One of the things i’ve done without any modicum of regret is the switch to buying only all-natural peanut butter. It tastes like a completely different spread, much richer in pure peanut flavor, and missing all of that orangy preservative aftertaste. Not only that, but the first few spreads from the jar are gloriously creamy and delicious.

However, many people get turned off by the oil at the top of the jar. That’s why i’m writing this post - after a few years of eating this stuff for occasional PB&J’s, i’ve got a few tips to share that are more or less obvious in hindsight.

First off, to get a good initial spread, it’s really important to thoroughly mix the peanut butter paste with the oil. I usually jab downwards with a knife to the bottom of the jar, which allows the oil to seep down into the paste. After doing that for a while, it lowers the oil level somewhat so that you can move on to jabbing downwards then pushing around the jar. Since the paste is normally pretty hard, it’s easier to do this once the oil loosens up the spread a bit. After that, it’s a simple matter of stirring.

This will give you a great jar of peanut butter, until you get to about the halfway point. You’ll notice that the oil tended to float to the top, and now you’re left with a half jar of very stiff peanut butter. The second tip is just to go out and get some run-of-the-mill peanut oil, and add it into the jar, repeating the stirring process again.

The last problem that I sometimes deal with is that i’ve sometimes got a soft bread and cold PB, which can easily tear the bread when I try to spread it evenly. This becomes an issue when you refrigerate your PB after opening, especially when getting towards the bottom of your jar. Although some oil would help, if you’re feeling lazy, here’s an easy trick. You can take your butter knife and pre-spread the PB on the sides of the jar. Just take the big clumps of PB and smooth them out along the sides of the jar as if it were a really stiff bread. The more you work with it, the more pliable it becomes.

So anyway, I hope that if you’ve been previously dissuaded from using natural peanut butter because of the oil or the stiffness, you’ll come back to it and give it another try. That’s all for this food-related post.

After giving a five-minute run down of my holistic approach to shopping enhancement via the Internet, I was encouraged to write a post about it by some of my coworkers. It’s going to cover a lot of ground, so don’t blink.

Mode of shopping: I know what I want, and I know what store I want it at.

Go straight to fatwallet.com (aka FW/ObesePurse), and search by store for special discounts, coupon codes, or in-store printouts. If you’re not dead-set on going to that store, follow the next section.

Mode of shopping: I know generally what I want, or exactly what I want.

First, I usually go to amazon.com to read customer reviews. This helps me gain confidence that I want a particular product, and get comfortable with the product’s competition. Any excessively bad or suspiciously good reviews can be background checked by looking at all other user reviews by clicking on the username. That helps eliminate the corporate shills and coffeesnobs on the net. Secondly, I perform a search on SlickDeals (aka SD), motherofalldeals.com, and Anandtech’s Hot Deals forum for the exact model number and type of product you’re looking at. That should get you remarkably good coverage of any recent or current deals going on. If you find nothing, you can use a service like bizrate, froogle, Yahoo shopping to look at vendor prices inline with vendor reviews. Features will vary by site, but you will get used to the areas of coverage that each offers, and pick the right ones in no time. Besides, more info never hurts.

Mode of shopping: Big Ticket Items, Non-Motivated Buyer

For big ticket items that you’re willing to wait for, RSS is going to be your best friend. RSS is a technology that lets you subscribe to updates for stuff on the web. In the realm of deals, RSS will let you be notified of new deals before almost anyone else. Some really important sites provide RSS for the patient deal hunter. My favorite two are craigslist and motherofalldeals.com. Craigslist is typically all used items, but if you’re cool with that, and you’re shopping for furniture or a car, RSS will let you know about it before all the other schmucks on the internet who only search for an item on the off chance they think about it once a week. RSS will shop for you, so you don’t have to. RSS is how I got such a good deal on my car. In short, RSS is good. You can get started with RSS by checking out a service like bloglines and reading up on it. When you go to craigslist and do a search, there is a small text link in the bottom right that says RSS. Copy and paste that link into something like bloglines to get started. Deals are really one of the big reasons to learn RSS.

Mode of shopping: Bored at Work

Each day, there are two fantastic websites that exclusively sell one item per day. The first is woot.com (woot), and the second is steepandcheap.com (sac). Woot was a pioneer in this field, so i’m going to spend a lot of time on them.

Woot is oriented around crap you might find in the clearance section of a Best Buy or Micro Center. They post a new item every day at 10:00 PM PST sharp. Check eBay time religiously, as they post closely to that clock. Woot has several really special characteristics, a few of which i’ll cover here. Shipping for every item is $5 flat. Even 150-lbs. televisions cost $5 to ship. The Bag Of Crap (boc, or other B.O.C. acronyms) is the holy grail of woot items. It consists of a bag, plus 1 to 3 random items, priced at $1 each. Occasionally, a woot member will post a ridiculously good item of crap, such as an Xbox 360 or a bigscreen DLP TV, which they claim to have received as one of their $1 “craps.” BoC’s are posted unnanounced, and typically have caused woot’s servers to crash, but they weather the traffic storm with aplomb these days. Bags of Crap sell out within the first 3 minutes these days, and it is somewhat of a mark of pride to buy one. The other unusual activity on woot is what is called the “Woot-Off.” The Woot-Off is an entire day where they post a new item as soon as the current items sells out. As you can imagine, this leads to a ridiculous day of constantly checking woot. There has been one recorded “rare afternoon crap” in which a BoC was posted during a Woot-Off. Generally, however, community interaction around items on woot tends to bring out knowledgeable folks on every topic imaginable. The commerce design has been streamlined beyond anything else I’ve ever seen, and the order tracking interface is top-notch. Also unique are the daily “Product Stats” which break down statistics like the “Wooter to blame for sellout” to the “Woot wage,” which I presume is a measure of the speed of gross sales per time period. Woot is a brilliant internet phenomenon, and I tip my hat to its creators and denizens.

Steepandcheap is a woot-like site I just found out about that features outdoor supplies. A new item is posted every night at 11pm PST. They sell high-quality, name brand outdoors gear for as low as a quarter of the retail price. It’s unbelivably awesome if you love good quality outdoor gear but gave up on going to REI once you realized that you were spending more time at the store than outdoors. It’s the perfect way to fill in the gaps in your gear, a piece at a time.

Other worthwhile things to check on daily for the hell of emptying your wallet are deal curators like slickdeals and one other one I can’t remember now (Update: I was reminded that the site I was thinking of was passwird), because it didn’t have RSS so I hated it for a while. I think of certain deal sites as curators when they make an effort not to post links to many other deals, but rather only to a select few each day. This theoretically keeps you from being overloaded by deals, a fate you are probably destined for anyway by reading this far.

Mode of shopping: Looking to Travel

This is its own post, but basically, if you’re not in the know about these things, just get started with using priceline for hotels (because it doesn’t matter when you check in, typically), and use something else for flights. I say “something else,” because the amount you can save is typically proportional to your technical ability, and I hate the way I end up on shitty flights at shitty times on priceline. A good middle-high ground is farechase, which lets you live-search through a decently sized flight fare database with a very nice comparison interface.

Mode of shopping: hungry, or hungry while traveling.

If you’ve got a pretty experienced palate (i.e. you’re not writing four-star reviews on citysearch on Wendy’s and TGI Friday’s), and you just want good, honest food for a decent price, do yourself a favor and learn how to use chowhound. It’s the most unpretentious group of eaters on the internet, willing to go down to the corner and have a taco at a grungy taco stand, only to return to the site with a comprehensive review of the experience, food, and owner’s conversational skills, history, and friendliness. Do the community a favor as well, and tell them about your favorite holes-in-the-wall, but avoid posting excessively positive (oh, sorry, optimistic) reviews on things before lurking for a while. Your taste may improve exponentially once you start really eating in your city, or in cities away from home, and what you once considered the best use of a $20 bill may no longer apply.

Conclusions

This should get you started in using the internet pretty far out on its bleeding edge to save money. Of course, “saving money” really means that you’ll be buying pieces of crap over the internet for a dollar each, constantly in suspense of news deals popping up in your RSS reader, and reading through hotly contested amazon.com product ratings like mystery novels in your spare time, all while dollars are floating in large chunks out of your pocket. You’ll know it’s bad when you desperately search through entire subcultures in order to buy the best $25 dollar pocket flashlight for your car.

If you’re like me, and you hit that point, you’ll retire from the active deal addiction, hit up woot and sac daily, and flip by slickdeals once in a while. You’ll rarely pay full price for anything after that point, but when you do, you’ll secretly know that if you just spent an hour, you could probably have gotten a better deal…

Okay, so there isn’t really a Bacon Tournament. But if there was, i’m pretty sure that Hormel’s Black Label Bacon would be a contender. I have yet to try the thick style (thick bacon is pretty common to eat in Rome), but I had four strips of the Black Label this morning with eggs, and the extra meat was definitely much appreciated.

Update: The second after I posted this, I began to think about how awesome an actual Bacon Tournament would be. If anyone in the Bay Area is interested, please post a comment and I’ll host a Bacon Tournament if there is enough interest.

I’m always very proud of my parents! My Mom, of course, for raising the four of us independent, crazy kids (harder than it looks). And my Dad, who I take a lot of my work ethic and inspiration from.

My Dad is a prominent Gastroenterologist (digestive systems doctor) specializing in Colon Cancer during his research years, and I offhandedly was discussing eating fish and worrying about mercury content. My Dad comes back with a handy notecard with the following information:

OK

• Salmon (wild)
• Sardines
• Sole
• Tilapia
• Trout
• Shrimp
• Clams
• Scallops
• “Light Tuna” (NOT Chunk)

Once a month

• Bass (Sea)
• Red Snapper
• Flounder
• Halibut
• Grouper
• Fresh Tuna (Chunk/Whole Tuna)
• Mahi Mahi
• Orange Roughy

NO

• Swordfish
• Shark
• Marlin
• King Mackerel
• Tilefish
• (Farm-raised Salmon)
• (Farm-raised Trout)

Well, I’ll probably still eat anything that a good sushi chef prepares for omakase. And, as Anthony Bourdain recommends, don’t eat fish on Mondays. But this list is very handy for me, and wow, i’ve started really looking at “Farm-raised” and “color added” labels on fish nowadays. This isn’t an “official” list of anything, just some crib notes from my dad about a topic that piqued my curiousity. If you have any questions about whether fish is right in your own diet, please consult your own doctor! (Just trying to CMA, you know…)

Finally got around to making an improvement to eatlunch.at that has been on the backburner for a long, long time. Spots have their own pages on eatlunch.at! See a sample here:

Border Grill

(Sorry, Border Grill. In all fairness, i’ve only been there once, and I should really try the other dishes.)

In addition, you’ll also notice that it’s possible to now comment on spots, and add in arbitrary text.

More features are on their way, and I hope to get them in soon in my copious free time.

• Stats on frontpage
• Mark and track where you went to lunch
• Add addresses and locations to every spot

Andy Baio of waxy.org fame pulled a massive coup yesterday when he linked to my lunchtime decision assistant application, eatlunch.at. He’d been bugging me for months to change the Spot Directory from global to simply all spots added and saved by local party members.

When he linked to it, and showed me that new spots to eat were getting added at an alarming rate, I paniced. He argued successfully that with tons of new spots being added, the original spot directory didn’t scale. I agreed, and ended up implementing that change, along with a few others, right away.

First off, the Spot Directory is only within your party by default, but if you click on tags, you can browse globally.

Secondly, the ordering on the tags on the frontpage was wonky, and i’ll be extending Freetag to handle arbitrary ordering, so I don’t have to make local library code changes to tweak sorting.

Third, you can now see the silly “Names” of people next to their email addresses in the party management view.

But for now, since so many people are starting to use it, there’s an open call for comments on this post. I’ll have to put together a more comprehensive eatlunch blog, but for now, just use the eatlunch.at category to view everything.

When I created eatlunch.at, I had little knowledge of existing “vote for lunch” applications that had already been made. In fact, the question “Where shall we have lunch?” is the universal third stage of civilization, and many have attempted to create a solution to that problem. Many have been brought to my attention, although I clearly think mine is the best. Here are a couple for your perusal:

Dave Regan’s lunch.cgi – it’s written as a perl cgi, so we can basically dismiss it entirely. It looks like it does single-party management, with categorization, list of eateries by last access (a point of argument on eatlunch.at), and automated emails. This one actually does a final email that’s supposed to be authoritative at 11:00 am (more on that later) – Found as the #1 result for ‘vote for lunch’ on google.

Dave Renteria’s Wheel ‘O’ Yum – disclosed to me on the makingstuff list, the wheel o’ yum is an actual desktop application that basically picks a random place to go to eat. Apparently the original version decides where you go to lunch, and that’s final; but, due to embarrassing situations, Wheel ‘O’ Yum Supreme now emails you a decision. Hmm… DrLunch.com – a similar web application written in JSP, that gives out helpful stack traces when you try to register. No idea what is inside, but it certainly sounds interesting. It actually makes a choice itself as well. Apparently, Photo Matt found this on a AdWord for this google search: “What are we having for lunch?” Nice. I tried the query, but no longer see the AdWord. Too bad.

In one of the more freaky google AdWord displays for “eat lunch”, BeMyBuddy.co.uk somehow promises to “Find people online to have lunch
with, throughout the UK.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds kind of odd, especially when combined with the pastel kiddy color scheme.

So, it seems like there are several differentiating factors in play here.

1. Whether the application chooses a place for you, or allows you to vote
2. Whether there is a “final result” that must be obliged.
3. Sends email
4. Desktop or web application
5. Downloadable Program or a service
6. Maintained, or, ‘et by the hogs’

Let’s look at the lunchtime voting matrix.

One of the most controversial factors in play is the “final decision” factor. For me, this was a design decision. I designed eatlunch this way because the final decision of where to go to eat is still a social one. The primary problem that we face as lunchtime adventurers is extracting daily preferences from each person. There are often those that profess “anywhere is okay,” but renege by rejecting suggestion after suggestion.

Making a final decision within an application not only leads to failure of the application, but also a sense that the application is useless anyway. A good lunchtime voting application should give you important data about your decision, and provide a way for you to express your preferences without committing a great deal of time or effort, and without blocking the way to last-minute lunch audibles.

With that said, there are plenty of improvements on the way for eatlunch.at that will make it easier for others to use and understand. Among those are: vast improvements for the spot directory, “opt-out” from the day feature, rss feed for your party, better explanation of the site, improved ‘hints’, better tag management features, spot detail pages (!), and more! But it’s still pretty fun to use as-is.

Well kids, that’s it for today’s market roundup. Remember, if you have a hard time deciding where to eat lunch at, try eatlunch.at.

Today, my good fellow coworkers pointed out that I kinda stepped over the line that made eatlunch.at more feature-ful, but not as simple and quick as before.

All along, my primary goal has been to get in the way of users as little as possible, while maintaining usefulness.

So I fixed the problems today and changed the spot directory to behave more like the normal party page. If you click on a spot, you vote for the spot. If you vote for a spot, it’s saved for you automatically. You only have to add tags if you really want to!

The hint system is fixed now, and voting for lunch should be just as simple and fast as before. The inline hints should help new users, and are easy to turn off when you get the hang of the site.

As a personal aside, I believe more in Usefulness than Usability, but it’s good to have both. I’ve found myself using a ton of tough-to-use but useful applications, because what they do are so cool, and once I figure out how to use them, i always end up going back to them again and again. Case in point: all of *nix, and most open source software.

It’s pretty interesting that there’s a ton of talk about usability, when there are plenty of usable but useless interfaces out there. First things first, right? So, anytime stuff on eatlunch.at isn’t particularly useful, please let me know and i’ll definitely accept your feedback.

It is with great humility that I submit for your review:

eatlunch.at - a lunchtime voting application.

It started as a silly idea spawned over lunch discussions with my coworkers, and has slowly and pleasantly changed the way we decide where to go to lunch. I wish I always had something like this - it not only saves a lot of time, but makes the decision making process a lot more fun than walking halfway out the building without having a clear choice in mind.

I’m also using it as an experiment with new programming trends, such as folksonomies and emergent pathways. It’s interesting learning to code this kind of thing, and i’ve also built a general-purpose freetagging PHP class that I will no doubt open source when I get some time.

Have fun, and check out the About Page for more information.

P.S. I hope you don’t find any bugs, and please don’t slashdot it, or my coworkers will never figure out where to go to lunch.

So, in response to a RFC (Request for Chinese) food that I just received, here are a list of a couple of my favorite restaurants as well as things to order when you arrive. I’m assuming family-style dining, where you can order at least 4 dishes and share. An order of steamed rice is assumed.

Sichuan (or Szechuan, if you prefer):

Oriental Pearl $ 621 W. Main St. (Atlantic Blvd.) Alhambra, CA 91801 626-281-1898

• I originally heard of this restaurant during an interview on NPR, so go figure. Having been to Beijing and eaten “ma-la” dishes, where your tongue goes simultaneously numb and hot, I was disappointed to return to the states and not be able to find authentic Sichuan cooking. This restaurant seems small, but packs a punch and is probably the closest to authentic that you can get. Not super cheap, but great, great value.

Order recommendations: Water Boiled Beef or Fish (or ask for combination) - try to get this one as spicy as possible, and ask for ma-la flavor if you can. Mapo Tofu - Probably the best mapo tofu around. A very common dish done right, extremely spicy as well. Spicy Crispy Chicken (sp?) I’m not sure what this is called on the menu. It should be little crispy chunks of chicken in a bed of red peppers. Pretty good. Kung Pao Chicken - very different from American style KP chicken. Chinese cabbage or broccoli - good to balance out the spicyness with veggies. To drink: the watermelon blended drink is pure, not-to-sweet watermelon, that really helps to cool you off during the dinner. It’s big.

Shanghai

Green City $$ (not sure if this address is accurate) 140 W. Valley Blvd #207 San Gabriel, CA 91776′

My friend and I drag our companions to this place often for the incredible specialty dishes that are available. It’s a little harder to recommend what to order, since i’m not sure of the english names of the dishes, but you can always ask the wait staff to help since they’re fluent in English. Prices are a little higher than your typical Chinese restaurant, but it’s absolutely worth it, with incredible taste and nice ambience. This is in Focus Plaza, on the second floor above Sam Woo.

Order Recommendations:

1 - Salted fried fish - in a tempura-like batter, this is one of their specialties. It comes out like incredibly delicate fish sticks with some salt for rubbing or dashing. My favorite dish there.

Braised (Hong-Shao style) tofu - this tofu is braised in a sweet red sauce, and is delicious. Crab meat dumplings - kinda foggy on this one. Just order one of the Shanghai-style steamed dumplings, and don’t forget to dip them in a spoon of vinegar first. Wu-ti ribs - I think it actually says “Wu-Ti” on the menu. These are some great rib chunks. Any veggie - it’s good to eat vegetables!

Mei Long Village $$ 301 W. Valley Blvd., No. 112, San Gabriel

Great ambience and food, but definitely upscale and pricier than your average Chinese restaurant. If you’re really feeling like beef though, this is your spot. Great shanghai-style dumplings, and make sure to get the pork pump and dip sweet rolls in it. Mmm. It’s in the back left corner of a plaza on the north side of Valley.

Order recommendations: Pork Pump - a huge thigh of pork just falling off the bone, with plenty of delicious pork fat. Sweet rolls - these come out hot and fresh from the oven, and are perfect for dipping with the pork pump. Shanghai-style dumplings - again, get the soft, steamed dumplings. Any veggie - balance out the pork pump with some vegetables.

There are a few of my favorites. Leave a comment if you visit a restaurant and try any of my recommendations!