Quest for the Best: Nong's Hunan Express

All epic journeys start with but a single step. Starting today I vow to find the greatest General Tso's chicken in Columbus. I will not falter, I will not fail. I will be judging the dish on many facets, which are listed below. Without much more further ado whatsoever, I present to you the first installment!

Restaurant: Nong's Hunan Express
Location: 1634 Northwest Blvd & King Avenue
Call: (614) 486-6630


Chicken: Off-taste for chicken, like more dark meat than usual? Not sure, just tastes a little strange. Not very much of it either, which I suppose isn't such a bad thing since it's not that great.

Veggies: Carrots, Broccoli, Mushrooms, Cabbage, Water Chestnuts, Snow Peas. Ample and crisp!

Sauce: Thick, darker than some other Chinese places, appropriate level of spiciness.

Rice: Fried rice, no add-ins, small traces of egg. Standard fare.

Spiciness: Right on target. Not too spicy, not too mild. Made my nose water just a tiny amount. Perfect.

Amount of Food: Rice was more than sufficient, in fact I threw some away. As I said, there was a bit of a shortage of chicken (only got about 4 pieces) but the meal as a whole filled me up. Good amount of veggies.

Price: $6.95

Overall: 4/10 - On a General Tso's chicken dish, it's all about the chicken. While I couldn't complain about the veggies, rice, or sauce, the chicken was both odd tasting and minimal. And for $6.95 at lunch, that's not going to cut it.

Cookie: A little thicker than most fortune cookies I've had, and much more flavor. THIS is what a fortune cookie is supposed to be! Brand: Fortella Co, Inc. (Chicago, IL)
Fortune: You will live long and enjoy life.

American Family Insurance is greedy

Latin Fest is this weekend. I'd like to say a few things about it.

- I'm fairly certain the webpage was designed by the Bubble Yum corporation. Honestly, who goes with teal, pink, and bright yellow?

- The picture of the boy on the front page is a ridiculously bad photoshop. No, I don't have to tell by the pixels. Maybe it's a joke by the webmaster?

- $1 tickets on Friday? Awesome! Pure win! I pay $1, I walk around, browse vendors, eat some sweet food, hear some music, take in some culture. Vendors get paid, I get entertained, it's win-win.

- $30 tickets on Saturday? Epic fail! Wait, I get to hear two bands I've never heard of! Sweet! Well maybe they are famous in the Spanish community!

- Lucero Terrazas - first act of two on Saturday. In theory, she's half the show, so she should be worth about 1/2 of the second act (if I know anything about how concerts work, which I obviously do). So say 10 bucks to see her? Lets see what google knows about her... expecting wikipedia page... dont see it... links to her stop at about page five. Must not be that great. Did they just get a spanish girl to make this pose? That's not gonna trick me at all. Anyone can make that pose. Look, I'm doing it right now.

- Who doesn't have their own wikipedia page?! Look, even I've got one. Seriously, this chick is just some stripper they found down at Columbus gold who could sing Feliz Cumpleanos and maybe do a sweet booty shake. It's not that hard to make it in show business with a little T&A.

- Los Huracanes del Norte - Hey hey, this looks a little more respectable. Google knows about em, wikipedia knows about em. But are they 30 dollars good? Eh, not to the average person at Latino Fest. I mean, there's a large population of latinos in Columbus, but how many of them are willing to drop 30 bucks for these guys? It's not like Christina or J-Lo or even Ricky Martin (she bang! she bang!)

- The group members of Los Huracanes is pretty stacked. Check it out:

* Heraclio "Rocky" Garcia
* Jesus "Chuy" Garcia
* Guadalupe "Lupillo" Garcia
* Francisco "Pancho" Garcia
* Antonio H. "El Guero" Garcia
* Jose Luis "El Chapete" Mejia
* Rocky Jr.

Rocky Jr?! Tell me thats just not the most awesome thing you've ever heard. I imagine a midget running around punching people with his maracas left and right. I hope I'm right. I am a little sad though that Jesus Garcia doesn't have a nickname involving tap dancing though. Those spanish people will never learn.

Will I go to Latin Fest? I'd say it's a solid maybe, depending on whether or not I can get some people to join me. $1 margaritas to go along with my $1 admission? Hopefully. See you there!

She bang!

Sometime I could use help in setting up my PC so that when in Outlook and I go to see Deleted e-mails & then want to return to the deleted email again, I end up at the Inbox. Same thing happens when go to Send.

Thx
(redacted)

I work as a systems specialist. Which is a fancy way of saying I do tech support for a building at Ohio State. The above is an email that we recently received asking for... something. I don't get it. I still have to acknowledge it. So, I'll head up there and slap them silly soon enough but in the meantime...



WHAT THE FUCK!
/facepalm

PC LOAD LETTER? WTF is that?!

Today's random wikipedia page: Paper size

I've always wondered what the difference between A4 and Letter sized paper is. Well, not always. But a good portion of my morning was spent wondering. At least the last couple of minutes. As it turns out, a "letter" sized paper is actually just slightly shorter than an A4, but it's very close. However, the printer knows. Oh yes, the printer is well aware of your attempts to feed it A4 sized paper when it expects Letter. This is the premise of the message PC LOAD LETTER.

The problem with PC LOAD LETTER is that each word can be misconstrued. The actual meanings?

PC = Paper Cassette
LOAD = Place the paper in the paper cassette
LETTER = Letter sized paper please, not A4!

See, it's so simple now. Remember, check your paper size and you won't have to sing Die MF Die MF Die in an empty field.

Solving the heart rate mystery

Happy belated Valentine's Day everyone! Hope you got to spend it with that special someone!

Last two days at the gym:

Wednesday
1 mile on treadmill
20 min on elliptical
20 min on bike
2 x Fish Game! on rowing machine (about 1600 meters, 10 min)

Thursday
30 min elliptical
30 min bike

So, I don't know about your gym's machines but at the gym I go to, each machine has a little heart rate chart on it. On the left side of the chart is a set of values that correlate age and optimal heart rate for "fat burning". On the right side of the chart is a set of values that correlate age and optimal heart rate for "cardio". The reason I'm going to the gym is to "get healthier" and more specifically to lose this damn gut! So, while the "cardio" side of the chart seems intriguing and is useful, I should probably be more interested in the "fat burning" side of the chart.

Well for my age, it says that I should be at a heart rate around 130-140 for fat burning and 150-160 for cardio. At this point I usually tilt my head to the side and give a hearty "Whaaaa?". See, when my heart rate is at 130-140 I'm barely even moving in my opinion. My breathing is only slightly heavier and I definitely don't even break a sweat. At 150-160 I'm starting to "feel it" and start heavier breathing and sweating, which to me feels like I'm doing an actual workout. So where's the discrepancy?

After reading multiple websites about heart rates and the many heart rate "zones" I feel like I finally understand the low rate. It turns out that at the lower heart rates your body burns a higher percentage of fat and a lower percentage of carbohydrates (sugars). The actual number varies widely from site to site, but that's the general consensus. A couple of examples with made up numbers:

In your "fat burning zone" you burn 100 calories. Lets say 50 of these are from carbohydrates (immediate energy source) and 50 come from fat (stored energy).

In your "cardio zone" you burn that same 100 calories. Let's say 70 of these are from carbohdrates and 30 are from fat.

So you can see the "fat burning zone" is more efficient at burning fat. However, the point to note is that while the fat burning zone is more efficient, you will generally burn total calories much slower than in a "cardio zone". Take this example from this website:

So, let's say you're exercising at a fairly low intensity that burns, oh, 100 calories in a half-hour. Let's say that 70 percent of those calories come from fat. Your neighbor, however, is working out much harder, outside the magical "fat burning" zone: She's burning up, say 300 calories in that same half hour, but only 50 percent of those calories are from fat. Now do the math. You're burning a higher percentage of fat, but 70 percent of your 100 calories equals 70 fat calories burned. Your neighbor, on the other hand, is burning a lower percentage of fat, but she has burned up 50 percent of 300 calories, or 150 fat calories, more than twice what you've burned in the same period of time!

So you can see thats it really a personal preference. It makes sense that they balance out. Work long and easy and burn fat. Or work short and hard and burn fat. Either way, it goes back to my original mantra which was -- "as long as you are getting your heart rate up, you're doing well!". It's just a matter of how high you go and what your time schedule and preference is. In any case, I am glad to have that mystery solved!

Sources: (1 2 3 4 5 6)