I got one of these today: 

And, boy, has it made life in the kitchen fun again.  I had read some good reviews online as well as on the television that convinced me to give this thing a try.  I’ve got a few knives that needed sharpening, including one that I really care about.  

I’ve been thinking about taking them out for professional sharpening but the more I read about this thing, the more convinced I was that I could give it a try.  It seemed that best case was that my knives would be ridiculously sharp.  Worst case was that I’d have to take them out for professional sharpening. I didn’t read anything suggesting that this device, particularly this top-of-the-line model would take a ton of metal off the blade, etc.   

When you think about it, sharpening a knive should be something that can be easily done with a device like this — fixed angles, rotating abrasion discs, etc.  Sure enough, it works really well.  I followed the directions for a professional polished steel edge on a spare knive that had grown quite dull.  I was very pleased with the results.  It cuts through paper, tomatoes and grapes easily.  I did this with a few other knives before tackling the Wusthof.  I wanted to make sure I really had the hang of it and could identify, by touch, the burr that results when the knife is appropriately sharp before steeling and polishing. 

Eventually I got around to doing the Wusthof and was instantly pleased with the results.  Shortly after sharpening I was taking apart a large chuck steak that I had procured at the Oak Park Farmer’s Market for a Guiness Beef Stew/Pot-Pie The knife carved through this effortlessly.  I was even able to easily cut away a nice strip of fat that I rendered a bit in bacon fat (left over from tonite’s dinner prep) to brown the beef chunks.  I could perform surgery with this thing, albeit incredibly clumsy surgery considering the greater than 8″ blade.  I then proceeded to cut a bunch of cherry tomatoes in half with great results. The knife is once again, absurdly sharp and life in the kitchen couldn’t be better.

 Incidentally, I happened to acquire the Chuck from Wettstein’s Organic Meats at the OPFM.  This is the same producer featured here, mentioned in this Ruhlman blog post (Oak Park getting a shout out by Ruhlman!).  The meat browned so nicely and had such a nice look to it.  I am very excited to be able to dig into this stew tomorrow.  

I loved Charlie’s decision to let Lidge pitch to Prince Fielder.  Awesome.  The worst, absolute worst, that Prince could do in that situation was tie the game.  The Phils would still have an at bat and it would help give Lidge some much-needed post-season mojo.  For the record, I was hoping Lidge would be allowed to pitch to Fielder in the heat of the moment, not just with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Go Phils! 

First, a little love for the house.  Any of you who have visited recently should remember the large plastic tarp in front of the sunroom.  The wallpaper had been peeled away, spottily, and the ceiling was covered in plywood.  I managed to finish the ceiling tonight.  Well, nearly finish.  The crown molding hasn’t been gotten yet.  But, the good news is that we were finally able to find solid red oak beadboard for the ceiling.  I tried to do this last night but after about 6 boards the nailgun jammed and I lacked the 3mm allen key to take it apart.  So I brought it to work this morning and cleared the jam and finished the job tonight (with 48-6 of the remaining boards).  Here’s the result:

I think it turned out pretty well.  I hadn’t placed the last and final board in the picture above, which eagle-eyed viewers may notice.

In other news, we recently became a UVerse family.  N. was getting sick of me trotting off to the bar for every Eagles game or other Philly/Notre Dame-related sporting event that was not on broadcast television.  I’ve also been pushing AT&T for years to invest in our neighborhood and bring the FiOS to the fine people of Oak Park.  I will never, ever purchase cable from Comcast (it’s a Philly thing) so we decided to give this a try. So far, so good.  We have it hooked up to the HDTV in our bedroom (a 24″ Samsung LCD).

A little primer: AT&T runs fiber optic to these nasty beige boxes all over town.  Then when you order UVerse they jumper the fiber to your Cu twisted pair. So, this isn’t my parent’s FiOS, literally.  My P’s live on the east coast and have Verizon’s fiber optic to the curb service which gives them a ridiculously sick internet pipe.

The twisted pair comes into our house and heads to a 2Wire wireless router — I think I read that the b/w is 20Mbps.  The router is hardwired to our TV’s set-top box and the phone line (for digital voice).  Our PC’s connect to our wireless network.

The installation was a bit hairy.  It was scheduled to start at noon on a particular day.  The technician arrived on time and immediately set to work.  However, at 4pm he informed me that he needed to call a lineman to do some work.  He waited in our alley until 8:30pm and then said that there would be no lineman that day.  I had to call AT&T to reschedule the rest of the installation — even though we had equipment lying all over our house. The next day the lineman fixed the problem and the installation was completed.   Despite these troubles, the quality of the installers was much greater than what I’ve seen with Comcast.  I’ve been present for two installations in apartments that I lived in and the contractors that Comcast hired were terrible.  The second guy told me that he took the job simply to learn how to install cable so he could quit in a couple of months and then start doing it for his friends on the side illicitly.  That inspires confidence.

The reason this install took so long is that the guys wanted to make sure that everything was optimal.  The lineman told me he was worried that I was too far from the box and that I may see video drop-outs and spotty internet.  But we’ve been running for over a week now and I’ve noticed nothing of the sort.  Our internet is a steady 3Mbps Down/1Mbps Up (I could get a faster pipe but it costs more) with none of the fluctuations observed in cable’s broadband.

TV:I really like the advanced DVR that UVerse comes with.  They advertise the ability to record 4 shows simultaneously.   This is true but you have to remember that the unit records, a la TiVo, what you are watching.  So in reality you can only record 3 additional programs.  Further, if you are watching an HDTV channel you can only record one other program (in HD).  Nevertheless, this is pretty cool.  The other night I was timeshifting the ESPNHD feed to match the Sirius broadcast of 94.1 WYSP’s Eagle’s MNF coverage when my daughter accidentally changed the channel.  Since I was recording the game I was able to tune back to the channel, rewind to where I was before the accident, and continue watching without any hiccups (it continued to record the ESPNHD stream during the channel change).

The quality of the video is very high.  The OTA HD is still better for the network channels (I still have my roof antenna) but not so much that I want to switch while watching cable.  The biggest improvement is the quality of the SDTV streams.  I am assuming that this is because they are all digital on UVerse while my OTA SD is still analog (?).  There is a marked difference and the UVerse wins out easily.

We haven’t futzed much with the on-demand service apart from watching a couple of free programs.  But I did cancel all Netflix/Blockbuster accounts in anticipation of watching movies on-demand.  UVerse provides an assortment of HD movies so that will be nice.  I still have the two TiVo’s hooked up to the antenna and they are doing their thing, but the DVR that comes with UVerse is pretty good.  I am most happy with the responsiveness of the remote/DVR: when I push the ‘guide’ button the Guide instantly pops up; when I change channels, the channel instantly changes.  Software update after software update has made my TiVo a bit laggy.  But it is still better than the time we had digital cable from Comcast for 3 months — the box was so unresponsive I was constantly wondering if it was still working.  Back then, the Comcast SD picture was terrible too. Comcast may have improved this but I can say with certainty that UVerse provides a sparkling SD stream.

While watching Legally Blonde while waiting for the little man to fall asleep N. and I noticed that Linda Cardelini portrayed the perma-permed Chutney Windham.  To confirm this I went to imdb.com.  While there I noticed that her F&G younger brother, John Francis Daley, is in a movie called 5-25-77.  Stranger still, this movie isn’t about the brilliant Dead show at the Mosque in Richmond, VA.  Instead, it’s about the debut of Episode IV.  When I saw the title I was very hopeful that he was in a movie that somehow revolved around that Dead show.

First I hear a God Street Wine track on Sirius’ Jam On station on my way home from work.  Then, tonight, while sitting on the deck eating dinner with the little ones and N., Sirius’ Vault kicks out ‘A Friend is a Friend’ from Pete Townshend’s 1989 rock opera Iron Man.

In 1989, I was 13 and this album was played a lot through the old headphones at my house.  I only owned it on vinyl and, sadly, it didn’t survive.  My parents dropped off a few crates of vinyl a year or so ago but most of them were their old platters.  I am not sure where my small vinyl collection went.  I went straight from vinyl to CD so this was probably one of my last vinyl purchases.

Despite serving as some sort of stimulus for the excellent Brad Bird film The Iron Giant I doubt that this record has aged well.  I can remember a few standout songs but Quadrophenia this was not.

edit——-

While singing the catchy refrain from ‘A Friend is a Friend’: “Be Friendly, Befriend Me Now”.  I was reminded that this was one of a few LPs that my brother-in-law and I recorded to cassette for a drive to Florida.  The rest of the family — my sister and her infant son and my mom and dad — was flying, our job was to bring the car.  For me, it was the summer between 7th and 8th grade.  Our tape list included the aforementioned Iron Man and Quadrophenia as well as an audiobook version of Lake Wobegon Days (read by Keillor himself), Seconds Out (Live Genesis!!), and a few others that escape me.  When we arrived at his parents condo, we discovered that his parents car had a copy of Steely Dan: Gold in it, much to our delight.  To this day, whenever I hear Babylon Sisters or Deacon Blues I think of the hot breeze of southwest Florida in August.  On the way back I remember listening to a lot of Stern once we got into the DC radio market (he was only syndicated in NYC, Philly and DC at the time and the station in DC, if I recall correctly, was WJFK).  I think we spent a whole morning driving through DC, Baltimore and Philly listening to Stern.  Lots of bridges, tunnels and traffic.  Ain’t nothing worse than traffic at the end of an 18-hour trip.

I also remember religously recording cassette versions of my favorite records for portable use.  This is why I skipped tapes, I was under the impression that the tape that I could record using my rig at home from a vinyl LP was just as good or better than a purchased cassette.  Who knows,  I may have been right about this?  I was at least correct that my vinyl played through my headphones was better than a cassette played through those same cans.  Besides, if I wanted to listen to War Pigs 50 times in a row it was far easier to pick up the needle and plop it back down in the groove than rewinding the cassette.  Not to mention the wear and tear on the tape during such an operation.

It is reflections like this that have me floating back to vinyl nowadays.  The days of high fidelity audio may be over.  I’ve heard it said that plenty of recording ‘artists’ consider it their goal to make a best-selling ringtone.  While HDD and flash memory gets cheaper and smaller it would seem that lossless media would step in.  But, where’s the market?  People gladly fork over money for inferior products right now — including yours truly.   But, I’ve been thinking lately that maybe it’s time to get back to hi-fi.  I like it that some artists are offering cards inside the vinyl duofold for downloading an mp3 version of the album.  This is a pretty cool compromise.

This refocusing is in no small part due to my experience with satellite radio.  The sound quality really is much  better than both FM and my iPod.  I see the value in that and I want more of it.

A great article about a nearly-lost tomato:

Jersey Tomato (NYT).

Man, I wish I was on the way to the shore right now and stopping by a farmstand and grabbing some tomatoes for the first sandwich at the shore-house.

N. got me a Sirius radio and subscription for Father’s Day.  To say that I have been enjoying it is an understatement.  After a bit of deliberation I chose Sirius largely for the Grateful Dead channel.  The allure of 24/7 Dead outweighed XM’s Bob Dylan-as-DJ Themetime Radio Hour.

I installed it immediately using the prepackaged car kit.  This was kind of a waste.  The antenna was installed properly so my signal is always real good but the FM transmitter that is built into the radio is a piece of junk.  The ‘CD-quality’ music sounded super thin and really tinny.  So, for a day, I used my CCrane FM transmitter in the car which greatly improved things.  It also meant that any of my fellow commuters, within a 50 foot radius, could also enjoy my Sirius should they tune to 88.5 FM. The problem with this set-up was that it was super-kludgy (wires everywhere).  The CCrane car kit comes with a dual-outlet cig. lighter adaptor which I need to power both the Sirius Radio (Starmate 4) and the FM transmitter.  Both of these items had to be ‘mounted’ to two different vents.  You can see that this was a terrible idea.  I got sick of it after one day.

So I headed out to Fry’s electronics on my half-day (Friday) and picked up a new, inexpensive car radio with an AUX input.  I then set to replacing my factory radio and simultaneously hard-wiring the power connection for the satellite radio so it turns on when I start the car and I don’t have to use the cig. lighter adaptor.  Here’s the results:

It’s still a touch kludgy as I didn’t want to screw the vehicle mount into the dashboard or console.  So I secured it in another way.  Now there are only two exposed wires, one is from the rear of the vehicle (antenna) and the other is to the AUX input of the radio.

Sonically the difference is astounding.  I really believe the ‘CD-quality’ claims of the providers now.  I am sure the new receiver has something to do with it but I’ve never been happier with the audio quality in the car.

As for the service itself I am really pleased.  The equipment makes a big difference, too.  We really enjoy being able to scan all the other channels and seeing the artist and track information while we are listening to whatever channel we are listening to.  I haven’t used the TiVo-esque feature yet but I’m sure I will once I get back into a talk-radio phase again and start tuning into sportstalk, the NPR channels or Sirius Patriot (just kidding about that last one). Because, TiVo has made me lazy. Its ubiquity in my house means that even in the car I am reaching for the rewind button to catch something that somebody said in its entirety.

I only have one artist stored in memory right now, Steve Earle, but that feature has worked out nicely for me — the radio alerts you whenever ol’ Steve is being played and pushing one button (the big one with the dog on it) will take you to whatever channel that is.

I never thought that 30 presets would be too limited but I printed out a channel guide last night and wittled down my interests to 30 and then tried to group them.  There were some notable casualties like the punk channel and one of the Kids Channels (NOT Radio Disney).  The omission of the punk channel brings up another bonus of satellite radio:  yesterday afternoon on my way home I heard the Dead Kennedy’s “Too Drunk to F*ck” without any blurring, beeping, etc.  Very nice.

I’m gushing, I know, but its made my commute immensely more enjoyable.

How can I respect an argument that begins, in its introduction, with a clear logical fallacy:

“It (The Islamist Fundamentalists) has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one.”

Spent most of the work week in the Dallas area.  Last night I ventured out to the Stockyards district of Fort Worth.  It is incredibly touristy but nevertheless kinda fun.  At the beginning of the last century, nearly all of the cattle that arrived in Union stockyard of Chicago boarded trains at the stockyards in Fort Worth.  Learning that fact made it worth the visit.

After returning home, I immediately set to work staining the deck which I had powerwashed over the weekend before.  So it has been a pretty hectic day — including me getting the first and only standby seat on a flight from DFW to ORD.  Luckily N. had a little something up her sleeve and set to work preparing the ’sandwich’ our own little take on Keller’s creation for Spanglish.  Tonight it featured Muenster cheese and Samuel Adams Summer Ale.  I’ve found that the bread and the beer that accompanies the sandwich are crucial to the overall quality.  Tonight, both were nailed.  The bread was from Jewel but N. found what could be the best rolls I’ve ever had from that grocer and they were near perfect for this sandwich.  But the final piece of the puzzle, what turns this sandwich from good to great is frying the egg perfectly so that when it is sliced the yolk runs out and combines with all the other juices present.  Tonight, we got that right too.  Doesn’t it look tasty?  It should be obvious that we never have plain ol’ BLTs anymore.

It seems my years long infatuation with tivo may be coming to an end. We’ve got two of the Kleenex of DVRs in our house and they keep us pretty happy.

You see, we don’t have cable. Or satellite. We have a large antenna on the roof that gets every channel that the Sears tower can spit at it. And, it gets them well. We have a small HDTV in our bedroom and the picture really is great. Upstairs in our den we’ve got a 10 year-old Sony Triniton that also has a nice picture, albeit non-HD, that will probably last another 30 years. We use TiVo to extract everything of any quality on broadcast TV. We supplement that with downloads from Amazon Unbox for TiVo. I’ve personally purchased 3 TiVo’s and recommended the box to plenty of people, many of whom have credited me via the soon-to-be-extinct TiVo rewards program. All of our TiVos are connected to our home network and we use that to ship programs to the other TiVos and also to my iPod via TiVo Desktop for use on airplanes or el-trains, etc.

All of this, it seems, could easily come to a crashing halt in February of 2009 when the FCC mandates that all local broadcasters, with minimal exceptions, turn off their analog broadcast and switch to digital. This didn’t bother me so much. I didn’t understand why the FCC needed to institute a drop-dead date but in the end I was willing to adjust. The antenna I bought a while back for our roof picks up the digital broadcasts just fine. So, the only thing I figured I’d need is to purchase two digital-to-analog converters for our two TiVos and the TV upstairs.

We received our ‘coupons’ from the federal government a couple of months ago and I recently set out to purchase a converter box. Before heading out I hit the intertubes to try and figure out if any worked the best with TiVo. As I found out, TiVo doesn’t support ANY of the currently available converters. A service rep that I spoke with assured me that TiVo hoped to have a solution by the time the switch took place but that they did not have anything for their customers yet. If they do not support the converters, than come February, my TiVo’s will become completely obsolete. What a bummer. TiVo has been fairly proactive throughout their history but they’ve managed to bungle this move for their rather small group of customers who don’t pay for cable/satellite. You see, I have to buy my converter box before the end of May in order to use the coupon, which expires otherwise. So, at best, I’ll get lucky and buy a converter box that TiVo will support in some fashion come February. At middlin’, I’ll have to shell out for a converter box that TiVo supports — as the converter boxes are returnable but the coupon may only be used once. At worst, TiVo won’t support any of them and I’ll either have to shell out for a couple of HD TiVo’s (not likely to happen) or get to work on some serious modding of my present TiVo boxes.

That frustration aside, I am pretty happy with the converter box. One recently frustrating aspect of the non-HD TV upstairs is that it is unable to pull in all the extra digital channels that the HDTV in the bedroom is capable of getting. For instance, our two local public stations, 11 and 20, put out 7 different channels all told compared to 2 analog. Now, with the converter box, all of those channels can be viewed on the old toob. So the switch to digital really is nice for broadcast TV folks.

One more pet peeve about the upcoming mandate by the FCC. The agency only maintains that all broadcasts be DIGITAL not high definition. The networks can ship out whatever resolution they want, provided the signal is digital. While many networks will continue to increase their HD catalog there is no mandate to do so.  People screw this up all the time.  The switch to digital will allow NBC to broadcast multiple channels on ‘5′ but there is nothing that say they have to load those channels up with high definition content.  In fact, they’ll probably continue to do exactly as they do now, broadcast most, but not all, of their programming in high definition and use the extra bandwidth for 24-hour weather, etc.  Until the market demands otherwise.  But, considering the market is 24 people who refuse to pay Comcast there is little incentive for NBC to show reruns of their hit programming on the extra channels…