Lone Locust Productions

Author: Eugene Glover

  • It’s not quite “Money for nothing”

    It seems like just yesterday when I was waxing poetic about my thoughts on environmentalism, recycling and the Taiwanese psyche about finding news ways to skirt any inconvenient laws.

    I’m humorously reminded of it in this article Taichung: No More Full of Sh*t at The View from Taiwan. In it, Mr. Turton explains the city of Taichung’s new plan to get citizens to clean up after their dogs… by issuing vouchers… when you trade in your dog’s… you-know-what… to the government.

    Go on, read it. You know you want to…

  • Light Rail, Tempe Wins

    We drove beside the light rail lines along Apache Blvd in Tempe today.

    25 years ago, I used to live on Apache, near McClintock. While much of the street, particulary as you head east towards Mesa, still has its old “charm” (read: slum-like qualities) – run down motels, dive bars and trailer parks – there’s been a remarkable rennovation in places.

    I was amazed that this included several mixed-use complexes, which have retail on the bottom and residential above. All of these are located near the light rail stations. One of them is part of the McClintock Park and Ride.

    I’m glad to see that at least one city along the light rail has a clue what needs to be done near the stations.

  • Ginger Beer – Less Superficial

    A few days ago, I posted some thoughts (barely that) on Ginger Beer vs Ginger Ale.IMG_0399

    I had planned on it being a very thoughtful and thorough exploration of my introduction to Ginger Beer, but I just hated the way I started off on each attempt to write it and I finally ended up with a graffiti-like blog post instead of deep, rewarding essay on the subject.

    Oh, who am I kidding? It’s soda pop. Mostly.

    I’m going to admit that for at least 18 years of my life being completely ignorant of ginger beer, and being nearly completely ignorant of it for the next 26 years. (In fact, the only mention of “Ginger Beer” I’d ever heard was on Doctor Who – Android Invasion, if you must know – and I assumed (incorrectly) that ginger beer was just one of those quaint English renames of something that’s already got a perfectly good name in American English. Specifically, I thought it was ginger ale.

    Rather than waste a lot of time, see wikipedia regarding ginger beer and ginger ale.

    I don’t really like ginger ale (there’s a story there, too) and so I haven’t really given this whole thing much thought over the years; however, I can’t remember why, but two weeks ago, something made me curious about ginger beer. Curious enough to look it up in wikipedia, but not curious enough to look up ginger ale. My conclusion was that, if ginger beer is stronger than ginger ale and don’t like ginger ale, I’m certainly not going to like ginger beer.

    Three days ago we stopped in Cost Plus to kill some time, and with that odd synchronicity that the law of large number throws at us and make people falsely believe in psychic powers, I found myself standing in front of a display of ginger beer bottles. I have never seen it for sale in the US before.

    And so I decided to give it a try. There were several brands, none which came from England, but there was one with a kangaroo on the front (and, indeed it came from Australia) so I chose that.

    (Everyone knows that Australian wines are so much superior to other countries’ because of the enormous size and hopping power of the kangaroo’s feet and legs when harnessed for the pressing of the grapes. It seemed logical that the advantage could be carried over into the production of ginger beer.)

    Bundaberg Ginger Beer is awesome. Sweet, gingery and tasty.

    The funny part was, as I said, on the whole, I don’t like ginger ale, but that’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed ginger ale. Sometimes I’d had a ginger ale and it was taste pretty darned good, but most of the time, it’s quite unpleasant to my palette. This ginger beer tasted of all the best in ginger ale, but stronger. Yum. (“Yum? Not Yum-O?” Yes, ‘yum.’ I refuse to say, “yum-o” even when it’s salaciously written across Rachel Ray’s breasts.)

    This observation fired up my very natural and rather expansive sense of curiosity. (Just to be clear: Curiosity about the taste of ginger beer/ginger ale, not about the taste or any other attribute of Rachel Ray’s breasts. If it had, that would deserve a blog post all its own and besides, I try to keep this blog PG-13 at worst – unless it’s about the Seal People.)

    So I started studying ginger ale a bit and that’s when I learned about “golden” and “dry” ginger ale. Dry ginger ale is most popular in America and tastes like slightly sweetened carbonated water – in other words, I finally understand why I don’t like ginger ale. It became popular as a mixer – in other words, its not meant to be drunk, just mixed with alcohol to try to kill he awful alcohol taste. The more awful the alcohol, the better dry ginger ale is. (See: Prohibition.)

    Golden ginger ale, on the other hand is the more original form, sweeter, more flavorful and much harder to find in the US. Obviously these have been the rare instances when I’ve enjoyed ginger ale. Mystery solved.

    So back to the ginger beer, which has more in common with golden ginger ale than dry ginger ale.

    Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Another trip to Cost Plus and I loaded up with several bottles of each brand of ginger beer available.

    Reed’s Jamaican Style Ginger Beer tastes like a bad white wine cooler, without the “benefit” of alcohol. Bitter.

    Ginger Beer from The Ginger People. The bottle says are the winner of the “Most Outstanding Beverage” award from Nation Association for the Specialty Food Trade. It was sweet, gingery tasty and very reminiscent of the Bundaberg ginger beer, but with a curiously odd aftertaste that reminds me of the smell of an auto parts store. That’s a bit off-putting. I’ve never been too keen on drinking things that remind me of industrial manufacturing and chemicals.

    (Let me be clear, I’m not opposed to foods that are industrially manufactured or full of chemicals, I just don’t want to be reminded of it with every taste.)

    Finally there was Fentiman’s Ginger Beer, from England. This one was different because it was alcoholic, although just barely. I had to tip this one down the drain as I couldn’t finish it, nor could I describe the flavor.

    In conclusion…3 out of 4 I didn’t really like. Perhaps I don’t really like ginger beer after all.

  • Ginger Beer

    I never realized just how much ginger ale sucks until I tried ginger beer.

    They should just stop making ginger ale altogether.

    Ginger beer. Yum.

  • Farm Cakes? Really?!

    When I was a kid, “Farm cakes” had a completely different connotation…

  • Pointless Food Tech

    IMG_0310 I just love technology! And one facet of technology that fascinates me is food technology. I love the great lengths that mankind is willing to go to to try to balance convenience vs taste/quality.

    Let’s face it, the microwave oven has transformed our world more than we can probably quantify. It’s a modern miracle of science, but… I think we can be honest here… it doesn’t bring out the best textures and flavors of food, does it?

    So I’m always interested in attempts to improve the taste of microwave food. Take for example, Marie Calendar’s new line of Al Dente frozen pasta dinners.

    The problem: Frozen pasta, recooked in sauce, turns soft and textureless, and absorbs too much of the flavor of the sauce.

    The Solution (according to Marie, anyway) is a new cooking tray. It’s hard to see in the above picture, but this sealed, frozen meal is in a bowl within a bowl. The sauce sits in the bottom, the pasta and meat is in a suspended colander. During cooking, the boiling sauce steams the pasta without turning it to mush.

    IMG_0312 After cooking, the inner bowl is tipped into the sauce, mixed and the happy consumer consumes his/her mass-produced goodness.

    So what’s the real verdict? As advertised, the pasta was properly cooked, and I applaud their ingenuity.

    On the other hand, the sauce and italian sausage were OK, and the meatballs just so-so. Frozen pasta foods still have a ways to go in the taste department, but at least they’ve got the texture right… and we only had to double the plastic waste and carbon footprint of production to achieve it.

  • JVC KD-R800 iPhone Compatible Car Stereo Review

    IMG_2809 It’s been a few days since I had this new JVC stereo unit installed, and I’ve now taken several “trips” with it, plus I’ve tried to test out all the features I’m likely to ever use.

    Background

    I love music. I listen to lots of music – eclectic music, perhaps, but I’m never far from my music. I’ve always required that I be able to take the music I want to listen to in my car. If that meant making my own cassette tapes, or CDs or whatever, I’ve always found a way to get my music in my car.

    To me, the iPod is a revolution. The idea of “all of your music in your pocket” is enormously compelling to me. Since I got my first iPod, iPod integration into my stereo system has been high on my wish list. These days, though, new stereo equipment isn’t high on the “have I got money to spend” list, so I’ve had to make do in my current vehicle with the factory stereo.

    First I tried those cassette adaptors. Wow, do they suck, especially since everybody’s tape decks are auto-reverse these days. Even the ones supposedly built for auto-reverse decks soon break and start madly switching back and forth.

    I tried FM transmitters. Wow, do they suck, especially in Phoenix where every space on the dial has a station or interference from a station. (And why is it every time I come within 30 feet of a city bus the station is drowned out in static?)

    The holy grail of iPod integration for me would be a directly connected wire from the iPod’s dock connector to the stereo – you know, like Steve Jobs announced being built into all BMWs, years ago. Of course, stereo manufacturers started making these types of systems, and I was about to buy one when fate threw me a curveball: I got an iPhone.

    The iPhone, while sharing the same dock connector, isn’t quite the same, and all the stereos on the market that worked fine for an iPod would not work for an iPhone.

    I was back to square one – except that FM transmitters are even flakier on an iPhone due to the radio transmitter in the phone.

    And so I waited. I waited and I periodically looked online for reviews of “iPhone compatible” car stereos. Finally, a couple weeks ago, things turned promising and I found a unit I was prepared to gamble on. I purchased a JVC KD-R800 via Amazon.com for $149.

    Review

    Here are the features that I consider meaningful on the unit.

    It has two USB ports, one front and one in the back which can be snaked over into the glove box. You can plug in a USB key, USB HDD or MP3 player of that ilk and it will play the MP3s and WMAs. Most importantly those two ports (and the unit itself) are branded with the official “Made for iPod” and “Works with iPhone” monikers from Apple.

    The unit has an auxiliary in port on the front which every stereo on the planet ought to have. That said, I have no use for it because of the USB ports, but it seems like a reasonable feature to have as a fallback should I ever wish to hook up some other varied and sundry device.

    It plays CDs and, in keeping with virtually every any modern stereo, it plays MP3 CDs. I still have some of both, although virtually everything I have is on my iPhone, but you never can tell what might come along.

    Finally, the last feature of some note is the Bluetooth connectivity. The unit is both a hands-free phone kit (and has a mountable microphone) and can play music streamed over bluetooth. Both of which are supported by my iPhone 3GS. I’m not too keen on the Bluetooth connectivity, as I’ll explain, but again, it does present a reasonable alternative and certainly should be a selling point of the stereo.

    The reason I’m not really keen on the Bluetooth is two-fold. First, it is two different things, the phone and the music streaming. The phone part isn’t very useful to me because, in the last 8 or so years since I’ve owned a mobile phone, I have received perhaps 5 calls which I was driving, and I never call anyone while I’m driving. That’s not because I’m one of those “you shouldn’t use a cell phone while you’re driving” people (although I am), it’s because, in most months, my phone usage can be measured on double-digit minutes – and often I barely reach double-digits. I don’t talk on the phone, therefore the Bluetooth phone connectivity is not likely to get a workout from me.

    The music streaming, while, I suppose might be nifty-keen, has no interest at all to me. Since I don’t gab on the phone, I don’t use my phone in the car. I don’t send text messages or e-mails, although once in a while I do use the Google Maps. I’d much rather have the phone sitting in the glovebox – being charged – sending music to the stereo over the wire than hanging on my hip or sitting in the front seat streaming music wirelessly and running the battery down.

    In short, Bluetooth is not a make or break feature for me. Plug iPhone in and play music is the make or break feature for me.

    (I should note that this unit also plays FM and AM radio stations and has optional “modules” you can buy to add both satellite radio and/or HD radio, but I hope to never listen to another radio station again now that I have iPod/iPhone connectivity.)

    My first “surprise” out of the box was that this “Bluetooth stereo” doesn’t actually have built-in Bluetooth. It has a supplied Bluetooth module that plugs into one of the two USB ports. It would appear that Bluetooth is not legal in all jurisdictions that this unit is marketed in and so it is not part of the actual unit. That’s bad because if I use it, I loose a USB port. Do I need two USB ports? That is the question.

    Let’s go over the various functions:

    USB iPhone connection.

    Works great, sounds good, zero configuration. I plugged it in and my iPhone started playing music immediately.

    The current track playing shows on the display, (but not the album or artists, as far as I can tell) and it does not support Japanese or Chinese character sets. (I have a significant number of songs with titles in foreign languages, which the iPhone itself has no problem with.)

    The iPhone can be controlled by the wheel on the front of the unit and it’s much like a standard iPod “click wheel” operation. The top level gives you things like “Playlists,” “Genres,” “Artists,” “Podcasts,” etc, and each push of the wheel selects a lower level. There is no support for videos or the new Genius Mixes.

    Everything worked great if I plugged it in to either the front or back USB port. Up to this point it was 100% problem-free. (Cue ominous music.)

    FM radio

    It works. There are no preset buttons, but there are presets. You have to access them via click-wheel menu, which is not the most convenient system, but I rarely have more than 2 or 3 stations programmed in. Making up (perhaps) for the lack of physical buttons, you seem to be able to store an awful lot of presets, although I haven’t counted how many.

    Bluetooth

    After everything important was working, I concentrated on the Bluetooth. I very nearly didn’t install it, but since the install place (Arizona Sound) did such a nice job of installing the microphone up near the sun visor, I felt I had to at least try it out.

    Pairing the Bluetooth was simple. I input a security code on the unit, turned on Bluetooth on my phone and the units paired right up. On the stereo the iPhone appears as two devices – one phone, one audio.

    I was immediately able to place a call from the unit, and I found my contacts waiting for me on the menus. Still, it’s a bit difficult to scroll through the whole list 3 names at a time and I’ve since learned that you can select (on the iPhone) which contacts to share over the Bluetooth, so I’ll be making a small group of people I’m likely to ever want to call.

    I was not immediately able to receive a call. The phone chirped away in the glovebox, and no display came up or other indication came from the stereo. Nor could I press the “phone” button to answer it. I have no idea why this happened, because the next time I started the car, it worked fine.

    Call quality was good. People had no trouble hearing me over the sound of the car, and they came through the car speakers crystal clear – or at least as crystal clear as you ever get on an AT&T iPhone. (Yes, that’s a dig at AT&T.)

    Bluetooth audio. Initially, I couldn’t think of a reason to try it, so I didn’t. More on that later.

    Problems?

    After getting the Bluetooth working, we drove across town for dinner, listening to music from the phone. It was delightful. Even though the underlying equipment (speakers, etc) are all the original factory equipment, this new stereo sounds better. There’s better definition in the stereo separation and I’m hearing more subtle details in the music. In short, It worked perfectly.

    Until we headed back home after dinner.

    I plugged the iPhone in and the music picked up right where it left off. I began to back out of the parking spot and got half out and the music stopped. It wasn’t paused as the display continued to mark the elapsed time and display the current song, but there was no sound.

    I unplugged the iPhone and plugged it back in and it picked up immediately again, but with no sound.

    I turned the unit off and repeated the procedure. This time the music came back, but only for about 20 seconds.

    I dinked around with it with various combinations of plugging and unplugging, turning the stereo off, turning the car off and finally, with no discernible pattern, it worked and didn’t kick off. We drove back across town (about 30 minutes) without a hitch. Strange.

    Frankly, I was not happy.

    I did some online searching, but found nothing. Then an idea hit me. What if this is something to do with the Bluetooth audio streaming?

    I took the phone out, hooked it up, started the car and, sure enough, the problem was back. Twenty seconds of music and it went quiet. Unplugging and replugging the phone made no different, so I turned the Bluetooth off on the phone and presto my sound came back. So now the question was, “Was it a problem with the stereo or the iPhone?” iPhones have notoriously poor Bluetooth support, so I couldn’t rule that out.

    Unfortunately, there’s not much in the iPhone’s Bluetooth configuration for the JVC device, and, perhaps significantly, the JVC unit appears as one device.

    I checked the Bluetooth settings on the stereo, and it shows the iPhone as two devices. I deleted the audio pairing, turned the iPhone’s Bluetooth back on and everything seemed to work fine.

    On my next trip, the sound stopped again, and when I checked the Bluetooth settings, the audio Bluetooth device was back.

    After much fiddling, I’ve stumbled across a provisional hypothesis as to what’s happening and how to circumvent it. It’s worked so far, but it remains to be seen if it proves true.

    My hypothesis is that, when I turn on the stereo, it and the phone have to connect. If I plug in the dock connector before the devices have paired up, audio gets sucked away from the USB connection once the pairing is made. To see if that hypothesis is correct, I now start my car and make sure that the iPhone’s Bluetooth indicator has connected before I connect the USB cable.

    So far it’s worked.

    …and with that, and if it keeps working that way, I’m happy as a clam with this new unit.

    Update 9/30/2009 I finally decided to try using the Bluetooth audio streaming capabilities of the unit, just to see what it was like.

    Since I’m not really interested in the Bluetooth streaming, I only fiddled with it for a few minutes but the quality of the streaming audio left a lot to be desired. The sound kept dropping out as if the streaming buffer were overrun.

    I’ll be sticking with the USB audio.

  • Facebook is Evil

    Mostly because it’s sucking away from my blogging.

    You know how easy many pages make posting their articles to your facebook page by just putting a little button at the bottom of the article? It’s so easy, I forget to post the articles here instead.

    Did you know there are killer rabbits in Australia that attack snakes? ‘Struth!

    Or alien monsters in Panama? No lie!

    Or that I have a new water bottle?

    IMG_0304

    The excitement never ends around here.

  • Pitch Report

    They say most people consider Labor Day to be the “End of Summer”, but in fact, it’s not till September 21. Typically, though, summer has begun to let off by now. Not so this year, which I think will be remembered not-so-fondly as the “summer without end” It’s still topping 100 degrees every day (101 today) and any way you cut it, that’s still hot.

    Nonetheless, we headed out to the back-of-beyond (read: Gilbert, AZ) to check out Nichols Park, which, supposedly, contains Arizona’s only grass cricket pitch. I’m not exactly sure how this flat lawn differs from the handful of other parks that are used, but that’s an argument for the academic types. This is supposedly the real deal.
    Although you can’t see it in the video, there are actually crease lines on the ground, although, sensibly, no one has obviously played here since at least the spring. Cricket is not a summer sport in Arizona.

    Now, I have in my possession both real and practice cricket balls and real and “beach” cricket bats. Between Michelle, James and myself, (Irene stayed in the car with the A/C running) we haven’t got enough people to really play, but I’ve been knocking that damned bat in for weeks now and I really wanted to let it loose on the ball.
    First though, I had to experiment with the ball and the pitch. I had Michelle crouch down at the far end of the pitch and, using the real ball, bowled on at her. My expectation was that the ball would be completely off target, both from my lack of bowling skill and from the uneven terrain, and that it would skitter harmlessly past her and she’d go chasing it.

    IMG_0210Much to my surprise, my line and length were right on target and had Michelle been a wicket, I’d have knocked middle stump right out of the ground. As it was, I was quite proud of her as, although she didn’t catch the ball, she did get both hands on it and nearly caught the ball and avoided getting hurt. (She’s had no practice catching the hard ball being through with any force.)

    We switched to the practice ball and hit a few. Michelle and James both managed to hit the ball a couple times, and I got to see how lively the new bat was. Compared to a baseball bat, a cricket bat can seriously spank a ball.

  • Dangers of the iPhone

    Recently, I got the new iPhone 3GS and, owning my old iPhone outright, I hated for it to go to waste.

    So, with a little jailbreaking we were able to replace my wife’s failing phone on the T-Mobile network with my old iPhone.

    Now, see what happens. We go out to eat and she sits there, ignoring us completely, watching Taiwanese soap operas on her phone.

    This was an unexpected outcome.