I love burgers. But it took me a while to find a really good non-fast-food burger in Austin. I thought the burgers at EZ were good, but I guess not good enough to get me to go back there. I liked Backyard Burgers, but the location nearby went out of business. I thought I finally found a great burger at Hole In The Wall, but lately, their burgers have tasted bad… kind of chemically. Plus the waitresses there gross me out. They are often overweight, which is not necessarily bad, but when they insist on wearing tight, low-cut jeans, with tiny t-shirts to show their fatty lower back tattoos, it’s just sick…

Anyways, I finally found my burger of choice, at Cheesecake Factory. Some people don’t like the place, but I have found it to be consistently good. And the “Tons of Fun Burger” is perhaps the best burger I have eaten at a restaurant. It’s got a great sauce on it, and it is huge, with double meat and cheese! The fries are really good too, not greasy, but very tasty. Today Mariko and I went to The Cheesecake Factory for lunch, and I had to try another of their burgers, The Ranch House Burger. It was excellent as well! This one had a thick single patty, topped with bacon, cheddar, mushrooms, and chopped sirloin steak. There was a garlicky mayo dressing, and the basic lettuce, tomato, and red onion on the side. Oh man was it tasty! I am not sure which one is better, but you can’t go wrong with either. The only downside is the price. The Ranch House is $12.95, and the Tons of Fun is around $10. But, I think it is definitely worth it to indulge once in a while.

I rented the movie ”Heartlands” after reading about it on a scooter messageboard, where they said the main character has a small roadtrip on his Honda Cub 50. I found the movie on Netflix, rented it, and, after having it sit on top of the dvd player for a month, finally watched it last night. It certainly has some great footage of Colin (the main character) riding around England on a red Honda Cub, but I was surprised how great the acting and story were. It is sort of artsy, sort of slow, kind of like Lost In Translation. In the middle of the movie, (SPOILERS FOLLOW) I was shocked to see his bike get destroyed by a truck, and the wreckage of the bent frame in the middle of the road almost brought a tear to my eye. Colin was pretty broken up too.

Anyways, the ending of the movie was excellent. Plotwise it works out how I wanted it to, but wasn’t expecting. And the bonus was that he goes to the Honda dealer and is offered a sport tourer that “hits 190mph”, but then opts for the same red Cub 50. The final scene is of him riding along on his Honda. Excellent movie!

My friend Ryan sent me a link to the SupersizedMeals.com website to check out the 100x100 burger from In-N-Out. It’s amazing, yet disgusting at the same time. If you think a 100-patty/100 slices-of-cheese burger is terrible, you need to check out all the other huge meals featured on the site, including the gigantic beef shank. It’s pretty gross.

[link via Ryan]

One of the cool things about our impending move is that we will have access to all of our stuff again! Right now it’s in storage, and I have been missing a few things.

First, all of my old camera gear will be neat to play with. All my film stuff is in a box somewhere, and I am itching to play with my Holga toy camera. Also on the camera front, our studio lighting will be great to use again, especially getting back into Mariko’s food photography. I need to think about where is the best place to keep the lights and umbrellas!

The Nintendo Gamecube has been missed… Now that I am fully engrossed in Animal Crossing for the DS, I’d like to play the Gamecube version again.

A real toaster/toaster oven. We left our old one in our previous house, and haven’t bought a new one yet, since there is just no space in our apartment. The only way to make toast right now is in the oven, which is overkill, don’t you think?

Refrigerator with side-by-side doors and ice/water dispenser. Our apt fridge has the freezer on top, with no shelving. It’s a real adventure opening the door to it, because there is always a danger of an avalance of frozen goodies coming down, and ultimately smashing toes. The water dispenser is mostly missed by me, because tend I drink a lot of water. Also, we will have our big freezer back, which will be in the utility room. This is going to make preparing meals in advance much easier! There are lots of things we like to cook in big batches, and freeze half for later.

Speakers. We bought a nice home theater system from some good friends who returned to Japan, but the speakers are a bit weak. I have four decent speakers in storage, and I can’t wait to attach them to the Dolby Digital receiver and crank it up!

I would like to see Star Wars Episode II again (and do I dare watch Episode I?), which is also in storage.

Tools and parts for my Honda C70 will be good to have again. Not only that, but the space to work on the bike is going to be great! I am planning on tearing it all apart, so I can properly paint the frame. Should be lots of fun.

Lastly, with access to a water hose and driveway, I can finally wash our cars.

Well, Konica-Minolta has announced that they will no longer make cameras, and Sony will now take over. The new Sony dSLRs will use the Minolta-mount lenses and Konica-Minolta technology, such as the anti-shake feature. I think that those people with Minolta dSLR gear should actually be encouraged, because they can look for more goodies, with more frequent upgrades, and more camera models, as long as Sony puts some money behind development and keeps compatibility with the 5D and 7D.

While I am sad that the Minolta name will finally be gone from the present and future playing fields, it doesn’t affect the quality of my photos one bit. My Minolta cameras still take the same photos today as they did yesterday. I guess my gear is more valuable now, as collectors’ items.

I have been using my dvd burner to make backups of all of our data, but it’s kind of a pain to keep the discs organized, and with the number of digital photos we take every month, the ~4GB is getting limiting. I thought that we could fit a year’s worth of photos on a DVD, but it’s not even close!

Anyways, I bought this wonderful Fantom 250GB USB 2.0 hard drive a couple weeks ago, and it is awesome. Not only can I backup all of our digital photos, but I can backup all of Mariko’s data from her laptop, plus the data from my desktop computer. It took about half an hour to copy all of our stuff, but I didn’t have to deal with swapping DVD’s or anything. Just drag the entire Data directory to the new hard drive, and let it do it’s thing. After that, just unplug the drive, and lock it up in our firesafe box. Simple as that! Plus, I bought it for $99 after rebate.

I noticed that a lot of men at my workplace don’t wash their hands after they go to the bathroom. And some just put their hands under the water for a couple seconds. I think it’s kind of gross. After I was my hands, I sometimes use a paper towel to grab the door handle as I leave the bathroom.

I don’t know when I started being a stickler for this, but it’s kind of like wearing shoes in the house, especially on the carpet, then later lying or playing on the carpet. When you are walking around town, your shoes are touching all kinds of stuff, like spit, piss and dog shit. Those same shoes then are rubbed over the carpet. Then you roll around in it. Kind of gross. I like the Japanese way of removing shoes and leaving them at the entryway. Plus it’s more comfortable. And you have a good opportunity to buy some nice fuzzy slippers.

I can’t wait to move into our house and become homeowners again. There are so many great things about owning a home, but one of the best things is that you get to leave the Hell that is apartment living. Last night, we got home at about 7:30pm after dinner, only to find that someone had parked in our covered parking space. We pay money on top of our rent every month to be able to use it. When we first moved in, we accidentally parked in the space next to our assigned space, and within an hour, someone had our car towed. It cost $185 to retrieve it from the towing company.

Last night, I figured I would just do the person a favor, and not call the towing company. Heck, we only have a couple more weeks living here, I suppose I could save someone the hassle and money. Well, this morning I saw that the car was still in our spot, so I wrote a note asking the person not to park in our spot, and that the next time they did, the car would be towed. When I was going up to the car, the lady who owns it, hopped in and started backing out. I tapped on the window, but the music was blasting (it *was* 7:15am, after all) so I knocked harder. She stopped and opened up the door, and a blast of sound and smoke came out at me. I asked her not to park in the spot. She first replied with denial, saying she only parked there for a couple hours. I told her that she was parked there at 7pm last night until now. She then tried to make an excuse, saying she was parked there for an hour, then had the late shift, then came back at 4am and parked there again. I called bullshit, since the car was in the same crooked position both times I saw it. She then got upset, saying that there were no empty parking spaces, to which I replied there always are open spaces if you are willing to walk (which we had to do), otherwise spend the money and buy a reserved space, like we do. She then said, “Fine, do what you have to do then, and call the tow truck”. All the while, I was trying to get the point across that I did her a frickin’ favor by not calling the goddamn towing company. Jeez. Try to be nice, and you get a shitload of attitude.

You know what? At this point, I say to Hell with it. Next time, I am just going to call the towing company without a second thought, just as that person did with us months ago. Man, I hate living in an apartment. Oh, did I mention the drunk driver who, a couple weeks ago, busted through the entrance gates, then overshot her carport and drove through someone’s patio gate? And it wasn’t even the first time! Oh, the joy of apartment living.

When I used to take photos with my film cameras, my favorite lens to use was the 28mm. When I switched to my digital SLR, I lost the wide-angle view that I loved, since the 7D has a crop factor of 1.5x. The widest lens I had was a 24mm, which worked out to be 36mm film equivalent, not wide enough to capture the landscapes and clouds that I like. So, I have been debating about which lens to buy next, and finally decided on the Konica-Minolta 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6 “kit” lens. The quality is not the best, but it is a very useful range (27-105mm film equivalent), and the price is right, about $150 new.

My timing was perfect, because I posted on dpreview.com about how my next lens purchase would be the kit lens, and added an off-the-cuff remark asking if anyone was getting rid of theirs. Well, someone replied that there was a lens for sale on dyxum.com (a site dedicated to the K-M dSLRs) for only $60! I immediately sent a message to the seller, and arranged to buy the lens. It arrived the following week, in perfect condition, and I have been enjoying it ever since. I now have the wide-angle view that I love, and I didn’t have to spend as much as I expected, even though the list price was cheap. The advantages of this lens are that it is a great range, the lens is very light, it focuses fast, and it uses 55mm filters, the same as my 70-210mm lens. And of course the price! The downsides to this lens are that the optical quality is not so great, and it has a plastic mounting ring. Both of these are really not that big a deal at all to me. 99% of my photos are resized for web viewing, and thus, sharpness is not critical. I don’t even shoot at the largest size in-camera. I think I pretty much found the perfect lens for my needs!

Here are a couple pics taken from the same position to illustrate the useful wide-angle view:

18mm:

24mm: