Month: October 2003

Do I Like Crunchy Peanut Butter?

Ashley Bischoff7 Comments

With the recent news that regular peanut butter may not have trans fat after all, I’ve had peanut butter on the brain. Now that regular peanut butter is ok again, I’ve been contemplating the various peanut butters that I could try.

What first came to mind was that a sugar-free peanut butter could work well — there’d be the thick texture of regular peanut butter but without the typical sugars to get in the way. But, even though I haven’t been to the supermarket recently, I’m not getting my hopes up about finding such a product.

However, I got to thinking that maybe I should give crunchy peanut butter another chance. I’ve had creamy peanut butter for years and it’s been quite a while since I last had crunchy. Back when I was a kid, I preferred creamy since the nut bits in crunchy would tend to get stuck in my teeth.

So, on our last collaborative grocery run, I had Mike pick up both creamy and crunchy peanut butter for me (just the natural variety for now). Since I still had a few days worth of the old supply, I’ve only tried the crunchy just recently. And I’m not sure if the natural peanut butter itself is a significant factor, but this crunchy peanut butter had some good peanut flavor.

Of course, a spoonful of peanut butter is one thing, but I wanted to do some real-world tests as well. And, I couldn’t really come up with a canonical test for peanut butter. Sure, I could try something like apples with peanut butter (still a favorite of mine), but that only combines peanut butter with one other ingredient.

After some thought, it occured to me that peanut butter & jelly could work well. So, I whipped up an open-faced peanut butter & jelly sandwich for myself (though I actually used sugar free blackberry jam). Having made the sandwich, I paused to consider my testing method. Still, my main concern was whether the crunchy peanut butter would end up stuck in my teeth. So, I decided to not chew carefully to test whether I’d be able to induce some to get stuck.

Pleasantly, the peanut bits were fairly tender and they broke easily as I munched them. And, I didn’t really have any problems with the bits getting stuck. More than that, the peanut bits gave a degree of extra peanut flavor over creamy peanut butters. So, I may do some further testing, but perhaps crunchy peanut butter could become my peanutty spread of choice.

Plucker 1.6 Released

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Earlier this month, the Plucker project released Plucker 1.6. I've written about Plucker before and, for those not aware, Plucker is an offline web browser for Palm. The package includes the Plucker Desktop for your PC which can be set to run on a schedule to download web pages during the day which are are installed onto your Palm during your next Hotsync.

In addition to support for anti-aliased fonts and experimental support for tables, I consider this to be a really solid release — while earlier releases had a few quirks, those have all been fixed in this release. In particular, has much lower CPU usage than older versions (which tends to help on an Athlon 700).

Plucker is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. All you need to download is the Plucker Desktop. And, though I’m fairly sure that the Plucker Desktop includes the Plucker Viewer (the application that runs on your Palm), you can always download that separately if you need to (from that same page). And, as always, feel free to make use of Plucker on this page.

New Freelance Gig: Mercer HR

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

I recently started a new freelance gig at Mercer Human Resource Consulting. I interviewed with them on Tuesday and started yesterday. It’s for at least four weeks, but could last up to a couple months — it all depends on how much the client wants to have implemented for Phase 2 (the “four weeks” comes into play if they opt for nothing, which I’m told is unlikely).

Mercer’s office is downtown, so the drive isn’t too bad. They’re in the Bank One Center which is approximately at Main St. & St. Paul. For the moment, I’m parking in the lots behind Plaza of the Americas, primarily because one of the lots takes credit cards (that way, I don’t need a wad of one-dollar bills to last me through the week). However, that lot isn’t very close by to the Bank One Center, so I have about a twelve minute walk over to the Bank One Center (which, other than the time it takes, I don’t really mind).

I’ll probably check out the lots on the walk back to my car one evening. With any luck, one of the smaller lots will have a reasonably priced monthly plan — that way, I won’t have to to worry about having enough greenbacks every day. I’m open to suggestions on any lots around that area; in particular, I’m looking for one that doesn’t often fill to capacity since even a monthly pass couldn’t help me there.

So far, the job is working out well. I’m in a cubicle, but it’s at the corner of a grid, so at least it’s a little quieter since people aren’t walking past it all the time. And, the desks all have Aeron chairs, though I still haven’t figured out how to get mine to tilt back properly (it’s not locked, but the tilting action is fairly firm and only tilts back a few degrees).

An unexpected perk is the soda machines in the break rooms — they don’t require any money (you just press the button and soda comes out). I’ve been making good use of that, though there are only so many cans of Caffeine Free Diet Coke you can drink in a day ;). The other sodas are Coke & Diet Coke, Dr Pepper & Diet Dr Pepper, Country Time Lemonade, Mountain Dew and Fanta. I suppose Diet Fanta would have been the icing on the cake, but you can’t have everything <g>.

Bulletproof Monk: Not So Good

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I saw the ads for Bulletproof Monk back in April and it looked pretty good at the time — Chow Yun-Fat, dual pistols, what’s not to like? Its PG-13 rating should have been my first warning, but Mike and I decided to add it to our Netflix queue.

I was aware that it got 39/100 at Metacritic, but there have been times in the past when Metacritic has been off. But, it wasn’t off this time — we watched it over the weekend, and Bulletproof Monk just wasn’t what I was hoping it’d be.

In short, every good scene is encompassed by the trailer. And, I don’t just mean “every scene” loosely — yeah, some movies put most of their good scenes into the trailer, but this one really had all the good scenes in the trailer. And, the non-trailer scenes were just not up to that level.

One gripe I have with the flick is that the trailer prominently shows Chow atop a car with guns in both hands (a good sign, or so you’d think). However, the trailer cuts out the following part of the scene: Chow uses the guns only to shoot the weapons out of the hands of the bad guys. And, that’s the only scene where the main characters even hold guns — according to the making-of featurette, the producers did that on purpose for the “sake of the children” in the audience.

And, in general, the PG-13 rating just gets in the way. In one scene in particular, a Nazi general executes several monks in a firing squad (this happens in the first ten minutes, so this doesn’t spoil anything). However, the view is framed so that you only see the shots being fired followed by the sounds of the monks taking the hit — lame.

It looks like the trailer got the best of me this time. Is this worth buying? Nope. Is it worth renting? Well, only if you really like Seann William Scott — and even then, only maybe.

No Trans Fat in Peanut Butter After All

Ashley Bischoff25 Comments

I’ve been enjoying natural peanut butter for about a year now. I first turned to it so I could avoid the trans fat in regular peanut butter.

Trans fat is created when liquid oils are turned into solids by adding hydrogen. And, food manufaturers like hydrogenated oils since they don’t separate like liquid oils. However, trans fat is also the worst kind of fat — it raises the “bad ” cholesterol while lowering the “good” cholesterol (even saturated fat leaves doesn’t affect good cholesterol).

You would think trans fat would be included on food labels, but that only goes into effect in 2006. So, in the meantime, you just have to look for “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” oils among the ingredients.

So, to avoid the trans fat, I went with natural peanut butter (which isn’t hydrogenized). However, I’ve learned that a study by the Agricultural Research Service — a part of the USDA — says that there’s no trans fat in peanut butter (natural or otherwise).

To see if the rumors had any validity, Sanders prepared 11 brands of peanut butter, including major store brands and “natural” brands, for analysis by a commercial laboratory. He also sent paste freshly prepared from roasted peanuts for comparison. The laboratory found no detectable trans fats in any of the samples, with a detection limit of 0.01 percent of the sample weight. […]

When I switched over, it took some time to get used to natural peanut butter; in particular, since its oil is in liquid form, the peanut butter can more easily slide off foods (such as apple slices). And, this study may be reason enough to switch back. In fact, just this weekend, I made an Elvis sandwich with regular peanut butter. And, that made for a tasty sandwich.

But, after tasting some regular peanut butter with a spoon, I realized that it didn’t quite have as much peanut taste as the natural peanut butter. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I soon realized that the sugar in the regular peanut butter may have masked some of the peanut flavor. So, I may look for some regular peanut butter next time I’m in Target, but I’m not sure if sugar-free regular peanut butter even exists ;).