Hand Coding

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.

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.

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> :).

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.

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).

While browsing BetaNews over the weekend, I came across Foxit PDF Reader. It’s a PDF reader and that concept may seem a bit redundant at first since Adobe has a PDF reader that works fine, eh? Well, the only problem is that the basic Acrobat Reader could read PDF documents years ago and yet Adobe needed something to put in the new versions…

So, for the last few years, Adobe has released new versions of their PDF reader, adding obscure features which only served to slow down the app for the rest of us. That's where Foxit’s PDF Reader comes in. In contrast to Adobe's PDF Reader which — at least on my system — weighs in at 70 MB (?!), Foxit PDF Reader is about 2 MB. And, it’s just a single .exe file, so there’s no complicated install, either; just unzip and go.

I must say, I was skeptical of of Foxit Reader at first. I mean, how could such a small app display the same documents that needed a 70 MB app previously? Well, I was pleasantly surprised — this thing loads almost instantaneously and it properly rendered all of the documents which I tested with it. On top of that, my mouse wheel actually works this time around (for some reason, my mouse wheel was perpetually ineffective in Adobe Reader).

The only downside to Foxit PDF Reader is that it doesn't support PDF-based forms. Sure, you can view the forms (and print them if you wanted to) but it doesn't support filling out the forms right within the PDF Reader. So, at least for those rare occurrences, it’d make sense to keep Adobe Reader tucked away somewhere. On the other hand, Foxit Reader does have a feature which is similar and, depending on the situation, may be better or worse than native form support. In what they call “typewriter” mode, you can type on top of any part of a document. So, yeah, you could fake filling out a form by placing text right on top of the form fields. More importantly, you can add your own text to any form this way — whether or not they were designed with PDF form support.

PDFs used to be a real drag; I never looked forward to having to open them. But, I can open a PDF document faster than I can open a Word document these days — and I never thought that would happen. (And if you're up for it, I’d recommend trying the 1.3 beta over the current release; I’ve not had any problems with it.)

I was talking with my friend Liz the other day and she mentioned that someone had asked on the Glen Mitchell show about whether there was any rhyme or reason behind why some words end in “able” (such as “comfortable”) while others end in “ible” (such as “horrible”). Before I get to the answer, though, here’s the scoop on the Glen Mitchell Show for readers who aren’t in Dallas — the show airs on Dallas’ local NPR affiliate and each Friday show features call-in questions which other audience members are invited to help answer. It’s a bit like Ask.MetaFilter but on the radio (HHOS).

Anyhow, you wouldn’t think that there’d be any reason behind such word endings, but there actually is (well, mostly).

• If the root is not a complete word, add -ible. (aud + ible = audible)

• If the root is a complete word, add -able. (accept + able = acceptable)

For example, “laugh” makes sense on its own, so that becomes “laughable”. On the other hand, “elig” can’t stand on its own, so that one’s “eligible”. Then again, English just isn’t allowed to be that easy ;), so there are some exceptions, such as “irritable” and “inevitable”.

I’ve been keeping tabs on Dell’s 2005FPW 20.1" LCD ever since I first heard about it on Engadget. Other than price, the big problem with most LCDs — as I see it — is that most of them have a fairly paltry resolution. I mean, sure, a 19" LCD may sound nice but what good is it if it can only handle 1280x1024? But, that’s where the 2005FPW comes in. It’s 20.1 inches and has a resolution of 1680 x 1050 (with a 12ms response time, if you’re curious).

I also found a comparison between this monitor and Apple’s 20" Cinema Display at AnandTech. Apparently, they use the same LG.Philips panel and, unsurprisingly, they perform about the same. Granted, Apple’s display may have the edge on aesthetics but AnandTech concludes by saying that the “UltraSharp 2005FPW is the display that we have been waiting for”.

This was sounding pretty good so far, but then I found an item on DealNews which further sweetened the deal — you can get the 2005FPW for about $400 + tax through a series of coupon codes:

Once again, the Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1" Widescreen LCD Monitor costs $749 at Dell Home. Add any item to bump your order over $750 (e.g., this CD-R media) and apply coupon codes “S0BDZ6HBTFDPSL” and “79VT3767HP833W” to drop the net price to $396.85, not including the cost of the extra item. With free shipping, that ties last week’s listing for the lowest total price we’ve seen. The 2005FPW sports a native resolution of 1680x1050, 600:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness, an integrated 4-port USB 2.0 hub, and S-Video, composite video, DVI, and VGA inputs. Offer ends May 23 at 7 am ET, but these coupons will likely hit their limits sooner.

Though the item appeared on DealNews on Friday, I only saw it today. I wasn’t sure if the coupons were still valid, so I just tried adding the LCD to my cart and applying the coupons — it worked! But, at this point, I had other matters to consider. Firstly, did I really need a new LCD monitor? ;) I already have a 19" CRT at home and at work and it dawned on me that a one-for-one replacement wouldn’t give me much. Just to be sure, I Googled for some “LCD vs CRT” comparisons and came across this Monitor Buying Guide at C|Net.

As I can see it, it basically works out like this. LCDs are thinner, have no refresh-rate flicker and a crisp image; but, they’re also more expensive and their color rendition may be inconsistent. CRTs, on the other hand, are relatively inexpensive, have good color rendition and they can easily display varying resolutions; however, they’re energy inefficient and it’s apparently barely impossible to get perfect screen geometry.

Looking over the pros and cons, the upshot appears to be that I could get perfect screen geometry without convergence problems but that it’d cost me $400. And, at this point, I think I’m going to pass. Don’t get me wrong, this LCD from Dell looks pretty sweet and I’d almost surely buy one if I didn’t have a 19" display but, of course, I already have a 19" display.

Maybe I’ll just wait for Dell’s 24" UltraSharp 2405FWP? Its 1920 x 1200 resolution would be definitively larger than what I have now. However, its $1200 price tag — which is cheaper than the $1500 for Apple’s equivalent-resolution display — is still a bit out of my reach.

You may recall an entry from a couple weeks ago about pretty URLs in WordPress. As it turns out, I ended up writing that entry twice. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the first version, but I just accidentally closed that tab in Firefox at the time (oops). I meant to click on the right-most tab in my browser but I instead clicked on the “close tab” button right there instead. Poof!

I was a little bit annoyed but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I wrote the entry a second time and I later looked around to see if there were any utilities which might help prevent that kind of thing in the future. One that I thought to look for was some kind of “undo close tab” extension. Well, ask and ye shall receive — a guy named Dorando created an extension called Undo Close Tab (how apropos). And, if you'd normally be wary of downloading an extension from a forum post, rest assured that he has a home page for his extensions as well, though the bulk of the information on Undo Close Tab is in his forum post.

I then took aim at the second thorn in my side, that dumb close-tab button which foiled my plans earlier. After all, even though an undo-close-tab extension would have saved me from the predicament last time, I wouldn’t have even been in that scrape if it wasn’t so easy to hit that button ;). Fortunately, that’s easily done as well. This MozillaZine Knowledgebase article writes about moving the tabbar (to the bottom of the browser or elsewhere on your screen) but it also includes the steps on removing the close-tab button (regardless of whether you want to move the tab bar as well). In short, you can remove your close-tab button but shutting down your Firefox and adding these lines to userchrome.css:

/* remove the close-tab button */
.tabbrowser-tabs > stack {
display: none;
}

Your userchrome.css file goes in your Firefox profile directory but the file doesn’t exist by default. Rather, there’s an example file called “userChrome-example.css” which you can Save-As to userchrome.css and make use of that. And, that previous link on the profile directory offers some tips on where your profile directory is located; that information is fine, though you may find it just as easy to just search your drive — starting from C:\Documents and Settings\ — for “userChrome-example.css”.

I felt better after getting those Firefox bits in order, and I then came across a WordPress plugin which also looked helpful. Gregory Wild-Smith wrote a plugin called Twilight AutoSave which “uses cookies and JavaScript to save the data you are typing and allow you to restore it (or delete it) later”. With that and the Firefox goodies in place, I should have a lesser chance of losing my posts next time. Not that I’m going to tempt fate, but I do have some peace of mind about it now.

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Kicking and Screaming; I participated in that offer.

I saw Kicking and Screaming on Tuesday night and I rather enjoyed it. In case you haven't seen the trailer — which appears to be just about everywhere these days, including as a promotional spot on my TiVo — the movie stars Will Ferrell as a reluctant soccer coach of his last-place kids’ soccer team.

It’s hard to pass up a gratis pass to a movie screening and, at the time it was offered to me, I didn’t know much about the film. Well, I knew that Will Ferrell starred in it and that it was about a kids’ soccer team. And, really, that’s all you need to know. It's a sports movie — so all the standard sports-movie clichés apply — and it’s also a father/son movie — so all those clichés apply too. Just to name a few:

• Don’t read these if you’re really scared of spoilers
• The coach of a father’s son’s soccer team drops out, so the father has to take over
• The father is pretty bad at coaching, at first, but gets much better at it with practice
• The team is a bunch of misfits in last place and, miraculously, they make it to the championship game
• And, of course, there’s the obligatory cute-kid-with-glasses for comic relief (gee, where have I seen that before?)

Having said that, though, the movie was enjoyable from start to finish. Sure, not all the jokes were home runs (or “gooooals”, I suppose) but I had some good laughs in there. In particular — and I don’t want to ruin the punchline — the scene where Will Ferrell’s character tells his son that his son’s grandfather traded to another team has a nice twist after Ferrell’s character Phil ends up getting more worked up about the situation than his son. Oh, and apparently (if my eagle eyes don’t fail me), his son Sam uses Safari for his web browsing ;).

(Minor spoilers in this paragraph.) I’d recommend the movie to just about anyone if this genre is your bag. My only gripe, I’d say, is that the flick tended to fall back on its formula towards the end. So, Phil ends up being an effective coach but he’s just too mean and he wants to win at all cost, even to the point of benching his son who isn’t one of the better players… blah. blah. blah. His son feels discouraged and doesn’t even suit-up for the final game. Of course, Phil realizes the error of his ways, emotes an apology to his son and — how convenient — Sam’s mom happened to bring along Sam’s uniform “just in case” he decided to suit-up.

All the while, though, the filmmakers are beating us over the head with the supposed compassion of the scene through the old trick of the swelling strings. And, it wasn’t just a little bit here and there — they really poured it on and I felt like I was bobbing in a swimming pool of violins, gasping for air. Really, I could have imagined any one of these quotes spurting from the from the mouth of the director as they edited that scene:

• “I’ll be honest… fellas, it was sounding great. But… I could’ve used a little more swelling strings.”

• “I got a fever! And the only prescription… is more swelling strings!”

One last thing. Maybe it was me, but it seemed like there were an inordinate number of songs within the soundtrack which were also featured in iPod commercials. The song from the new rollerskating commercial (“Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz)? Yeah, that’s in there. And that older one from the commercial with the hipster and the dancing posters (“Ride” by The Vines)? That too.