vaporloop

I had MLK day off for the first time in many years.  It’s been cold and snowy here in Massachusetts and we all needed to get out of the house and relieve some cabin fever.  I’d heard about Five Guys Burgers and Fries on the Phantom Gourmet and, since the cheeseburger is perhaps the most perfect food created I decided we should take a little trip to Foxborough Stadium to try out Five Guys at Patriot Place and then take our daughter to Bass Pro Shop to see the “fishies”.

There’s not a lot of room to walk at Five Guys as they’ve packed as many tables and chairs as can be fit into the space.  The menu is pretty simple Burgers. Dogs. Fries. Soda.  Oh and some sort of obligatory “veggie” sandwich.  I ordered a Cheesburger naked (the way any self-respecting cheeseburger conniseur should have a cheesburger) and Cat ordered a Cheesburger with Lettuce, Tomato and Ketchup.  We split an order of their peanut-oil fried fries.  Once you order there’s really nowhere for you to go while you wait, so there’s a throng of people milling about at the end of the counter waiting for their food.  The condiment bins are located at the end of the counter as well so it gets annoying that you are constantly bumped around by people coming up for ketchup and napkins and malt vinegar.

Burgers were well-done, but not cooked beyond recognition, and very tasty.  Five guys burgers are actually two burgers with two slabs of  gooey American cheese between two buns. Five Guys is famous for their fries as well, as they are happy to remind you with clippings of quotes about their french fries plastered all over the walls. I thought the hand-cut fries were okay, but they tasted more like peanut oil and less like potatoes.   This is not a place to sit and linger over lunch.  As I mentioned, the tables are so packed in that I was constantly being pushed and prodded by people trying to get by me on their way to secure a table or get more ketchup.

If you’ve never been, it’s worth a shot, but I’m not buying into the hype just yet. I’ll give it another go next time I’m over in Foxborough.  There’s probably one near you somewhere.  You can look at their site: http://www.fiveguys.com/home.aspx.  But if you’re in my neck of the woods, I recommend you head to Joff’s Backyard Grill in Bellingham, MA for your next Cheesburger fix.  This South African transplant makes the best burgers in Southeastern MA, and the fire roasted wings rock as well.

then please train me.

Over the last two days my employer required me, along with 25 or so of my coworkers, to attend a training session for an internal project management tool.  The training was led by one of the engineers that developed the tool.  Now I have nothing against Engineers, I am friends with several.  However most of the engineers I know –  software, electrical, civil — are great at what they do, but lack the ability to explain how to use what they engineer to the average Joe, whether Joe happens to be a rocket scientist, project manager, fellow engineer, or even a plumber. 

When corporations decide they are going to require large numbers of people to attend a training I propose they evaluate the trainer with what I’ll call the Food Network test.  Cooking is really just a process of steps to complete a task.  Granted talk of BBQ ribs, Filet Mignon and Bleu Cheese will wake up most ears quicker than pointing to dialog boxes and drop-down lists, but what makes me land on the food network while channel surfing and lose a half-an-hour of my life is not what so much what’s being cooked, but the excitement and passion Rachel Ray or Bobby Flay or Emeril Lagassi convey when they are presenting the process.  Of course I’ll stop to watch Giarda De Laurentis boil water in silence, but that’s another blog.  Should every PowerPoint presentation be interrupted with a loud “Bam!” between each slide? No. But the presenter needs to convey “I am excited about this because it will help you do your job better/faster/easier/more efficiently and when we’re done you’ll be almost as excited as I am!”  So if the trainer can’t captivate his or her audience, please please please find someone else to present the training.

Corporations also need to decide if something is truly training, or just an overview.  Hint: If it’s a Power Point deck with 150 slides and some screenshots it’s NOT training.  Training means that when you leave you know how to do something.  When I went to driver training I watched a slide-show (okay, a filmstrip, I’m old) with diagrams of the proper moves to parallel park and then I went outside and did it in a real car.  If you’re only showing the process and not reinforcing any learning with “see it, now do it” then the time the corporation is “investing in you” is money and productivity down the toilet forever. If 75 people took this 6 hour training and it costs an average of $40 an hour per person to have them working for you that’s $18,000 blown.  For $12,000 the company could purchase 12 decent laptops and the trainees could actually practice what they are being taught and retain it. Instead of 6 hours per employee you could have someone trained in 2 hours.  And the 12 laptops purchased are there for the next training session. 

I’ll stop trying to make sense now.

There were some great photos here:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/the_inauguration_of_president.html

Then I started reading some of the comments posted by Obama devotees and saw this one:

Why I voted for Obama?
I am a Denver native, study at BU .
My grandparents and parents
are lifelong Republicans. 08 was my
first time vote and I voted for Obama.
Here is why:
My generation have first hand knowledge
of low wage jobs because over 90% of
us have summer and/or year round
jobs as early as we can both in high shool
and college . This is not because we
are diligent or have nothing to do but because
our so called “middle class” parents unable to give us decent amount allowance on regularly basis. As such we have to work from mid teen years, in supermarkets, department stores, restaurants, gas station.etc
you name it, everywhere, day and night.
(study show that at least 40% US service and retail sectors jobs were staffed by cheap student labors since 80’s.) And many of us witness our “Middle class” parents fighting periodically due to money. WE know intimately that under our parents so called Middle Class image is daily struggle on the never ending worry for mortgage, car loan, credit card payments etc. We know how hard it is to earn enough to fund a weekend gateaway or a music instructment or an used car from our students jobs even though we don’t pay room and board.
All the so called middle class I met in in my life are Fake, they are under class pretend to be middle class due to social and/or peer pressure!!
As such we, milions college students can
resonate and support Obama’s Message:
Spread the Wealth. Because we are Honest, we
don’t want to pretend rich in front our friends, neighbors etc. Because we don’t want to use credit cards to fund our basic needs and at the same time claim ourself middle class, we are not!. The Massive low income work place
is the breeding ground for young, loyal Democrats for next 8 or more elections.
We, the Democrats will Lock In the Executive Branch (White House) for at
least 30 years for sure.
President Obama: we, more than 130 Millions
working poor Caucasian Adults can’t endure the unendurable indefinitely. Please spread the wealth, Thank you!

Posted by bu studennt with massive student loan. January 22, 09 12:32 PM

Okay, I guess B.U. no longer requires one to know how to write.  Just come up with your $50k and welcome to Kenmore Square.  Please, spread the wealth Mr. President.  Take the money from those rich corporate bastards that own the gas stations and department stores and fast-food chains and give it to us, the working poor who will never make more than minimum wage because we can’t write a cohesive fucking sentence!   Dear bu studennt with massive student loan…  Where are the rest of your working poor Caucasian Adults going to work when the gas stations, fast-food chains and Wal-Marts stop hiring “cheap student labors” because Obama heeded your request and spread the wealth?  Who is going to hire you when (hopefully after four years and 200 grand) you leave B.U. with the ability to compose a sentence and are looking for your first real job with a small company?  If the person that wants to hire you makes over $200,000 and Obama decides to put them in the higest tax-bracket guess what? You’re not getting hired because the money you were going to get paid now has to go to pay more taxes to “spread the wealth”.    Please, dear studennt, please get all you can from your very expensive education, and learn that “spreading the wealth” will spread only more poverty and unemployment.

Verizon FiOS came to my street a little over a year ago.  With the promise of a free 19″ flat screen TV and lower monthly bills than Comcast was offering I decided to make the switch from cable to FiOS.  Having lived with FiOS for a year now I can report on the good, bad and ugly of switching to FiOS.

 

The Good:

FiOS TV: The picture quality is excellent.  I purchased a 42″ Philips 1080p LCD and connected it to the HD box.  One of the first shows we were able to watch in HD was the Planet Earth series on Discovery Channel.  When a program is shot in HD from start to finish the picture quality is truly amazing.  You do almost feel like you are in the picture.  My wife is not a huge football fan, but watching the Superbowl in HD almost made her a convert (better luck in 2010, Patriots).  There are now about 100 HD channels available in the lineup, but we rarely switch between HGTV and Food Network.

 

One thing to realize about FiOS (and Comcast, I believe) is that the maximum picture quality you will get from your provider is 1080i.  Unless you are going to hook up a Blu-ray player or other 1080p source to your TV the extra expense for a 1080p TV set will not be realized.

 

DVR: The interface on the DVR is leaps and bounds ahead of what I had with Comcast, however, it still isn’t as good as TiVo  (Comcast is now offering TiVo with it’s service, so I may ultimately switch back).  Fortunately the search feature is pretty easy to use, as there are over 1400 numbered channels on the lineup now.  The remote is also much better than the Comcast remote I had (one of the least intuitive designs I’ve ever seen).  Again, the TiVo remote was still my favorite for comfort, design and intuitiveness, but the FiOS remote isn’t bad. 

 

Home Phone: It works like a phone should work.

 

Internet:  The speed is a little slower than I had with Comcast (5Mbps down versus 8 with Comcast) but I don’t do a lot of stealing music or movies or software so I have yet to find myself frustrated by the connection speed.  Setting up my VPN to my office was also hassle free and works with little to no lag most of the time.  The wireless router/modem combination works well, with plenty of range.  The router is in my attic office and we get an excellent signal throughout our 3000 sf house.  Two wireless laptops and a Wii all connect without issue at a consistent 45-54 mbs and an “excellent” signal strength.

 

The Bad:

Cost:  Verizon advertises Phone, TV and Internet packages at around $120 a month.  Unlike cable, however, you can’t plug a TV into the coaxial jack and get basic cable like I was able to do with Comcast.  This means you need a box in every room.  An HD box with DVR and Home Media features costs about $20 a month.  The Home Media feature allows you to watch what’s on the DVR on another TV set, which we do find handy.  However, the home media feature is also supposed to also allow you to view your photos and listen to music from your computer.  It works, but it’s painfully slow.  The software you need to install on your computer indexes your photos and makes thumbnails.  So now I have Windows thumbs.db files, my Zoombrowser (Canon camera) thumbnails, and my Verizon home media thumbnails.  I need more hard-disk space to store thumbnails than to store my actual pictures.  Again, TiVo had this nailed perfectly, and I miss you both dearly. Standard definition boxes add another $5 a month to your bill.  We have 3 HD capable TVs in our house, but only one HD box as we don’t want to pay another $20 a month to have HD on all of our HD capable sets.  Movie packages run about $20 and up .  Here’s the break down of our bill:

 

The Triple Freedom Package (TV, Phone, WWW) $99.99

Movie Package (everything but HBO and Cinemax) $12.99

2 Standard Def Boxes   $9.98

Home Media DVR HD    $19.99

Taxes $14.15

For a total of $157.10

 

With a rental or two my bill is more on the average of $170 per month, or about $25 more than I was paying for cable.

 

Phone:  My only complaint… no call waiting caller ID.

 

 

The Ugly:

DVR:  The DVR contains a 60GB hard drive.  When the hell was the last time anyone bought a 60GB hard drive?  I bought 500GB drives over a year ago for less than $150.  You’d think that at the very least there would be a 120 or 200GB drive.  Even with nothing recorded the DVR is always 50% full (maybe because it is caching what’s currently on?).  We like to keep a handful of kid shows on the DVR for our daughter, and there are a few series that we follow and the DVR is always nearly full.  If you want to record HD you’re limited to about 4-6 hours of total storage.  Recording only SD channels bumps that up to about 40 hours, but what’s the point of a HD DVR and TV if you have to record everything in SD?  There’s a FireWire port on the front of the DVR that I would love to plug my own external drive into, but the port is disabled and can’t be used.

 

Conclusion:

I’m going to give Verizon a few more months, and see what Comcast has to offer in competition.  FiOS is better than the Comcast I left, but it may not be better than the Comcast I return to, if that includes a true TiVo package.

I was hoping to launch this blog on 1/1 but our son had other plans.  Not in time for the tax deduction, and too late for the 1st baby of 2009, he decided to join our family on 1/2.  It’s been almost two weeks and we’re trying to figure out what “normal” now entails. 

 Why am I launching a blog?  I’m glad you asked.  My parents spent what was then a lot of money in 1989-93 to send me to college to get a degree in English. Since then I’ve written a lot more code than prose.  The code’s paid my way for the last dozen or so years, but only a few people are able to read it.  In an attempt to dust off the right side of my  brain I decided that this was the year to start writing about stuff. Stuff that I hope you’ll find interesting, entertaining, humorous, and perhaps even informative.  That, and everyone else is doing it.

Happy new year.