Joey Gibson's Blog

Matthews Cafeteria: A Disappointing Breakfast

2012-05-15T11:11:15Z

In the late 1990s, I worked at a company in Tucker, GA. We would make almost-weekly visits to a local landmark: Matthews Cafeteria. In business since 1955, everyone in the area knew about Matthews. It was a meeting place for locals, and it drew diners from all over the area, because the food was wonderful. And when I say “food,” I mean real, Southern food. Wide, flat green beans, seasoned with ham hocks. Corn seasoned with bacon grease. Fried chicken, battered and fried by hand. Really, really good Southern food. I had not had a chance to get back over there since I left that job in 1999.

About two years ago, Matthews was featured on the Food Network show, “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives,” with Guy Fieri. Guy was shown around by, I presume, one of the owners. The guy showed him how they make their biscuits from scratch, by hand, and how they lovingly make their sausage gravy to slather on top of their biscuits. Upon taking a single bite, Guy loudly declared, “O! That’s money, right there!” I had seen this episode before, but I saw a rerun of it on Sunday, and it flung a cravin’ on me to go. So this morning, I arose at 5:00 AM, was out of the house by 5:25, and was walking into Matthews at 5:50.

This is an old-timey cafe, that I imagine looks pretty much like it did when they opened in 1955. There are no frills, but that’s fine. You don’t need frills for good food. I’ve long felt that the hole-in-the-wall, sparsely decorated joints had the best food. Sadly, that mantra failed me this morning.

You first go through a line, telling the servers what you want and they hand it to you on a plate. I knew I wanted a biscuit with sausage gravy, but I was also thinking about the fried steak. The woman who was helping me didn’t seem to speak much English, since when I pointed at what I assumed was the fried steak and asked, “Is that the fried steak?” she didn’t answer. Instead, she placed two patties on a plate, and then proceeded to dump hash browns on them. I was able to stop her, so she raked the potatoes and onions back into the chafing dish, and looked at me for what was next. I said, “I’d like a biscuit and gravy, please.” She grunted, split a biscuit and ladled some gravy over it. I then got a glass of orange juice, bringing the total to $5-something. I took a seat on a terribly uncomfortable metal chair, and got ready to tuck in.

I should note that there were maybe 5 other customers in the place, two of which were older men (mid 60s to early 70s, maybe) seated together. The first thing I heard one of them say was, “… that skanky bitch…” which is not something you hear coming from an old guy all that often. I heard that same phrase at least three more times over the next ten minutes, along with “motherf**ker,” and an account of how drunk he was at some function. Keep it classy, gents, keep it classy.

On to the food. The biscuit was probably OK, though it was hard to tell. It seemed like, by itself, it would have been light and flaky. The gravy that was on top of it was horrible. It was the thinnest white gravy I’ve ever seen. It was basically water, with a dusting of flour, a dash of pepper and one piece of sausage, one thin, tiny, almost imperceptible piece of sausage, that was hardly worth mentioning. There was no flavor at all to this gravy. The fried steak was the highlight of the meal, but even it tasted like it came from a factory, via a deep freeze.

The orange juice was that particular gloop that hotels give you for free. You know what I mean; it’s from concentrate, tastes like it is still too concentrated, and leaves you wishing you’d actually had orange juice to drink.

Needless to say, I was terribly disappointed. I had gotten it into my head that the Matthews cafeteria food I remembered from 14 years ago was what I was going to get. That the owners still took pride in making quality food, and serving it for a good price. Sadly, that’s not what happened. This leaves me with two possible explanations for how Guy Fieri could possibly rave about the food during his visit. 1. What they served him was tailored just for him, and is not what they serve to the average customer. 2. Guy is contractually obligated to only rave about the food he gets to taste on his show, no matter how odious it might actually be. Or maybe even a third option: the food was still good when the show was filmed, but they’ve fallen off a cliff in quality since then. I don’t know which one is more likely, but it doesn’t really matter. I won’t be going back to figure out which is correct.

GV Places 1.3.2 Now Available

2012-05-11T02:35:03Z

Last week a bug report came in that it was impossible to turn off notifications for automatic region switches. That is now fixed, and the update should be appearing in your list of updates.

It’s interesting that I spent 5 minutes replicating the bug, 10 minutes fixing it, another 10 doing all the necessary steps to get the app loaded into the store… and then a week waiting for it to be approved. I appreciate the app store for what it gives us, but it really shouldn’t take a week to get bug fixes out to users.

On Motivation

2012-03-01T14:03:13Z

I just read this quote on Reddit from Neil deGrasse Tyson when asked about finding motivation. I love what he said.

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

The second paragraph sums up my philosophy, too.

GV Places 1.3 Available in the App Store

2012-02-17T17:41:06Z

After just a week in the Apple queue, version 1.3 of GV Places is now available. Here’s the list of what’s new:

Changed the screen order for adding a place. Now the phone number selection comes first, then the map.
Places no longer have to have geography associated with them.
A place can be designated the “default” place that will be used when no other places’ geography match the current location
When adding geography, the map can be searched, just like in the Maps app.
The list of places is now sorted alphabetically, rather than by how well they fit around the current location.
Completely rewritten calculations for determining if the current location is within a region, and for determining which of multiple overlapping regions is the better choice.
Removed most modal operations.
Much faster to start.

The Most Painful Thing I Ever Ate

2012-02-15T04:36:13Z

Back before Christmas, I discovered a restaurant called Genghis Grill. It’s Mongolian BBQ, and it’s quite tasty. I eat there about once a week, because it is about a 10 minute walk from my office. Anyway, I was there today, and made the same bowl I always make. It had some thin-sliced beef, a metric ton of carrots and broccoli, some chickpeas, black beans and soybeans. As usual, I put a few dried red chile peppers on it. I never eat those peppers; I just like to have them mixed in during cooking to add some flavor.

While I was waiting for my food to cook, a few co-workers who were also there invited me to their table. Once the food arrived, I was talking and eating, and not really paying attention to what made its way onto my fork. You can see where this is going. At one point, I chewed up something that was kind of hard to chew up; sort of leathery. I thought to myself, “Man, they really burned that carrot.” It wasn’t a carrot.

About ten seconds later, it felt as if I were sucking on a blow torch. The entire left side of my mouth felt as if it were melting. My nose started running. My eyes started watering. I’m sure I was turning red in the face. One of my table mates asked, “Eat something hot? Need some more water?” I replied, “Yes. And the only thing that will help this is milk. Or vodka.” As I was chugging my water, knowing that it only provided momentary relief, I was poking around the bowl with my fork, looking for the other two peppers. They were not there. Apparently, all three peppers had gotten stuck together, and I’d chewed them all up at once.

It took a good fifteen minutes before my mouth started to calm down.

No, Santorum, You’ve Got It Backwards

2012-02-08T03:50:52Z

Today, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. Frothy Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum took to Twitter to share his wisdom on the subject, saying

7M Californians had their rights stripped away today by activist 9th Circuit judges. As president I will work to protect marriage.

February 7, 2012 19:19:09 via HootSuite ReplyRetweetFavorite

@RickSantorum

Rick Santorum

Only a religious zealot homophobe like Santorum could frame the restoration of rights to millions of people as taking rights away from someone else. Heterosexuals’ rights to marry have not changed one iota by this decision.

Three Songs From Anvil’s Show in Athens, GA on 02/03/2012

2012-02-05T06:31:41Z

I went to see the awesome metal band Anvil last night at the Melting Point in Athens, GA. They played a great show, and here are three highlights. The first video is the first two songs of the night, March of the Crabs and 666. The second video is the Spanish Inquisition-themed song, Thumb Hang, which nobody expects. Check the videos out, and if Anvil comes to your town, definitely check them out.

Fast Apple Customer Support

2012-01-28T04:00:53Z

Today I bought the 24 song, 2.3 hour-long Van Halen record Live: Right Here, Right Now from the iTunes store. But there was a snag: “Why Can’t This Be Love?” failed with an error -100000. I tried restarting it a couple of different ways, but each time it would download it, then restart, three or four times, until it would finally choke with error -100000. I even downloaded the album on a Windows machine and 23 songs downloaded fine, but that one track failed with the same error. This pretty much proved to me that it was a problem on Apple’s end. I then went to my account in the iTunes store and reported an error with the track.

I received an auto-response pretty quickly with some things to try, but nothing useful. An hour or so later, I got an email from a human at Apple that basically told me to try what I had already tried and to let them know if I was still having problems, as well as providing some other info like ISP, Internet connection type, etc. I emailed them back with the details they asked for, and told them what all I had tried, including trying to download to another machine. I wondered how hard it was going to be to convince them that the problem was on their end.

A couple of hours later, I received another email, this time from a different human. I immediately assumed I would have to re-explain everything. Much to my surprise, this is what the email said:

I understand that you are unable to download the song “Why Can’t This Be Love” as your [sic] getting error -1000000. I know how eager you are to have this resolved at the earliest. I will be glad to assist you today.

Joey, please accept my sincere apologies for the frustration this download has caused. I took the liberty of removing the file causing the issue from your download queue. To give Apple time to investigate the issue and make any corrections that may be necessary, please wait at least two weeks before repurchasing this title.

I have issued a replacement song credit to your account. You can use the credit to buy a song of your choice from the iTunes Store.

So, while it kind of stinks that it could be two or more weeks before I can get the track replaced, it’s nice that they refunded me the money for the track so quickly. That’s nice, fast, customer service.

New WordPress Sociable Plugin Has Unintuitive Setup

2012-01-20T15:45:45Z

I got a notification this morning that the Sociable plugin for WordPress had a new version available, and did I want to install it. I try to keep my plugins updated, so I upgraded. Sociable now has two modes: Skyscraper and Classic. Classic is what you’re used to, with a row of icons under a post. Skyscraper is a tall and thin tower that lives in the left-hand margin of your site, scrolling along with the page. Skyscraper is the new default, but going back to Classic is what is unintuitive.

In your admin page, if you hover over the new menu “Select Sociable Plugin” you will see three options: Select Sociable Plugin, Sociable Options, and Skyscraper Options. Selecting the first one brings you to a page explaining the difference between the two modes, with ginormous buttons at the bottom to choose which version you want. Clicking the button for either mode takes you to the options for that mode, but doesn’t actually change which mode is selected.

At the bottom of each mode’s options page is a checkbox labeled, “Activate…” and the mode name. I assumed that checking the one for Classic mode was all I needed to do, but clearing my cache and viewing the page showed that not to be the case. You must also uncheck the “Activate…” checkbox on the Skyscraper options page to enable Classic mode. If you don’t uncheck it, then you will still get the Skyscraper showing up on your posts. If you decide to switch back from Classic to Skyscraper, you have to uncheck Classic, then go to the Skyscraper options page and check that one.

Since this is a binary choice, they need to have ONE place to enable one and disable the other, or at least explain to you that you have to take the extra step.

Write Your Congressmen: Please Do Not Support SOPA/PIPA

2012-01-20T21:51:56Z

Depending on what sites you visit, you may or may not know that several sites have shutdown today, or have modified their logos, to protest SOPA/PIPA. These are bills before the House of Representatives and Senate, respectively, that would have a crippling effect on web sites that support user-uploaded content. Sites like Reddit, Youtube and Tumblr are just a few.

If you are concerned about Internet freedom, write your Congressmen. I just wrote both my Senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, and my “representative” in the House, Rob Woodall. Here’s what I said (with SOPA and PIPA exchanged depending on the recipient):

I do not have a form letter or an eloquent defense of why you shouldn’t support PIPA. But from what I have read about PIPA (and SOPA, in the house), it is bad news for web sites that support user-uploaded content. In an effort to stop “piracy” of content, it places an undue burden on site owners that will cripple and/or shut down many sites. I am not saying piracy is not a problem or that it doesn’t exist. It does. But this bill is not the way to solve it.

Please do not support it.

I don’t really think that sites like Reddit, “going dark” for a day or Google slapping a black box over its logo will have much effect. Millions of people writing their Congressmen should have an effect, though without millions of dollars for lobbying, it remains to be seen how much of an effect it will have.

01/18/2012 1:13 PM Update: I just received this response from Senator Isakson’s office.

Dear Mr. Gibson:

Thank you for contacting me regarding intellectual property theft. I appreciate hearing from you and I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

S.968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT IP) Act of 2011, was introduced by Senator Leahy (D-VT) on May 12, 2011, and was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. On May 26, 2011, it was reported out of Committee and is currently pending in the Senate. The bill targets websites, particularly those registered outside of the United States, which are “dedicated to infringing activities.” These rogue websites typically offer unauthorized downloading or streaming of copyrighted content or the sale of counterfeit goods including music, movies, and pharmaceutical drugs.

Websites targeted by this bill are foreign owned and outside the reach of U.S. laws despite the fact U.S. intellectual property is being infringed upon and U.S. consumers are the targets. Rogue websites cost American workers jobs and cost businesses millions of dollars in lost revenue. As online technology and commerce advances, we must see to it that injured parties have the ability to stop infringers from profiting from counterfeit products. For example, a victim of infringement will have the authority to file a civil action against the owner or registrant of a rogue site. If an order is granted by the court, third parties will be required to stop processing payments from the infringing sites, therefore, preventing infringers from collecting payments. I will work to ensure that our laws our modernized to protect intellectual property, and will keep your thoughts on this bill in mind should it come before the Senate for a vote.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please visit my webpage at http://isakson.senate.gov/for more information on the issues important to you and to sign up for my e-newsletter.

Sincerely,
Johnny Isakson
United States Senator

01/20/2012 4:40 PM Update: Today I received an email from Saxby Chambliss’ office. Here it is. Notice the bold text, which I added for emphasis:

Dear Mr. Gibson:

Thank you for contacting me regarding S. 968, the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP),” and H.R. 3261, the ”Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).” It is good to hear from you.

S. 968 was introduced on May 12, 2011, and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. On May 26, it was reported out of committee and placed on the general legislative calendar. If enacted, S. 968 would amend federal copyright law to authorize the Attorney General to file civil action against violators of copyright infringement law.

H.R. 3261 was introduced on October 26, 2011, and referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary. On December 16, it was considered before the full committee; however, the bill was not voted out for consideration by the full House. If enacted, H.R. 3261 would authorize the Attorney General to seek a court order against a U.S.-directed foreign Internet site committing or facilitating online piracy.

On January 23, 2012, a procedural vote on S. 968 was scheduled in the Senate; however, Majority Leader Reid announced that this vote will be postponed in order to allow for modifications to the bill to be made. Furthermore, House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith announced that further consideration of H.R. 3261 would be postponed indefinitely.

It was always clear that SOPA and PROTECT IP needed to be perfected, and that legitimate concerns needed to be addressed before these bills could move forward. Given this and my constituents concerns, it was always my intention to oppose moving forward until concerns had been addressed. With the majority leader’s decision to postpone the cloture vote on the PROTECT IP Act originally scheduled for January 24, I withdrew my co-sponsorship to await the resolution of the outstanding issues.

I believe that online theft is a serious issue, and that Congress needs to make certain that our laws adequately protect the interests of rights holders. When $58 billion in economic output is lost to the U.S. economy annually due to copyright theft of movies, music, packaged software and video games, and about one-quarter of all internet traffic is copyright infringing, there is a real problem that needs to be addressed. I have complete faith that we will be able to work out a compromise in the future that addresses this, while still promoting free and open access to the internet. Should a bill addressing this topic come before the full Senate for consideration, I will keep your thoughts in mind.

If you would like to receive timely email alerts regarding the latest congressional actions and my weekly e-newsletter, please sign up via my web site at: www.chambliss.senate.gov . Please let me know whenever I may be of assistance.

The bold part is interesting because he claims that he knew both bills were flawed and that he “always intended” to oppose “moving forward” until they were fixed. Given that he was a co-sponsor of PIPA, I don’t really think he’s being honest here. It seems a bit odd to be a co-sponsor of something you think is flawed.

Still, he’s withdrawn himself as a co-sponsor now, which is a good thing.