The Rogue Estate

Both as a motivator to write more and as a method of regular content generation, I’ve decided over dinner tonight to publish a short article detailing my daily cooking adventures as time and said culinary activity permit.

The plan: I’ll keep notes as I cook and publish my recipe, the photo I always take for my Flickr album, and of course if it’s a recipe I didn’t make up myself, a link to the source. For the meals which I’m honored with guests, I’ll include their comments on the meal as well.

With that being written, grab a fork and let’s dig in to this evening’s dinner:

Mixed vegetables with pork bacon and chicken breast rubbed with Penzey’s Bavarian blend

The goods:

• 1 large chicken breast, deboned and sliced into medallion size chunks
• 5 strips of pork bacon
• 1 red bell pepper, sliced into strips
• 1/2 sweet white onion, chopped
• 4 baby bella mushroom caps, chopped
• 1/2 ~6″ zuccinni, halved and sliced thin
• 14-18 baby asparagus stalks, cut into 1/3’s
• handful of fresh italian parsely
• 2 tbs butter
• black pepper & salt to taste
• Penszey’s Bavarian seasoning blend
• 1/2 fresh lemon

The inspiration for this one was “what’s in the fridge that I’d better use before it spoils.”

I started by adding the bacon strips to a hot pan to fry until crispy.

While the bacon was frying, I sliced the chicken into medallion sized pieces and coated both sides with the Bavarian blend and set aside.

When the bacon was finished, I removed it to a paper plate to cool and left the bacon drippings in the pan as a lubricant, reduced the heat to medium and placed the chicken in to brown on each side while I chopped the vegetables.

Added onions first, then zucchini, peppers, onions and mushrooms. tossed in some more Bavarian and covered to steam for 5 minutes. Gave everything another toss and added the parsley and asparagus. Also chopped and returned the bacon, added coarse ground black pepper, butter and covered again to steam for another 5 minutes.

Served in a bowl with salt to taste. It was a good dinner, although a bit tame in comparison to some of the hot pepper and garlic taste explosions which are my common fare. In retrospect, it could have used a good squeeze of lemon just before serving to give it a little more bite.

If you use one of my recipes or you’d just like to have me cook you dinner, leave a comment below. ;)

-///

Fast look up JP and EN - Navi

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Two weeks ago after many years of lusting to own a Macbook of my very own and may months of saving money to do just that, I made my dream purchase: a shiney new 15? MacBook Pro. It arrived on Valentines day and there is no amount of chocolate hearts that could have torn me away from it.Hands down the most amazing and wonderful computer owner / user experience ever. And I’ve owned and used a lot of computers in my time. The bar was set very high for me at a young age with the Commodore Amiga. Apple has outdone even that deeply ingrained machine-love.

Today, a mere 12 days after my beloved MBP came into my life, Apple went live with the oft rumored, oft non-materialized MBP product refresh. While nothing overly dramatic, the features updated were enough to sting a little. Video ram doubled, CPU bump, and the highly anticipated multitouch trackpad.

I began looking at Apple’s RMA options and any protections I might have from CitiBank, since I used my Citi card to make the purchase for those added benefits. (and paid it right back with the money in my savings, one of the many “tricks” I learned from reading Consumerist every day). Hoping to avoid a 10% restock on an RMA, which would have been $240, I decided to call Apple to inquire about exchange options. Couldn’t hurt to ask, right?

Lately this is the point of a story where folks expect the other shoe to drop, for a tale of joy to turn into a nightmare. I’m happy to report the opposite. After a 15 minute hold time, which is totally acceptable given it’s an Apple new release day - I was greeted by AnneMarie, who took some information from me, put me on hold for a moment while she verified the policies and options, and then helped me set up the RMA and such, explained everything and then transferred me to Sy, and apple hardware sales guy who stepped through the new order for me.

Everyone was friendly, well informed, empowered to make decisions, insuring superior customer service and helpful beyond all expectations. Apple is cross shipping the updated MacBook Pro to me with expedited shipping at no extra charge, an RMA label is being emailed and when they receive my returned item, my account will be credited in full.

The end result - I get the updated product at no additional cost from my original purchase and Apple gets a loyal customer for life who can and does not only wax poetic on all the virtues of the hardware and software products, but also on the fantastic customer service experience, and even goes so far as to blog about it.

Thank you, Apple. Very well done.

-///

[UPDATE 03/11/08] The replacement MBP arrived a mere 3 days after my call to Apple, right off the assembly line in China to my front door. I moved my data and apps over and shipped the previous MPB back and my creditcard was refunded within hours of the package being delivered. No fuss, no muss! Thanks again, Apple Care - you guys are great to work with.  -///

Nerds who like color, flock together - or some such clever thing. In my quest to create a design for this very site which be even better than an eye massage, I’ve stumbled across the ultimate color palette tool - Adobe Lab’s Kuler. (flash required)

The site hosts a community of color nerds who create, share and rate swatches, complete with RSS feeds for catagories such as “newest” and “popular”. The editor tool itself is really fun to use, as well as extremely detailed. instant visual feedback for any and all adjustments  which show just how those adjustments effect the swatch as a whole make for an extremely interactive user experience.

I figure if by the time you are reading this blog that the color scheme doesn’t make you wince with pain, it means we all have Kuler to thank.-bp

I ordered the new Negativland DVD “Our Favorite Things” a couple weeks ago from a vendor on Amazon’s marketplace. It arrived this afternoon, much to my delight. I was getting rather impatient.

I had previously heard a working cut of the bonus audio CD by the 180G’s who happen to be natives of Detroit, and of whom the various members are responsible for plenty of great audio wanderings. The finished product is every bit as fantastic as the earlier version, complimented by the finishing production touches. Imagine if you will, 13 of Negativland’s more popular tracks, all rendered by the human voice alone. Samples and lyrics of the original songs lovingly recreated a capella. Absolutely brilliant. My original purchase motivation was this CD and in my opinion the DVD content is the bonus for my money.

What a bonus it is. The weatherman sample that opens the disc is telling - “Do you COPY…over?”. To say Negativland’s content decisions are bizarre doesn’t even begin to describe what I’m seeing and hearing. As expected, it’s a audio/video mish mash of found content, samples and otherwise dubiously acquired items mixed in with oddities created by the group themselves. This is probably as close to a music video collection as one can get from the pioneers of today’s sample-happy music and video cultures. Long time fans will no doubt “give a fuck” that a section of the DVD deals directly with the letter U and the number 2.

This is a definitely DVD and CD set for the established Negativland fan. it’s a well rounded package, slick, well produced and worth the time spent listening and watching. A new viewer or listener being exposed to this as an introduction to the band (if they can be called a band, I fear that may be an insult) will probably be confused to the point of being put off, as it does tend to come off like an inside joke a lot of the time.

-bp

The sale of LJ to SUP - and really, people.. so what? Do you honestly think they’re going to change the site and make it unattractive to it’s users after investing millions of dollars into it? That would be a pretty dumb business plan.

The Beacon ordeal on Facebook is more interesting to me. See this PC world article for an overview of the technical issue… and this Idea Shower Article for a potentially useful method of blocking the data exchange between FB and partner sites.

The above countermeasure requires firefox, but you’re all really smart people and you all use firefox for a safer and more rewarding web browsing experience anyway.

-bp