Craftsman 5.50 Torque Rating 22 in. Deck 2-n-1 Mulch-Side Discharge Push Lawn Mower

It's spring. That means grass starts growing and if you don't live in an apartment, condo or cardboard box, you have to cut your grass. I have lived in either university dorms or apartments the past 4 of 5 years so I rarely had the occasion to perform the ritual of lawn care. Now that I've settled into a full-blown house with all the responsibilities that entails, I found myself without a mower.

Enter the Craftsman 5.50 Torque Rating 22 in. Deck 2-n-1 Mulch-Side Discharge Push Lawn Mower! This no-frills mower from Sears runs $149.98, which is a great price for an entry-level machine. I have less than a 1/4 acre lawn (.08 acres to be exact) and this is about all that I needed to get going. Stay tuned for the performance review!

UPDATE: After it's maiden voyage, I would have to say that the intentional consumer-confusing "5.50 Torque Rating" (what's wrong with horsepower?) did nothing to bolster my confidence for cutting the thickest of domestic lawns. Our lawn was around 8"-12" tall and upon covering these areas, the little 158cc Briggs & Stratton engine would bog down, then a second later, increase RPM to compensate for the loss in cutting speed. It seemed like the thing was going to shut down if I kept plowing through the thick grass so I would have to pause while it caught it's breath.

The blade wasn't as sharp as it could have been coming out of the factory. Even in thinner areas on the lawn, some grass was left standing tall and proud and warranted a second go-over.

Despite these things, I think performance will improve as I maintain a mowing schedule that doesn't allow the grass to get wildly out of hand.

Rating: ***1/2

Review: Garmin nuvi 650

Image copyright Garmin

So you've navigated your way back to my blog! Well, I'm glad fate has guided you here. Well, if you couldn't tell by the post title, the picture or the punny puns, I'm going to be reviewing the Garmin nuvi 650.

Reviewing this product has taken a while mainly because I got a job and had to move the family to Norman, OK. But another important reason is with that time, I've been able to use the GPS system on enough roads and highways to compile usage data.

//DISCLAIMER
Having gone to a university that was heavily recruited by Garmin, being interviewed for employment by Garmin and having friends that work at Garmin, I feel that I should disclaim that these reasons are what steered me in the Garmin direction. My wife surprised me with the nuvi 650 as my graduation gift. (I mean really surprised me. I had purchased my own Garmin GPS shortly before, but that's another story).
//END DISCLAIMER

Down to the review. Initial impressions had me surprised at how light the nuvi itself was. I knew it had an internal battery and glass touchscreen, but the weight is light enough to put in a coat pocket. However, after using the Garmin nuvi around the state of Oklahoma and a drive to and around the Orlando, Florida area, I would say the Garmin nuvi, or any GPS for that matter is only as good as the MAPS that are on it. Out of date maps can seriously cripple your trip, especially if you have no experience with the area. To remedy this, Garmin introduced the nuMaps Guarantee. You can get the latest maps within 60 days of purchase (it's actually within 60 days of the GPS's first satellite acquisition. Those pesky GPS sats have timekeeping onboard and beam it to your unit.

The 650 has a touch widescreen (I recommend over the square screen) and an MP3 player, which I think is more of a novelty than a feature. The speakers are adequately loud to overcome road noise. The rendering engine takes time to update and draw, which, as 3D hardware becomes more mobile device friendly in terms of power consumption, we can expect to see really slick looking map displays. Even though the GPS updates once per second (and driving to the mall doesn't require much more), I would like to see the maps up at ~30 frames per second using dead reckoning. Of course we might be talking about a beefier processor and extra RAM. But for a company that relies on WOW factor for it's consumer lines, it would be getting that edge in my book.

So the Garmin nuvi made it endlessly easier to navigate Orlando and Norman, OK, two places I don't have much street knowledge of, but the large gripes from me are the map rendering speed and the unit shipping with 2 year-old maps.

This unit is DISCONTINUED, but still available for purchase at fine retailers like Amazon.com for $202.

Rating: ****1/2

Review: Chipotle vs. Qdoba

Being the fever pitch of college football season, I thought this post could pit two very, very similar Mexican fast food restaurants against each other. In my town, Chipotle and Qdoba are recent acquisitions with Qdoba taking the lead in time spent in Stillwater, so we'll start there.

Qdoba offers burritos and Mexican dishes, "Subway style" as many people put it, in that you order which meat you want then go down the line picking and choosing what else to put in it. Qdoba offers at least two types of salsas, pico de gallo, and cheese. Sour Cream and guacamole are available for an extra $.50 each. The main thing Qdoba has going for it is the vairity of ways you can put together meat, rice, beans and cheese. Burritos, the signature entree, start at $5.79.

RATING: ***

Chipotle is Qdoba's twin brother that went to art school instead of culinary vo-tech. The decor is neo-constructionism with exposed sheet metal and bolted-on metal siding that distinguish the restauraunt from it's counterpart. The meat, however is the focus of this place. They tout the time and effort they put into the various meats and to me, it showed. I got the Carnita Burrito, which was pulled pork, rice, beans, and cheese in a tortilla big enough to wrap a football. The taste was better in many aspects than Qdoba's. The meat, once again, was very tasty for having been mass produced. Carnita pork was $5.85.

RATING: ***1/2

So in the Championship of Fast Mexican food, Chipotle beats Qdoba's 3.5 to 3.0.

Review: Chili's White Chocolate Molten

I've noticed a movement in the restaurant industry from offering only chocolate items to complementing them with the white chocolate counterpart. For years normal chocolate had been the only choice for choco-holics at restaurants. The Wendy's fast food chain is an example. My wife thought it was blasphemous when Wendy's started offering the white Frosty, even though "vanilla", the Frosty still tastes like creamy white chocolate.

flickr image by chapstickaddict

We have another example of this with Chili's new White Chocolate Molten Cake. The original Chocolate Molten Cake was outstanding which prompted my wife and I to share a White Chocolate. This dessert is very sweet, bordering on too-rich. But the raspberry sauce 'tease' does for this dessert that the caramel sauce did for the original Chocolate Molten: it's great. The cake that we got was a little dry around the edges, indicating to me that it had been sitting out for a few hours. Regardless, the presentation is awesome (it's modeled like a little volcano).

Overall, I would give this dessert a try. It went for $5.69. I think a $4.99 price point would see it sell a lot more.

RATING: ***1/2

Review: Consuming the mobile Intarwebs

So the Internet is increasingly mobile these days. With everything from Blackberries to iPhones tagging along with everyone, it seems like we can't unplug ourselves from anything. Don't feel guilty, neither can I. But mobile websites are good in other cases than for mobile devices. I'll explain.

To obey the rules of this post, I'm reviewing my internet connection at home. My wife and I wanted to save a bit of money this semester and go with a "cheaper" internet plan. Previously, we had an ISP called "SuddenLink". Clever word play aside, SuddenLink provided a decent connection at 6Mbps down and 1.4Mbps up. It was slightly overpriced at nearly $40 a month ($39.95). A little competition would go a long way in bringing down the price point here. $40 a month is what my parents were paying for cable internet nearly 8 years ago, so what gives?

Anyway, now Aubrey and I are with "Lindsey Communications", a subsidiary of our apartment management company. Providing mediocre service for the price of the "other" guys is their specialty. It's a 128kbps connection that's CAPPED at 1 Gig up/down per month. It's $19.99/mo (half the price for 1/50th the speed?) which makes me wonder how much the profit margins are given the distributed electrical cost for their obviously minimal equipment and 15 person payroll.

RATING: **

Regardless, now I have Internet that's...wait for it...TWICE as fast as dial-up. And it's coming in...over a cable modem. This leads me to my other use of mobile computing websites! Websites specifically designed for mobile machines usually contain all the same content of the parent site, but are stripped of a lot of the formatting and ads that normally appear. They are built to load much faster than their bloated counterparts. Here's a list of popular and personal favorite sites.

Popular:

• CNN.com's mobile site http://m.cnn.com
• Google tools in mobile form! http://m.google.com
• The BBC's mobile site http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/ents/index.shtml
• Flickr Mobile: http://m.flickr.com/

Personal Favs:

• Slashdot (nerd news) http://slashdot.org/palm
• USAA bank: http://mobile.usaa.com
• National Weather Service mobile: http://mobile.srh.weather.gov/

Anyway, this is just a taste to raise awareness that mobile sites can be used on regular computers for even faster access times to your favorites sites. A really good list of mobile sites is in the form of a mobile site itself (which I think is neat) at:

http://cantoni.mobi/

If all you need a is some quick info without wading through a lot of clutter, go mobile.

Review: FedEx Kinko's

Can't leave a good thing well enough alone, can you FedEx? Kinko's is the premiere copy and office-supplies-away-from-your-office store. Or at least it was.

My wife is graduating this May and she wanted graduation announcements printed up a little bit nicer than our clunkly, broken inkjet could do it, so... we whipped up a formal looking design in Microsoft Word, and I, being somewhat techo-savvy kinda guy, saved it as a PDF and threw it on a USB drive to take to Kinko's.

First Visit: Aubrey and I walked into the store and there were two associates and two customers. They all had their heads down looking at, what I assume to be, product designs for Kinko's to print. Okay, we'll wait for someone to get done, I guess. A minute goes by, and we haven't been greeted. Two minutes goes by and no one has looked up. As an aside, I once was an associate for a certain Shack that sells Radios, and we were ALWAYS to greet the customer within 90 seconds of them entering the store. Well, 5 minutes rolls around and Aubrey and I are getting tired of standing around like bumps on the log. Did we leave? No. We looked around at some of the merchandise, card stock, picture frames, sniffed rubber cement, whatever. And then...one of the customers is done!! Before we could close in on the associate, he makes a beeline to the back of the store! And STAYS there for at least the next 5 minutes before we left. Yah...15 minutes of merely existing in the store and no hello or anything. So we left.

Second Visit: Being as how we needed the announcements made pretty quick, we persisted in choosing FedEx Kinko's for our copy needs. An associate actually greets us this time and we explain what we want. A simple card style grad announcement made from a PDF that I have ALREADY CREATED. The response was "Sir, we can't do PDFs". My jaw had to have hit the floor. The PDF is the de facto standard of digital typesetting! We were told that it had to be Microsoft Office Word format. We left, frustrated.

Third Visit: Color us stupid, but yes, we went back, MS Word format in hand. They finally agreed to print up what I made. The first draft was off center and crooked as it sat on the paper. I showed them these obvious flaws and with a grunt, the associate set off again to fix it. I was a stickler about it and finally got the draft I liked and ordered the set. They tried to pull "All these drafts are going to be extra" on us. We called them on that one, saying the drafts should be part of the customer satisfaction. Anyway, we got the prints that night at 10:30pm when they closed. For some reason they could shoot out 5 draft sheets in 15 minutes, but it took 4 hours to do our 20 copies.

My take? They should re-name FedEx Kinko's to Barnum and Bailey's Kinko's.

RATING: *

Review: Oklahoma State University Theatre's Sweet Charity

Based on a book by Neil Simon, the 1966 Broadway show is being produced by my school, so I went. Honestly, I had no idea what it was about except for the blurb in the school newspaper. I knew that this girl gets stuck in an elevator with an introverted accountant and they fall in love, but that was it. The play has a huge amount of energy and humor, but also a fair share of risque and suggestive poses/lyrics/costumes.

It starts off with the main character, Charity, entering Central Park in New York City and having an imaginary conversation with her silent, preening "boyfriend". She falls into the lake, thanks to her boyfriend who steals her money and runs, and she is rescued by half the city. Later we find out that Charity is a dance hall hostess, which seems to me a step short of a call girl.
I didn't realize that the popular song "Hey Big Spender" came from this play and found myself humming it when the play was over. Anyway, all the hostesses launch into "Hey Big Spender" and soon afterward, Charity and some of the other hostesses decide to branch out in life and we find Charity stuck in an elevator with an accountant. (They were both going to a support group of some kind). The second act meanders the same exuberant way the first act does, but ends in kind of head-scratcher. The production quality is good, given the amateur nature of a university play. The dance numbers were well done, especially "Rich Man's Frug" which was extremely stylistic and well choreographed.

The play is $12 for general admission and $10 for students which is a bit steeper than some of the other plays OSU has done this year. Also, if you can withstand the constant barrage of innuendo and a bit more flesh than is allowed on primetime TV, then you can make a fun night out of this play. Overall, however the play loses a star on it's 2.5+ hour run time, as some things could have been cut. Some racy dialogue could have been spared as well. As is, the play is somewhere between PG-13 and R, so... PG-16 maybe.

Rating: ***