Nine months ago when the kid was born I immediately started looking forward to the day that we could go for a bike ride together. I love biking, and sharing it with the kid is something I've looked forward to.
Jumping into research mode, I decided that I really wanted to get a front-mounted carrier for the kid. A trailer, while debatably the safest, is so disconnected you may as well be hauling a sack of potatoes. A back carrier is huge and I can't imagine very fun for the kid; staring at my rear can only be fun for 15 min or so max. Front carriers are interactive: you can see what the kid is doing, hear him, reassure him and BIKE with him. So a front carrier it is.
There's a catch though – front carriers require a very specific type of stem (the piece that connects your handlebars to your bike). 20 years ago, there was only one type of stem, known as a quill stem. These days, >90% of bikes come with a new type called a threadless stem. All the front-mounted bike seats require quill stems, and my two bikes are both threadless. So, an excuse for a new bike.
There are tons of great options for somewhat reasonable bikes with a quill stem out there, starting for just a few hundred dollars. But of course, once I started to look, I quickly realized all these things I HAD to have. I HAD to have at least 8 gears since I'll be dragging the kid around and that's a lot of extra weight. Shimano has the nexus line, but the alfine is more durable in extreme conditions. I should go with that since I'm going to have this bike for a while. As long as I'm getting the Alfine, I should look into that the Alfine 11. That nice huge range will come in handy for the flat land around my house. And I can't get by with just a coaster brake, that's really not enough stopping power and wouldn't be safe at all. If I'm going to be a responsible parent, the bike has to have decent brakes. These days, I'd really be endangering my kid if they aren't disc brakes. Those are the only good ones out there. (Rationalization is an amazing thing.)
I decided on the Retrovelo Alfons. Retrovelo is a German bike company, with a whopping four stores carrying them in the US. With the help of an amazing new bike shop in Palo Alto I ordered the Alfons – a model that no one in the US seems to actually carry. Based on the one-page catalog and picture it seemed like a great choice. What could possibly go wrong?
Bit over a month later the bike arrived. It's BEAUTIFUL. Rides like a cloud. Everything I could have ever asked for. The workmanship and attention to detail is incredible. The lugs are amazing to behold, the way the bike comes together and rides is a joy.
Oh yeah, except I can't mount that front bike seat. Apparently they switched over to a threadless stem sometime recently since they printed up the catalog.
So now I've got 3 bikes on which I can't mount my kid's seat.
A few years ago we started eating steaks at home on occasion. (Olivia was a life-long vegetarian, only starting to eat a bit of meat after much coaxing.) I was curious how different steaks compared, so we came up with the idea for a steak 'vertical' tasting. Grab a bunch of steaks of the same cut from different sources, cook 'em up and see how they do. 3 years ago when we tried it I botched it and confused some of the steaks so we really weren't sure what was the best.
With the new grill it was time to try again.
The entrants
Dry-Aged
 Prather Ranch. Pasture raised. 180 day Grain finished. 21 days dry-aged. 5 Dot. $20.50/lb. 100% Pasture raised. 21 day dry-aged.  Fatted Calf Piedmontese Beef. $25/lb. 100% pasture raised. 21 day dry-aged.  Bryan's Fine Foods. $42/lb. Grain & corn fed. 30 day dry-aged.  Golden Gate Meat Company. $25/lb. Pasture raised, grain finished. 21 day dry-aged.  Schaubs Prime Market Steak. $19/lb. Corn fed, grass finished according to the butcher!? 30 days dry-aged.- Whole Foods Dry Aged. $23/lb. Grain raised, 21+ days dry-aged. (Arrived after the photo shoot)
Not Dry-Aged
 Marin Sun Farms. Pasture fed, supplemented with grains.  Whole Foods 100% Grass Fed. $22/lb. 100% Grass Fed.  Whole Foods Grain Finished. $15/lb. Pasture raised, grass fed. 180 days grain finished  Costco USDA Prime. $13/lb. Guessing corn fed.
The plan
We had 2 of each steak. Steaks were labeled alphabetically A-L (missing G) and randomly sorted. I kept a key of which was which, and had 2 people watch during cooking and cutting to make sure we didn't mix A with B, etc.
Steaks were brought up to room tempture. Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper applied. All steaks were cooked to medium-rare on the grill, then sliced into small strips. People took a piece or two of each steak, noting on provided paper (or their plate) what they were taking. At the end there was enough for everyone to at least taste each steak that they wanted.
Notes on the tasting
Because Rib Eyes are so fatty, the slice each person got considerably affected the flavor and opinion. Parts that were right next to the fat (or even mostly fat) just taste 100% different from the pure muscle sections, even for highly marbled beef. To do this 'for real' it's clear you would need to buckle down and just eat a good part of each steak to really get a good feel for exactly how they compare.
Tasting nauances requires a trained palate. None of us had one. Unlike even wine tasting where we've been at least indoctrinated by media to compare, for steak we were all coming at it blind. On the wine analogy, it often seemed like all I we could say was "Yup, it's red wine for sure."
The texture was often the primary difference noted vs. the flavor. A few of the steaks actually tasted so similar I bet if we switched them blindly no one would have known. Others were night and day different (for good and bad).
Salt and pepper quantity made a huge difference. If you got a piece that happened to have a bit heavy or light seasoning, it totally changed the flavor profile.
The Results
I asked everyone to vote if a steak was in their Top 3. Results here are based on the highest summed score. I quickly forgot most of which was which, except for the Costco, Flannery, and Fatted Calf, so my results may be slightly biased and weren't included in the count. Results below are ranked based on the group, but notes are my own and I didn't really agree with the ranking often.
#1: Whole Foods Grain. Overall top choice. I actually wrote "Holy Cow" in my notes. It just tasted different than everything else, and in a good way. Tender, not overpowering meat flavor, true strong flavors.
#2: Costco USDA Prime. By far the sweetest steak. Tender but didn't have the buttery texture. Personally I didn't like this one though I also knew which one it was so may be biased.
#3: Fatted Calf Piedmontese. Very beefy, very tender. By far the fattest of all the steaks meaning there was huge variance between the bites. The good ones were phenomenal. The overly fatty ones may have hurt it. My favorite. So fatty it's actually even more expensive as you're going to throw away a fair bit of steak.
#4 Tied: Prather Ranch. A solid strong steak, exactly what I look for. To me tasted almost identical to Golden Gate Meat.
#4 Tied: Bryan's Fine Foods. Clear sweet flavor, but also somehow just not right. It didn't have the beef flavor that others had, more gentle than all the others. Probably a feature they selected for, but not what I'm used to or expecting. It was very tender, great texture. I knew which one this was, knew it was the most expensive, knew that Chuck says it's the best thing every, but still couldn't convince myself that it was #1 or 2 in my list.
#6: Golden Gate Meat Company. See Prather ranch, seemed almost identical to me.
#7 Tied: Schaub. Solid, slightly sweeter flavor.
#7 Tied: Whole Foods Dry Aged. Strong beef flavor, not my favorite.
#9 Tied: 5 Dot. Great flavor, but not the best texture, a little tougher. One of the thinner steaks
#9 Tied: Marin Sun Farms. The thinnest steak. Too thin. Pepper and Salt flavors were therefore strongest and the primary flavor.
#11: Whole Foods 100% Grass. Ick. No fat. Chewy. Bad flavor. Just not worth buying.
Conclusion
Personally my top 4 are Fatted Calf, Whole Foods Grain, Prather, and Golden Gate. The Whole Foods Grass was the only one flat out not worth buying. If we were to grade these on a scale of 1-10, everything would cluster in the 8-9.5 range, with the Whole Foods Grass being a 5. Or a 4. Just don't get it.
Americans are trained to like the taste of corn fed beef. That sweet soft taste is just what we're used to. Time to retrain.
I was surprised at how little I could tell the impacts of dry-aging. I tried to guess in my notes, and failed 50% of the time. It would be an illustrative future exercise to compare dry-aged and non of the same steak to learn what that tastes like.
So next time I buy a steak (maybe in 6 months after I'm no longer beef'd out), what will I buy? Fatted Calf if it's a special occasion, Prather Ranch or Golden Gate meats for a more normal meal.
From food cooking over a campfire to some obnoxiously expensive gas grill, they've all got a personality. It's the way they distribute heat. Hot spots, cool spots, the weird way piling up the coals on the left makes that one spot on the right hotter. Coal grills are probably much more consistent – there's heat where you put the coals. Gas grills, you gotta pay for that convenience of the knob. My last grill I had for >10 years, and over time learned that the back was always WAY hotter than the front and that one spot over there was just cold. And by "learned," what I really mean is ruined food all sorts of ways.
With a new grill in the backyard and the carnapocalypse coming tomorrow I wanted to get a better feel for my grill without squandering 20+ steaks. A quick trip to the grocery and one loaf of sliced white bread later, I've got some interesting insights.
I pre-heated the grill on full high for ~10 minutes. Put down slices of bread covering most of the grill. Grilled them for 45 seconds, then pulled them all off in the order I put them on. You can see above just how variable the grill is, with some insane hot spots, and other parts where the bread is basically untouched. There's clearly a spot over on the right middle that's just punishingly hot - >900 degrees is my guess. Going to try turning the grill down over there and seeing if it mellows out.
Each spot on your grill might be a bit different. Try it out, and get a feel for what's going on.
Dry-Aged
Not Dry-Aged
- Marin Sun Farms. Pasture fed, supplemented with grains.
- Whole Foods 100% Grass Fed. $22/lb. 100% Grass Fed.
- Whole Foods Grain Finished. $15/lb. Pasture raised, grass fed. 180 days grain finished
- Costco USDA Prime. $13/lb. Guessing corn fed.
I'm finally fully switched from Lightroom 2 to Aperture 3. Overall, I'm ecstatic with Aperture 3. It's UI makes more sense to me, the organization capabilities are great, the non-modal UI flows better, and the quality of pictures is great.
Syncing photos from Lightroom to my iPhone (and soon iPad!) was always painful - the best option was to export stuff in a pick-and-choose fasion to a directory, and point iTunes at that directory. Aperture adds a nice iTunes sync integration, though it's woefully lacking. Before iTunes 9.1 came out, the only option was to select from indiviual albums, without even any hiearchy. In 9.1, they've added some more selection criteria, but it's still not quite what I'm looking for. You now get to see your hiearchy you've created, plus have the ability to select faces specifically.
As most do, a typical day of shooting involves taking a good set of photos, and then picking only the best via star ratings. I have a few hundred albums of each of my shoots, and in each album there's maybe 100-500 photos, with 5 that I consider good enough to look at regularly. Ideally, I'd like to be able to tell Aperture to sync ALL albums, but only include PHOTOS that are 3 stars or more.
Instead, I'm currently contemplating setting up a smart folder structure where after I'm done editing an album, I duplicate the album into the "export" structure, with the star filter, then only select those for export. Tedious, especially for the few hundred I have in the past.
Any other suggestions or ideas out there?
Aperture 3 introuced places and faces. Both are pretty great features, but the export workflow around them isn't ideal. The information isn't actually stored anywhere logical like IPTC metadata, so depending on how you export the images, you'll get different sets of data.
I upload images both to flickr (general photo sharing) and smugmug (more portfolio work). Let's look at each:
Flickr
There are 3 ways to export images to Flickr from Aperture 3.
- Export the image as a jpeg, and upload to flickr yourself.
- Use the built in flickr sync feature
- Use a 3rd party plugin like FlickrExport
*UPDATE* - Turns out FlickrExport has a bug in the free version that doesn't include the names. The paid version works great. UPDATE 2: Communication confusion - flickrexport DOES NOT support faces at this point.
If you want BOTH faces AND places, only #1 will work. The export will convert faces to nice keywords, and embed the GPS information. Here's the example.
Using the flickr sync gives you nothing. See for yourself.
Finally, using the FlickrExport plugin gets you halfway there. You get the GPS coordinates, but not faces. According to the developer, there is no API in Aperture to get the face information, so he's stuck until apple makes it available. UPDATE - if you're using an export profile with metadata, the names will be included in the paid version.
SmugMug
There's only two options with Smugmug - #1 & #3 above. In this case I'm using the ApertureToSmugMug plugin .
No surprise, but method #1 gives you both the face name as keyword and the location. Link
Surprise for method #3 though; it works perfectly! Both GPS and the face name are exported correctly. I used a different picture so you could compare easier.
I recently bought out the lease on my car. I had a huge range of quotes, options and feedback, collected here for your benefit. Sorry, it's long.
I picked up the car through Swapalease.com last year. I assumed the lease with 13 months remaining - a perfect time for me. In my perfect world, I'd get a new car every year. As my lease came to and end (10/21/2009), I started looking around. And found nothing else I wanted. <digression> I need european cars here. I'm a wagon guy. I love the space and practicality. Throw my bike in the back. Or the dog. Or the dog, and a weekend camping gear. And still get 28+ MPG with awesome handling. I don't get SUVs. Despite looking for months, I couldn't find anything I liked better than my existing car - a 2007 BMW 328xiT manual transmission. It's red, which I hate, but otherwise is perfect.</digression>
If you'll excuse me being gauche, I'll talk turkey here and include prices.
My lease buyout was $32,000. An insane number, set back when BMW thought residuals were in the 65% range. Oops! A quick search on BMWUSA.com came up with a number of similar cars, with more options, in better colors (i.e. anything but red) AND with the extended warranty for under my residual. Moral of this part: DON'T just buy at the residual. That's for chumps these days.
First step, solicited feedback from car guys I know. Seems that BMWFS (the leasing company) doesn't negotiate with consumers. Just doesn't do it. The dealers, on the other hand, can negotiate. If they want to. I've seen conflicting information, but it appears that when your car lease is up, the dealer has the choice to buy it if they want, or else BMWFS just takes it back and sells it at auction. Some dealers will work with you, others are just lazy I guess.
I started calling dealers, trying to find out what kind of pricing I'd be looking at. I'm willing to drive for a deal (I picked the car up in Seattle), so called a few: South Bay BMW in LA, Carrera Motors in Bend, OR (the originating dealer), Peter Pan in San Mateo, CA (closest to my house) and BMW San Francisco. For each, I asked them to provide me with two quotes: one to just buy the car, and one for CPO.
Phillippe Kahn from South Bay was first. He came recommended from a car friend. I called him up at 9:15AM, explained my request and provided my VIN. 30 min later, he emailed me a quote. No hassles. Amazing service. No BS. Perfect experience. Quote was for 27.5K, +1500 CPO. Could do the straight buy out here, for CPO I need to drive down there.
Next up, BMW SF. "So, how much do you want to pay". Ummmm.... no. Give me a quote. "That's not the way BMW FS works. I'm just here working on your behalf. You give me a number, then I'll go negotiate that for you with BMW FS". Ummmm... no. Give me a quote. "I'm sorry, we can't." Look, another dealer already gave me a quote. If you want my business, let me know what it's going to cost with you. "Oh, OK, we'll provide a quote." That was a week ago. No email. No call back. Nothing. In case it's not coming across strong enough, total complete slime balls. Sleeze. Ick.
Carrera was nice, but slow and confused. I called up, spent 20 min explaining what I wanted. The sales guy asked for my VIN twice, wanted to know who I had bought it from (explained I didn't - twice). I had heard that the originating dealer can get a better price, so after not hearing back after a day I called back. Provided my VIN again. Explained that no, I didn't know who the original person bought it from. Finally, a few hours later heard back. Received a quote only over the phone. It was higher than South Bay BMW, by about $1K as I recall. Didn't write anything down since it was higher.
Peter Pan. My wife bought a car from these guys a few years ago. I liked our sales guy a lot - Hank - a great persian guy who reminds me of much of my wife's family. He's a typical sales guy, but he's been straightforward. He wants to make money, but does it 100% honestly. I dropped in to test drive a new car (hey, why not!). After heading out for 25 min on my own in a brand new 535xiT (nice, but not 2X nice for me right now), I asked him for a buyout quote. A day later he called me: $28K all-in, with CPO. Do it fast, no work for him, and he gets to keep me as a great customer. I instantly was sold. Moral here: having a relationship with a sales guy is worth it. And Hank is smart. In two years (or one?!) when I'm moving on to my next car, you can damn well be sure that he's my goto guy.
If you're in LA area, or willing to drive down, Phillippe Kahn was also awesome. Go see him.
Another fun wrinkle: BMWFS offers financing for used cars, but only if they are CPO. They have a 2.9% APR on 48 months right now. On a 20K loan, that 2.9% more than pays for the CPO cost. It's a net savings to pay more for the CPO and get the lower financing.
Hope this helps others thinking about buying out their lease.
While on vacation here in Boulder, I've been catching up on my lounging time. Lots of reading, playing games and in general full on bumminess.
After much practice, I must however conceed defeat. The cat has shown me the true power of sloth. He has been in this chair for 10 hours straight. He turns left, then right, but he does not leave the chair. He has shown me the true power of inaction.
Part of my ride on montebello was through the open space preserve. This hill was a bit tough on my road bike- it's steep enough that if I stood the back wheel just spun. I had to walk up the last bit.
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