We love you Tyla! Elijah and I made a video for you.
Grilled Vegetables
If you follow my Instagram feed, it will come as no surprise that I grill fairly often and usually our dinners involve some grilled vegetables. It’s a pretty simple task, but I’ll share a few tips that I’ve learned about the process.
- Buy a good grill basket. You can do it other ways but this makes it really simple.
- Spray the basket with non-stick spray every time before you use it and cleanup will be a lot easier. I didn’t learn this soon enough and my basket has a bunch of stuff burned on that I’ll never get off. Yum, extra flavor.
- Coat the veggies in olive oil first, but don’t use too much. The vegetables will get quite soft just from grilling so the oil is just for flavoring and to help the salt and other seasonings stick.
- Denser vegetables like potatoes and carrots take quite a bit longer than soft ones like zucchini and mushrooms. If you’re going to mix and match soft and hard vegetables, start the hard ones first and then throw the soft ones in about halfway through. I generally figure that potatoes take 30-40 minutes and zucchini takes 15-20 minutes. If you have the basket extra full, that time might be longer.
- Keep your slices a standard thickness so that they will cook similarly.
Your options are boundless. Experiment! Some of our favorites are red and gold potatoes, whole mushrooms, zucchini, bell peppers, onion and carrots.
Car Bluetooth
Now that I’ve caught up with the times and realized that Bluetooth actually works, I decided to finally add Bluetooth to my car. It’s easy to get jealous riding in our new Escape that Tyla drives most of the time. While I did add a nav system to my Subaru, it was a unit from 2006 so there wasn’t much to it.
For $18, the SoundBot seemed like an easy device to test out, and so far, I’ve been very impressed with it. It gets power from the cigarette jack and then connects to the auxiliary input on my head unit. Now I just get in my car, it pairs automatically. The SoundBot is sticky mounted to my dash and I can use the play/pause, forward, and backward buttons to control basic playback. I’ve spent so many years taking my phone out of my pocket and plugging in an audio cable. This feels luxurious!
If you have an older car, I think you’ll be happy with this device, and hey, if not, you’re only out $20. It’s not a major life commitment.
R.I.P. Windows Media Center
Microsoft has announced that Windows Media Center will not be present in Windows 10. Some of you know that’s how I run all the TV in my house and were asking what I’m going to do. The answer? Nothing. It’s not a big deal.
Even though Windows Media Center was shipped with Windows 8, the code is exactly the same as it was in Windows 7. If you’re running a Media Center PC, there’s no reason to upgrade it past Windows 7. Mine sits in a closet with a heavily restricted firewall and I turn off automatic updates. It’s an appliance, not a general use computer. Every few months, I carefully back everything up in case of an emergency and then apply all the patches and driver updates that have accumulated.
So while I’m bummed that a great product is officially dying, I knew it was dead years ago. However, my Windows 7 Media Center box will continue to live and work just fine. I’m guessing that this setup will outlast my desire for cable TV. I’m getting closer and closer to cutting that subscription entirely.
Like Riding A Bike
I’ve written about the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel previously, but it continues to be excellent. I can’t wait until Elijah is old enough to start watching and understanding these with me.
One of the latest videos is an excellent example of the series. What would happen if your bicycle handlebars worked opposite of a normal bike? When you turn left, the bike turns right and vice versa. Easy right? With a little practice you could figure that out. Or could you?
Country Isn’t Country
Rant: As if we needed another sign that I’m turning into an old man, I no longer enjoy country music on the radio. Thankfully I don’t have to listen to the radio very often, but when I do, I struggle to find anything to listen to. I’ve listened to country for a long time but today’s country music is ridiculous. Every song is about a party in a field with trucks, bonfires and beer. How many songs about that do we really need? And why on earth are you using autotune in your country songs? This has been happening for the past 5-7 years but it’s completely gone now. It’s a new genre. I’ve given up hoping and waiting for the good stuff to come back and instead, I have my in-house FM transmitter playing a huge playlist of country songs from the 80s and 90s.
Grump grump harrumph. GET OFF MY LAWN!
Shop Smart At Costco
I love my Costo membership (though probably not as much as a few of you do!) I stumbled across a price comparison of a local grocery store to Costco. Obviously you’ll want to verify this for your local stores before changing any habits, but it’s an interesting read. A couple key takeaways for me are:
- Better at Costco: frozen and canned foods
- Better at the grocery store: fresh meat, fresh veggies
Fresh Fruits And Veggies
As the growing season approaches, prices in the produce section start to swing wildly. I’m regularly confused about what is a good deal and/or what is currently in season. There are a few websites that give this info, but one of my favorites is http://www.eattheseasons.com/ It’s a super simple design that tells you what is in season now. I’ve got it saved as a favorite on my phone’s web browser so I can pull it up at the store.
Uncle Dean and Aunt Sandy
A couple weeks ago, we had a great visit from Uncle Dean and Aunt Sandy. They came out a few years back with Mom and Dad for a week, but that was before we had our house and they had to rent a place to stay. This time we were able to be much better hosts and give them an actual guest room.
Thankfully the weather cooperated pretty well and we were able to go to Gas Works Park and the Ballard Locks on Sunday afternoon. It was great to see them again and introduce them to Elijah!
Exponential Growth
Humans have a bias toward thinking that progress happens linearly meaning that in the next 80 years, we’ll see roughly the same amount of progress that we did in the previous 80 years. If that’s true, I can’t even begin to imagine what the world will look like when I’m heading for assisted living.
The truth is even more remarkable though. Instead of progressing linearly, technology is advancing exponentially. This means that not only is technology advancing, the rate of advancement is also increasing. We will advance more this year than last year and so on.
It’s hard to think about this or observe it while you’re in it, but if you look back in history, it’s a little more obvious. It took us thousands of years to go from horses to cars, but the cars from just 50 years ago are relics compared to what we have now. Similarly, computers were huge and bulky for the first decades of their existence, but now they are getting small, faster and more powerful every year.
The amount of data that we collect is rapidly increasing too. At a recent Big Data conference, one of the speakers estimated that 90% of all the data that the world has was generated in the last two years. By 2016 the total amount of data will double every two months and by 2020, it could be doubling every SECOND. Even if those numbers are a bit off, it helps to show what exponential growth looks like.
With all that in mind, how will I ever keep up with technology as I grow older? Grandparents have a hard enough time now. With the exponential growth of technology, is it hopeless for us who think we are sort of in touch now? Probably, but maybe we’ll be able to abstract technology away from the user in such a way that the user doesn’t have to understand much about how it works to get value out of it.
I’m not a futurist and I struggle to bring this post to a reasonable conclusion. I don’t have any magic answers but this stuff has been on my mind a lot lately, especially when I see Elijah interacting with any technology. He’s going to look back on these times as the technological stone age, and it’s awesome to think about what the future world will look like.