Big Fat Ostrich

I couldn’t stand waiting for the Android 4.0 OTA update for my Nexus S any longer so I updated manually. It’s a fairly easy process and honestly, I can’t see what the delay is at this point. I get that the December roll-out was stopped because it was problematic. I get that. But still waiting for my phone to be updated  “some time in March” just isn’t accurate enough for me.

So. If you want to manually update your Nexus S, first download it by getting it directly from google.

(Before you update, remember that you may need the correct Nexus S variant. This worked on Baseband version I9020XXKI1, so update at your own risk. However, the update will simply not work if your phone is not the correct variant. It simply will not follow through, without doing any harm. Make a backup just in case.)

Next, follow these steps to update your phone:

1) First I renamed the downloaded file VQ8PQk.zip to ICS.zip for the sake of clarity.
2) Copy ICS.zip to your memory card/internal storage. Then turn off your phone.
3) Power it on while holding the volume button up. This will bring you to the bootloader.
4)  Navigate with the power button and select recovery by pressing the power button.<
5) At the warning page (triangle), hold the power button and press up volume.
6) Select apply update from /sdcard and choose ICS.zip (or whatever you called the file).
7) The update process will take 5-10 minutes. When it’s done (you’ll know when). Reboot the phone.

And that’s it!

First off, ICS is slick. They put a lot of thought into this redesign. The main thing I noticed is that a lot of redundant steps have been removed, so it takes less clicks to get where you want to go. Obviously, this means less time touching the screen and more time actually interacting with your phone (in a totally non-obsessive way of course).

Battery life seems to have improved, but so far it seems that it mostly depends on which apps are more battery intensive. Overall, battery life is good, but not stellar and considering my phone is already over 8 months old, I don’t suspect that the battery is in its rime anymore.

With any new OS it’ll take you some time to get familiar with it, but it’s truly a much more intuitive interface. Like I said, it’s faster, more efficient and very snappy. Makes me very curious about the rumored summer release of Android 5.0 aka Jelly Bean, although I can’t see such a major version jump happening so fast. At least for the Nexus S.

Now for the bad thing

USB connectivity no longer works in the car!

This is a very bad thing unless you love local radio. What I used to do, was plug my Nexus S into the car’s (Nissan Sentra) usb jack, mount the device, and then listen to music through the car’s stereo. Bonus was that I could skip tracks by using the controls on the steering wheel. This was an awesome convenience which simply doesn’t work anymore.

I’m lying. It worked once and doesn’t work anymore. The device is recognized, but the car stereo’s software fails when trying to read the contents of the USB device (aka Nexus S). I thought maybe that the phone had remained mounted, so I rebooted the phone and yes, I even “rebooted” the car. No luck and I still have no idea what the problem is.

I’ll do some research and try to find a solution because no longer being able to use my phone as an automotive mp3 player is a major failure.

UPDATE: I figured out how to get USB connectivity to work in the car. It’s a timing issue, so you need to plug in your Nexus S into the car’s USB jack, an press Turn on USB storage. You basically need to do this a whle bunch of times until the timing is right. On the Sentra’s on screen display, it’s going to say “Reading media files” or something like that. If the timing is right, it’ll read them. If not, it’ll error out and fail. This is all more a flaw with how the two systems talk to each other and I don’t know if this post will actually help anyone. It’s really an interoperability failure.

I love how when you do a Google search for “McCain rising crust pizza is disgusting” (without the quotes), the #1 result is McCain.com. As if we’re expected to believe that the word “disgusting” resides somewhere on their website! It kind of makes me wonder if McCain isn’t involved in a little black or grey hat SEO magic. Either way, I’m pretty sure they’re paying the advertising dollars to net themselves a nice Google ranking.

Anyway, if you’ve ever tried McCain’s Rising “crust” pizza, you may have noticed two things:

a) it sucks
b) the crust doesn’t cut or tear at all like crust is supposed to!

I don’t know. It rips like cardboard. That’s the only way I can describe it. It has this weird plasticky (sp?) feel to it. Like it won’t burn or go bad. Ever.

I just can’t place my finger on it. It’s like the crust rises not with the help of yeast, but through some weird non-yeast chemical reaction. It has a strange hollow feel to it too and just doesn’t feel like bread. Anyway, I love a good pizza so I gave it a shot. I ate the whole thing and just felt sick afterwards. And no, it’s not because I ate the whole thing that I felt sick.

You see, being able to eat a whole pizza is the barometer of goodness. A proper, well made, medium sized pizza can be devoured by any self-respecting man in one sitting. Afterwards, he should drift off into a dreamless pizza coma, his thoughts becoming nothingness, like the pizza that once occupied the now empty box strewn on his coffee table.

With McCain’s Rising Crust “pizza”, halfway through eating it (I think it was the Crescendo) I found my brow beginning to furrow uncomfortably, with a low-grade feeling of dread slowly washing over me. By the time I finished it, I was curled into a fetal position, too weak to change the channel and forced to watch the remnants of American Idol with my eyes closed.

I think I’ll stick to homemade pizza from now on.

Then install your favorite media player, like VLC or MPlayer or whatever.

That’s really all there is to it!

My first acoustic guitar was a Yamaha. I can’t remember the model because it was stolen during a camping trip when I was 18 or so. I was still very amateurish as a player, but I knew that it was a solid guitar. It sucked when it disappeared from our campsite and every time I play a Yamaha I remember that guitar. Pretty much every Yamaha I’ve ever played has felt like a solid piece of work.

Which is why I wonder why I’ve left this FG-75 in its pathetic state 3 stringed for so many years.

For one, it just never stayed in tune. I inherited it from an old roommate and we once tried to put strings on it. The experiment failed and we left it. Then I got busy with other guitars and it sat neglected in a corner for years.

Anyway, I have a rule: never throw out a guitar. So if I wasn’t going to ditch it, and it’s just taking up space…may as well try to fix it.

The machine heads are pretty old school. The FG-75 dates to around the mid 70′s and the machine heads come in strips of three. I picked up a set for about 12$ and amazingly, the screws aligned. Mostly.

Pretty slick, no?

This might have been the easiest tuning repair job ever. I had the new heads installed in about 10 minutes. And they look great too. The old heads were in terrible shape. You could tell just by touching them that the gears were slipping like crazy. Not surprising with 35 year old tuners. The new ones are rock solid and firm.

Yep. They look pretty good too. Ten minutes later I had the strings on. I expected the strings to go out of tune as new strings often do, but they adjusted pretty quick. In fact, this guitar really plays well and has great tone. Plus, it’s super light. Seriously, for a guitar that’s been sitting around with 3 strings for many years, there’s no sign of warping at all.

Feels like great craftsmanship. In fact, I did some quick research on the FG-75 and this guitar has been called the “perfect campfire” guitar. I can see it. For its lightness it’ll travel well.

Ok, that’s all I have to say about this. I’ve been trying to fill up this white space with guitar related text, but what else can you say about something that took 20 minutes to do.

It’s done. It’s a decent guitar. Really. It sounds great.

Finally, Dobson totally endorses this product:

Remember that chicken pita recipe that we put together last year? Well this is nothing like it, yet it is, in that special way that gives you a sense of longing and sadness for that certain taste that you just can’t put your finger on.

As usual, we don’t bother with teaspoons or measuring cups because when you cook at BFO Kitchen Labs and Grills, you go oldskool and measure with your bare hands. Like your grandmother did. Anyway, worry about those tummy tucks later if you use too many ingredients today. That’s our motto!

To start, you’ll need the following ingredients:

1 chicken breast
a bunch of fennel seeds
freshly ground black pepper
a handful of whole or sliced almonds (I used both)
1 Spanish onion. Use about 1/4. (don’t use the whole thing unless you’re insane)
1 Orange bell pepper (use whatever color you like, but the orange looks awesomer)

Heat up some olive oil in your pan or skillet or whatever you’re cooking with today and throw in about half of the quarter of the onion. Slice up the chicken into strips and toss it into the pan when the onions start sizzling. When the chicken is sealed, throw in some fennel seeds. Use your instincts, so don’t use too much, but just enough for the fennel to do its fragrant magic. You can throw in the almonds at any time too since they’re not accomplishing anything just sitting there on your counter.

Next, slice up the orange bell pepper, throw it in as well and grind some fresh black pepper over everything. I sometimes throw in a little water just to keep the chicken extra tender. You don’t want it to dry out, so watch the heat.

And that’s pretty much it! Your chicken fennel almond dish is ready:

Served with fresh salad and pitas to wrap it all up in. You can use a little honey mustard on it for fun, but it was really pretty succulent and didn’t need anything else. Yep. It was that good.

The recipe is scalable as usual. To make more servings, add another chicken breast, another fistful of almonds, etc. Don’t forget to invite your guests to share so that you can keep your liposuction cost down.