I think I Just Lost My Galaxy Tab 10.1

Obviously I'm disappointed for the financial loss, but it was interesting. I'm traveling with four gadgets: my Nexus One, my Kindle, my Galaxy Tab 10.1, and my laptop (Dell Inspirion 17, though it hardly seems worth mentioning by brand). I made sure I had my phone - it sits prominently on my desk, and it's the one thing I use on a daily basis. My Kindle was in my backpack, where it usually sits unless it's being charged. And my laptop - it's so big and my only full computer, so I'm damn sure to not leave that behind.*

But my tablet? Sure, it was fun to whip out on the plane ride over, but I have hardly used it while my laptop was out and available. I hadn't used it in a couple of days, and I had completely forgotten about it. What does that say about its niche in my life? Even while I was at home I had it replace my laptop as my kitchen gadget, but where I could look up any recipe on any website on a 17" screen, I now had to make due with a very stretched out Food Network app that was a little difficult to search while I was in the thick of it.

When I was in five year-old kindergarten I brought my Sega Game Gear to school and promptly got it stolen from my backpack. Tears were shed (and not just because I never figured out how to beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2). Now that my second portable electronic device has been ripped from my hands, though I'm not nearly as torn up about it. Where does that leave me? $600 poorer, for starters, but as much as I used to tell people just how much tablets really were content consumption devices, I didn't realize it until I owned one myself.

- I watched videos on it.
- I surfed the web on it.
- I played games on it.

...And I think I want something more out of my devices.

My biggest fear was the vulnerability of my personal information, but I rectified it by activating Google's Two Factor Authentication. Any device that isn't explicitly granted access will not be allowed to access my Google Account, and you can revoke access from your computer at any time. I recommend all Google users do the same.

I put my name and phone number on the lock screen. If it was just a serious case of me misplacing it, I might get a call. Otherwise, I hope they enjoy playing Fruit Ninja and watching Seasons 1 and 2 of Taxi for six hours, because the battery's not going to last much longer than that and I have the power cable.**

*Incidentally, my laptop cost just about as much as my tablet.

**Turns out this is a benefit to having a proprietary cable design.

Replacing Facebook

Six years after getting in on the ground floor of Facebook (well, the first or second floors, at least - December '06), I've come to adamantly despise the site. I signed up for a private communication tool between me and my college friends; the Facebook of today is an all-inclusive public communication tool, chat client, games hub, search engine, universal commenting system, like-harvesting, check-in, and Q&A site that fights against me to make as much of my content as public as possible in order to sell to advertisers.

With each passing year comes an increasing burden upon us to control our digital identity. The data I share on my profile dictates that I keep my privacy at a high level, and that makes it a poor choice to broadcast to the world. At the same time, there are aspects of Facebook which I like, but don't like the manner in which they implement, or have found sites around the Web that do a better job of it. My favorite TV Shows and movies are a good example - on an older version of Facebook, I listed Dexter as a favorite show of mine and was done with it. A couple of upgrades ago, they forced me to convert it into a Like, so now I have "useful" promotional information about the show shoved into my News Feed with no way to completely remove it. Similarly, my "favorite movies" section included the phrase "the films of Mel Brooks," which got converted into a gibberish Like link that went nowhere, and which I could only fix by removing entirely. Now it looks like I don't like any shows and movies, when the exact opposite is true.

My news feed is a collection of people who think other people care about every minute slight that occurs against them in their daily lives; a place for recent or soon-to-be mothers to complain about the inconveniences of pregnancy or to document how raising their ugly kids has completely put an end to them doing anything interesting with their lives; a trap for stupid people to display to the world their stupidness by posting status updates riddled with misspellings, the latest plea for those suffering from the Whogivesashit disease, or a request to be their friend in whatever time-killing game is currently distracting them from contributing to society.

As each incremental update has been met with more consternation by Yours Truly, I've made a bigger push to move as much content as I can outside of Facebook and into more powerful and more segregated platforms. Thanks to Google Profiles and a slew of other services, I think I've exceeded what Facebook has to offer in many respects, but there are still some aspects that work best within the service. Photo tagging, for example. The all-inclusiveness of the News Feed can't really be found anywhere else, either, which affects engagement, and it's really one of the only reasons why I don't just shut down my account altogether. Despite the participation of seemingly the entire world, Facebook isn't too big to fail, and once more people reach the point at which they are sick of the site telling them how to be social, maybe we'll realize that for social to be effective, it needs to be on the open web. In the meantime, I'll still have some sort of presence on The Social Network, though it will continue to dwindle, so you can reach me there, doing a search for "Brad Seehawer" on Google, or by going to www.bradseehawer.com . 

The Hangover Part II, or How Many Times Will We Reference This Exact Premise Happening to Us Three Years Ago

Check-in Fatigue

I just checked in four times with four different services. The thing is, they all still each have their own unique features that make me want to continue using them, but if I'm getting sick of it, I can't imagine how regulars users feel.

By the way, the new Blogger app is pretty nice.

Lean Cuisine Review #4: Spaghetti With Meat Sauce

Spaghetti with meat sauce with mushrooms and basil

In my youth, I was a spaghetti freak. I guess it started with my grandparents, who fed me the Franco-American Spaghetti (not Spaghetti-O’s) when I used to go to their apartment after school. By the time I was older - 8 or 9, I’d imagine (they died when I was 10) – I was making them myself. It was a simple process – open can, put into a pot (in thinking about it, I don’t think they owned a microwave), and heat until done.

In my early teens, I was a latchkey kid, and often had to make my own dinners. Sticking with what I know, it turns out it was easy to make actually spaghetti, too – boil water, strain, and heat up a jar of sauce in the microwave. I experimented through many iterations – browning some ground beef, opening up a can of mushrooms, adding some dried basil and oregano - getting real crazy with it.

I bring this up because the Lean Cuisine spaghetti I ate from this box tasted exactly like what I used to make as a young adolescent – overcooked noodles, sweet sauce with blatant dried herbs, canned, rubbery mushrooms, and tasteless ground beef. It didn’t taste bad by LC standards, and even less so given my fondness for the dish, but I could have easily made the same dish myself in less than 15 minutes. The only benefit to getting it in a Lean Cuisine is the portion control, and the ability to have it in 5 minutes, and I don’t want to pay $2.50 for that. I guess there’s a reason they call these “simple favorites,” and there’s also a reason why I haven’t liked one from this lineage yet.

Travelog: Milwaukee Part 1

What began as essentially a quarterly return home during the Spring and Summer Breaks, Thanksgiving, and Christmas during my college years has reduced to simply the two actual holidays at the end of the year, as it turns out that real life doesn't have a week-long breaks.

Despite the day's worth of travel it takes to return to Milwaukee, even now that I'm living in the dead center of the United States, and further despite the age of my car (which passed 100,000 miles on the way up), I've liked the drives ever since I got my car - I'm alone somewhere in the world between who I am and who I was, and in that undefined space I can be whoever I want to be. Also, I like to sing. There's usually one city in which I stop along the way - if only because I don't like paying for lodging all that much. This time, Des Moines, Iowa was the place, though really, so long as there's a good place to eat and a reasonably clean bed, any city would do.

I did encounter a bit of strife by way of my phone. I tried Glypse, a pretty cool app that allows you to share yourself riding or driving somewhere, but you can specify exactly who gets access and for who long. Aside from the slicker interface and the minute sharing detail, it's not unlike what I already offer my parents with Latitude, but they found the concept of a one-time instance rather than an always-on product more accessible.

About an hour away from Des Moines, I noticed I was getting low memory warnings on my Nexus One. It was nothing new - I get them all the time due to the small amount of internal memory and the fervor with which I download apps, and I figured that Glypse was saving my trip data to the internal memory rather than the SD card. Except that after exiting Glympse, it didn't free up that memory. In fact, it looked like the amount of memory was still actively decreasing, and resetting the phone nor uninstalling Glympse did anything to rectify it. Before long, I was down to mere kilobytes of drive space remaining, and programs were failing on me left and right. It wouldn't have been so worrisome if my phone wasn't my only source for navigation and search, so I was worried that I wouldn't get to a place to stay before my phone completely stopped working.

Ultimately, I made it, though I ultimately had to restore my phone to its factory defaults and spent the rest of the night reinstalling apps. I think the Market was having some problems, as 2/3 of my attempts to download apps failed, which served as really bad timing. I had 75% of my apps back to normal by the morning, thanks to AppBrain, and 100% of my data was still there thanks to all the important stuff being saved either in the cloud or on the SD card. On the plus side, I had an extra 30MB to play around with, thanks to all the temporary files being cleared out. I guess it's good to start anew every once in a while. I don't think I'll be trying Glympse again.

Ever since my food revolution after graduating college, I’ve become more and more interested in the hyperlocal – supporting local restaurants, getting interested into the history behind the city in which I’m living, and taking part in the uniqueness of each of these cities. My choice of beer is a good example of this – when going to a restaurant or bar to which I’ve never been before, my initial choice for beer goes:

· Whatever’s local
· Microbrew
· Macrobrew
· Domestic

And even the domestics prioritize to my local roots – Miller, Coors, and finally, Bud. Over the past three years, I’ve grown to embrace what’s different about different parts of the country, whether it’s the large Mexican influence on Del Rio and San Antonio, the Germanic roots of Milwaukee, or – as I just recently realized – the Lebanese history of Wichita. They all have an influence on what defines the area, and too many people are too content with eating from chain restaurants and living in a bubble of comfort that makes the city interchangeable.

I didn’t come to this realization until after leaving Milwaukee, though, so I’ve been making attempts to get as much of an experience as possible while at home. I think I made a good a go of it, visiting a handful of contemporary restaurants, some old ones featuring some classic Milwaukee dishes, and a culinary walk down Old World Third street, a part of Downtown that is preserved in the way it used to look a century ago. Cheese, sausage, and beer were all acquired.

Of course, there was also Thanksgiving. As my mother and two aunts both had two children each, it’s interesting to watch how the demographics have changed over time – some of those children moved away, some started families of their own with holidays to match, and some still swing by to say hello and politely decline a slice of pie. The “moving away” demographic is a very small one, as it seems that Milwaukee has a way of sucking you into staying based upon the proximity in which all of those aforementioned aunts and children live in proximity to each other.

I wouldn’t mind living closer on this holiday, as it would give me a chance to participate more in the cooking. On the plus side, it probably avoids some uncomfortable arguments between traditions-based cooking and the science and trend-following of contemporary food lore to which I subscribe. I think I have made some progress – my mom thinks highly of brining the turkey based upon a good experience from a few years ago – though her sisters still think that basting a turkey does something. I know how annoying it can be to have someone constantly criticizing you, especially when it comes to something personal like cooking – so I made a conscious effort to avoid contention whenever possible.

I did at least play some role in the dessert portion of the evening – I’ve wanted to try Chow’s fruitcakes for the past several years, though given the time they needed to age I never got started in time. I got it together this year, making all three of the fruitcakes, plus the Good Eats version, and aged them for around 2 weeks. They were a pain to make in themselves, between the cost of all those dried fruits, the cooking, the basting, and the figuring out what to do with three extra fruitcakes (the Chow recipes made two loafs per, and because I knew getting rid of four loaves was going to be difficult enough, I forced the extras on friends.
Everyone wrinkles their nose when they hear “fruitcake,” though at this point it’s merely because of the stigma that has carried them since the time when anyone ever ate the tough and dense cakes during the holiday season, and it’s this distaste that interested me enough to go with this fruitcake tasting. Unfortunately, I don’t think I managed to sway anyone’s opinions, including my own – I don’t know if it was the cold environment of the car or the amount of booze, but I got real sick of the fruit real fast, and the cakes weren’t exactly dry, but not exactly moist, either. In the end, I threw most of them away. The odd thing is, I had a little extra batter left from the first fruitcakes I made, and it got spilled into a cake pan I had lying around. The resulting fresh fruitcake I liked quite a bit, and got though it in a matter of days. Of course, having four slices of fruitcake, each featuring a different type of basting alcohol, and each being an end slice (concentrating the booze flavor) probably didn’t help matters, either, as I had a bit of a buzz going afterwards.

I don’t mind making mistakes in life - partly because I know they make me a better person, but also largely because I know I’m going to make them regardless of what I do, so I might as well accept it – but I try to be careful about it in interactions with other people, especially when introducing them to new things or maintaining a social status as an expert on the subject. Initially, you have to work hard and have a good backing of successes for people to trust in you – fail too early, and you might not get another chance. Here’s an example:

When I went to Birmingham with my crew, we had a van in which we all traveled, and being unfamiliar with a new city, we used our GPS applications on our phones to find the way. I was quick to step into this position early in the trip, and as a result I was considered the go-to guy for the task until one time when I accidentally took us to the wrong location. After that, you could feel their trust in me get sucked out through the cracks in the window, and the resulting ribbing I suffered verbally confirmed it, too.

I probably salvaged myself with the fruitcakes by virtue of very few people being interested in trying it to begin with, though it was overall probably a loss. I think I did better with the Good Eats pumpkin pie recipe, which I was quick to try after the showed aired because I’d always wondered how to eat an actual pumpkin, and because I simply like the pie. It was overall more successful if only because it wasn’t a radical change – there was already another pumpkin pie on the table – this one just tasted more pumpkin-y. Personally, I liked the gingersnap crust on mine, too, though I don’t care for how it holds up in the recipe.

This holiday season is shaping into a largely technological one, especially in my family. Desktops, laptops, printers, iPods, iPhones, e-readers, TVs, the Kodak Zi-8 (that one was for me) – this is partly because of necessity (the computers especially – my family just became used to how slow their computers were) and partly because the prices are entering the realm of the reasonable. Despite this, my Black Friday shopping was done entirely behind a computer, though I was still up at 0430, and I still went out to see the mayhem. Also, to get a Foursquare badge.

I scored a good amount of crap for me, too – namely another nine Threadless shirts when I’m already running out of closet space, my annual $100+ beer run to Three Cellars where I stock up on the good stuff I can’t get back in Kansas, and another two 2TB internal hard drives on the cheap from Newegg, bringing my total computer storage to 14TB. I’m not sure, but I think I’ve increased capacity by a solid 10TB since this time last year. When will the madness end?

Both on my outbound and return trips to Kansas I was able to knock off another two Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives locations off my list. As there’s only two more in the state (on the Kansas side of Kansas City), I’m going to focus on those on my return trip this month so I can close out the state. After that there should be another four or so on the Missouri side of KC, and I should be good there, too. I thought I could scratch off Wisconsin, but they recently had a taping for a restaurant in Superior, WI, which is way the hell on the northwest side of the state, near Duluth, so I don’t know if I’ll ever get up there (though I think it would be interesting to have driven the entirety of I-35 from San Antonio to its end in Duluth.

I think this was one of the more productive of my trips – I didn’t really spend a whole lot of time trying to find something to do, and I was able to focus on the family, though this was done at the expense of the few friends I have left in Milwaukee. By bringing them back into the fold for the New Year’s vacation and trying to juggle it with my family and the typically more social New Years (I would love to get fucked up and go to Girl Talk’s NYE show at the Rave, but I don’t have anyone to go with), but I’m sure I can organize everything so that everyone who wants a little Brad gets a little Brad.

A Beer a Day

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I got the idea to take pictures of beer bottles from the folks who physically collect the things, because I wanted to admire the variety without having to deal with finding a way to clean and store hundred of fragile beer bottles.

In cleaning out the content of my camera's memory card and adding all the new beers I've dunk over the months, I've realized that I started collecting pictures on December 9th of last year. And with 371 pictures in my collection, that amounts to nearly a new beer a day!

We are in the middle of a microbrew revolution in the United States, and I encourage everyone to go out an explore the myriad types of beers available in your local beer purveyor.