I use Internet Explorer for most of my work and play but sometimes I also fire up Chrome. I love Chrome’s extension model for expanding the capabilities of the browser. I was very excited to hear that Edge (the new Windows 10 browser) is going to be supporting Chrome extensions! I haven’t flipped over to Edge yet because it doesn’t have any extensibility so I can’t run AdBlock or LastPass, but once they enable these extensions, I’ll be able to upgrade to Edge. It’s a great (and ambitious) idea. I hope they can pull it off cleanly.
Meat Week – Steak
It’s no surprise that steak ended up on our grill as part of meat week. It’s a staple of grills around the country. One of our favorite steaks to grill is the boneless ribeye from Golden Steer. You may remember that this was the winning cut from our Meat Day.
Grilling these is pretty simple: I get the grill pretty warm (500-550), cook for 2 minutes, rotation 90 degrees and cook for another 2 minutes. Then I flip and after 2 minutes I rotate 90 degrees. That gives me those beautiful crosshatch grill marks on both sides. At that point, the steaks are pretty close to done but I’ll finish them off with a couple more minutes as needed to bring them up to ~130 internally.
The trick with steak (and most meat) is to let it sit out on your counter for 30-60 minutes before you grill it. You want to get it closer to room temperature so that you don’t have to raise the temperature as much when you are grilling. And then when you take the steak off the grill, let it rest for 5-10 minutes before you grill. This will result in a juicier steak (here’s why.)
Kangaroo Farm
Tyla has wanted to visit the Outback Kangaroo Farm in Arlington for quite a while, so her birthday seemed like a good excuse to go. You pay $10/person an get a one hour tour around their facility. Imagine if someone you knew bought a kangaroo. And then another. And then 10 more. And then they bought some alpacas, lamas, donkeys, goats, tortoises, lemurs, peacocks, mini horses, ostriches and emus to go with them. You’d have the Outback Kangaroo Farm.
On the tour you get to feed and pet a lot of the animals. Tyla loved it and Elijah had fun too, though you can imagine that those animals look a lot bigger to him so he was a bit nervous at times.
It was a fun experience but probably not one that we need to repeat on a regular basis. It’s a great place to see some animals that you don’t normally see in the Pacific Northwest. And oh yeah, feeding the alpaca is done by putting a piece of food in your mouth and letting them kiss you…
Meat Week – Sausages
Tyla and Elijah went to a birthday party one night so I was on my own for dinner. I had been to the butcher earlier that day and picked up a couple sausages: Italian and Hot. I wrote about grilling brats before and these are pretty much exactly the same, but that didn’t make them any less delicious.
Since this is kind of a repeat post, I’ll throw in a little trivia tidbit for you: Golden Steer butcher has a lot of different sausages to choose from. They make all of them on site except for the brats. Those come from Bavarian Meets because Golden Steer sells so many it’s not efficient for them to try and make them all. This explains why the brats are a dollar more per pound than the other sausages.
Meat Week – Huli Huli Chicken
Mom has been telling me about this recipe for quite a while, and I finally got around to making it. It’s made with chicken thighs which we don’t usually have around the house so that was my excuse. The end result was really delicious though and this is very easy to throw together.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/3 cup ketchup
- 1/3 soy sauce
- 3 Tblsp. red wine or chicken broth
- 1/4 tsp. ginger
- 3/4 tsp. minced garlic
- 12 boneless skinless chicken thighs
Directions
- In a small bowl, mix the first six ingredients. Place chicken thighs in a large resealable bag; pour the marinade on top of chicken. Seal the bag and turn to coat.
- Refrigerate for 8 hours or overnight.
- Drain and discard marinade from chicken. Moisten a paper towel with cooking oil; using long handled tongs lightly coat the grill rack.
- Grill chicken, covered, over medium heat for 6-8 minutes on each side or until no longer pink.
Windows 10 Thoughts
Windows 10 is a big deal, and I have lots of thoughts about it. Instead of splitting them up into a bunch of posts, I’ll try to list them all here and you can pick and choose what might be interesting to you.
Should you upgrade?
If you’re an early adopter, you’ve probably already upgraded to Windows 10. Good! I’ve done it on most of my machines, but if you’re not in a hurry then it’s fine to wait. I’m waiting for a month or two to upgrade Tyla’s computers and I won’t upgrade the computers at church until January or February. However, you should definitely upgrade before about June next year. Microsoft is giving free upgrades for one year. Don’t miss out!
If you do upgrade now, the one change that I recommend is to not use the new Microsoft Edge browser as your default. At least that’s what I’m doing on my machine. I really like the new browser and it is super fast, but it also doesn’t support any plugins yet and that’s a deal breaker for me. I like to run AdBlock and LastPass and I can’t do that in Edge yet. Support for plugins is coming later this fall and it’s going to be awesome because Edge will support Chrome plugins! To change your default browser, open the start menu and search for “default web browser”.
What does it mean that “Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows”?
You hear this a lot in the media and even from Microsoft. What it probably means is that there won’t be a Windows 11. We’ll just see incremental changes to Windows 10. This is similar to how Apple has been handling updates to their operating system for the last few years. You’ll get feature updates on a more regular basis, but I’m sure there will still be plenty of marketing and fanfare around some of the releases.
Will I like it better than Windows 7 or Windows 8.1?
I’m the wrong one to ask about this. In fact, the question makes me a bit cranky because people love to talk about how much Windows 8 stinks. I find that most people dislike it because of a couple tiny UI things like the start screen and the charms bar. If that’s enough for you to hate it, fine. Everyone gets their opinion. Personally I almost never see those UI things and it doesn’t bother me at all. I love the additional OS features that are available in Windows 8 like Storage Spaces, Hyper-V, and more.
In general, I think people will be more receptive to Windows 10 than Windows 8 for the simple reason that it has a start menu. So many people get stuck on that one tiny fragment of the operating system, and there, now you have it. You also have ~5 years of awesome new features that have been developed while you were still on Windows 7. Welcome to the future!
Why is Microsoft offering it for free?
There are lots of articles about how Microsoft is dramatically changing their business model by offering Windows 10 for free. This statement oversimplifies the situation. First of all, they are only offering free upgrades to home users who already have a legal license for Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. The vast majority of Windows income comes from enterprise sales and sales of new PCs. Neither of these money makers is included in this free offer. Sure, it’s a big deal and I’m happy about this offer, but it’s not like half of the company’s money is disappearing.
People who state this also fail to comprehend where Microsoft makes their money. Lots of media people only think about the consumer facing stuff: Windows, Office, Xbox, Phone. They forget that there is a third pillar that as big as Windows and Office (and is growing much faster): Cloud and Enterprise. This team has a whole bunch of new billion dollar business and the growth rate of some of these products is incredible. For example, Azure had triple digit year over year growth in both revenue!
How did they make the picture for the Windows 10 logon page?
Nobody has asked me this question, but it has a cool answer. Check out this video to see behind the scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL8BBOwupcI It’s an actual photo, not something designed on the computer.
Meat Week – Pizza
Ok, this isn’t just a chunk of meat, so maybe I should have called this “Grill Month” or something. The name needs work. Whatever you call it, we’re still going strong on our streak of only having dinner from the grill.
We like to get pizza from Papa Murphy’s. It’s a “take and bake” place meaning that they make the pizza for you and then you bake it at home. They have grilling instructions and I decided to give it a shot.
![grilling instructions](http://<a href="https://www.studio711.com/wp-content/uploads/hulihuli.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-9068" src="https://www.studio711.com/wp-content/uploads/hulihuli-500x281.jpg" alt="hulihuli" width="500" height="281" /></a>){kind=link}
The pizza came out really well. I used an aluminum pizza pan with holes in it as the barrier between the grill and the paper tray on the bottom of the Papa Murphy’s pizza. The crust was nice and crispy and there weren’t any burned spots. It tasted pretty much the same as it would from the oven which makes sense because all I did was basically use the gas grill as an oven. We’ve made our own pizzas from scratch and cooked them on the grill before but this worked significantly better.
We aren’t able to cook two pizzas simultaneously in our oven very effectively so maybe this would be a good way to cook the second pizza if we’re trying to get two of them out around the same time.
If You’re Excited About The Start Menu In Windows 10, You’re Doing It Wrong
How’s that for a click-bait post title? A little long maybe… anyway, I say it with tongue in cheek. Obviously you can use your computer however you want. But my point is that people who are excited about the start menu are usually using their computer a little bit inefficiently. Ever since Vista, there has been an awesome keyboard shortcut that obviates the need to use the mouse in the start menu. To start ANY program on your computer, press the Windows key on your keyboard and then start typing. Whether you’re on Windows Vista, 7, 8.1 or 10, the Windows key will bring up a search box and then as you type it will start filtering through the programs you have installed. Once it finds the one you want, just press enter. I do it so quickly that you can’t even really see what’s going on as the screen flashes around. And that’s the point. It’s FAST.
Here’s an example: press the Windows key and then type notepad and press Enter. Don’t worry about what is happening on the screen. When you’re done, Notepad will be open. Do the same thing for Word, Chrome, Excel, Spotify, Solitaire, etc. It’s so much faster than using the mouse to fumble around and navigate to find the program you want to use.
I think this is one main reason why Windows 8 never bothered me. I don’t really care about the start screen because I never click around it and it only flashes on my screen for fractions of a second throughout the day.
Meat Week – Burgers
Burgers are a staple of the grill. Everybody has done them. It’s maybe not even worth a blog post (though that bar is VERY low on this site) so I decided to spice them up a bit.
My basic process is to dump the ground beef into a bowl and add some spices: salt, pepper, garlic, onion, and rosemary are generally in there but it varies from batch to batch. Then I mix it all up with my fingers, taking care to mix as little as possible just to get it all combined. Then I form it into patties that are roughly 1/2 pound each. I keep them uniform thickness and make them extra large and a bit flat. They will contract as you cook them.
I get those patties made about 30 minutes before I need to put them on the grill so they can warm up a bit. The grill gets preheated to around 450-500 and then the patties go on. I give them about 3-4 minutes on each side and once the thermometer reads around 140, I pull them off.
For these burgers, I melted some cheese on top, toasted the bun on the warm grill grates and then added some bacon and a fried egg. YUM.
Along the way I also made a batch of sliced potatoes. I love fries with my burger but I imagine this is a little healthier than frying (though potatoes aren’t very healthy no matter how you eat them.)
Burgers are cheap and as easy or complicated as you want them to be. It’s a great meal to try over and over and come up with your own perfect process. The only thing I’ve found that really screws them up is using beef that has been previously frozen. Burgers made from thawed meet regularly fall apart on the grill for me.
Authority
I think back on that regularly and chuckle, but that whole scenario is applicable to what we deal with on the internet every day. Some random person writes an article and bam, it’s fact. We all joke “It must be true, I saw it on the internet”, but then time and time again we get sucked into giving something way too much credit because it’s on a website that looks like it must be legit. Whether it’s diagnosing a disease, predicting earthquakes, or one of millions of other topics, the ability to understand how much authority or credibility the author has is so important. I don’t know how to teach this to my son, but it’s high on my list of things that I want him to learn. How do you pick up a piece of text and decide how much to believe it?
We used to base a lot of decisions and beliefs on common knowledge from our local circles, but now we have access to huge amounts of actual data on a huge range of topics. Seeking out that data is a good step, but you still have to be able to filter out the human interpretation of the data. It’s not like the old days where you had to be a published author to get read. Now any yahoo with a computer can write on the Internet and pretend they know what they are talking about …
* Well… we never pulled it again on her. Back then mail servers were much less secure/complex so somebody sent an email that appeared to be from one of our profs to the entire class saying class was canceled. They were careful to not include the prof on the email.