Aren Cambre's Blog

After “enjoying” three vomitous meals, I declare that Fat Daddy’s Burger House in Casa Linda Plaza is the second worst burger place in Dallas.

The first two meals were overpriced and disgusting burger and fries. It’s overpriced because you’ll lose $8 per meal without a beverage. It’s disgusting because they overseason everything with a nasty salt/seasoning mixture, and it’s very greasy.

Some people bathe in perfume to mask bad hygiene. Fat Daddy’s seasoning bath masks its sewer-class quality.

The last time I was there, I got the chili and salad. I asked the cashier if the chili was made in house, and she assured me it was.

Damn liar! It was meat-flavored rubbery chunks from a can! Yuck! And the salad was just iceberg lettuce with a little cheese and a few vegetables on top.Highland Park prices imply quality. Fat Daddy’s delivers crap quality.

There’s is one draw: free beer. Seriously. Rumor is they can’t “sell” it because they lost their alcohol license. (Not sure if that’s true.) Since I’m don’t do beer, I’m not impressed.

Other bad burgers:

• Miami Subs, which used to be in Dallas on the northeast corner of Central Expressway access road and Southwestern. That was the absolute worst, most tasteless rubber burger I have ever had.
• Aramark‘s Umphrey Lee Cafeteria at SMU. When I was a regular, I enjoyed greasy, drippy, tofu-enhanced burgers. Aramark actually had great burgers at a grill in the bottom of Hughes-Trigg in the mid-’90s. However, in typical fashion, they shut it down because it was too good.

I just dug up a 10 year old medical checkup form. Despite significant muscle mass gains, I am 15 pounds lighter than 10 years ago! Here are the rules that helped me lose weight and maintain the weight loss:

1. Don’t eat when not hungry. We eat a lot of food because of craving, not hunger. How do you tell the difference? Think of how you feel if you have eaten nothing in 8 hours. It’s a grinding feeling. Craving is just a dull, psychological feeling. If your digestive track is normal, like virtually everyone else on the world, then it will signal true hunger when you need food. (Actually, it signals true hunger even when you don’t need food. More below.)
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   …or eat fresh produce. If I cannot resist the craving, I eat unprocessed fresh fruit or vegetable. That doesn’t fully satisfy my craving, gradually retraining it. Additionally, fresh produce is much better for me than junk food snacks.

3. It’s OK to feel hunger. In nature, animals eat all they can find because they don’t know where the next meal comes from. That’s why my dog is constantly starving. She forages all the time. If I fed her all she wanted, she would be a blimp. Humans share that same evolutionary programming. However, I am better than my dog; I can choose not to eat and feel hunger before meals. I don’t have to quench it with a snack.
4. Many “healthy” foods are really junk foods. Anything packed with calories with relatively minimal nutritional value a junk food. This includes:
   • Fruit juice is junk food, even non-sweetened fruit juice. They are so packed with calories that you’re better off with sugary soft drinks. The same goes for smoothies. The average “original” size Jamba Juice smoothie is a 480 calorie bomb! That’s about three and a half soft drinks! My kid isn’t a blubber butt partly because he drinks no fruit juice. His only eats whole fruits.
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     Stuff with trans fats are junk foods. Trans fats’ peculiar harm is more than just weight gain. Still, most foods chock full of trans fats aren’t good for you even without the trans fats. You don’t need the Twinkies, Oreos, fries, pastries, donuts, cake frosting, etc. regardless of trans fat content.

   • “Healthier” junk food is still junk food. It’s just marginally less deadly. Wendy’s removed the trans fats from its fries, but they still make you fat and clog your arteries and do other nasty things. Remember when Snackwell cookies and other low fat products first came out? People started eating them as if they are healthy. In fact, most “healthier” products, like the Snackwell cookies, make you just as fat as the originals.
5. “Healthier” junk foods have a high opportunity cost. “Healthier” potato chips, popcorn, crackers, or other junk foods provide virtually no health benefit and offset better foods, ones with actual nutritional qualities. In high school, I knew kids who had a bag of potato chips with every lunch. That is a travesty; those potato chips offset something healthier like fresh fruits or vegetables.
6. Exercise. Diet and exercise go hand and hand. While only one of the two is better than neither, you have to do both to get best results.
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   Quit blaming the dog. This is euphemistic for society’s tendency to blame others for our own failings. Two common bogus reasons weight problems are “those restaurants are feeding me too much” or “it runs in the family.” Whatever. I take personal responsibility for my dietary choices.

8. Don’t gorge at restaurants or special events. The solution is simple: lay off the chips and salsa, order smaller meals, and slow down the pace. It’s OK to be be satiated without being stuffed, and you’ll save money to boot!
9. Don’t buy into stupid alternative medicine crap like detoxification, coffee enemas, grapefruit diets, or whatever. They’re bunk, and even if they don’t harm you, they’re a distraction from good nutrition. You’re too valuable to be a living pseudo-science experiment.
10. Stop pampering yourself. Modern “pamper yourself” marketing and mindsets make me sick. They are a flimsy excuse to do stupid, selfish stuff. Nobody ever accomplished anything great by pampering themselves.

Your skeptical side may suspect I am preaching but not practicing. You’re partly correct. I don’t follow these rules perfectly all the time.

I shared a half gallon of Blue Bell Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream with my son over the past week and a half.

I have lightly salted almonds at my desk at work, and I shovel several into my mouth each day.

But I am following enough of the rules enough of the time to go somewhere, and I am improving a little bit each month.

I didn’t stuff myself at Thanksgiving.

I didn’t clean my plate the last time I was at a Tex Mex restaurant.

I only ate one ice cream cone (instead of 2) the last time I was at Dickey’s.

I want to lose another 10-15 lbs to get rid of belly fat. (I may have ab muscles underneath them?) I’ll have to crank down these rules further. I think it’s an attainable goal, but we’ll see!

I’m unimpressed with WordPress’s image support.

With my old DasBlog blog, I authored my posts with FrontPage. Not only did this give me a rich editor, photo management was a snap. I could resize and adjust images that I dragged and dropped into the blog post without external tools. Transferring the blog post into DasBlog was simple.

I can’t find anything similar in WordPress. Despite many image plugins, image management is a stupid, cumbersome, multi-step process.

The best option appears to be integration with Gallery2 with the WPG2 and Gallery Image Chooser plugins. However, even this option has drawbacks:

• No resize. Gallery2 is limited to a fixed-size thumbnail and the full-sized image. There is apparently nothing in between, and wait, there’s less! The thumbnail size is fixed for all images across the entire Gallery2 application. That is, there is only one thumbnail image size setting. Rumor has it that the next Gallery2 version, which was supposed to be out 4 months ago but isn’t even in release candidate yet, will have midsize image support. But even then, unless the midsize image is supported through URL parameters, I’ll probably have to wait for WPG2 and Gallery Image Chooser updates to use it.
• No auto caption. Sure would be great if captions in Gallery2 could automatically and dynamically transfer to WordPress. This may need to be a WPG2 feature. Maybe I can hack this feature?
• No image adjustment. FrontPage’s basic image adjustment tools were great. I could change the brightness and contrast on the fly and resample the image at will. No such luck with Gallery2.
• No clipart. With FrontPage, I had access to a decent amount of royalty-free clipart. I have virtually no instant access to any clipart with this setup.

It looks like I am stuck fully finishing my photos on my PC with an image editor and then uploading them through the WordPress interface or dumping them into Gallery2.

Argh.

I may whine like a petulant twit, but this image handling problem is a barrier to to quick, casual posts with images. An image is worth a thousand words. That’s why I believe that the better blogs are full of helpful images. WordPress’s image support is a major shortcoming.

I still feel that I did the right thing getting off DasBlog, however. It’s a dead product, and there are almost no run-it-yourself Web 2.0 applications for Microsoft platforms.

I have a follow up post about my dishwasher coming soon. These image hassles have gotten in the way.

Items sold in “real” hardware stores, like Home Depot or Lowe’s, should be reasonable quality, right? The truth is often “no.”

These stores now carry doors with encased plastic blinds. Yes, “encased.” You never have to clean them because they are encased in the door.

I knew they were a pending disaster the first time I saw them. Plastic blinds are disposable, and, consequently, they break easily.

What’s the logic in encasing cheap blinds inside a door?

Apparently, little. Here’s a demo product at my local Lowe’s:

See any problems?

The baby supply market has many totally pointless products. Here are some key ones:

Big honkin’ strollers: too much. We have one of those stroller systems where your kid’s car seat can snap into a monstrous SUV stroller. You can also put the kid directly into the stroller. The car seat feature is useful, but the monstrous features add so much bulk that it takes up most of the trunk of our car. We rarely use all its features. It sure would be nice to have a smaller unit. Maybe we could do without both cup holders!

Diaper wipe warmers: waste of electricity. My wife may disagree with me on this one, but I think they are pointless. In the winter the wipe gets cold by the time you get it on baby’s “cute widdle hiney.” But what’s the point of warming the wipes in the first place? Room temperature is too harsh for 21st century babies? I’ve read claims that some babies get upset with room temperature wipes. Maybe the baby would be used to room temperature wipes if Mommy and Daddy used them from the beginning. My kid gets heated wipes at home (yeah, I admit it), but he never screams when we use room temperature wipes on the road.

Bottle warmers: why? Get the baby used to room temperature liquids early and you won’t need a warmer. My kid has never objected to any reasonable temperature liquid: warm, room temperature, and refrigerator cold are just fine with him.

Car mirrors: hazardous. Baby car mirrors are irresponsible. You have to squint and roll your head around to line up the two mirrors just right to see the kid. But think about it: you can’t do anything if he is whining in the back seat, and the kid is not gonna die in the car seat! How safe is it to distract yourself while hurtling down the interstate or navigating congested side streets? Every time you stare at the goblin in the mirror you you increase the odds of a crash. Congratulations, becoming a dangerous driver is all you’ve accomplished with that baby mirror. Let the kid whine until you can safely pull off the road.

“Sanitizers” and “sterilizers”: dumb and dumber. Yes, there is a difference. “Sanitizers” just blow hot air across the toys. They don’t do anything useful. “Sterilizers” supposedly clean the germs and bacteria off the toys. But consider this: when your kid learns how to grab stuff, he is going to put every imaginable filthy object in his mouth. Think of how filthy baby’s hands are after he crawls around the floor. Guess what, Precious ain’t gonna die with his own filthy habits, so he won’t die just because Mommy or Daddy didn’t run his filthy toys through a stupid sterilizer. You should have learned that you have to use manual scrubbing to clean your hands, dishes, etc. Why then would you believe that throwing junk in a steam bath does the same? The only thing these things do is put a load on your house A/C system.

Some car toys: patently dangerous. Here’s a quick way to figure out if your car toy is safe: have a friend hurl the toy at your noggin. If it hurts, you are crazy to let your kid play with it in the car. If it doesn’t hurt, it’s safe. Some products marketed as car toys—whether directly or by implication (e.g., they fit on the car seat)—have hard plastics or just weigh too much. They have no place in a car. Hey, while you’re at it the same test is good for adult objects like umbrellas and bound maps.

SUVs: come on. Many parents buy SUVs just because they had a kid. Guess what? Your kid doesn’t need a freakin’ SUV! Great, mommy and daddy blow tens of thousands of dollars on a expensive to purchase, expensive to operate SUV in lieu of paying down debt, starting a family emergency fund, or, gasp, saving for college. (In other words, instead of doing the right thing many parents flimsily justify their own wants by making a huge donation to carmarker’s profit margins. Yeah, did you know that automakers are generally just breaking even on traditional cars? SUVs’ fat profit margins are their profit centers.) My family manages fine with two 2 door cars. Until I was 10 my family’s main car was a 2 door compact car by 1974 standards. (Oh, wait, that very car is still my car!) We manage just fine.

Enough rants for today. I expect the first comment to be a “dear idiot” note from my wife.