United Airlines and the opposite of sense

on a recent trip to nyc, i elected to pay $25 to check my first bag, for each leg. i rightly guessed that by the time i boarded, there would be no overhead space left.

on the return, United announced at the gate that the flight was full, and rollerboards would be gate-checked for free. naturally, i do not expect to be refunded my $25. why should i, when my pre-planning helps them to load the plane more quickly and have a better chance at on-time takeoff.

does it not make more sense to charge people for carry-ons, and grant free checking of the first 2 bags? am i correct in thinking that incenting people to reduce what they carry on, rather than incenting them to increase it, will save money? am i correct in thinking that granting passengers that much extra space, and doing away with at least some of the fighting for shared space, will improve the experience for everyone involved?

is the cost of baggage handling really so prohibitive?

what am i missing?

a little credential standardization, please

just a small rant about sites, especially financial ones, enforcing silly rules for usernames and passwords that vary wildly from one site to the next.

some require special characters in passwords, some can't handle them! is my letters and numbers-only password really secure enough to protect my money?

i had a standard 6-character username, which in the past couple years became insufficient for banks. several financial sites required 8-character usernames.

great, now i have to remember which sites are the username exceptions, along with whatever peculiarities the password rules may have.

this week, i made logins for two more sites where i have some investments. one required a 10-character username, but couldn't handle special characters in the password. what security purpose is served with unwieldy usernames? and what kinds of backends do these sites have that the policy is to exclude special chars? injection-prone php servers? doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

the wild west of content delivery

in a flurry of activity this week, i signed up for Amazon Prime and hulu+, and bought a Roku and a new cable modem.

the ultimate goal is to cut down the monthly and outrageous Comcast bill, through which we currently get internet and tv.

the small part of the savings will be the cable modem, which we've been renting for $7/mo. replaced that with a Motorola SURFboard SB6121, which has proven to be about 15-20% faster on the downloads.

the larger savings will be eliminating the cable tv and getting our content via streaming. today started an experiment to see if the $79/year amazon prime and $8/month hulu+ covers enough ground.

i think the difficult transition for me will be going from a "what's on" model to "let's narrow down this incredible catalog to something we both want to watch now" model.

i've had the roku hooked up for less than 24 hours, but here are my initial impressions:

1. hulu+ shouldn't bother me with commercials
2. it's disappointing that i'm not allowed to stream certain shows through the roku (e.g. Good Eats), but am allowed to do so in a browser. wtf?
3. Top Gear (via Amazon VOD) has the full show, including the news! BBC America chopped it all to hell
4. there's an incredible disparity of what's paid content and what's free. i can see Top Gear series 15 and older for free, but Prime Suspect all the way from 1991 is $5/episode
5. interaction is embarrassingly primitive. browsing isn't well organized, and i'd like a way to indicate interest in items, e.g. Arrested Development, then have it organize my viewing history so i can easily tell what i've seen and what's left to see. Bonus points for putting together a single place to go to see what i should logically view next.
6. so far, the streaming has been high quality with no hiccups or sync issues. nice job that.
7. the roku box is actually *too* small and light -- it's in danger of being dragged off the shelf by the weight of the cables
8. some content we currently enjoy, like HBO shows and AMC shows, will probably be inaccessible to us for a couple years unless we feel like paying extra for them (which i don't). Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, the Killing -- might be hard to basically give them up for a couple years.

despite the impressive libraries available, not to mention the impressive tech to make all this possible, i do wish the content providers would be just a little more consumer friendly and not make the licensing so absurd. being able to stream on one device but not another, despite paying for it, just seems anti-consumer to me. and needlessly confusing.

sausages!

we received a meat grinder for xmas (this one) and last night made some sausages!

the recipe was for a Romanian Jewish beef sausage. we had most stuff on hand, except beef suet, so we used lamb suet instead. and guess what -- it tastes like gyros. really tasty gyros.

no casings on our first try, we made patties and rolled up a few, seen in the photo.

only one mishap, seems the forward/reverse buttons on the grinder were wired up backwards. took me a few minutes to figure out why i couldn't get anything through it. once that was sussed out, the grind went very well. i'm happy with performance of the machine.

as the reverse switch is momentary, i did get an RMA for this one, and a replacement machine is on its way. hopefully that one will work as expected.

a cat's recovery

the gf has two cats. when we started dating, over 4 years ago, her cat Smokey was large, inactive, and was unable to navigate the stairs to the 2nd floor.

over time, and with a diet change (removal of grains), Smokey has lost weight, become more active (i've even seen her run at times), and frequently changes floors. it seems her previous life was not without damage, as she takes stairs slowly and clumsily, as if she has joint pain.

to our great surprise, two nights ago, we came home to find her asleep on the bed -- newly found jumping ability! i haven't seen her actually jump yet, but every night now she finds her way up.

vanilla chocolate chunk ice cream

this was the 2nd batch in a week, with some modifications to improve upon the first (and double the yield, since the first batch was small). preliminary taste tests indicate success; i'll wait for an overnight freeze for the real test.

dairy for this batch was not as top-notch as the first, but it seems to have worked out.


1 cup heavy cream
2 c. whole milk
3 c. half and half
3/4 c. sugar
2 pinches salt
9 egg yolks
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 vanilla beans
1 bar Lindt 70% chocolate (put in freezer)
4 tbs vodka (if beans are a little tough)


0. soak the beans in the vodka to soften (couple hours)
1. split the vanilla beans and remove seeds. set aside. keep the vodka.
2. combine the milk, half and half, sugar and salt into a pot
3. stir over low heat until hot to the touch
4. remove from heat, add vanilla beans and seeds. cover and steep vanilla for 30 minutes.
5. slowly fold some of the mix into the egg yolks, stirring constantly
6. pour yolk mixture back into main mix
7. apply medium heat, stirring constantly until custardized
8. pour mixture through strainer into bowl containing the cup of cream
9. add vanilla extract
10. put bowl into ice bath, stir until cool
11. if you used vodka, now add it the mix
12. cover with plastic wrap and place in fridge overnight

13. chop chocolate into desired chunk size
14. prepare mix in maker, adding frozen chunks to mix near end (i put the chocolate through a strainer to keep out the dust)

note that this is a double batch, so for my maker, it makes two batches.

notes: next time, i would balance the cream and milk. here, i used what was on hand. i would use no fewer than 9 yolks, perhaps up to 12. i'd also consider adding another 1/3-1/2 bar of chocolate.

the Polish chicken doner

in Krakow, on a day with a big lunch, we opted for a light, easy supper: a shared chicken doner sandwich around the corner from the hotel.

into the pita went a reasonable amount of shaved chicken, a whopping amount of cabbage, some tomatoes/onions, and a mixed sauce of yoghurt and "hot" that looked like 1000 island dressing.

"wow," i thought, "that's a lot of cabbage."

happily, given that there was still room in the pita, he topped it with some more chicken. that made me happy.

and then on top of that went another whopping amount of cabbage. it was done before i could say anything. but look! more tomatoes, onions, and sauce that i hoped tasted better than it looked (it did).

and more chicken! hurrah! i'd like to have that first bite be chicken, even though i thought he was out of room. oh no! ANOTHER giant whopping amount of cabbage! how does it fit?

and after more tomatoes, onions, and sauce, he actually was done this time.

it was good, if not a bit cabbage-y. and i learned that night that cabbage is a diuretic.