Sunday Serial: Royal Spice Indian, Antis Reservaantis Reserva Mendoza, and Funny Coworkers

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.

Chole Bhatura at Royal Spice in Millville, NJ

Mendoza

Many hands make light the work

Today’s 10K Rowing Workout: A New Personal Record

I had no expectations going in to today’s 10K; I was on the fence about whether I should even attempt one, considering last night’s over-indulgence in delicious locally grown wines.


Top 5 10K Rowing Workouts

Yet I found myself crouching into every last meter, realizing early on that I was at least close to matching last November’s pre-COVID 10K personal record. I felt good; the pace was below 30 strokes per minute, and I was able, with focus, to keep things at 2:02 or lower for most strokes. My heart rate stayed in the lower 160s till the end of the piece. I felt good and in control throughout the row.


Today’s 10K PR

I ended up shaving about 20 seconds off of November’s PR. That’s not a lot of time, cosmically speaking, but 20 seconds is a long time when you’re pretending to win a boat race.


November 2023’s 10K PR

To be fair, I have lowered my drag setting a bit.

Sunday Serial: Bluesky, Happy Scale, and Sharrot Winery

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

  1. Bluesky: This Twitter alternative moved from private to public this past week. So far, I like it very much, and a looking forward to native Mac clients. Follow me at @alexnonn.bsky.social
  2. Happy Scale: This is a cool app that reads your Apple Health body weight data and presents you with some graphically novel presentations of said data. It’s a subscription but very cheap.
  3. Sharrot Winery: Rhonda and I took Thursday off to check out a new (to us) winery in nearby Hammonton, Sharrot Winery. We split a bottle of their excellent rosé, and three plates: a burrata plate, mac and cheese, and a pepperoni flatbread. Everything was great, including the service and atmosphere. Can’t wait to go back.

Happy Scale

Bluesky

Bluesky

Happy Scale

Happy Scale

Sharrot Winery

Rosé

Mac and Cheese

Burrata

Flatbread

Sharrot Winery

10K Rowing Update and LSD

I took the time Sundays often afford to row a 10k this afternoon. As I lamented in my last 10k update, I didn’t match or best my current PR. There was one noteworthy stat, though: my stroke rate.

Here are the splits table from my PR from November 2023:

My Current PR Splits

My Current 10k PR

I averaged 30 strokes per minute on this piece.

And here are the splits from today’s 10k:

Today's 10k Splits

Today’s 10k

My last split got up to 28 strokes per minute, but check out my average: 25.

I’ve been looking to reduce my stroke rate to allow me to more comfortably row longer pieces. It reminds me a bit of weightlifting, when I would deload to fix an error with my form.

A quick word on comparisons: It’s fine to compete with yourself. But the progress and knowledge of others is worth consideration, too. Case in point: I used to cycle, and rode solo all them time (I’m an only child and most of the things I prefer are solitary pursuits). I did chance upon a local club ride, though, and I learned a lot from riding with better, more experienced riders, and it changed my skill level after just one ride.

OK, enough about cycling.

In that spirit, however, I took to Concept2’s excellent Logbook (which doesn’t require a separate subscription, thank you very much!) to compare myself to other rowers. Filtering 10k pieces by males in my age group 40-49, I found the following record holder’s stats:

10k PR for my Age Range

Impressive. This guy was pulling with way more power than I can muster, but with a stroke rate just a digit above my 25.

Long slow distance.

PS: I am comparing myself to heavyweights. I weighed in as a lightweight this morning, though. Here’s the same age group’s lightweight record holder:

Current Lightweight 10k

30 strokes a minute. Heaps of power.

Sunday Serial: Todoist, Amazon Essentials Jeans, and a Trickle Charger

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

  1. Todoist: I have tried Todoist as an alternative to my otherwise-stalwart to-do app OmniFocus several times, most recently moving over last spring/summer because I liked the Windows client better than OF’s web version. I do not generally like Todoist more than OmniFocus, as it’s not a native Mac app in the way that OmniFocus is a Mac-assed Mac app. But even when I’ve gone back to OmniFocus after a Todoist flirtation, I always missed the native language input that Todoist offers across all platforms (and the iOS and iPadOS apps are credible on those platforms, compared to the electron version you get on the Mac and Windows). Let’s say that you want to remind yourself to pick up some milk tomorrow. In Todoist, I don’t have to go beyond the quick input panel with this line of text:

    pick up milk @errands tomorrow #Home Single Actions /Out and About

This creates a task in the project “home single actions” under the section titled “Out and About,” flagged with the errands context and due date of tomorrow. It’s fast and easy and I miss it in OmniFocus, where you have to bounce around in multiple fields to classify the action.

  1. Amazon Essentials: I was hot to get a pair of smaller jeans recently but wasn’t interested in either going shopping or paying a lot of money. I ordered a pair of Amazon’s Basic brand and while they will never be in the top spot for most comfortable jeans, they are just fine. They’re less stretchy than most current offerings and very true to size, with little forgiveness in the waist, thighs… well, anywhere. I still wear them all the time though. I have a pair of gray pants for the office that fit about the same. The polyester really dials up the static cling factor.

  2. Trickle Charger: I picked up this Schumacher trickle charger for our cars a while back. As cars age, their batteries often need a boost after many short trips. This unit isn’t fast but it’s small and does the trick.

Todoist

Amazon Essentials Jeans

Schumacher Trickle Charger

Sous Vide Burgers FTW

I’ve been cooking sous vide for years now: egg cups for breakfast, made for the week each Sunday, a great salmon recipe everyone loves, and plenty of other applications. Hell, even oatmeal. I’ve done burgers a bunch of times, but burgers are a quick and easy dish that I often don’t bother to sous vide because it adds a good bit of time and work to the process.

This past weekend we found ourselves rained out on Sunday, when we planned to have burgers, so I made the patties and chucked them in the freezer. I followed Kenji’s method (exhaustively documented, of course) by cooking them in the tank at 126 for a little over an hour, removed them to a cutting board to cool off, and then grilled them off on the grill, ripping hot.

I will say that making them this way yields a perfectly cooked medium rare burger: nice exterior char, lots of tender pink meat, and… well, that’s that.

Sous Vide Burgers

Finbar

I was using the newish Mac browser Arc to proofread something Rhonda wrote for school, and was confounded about where the URL bar was. Arc, like many newfangled apps, uses a hotkey-activated command palette to open a new URL (among other things). This is potentially confusing UI design for many users, but I happen to like this mode of interaction (starting, I supposed, with my love for LaunchBar).

ARC Browser’s Command Bar

Launchbar

In my quest for ever-more-Camino-like Mac browsers (think light and simple), I was looking for a browser to try out that had minimal UI chrome exposed by default. I forgot about Arc but then remembered that I had installed it and tried it for a bit.

I liked the command bar!

So I thought, maybe someone made a Safari extension. My first search led me to FinBar, a very cool riff on the idea.

FinBar reminds me of Paletro, which I wrote about here, in that it uses a hotkey-enacted palette to expose the menu bar options available to you in the active application. You can accomplish different things in different applications, but the key is, you are always using your keyboard.

;

FinBar in Ulysses

Sunday Serial: UGG Boots, CARROT Weather, and Frozen Blueberries

This week’s things to consider:

  1. UGG: I’ve never cared for UGG much but recently found myself desiring a pair. I pulled the trigger on Amazon ($180 gulp) for a pair of chestnut UGG Men’s Classic Short Boot. They remind of Birkenstock sandals and Doc Martens: lovably ugly and lusciously comfortable.
  2. CARROT Weather: This iOS/iPadOS/macOS weather app got another mention on Upgrade #493: Upgradies Hall of Fame and I thought maybe I should give it a look. I was a long-time subscriber of Dark Sky before Apple bought it, and I’ve really liked Apple’s integration of Dark Sky into their own weather app. But CARROT boasts a few neat tricks: snarky reporting, multiple data sources, and a highly configurable interface. I let the sub continue after the trial. Rhonda likes to pay attention to the phases of the moon, and CARROT Weather has a great feature for tracking this, too.<sup>1</sup>
  3. Frozen blueberries: Buy a pack of blueberries at the market, chuck the whole thing in the freezer, and you can have a guilt-free handful of tiny popsicles whenever you’re craving a sweet.

UGG boots on my feet

CARROT Weather

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<sup>1</sup> Teachers are terribly fond of attributing aberrant behavior to a full moon.

10k Rowing Update

I haven’t had much to crow about my recent 10ks: after my second go-round with COVID1, I was never able to match 11/26/2023’s PR of 41:10.8. Today’s was 41:29.6.

My top 10ks

My Most Recent 10Ks, descending

10k PR

My 10k PR

Today's 10k

Today’s 10k

As I observed in my post from 12/4, I was not as fast as my PR, but I was close, with a stroke rate below 30. Lowering my stroke rate has been a goal of mine.

1 Once again, mercifully mild, with no long-lasting symptoms