Month: May 2005

Hell’s Kitchen is Awful

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

I like cooking shows as much as the next guy (well, ok, maybe a little more than the next guy) and I have a soft spot for some reality shows as well. So, I've been having a great time watching Cooking Under Fire — a cooking/reality show airing, of all places, on PBS. In this show, there’re three judges, Ming Tsai, Todd English and Michael Ruhlman. Tsai is the host of several cooking shows, English owns multiple restaurants in New York and Ruhlman is a successful food author.

There’re twelve contestants and they each cook dishes for the judges; a contestant is eliminated after each round and the winner will be awarded a job at one of Todd English’s restaurants in New York. In some ways, this is my favorite variety of reality show — sure, it’s rooted in reality, but each of the contests is merit-based rather than just luck. So, simply the best cook wins; it's not just a matter of seeing who can balance on a log the longest or something equally obtuse.

Cooking Under Fire is an excellent show and I look forward to it every week. Then, I heard about another cooking-based reality show, Hell’s Kitchen which airs on Fox. This too features a set of aspiring cooks that want to win a job in the host’s restaurant (in this case, there is just a single judge/host, chef Gordon Ramsay). The difference this time around is that Ramsay is an asshole.

I had my TiVo record the premiere episode last night and I eagerly sat down to watch it later that evening. The show opened with the obligatory meet-and-greet where the contestants were in their finest attire in some ballroom drinking sparkling wine as they tried to get to know one another. A little while into the evening, two of Ramsay’s sous chefs were introduced and they addressed the group. They informed the group that the contest won’t be easy and that chef Ramsay demands perfection… blah blah blah.

At this point, they revealed to the contestants that the contest was starting right now and that they had to prepare their “signature dish” for chef Ramsay using the adjacent kitchen. As if riding the cliché wagon for all its worth, the sous chef with the shaved head then yelled to the group, “What are you waiting for?! Go!”. So, the group rushed off to the kitchen to prepare their dishes (still in their fine clothes, of course).

Now, it would have been one thing to have each of the contestant’s kitchen attire (“chef’s cloak”?) on hand, but that wasn’t the case. More importantly, though, the contestants didn’t have access to their own knives; rather, they had to scrounge around to find some knives to use within the kitchen. To you and I, knives are probably pretty similar from one to the next. But, through watching countless cooking shows — all in the name of research, natch — I’ve learned that chefs consider their own set of knives a unique personal asset.

Or, put another way, foisting an unfamiliar set of knives upon a chef would be like requiring a developer to use an foreign editor. Say you like to use Crimson Editor or maybe HTML Kit but then your boss forced you to use Emacs all day? Well, how do you like them apples?! Not so much fun, eh? (And, before the Emacs guys jump on me, I only used your beloved editor as a hypothetical example; feel free to substitute Vi there if you would feel better.)

To show such disrespect for these aspiring chefs astounded me. But, it didn't end there. After everyone’s dishes were ready, Ramsay began tasting them. He walked over to a pasta dish and started by asking who prepared it; a guy in his mid-20s stepped forward and stated that it was “Andrew’s Awesome Penne” (though I have a hunch about the fellow’s name, I’m not certain I remembered it correctly). In any case, Ramsay tasted the food and then spat it out into his hand.

Granted, this guy is probably used to “the best of the best” but that gesture was simply unnecessary. Of course, Ramsay began berating the guy at this point for what he considered a lousy dish and I just (beep-boop-boop) deleted the show and its Season Pass from my TiVo. I’m all for reality shows with civility and especially reality cooking shows; but where does this acridity come from? Maybe I should’t have expected such high standards from Fox.

I Wonder If I’ve Forgotten Something…

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Merriam-Webster has a collection of their readers’ favorite words that aren’t in the dictionary. Slashdot covered the article in the context of item #3, “woot” or, as I prefer to spell it, “w00t” (with zeros in the middle). Of course, that would be an interjection meaning “an exclamation of joy or excitement”.

Wootiness aside, my favorite is actually #5, “cognitive displaysia”:

cognitive displaysia
(n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you’re on the highway

I don’t know about you, but that one happens to me all the time and especially as I’m heading off for a long trip. I mean, I’ve done silly things like packing my cell phone on a week-long trip but not its charger (d’oh). Or, just as boggling would be to forget one’s socks on a trip (which I haven’t done but I’ve run into someone who’s done that). These days, I mostly resort to making myself a list of things to pack the night before. That way, I can calmly compose the list and, when it comes time to pack, I just follow the list and I don’t have to worry about forgetting something.

A Substitute for Both “Yes” and “No”

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I was surfing through Answers.com and I came across an entry which I’ll get to in a moment. But first, Jeopardy-style, here’s an abbreviated version of the word’s definition (the answer) followed by the word itself (the question).

A: This word can be substituted for both Yes and No.

Q: What is “meh”?

I got a kick out that one. I mean, it's not often that one runs across a word which has two meanings — each opposite of the other. Jeopardy-ness aside, here’s the rest of the definition for meh:

“Internet and general slang or spoken, ‘meh’ usually signifies apathy or indifference. It is used to signify unwillingness to answer a question, or admitted laziness. Can be substituted for: Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t care. Whatever. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?”

The part I struggle with — if I were to attempt to make use of the word — is that I’m not sure of its connotations. If the connotation skewed towards “lacking a preference”, that would be, erm, preferable; but, if its meaning was more along the lines of outright “disinterest”, that might lessen the general usefulness of the word.

PS Note to semantic enthusiasts: Rest assured, I used a definition list above and, yes, I coded the <dd> before the <dt> :).

Traffic Alerts on Your Cell Phone

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

After finding myself unexpectedly stuck in traffic on my way home from work one too many times, I thought to check whether I could get traffic alerts e-mailed to me (after all, there’re websites which track traffic, so I thought there was at least a chance someone might offer an e-mail option). I did some searching but I couldn’t find anyone that had traffic alerts over e-mail.

Then it occurred to me that traffic alerts sent to my cell phone would be even better — that way, I wouldn’t even have to be near my computer to keep up-to-date on any traffic anomalies. I wasn’t very optimistic about finding much, though; sending alerts via e-mail is one thing, but having a traffic-alert service with an integrated SMS gateway on the back-end seemed like a tall order. Nonetheless, I searched anyway — and, sure enough, there is such a thing. Apparently, MSN has a free MSN Alerts service which can send traffic alerts (or other updates) to one’s phone.

The process is fairly straightforward. First, you’ll need an MS Passport account. Then, just load up the MSN Alerts page and choose the “Add Alerts” link which is on the top of that page. The only tricky part, if you can even call it that, is that the traffic alerts are under the “MSN Autos” header (though, to be fair, the subheader does say “Receive real-time local traffic incidents from MSN Carpoint”).

From there, the options are up to you. After choosing your metro area (“Dallas-Ft Worth” in my case”) you can select from what looks to be several dozen metro regions (which, on my list, starts from “Abbott”, goes through ”Euless”, and continues right through to “Wylie”). In my case, I just chose “Dallas” ;). And, from there, you also have a choice of delivery times, delivery days and traffic incident severity; I set that last one just to “High” since it was mostly the accidents that I cared about and I didn’t want to rack up too many text messages needlessly.

I’ve been using MSN Alerts for a few days now and it’s working out well. Granted, it sometimes tells me about accidents on roads on which I don’t drive — c'est la vie — but the alerts on roads which I use have saved me a few times from driving into a block of traffic. And, other than traffic alerts, some of the other alerts offered have been handy as well; I’ve also signed up for breaking news alerts (under the “MSNBC News” header) and a Dow Jones stock alert (under the “MSN Money” header). There’re also alerts for sports and so on, but those didn’t interest me enough to use up my text messages for those.

Autoblog on Speed Channel’s WRC Coverage

Ashley Bischoff12 Comments

In a post last month about how Netflix tried to recommend a pregnancy workout disc to me after I had added an autocross driving disc to my queue, I made an attempt at describing WRC (World Rally Championship racing). However, I came across an entry at Autoblog (a car blog in the Weblogs Inc family) that painted a better picture:

I personally think that the WRC is the most exciting race to watch, and the more you guys care, the more chances they’ll show it live in the US. Here are the reasons to care: It has fast drifting turns, spectacular scenery, death-defying leaps over blind crests and some dude in the passenger seat reading out the turns to a guy driving at 100mph who hasn’t seen the road before. These guys have balls, real manly ones. Oh, did I mention awesome crashes into trees? Yeah, they got that too. For those of you who want to start watching, the WRC Magazine show airs on the Speed Channel.

After reading over that, I really began to ponder whether I should sign up for DirecTV sometime (or some other television service which includes Speed Channel). Really, I’m not even sure what my options are, Speed Channel-wise. I’m pretty sure that DirecTV carries it, but might Comcast Digital Cable or Echostar carry it as well? Oh, and just to clarify a minor thinko in Autoblog’s post — the drivers have seen the roads before, during the pre-race “recce” (however, in the midst of a race, the driver steers largely on the faith of the directions blurted to him by his navigator in the passenger seat).