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By Pete, November 25, 2009 11:52 am

Thanksgiving isn’t the same without some football… Here’s a little something to get you psyched up…

[Nike Pro Combat: Texas]

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By Pete, August 28, 2009 11:12 am

I’ve been on a tennis/mahjong binge lately. So that’s probably why the last post I did was on Alinea from my July 4th trip to Chicago and my series of posts on my Spain trip in May is still unfinished. I have decided to break my silence on my blog with the discovery of Gizmodo’s coverage of food tech this week when I’m catching up with my google reader.

Nick Kokonas, co-founder of Alinea, has been contributing to a new series of posts on Gizmodo (a tech blog) about technology and food called “taste test” (other notable contributors include Wylie Dufresne and Alton Brown). If you want to know about cutting edge technology in today’s kitchen, this is a pretty good series to catch up on. Meanwhile, check out this AMAZING video of Alinea…

Alinea/Crucial Detail – Tokyo Taste Intro from 2061wc on Vimeo.

If you want more, Chef Achatz is doing a live stream from the Alinea kitchen throughout the next few days, check out the link here.

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By Pete, June 9, 2009 1:33 pm

I’ve had June 10th circled on my calender for about a month now. On June 10th, 24 very accomplished chefs will compete on behalf of a charity on a new “Top Chef” spin off called “Top Chef: Masters“. It’ll be a brand new cast, new host (Sorry Kelly Choi, but no one can replace Padma), new judges, everything. There’re a few very well known chefs (some have also made Top Chef appearances) – Hubert Keller, Wylie Dufresne, Roy Yamaguchi, Rick Bayless, Rick Moonen, & John Besh just to name the few that I know off the top of my head. Here are a few things I’m looking for on the show:

1. Since they are all very well known chefs (at least amongst foodies), it’ll be interesting to see what the chefs can do without their supporting cast (sous chefs, pastry chefs, etc.) While I don’t think they’ll throw everyone in a knife skills competition right away, I think that those who aren’t in a restaurant everyday would have a significant disadvantage.
2. Some of these chefs are specialists in a particular type of cuisine, it’ll be interesting to see how they’ll handle the curve balls that TC like to throw at the contestants.
3. It’ll be interesting to see how some of these very successful chefs handle the criticisms of the judges. Generally, chefs (especially the highly successful ones) have a certain type of personality and for the most part, I don’t think they’ll handle the criticisms well (no matter how credible the judges are).
4. I feel that there’s a wider range as far as the age range of the contestants. It’ll be interesting to see how experience will play in and also how innovation (challenging/redefining old concepts) will play into the contest.

Top Chef Masters airs on Bravo at 10pm EST on Wednesday.

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By Pete, June 8, 2009 1:25 pm

“It’s not as much about the result, as it is about the journey.”

How true is that statement?? What a story that unfolded in France on Sunday!! For those of you who don’t follow tennis, history was made in a rainy afternoon in Paris. Roger Federer was crowned the 2009 French Open Champion while completing the career grand slam and, most importantly, won his record tying 14th career grand slam title. I never watched tennis growing up. In fact, it wasn’t until the Andy Roddick – Roger Federer match at the 2006 US Open that I started watching tennis (while I was waiting for a haircut). I was actually cheering for Roddick that day since I knew he was a fellow Austinite. But Federer was simply too good.

Fast forward a few years and I found myself riding along an emotional roller coaster that had him losing a heart-break at both the 2008 Wimbledon and the 2009 Australian Open to Nada, an up and coming tennis machine that is pretty much the human version of Pong. You can see from the first video (after the jump) that Federer wanted it bad – there was no question about it. And this is what made #14 so sweet (and #15 even sweeter if he redeems himself at Wimbledon against Nadal).

Continue reading 'From heartbreak to GOAT.'»

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By Pete, June 7, 2009 8:30 pm

Roger Federer - Champion of 2009 French Open

Congratulations Roger Federer for winning the 2009 French Open, completing the career slam, and winning your record tying 14th career grand slam!!! This one hasn’t come easy, enjoy it and get ready to capture #15 at Wimbledon!!!

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By Pete, March 17, 2009 5:52 pm

…for now at least…

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By Pete, February 22, 2009 12:26 am

Don’t know if you caught what many dubbed to be the “rant of the year” on CNBC earlier this week, but here’s my 2 cents:

First, in order to have an opinion of the solution, we must first try to understand the problem. Here’s a good, general visual explanation of how we got to where we are today (found via The Big Picture).

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but in my opinion, this whole thing got out of hand with leveraging, so the problem now is how to sustain a flow of credit while during a deleveraging period. My problem with the Obama/Geithner plan are many:

1. The lack of details. A few weeks ago, Obama build Geithner up during his national address and set the expectation that Geithner would have details to the plan the next day… Except Geithner didn’t get the memo and pretty much came out and said, “We have a great plan, and you will see this great plan as soon as my magic wand arrives.”

2. What the hell does “through no fault of their own” mean?? The plan keeps saying that we (the taxpayer) will be helping people who’re in danger of losing their house “through no fault of their own”, I don’t understand that that means. Did someone force them to borrow that amount of money?? Did they misread the amount of money they were borrowing?? Or does it mean that it wasn’t their fault that the market price of their house is going through major correction and it doesn’t make sense to continue their payment?? Assuming it’s the latter, then…

3. The quick fix for this problem is NOT the way to fix this. I am not sure how the government plan on doing this (see #1), but by forcing a new mortgage (or adjusting the mortgage, depending on which side you’re looking at this from) between the homeowner and the lender is just another of keeping the price of housing artificially high (I might be using the term artificial loosely here, but I really believe that the housing market still has some room on the down side to move towards). I’m not sure why I, as a taxpayer who is not a homeowner, would want to use my money to subsidize someone else’s mortgage when it could be going to other things like schools & healthcare; Especially when, according to the free market, these people can no longer afford to stay in their house. So essentially the only thing we are doing is keeping status quo on the barrier towards homeownership. Maybe we should call our housing market the world’s biggest and most notorious ponzi scheme.

4. On behalf of the individual taxpayer, this is a horrible investment. Let’s say that all of this stuff works, and x years down the road, we’re well recovered and housing is rising healthily. I don’t see any mention of any provisions that would give the taxpayer ANY returns if the homeowner who took the help end up selling their property for a profit. So we’re forking them money now in return for nothing?? And these are the people who were irresponsible by getting themselves into a mortgage that they cannot afford?? And now we’re subsidizing them to live in a house that they cannot afford??

5. Our children will end up paying for this, mightily. There will come a point in time where the “full taxing power of the United States” government won’t mean anything to the countries we’re borrowing an ass load of money from. While (I know how bad this sounds) we should be glad that they also bought a lot of this “toxic assets” and that they’re also in the deep end of the pool like we are (right now at least). We are pretty much selling our children so that we can continue down this path.

6. We still don’t have any means of pricing these assets. If free market is not going to be determining the price of these assets, there needs to be some way for us, as taxpayers, to protect ourselves from sending free money to people.

While I might sound a little bit like the pessimistic jerk who is sitting in the back rejecting all the ideas. I do acknowledge that, at this point, something has got to be done. And whatever that something is, we will be passing or delaying a lot of the burden to the future. I just hope that we won’t be giving away too many free lunches.