Todd's Blog!

Ribs!

2011-05-31T18:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I don't quite know if it's the Best Ribs Recipe Ever, but if you're looking for a ribs recipe with one of the highest deliciousness / effort ratios, it's hard to beat this one...

St. Louis Pork Ribs

I made these last night, and they were great. The ribs came out nice and tender, and the while process took less than 2 hours start to finish. It helped that I had a pretty good quality sauce, too. (Rufus Teague's Honey Sweet Sauce)

It's funny -- even though I'm a big fan of stews, I always have a knee jerk negative reaction to the idea of boiling meat (it just conjures up images of flavorless, weirdly-colored meat-like product). Glad I was able to try this out.

Incidentally, if you're looking for the Best Pulled Pork Recipe Ever, it turns out you can find it here. Who'da thunk Esquire magazine would be my go-to guide for recipes these days?

Pretty Sneaky, Energizer...

2011-04-28T22:28:00.000-07:00

So I was at the drug store the other day purchasing some batteries. And, as I was deciding which kind to get, I noticed this label on the pack of Energizers...

My initial impression after looking at this was, "Wow! The world's first zero-mercury batteries? That's great! Heck, I didn't even realize all those other batteries had mercury in them!" And, as a parent, I like to know when I make my patented Used Battery Teething Ring for my daughter, she's not eating any mercury. That's just the kind of responsible father I am.

So I was all set to buy these batteries -- the mercury free ones -- when I read the label a little closer.

"Makers of the world first zero mercury batteries"? Well, that's the same thing; isn't it? And that's when I noticed the asterisk that pointed me to this little footnote...

Hmmm... okay. So it turns out that Energizer started making zero-mercury batteries back in 1991, and then just about every other manufacturer in the U.S. and Europe quickly followed suit. So pretty much any modern battery you buy today is going to be mercury free. Not just the Energizers. They just happened to do it first, and then tell you about it in a kinda misleading way.

Well played, Energizer. Well played.

In the end, though, I still bought the batteries. Sure they were sneaky, but hey, they did go through all the trouble to develop a mercury-free battery first. Why not give 'em my cash? Besides, I tend to have a bit of grudging respect for sneaky marketing tactics.

Follow-up: Turns out, Energizer has received millions of dollars in patent-licensing fees so other companies could make their own mercury-free batteries. So I guess maybe they didn't need my $14.

...and the answers!

2011-04-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

Well, in celebration of Portal 2 releasing today, here are the answers to the Portal Crossword Puzzle! I hope you were able to figure out that center square; I was kinda proud of that one. And I'd like to apologize for 46-across. Like I said, that section of the puzzle was really tough to fill out.

Of course, between the new job, new daughter, and parents coming into town to visit, I'm not sure I'm actually going to have any time to play Portal 2 for a little while. (Heck, I just picked up Red Dead Redemption) But one of these days, I'll get to it...

Answers after the break!

(Click to enlarge)

Portal: The Crossword Puzzle

2011-04-13T22:43:00.000-07:00

So this was an idea I had for a long time, and what with Portal 2 coming out next week, I figure I'd better get cracking on this thing and finish it. Granted, I kinda suspect that "crossword puzzle enthusiasts who are also really into Portal" might be a bit of a niche market, but hopefully a few of you out there will appreciate it.

Anyhoo, without any further ado, I present Portal: The Crossword Puzzle!

I'll post answers on Monday, in case you get stuck. Note that this does require some pretty extensive gamer knowledge to solve. (Sorry, mom.)

If you liked it, how's about subscribing to my blog? I can't promise every post will be a videogame-themed crossword, but they should still be entertaining.

Anyway, here are some other trivia and notes for those of you who are really curious about the process of crossword creation...

Holy crap, this was a lot of work. This took way more time to finish than I ever thought it would. I think at this point I owe my wife a nice dinner out after all the romantic evenings we spent together where she watched me repeatedly fill out and erase sections of graph paper.
I didn't use any crossword creation software to help me out -- this is all hand-generated. Although I did make extensive use of oneacross.com and crosswordtracker.com. And Google.
I think one issue that made this extra difficult for me is that I'd find a really good game-related word that would partially fit into the grid, and then I'd get attached to it. Even when it was obvious the word wasn't working out, I didn't want to let it go because it was just too awesome of a word.
Some awesome words that I couldn't end up using are: LAYTON, TALI, HALO, ESRB, CATAN, LINK, and KANO. Come to think of it, half the Mortal Kombat cast makes for pretty awesome crossword puzzle words.
I was trying to figure out whether the puzzle would be better if I didn't put the portals directly into the grid and let you discover them on your own, but in the end, that just seemed a little too difficult.
I think the hardest areas to for me to complete were the sections in the left-center and right-center. I ended up having to use a couple of crossword-y words that I'm not especially proud of. Sorry about that.

OMG! First post!

2011-04-09T21:50:00.000-07:00

Hi! So... uh... welcome to my blog!

Apparently, as a Developer Advocate, I'm supposed to be spending a lot of my time blogging and communicating with the outside world. But, since the project I'm on hasn't been made public yet, I'm not actually allowed to talk about anything related to work. So I guess, for the time being, you can expect this blog to be primarily about snacks.

Maybe some stuff about videogames, too. But mostly snacks.