Sunday, September 28, 2008

A-1 Flavors

I love A-1 for seasoning meats, but it is way over priced. My wife found some on a clearance cart and instant messaged me at work to tell me that she found a deal on A-1 for half price. She is awesome.

It turned out that it was A-1 in various flavors. First let me ask, "Why flavors?" A-1 is perfect, other than its overpricedness, so why mess around with it. We purchased two of the flavors, Smoked Mesquite and Cracker Peppercorn.

The Smoked Mesquite tasted nothing like A-1. It was like a Mesquite BBQ sauce. No thanks. If I liked Mesquite BBQ sauce, which I do not, I could find it for a lot cheaper than A-1 sauce.

The Cracked Peppercorn tasted like A-1 with chunks of crushed peppercorn in it. Some might like it, but it was not great. It was at least tolerable as opposed to the Mesquite. At first it was runny like water. I shook it up a little and it was better.

I have tried the store brands that are positioned near A-1 on the shelves, but they were not even close to the A-1 formula. At least they were a store brand. These A-1 brand flavors were inexcusable.

Somebody please tell the makers of A-1 to lower the price, so more of us can buy it, and stop messing with perfection.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

RCA RP5130 512MB USB MP3 Digital Voice Recorder

RCA RP5130 512MB USB MP3 Digital Voice Recorder


Pros
-Good battery life.
-Is about the size of a cell phone. It fits in my cell phone holster.
-Easy to get files on and off of it.
-Multi speed playback.

Cons
-When you turn it off it loses that your settings like the speed you were playing at. So I ride to work and use it to listen to notes or podcasts at fast speed. I turned it off and don't use it again till the next day that I do the same thing and I have to re-set it to fast speed again.
-When you turn it off and come back it looks like you are on the track you left off on, but when you press play it returns to the first one in the folder.
-Bookmark button fell off in the first month I had the device.
-Can't seem to bookmark podcasts that I load on it.
-Interface is not intuitive.
-Occasionally it will flip into different modes. Maybe a button gets pushed while it is in my holster, not sure. For example, sometimes it will slip into just play one track mode. So I take off in the morning on my bike get everything set to play and take off only to find that the device stop playing after the first track and I have to stop my bike and fiddle with the device to get it going. Other times I will try to delete a track and notice that it has slipped into delete all mode. One time I did not notice until it was deleting everything on the device. Might have just been everything in that folder, but that was where the majority of my files were and there were 40 of them. Fortunately they weren't my recordings that I hadn't backed up yet.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Chuck-A-Rama

Notoriety
I had heard of Chuck-A-Rama perhaps in LDS movies (like I had also heard of Hogi Yogi), but it always just sounded like a funny name and not a serious place to eat. That being said, I guess the name Stucky's also gives me a weird feel, even though I have eaten there.

Chuck-A-Rama appears to have started in Salt Lake City and only has a handful of locations in Utah and two in Idaho.

Impressions
Anyway, I ate at Chuck-A-Rama for the first time. It was much classier than the idea that the name brought to my head. I guess I might have been thinking like a place with a clown or something like that. Nonetheless, the name is catchy and the place is not corny. It was a lot like a Ryan's or an Old Country Buffet with a western feel.

Food and Drink
There was a large selection of desserts, lots of sides, and a plentiful salad bar. On the other hand it was greatly lacking in fruits and main dishes.

It had a large selection of items. There was three or four tables of regular food (mostly side dishes and chicken prepared in different ways), a table of salad, and a table and a half of desserts including an ice cream machine.

A side effect of the selection or the lack of main dishes, when I was full I did not have a feeling of "that one thing" was great and I really want to have some more of that again. That sort of feeling usually makes me hungry to go back to a place later and makes the end of the meal perhaps more satisfying.

They had a few more drinks besides soda. They had a slushy machine, but it only had two flavors. The flavors were weird and a little strong. I think one was sour apple. In addition to the flavor, the machine seemed to be malfunctioning. The red was not slushy and the green was actually warm.

Prices
$9 for adults at lunch. I think it was $11 at dinner. Kids for lunch were $0.60 per year old up to 11 years old. I can't remember if the price was different at dinner.

I would go there for lunch during work hours every couple of weeks if the lunch price was $6 or less. At $5 I'd go almost every week. $9 for lunch is expensive and $11 for a buffet really seems high. I know this seems to be the going rates, but those prices keep me away. Fortunately this time I went someone else was kind enough to treat me to it.

Website
Their website is very flat(www.Chuck-A-Rama.com), but did have the information I was looking for which was where their locations are. It took me a bit to find it since I first typed in ChuckARama.com. They should probably have both domains.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Google Chrome

Bumps...
At first Gmail chat did not work in Chrome.  The next day it started working.  I did not install an update to Chrome, so i assume Google tweaked Gmail chat to work with it.

I find that frequently there are links I click on that just sit there and spin.  One that comes to mind most recently is in Facebook when you click to see more applications.  It then dynamically expands the list.  In Google Chrome it does nothing.  I had to switch over to Firefox to do what I wanted to do.  Could be the way Chrome implements Javascript.

Things I like...
When one tab has a link in it that spawns another tab the tab opens right next to the tab that spawned it and not at the end of the list.  Very help ful when you have several tabs open and when you are done with the spawned tab you want to go back to the parent tab.

Tabs run in their own process.  This possibly makes it more stable, since one rogue tab most likely will not take the others down.  It also allows you to kill a tab that is misbehaving without having to take them all down.

Tabs can be dragged out of the main app and made their own window.  They can also be dragged from their own window into the main app with the other collection of tabs.