Here’s this week’s things of check out:

1. Quick Accent in PowerToys: I’ve written about my love for PowerToys on Windows before, but necessity was the mother of discovery for me this week. While trying to type “café” a few times this week, I struggled to find the accented “e” character in Windows. A quick web search helped me discover that PowerToys has an affordance similar to that offered on the Mac: to find and enter an accented letter, hold down the letter key and tap the space bar. Presto: atop your screen appears a list of possible accented letters. You use the number key or the arrow keys to select your target. Pretty bueno.

2. Butter Steak: Rhonda and I had a neighbor who used to crow about this downmarket grocery store nearby and their “butter steaks.” I didn’t know what a butter steak was and suspected the name was an Orwellian trick to call the steak the opposite of what it was. Having seen them in our local butchers, I knew they were cheap and kinda homely. Turns out it’s a flat iron steak, which is a much sturdier sounding name. I’ve had exactly one flat iron steak before, at the now-defunct (pour one out) Winfield’s in Millville, NJ, site of many excellent meals shared with family and friends before it closed during the COVID pandemic. I purchased one butter steak alongside a more fanciful ribeye roast (two bones) for under four bucks, chucked it in the sous vide tanking along with the ribeye, and seared it off on the grill with the roast. I sliced it on the bias and served for everyone to try. I was excellent; more tender than a flank, more chew than a filet mignon. What a great, cheap, if ugly, cut of beef.

3. La Jolie Fleur Rosé: Rhonda and I nipped out Friday to the around-the-corner Greenview Inn. We have been sipping rosé regularly at local wineries, and taking a bottle along from said wineries to our favorite BYOBs in town. Greenview offering a full bar, we ordered off of the menu, and tried the only rosé on the list: la Jolie Fleur. It was more grapefruity than the Outer Coastal Plains varietals we’ve been enjoying, with some sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Very crisp. Would be nice to sip chilled by the pool this summer.

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Barry Hess on blogging:

You don’t need to labor over your posts. You don’t need to have perfect grammar or spelling. You don’t need to leave a post in draft for seven months, pouring over research. (Though you can if you want!) You don’t really need to have an idea.

Just write. Then share.

You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist

I’ve shared before that one of my rowing goals is to row a 10k in 40 minutes flat. I’ve gotten close but I still have some seconds to shave off my best time:

Today’s 7500 was a surprising jump, especially for a weekday row (fueled by nothing more than a cup of coffee and some pineapple). I managed to keep my pace at just about 2:00 and finished just over 30 minutes. That’s only 75% of the 10k total I’m shooting for, but I was pleased.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Notion Calendar: One of the development artifacts of macOS’s UNIX routes is a preference for single-purpose apps. Unlike Outlook, Apple includes separate mail, contact, and calendar apps. You can swap out your favorite software for any of those build-in apps; I use MailMate, MimeStream, and Fantastical on my Mac, and Fantastical and Spark on iOS and iPadOS. Microsoft touts Outlook as an integrated solution, and is deprecating its standalone apps in favor of it. I’ve been generally happy using Outlook on Windows, but I still search for good standalone options. Notion Calendar is no Fantastical, but it looks quite a lot like it, and works nicely on Windows (it is severely limited on iOS, though).

2. Blue Cork Winery: I recently visit the town of my soon-to-be employer, and stopped on the ride home to grab a bottle of wine to share with Rhonda. We’ve been drinking Rosé at most of the wineries we’ve visited, and while this was a solo mission, I was glad to find their Cab Franc Rosé in the fridge. We had it with sushi Friday night, and while it’s a bit more berry-forward than Sharrot or Bellview’s take on this wine, it was very Outer-Coastal-tasting and emblematic of the local style.

3. Dr. Martens Men’s 1460 in Cherry Red: A fit of nostalgia found me searching online for Doc Martens in blood red. I didn’t find that color, but the Cherry Red is, I suppose, the modern equivalent. I haven’t work Docs in over 20 years, but I started thinking they might not look bad with some of my officewear and especially my more casual selections (which I am prone to, at work, these days). They are pricey but I have really enjoyed wearing them since they came in, although they’re tough to break in. I imagine some black and brown Docs are in my future!

Blue Cork Rosé

George Hahn:

The Chemex was invented in 1941 in New York City by a German-born chemist named Peter J. Schlumbohm. This beautiful and simple coffee maker is made of heat-proof, laboratory grade, borosilicate glass with a wood handle tied to the neck with a leather strip. No plug. No electricity. It’s a work of modern art… literally. (It’s part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian and the Corning Museum.)

My Coffee Method of Choice: Chemex

Totally getting a chemex for my new office.

Haven’t had a pair of these in over 20 years. Tough to break in but I’m enjoying them more than I thought.

Some things to check out:

1. Old Grandad Bonded Bourbon: Not the most exciting whisky I’ve ever had. Fairly sweet, lots of corn. Just fine in a Manhattan, though.
2. eMClient: one of the pain points of using Windows is having a good email client option. My particular needs for work center around a useful smart folder scheme. On the Mac, it’s MailMate, hands down. This Windows client uses IMAP to access your Gmail account, but the clutch feature for me is Smart Folders. It’s not as flexible as MailMate, but is anything?
3. Villa Fazzolari in Buena makes the best pizza around. Rhonda and I split the personal Gino Jr.’s Favorite, as we often do.

Gino Jr.’s Favorite Pizza

eMClient

On the heels of much writing celebrating writing blogs, I added a blogroll page to Uncorrected. Enjoy.

This is a silly little thing, but I get a kick out of it. This is a small pocket I knife I inherited after my father-in-law died. It was eminently amendable to sharpening, but the tip of the blade had broken off.

I busted out a two-sided whetstone I got at Ace Hardware some years ago and filed the blade down into a point. No bladesmith am I, but it’s really usable now.

Last August, I wrote in “Another Good Trend” that my cardio fitness levels, as reported by my Apple Watch through the Health app, had gone from “below average” to “above average.” Cardio fitness is Apple’s term for VO2 max. From the Health app:

This is a measurement of your VO, max, which is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise. Also called cardiorespiratory fitness, this is a useful measurement for everyone from the very fit to those managing illness.

A higher VOz max indicates a higher level of cardio fitness and endurance.

Oddly, all of the rowing I do doesn’t lead to Cardio Fitness reports. But walking does. Rhonda and I took the dogs for a 30-minute walk again today and I found a pleasant update when I checked my stats: I moved into the “high” category.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Tabbs: Tabbs is a Chrome extension that adds some flair and functionality to the default tab search in your Chromium-based browser of choice (I’m using Brave). You can search your open tabs, close duplicates, creat tab groups, and more.
2. Tri-Tip Roast: Tri-Tip might get its own post here on Uncorrected. This roast is from the sirloin of the steer, and this one came complete with a nice fat cap. I sous vided it at 129 for about three hours and seared over lump charcoal for about ten minutes. Delicious.
3. Dune: I haven’t seen the second install ment of Villaneuva’s interpretation of the Frank Herbert sci-fi classic, but I can’t wait. It’s getting good reviews. I read all six of the original books in college. My roommate was one book behind me and gobbled them up right after I did.

This is Tonewood Brewing‘s Bend Hoppy Brown. 5.2% Dark Specialty Malts w. Chinook & Cascade. Milk Chocolate & Orange Zest. One of the best brews i ever had.

1. We’re lucky now to have an Indian restaurant nearby (two, in fact). Pictured below is their excellent Chole Bhatura appetizer, which Rhonda and I split.

2. We had a nice Mendoza from Moore Bros with our Indian. Very good.

3. Funny coworkers: I’ve often remarked that I get much of my social exposure at work. Outside of work stress, I’ve never found my colleagues to be anything but funny and admirable people to work with. One of my coworkers hung this sign up at the new worksite we’ve been opening this week after I quipped this hated boss phrase about having the student workers keep at it.