The Rogue Estate

All the rage on teh internets right now is this Alton-Brownesque post on turning mediocre cuts of beef into prime time steakhouse delicacies.

Never being one to shy away from quality time in the kitchen, at the grill and with a plate full of cow, I picked up a pair of inexpensive cuts from the meat counter at my local Spartan store and made with the salting.

I used ground black pepper, cumin and Coriander rubbed into the steaks, both sides and salted heavily with large rock sea salt for 35 minutes.

Rinsed and dried the steaks and gave em a fresh application of black pepper, garlic and the remainder of a “montreal steak” spice blend.

Grilled over moderate heat (hardwood charcoal, not briquettes) along with a blend of shredded jack daniels oak barrel and shredded mesquite for smoke, about 3 minutes direct and 6 minutes indirect heat per side.

Fancy schmancy, I know but this was a labor of science!

The end result:

Damn tasty. And tender. Next time I’ll use a finer grind in the salt and wrap the salted steaks with glad wrap to make a tighter salt to meat contact and see what happens.

So for those who were hesitant to give this method a try - I say go for it. It’s time well spent in the pursuit of affordable steak dinners.

-bp

My idealism sends greetings from Utopia.

Eventually the real live version (yet to be completed) of Rogue Estate will delve into this subject quite a bit… for now, here it is in brief on LJ land.

Social networks, personal identity and the pipe dream of managing one profile that can be transported across multiple platforms.

A good start: http://opensocialweb.org/2007/09/05/bill-of-rights/

Seriously. Myspace, Facebook, Virb, LJ, Blogger, Twitter, Pownce, iLike, Groov, Consumating, Xanga, Joost, Flickr, YouTube… the list goes on and on and on with every possible niche having a social network built around it. It’s too much. One could make a full time job maintaining a presence on even a handful of sites, even with small interoperability hacks and inroads (for example, the widget that allows my twitter stream to be posted automatically to facebook or my Flickr photos to be posted automatically to LJ.)

And lets not forget - every time there’s a new push to a new platform, we all have to go out and spend a few weeks finding all our friends AGAIN.

The big questions are of course - who controls the master silos? (I say google.) How does it all work? how can it be kept secure? What are the limits? There will have to be definite boundaries where the centralized personal data ends and the value-added services of individual platforms begins.

I’ve spoken of it and will no doubt continue to churn away for some time to come. The big prize - the next upheaval (Web 3.0?) will be the plan that brings the dream of Write-Once-Maintain-Many a reality. RSS in reverse. Here is my chosen interface, here is my updated content - computer, do my work for me and make my life easier instead of more complicated.

Total homogeny is definitely not the goal, mind you. Facebooks, Myspaces, iLikes all have their target markets, audiences and their place on the network. The gold would be to be able to move from one to another without having to start from the ground up every time. Much like the telephone number portability law did to ease some of the pain of switching cellular network carriers, I see a social network bill of rights type concept doing for the social web.