Low Carb Snacks

I setup a Google News Alert for “Atkins” and I discovered this Time magazine article on low carb snacks. I’m not on Atkins, as I find The Zone to be more well-rounded, but I’m still interested in upcoming lower-carb snacks.

Catering to adherents of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, foodmakers are filling out the $40 billion diet industry with alternative versions of their favorite sins, from marshmallows and margarita mix to biscotti and beer. And thanks to increasingly successful formulations of sugar substitutes, many members of this new generation of munchie killers are downright delicious. […]

The second page from the article also lists several low carbs products and how they comapre to their high-carb couterparts. For instance, Michelob Ultra has 2.6g carbs (compared with 13.3g in regular Michelob). But, Michelob Ultra isn't the tastiest of beers, either (it’s at the 0.1 percentile at RateBeer.com).

Roger’s Birthday at Texas Roadhouse

We celebrated Roger’s birthday at Texas Roadhouse last night. Interestingly enough, the chain is actually based in Indiana and only came to Texas relatively recently.

Since they have their menu right on their site, I checked that out beforehand. Before looking, I already had a fillet in mind, and they had two to offer (6 oz & 8 oz). At first, I wasn’t sure whether I should go for the 6 or 8 oz, but I quickly realized that it’s not every day that I have fillet (8 oz it is!).

And that wasn’t the only decision. Each entree also comes with two sides (cup of chili, baked potato, sweet potato, steak fries, green beans&hellip). So, I had more decisions. But, I quickly narrowed that down since they included house and cesar salads among their sides. And, since I wanted a salad anyway, I could just include my salad as a side and not have to order it separately.

I could have ordered a baked potato as my other side (you can’t go wrong there), but I figured that I’d have plenty of carbs from various birthday goodies. So, I just selected the vegetables as my other side.

The food arrived relatively quickly and it looked great. I wasn’t sure what to expect of the vegetables, but the vegetable side had broccoli, cauliflower and carrots (a reasonable combination). Before tasting anything else, I cut right into the fillet to check its done-ness — it seems that some steakhouses don’t account for meat’s tendancy to continue cooking after it’s removed from heat. But, it was pleasantly pink — a perfect “medium”.

The meat looked good, but how did it taste? Fantastic. It was warm and very tender — I really cherished each bite. Maybe it wasn’t the best fillet I’ve ever had, but I’d be hard-pressed to come up with which ones were better.

For birthday merriment, Leia and Ru made some double-chocolate cupcakes earlier in the day. As I understand it, Ru helped mix the batter while Leia baked and iced the cupcakes. They brought them along to Texas Roadhouse for dessert.

As cupcakes go, these were possibly thesecond best from-a-mix cupcakes that I’ve had. I’m also a chocolate fiend and the double-chocolate nature was an added bonus. Leia even adorned them with sprinkles/jimmes.

As it turns out, these cupcakes featured the dot-type sprinkes. The dot-type sprinkle adds a pleasant color to the cupcakes but they can be rather crunchy — somewhat like adding sugar-flavored sand to a cupcake. Don’t get me wrong — I like dot-type sprinkles as much as the next guy — but perhaps the cylindar-type (softer) sprinkles could have been even better.

I’m not one to turn down a steakhouse, but I was a bit skeptical about Texas Roadhouse. After all, could a good steakhouse really come out of Indiana? In the end, it worked out great and I’d go back to Texas Roadhouse anytime.

Temptation Island Returns to Fox

Zip2it reports that Temptation Island is coming back to Fox on Thursday, August 28th:

As with the previous two editions of the show, four couples who’ve been dating for a while will spend two weeks on a tropical island — in this case, the Caribbean’s Bay Islands. They’ll spend most of the apart from each other and in the company of 14 members of the opposite sex whose goal is to, as the title suggests, tempt them. […]

There’s a degree of schadenfreude in any reality tv show, but perhaps none more in what I like to call Schadenfreude Island. Really, I don’t know why couples agree to go on the show — I can imagine nothing good for their relationship that could come from participating. But, at at least it gives a good laugh for the rest of us :).

Google News Alerts

Via the MediaBistro mailing list, I saw a link to this story on C|NET that Google is beta testing a News Alerts program:

People can subscribe to the test Google News Alerts by providing keywords that are related to stories that they would like to receive and their e-mail address at the sign-up page. People can limit their alerts by source and choose to receive them once a day or continuously, as Google crawls the Web. There is a limit of 50 keywords per e-mail address.

The test launch comes a couple of weeks after Google refined its daily news search tools. It now allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets on the Web. […]

I already use Google News as my primary news source and I’m looking forward to trying this. If their setup allows it, I may even try subscribing my cell phone to their News Alerts.

Mozilla — Now with Spellchecker!

Thanks to bug 56301 being fixed recently, the latest builds of Mozilla now include the spellchecker built right in (it used to be that you’d have to install the spellchecker separately). I’m really pleased about this since it’s not only one less step that I have to go through each day (yeah, I upgrade Mozilla every day), but it also means that the spellchecker’s reliability is now tied to the core Mozilla development (I’ll explain).

When the spellchecker existed as a separate plugin, it had no association with the Mozilla team. So, if the spellchecker stopped working, you’d just be stuck without a spellchecker until the spellchecker guys got around to fixing it (which could sometimes last for months on end). Now that’s it’s integrated with Mozilla, if the spellchecker breaks, the core Mozilla team will work towards fixing it. And, even better, the spellchecker won’t check quoted text anymore either.