Bacon

I tried Butcher's Cut Bacon because the price was superficially attractive, but it had a pretty high percentage of white fat.

I think Hormel's Black Label is the best supermarket brand we've tried so far.

Pilot G2 Pen 0.38mm

I have been an evangelist for the Pilot G2 pen for a long time. When I was a poll worker at elections and had people signing a register all day, I put out Pilot G2 pens so that people would be exposed to the greatest pen in the world. One person tried to walk off with the G2 and I had to stop her. "This is your pen?" she asked. "Yes," I said firmly. "But I have one just like it," she said. "Nevertheless," I said. "It's a good pen," she said. I agreed.

During this time I may not have always discriminated between the G2 Fine (0.7mm) and Extra Fine (0.5mm). Although I appreciated the G2's bold stroke, I have to admit that the ink was a bit smeary, which made the pen less than ideal for some applications, e.g. crosswords.

Enter the world's truly greatest pen, the Pilot G2 Ultra Fine (0.38mm). This pen is not widely available in the U.S., apparently because it is being hoarded in Japan. However, I first found it on Jetpens.com (after following a link from Daring Fireball) and later bought some more, somewhat cheaper, at DiscountOfficeItems.com (item number PIL31277). I think those are the only two websites where I was able to find it!

Motorola SLVR L2 phone

These are the things I like about my Motorola SLVR L2 phone.

1) It is slim and fits easily in a pocket.
2) It has a nice loud speakerphone so I can set it down for a conference call and leave my hands free to type.
3) In theory I could use it abroad although I haven't actually done that.

These are the things I do not like about my Motorola SLVR L2 phone.

1) The phone will tell me that I have voicemail, with the little voicemail envelope symbol or with the voicemail ringtone. I will pick up the phone and listen to my voicemail, then I will put the phone down. But the phone is not done. It also wants to let me know that I missed a call-- the one that left the voicemail that I just listened to. The phone will beep at me loudly until I pick it up and press "View Calls" to see what call I missed, and "Exit" to signal the end of the missed call viewing.

2) When the phone is getting low on charge, it beeps loudly. For example, if the phone gets low on charge at say, 3 am in the morning, it will beep loudly enough to wake me up. It will keep beeping until I get up and plug it in, or more likely turn it off in disgust.

3) It has a mini-USB port to charge with, but only the particular charger it came with actually works to charge the phone. If I put another mini-USB charger in the phone, it makes lights and sounds as if it were about to be charged, but it doesn't actually charge.

4) There are two buttons on each side of the navigation control. The positive/negative polarity of the functions is mixed up. The buttons on the left side are used for "Call" and also "Back" and "Exit." The buttons on the right side are used for "View" and "Select" and "Hang Up." I find it easy to Hang Up when I meant to Select or Select when I meant to Exit.

5) You cannot enter multiple phone numbers for a single person. Every entry just has one number.

6) This phone still hasn't figured out about Daylight Savings Time, yet I can't set the time myself either.

The Minimalist's Chicken with Riesling

To make this simple dish, just take a lot of onions and saute the crap out of them in butter. Then put in some chicken and some Riesling, cover the pot and let it cook until it's done. I added a little bacon to the onions, and pureed the onions and liquid to get a creamy sauce to pour over the chicken.

The resulting dish has a wonderful fruity flavor from the Riesling that complements that of the sauteed onions nicely. However, it is incredibly bland-looking; in fact, Richard said it looked almost unappetizing. This is bound to happen when your plate has three different shades of beige on it (the chicken, the onions and the butter noodles I served as a side dish). Filling the remainder of the plate with green salad helped a little, but a final sprinkling of fresh herb or red pepper flakes would go a long way if you were serving this to company.

Another triumph for Mark Bittman! I tell you, the guy can do no wrong. This recipe was from The Minimalist Cooks at Home : Recipes That Give You More Flavor from Fewer Ingredients in Less Time. You certainly can't get simpler than chicken, onion, butter, and wine, and it is tough to do better with so few ingredients. I can't wait for the leftovers -- the dish is supposed to get even better on the second day!

I hate Roomba

I was skeptical of Roomba from the start. It would take the person in our household who complains about dusty floors about ten minutes with a Swiffer to clean our small apartment; thus, there was really no reason to spend $200 on a gadget that would do the same thing. But I was worn down by the constant whining and pleading, so we bought a Roomba.

After all that whining, this thing sat in the box for three months after I surprised the recipient with it. Finally he dropped some pastry flakes from Trader Joe's mushroomakopita on the floor and, rather than take the five seconds with a paper towel to pick them up, he brought out the Roomba.

This did not even immediately solve the problem of the mushroomakopita debris because the Roomba takes sixteen hours to charge up the first time. So we spent the next sixteen hours not cleaning up the obvious mess so that we could have a robot do it.

Finally, we set the Roomba free. First of all, it is loud. Like a freight train. Definitely not compatible with a peaceful Sunday morning eating muffins and reading the blogosphere. Roomba's advocate claims that a regular vacuum cleaner is louder than the Roomba. This may be true.

However, it would take a regular vacuum cleaner only about five minutes to vacuum our 300 square foot living room. It would probably take Roomba about five hours. Set it down in the vicinity of mushroomakopita flakes and it will immediately turn in the opposite direction. It has a homing beacon which makes it want to head straight for the nicest, most expensive furniture in the house. Once it finds it, it will bonk its plastic self into that piece again, and again, and again, whether or not there is any actual dirt in the vicinity.

Eventually, after we blocked it from the 80% of the room that did not contain debris to be picked up, the Roomba did manage to successfully vacuum up the mess, I'll give it that. Nevertheless, I am not a fan of Roomba. You don't want to be home with it, because it is loud. But you don't want to leave it unattended either, because it will leave Roomba-height dings on your furniture.

I can hardly believe this thing was invented by a woman, because any other woman would have thought about these problems before unleashing this monster on the universe. Use a Swiffer.

Nordstrom Rack at the Howard Hughes Center

I have been to some very nice Nordstrom Rack stores which sell designer merchandise at 50-90% off the original retail price. This is not one of those very nice stores. This particular Nordstrom Rack is where crap goes to die.

There are racks packed full of clothes as well as a monolayer of discarded stuff on the floor. It is impossible to pick through every item, but chances are good that if you are looking for something that is (a) lime green (b) beaded (c) one of those tiny little sweaters that only cover your boobs (d) some combination of the above, you will find it. There are a few pieces from decent brands here (Tahari, Laundry, Eileen Fisher) but they are really the ugliest dregs from those lines and many of the pieces are damaged in some way.

The shoes are a large jumble which is supposed to be sorted by size but really isn't. If you can find a matching left and right shoe in the pile, you probably get them for free. The scarves are a big tangled ball of fringe and the handbags are no better than you would find at TJ Maxx but cost twice as much even at deep discount.

This Nordstrom Rack did have a section full of brand-name hair products (Redken, Bed Head, etc.), which is weird because I don't think real Nordstroms carry such things. But they didn't appear to be that much cheaper than at any other beauty store so I ignored them.

The rest of this mall is not that great either. It has a movie theater that I've heard is pretty good, but it has more crummy-looking fast food places than it does shops.

The one bright spot appears to be a branch of Kabuki sushi restaurant! If this place is as good as its sisters in Pasadena, then that's a good reason to head back here. I certainly didn't find any others.

HP LaserJet 1020

This is the replacement printer for the evil Brother MFC-3100C, which despite all efforts to take it apart and fix it refused to ever print again.

I liked the HP LaserJet 1020 because it had a small form factor at 13.6 x 11.8 x 19.7 inches, and because it was on sale for less than $100 at Staples. Printouts are of good quality and come out fast (15 pages per minute). It came with a toner cartridge but, oddly, not a USB cable. We used the one from the Devil Printer and it works fine.

The trick was to get this setup on our network, which consists of one iMac directly connected to an AirPort, plus a PowerBook and a PC that are connected wirelessly to the AirPort. For the Macs, the advice is to ignore the driver for the 1020, which apparently does not support Macs, and use the driver for the 1022 instead. After rebooting a couple of times, this worked.

The PC is a little trickier, but I got it to work by following the advice enumerated here, which is as follows:

Here's what I did to set it up on my Windows box:

1. Selected "Settings->Printers->Add Printer" from the "Start" menu.

2. When the "Add Printer Wizard" comes up, click Next.

3. When prompted for Local or Network Printer, make sure the "Local printer" radio button is selected and that the "Automatically detect..." checkbox is OFF and then click Next.

4. In the "Select the Printer Port" screen, click the "Create a new port" radio button, select "Standard TCP/IP Port" from the popup and click Next.

5. The "Add Standard TCP/IP Printer Port Wizard" will pop up, click Next in that window now.

6. In "Printer Name or IP Address" I put "10.0.1.1" and let it generate "IP_10.0.1.1" as the port name, click Next.

7. For "Device Type" in this next wizard screen I made sure "Standard" was the radio button selected and then I selected "Hewlett Packard Jet Direct" in the popup menu, click Next.

8. In the Finish screen, it'll say "RAW, Port 9100" for Protocol and "10.0.1.1" in the Device field, click Finish and that wizard will close.

9. The Add Printer Wizard will now go to a new screen, for you to select the type of printer you have. Select the printer type and model and click Next. You may need your Windows CDs handy if it asks for them.

10. Click Next again for it to be the default printer.

11. Click Next again because you don't want to share it through the Windows PC.

12. Click Next so that it prints a test page.

13. Click Finish.

I kind of want to take the old Brother out into a field for a little Office Space moment now. Damn, it feels good to be a gangster, and to have a working printer.