If you don't know how to make a fried egg sandwich, you're an idiot

You may not know what a UPF is. I'll tell you.

Supposedly, one in seven adults (14%) are addicted to UPFs, which means ultra processed food. You can probably guess what type of food that is, but I'll tell you anyway. It's the usual suspects. Soda, ice cream and basically all the stuff you're not supposed to eat regularly.

Is this 14% figure an America thing only? No. It's a global thing.

What I would love to know is how many of those UPF addicts actually know how to make a fried egg sandwich, as that is the second most basic thing you could make in the kitchen. I'll tell you what #1 is in a moment.

A fried egg sandwich in its most basic form is this: Toast two pieces of bread. Toss a pat of butter in a pan. Do your pans suck? Get a new set. Turn on a stove burner and put the pan there so the butter melts. Once butter is melted, crack an egg into the pan. Cook until firm. Put the cooked egg on one piece of toast. Take the other piece and put that on top. DONE.

Yeah, you can get more fancy with a fried egg sandwich, but that's the basic version. Anybody who doesn't know how to do that is an idiot because that's seriously basic kitchen skills.

The absolute most basic thing I know of to make in the kitchen where you actually have to cook something is boiled potatoes. Wash potato. Cut potato. Put potato in boiling water for 10 minutes. Drain. Eat.

Any one of those UPF addict fools can do that - and don't tell me they couldn't, because they ALL know how to make macaroni and cheese from a box. If you can boil crap pasta, you can boil a potato.

My guess - and I'm certain I'm right on this one - is that those UPF addicts don't know how to cook a damned thing using real food. Zero kitchen skills. They never learned, nor do they want to. And no, a microwave pizza doesn't count as cooking. In fact, none of that frozen crap you "cook" in a microwave counts.

That article says more research needs to be done into the problem of people eating nothing but garbage, and that UPFs should have more clear labeling.

Oh, great job, genius. Slap a label on there. That'll work.

It won't.

How do I know? It's already been tried and nobody pays attention to them. Ever see those cautionary labels on soda vending machines? You know, the whole "Balance what you eat, drink & do" thing? That's a good example. You've probably seen them. Does anybody care? Nope.

You could go full stop and slap a big ol' label on a chocolate bar wrapper that said outright "THIS IS REALLY BAD FOR YOU, DO NOT EAT IT", and people would still ignore it and eat the chocolate bar anyway.

Labels won't fix anything, but kitchen skills would.

Boil a potato. Make a fried egg sandwich (if you want to go fancy, add ham, cheese and garlic powder for "Italian" tasting bread). Steam some vegetables. Fry up a chicken breast. Make your own salads.

And for any idiot that says, "But.. but what will I eat when I'm on the go and not in the kitchen?" Oh, please. Just stop at a 7-Eleven and grab a packet of plain nuts. That's infinitely better than some fast filth slop burger. Grab a bottle of water there while you're at it. Or just pour yourself a hot coffee (not the premixed crap). You don't need the damned soda.

It's not hard to get off the filth, people. Truly, it isn't.

I stopped driving on the highway

It's not for the reasons you think.

My definition of highway is any road with a posted speed limit of greater than 50 miles per hour. Yes, there are plenty of non-highway roads with posted speed limits greater than that, but to me, I consider driving over 50mph anywhere to be traveling at a highway speed.

I do live in the land of crazy drivers. This is said of many areas, but mine in particular is notably bad. The drivers are actually not the reason I stopped driving on the highway. I'll get to the actual reason in a moment.

A fact of anywhere that has bad drivers is that in order to stay safer, you must do the "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" thing. Some people label this as driving defensively. It's not. What it does means is that you must do as traffic does else you increase the risk of an accident happening. For example, if everybody is speeding along on the highway at 80mph, you must also do that. If you don't, you're the slow guy that everybody is trying to get around, causing people to weave all over the place. You are the problem in a situation like that.

So if it's not the drivers that got me off the highway, what was it?

Debris.

A whole lot of construction just began around my local area, and that means trucks. Dump trucks, gravel trucks, haulers, loaders and so on. These big vehicles get on the highway and spray rocks all over the place.

My little car has taken a real pounding over the years from all the debris that's smacked into it from highway driving. Oh yes, there are scratches, dents and paint chips. I had become used to this, but when the construction started, the debris got even worse.

It was time to get off the highway for a while, so I did. I set my Garmin DriveSmart 66 to avoid highways completely (very easy to do), and I've avoided highways for over a month now.

The photo above is an example of the types of roads I've encountered. These are the type where big trucks can't go, which is what I wanted.

I grew up in the northeast, and a big part of the driving experience there are backroads. Small, narrow roads with twists, turns, roll-offs on either side (no guard rails here, just trees), almost always in need of repair, and you legitimately put yourself in danger if you travel over 35mph on one. Why? Blind corners, and a lot of them.

Backroads scare people, but not me. Obviously, not all roads are like this, but since I stopped traveling on highways for now, I'm encountering more of them.

The single biggest advantage I have by using no-highway routes is time, as in time to react. The likelihood of my car getting hit by debris from a big truck is diminished significantly when using roads with a posted speed limit of 50mph or lower.

Surprising things I've learned about no-highway routes

This stuff is really eye-opening.

More often than not, only 5 minutes is added to the trip

I recently went on a 13 mile (each way) trip that has several different ways to get there but I'll concentrate on just 3. The 3 are highway, major roads and backroads.

The backroads way - and it is all backroads - while certainly the slowest, only adds about 4 minutes each way.

The backroads route feels like a ton of time is being added to the trip when driving it. Nope. An extra 4 minutes each way is not a big deal at all.

For trips over 20 miles each way, that is when a significant amount of time is added on. But generally speaking, if the trip is fewer than 20 miles each way, I'm not seeing more than 5 minutes added on each way at worst.

Not having to deal with highway ramps is nice

Both highway entrance and exit ramps really beat the crap out of a car. I have to put my foot into it when on the entrance ramp, and do a lot of braking when on the exit ramp.

Since I don't deal with those, I now accelerate and decelerate slower. My car doesn't get beat up as much.

It's easier to get places

This is the one that surprised me most of all.

The highway is supposed to be the easiest way to get anywhere.

It isn't.

The complicated crap happens at the end of the exit ramp. When I exit the highway, I'm on that ramp and get shoved in with a whole bunch of other cars all going to the same general area. The traffic that happens there basically negates any advantage the travel speed of the highway had.

I've already had a few instances where I putt-putt by where everybody is stopped at the end of an exit ramp. Several lanes jammed, each with 10 to 25 cars or more. And when the light goes green for them, it's a certainty not all of them will make it. This means whoever is at the back of the pack will have to wait through two red lights.

I don't deal with that because I'm not on that ramp, and that feels good.

Will I keep using no-highway routes?

In the month I've been doing this, yeah it's working out well. I avoid the big trucks, there's less wear and tear on my car, and only a few minutes is added for most trips I make.

For the time being, I'll continue driving this way. At bare minimum, I'm staying off the highway until all the construction on or near it is completed.

Right to repair going in right direction.. somewhat

We're getting there but not quite where we want to be just yet.

What is right to repair? The ability to repair something you bought using readily available parts.

I'll give an example of repairable vs. unrepairable.

Repairable: Garmin DriveSmart 66. I can take out the screws from the back of that device, take it apart and repair whatever I need to. Replace the battery, replace the main board, replace the screen, microphone, whatever. All of the internals are accessible and parts are available.

Unrepairable: Most smartphones and tablets. The battery is sealed and the device is usually designed in a way where it's very difficult to get in there. And even if you could get in there, getting parts is either not easy or outright not possible at all.

Google has bucked this trend by stating they will stock spare parts for seven years for the Pixel 8 phone. That's good. Very good.

Two drawbacks to this. First, the Pixel 8 right now isn't cheap, but that's not too much of a big deal since prices will fall since tech always does that. Second, how repair-friendly is the Pixel 8? Nobody knows that right now since it hasn't been out in the wild enough just yet.

What this says about the state of tech in general

Basically put, this 7-year commitment for parts availability by Google says, "It's okay to coast for a while."

At this stage of the game, there are two obvious things going on. "Faster" isn't a selling point anymore, and consumers just want tech that works and stays working without having to re-buy it over and over again.

Regardless of how speedy a CPU is in a phone, what ultimately slows it down isn't the hardware but rather the network it's on. Yeah, you could have a phone with the fastest processor on the planet, but that doesn't do anything to improve upload and download speeds. That being true, it makes more sense to improve software technologies rather than hardware...

...except when it comes to the battery. I'll get back to that in a moment.

Where software is concerned, this phrase should be in every developer team's office: "NO BLOAT". Get that code to be as small and minimal as possible. Make it tiny. Do the same for network transfers, because since the network itself is the choke point, get those uploads/downloads to be super small.

And the reason I say right to repair is going in right direction somewhat is because I'm a firm believer in the following:

Every single thing considered to be a portable computer should have a user replaceable battery.

The only thing anybody cares about when a phone gets older is the ability to replace the battery. We used to be able to do that, but then that was taken away in favor of non-replaceable sealed batteries. Why? "Thin" styling and the very weak reasoning that it improves resistance to water damage...

...but the actual reason is that when the battery dies, it forces people to buy a new phone since they can't replace it.

A commitment to parts availability is great and that is a step in the right direction. But what really needs to happen is BRING BACK THE ABILITY FOR THE USER TO REPLACE THE BATTERY.

Changing the battery in a phone should be DOABLE and EASY. In the past, all you needed to do was crack off the back cover, old battery out, new battery in, DONE. That's what needs to happen again.

From a design standpoint, designers hate the idea of a user replaceable battery because it adds thickness to a phone handset. To that I say that everybody is already thickening up their phones with things like Otterbox cases and phone grips anyway, so the whole idea of thin design is just stupid to begin with. All that ever did was make the handset more fragile.

To really make things right, so to speak, bring back the user replaceable battery across the board. Yes, you can buy a cheap BLU View 2 prepaid phone which does have a replaceable battery, but that handset is considered to be an outlier. User replaceable batteries should be the standard across all handsets.

How I keep weight off

It's one thing to lose weight as there are methods for that. Keeping it off is a different story.

Back in '16 I lost a bunch of weight. Wrote a book about it and everything. I may have to write a followup book to answer the question of "What happens after you're done losing the weight? What then?"

It would take a book's length to answer that, but what I can say right here right now is that an integral part of keeping the weight off is a food journal.

My food journal is nothing more than a pen and top ruled memo pad. I like top ruled because it feels better flipping a sheet up to go to the next one instead of to the side.

What do I track on the food journal? One thing and one thing only. Calories consumed per day. On the left side is what I ate or drank. On the far right is how many calories total at that moment, and the column just to the left of that is where I do a little addition math. I was using a cheap desk calculator for a while but I found it's just faster to do the math by hand. At the very top left I write the date I'm tracking.

Why not use an app?

This adds in totally unnecessary complications to something that should be dirt simple.

Yes, there are several calorie tracker apps out there, and they all work. But the process of a) getting my phone, b) launching the app, c) entering in a username and password, d) looking up the food or drink I consumed and e) adding that to the journal takes WAY LONGER than just grabbing a pen and writing it down.

Does this mean I have to read labels so I know what calories are in what? Yes, but at this point I've memorized the calorie counts for all the regular foods I eat so I don't have to read labels or look up anything online.

Do I need to periodically use a food journal to maintain a certain weight?

Yes.

It's almost too easy to gain weight just by not paying attention.

I never put back on all the weight I lost (that would literally mean I'd have to gain over 50 pounds), but there have been times my jeans have felt tight, I get on the scale and uh-oh, 10 pounds heavier...

...and that's when I break out the pen and pad and restrict to 1,200 Calories or fewer per day until those 10 pounds are gone.

Every Calorie is accounted for, including any sugar (which is 4 Calories per gram) be it added sugar to the food item or sugar I add in myself, such as for sweetening coffee.

I don't restrict what I eat, but do restrict total daily Calorie intake. This method along with a few other things I do works for me.

Again, I may write another book on this because yeah, the "aftercare" matters once the weight is off. A lot.

Does a car compass actually work?

This is something I wanted to know, so I bought one.

Short answer:

Yes, it works, conditionally.

What are the conditions? That's the long answer.

Long answer:

Car compasses are cheap. They come in many shapes and sizes, and yes they are different from a trail compass (Cammenga is the best brand for trail and field use) because a car compass is a ball that sits in liquid while a trail compass is flat.

The only place in a car a ball compass can be mounted where it will actually work is in the center of the windshield. Why? That's the only mounting place furthest away from metal so the magnet in the compass can work.

If you were to mount a compass to the side, the magnet is going to attract to the window frame and it won't read properly. Mount it high or low on the glass and you get the same problem.

It also doesn't help there are several US states that say it's illegal to mount anything to the windshield at all.

I have seen one and only one compass that hangs down from the rear view mirror, which you can see here. Does that actually work? It should, but I don't know how accurate that would be since you get close to the center of the windshield but not exact center.

Is that hanging compass legal in all 50 states? No, because some states have laws written saying you can't have anything hanging off the rear view mirror. While I seriously doubt a cop would pull over somebody for that, yeah, your state may be one of those nothing-dangling-from-the-mirror places. You'll have to check your local laws for that one.

The other option is to use a compass on some kind of bean bag mount (one for a phone would probably work because of the grips) and then place it in the center of the dashboard. No, it won't reach the center of the windshield, but your compass should be mostly accurate.

Why bother with a car compass?

If your car navigation system decides to have an "off day" or just outright fails, at bare minimum you should at least know what cardinal direction you're driving. This is especially true if you're in unfamiliar territory.

The magnetic poles of the planet never have an off day. They always work.