dollars? That's right, I have $2,147,483,647. Two billion, one hundred forty seven million, four hundred eighty three thousand, six hundred forty seven dollars. Recognize that number? If you read my blog regularly, you might. After all, it's the upper limit of signed integers. The game is officially boring - no matter what I do, I'm always capped at that number, I can never get more money. I wonder if the iPhone...

EW.com is running a piece on possible changes to American Idol. American Idol is - as we speak - jumping the shark. Everyone is trying to predict why. I'm going to give you all the reasons right now. ## 1 ## First and foremost, as Howard Stern said in his broadcast yesterday, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Idol used to be one hour for the contest, 30 minutes for results. This season, it was 2 hours for the performances, 1 hour for results. The results shows are way too long, way too cheesy, the divisions are contrived, the call-taking is stupid, the banter is obnoxious and worthless, and the results are purposely not revealed until the last 2 minutes. In the beginning of the season, it aired thrice a week in 2 hour specials, requiring a SIX hour commitment. And most of the funny "bad" auditions are now from actors trying to be bad to get on TV, making it mostly worthless. Recently, the performance shows have slowly scaled back in time, but should just be performances. Which leads me to... ## 2## The guest judges are mostly worthless. It used to be they were...

Sometime ago, say, 1999, Slashdot was the king of the online tech world. In fact, from a "hits" standpoint, they may still be, if not second to Digg. Slashdot has always been the first big blog-style tech site, long before the word "blog" meant anything to anyone, and somehow, Rob Malda and crew are still relevant in the scene. Not too long ago, Slashdot started overhauling their incredibly horrendous HTML and rewriting in mostly compliant HTML. The goal of the rewrite, amongst many other things, such as incredible bandwidth savings, was to support stylesheets and graceful degrade. When all was ready, Slashdot held a contest to solicit new stylesheets and received tons of submissions, some really cool and others really ugly, and chose a very nice, very reserved, very modern-but-conservative one as their new default style. Let's back up a bit: Slashdot is written in Perl - ack! - and is built upon an open source system called, simply enough, "Slash." Slash code is horrendously out-of-date and the last download is pathetically old. In fact, the only way to get Slash in any recent form is via CVS access. Slash requires mod_perl and tons of Apache and perl customization. Since...

I have no real reason to be excited for the weekend, but I've been really looking forward to it since Wednesday. I think the idea of going home, relaxing, and spending some time with the baby is really appetizing right now. The kid was really good last night, she was sitting on the spare bed while I was fooling around on the computer. The dog got on the bed -- he's great with her, because he really has a huge amount of patience with her. She smacks him, pulls his facial hair, punches him, and he just takes it. The only problem is that sometimes he just tries kissing all over her face and she's clearly annoyed and can't escape him. Either way, somehow, he laid down and she reached over, so he put his front leg across her legs. She was sitting on her butt playing with his leg - drumming on it, petting it, etc, and he actually closed his eyes and let her just tap away. It was pretty amazing, given that he's rarely that relaxed around Jenn and me and she's so innocently rough with him. Every time the dog pisses me off - which is...

They tell mothers-to-be that they may not feel that motherly attachment to their baby the minute the baby is born. It has a lot to do with hormones, societal expectations, and culture. But they do tell them that the baby may seem foreign and unfamiliar at first, and it may take as long as two weeks or more to become familiar with this new life. I didn't take to fatherhood at first. I guess that's unfair, I took to it just fine, but the minute Jillian was born, I was much more concerned about my wife who had just had a C-section than I was about the little baby. After all, if something happened to the baby, I'd still have Jenn and life would go on, albeit tragically. But if something happened to Jenn, I'd be crushed; devastated without direction. I guess I could say I loved Jillian on day 1, but the truth is it took a few days to warm up to her. Babies really aren't much - they don't really tell you this - but they don't do anything. They just lay around, sleep, cry, crap, and occasionally feed. They don't smile, focus, laugh, or express any...

Somehow, I'm embarassed to admit, I got sucked into watching VH1's Celebrity Fit Club this weekend. Normally, I find the show to be an uninteresting train wreck. Over Christmas break, a few of us were sitting around in front of the TV and I caught several episodes in a row where Dustin Diamond, the guy who played Screech on Saved By the Bell, mouthed off to the drill seargant and got himself the title of "bad boy." To make a long story short, he became a pain the ass by continuing to eat cheeseburgers and generally annoy everyone throughout the "season." He also made a very loud and obnovious point to pimp his sex tape - yes, seriously - at every opportunity. Fast forward to this weekend, when they are airing "Celebrity Fit Club: Boot Camp." In some weird twist, they have "brought back" some previous contestants (read: cheap Omarosa-style publicity stunt) to revisit the Fit Club. Now, unlike a show like The Biggest Loser, where contestants work out, eat healthy, live on set, and lose up to 12 to 15 lbs or more each week, these celebutards are given fluff goals like 1 or 2 lbs to lose each...

I've been sick for over a week now. A nasty bug has been going around my office, and last Friday I started developing a fever. I slept for 3 straight days. A week plus later, I'm still with fever and now bronchitis and pharyngitis and I'm on antibiotics and narcotic cough syrup, my chest and arms are sore from coughing so much, I'm a wreck. Yesterday I stayed home, and one of the habits I have is turning on the TV and then sleeping with it playing in the background. It just so happens that I have the American Idol season 5 final still on my DVR. So, since mid-day TV generally stinks, I put that on. For those who can't place it, season 5 included Taylor Hicks and Katherine McPhee, Elliot Yamin, Chris Daughtry, Paris Bennett, Kellie Pickler, Lisa Tucker, Ace Young, Mandisa, among others. Let me tell you: these kids could sing. They put this year's crop to shame with their tight harmonies. When the women did their medley, I was seriously impressed. In retrospect, even guys who weren't even front runners still had some serious pipes. I also decided that despite the fact that I railed on...

If you look around the internet, you'll find all sorts of horror stories about the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration. Last month, there was an interesting turn of events as the TSA didn't believe the Macbook Air was a real laptop and caused the owner to miss his flight. But then, in a a very non-governmental way, they X-rayed the Macbook Air and posted the video so that the TSA field agents could understand it. This is nice to see. So, this week, when passing through Bradley International Airport, I was stopped by a TSA agent who said to me, about my baby's formula: "You'll have to mix that formula here now." "I'm sorry," I said, "but mixed formula is only good for 60 minutes, and the flight is over 3 hours, and it doesn't leave for over an hour. I checked the website, I'm allowed to bring the formula." She said to me, "That's true, but you can't bring this water, even though it's sealed." So I calmy replied, "Are you sure? That's sealed nursery water. It's distilled and fluoridated. I can't get that in the airport." This is a gray area. The TSA has fairly broad requirements for...

This weekend, I took a stab at the "Firefly" series via the movie Serenity which was delivered to me via HBO. I tried, I really did, but I bailed after about an hour. I generally believe that even though I don't watch much Sci-Fi, I probably would like most of it by nature of the fact that I am a scientist and (mostly) a nerd, and I can get on board with complex, scentifically sound ideas. So I figured this would be a good starting off point. Let's start here: I really like Nathan Fillion, I really do. I loved him in Two Guys, A Girl, and A Pizza Place (seriously) where he played Johnny. But whoever wrote his "accent," you know, the one that pretends that this space captain who grew up on a farm has a hick twang, should be slapped around. Even Fillion couldn't convincingly tell me we're supposed to be believe that. Ditto for his female first mate, who threw in some extra verb-disagreement. I just couldn't get past the strained dialogue. Also, the plot left me clueless. I didn't know what the plot was going in - I just knew it was based on Firefly....