Dynamite Margarita

Delicious, and kicks your butt! Makes 2 servings:

3 oz tequila of choice (I use Sauza Hornitos Reposado, generally)
2 oz orange liquer (I use Patron Citronge, other good choices are Grand Marnier or Cointreau)
3 persian limes
4 squirts** agave syrup
lowball glass(es) with ice cubes
** - a quick pump of the bottle, not really sure how much comes out.

optional
pinch of black, flaky salt (I use Falksalt's black variety, but whatever)
5 sweet mint leaves

In a shaker, combine the tequila and orange liquer. If you want the mint, add all but 1 leaf and muddle. Hand-squeeze the limes into the shaker and add the agave syrup. Shake. If using mint, place one mint leaf decoratively between ice cubes. Pour over ice and crumble salt gently on top.

Please sip responsibly.


For a "Nor-Cal" alternative, use 4oz silver tequila, 3 persian limes, no orange liquer, no agave syrup and a few ounces of seltzer water.

Sailing west to the North Pole

"Shouldn't we take a right turn?"
"... well, we've been going West for a long time, we can't give up now!"

It seems to me that a lot of approaches get stuck going in one direction like that. People don't seem to like to re-evaluate. They don't even seem to like to consider re-evaluating.

I tend to believe that all options should be valid for evaluation, even those that are pretty much guaranteed to be dismissed. I think the win of laying out all options (even the dumb ones), is that a deliberate decision is reached for a reason, as opposed to just left nebulously behind.

Often during re-evaluation, we can realize that circumstances have changed and those reasons to not take a particular approach (or why the current was chosen) are no longer there. If we don't look around on a regular basis, we never get a chance to make better decisions.

Tires

Exciting stuff, this is the rubber that meets the road! But with so many options, how can you choose?

For many people, tires are an afterthought. When they need to be replaced they either get what the dealer recommends for them, or whatever has the highest mileage warranty, or whatever is cheaper. For a few of us, tires are an agonizing decision between performance, versatility and value. I clearly fall in the latter bucket.

So, what do I care about in a tire? In addition to being round and the right size, it should 1. have excellent dry grip for braking and acceleration, 2. have excellent stability for cornering, 3. have at least good wet grip for the same reasons (and since Seattle is wet a good portion of the year, this represents a relatively large percentage of driving days). Additional considerations include road noise (though that's more of a bonus) and some ability to drive in light snow (since we get the occasional dusting).

Great, now to pick one ... this is a perfect place where brand loyalty comes in. Aside from reading reviews, there's really no way to try a tire out other than forking over a bunch of money, putting it on, and driving around a bunch. I had been happily using Pirelli P Zero Nero summer tires on my Prelude in Arizona, but after the factory tires on my Acura wore down, I decided maybe I should get something more all-season-esque. The guy at Discount Tire recommended the Bridgestone RE960, which sits in the "ultra high performance all season" category (highest performance for an all season tire). I figured Bridgestone makes pretty good stuff (their S-03 max performance tires seem to rate on par with Michelin's well-known Pilot line, for example), and their Uni-T technology uses magical hand-holding elves to help the tire stay closer to round despite uneven wear or slightly bent rims (an issue I was particularly sensitive to after a bad encounter with a pothole in Tucson). The price was ok, so I took the plunge. I didn't really like them. They seemed somewhat noisy, and most importantly they never seemed all the grippy. I didn't have the same confidence in turns, and definitely didn't have the same confidence on wet surfaces. I limped along on them until now. As of today, I'm back on Pirelli P Zero Nero summer rubber and already loving them more. They might not last more than 30,000 miles, but I'll enjoy every last one of them.


An aside about choices:
The sheer number of choices is overwhelming. I really like tirerack.com for their selection, prices and reviews/tests of tires. However, when I plug in my car and look for 215/45/17, I get almost 80 results. I know I'm only interested in the higher performance options and don't need runflats (I have a spare). Filtering only "ultra high performance" or better still leaves about 50 results. Reducing my choices down to the best-known brands who are consistently used by performance carmakers as OEM providers (Bridgestone, Continental, Goodyear, Michelin, Pirelli) still leaves 19 results. I'll remove Bridgestone because I've now had a sub-par experience with them. This leaves me 11 options ... and now I've concluded that maybe I should have tried the Michelin Pilot Super Sport instead. But I know I'm happy with the P Zero Nero. And here we are. Choice made, questions unanswered.

UPS vs FedEx (vs USPS)

I recently posted on Facebook asking if people had a preference between UPS and FedEx. No one prefers FedEx, but several people threw in that they prefer USPS. I hadn't even considered them as a serious option. Perhaps I should look.

FedEx is curious though. They invented the notion of tracking, yet are being beaten at that game by UPS. UPS's tracking info is more up-to-date and if you miss your package you can immediately call it in and have them hold it at the station the same day (which, btw, stay open til 8pm or later as needed). FedEx seems to run two networks: FedEx "real" and FedEx Home. The home service is their regular parcel service and doesn't offer any of the above. The only effective way to communicate with them is through the tags they leave on the door. So, if you are regularly not at home because you, say, work, you have to:

Delivery day 1: miss package, sign tag to authorize drop or have them hold at the station.
Delivery day 2: get package. Unless a signature is required, in which case they will take above tag and act on it.
Delivery day 3: package is at the station. Go pick it up [during working hours].

UPS has managed to condense this to:
Delivery day 1: miss package, call UPS with tag number and have them unload package from truck when it returns to the station that day. That night you go pick up your package. Done.

The company from the northwest wins in customer service! What a surprise.

Does PowerPoint suck?

This is not a technical review. For full disclosure, I find designing a presentation in PPT to be a continuously annoying experience. However, others seem to be able to crank stuff out a lot faster and nicer-looking than I do, so maybe it's just fine on that front. My presentations, however, look like the art-analogs of stick figures and doodled speech bubbles.

Sometime in the late 90s, PowerPoint became the thing to use for presentations. It was to make presentations amazing, dynamic and infinitely informative....assuming the presenter had the vision to know what they wanted to put together and show. In reality, most presentations look[ed] like what I produce. And, PowerPoint ended up not being the answer and plenty of people say "PowerPoint kinda really sucks"

Most of its users never learned how to use it, or ever even figured out what they wanted to make with it. The users' shortcomings infected the impression of the product. Does anyone blame a drill and saw when Uncle Fred's homemade chair is ugly and doesn't work?

Gun proponents should be familiar with this: guns are getting the bad rap because enough of their users are stupid with them.

About those tax "loopholes"

Getting mad at companies for taking advantage of tax "loopholes" is like getting mad at extreme couponers.

There's a common sentiment that companies are doing something wrong, unethical or even illegal by doing tax planning that involves multiple states or countries. Most large companies aren't going to do anything illegal in these scenarios. Beyond that, it's just a matter of finding the best deal. If that deal happens to lead to great savings, so be it.

When an extreme couponer manages to pay $3 for 4 grocery carts of food, who do we blame? No one, really, we just marvel that they were able to combine their coupons and store deals and everything. If anyone is at fault, it's the store for having double coupon days or whatever. Practically giving away hundreds of dollars of groceries would be the exploitatoin of a "loophole", and if anyone should shut that down, it's the store.

It's not a company's job to lobby for a state or country to change how they operate. Any preferential tax deals were created because there was a mutual benefit at the time: maybe a state got a company to set up shop there, etc. States and countries need to decide if they're getting a bad deal and change their tax laws if they are. Just keep in mind that changing the terms of the deal may turn off your big client... and then they take their money elsewhere.

Public transport

I just returned from my second trip to Budapest in the last year, and one key reason the city is a great place to be is its public transport. Specifically, it's breadth and volume of transport options that share a key component: during the day, you never have to wait more than 3-4 minutes for anything. This is key because it reduces the penalty per line exchange and allows for lots of short lines that the user can combine as they need, without getting out a timetable and planning.

In contrast, Seattle's bus system has large gaps between successive buses. When I lived in Queen Anne, I could take the 545 to work from Westlake and be there in about 30 minutes. Not bad, right? I just needed to get to Westlake. Any of the following lines would do: 1, 2, 13, 15, 18. And since any of those would be around any minute, this worked great!

Correction: would have worked great, if that assumption held true. The 2 and 13 ran down Queen Anne Ave and stopped 2 blocks from my place, but only ran about every 15 minutes combined. If I just missed one, I'd have to wait a long time for the next one. The 1 came over on Olympic and also stopped about 2 blocks from my place, but ran equally infrequently. All these lines, however, stop at Mercer and Queen Anne Ave (the 15 and 18 came up Mercer, alternating every 10 minutes). So, to give myself the best shot at catching any of these, I'd walk slightly further and between the 15 and 18 would never have to wait more than 10 minutes (except when a bus would inexplicably never show up) and sometimes I'd get lucky with one of the others. However, there was a mass convergence: all lines were supposed to be at Queen Anne and Mercer at 9:31. If I showed up at 9:32 (after walking about 5 minutes), I'd have to wait 9 more minutes.

For reasons that baffle me to this day, these lines then stop every 2 blocks (are we to believe that asking people to walk one extra block is a big ask??), including through the ride-free zones where all the homeless people add to the bus-stop overhead. Every stop features people getting on one at a time and if you're lucky, tapping their ORCA card, otherwise fishing for change. God forbid a person in a wheelchair want to get on the bus: that's about a 2-minute operation (in contrast, transport stops in Budapest happen in about 10-15 seconds). In other words, these bits of time add up real fast. And somehow, the bus would always get to 3rd and Pine/Pike right as the 545 was leaving (wait penalty: 9-15 minutes, depending on time of day).

Let's recap: walk 5 minutes, wait 0-9 minutes, ride the bus for about 15 minutes, walk 1 minute, wait for the 545 (0-12 minutes), then add 30 more minutes. Getting to the 545 (and lacking control over when I get there relative to 545 departure times) costs me 21-40 minutes.

I lived 2.1 miles away from the 545 stop and after a while decided that walking was the best course of action. It takes 26 minutes to do so every single time, and I can plan my arrival time to line up with the 545 so I don't have to wait as long. Taking the bus from Queen Anne occasionally saves me a few minutes and works out better, and often causes me to miss my connection. Let's call it identical for this exercise. How big of a fail is it that the break-even point for distance where riding the bus becomes worth it is in the neighborhood of 2 miles?