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Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube idea

I have started cooking a lot more at home.  I am not a fan of cookbooks, but I really like watching a quick video showing you how to make good stuff.  There is a ton of people out there making cooking videos, but I think the best is FoodTube, by Jamie Oliver.  FoodTube, if you don’t know, is a network of half a dozen great chefs.  The videos are really well done and the meals are typically pretty simple and soooo good.  Here is a YouTube playlist with my favorites.

Yesterday I was cooking Donal Skehan’s Roast Chicken.  I actually looked at a couple recipes including one by Laura in the Kitchen.  She made a big deal about how important it is to be sure the chicken is thoroughly cooked and she had the oven at about the same temperature but for a totally different time (I think about 50% more).  She also stressed how important it is to use a thermometer.  I over cooked my chicken just a tad.  My point is this: it would be cool to have a few episodes on cooking tools.  I saw an episode where Jamie is showing kids knife skills.  I think an episode just on how to use a knife and maybe how to sharpen one would be great.  What is the best thermometer?  Is there one where I can tell the temp of the item without actually opening the oven?  I bought a crock pot but now wish I had gotten a dutch oven instead.  I don’t know that there would be a ton of episodes, but suggestions would be great.  I don’t even think you would have to give brand names, but know if a high quality knife is worth it or what to look for in a knife, those kinds of things are great for someone new to cooking like me.

Also, I get that your audience is mostly on the metric system, but it might be cool to have recipes with both in the details.  For that matter, having the recipe in the details would be great.  A lot of times it is a broken link to some site.  I know site traffic is important, but if you are ever going to remove a page, it would be nice.  Just a thought.  Great stuff.  Keep it up.

Evan and Apple

I have been Tweeting a lot of frustrations about Apple and a friend asked why, so here are the details….

I begged my parents for my first computer, which was an Apple.  And right before I went to college I worked all summer and saved up my money for my second.  Which I immediately regretted since everyone at school had PCs and it seemed all the cool pirated games were made for PC.  So I converted to PC until Steve Jobs came back.  Not because he came back, but he did three things that I thought were genius.  One was the iPod.  Right before the iPod came out I bought my first “MP3 player” that was expensive, as big as a pack of cigarettes, and only held 6 songs which you had to play in the order they were loaded on your player.  By comparison the iPod held “1,000 songs in your pocket” and the interface was light years ahead.  The other thing that really interested me was that the new Apple operating system was based on Free BSD.  So UNIX.  This was also the time I started getting into open source, so I thought this was a genius move on Jobs part.  He was basically harnessing the community for OS development.  The last thing was he was selling songs for a dollar.  That was the last straw.  I was back on board.  I loved iTunes.  When the iPhone came out, I was an outright fanboy.  Visual voicemail.  Email (which had not yet become a pain in the ass) right on your phone.  And anyone could make apps for the phone.  It felt very open.

Lately there are some things Apple is doing that just, frankly, infuriate me.  I mean, seriously just gets me worked up.  It feels very similar to the things Microsoft was doing that people hated so much back then.  I can remember when Windows 95 came out, people were not hating on Microsoft.  But it came.  And slowly people left because of it.  Let me explain a few but they are basically bloat, greed, and closed systems.

You talk to anyone who knows operating systems and the Microsoft of old, and they will talk about the bloat.  Case in point: the latest Windows 10 uses 20 gigs of space and the latest Ubuntu uses 5 gigs.  OS X El Capitan uses about 13 gigs.  That’s a lot.  And it will effect performance.  Arguably most of those “improvements” are not really improvements.  They are just bloat.  And that bloat will leave your computer sluggish.  So you can try to fight it by not upgrading, but then you run into issues where you have to upgrade some piece of software that is no longer supported on your older OS.  Do you know anyone that has had an Apple for more than 3 years without performance problems?  I am not saying it can’t be done, but you have to fight issues and that is not how it should be.

It bothers me that Apple’s strategy is for us to upgrade our phone every year.  It also bothers me that those phones are artificially below market rate.  What I mean by that is, they could never hope to produce that phone if they had to pay everyone at least $15 an hour with benefits.  I would rather pay for a more expensive phone that I could keep for a decade at a time.  Or more.  Cars should not out live computers.  And Apple should not use slave labor.  They are sitting on hoards of cash and have become one of the largest publicly traded companies.  I think at one point the goal was to make the best product out there and that has slowly eroded to having a goal of being wealthy.  They went from fighting the establishment to being the establishment.

The last one is just my observation.  There used to be a real simple and elegant file system that is typical for open source products.  In WordPress, you don’t have to back up the whole thing, just the WP-content directory.  Apple OS X started out the same, but has made some minor changes that suck.  I wish iTunes was just music.  It went from being this simple, perfect music application to….I don’t even know what it is anymore.  I know that I do not use it.  EVER.  It has just become to convoluted.  The iPhotos is doing the same thing.  I will admit they have opened up the file structure, but I think it is because they realize no one uses iPhoto.  I feel like there are so many great photo solutions out there and Apple’s iPhoto is not on the radar.  And that is because they had such a closed off system.  iCloud was such a cool idea, but it isn’t easy to use.  Not as easy as other cloud solutions.  That is problematic.  But they are making the same mistake with other products, particularly iTV.  I am curious about their new iTV, but at this point it is too little too late.  This is a problem because Apple (like Microsoft before it) has used this “our products work really well together” strategy by making sure they do not work well with others.  So if you start moving to Android for TV, then you might think about your phone.  And you are probably not using Safari.  Or iTunes.  Or iPhoto.  So then you start asking yourself why you are paying so much for a laptop when there are things like Raspberry pie and Chromebooks.

Apple has built this house of cards.  Honestly, I feel there are a lot of companies out there that are dead, but just don’t know it yet.  Technology is rapidly disrupting business.  It used to be that if you didn’t like something, you had limited options.  But now there are so many options.  If Apple doesn’t embrace that, it could end up like Microsoft, Dell, Blackberry, Nokia, IBM, Xerox, Atari, Palm Pilot, or Commodore.

 

Uber Tips for Drivers and Riders

I had a high school friend that is a teacher that drove for Uber. He told me how much he was making and I decided to drive. I had a bunch of unused miles on my cars lease, so it worked out good for me. Since then, when getting rides from drivers, I have given them some Uber tips. Tips Uber drivers gave me that helped me out a lot. In the middle, I have some Uber rider tips.  At the end, I have some stories of crazy rides or things drivers have told me.

If you are interested in Uber, let me start by giving you an idea how much you can expect to make. Basically, you make 80% (Uber gets 20% of what you make) of $1/mile plus $0.15 per minute. So you make $9/hour plus $1/mile while driving. The problem is that if it is slow, you can sit there making nothing. And there's the rub. There is one caveat that is REALLY important.  They pay surge pricing.  Which is to say, when it is busy, you get paid more.  One rider told me they saw 12x.  The highest I've seen is 6.5x.  In theory that means you get 6.5 times the fare, but you will quickly realize that isn't really how it works.  So this is what I would advise:

  • Try to time the times when you drive with high demand, where you get surge pricing.  So 4am to 10am, 5pm to 8pm, and 6pm to 4am on the weekend.  Those hours suck but you can work much fewer hours if you can get in that sweet spot of surge pricing.  To give you an idea, I made $150 in one 20 minute ride.  So it can make a huge difference.  In fact, I have turned down half a dozen trips waiting for a surge trip.  It can really make a difference.  4am to 8am is the best time to drive.  This is when people are driving to the airport.  So if you are in uptown, the basic fare is about $28.  If you get 3x or higher, that is pretty close to $100.  If you work 8 hours where traffic is pretty consistent but not surging, you might make $15/hour, so a couple good airport trips can be worth a days work in one shot.  It's the difference between making $25/hour instead of $15/hour or lower.
  • Do not drive far from your last dropoff.  The only exception is if it is close to 2am and you are driving on the weekend and want to get back to the bar crowd.  You will be mazed where you get trips.  Even if you are way out in the middle of no where.  The reason is there aren't many drivers out there AND most of the trips out there are pretty far.  In Uptown, the trips are minimum fare about half the time.  Being out in the middle of nowhere, you are almost guaranteed a long trip.  And long trips are where the money is.
  • Know where the cheap gas is.  Normally I never pay attention to this, but if you are driving 20k miles a month, this can make a difference.  The best place I know of is on Northwest Highway on the way back to the airport at Racetrack.
  • If you decide to do this full time, you might think about getting a Toyota Carolla or a four door car that is less expensive that has a great service record.  If you have good credit, definitly try for a business loan.  Uber will get you a loan, but it is for about 19%, which is about as bad as it gets.
  • Always check your car for trash.  People will leave trash in your car and many times you will not know about it.  And if you do not take care of it, your next ride is going to think you are a slob and give you a bad rating.  Those ratings really matter because if you go below 4.5, Uber will cut you off.  True story.  Some drivers wash their cars every day, but I think that is over kill.  Checking your car for trash is NOT overkill though.
  • Speaking of things left in the car, if someone leaves something of value that they will want back, like a cell phone, DO NOT try to drive back to the rider.  I did that once and could not find the person and ended up wasting a ton of time.  One time a guy started calling me threatening me.  Ultimately I took his phone to him.  Not because he threatened me.  I just hung up on him.  He eventually promised $20.  I shouldn't have done that though.  Immediately, through the Uber app, notify Uber that you found a phone.  They will want you to take a picture of the item and they will tell you to take it to their office at your convinence.  One time a guy left his keys and begged me to bring them to him (he wouldn't come to me) and when I did, he didn't give me any money and there was nothing I could do.  Just give whatever it is to Uber and let them deal with it.
  • I am always asked if anyone puked on my car.  No one puked in my car but someone rolled down the window and puked out the window and it got on my car.  If this happens, be sure to let Uber know through the app so you get a cleaning fee.  Also, pour water on your car immediately.  Sometime puke can be sticky and impossible to clean off if you don't do it right away.
  • Some people want to tip.  Uber says to be clear that they are not required.  I always say the same thing, "tips are not required but appreciated."  I've made as much as $100 in tips in one night.  So be nice and go the extra mile!
  • I always thought it was better to have the stereo off by default.  Some people talk.  Some request music.  If they request music, I usually tell them about Spotify's program.  If they have Spotify, you should see that when you accept the ride.

When my lease was up, I still didn't have a job, so I just didn't have a car and Ubered all over the place.  So here are some Uber tips for a rider:

  • Be nice to the drivers.  They work hard and you never know when they might really help you out.  I ALWAY sit in the front with the driver.  If you sit in back, you're a douche.  I also always strike up a conversation.  Either A) What is your craziest fare OR if they have a think accent B) Hey, sounds like you have a thick accent.  Where are you from originally?  If they are from some other country, I ask them to tell me about it.  I have heard so many great stories.
  • Uber is cheaper for short trips.  Minimum fare is $5.  It is a little higher for lyft HOWEVER it is actually cheaper on Lyft for longer trips.  Lyft's time rate is the same but the mile rate is $0.90, but they charge $1 for some reason.  So more than 10 miles, Lyft is cheaper.
  • If you use a Capital One credit card, you get 20% credited back.  So basically 20% off Uber rides!  Details.
  • Spotify is also a partner, so if you have Spotify, you can play anything from your phone and it will play automatically on the drivers stereo (if he has it set up).  Details.
  • As a driver, I hate it when people stop a store and go in to grab something, but it happens so if you need to, don't feel to bad about doing that.  If you are at your place and just need one or two things from the grocery store, you might pay the $5 minimum each way.  In that case, it is actually cheaper to use Favor.  Costs about $6 for the trip plus $2 minimum tip.

Want some stories?

  • Once I had a female SMU student ask me to take them ONE FUCKING BLOCK!  On campus.  They had shorts and tshirt and running shoes on because they were going to play some sport, but wanted to be driven the intermural field.
  • One time I picked up four girls from a Taylor Swift show at the AAC.  Two parents and two really young (elementry school?) young girls.  As you can imagine, it was a total cluster fuck.  Took me 15-30 minutes just to get them.  I called them immediately so they could tell me EXACTLY where they were and told them what I was driving.  They gave me an intersection.  Keep in mind it is PACKED and tons of cars are behind me.  I have one shot at this.  It might take me an half an hour if a cop forces me to go around.  I get right to the intersection and put my hazards on.  I call them and the woman that picks up says, "We are four girls.  Don't you see any girls!?!?!  That's us!"  It's Taylor Swift.  It is nothing but a sea of young girls and gay men.
  • I had five people come up to my car.  2 guys and 3 girls.  The girls got in first.  Then one of the guys tried to get in back with two of the girls.  It turns out he was not with them.  The girls did not speak English but you could tell something was wrong.  I finally asked the girl that requested the car and she said they were not with them.  It was the only time I felt threatened.  I eventually said, in a strong tone, "get out of my car RIGHT NOW or I will call the police."  So he got out.
  • The guy that developed Great Plains (financial software that Microsoft purchased) gave me a ride one time.  He had the nicest car, too.  Really nice guy.  He was probably in his late 60s and "retired".
  • I have met a ton of people in bands.  They all seem to have part time jobs driving for Uber.  No one really famous, but its cool when you ask about their band and they put themselves on the radio.
  • I got a ride from a guy that had been a taxi driver for a decade.  I was telling him I thought the Uber deal for a car loan was stupid expensive.  It came to about $500/month for a Toyota Corolla.  He told me he used to pay that much EACH WEEK for his cab.  He LOVED Uber.  He also kept a GoPro in his car pointed on him when minors were in the car.  He was worried they would make up some story and he would get in trouble.  He had tried to deny the trips with minors but Uber wouldn't let him do that, so he got the GoPro.
  • I won't tell an individual story, but pretty much each time I picked up an SMU student, they would talk to their friends casually about drug use like I wasn't there.  I now am under the opinion that all SMU students do drugs.  Hard drugs.  ALL OF THEM.

Are music videos bigger now? Or why I left Spotify for Youtube.

I love YouTube more and more.  I just realized you can create playlists on YouTube.  You can also make them open to the public.  You can listen to YouTube on your phone, on TV, on your computer.  Why was I paying for Spotify again?  Not too long ago I wrote about Why Strategically Taylor Swift Leaving Spotifly Is Important where I basically explain that she is probably making considerably more on YouTube than on Spotify.  The other day it dawned on me that in many ways YouTube was better than Spotify.  It's like MTV, except you choose exactly what you want to see.

There aren't many things you can do on Spotify that you can't do no YouTube.  There are things you can do on YouTube that you can't do on Spotify.  Listen to any song on demand?  Yes, you can do that on YouTube.  I have yet to find a song that isn't on YouTube.  Even songs I have not found on iTunes or Spotify.  Creating and sharing playlists?  Yep, you can create playlists and make them public.  For most artists, you'll find YouTube has already done this with the artists most popular songs.  Here is my playlist of some of my favorite music videos.  Not songs.  I am focusing on visually creative or interesting videos.  Here is the Youtube playlist for Bob Schneider, one of my favorites.  Take a second and open one of these in a new tab on your browser.  Here is another thing that is cool.  On both you can shuffle the playlist, repeat the playlist, and share the playlist.  Wanna jump to a specific song, click on the song title in the right pane.  Here's where it gets cool.  You can play these playlists on your TV using Apple TV or (I assume) Amazon Fire TV or Android TV.  So if you are having a party, you can make your really cool party playlist and play it on your TV MTV style.  Here's where it gets cooler.  If you have your iPhone, your friends can join your WiFi network and play their favorite song or playlist from their phone.  So people can take turns sharing their favorite songs without getting off their asses, which is exactly what Landon and I did last weekend.  "Wait!  Wait!  One more!  You've got to see this!"  Which as you can imagine, can literally go on forever.  Well, assuming people keep making great videos and putting them on Youtube.  I digress.

Here are 7 interesting facts you can gleen from comScore's February 2015 report.

  • Less than 3% of the world watched a video in February 2015. 188.6M people watched an online video, though, which is a ton.
  • 77% of people that watched an online video, watched a video on Youtube.
  • Yahoo is behind Facebook and AOL (Yahoo, Marissa….clue in. For God's sake, Youtube is #2. Doesn't that tell you anythign?)
  • 29% of Youtube viewers watched a VEVO video, making it consistently the most popular property on YouTube
  • 23% of total online video views were on VEVO, putting it ahead of Vimeo, Netflix, and Hulu.
  • PSY's Gangnam Style has 2.4BB views.  And that song sucks (yes, that is a fact).
  • Taylor Swift's Bad Blood has 213.5M views in just one month!  (Congrats, that is awesome!)

How can it be that Youtube has 1 billion viewers and cannot generate profit? My guess is that this is a transfer pricing issue or just total incompentency on the part of Susan Wojcicki. Seems like there are a several things they can do to attract viewers that cost nothing, several things they can do to attract content creators without increasing expenses, and I can think of a few things that would help them gain market share to their competitors. Maybe I should write a blog post on that.

Sandcastles: Thoughts on math, science, software, and God

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. – Matthew 7:24-27

I was thinking the other day that science is such a flimsy reed.  It is like a house built on sand and yet it seems so many people have bought in to ideas like evolution and black holes.  I am not saying that I don’t believe in black holes.  Mathematically it seems it would make sense.  Or at least that is what Einstein thought.  And that is what was cool when they found evidence that suggested that Einstein is most likely right.  Even our own galaxy would seem to have one.  The fact is, we have never actually seen one.  It is like bigfoot, lots of blurry pictures and footprints.  LOTS.  And lots of math.  So big foot….I mean black holes must exist.  Right?  And evolution is equally factitious.  I mean, it must also be a fact.  We can see all these animals adapting to their environment.  In many cases, they change color.  And one species of ape can become an entirely new species of ape.  Ergo man must have come from apes and apes must have come from plants and plants must have come from nothing.  Totally makes sense.  Provable, in fact.  Just like the Pythagorean theorem is provable.  Although I have not seen the proof.  It is science, so I am sure the proof is there somewhere.

So is math just the representation of ideas?  What are ideas?  Cogito ergo sum.  If thinking is the evidence that I exist, the ideas I think must be equally tangible.  Or maybe ideas are nothing but thoughts in our mind.  We can write them down, but they don’t necessarily exist.  I can think about a dragon, but that does not make dragons real.  Could it be that math exists in the same way dragons exist?  Maybe math is nothing.  It is something in the same way this imaginary dragon is, some idea in my mind.  It is something in that two sheep and two sheep ARE IN FACT four sheep, but “4” is an idea that explains the four sheep.  There is no “4” outside our imagination and symbols we write on paper.  So when we say, “what is the square root of negative 2,” it is in fact, in every sense, an imaginary number.  There are no number that you can multiply by itself to get -2. 

I have been learning about software.  Codecademy offers all these free courses, so I took them.  It seems all software is basically math.  You have variables.  Variables, like algebra, can be numbers.  Oddly, they can also be words, collections of words, and collections of collections of words.  And words are definitely not math.  Except in this case where they are.  Each letter is made up of 1’s and 0’s.  A computer just calculates incredibly long strings of 1’s and 0’s.  And somehow that does all this cool stuff.  So if software is math.  And if math is nothing but an idea.  Is software just an idea?  Then software is nothing?  Have we built nothing out of nothing?  That doesn’t make sense.  Maybe we have built upon sand.  We have built sandcastles on sand.  And as Jimi Hendrix said (sang, whatever), “castles made of sand, melts into the sea eventually.”  He also said “manic depressions a frustrating mess.”  That’s another story.

If a mathematical proof is all we have to show us a black hole must be out there, can we be sure it is really out there and not that the mathematical formula which led us to believe it was there was just some imagined fiction?  I think in the same way the theory of evolution is flawed.  To believe it, you must stake quite a bit on math.  And man made theories that came from the mind.  In the end I think you will find science is built on sand.  It is not provable.  I am not saying the belief in God is provable, either because it isn’t.  I have my own experiences, the Bible, witnesses, the prophets, and God himself.  And to me, that is worth more than science. 

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