the tindog coffeehouse

I got the newest issue of Texas Monthly in the mail a few days ago and haven’t stopped salivating since. Why? Because it’s the barbecue issue, with their rundown of the 50 best barbecue joints in the state. (Between this list and their list of the 63 tacos you must eat before you die, I’ve got my work cut out for me.)

Topping their list is a place called Snow’s BBQ in Lexington, a small town about 50 miles east of Austin. These guys are only open on Saturdays from 8:00am to whenever the meat runs out, which is usually around noon. Now that’s what you call serious devotion! (I’ve never had barbecue at 8:00 in the morning, but I bet it’s good. Heck, it’s probably the best breakfast you’ll ever have.)

In the top 5 are perennial favorites, rival siblings Kreuz Market and Smitty’s, both in Lockhart. Both of these places epitomize the soul of real Texas barbecue. In short, it’s all about the meat, specifically brisket and sausage. The meat should always be good enough to stand on its own without the help of sauce, and in fact, at Kreuz you can’t even get sauce (you can at Smitty’s upon request, but why would you want to?). It should also be unpretentious; no fancy presentation or French-sounding adjectives, just some butcher paper and lots of napkins, with an ice-cold Shiner Bock to wash it down with.

Texas barbecue–real Texas barbecue, not the “Texas-style” stuff you find beyond the borders–is a modern-day amalgamation of the state’s proud cattle industry and the rich German and Czech heritage so prevalent in central Texas and throughout the Hill Country. Together with Tex-Mex, these two styles of food accurately represent what it means to be a true Texan.

We made a pilgrimage to Kreuz Market a few years ago while visiting the Hill Country, and I can still taste it. We didn’t get to Smitty’s, but I know we’ll be back. Another one of my all-time favorites is Ruby’s on Guadalupe in Austin. Their all-natural brisket is juicy and smoky, and the sausage is perfect.

So, wait… when do we leave?

I love the title of this Radar article: “Facebook an Agent of Communist Propaganda?”

It seems someone created a Facebook profile of Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao (as a propaganda tool?) following the recent earthquakes there, and dang if the guy doesn’t already have over 16,000 friends supporters and climbing. (I guess when you’re PM of a country of 1.3 billion people, you’re bound to know a few of them.)

Interestingly, “Grandpa Wen’s” profile includes the following applications:

• “What kind of Commie are you?” quiz
• “I brake for Mao” bumper sticker
• A link to his blog: “Made in China… sucker!”
• And of course Scrabulous

We also learn that his interests include reading, cross-stiching, and oppressing the masses, and that his favorite TV show is Sex and the City. Who knew?

Napoleon Dynamite: Well, nobody’s going to go out with me!
Pedro: Have you asked anybody yet?
Napoleon Dynamite: No, but who would? I don’t even have any good skills.
Pedro: What do you mean?
Napoleon Dynamite: You know, like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills… Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.

Esquire has come up with a list of 75 skills every man should master. OK, I’ll bite. How do I measure up?

As with any list of this type, much of these “manly skills” are extremely basic things that everyone should be able to do:

3. Take a photo.
9. Write a letter.
31. Make a bed.
38. Tell a joke.
58. Avoid boredom.
61. Make bacon.
62. Hold a baby.

Are these really “skills”, per se? I mean, in that case, add “tie your shoe” or “hold your breath underwater” to the list.

And I’m not really sure how “knowing some birds” (#74), “describing a glass of wine in one sentence” (#32), or “explaining what a light-year is” (#57) makes a guy more manly.

Christy gave me one of the coolest Christmas gifts last year: The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden, “a guide book for dads as well as their sons, as a reminder of lore and technique that have not yet been completely lost to the digital age.” Covering everything from tying knots to grammar to skipping stones to the Battle of Thermopylae, it’s a much better guide to manliness than anything Esquire could come up with.

The Texas attorney general’s office has created a parenting curriculum for high school students which will become mandatory throughout the state beginning in the fall.

State officials say the goal is twofold: They want to teach teenage parents their legal rights and they want to show other students the difficulties of being a parent in hopes that they’ll wait to have children.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. In one sense, I guess it’s good if the goal is to discourage teens from getting pregnant or to provide resources to teens who already have kids so they can be better parents. On the other hand, is this really the responsibility of the schools?

Should public schools be responsible for teaching parenting courses or sex education or “life-skill” courses such as money management? Ideally, that sort of stuff should be taught at home, right? Isn’t that still the job of a parent? Of course, that’s the problem: the parents aren’t teaching these things to their children; they expect the schools to do it for them.

And this is what we get as a result. For better or worse.

How excited am I about SP3 for Windows XP? Probably about as excited as you are about it.

Nevertheless, the fine folks at Microsoft have written up a 28-page white paper comparing XP SP3 to Vista SP1. Here’s the short version: Vista is better. At least that’s the spin.

“Oh, you still want to keep XP? OK, we’ll give you another service pack. But wait! This spiffy Vista service pack is sooo much better! See how shiny it is. And secure! And it’s even still got that new OS smell!”

(Cut to a shot of sexy bikini-clad models clinging to John Hodgman.)

It’s not that I specifically disagree with the details of the white paper, mind you. It just seems kinda desperate to me.

Can a bunch of psychiatrists agree on what is considered “normal” sexual behavior and what is “abnormal”? And can we trust their conclusions?

The American Psychiatric Association is setting out to update their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a guide used by psychiatrists and psychologists to help diagnose mental health disorders, and of course one of the most controversial sections is the area related to sex.

So what is considered normal and what isn’t? Is erectile dysfunction or low sex drive normal? Are they biological/medical conditions or mental health disorders? What about sadomasochism or pedophilia or transgenderism? What about homosexuality? Where do you draw the line?

The group’s conclusions have wide-ranging consequences.

“Psychiatric diagnoses affect child custody decisions, self-esteem, whether individuals are hired or fired, receive security clearances, or have other rights and privileges curtailed. Criminals may find that their sentences are either mitigated or enhanced as a direct result of their diagnoses. The equating of unusual sexual interests with psychiatric diagnoses has been used to justify the oppression of sexual minorities and to serve political agendas. A review of this area is not only a scientific issue, but also a human rights issue.”

And those diagnoses have changed over time.

“Definitely a change in culture affects diagnoses,” Leiblum says. “We used to think oral-genital sex was deviant and we have embraced that. Masturbation was evidence of out of control behavior, now we see it as not only normative but to be encouraged.”

So can we trust these conclusions to guide our own views of sexuality when those conclusions are always changing?

One guide on sexuality that has never changed is the Bible, and it is very clear on what the proper role of sex is in our lives, what is good and what is not good. It’s very clear that sex is a good thing but meant between a man and woman who are married.

If you’re looking to define what is normal and what is deviant, wouldn’t it make more sense to use a guide that doesn’t change over time? If you’re building a house, could you trust a ruler if the definition of a “foot” or a “yard” was relative rather than absolute?

It goes back to the old saying: “What one generation tolerates the next generation embraces.” Therefore, what is considered “normal” may not necessarily be “right”.

Facebook is rolling out some pretty significant design changes to its profile pages beginning in June, breaking the single-page 2-column profile down into multiple tabs.

Per CNET:

The redesign, a preview of which was released Tuesday night, slots member information under five new tabs: personal news feeds; profile information; photos; applications; and a customizable page.

As part of the redesign, Facebook is dramatically playing up the role of its News Feed, which will be the anchor, or first tab, of the new member home page.

(More coverage here and here [with more screenshots].)

Having done a little web design over the years, I can appreciate the desire of developers to both clean up the often chaotic nature of many people’s profiles as well as allow for greater scalability. You want to give users the ability to clutter it up as much as they’d like while still making it usable. But I also know that people can be very resistant to change, and I think this redesign is a big enough change to really tick some people off.

That said, while it is a really big change in the functionality of the site, it seems like it would be pretty easy to get used to it. And actually, from the screenshots I’ve seen, I think it’s a huge improvement over the current design.

My only gripe is that I don’t think it goes far enough in giving users more flexibility to customize it to their liking. What about reordering the tabs? What about adding or deleting tabs? What if you want to stick with the old design? It would be nice to give users more options. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

No work today. I’m escorting Megan’s 1st Grade class to the Fort Worth Zoo. Should be absolutely perfect weather.

Megan said she was most looking forward to seeing the horses. (‘Cause, y’know, she never sees horses anywhere else.)

Hopefully the animals will be a little more excited to see us than they were the last time I was there. Hurry! Get this lion a double espresso!

Lifehacker posed a question to its readers: “What Makes Vista Worth It?”

I was surprised by the number of positive responses since all you ever hear about in the “tech community” is how bad Vista is. The problem is, so much of what you read and hear on the various tech blogs and podcasts is simply regurgitated from somewhere else. That’s why you see the same gadget talked about on 20 different blogs with almost no original content. (That’s also why I didn’t want to create yet another tech blog–what’s the point?)

Anyway, I’ve been using Vista on my home computer since it came out last year, so I thought I would use this opportunity to put my 2 cents in on the discussion.

The bottom line is that I really like it, but I think part of that comes from my history with XP. I used to work at Microsoft prior to the launch of XP, so I spent a lot of time running the various Whistler betas and taking and delivering various training on XP. Since leaving Microsoft, I’ve been a network admin at a couple of different companies, and so I’ve deployed or redeployed at least a couple of thousand machines over the last several years. I’ve stared at the XP splash screen, the blue-and-green “Fisher Price” color scheme, and the “Take a tour of XP” popup balloon waaayy too many times. Honestly, I’m done with XP.

So I was really ready to move on to Vista when it came out. I upgraded a few of the components on my old Dell desktop at home, installed Vista Business on it, and have never looked back. (Well, I still have to stare at XP at work, but at least not on my home computer.)

Now, a little more than a year later, here’s my non-exhaustive list of Vista’s features: the good, the bad, and the meh (in no particular order).

The Good:

• Aero, Aero, Aero – The interface is much cleaner, and I like the transparency. It feels a lot more polished and grown up than XP’s Luna GUI.
• Better use of graphics cards’ processors – Part of the reason the Aero Glass interface looks so good is that the OS offloads more of the graphics processing to the video card’s GPU. That frees up more of the system’s CPU for other tasks.
• Sound mixer – You can adjust the volume for applications independently. For example, turn the Windows Sounds down while keeping Winamp louder. This is one of those simple things that you don’t really appreciate until you go back to an XP machine.
• ReadyBoost – Stick a fast USB flash drive in the computer and use it to pre-cache commonly used applications so that they load faster. While some people have said it doesn’t make a noticeable performance difference, it did on my older machine.
• Better firewall and better integration of Defender - Yeah, XP SP2 has a built-in firewall, and you can download Defender separately, but they work better on Vista. The Vista firewall is also much more robust and can block outbound traffic as well.
• Expanded Task Manager and performance monitoring – Monitor processes, services, and performance as in XP, but then launch the Resource Monitor for lots more performance information.
• Background defragmentation – Not a huge need in this age of ginormous hard drives, but it can help maintain the performance levels of your system. Being able to schedule it to run automatically is a nice change.
• Explorer – “Favorite Links” panel, more viewing options, and a preview pane make it easy to customize the view to your liking. I don’t like how the File menu is hidden by default, but it’s fairly easy to turn on and keep on permanently.
• The games – OK, so I’m easy to please. But as a sidenote, you can use parental control settings to limit which games your kids can play in Vista.

The Bad:

• User Access Control (UAC) – It’s annoying and unnecessary. It’s the first thing that got disabled. I log in under a local administrator account. I know what I’m doing. I shouldn’t have to ask for the computer’s permission first.
• The Search and Indexing services – One of the common praises on Lifehacker is for the enhanced search capabilities in Vista. I rarely search for files on my computer, so these services just bogged down my computer.
• Other unnecessary services – Much like XP, too many things are enabled out of the box in Vista. Turn off what you don’t need, and the system will always run a lot better.
• Backup – Unlike in XP, you can’t pick and choose which files to back up. It’s either everything or it’s only certain types of files such as all your documents. And then the backups aren’t to a single .BKF file but to tons of smaller files. No, thanks. I use Nero BackItUp, and it works great for what I need.
• Media Player 11 – Specifically the DRM restrictions that make Vista’s WMP almost completely worthless. Why should my CPU run at 100% utilization just to play an MP3? I’m sticking with Winamp 5.5.
• Task Scheduler – How do you ruin something so simple and intuitive as the Task Scheduler? Make it as robust as it is in Vista. Holy cow! You could get lost in that thing. I think I scheduled some tasks to run but I’ll never know for sure.
• Automatically enabling IPv6 – Very few people need to use IPv6, so why enable it by default? Turn it off to increase network performance.
• Longer boot times – Sorta. The actual time from turning on the computer to the point at which I’m at my desktop is about the same as XP. But it takes so much longer for all the services to start up. If you don’t have to reboot often, it’s not a big deal. But I really dread the times that I do.

The Meh:

• IE 7 – Whatever. I use Firefox.
• Windows Photo Gallery – All I want to do is view pictures. It does that fine. I don’t use any of the other features.
• Windows Sidebar – I don’t understand the appeal of gadgets or widgets or whatever on your desktop.
• Flip 3D – What is the point of that again? Alt+Tab is faster.

I got a notice in the mail last week from Allstate showing my car insurance was going up almost $40 a month starting in June even though Christy and I both have clean driving records. That didn’t make any sense …until now:

Allstate Insurance agreed Monday to refund $51.6 million to its Texas customers for overcharges in homeowners insurance….

Are my increased car insurance rates helping fund Allstate’s refund to homeowners insurance customers?!

Texas residents shopping Amazon.com may have to start paying sales tax because the company has a distribution center here?  WHAT?! They can’t do that!

I am a huge fan of Amazon. I automatically go there any time I’m looking to purchase anything or even researching a product. Why? Partly because of the huge selection (I know I can find it either for sale by Amazon or by a reseller), partly because of the user reviews, but mostly because of the price. Typically the price at Amazon is cheaper than most other Internet retailers and almost always cheaper than what you would find at a brick-and-mortar retailer. And even if the price is the same, it’s still cheaper because you don’t have to pay sales tax and because you can often get free ground shipping.

I’m not fundamentally opposed to paying sales tax. In Texas, where we don’t have a state income tax, the primary sources of income for the state are sales taxes and property taxes, and we pay out the wazoo on both accounts. So while I’m used to paying tax on stuff I buy, even stuff I buy online, any time I can avoid doing so, I will.

So would I shop Amazon less if I had to pay tax there? I don’t know. If the price is still cheaper and I can still get free shipping, then I probably wouldn’t go elsewhere. But I would definitely shop around online more to look for the best deal.

Yesterday marked the 5th anniversary of President Bush’s ill-executed “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and of course the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq press were very quick to use it as another opportunity to label Iraq (and Bush) as a failure.

For all the polls and statistics, though, something occurred to me as I was driving home from work yesterday. Where have all the patriotic “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon magnets gone? It used to be not so long ago that maybe every fourth or fifth car you saw had some variant of these magnets on them, either the traditional yellow variety or maybe the red, white, and blue version, perhaps even a camouflage version. There were also a lot patriotic bumper stickers or other stickers on car windows. Today? Very few.

Yesterday I began watching other cars (in addition to watching the road), looking for a patriotic sticker or magnet on the back of cars. Out of the maybe couple thousand cars I saw during my hour-plus drive home, I saw two cars with a “Support Our Troops” magnet. Two.

Now, I know that’s nowhere near a scientific survey, and that’s not to say that a driver without a patriotic sticker isn’t patriotic. (Full disclosure: My car’s only external decoration is a UT Longhorns emblem.) But I can tell you for a fact that the number of patriotic magnets a year ago was way higher.

So what’s the deal? Are people really expressing their frustration and exhaustion with the war? Are we, in fact, as “bitter” as Barack Obama says we are? Or has the obnoxious car magnet fad just played itself out, as the Livestong bracelets did and as Crocs will surely do? I don’t know. But I should also point out that I also didn’t see any political bumper stickers during the same trek home, which seems odd being a presidential election year. Maybe that fad has played itself out, too.