All posts by Nate

Nate is the Techie / Barbecue-y half of the House of Annie team. Born in Hawaii, his favorite hobby is surfing...WEB surfing that is. Visit my Google+ Profile
Texas

Central Market (Austin)

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I remember reading an article once that suggested college students could save money on food by eating lunch at Costco. Not by buying food at the food court, however. But by going inside the store and eating from all the samples!

Now, we didn’t go to Central Market in Austin with that in mind. We just wanted to check out Whole Foods’ competitor and see what it was all about. But of course we wouldn’t turn away from all the various plates of samples left out, like at the cheese counter where we couldn’t stop sampling a fantastic vodka currant cheese from Sweden.

Or the beef fajita wrap served hot at another station sampling various meat rubs and seasonings:


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Tech

Stop, Thief! (Part 2)

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Contrary to this post’s title, there isn’t a foolproof way to prevent a determined thief from copying pictures from your website or blog to theirs. If you put a picture out there for all to see, someone may want to take it for themselves. For the most part, you have to respect your readers and expect them to show you the same respect in return.

Still, you can take steps to protect your pictures from being inadvertently misused. I have started placing watermarks on my photos and also appending a copyright message at the end of the filename. To do this, I use a program called waterMark v2 from PMlabs.

It is a very powerful program that can batch process several pictures or even folders at once. It even puts a menu choice in your Explorer context menu so that you can just select pictures in Explorer, right-click, and launch waterMark. I have my settings saved as a profile so all I need to do is open the profile and then click Start. Voila!

Best thing of all is, this program is free. One downside I noticed is that it adds 100KB to the filesize but that is something I can live with.

Aloha, Nate

Bay Area

East Lake Seafood Restaurant (San Jose)

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One of the first restaurants I ate at when I first arrived in San Jose was East Lake Seafood Restaurant in east San Jose. It had (and continues to have) a reputation for good Chinese food at great prices. Most nights, if you go at dinnertime, their tables will be full.

Same thing happens on the weekends for lunch. If you don’t show up early enough, there will be a line out the door and the hostess will be telling you the wait is half an hour to 45 minutes. So why all the fuss?
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Texas

Williams Smokehouse (Houston)

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I am a barbecue afficionado. When I told some friends in Houston that I was going down there, and could they suggest somewhere to eat, the name Williams’ Smokehouse came up. They said it was the best place in town. One of my friends, who happens to be on a championship competition barbecue team as well as a judge, says he’d like Williams’ ribs to be his last meal.

We had originally planned on meeting up at Williams’ Smokehouse for dinner, but plans were changed and we ended up actually at our friend’s house. He picked up the barbecue for us earlier in the day. This turned out to be even better, because we could eat in comfort without worrying about the kids or being kicked out at closing time (7 pm).

This also gave our friend a chance to showcase his own barbecue, in this case some chopped pork butt that he had smoked on his Weber Smoky Mountain. He also provided the cole slaw and buns.

So here on the plate are brisket and ribs from Williams’ and chopped pork and cole slaw from my friend Pete.

These ribs were the best ribs I have ever had. Seriously. They were cooked tender but not dry, flavorful but not overly spicy or smoky. The brisket and pork were also delicious. But oh, the ribs!

I’m so sad we ran out. We should have picked up another rack.

More pics from our Texas trip on my Ball of Dirt journal: http://www.ballofdirt.com/journeys/17578.html

Aloha, Nate

Edit: So sad to note that Williams’ Smokehouse burned down, and the proprieter had no plans to reopen. Where now can we get perfect ribs?