I wrote about the filet mignon at Drift in Reboboth Beach back in the fall, and the perfect doneness found me swearing to cook mine a bit lower the next go round. We grabbed a three-pack of filet at an ACME yesterday, and true to my word, I left it in the Anova at 124 instead of 128 for an hour before finishing it on the jet engine method I use to grill off a sous vide cut. (I cribbed this move from Alton Brown, albeit a variation of his innovation.)

Filet Mignon

This was one of the best dishes I’ve done, a perfect medium rare, very little “gray line,” as Aaron calls it. I used to fret about overdoing filet, but sous vide neatly solves that problem.

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

1. Ciprianni Bellini: this is a premade Bellini, the storied cocktail from Harry’s Bar in Venice. This is sweet for my tastes, but I’ve never had a proper Bellini.¹
2. Phô: The three of us were dining last night and remarked how long it had been since we’d had phô. Aaron and I were into the traditional Vietnamese soup for a while. We found ourselves today at Phô Cali in nearby English Creek. I got the P1 with several proteins: brisket, steak, tendon, tripe, and meatballs. So good.
3. NotePlan: I test-drove this notes+todo app last week for the duration of the free trial. It’s a Mac-only app that helps you orgnanize your to-do list using both project notes and daily journal pages, all connected intimately with your calendar. NotePlan offers support for tags and other metadata (including due dates), and relies on Markdown. Also works on the iPhone and iPad. I could easily replace my notes and to do managers with NotePlan. I’m an inveterate switch of apps and systems, which is a bad habit I’m keen to break. Sometimes.

Cipriani Bellini

Phô

NotePlan

¹I traveled to Venice once but never went to Harry’s.

I found this script online back in 2018 and it still works in Sonoma. Fire it using LaunchBar, natch.

tell application "System Events"
    tell appearance preferences
        set dark mode to not dark mode
    end tell
end tell

It will switch to dark mode and back again, somehow.

Here’s this week’s list of things to try out. I took a couple of weeks off for the holidays:

1. Fuji in Haddonfield: We dined here tonight (and many times before) for my son’s brithday, my dad’s birthday, and Joey’s girlfriend’s. It was excellent as always. I can’t avoid the crispy salmon skin roll every time.
2. Bellview Winery: Bellview Winery has been open for something like 20 years. They did our wedding favor splits back in 2003. I went recently for a celebration of life and had two glasses of their rosé. I was smitten and talked up coming back to Rhonda many times. Our Cape May jaunt ignited a renewed interest in checking it out, which we have several times since.
3. Tabby: One of my favorite keyboard shortcuts on Chromium-based browsers is shift-command-a (on Mac) and shift-control-a (Windows) to search open browser tabs. This makes finding open tabs much easier than scanning horizontally across the toolbar when you have a lot open. Tabby is a tab manager for the Mac that exposes and allows you to search your open browser tabs across browsers. Pretty killer and infrastructure for me.

Fuji in Haddonfield, NJ

Bellview Winery Rosé

Tabby for Mac

I described a bit how I’ve lost some weight rowing and changing my diet here on Uncorrected. I keep close track of this by weighing myself every morning and appending the data to a CSV file via an action in Drafts. The resulting data file made it easy to ballpark how much I’d lost overall, and analyze some patterns (Monday mornings after three-day weekends=a bit of weight gain, for example). But I wondered about the larger data set and what I might learn from some analysis in Excel. So I fed the sheet into Excel and ran a pivot table.

Takeaways:

• Quarter 2 in 2023 was my greatest loss on record (28.5 lbs), with the most lost occurring in May. This puzzled me at first, but the reason is that I got a new rower for Rhonda to use. It had the newer PM5 computer on it, which synced with my iPhone over bluetooth using Concept 3’s ErgData app. As you can see below, I didn’t log the most meters of all of the months after which I started tracking the data using the PM5, but I moved from using the PM3 on my older rower and tracking the data manually to getting more competitive with myself. I did track data before this, but I used a Drafts action to write to a text file. I was not as concerned with my standings when I was using Apple Fitness+, only getting in a 20 or 30-minute workout with Josh or Ana. I would like to look more closely at my output prior to moving to the PM5 in the future.

• Closing in on losing 80 pounds, I’m starting to plateau. And while that causes me a twinge of panic, obviously you have to stop somewhere. I have to stop somewhere. Considering I was hoping to just move down a pant size, (I’ve moved down to a size 30 from a 38, when the 38s were cut generously), I should be just fine with that.

So what’s next?

Maintenance, I guess. I have considered cutting a day of rowing out of the schedule (I generally do six days a week). I have a hunch that I will be able to break some new goals if I rested more in between rowing sessions. I have also been thinking about adding some strength training back into the routine, if my left shoulder will cooperate (probably just bench presses). I can do up to 10 pull-ups now, which is 10 more than I could do a year ago. I don’t want to get bored and I don’t want to get frustrated if I’m not setting PRs. I even find myself getting anxious before attempting a PR now. I have a good idea of what I need to do to lose weight were I to gain some back, but I still fret.

It’s a crazy ride, this life. This goofy mind of mine.

Def gonna row tomorrow though 😉.

In a study of people taking tirzepatide, people who were switched to a placebo gained back 14% of the 25.5% of their lost body weight (the placebo group continued to receive coaching). It’s not necessarily unexpected, though:

“If a patient wants to go off the medicine, we’ll try. But we also say what the results are — so far, it seems like most people are going to gain weight back,” Dr. Jay said. “And that’s not your fault. That’s because obesity is a disease, and this medicine is helping to address it.”

How Much Weight Comes Back After You Stop Using a Weight-Loss Drug?

As a person farting with Windows more nowadays out of interest than necessity, I greatly enjoyed this article on Mashable. There are some basics that Kimberly Gedeon gets wrong, only out of being a Mac newbie:

Snap Layouts

As someone who often works with several different apps simultaneously, having the ability to snap Windows into certain quadrants of the screen is incredibly helpful. I’d love to have Slack snapped to one side of the screen, Gmail attached to the top right, and Google Docs positioned on the bottom right. Sadly, macOS doesn’t have this feature.

This is both true and false at the same time: macOS doesn’t have an exact copy of Windows Snap, but there is an affordance in the windows controls on the Mac. Excellent third-party options exist, like Mosaic and BetterSnapTool (which is no emollient if you are allergic to paying for software). If you are more techie, there’s always Keyboard Maestro.

I don’t get the gripe about having to tap the spacebar to pull up a preview of a file or photo in Finder.