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.

How is this even possible? Where do they get these numbers? And why is this entire pile Motorola V60’s?

The numbers are admittably too large for the human mind to truly grasp, much like a those of a holocaust… it doesnt sit right. How is it even possible that many people are getting that many new cel phones on average every single day?

426,000 cel phones per day, 365 days - that equals 155,490,000 cel phones per year, in the US alone for a current estimated population of 302,442,586. By these numbers, every year over 50% of the US population including infants and old timers ditches their phones and grabs new ones.

I suspect these numbers to be a bit… exaggerated. Even taking the iPhone explosion into consideration. I can’t be the only person still adhering to “new every two” to save a few bucks.

-bp

Despite my regular urgings, most of my nerdy friends continue to resist signing up for twitter as though it would trash their computers and sign them up for magazine subscriptions. It’s time to get on the bandwagon as ancillary apps are being rolled out with increasing frequency which have the potential of turning this web2.0 curiosity into a legitimately useful tool.

My current favs - Twittercal, which allows me to add quick items to my google calendar via a simple SMS to the “Mr Gcal” twitter member and Timer, which I can schedule quick reminders via SMS to be sent to me after any interval I specify.

The beauty of both of these in conjunction with Twitter is that I don’t need to use a web browser or even a web enabled phone to make things happen. Elegance in simplicity.

There are a few others with more on the way - this very type of development is what convinced me to throw my hat in the ring and learn to hack code. ReTweet is keeping a decent list as is the Twitter Fan Wiki.

Get to it. I wouldn’t bother writing about it, much less using it if it was a waste of time. Don’t forget to add my account to your buddy list.

-bp

…And so it shall. I posted a text link to this on my LJ today and in so doing have probably sold as many 3-packs of this stuff as the posting on Dethroner where I originally saw it. Those guys are going to be rich. Perhaps I can get my first sponsorship deal from them.

Per my friend Angie, there shall be a Bacon Salt cook-off in Detroit on a date to be determined this fall when her kids are back in school. Everyone who picked this up today best be prepared to represent.

Make it happen.