Cafe Rio Sweet Pork Barbacoa

If you're familiar with Cafe Rio, you know their sweet pork barbacoa and how good it tastes mixed up in a salad or tacos or burrito or whatever. Our closest Cafe Rio is over 100 miles away, so we usually have to fake the experience by mixing up our own pork and rice and dressing using copycat recipes from the internet.

There are exactly 1 million copycat recipes for the Cafe Rio pork out there. I've read through them all and tasted many of them, and found them all... lacking. Most of them involve a crock pot, but leave the meat sitting in a puddle of flavored water at the end. That's water that will either not come out with your meat, leaving the flavor in the pot, or will come out with your meat, ruining your salad or tacos or burrito or whatever by making it too soggy and drippy. Actual Cafe Rio pork is not sitting in a puddle of water, but has a drippy glaze, loose enough to flavor the other things it's touching, but thick enough to not run around where it's not wanted.

There are a few recipes that attempt to remedy this consistency issue by throwing away all the liquid that's produced in the cooking process and making a new sauce to add to the pork after it's been shredded. That's on the right track, but that liquid you're throwing away has all this great flavor you'd be losing. It's a waste to then make a sauce out of some of the same ingredients that went into the stuff you just threw away. On top of that, the cooking liquid has, like, pork stuff in it. Rendered collagen or something. I'm not actually sure what's coming out of the pork and into the liquid, but it's essentially turned the liquid into pork broth with all this umami and stuff in it, especially so if your pork roast had a bone in it when you started. That porky flavor is super important to the final product.

So, I add the additional step of turning the cooking liquid into my sauce, then reducing it (boiling it for a while until a lot of the water evaporates) until I get the more syrupy/glazey sort of consistency I'm looking for. That's the big revolutionary step that makes this recipe better than the others.

On top of that, I've played with the ingredients somewhat. Most recipes use Coke, which is great for southern cooking, but doesn't seem as good here. Coke braised things seem a little dry and acidic tasting to me, so I didn't think it was the right choice here. I used root beer instead because the flavor comes from, like, herbs or something. I also used Dr Pepper. I think someone told me once that Cafe Rio makes their pork with Dr Pepper. Or, maybe Dr Pepper reminds me of my Uncle Rex, and he spent lots of time in New Mexico, and Cafe Rio's food shares something with the specific style of Mexican cooking from that area so it seemed appropriate. Regardless of my lack of care and thinking that went into the choice of these sodas, the flavor profile was still far preferable to any of the copycat recipes made from Coke.

I made this recipe for a dinner party tonight, and it appeared to be unanimously loved. The guests I talked to all agreed that it was definitely closer in consistency to the actual Cafe Rio pork than anything else we'd tried. And while we didn't have any actual Cafe Rio pork to compare against, we thought it was at least closer to the taste we remembered than the other things we've tried.

So, I'm not going to say this is an exact copycat recipe, since memory is a fickle thing. If put to a direct taste test, I might find that it's actually much further in taste. Even if that were true, this recipe still makes some really great tasting pork, so it's what I'm sticking with from here on out.


Cafe Rio Pork Barbacoa

Ingredients:
2 lb pork shoulder roast (If the roast is bigger, scale the other ingredients appropriately)
1 cup Dr. Pepper®
1 cup root beer
1/4 tsp garlic salt
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp chili powder

10 oz can mild red enchilada sauce (I used Old El Paso™ brand)
4 oz can diced green chilies
1/2 cup brown sugar

Directions:
Put the pork in the Crock Pot® with the sodas and the spices. Cook on low for 6-8 hours until the the pork is ready to shred easily.

When the pork is done, drain all the liquid into a wide skillet or saucepan. Add the enchilada sauce and green chilies and boil on high heat until mixture is reduced by at least half. Stir it at least occasionally so that nothing burns to the bottom. I give it a quick buzz with the immersion blender while it’s in the pan to make everything all smooth, but it’s also okay to leave it chunky.

While the sauce is reducing, shred the pork, return it to the Crock Pot®, and keep the Crock Pot® set to low to keep it warm. When sauce has finished reducing to a thicker, more syrupy consistency, stir in the brown sugar and boil for 1-2 minutes until fully dissolved. Stir the sauce into the meat in the Crock Pot® and cook for 2 hours on low or 1 hour on high until everything’s nice and hot and tasty and juicy.

Free Pringles

Becki encountered this exact situation just today. Luckily, I had already prepared this flowchart to help us figure out what to do.

Piecaken

from http://www.roadfood.com/Forums/PIECAKEN-m680883.aspx:

Will I be attempting this someday? If you have to ask, you apparently don't know me very well...

More Cleaning

I used to collect Kool-Aid fairly seriously (as seriously as someone can collect Kool-Aid, I suppose). I had amassed a sizable collection of discontinued flavors, mostly from the mid-90s, but with a few dating back before that. I had about 150 packets, representing about 35 different flavors. The oldest piece in my collection is from 1970 or 1971. It's a pack of grape Kool-Aid presweetened with cyclamate, an artificial sweetener that excelled in every possible way except for the way of not giving you cancer and killing you.

Post marriage, kids, and house, I just don't have it in me anymore to collect much of anything, so this has been stashed away for the last ten years. I just dug it up yesterday and I think I've found it a good home. There's no real market for this stuff on ebay anymore, and I can't find quite so many collectors on the internet as I used to. I did find one guy who looks like he's serious enough to appreciate my collection, so I emailed him and told him I'd send my whole stash to him at my expense. He seemed quite excited, but honestly, I think I'm more excited to have found a good home for this. The alternatives would be for me to keep it forever, drink it, or trash it, none of which made me happy.

Cleaning

I don't normally keep mementos like this around anymore. I found this while cleaning out a box of old stuff tonight, and it saddened me that both Elliott Smith and DV8 have died (by self-inflicted stabbing and fire respectively). The only reason that Grandaddy has been spared a horrific death is that they didn't show up that night. We had Teddy Thompson instead (if I remember correctly).

Camper Van Beethoven

My favorite band (Camper Van Beethoven) playing my favorite album (Key Lime Pie) in its entirety. Live right now in Scottsdale.

Aaron's Famous Shrimp Boil

The last couple of times we had the whole family at the beach, I made a good old fashioned shrimp boil. It's basically a giant pot of boiling seasoned water with potatoes, corn, sausage, onions, clams, and shrimp. When done, you just dump it out onto an outside table covered with freezer paper, and everyone gathers round to eat it up with their fingers. It's really the embodiment of my three favorite qualities in a meal: huge quantity, tastes delicious, and little cleanup (you just wrap the remainders up in your table covering and throw it away).

On this last trip, I heard it referred to as "Aaron's Famous Shrimp Boil" (see Danniey's blog), which is hilarious because I've made it a whopping 2 times, for basically the same crowd each time. Still, I did take copious notes both times about the ingredients and quantities and cooking times. So, even though I've only done it twice, I feel that I have at least 10 normal peoples' shrimp boils' worth of experience.

Given this wealth of accumulated skill, I feel it's only right to share this proficiency with you, dear reader, and so I present for you here my accumulated knowledge on the subject of Shrimp Boil.

Shrimp Boil

Servings: makes enough to serve 12 very hungry adults (this quantity will fill the turkey fryer near to the brim, so don't increase any one ingredient without making a corresponding decrease somewhere else.)

Ingredients:

2 bags shrimp boil seasoning (Zatarain's)

1/4 cup to 1/3 cup salt

1-3 heads of garlic

1-2 lemons (quartered)

4 lbs small red potatoes (cut in half. If you don't cut them, they'll roll off the table when you dump out the boil)

3 med. sweet onions (no need to peel; cut most of the way through the onion into quarters, but leave connected at the root end)

3 lbs sausage links (spicy but not too spicy - kielbasa's okay; Farmer John Louisiana Style Smoked Sausage was well liked; Bar S Hot Links were not; anything called red hots are probably too much)

16-20 frozen mini ears of corn

10 lbs clams (rinse the shells)

7-8 lbs shrimp (either shell on or deveined but with shells still on)

Instructions:

Fill turkey fryer with water about 2/3 full (at least 3 holes on the strainer basket still showing above the water line) (Keep a pitcher of hot water on hand in case you underestimated the water and have to add more. It's easier to add more water than to have too much water and have to bail it out at the end). Bring to a boil, then throw in the salt and seasoning bags. Cut the garlic half longitudinally and throw that in. Slow boil for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, squeeze lemon juice into pot, and throw the remains of the lemons in. Put in the onions and potatoes. When you put in the onions and potatoes, check your watch, because every five minutes after you put in the potatoes you'll add another ingredient in this order:

• sausage

• corn

• clams

• shrimp

Keep everything at a low boil, but crank up the heat right before adding each new ingredient so that it'll return to a boil quickly. After throwing the shrimp in, cook just until shrimp are pink and cooked through (2-5 minutes).

Pull out strainer basket, then dump on paper covered table. Serve with squeeze butter and cocktail sauce. Also, remember to get your drinks before you start eating because your hands will be too messy to go back and get them later.

A white Christmas. I'm dreaming of it.

In most of Arizona, you can't count on nature to really do anything that you'd consider festive for the winter, like, say, snowing. Or getting below 70°. Any festive atmosphere is entirely artificial, brought on through decorations.

I can't be arsed to hang lights outside even on a good year, much less when the house is still under construction, so our house normally doesn't radiate the Christmas spirit out to the neighborhood. But, it got this coat of white primer yesterday, and I'm kind of surprised how much I like it as a seasonal thing. I wish I could have told the painters to just leave it and come back in January to finish the job. (I'm trying to tell them to come back a couple of Januarys later to pick up their check.)



I remarked to the foreign students we host at our house that our house looks like it's all decorated for Christmas, and one of them, the not so great at English one, later asked Becki if we repaint the house to decorate for winter every winter, or just this one.

The Pixies, and theories thereon

The Pixies and their doppelgängers (from left: The bald one, the fat bald one, the other bald one, the fat one that's a woman)

There are a handful of albums that I feel like I know so well that I know every single note of music on the album; that if you dropped me into the album at any point, I could hear exactly what comes next before the sound even came out. Albums I've heard so many times as a whole album straight through that the album in its entirety becomes an indelible mark on my brain. The Pixies' Doolittle is one of those albums.

Joey had a copy my freshman year at BYU, and we had to have played that whole thing from beginning to end at least 200 times. There were some nights where I feel like I heard that album five times in a row. (That album and Camper Van Beethoven's Key Lime Pie were the two albums I think I heard the most that year. In fact, you could probably take this entire blog post and replace "the Pixies" with "Camper Van Beethoven" and replace Doolittle with Key Lime Pie and still have it be about as accurate). Even after I no longer lived with Joey, it took me a long time before I finally broke down and bought my own copy of Doolittle since I didn't think I really needed to. I knew every note already.

So, I was already familiar with the Pixies before that year, but that album really made me into a big fan. Alas, as was the case with so many of the bands I liked, the Pixies broke up (in a very big way) before I could ever see them play live. This was sad, but eventually I got over it and learned to accept it. Then, in 2004, the unthinkable happened. The Pixies reunited for a handful of shows, then a full fledged tour. There was a time in my life when I would have been driving cross country if necessary to see one of those shows, but being married with kids has kind of made that kind of thing a lot less likely. So, since the Pixies were never playing anywhere close, I would just find bootlegs on the internet and live vicariously through other people's concert experiences.

Luckily, instead of breaking up again, the Pixies have continued to tour off and on. This year, they were coming to Mesa Amphitheatre (only a 90 minute drive), coming on a Friday (meaning it's a lot easier to find a sitter for the kids because I can just leave them overnight with someone), and coming right after Becki's birthday (meaning I can justify the expense as a birthday present and throw in a hotel room to make it a romantic weekend getaway). To make it even that much better, this is their Doolittle tour, where to celebrate that album, they play the entire album straight through from beginning to end, throw in the B-sides, then finish with a couple of other hits.

So, of course it was a fantastic show. As were walking out of the amphitheater, I was wondering if this was better or worse than it would have been had I seen the band 20 years ago. Since I hadn't seen them then, I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty convinced that this show would have been better, and I'll tell you why:

The band looked genuinely happy to be playing together.
I'm sure that since tensions ran high in the band for quite a while in the old days that it would have shown in their playing somewhat. Just a guess on my part, but it seems easier for older band members to overlook the little things that would have bothered younger musicians. Also, when you spend a long time without something that you really liked, and you get it back, you tend to not let little things threaten to take it away again.

The band looked genuinely appreciative of the audience.
Same as above. None of these guys really played to audiences like this in their other interim projects, and even during the heyday of the Pixies they struggled to muster up these kinds of crowds. They're clearly making more money playing to more people than they ever did when they were active before, but they went without that for long enough that they're obviously very happy that we all showed up to make that happen.

The audience was very obviously thankful that this opportunity even exists. Seriously, probably 95% of the people at that show didn't have the chance to see the Pixies in the old days either because of circumstances or because they hadn't become fans yet or hadn't been born yet. So, we all got a second chance and are respectful to the band at the concert to show them that.

40 year olds are generally much better behaved at concerts than 20 year olds. There are some drunk people at every show that try to ruin it for everyone, but the drunk jerk contingent was proportionally less well represented at this show. Same with the pushing shoving people. All else being equal, I like going to shows with people who know that their enjoyment of the concert needs to not somehow prevent other people's enjoyment. (There's one weird difference in favor of the kids though: When I went to concerts as a kid, they were just constant clouds of smoke. You'd come home smelling like an ashtray, and that's just the way it was. You accepted that as the cost of seeing live music. With indoor smoking bans, it's been a long time since I've been to a show with any smoke at all. This show was outdoors, and it was just as smoky as any of the worst smoke filled venues I've ever been at. I've been to other outdoor shows with hardly any smoking, though, and the only difference I can see is the age of the crowd. These people tonight are the same people who were smoking at the shows 20 years ago, and they just haven't quit. Outdoor shows with a young audience don't have smoke, probably because the kids there never started smoking. There's a valuable lesson and some good news in there somewhere.)

The band is tighter and are generally better musicians than before.
After the band broke up, all the members played a lot of music with a lot of different people in a lot of styles. They all practiced up some, and that reflects in their playing.

I get to not drive straight home.
The band doesn't get credit for this. It's just nice that I'm old enough that I can afford to stay in the hotel right next to the amphitheater so that I can just walk over to the show and walk right back instead of having to deal with waiting an hour to get out of the parking lot and drive a couple more hours home.


So, while I'm on the subject of theories, there's probably a whole other blog post to be made out of trying to formulate a theory that would explain why I only see old bands. Maybe because I like the older crowds? Maybe because I just can't get into the new music as much? Maybe because these kids won't get off my lawn? I don't know, but off the top of my head, here are all the shows I've seen in the last ten years (I'm sure I'm missing a few, though, and these are definitely not in order):

Badly Drawn Boy (twice)
Elliott Smith
Peter Murphy
Weezer (where I was clearly the oldest person there)
Cake
The Samples
Cracker (four times)
El Vez (twice)
Spinal Tap
Joe Jackson
Ben Folds
Robyn Hitchcock (once solo, once with the Venus Three, and where both times I was the clearly the youngest person there)
INXS
No Doubt
Fishbone
Café Tacuba
Nitzer Ebb
Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players
Gogol Bordello
American Music Club
Camper Van Beethoven
They Might Be Giants

Badly Drawn Boy was right after the first LP, and again after the second. The Trachtenburgs and Gogol Bordello had been playing maybe 5 years by the time I saw them. Café Tacuba had been around a while but hadn't yet peaked (and possibly still haven't). Elliott Smith had released his last album and was playing one of his very last good shows when we saw him (Election Day 2000). Ben Folds is a weird one, because this was after Ben Folds Five, but before any solo record came out. I'm still leaning towards the solo career being a demotion from the band career, so I'm going to mark him as being on the downslide. Everybody else on this list was at least 10 years into their career, and on a definite downward trend career wise. This isn't a judgement on them. Some of them, like the Pixies, were playing their best shows, or releasing their best work. They just had long since peaked popularity-wise.

So, I only mention that because I can't figure out whether this is a problem or what the problem might be if there is one. I've got tickets to see Robyn Hitchcock again tomorrow. But he plays Tucson so often I feel like he's local and no longer counts in my list. I saw that School of Seven Bells is coming next month. I bought both of their albums, and really dig them (think Cocteau Twins with some of the shimmery guitar replaced with beats), so I might try venturing out to see a new act for a change. Other than that, you'll probably find me down at the state fair or at the casino watching whatever thirty year old band is playing over there.

Google Voice gives up

Today, I got a wrong number call to my Google Voice number, and the message that was left was entirely in Spanish. So, what transcription does Google Voice give when it can't manage to figure out a single word of your message?

(Actual unretouched screenshot)

iPad, Part 3

As prophesied in my previous writings on the subject of iPad, my Dad purchased an iPad over the weekend. He's absolutely tickled that he's got a "computer" that's all his and that he can actually use.

He coined an absolutely brilliant term for the device. He calls it his flaptop, originally as a portmanteau of faux + laptop, but also because the Apple case has a little folding flap on it for to cover the screen.



Parenthetical aside: As far as I can tell with a 2 second Google search, he's the first to use that word (at least in this context), so I'm memorializing the event here on the interwebs for all succeeding generations to see.

We are sorry for inconvinience.

Internet Explorer crashed on my work computer today, displaying the following error message:


(The actual text, for Google purposes: "Internet Explorer raised unhandled exception in third party module and should be closed. We are sorry for inconvinience.")

The lack of articles and the misspelling made me think it's some browser hijack cleverly disguised as an error dialog. However, any anti-virus or anti-malware program I can find to run doesn't throw up any flags. Googling for the specific text doesn't give any hard info, but does show up instances of this message dating back to 2004!

This was in IE 8 on XP today, so either this is in some little-touched section of the IE code that hasn't been updated in forever (less likely), or it's thrown by some library that's used by toolbars or plugins (slightly more likely), or it's actually from XP, and never got updated in any of the 3 1/2 service packs and 45,000 other miscellaneous updates rolled out for that beast (most likely). Either way, text like this isn't supposed to make it out in a release, much less persist through many versions over many years.

Happy Mother's Day

Every Mother's Day, our ward, like probably every ward in the US, puts together a little gift/treat thing to pass out to all the mothers (or any woman of apparent child-birthing age). This year, I got tasked with deciding what to do for the mothers and putting it all together. I'm not sure exactly how that happened, and I'm really confused as to why I was chosen for this responsibility.

I'm sort of a non-believer in Mother's Day (and all greeting card holidays for that matter). It's not that I don't think mothers deserve respect. Quite the contrary. Mothers are awesome. I'm just more of the view that every day should be Mother's Day. We should reward mothers every day of the year, and if we're not, one day in May is not enough to make up for it. So, I'm not exactly your first choice to be in charge of the Mother's Day celebrationing.

So, I thought and thought, and got a few ideas, and eventually found some chocolate covered almonds at Costco that were a great deal. I put them together with some Jordan almonds from Target, then Becki and I wrapped little piles of almonds in sheets of cellophane, tying them with ribbon.


Then, to give it a little more of a gospel focus, I thought of printing little quotes on motherhood and tying them to the bags. Michelle had suggested Sister Beck's conference talk this year, and I remember liking that one a lot. So, I went back through it and found the perfect quote for the compulsory Mother's Day treat distribution.


So, remember that old Shel Silverstein poem where if you hate to do the dishes and you drop one on the floor, maybe they won't ask you to do the dishes anymore? Think this might work?

An Evil Twin?

My beloved wife Becki, during tonight's Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies:

"I can't decide who I can stand less, but I think I can stand Sarah MacLachlan more than that red haired lady who sings 'Adia'. Who's that lady, again?"

(In the meantime I kept yelling at the TV every time they introduced another musical act that wasn't Rush.)

More iPad

This started as a comment in reply to Scott's comment on the last post. I began to ramble on (as is typical for me), and after a while, it just seemed too long for a comment so I put it up here.

People have often asked me, "I'm getting a new computer; what should I buy?" Problem is, the people that really can make use of a computer usually already know what they want. So, the people who are coming to me for advice are people who can't really explain what they even want a computer for or what their needs might be. For most of those people, I flippantly reply "WebTV", "Typewriter", or in some cases, "Etch A Sketch". The only genuine component to my reply is that they should just buy a computer from whomever has the best phone support, meaning whoever's going to take their phone calls when they can't figure out where all these new toolbars came from or why the computer that they over-specced to somehow be "future-proof" is now running so slow. I sure as heck ain't taking those calls.

Whenever anybody like that asks me about a computer again, I will completely absolutely seriously reply "iPad" from now on. 99% of the people in that situation would be best served by an iPad. It's not an issue of something else being more than they need. It's more an issue of something else being a downright hostile user experience for them.

This kind of thing would be perfect for my mother. Or my mother-in-law. Or my sister-in-law who just spent large amounts of money on a laptop but literally only does 2 things with it: MySpace and watching Robert Pattinson movies. Or my aunt. Or my uncle. You get the idea.

I think specifically of my Dad who I don't really trust with a TV remote, let alone a computer. He accidentally erases the contacts on his phone every other week because he can't find the one number that he knows he saved somewhere but accidentally got saved to "SIM Card" instead of "Internal Mem". He got an iPod touch for Christmas and he loves it. More importantly, he uses it. He can figure out how to make it work and how to do things with it. It's downright amazing. He could totally use an iPad and be a web surfing emailing internet using fool.

The more I think of it, the more I think that Apple is not trying to shoehorn a device between the computer and the phone. I really think that they are out to replace the personal computer entirely for a huge segment of the market. And, more power to them. I've long thought that the computer was the wrong tool to choose for millions of people, but there really wasn't another tool that they could choose instead for their particular needs. This is the first real alternate choice there.

iPad

A few people have asked what I think of the iPad, so I figure I might as well write it down here. The answer is "I don't know." I'd have to actually have one in my hand to form a real opinion. If it's anything like the iPhone (and it obviously is), then reading about it is a far different experience than actually picking one up and putting your fingers on it. Therefore, it would be foolish for me to really come up with a concrete opinion without some actual hands on time.

That said, I can answer a few more specific questions, like "Do you think you're going to get one?", and "Do you think it will be a hit?"

I'm attempting to be a more provident provider right now, so the answer to any question asking me if I'm going to spend money on anything is a reflexive "no". However, if I had extra money lying around and was debating whether to buy this or something else it might still be a hard purchase to justify.

On paper, it doesn't seem like I'd really need it. I use my iPhone for many things, and my MacBook for everything else. There is almost nothing that I do that couldn't be done by one of those devices yet could be done by an iPad. Still, the iPad could be more useful at some of the things those other devices do, like surfing the internet on the toilet, for example (there's about 1 hour of my week right there).

An iPad would actually be really useful in church (I'm the executive secretary). I've got 2-3 meetings each Sunday, and I have a big padfolio plus my iPhone to manage it all. I'd honestly really rather do everything electronically, but my laptop would be a poor choice for that. It's too bulky, and I can't use it in the hall or in priesthood or anything. An iPad with nothing more than the built in apps, Pages, and the iPhone church apps that I already have would really already be perfect in my church workflow. If someone makes an iPad-specific app that's more useful for what I do at church, even better. I would feel a little self conscious using it for reading in priesthood or something, but there are already 5 guys in the elder's quorum who use their iPod touches or phones for scriptures, so I'd get over that quickly.

I said that there's almost nothing that couldn't be done by one of my other devices that could be done by an iPad. There's one thing I can think of that neither my laptop or phone could do that the iPad would be perfect for: sheet music. I've got a ton of sheet music, yet my collection is puny compared to others (I've got maybe 3 cubic feet worth. I know people who have rooms of their house dedicated). Still, I can never find what I want because there's no rhyme or reason to the way I've got everything thrown in a cupboard. On top of that, half of what I have is photocopies, so without going through each page individually, there's no way of telling what's what. Imagine an app for displaying sheet music that could also catalog and manage scanned music, import the various electronic score formats, give all the expected options for the electronic formats like transposing and audio playback, and couple that app with an online sheet music store with a wide selection. That would be a dream come true for me to be able to sit down at any instrument anywhere and pull up any music I own, or buy/find what I don't. If someone put together the right combination of app and store, I'd be digging through the couch cushions starting today for the money to buy one of these things the second they're available.

Yes, there already exist electronic solutions for this, but they suck. Hard. The MusicPad is $900, is single purpose, and is too big to really carry around idly. The software is also terrible. There's another package that attempts to replicate the MusicPad's functionality for Windows on any Tablet PC. That's a slightly better value, since you can get more use out of a Windows computer, but almost every Tablet PC would still be too big and heavy and poor in battery life. There's the other problem that the program's designed like a Windows program. What works with a mouse and keyboard doesn't work the same with a stylus and certainly not with a finger. That's the big hangup when you try to take an existing solution and just put it in a new context.

What Apple does is different. Rather than use the existing solution, they really rethink the problem instead. They usually do that in such a way that their solution is unrecognizable and unfamiliar. But, if you try what they came up with, you'll often find that they really have come up with a better way. Does that mean I think this thing will be a huge hit? I have no idea. It's hard for me to come up with a list of reasons why anyone would need one, much less me. But, I would not want to bet against Apple on this one. If they're entering a market, you can be sure that they've really done their homework and they have every reason to think that they'll succeed. If they're attempting to create a whole new market, a market that many others have attempted to define and failed, they must really have some reason to believe that they've cracked it, that they've figured out what's been missing from all these other attempts.

If it was any other company, I'd laugh at them and wait for them to fall flat on their face. But, it's Apple, and they've pulled this off twice before with the iPod and iPhone. So, if you don't want one and can't understand why anyone else would want one, that's fine. But don't think that means that no one will buy it, since Apple clearly knows better than you or I about what people want.

(Further evidence that Apple knows what it's doing: the Apple stock I added to my IRA back in 1996 is up over 3800% since I bought it. Sure would have been nice if I had the foresight to buy more than 5 shares, though...)

He has the power...

Blinged-Out Cabbage

Just seconds ago, I got in an order for only my second ever Bag of Crap. There's no possible way it can be as good as last time, but I am still beside myself with excitement.

Two Words: Rodrigo y Gabriela

I'd like to now call your attention to Rodrigo y Gabriela, a Mexican flamenco metal duo. I had heard the name mentioned a couple of times, and probably even heard a song or two. But, it totally didn't register with me until I saw a video clip as part of a NPR podcast I keep up with.

I guess if I had heard the songs before, they must not have triggered anything because I assumed they were ten people or something. No. All this is made by two people and two nylon string guitars, and once my brain had visual confirmation of that, it attempted to process that information and then exploded. Seriously, I haven't gone out to buy the CD or anything because I don't think I could take any more than 10 minutes straight without my mind being completely blown. Were they to come to my town to play a concert, I would love to go to see this in person. But, I would most likely go to the show, watch the performance for ten minutes, then excuse myself to the restroom to sob uncontrollably about how pathetic I am and how cruel fate forbids that I could ever possibly hope to do anything this cool ever.

Seriously, watch this clip of "Buster Voodoo" from Craig Ferguson the other night and see if there's any way your pathetic human brain can even hope to withstand the sheer awesomeness. If you're still breathing after that, download the NPR podcast clip and see what that does to you.



http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113641457

Toyota Customer Service Rant

I'm pretty upset with Toyota right now. I've had a bad experience with their "Customer Experience Center" that I wish to share with the world.

I've got a 2006 Prius that I bought new in April of 2006. My passenger side headlight started winking out about 10,000 miles ago. I would be driving and notice that I had no headlight on the right side. What's weird is that turning the lights off then back on again quickly would solve the problem for a few weeks until it happened again. My car's got the fancy HID lights which have a bunch of supporting electronics, so I assumed that a transient problem like that was an electrical issue and not a blown bulb or anything.

I did a little research to figure out what the repair might be, and found that this is apparently a widespread problem affecting Priuses (Prii?) of that vintage, spawning an NHTSA investigation and at least two class action lawsuits. It appears to be a failure in the capsule (bulb) itself or possibly a mismatch between the capsule and the ECU. Evidently, the capsule requires a certain voltage range, and the high end of the range of voltage that the ECU is putting out doesn't overlap much with the low end of the range required by the capsule. If the ECU doesn't put out enough voltage to keep the metal in the capsule vaporized, the light shuts off. Restriking the lights gives them a boost of electricity and starts them going again.

Here's the thing: Just because it's the capsule (the HID equivalent of a bulb) doesn't mean I can just pop down to AutoZone to pick up a replacement. The replacement capsule costs $150-450, and the installation has to be done by a mechanic because the bumper has to come off.

Because it's such a widespread defect, many Prius owners have reported being able to call the Toyota Customer Experience Center (i.e. Toyota Corporate) to get the repair cost covered even out of warranty. I've got an extended warranty on mine, so I figured I'd be covered by that.

I finally got the problem to happen during the day so I could show the dealer. Without even lifting the hood, they said they've seen a lot of these, the capsule needed to be replaced, it's $250 per headlight to replace, and not covered under the extended warranty. I called the Customer Experience Center (800-331-4331) the next day and told them about it. I was called back a day or two later by a rep who said without batting an eye that Toyota would be able to help me and would take care of it, but the only catch is that I would need to go back to the dealer and have it fixed and Toyota would reimburse me. I asked specifically about the possibility of it being something more than the capsule (like it being the ECU), and she said that the dealership would need to do a diagnostic to determine what parts would be at fault, but that Toyota would reimburse me that cost as well.

(Normally, if someone says "yeah, just go spend some money and I'll reimburse you later", I'd be pretty skeptical, and demand something in writing. In this case however, I had heard all the stories elsewhere about Toyota Customer Experience Center making good, and thought there was no reason not to trust them. Turns out that was a mistake...)

A couple of weeks later, I took the car in to the dealer, and told them I needed the headlight fixed, but that they needed to do a diagnostic first to make sure it was just the capsule. They did the diagnostic, but waived their usual diagnostic fee, then replaced the capsule at a parts cost of ~$160 and labor of only $55, for around $217 including tax. That's way better than some of the prices I've seen quoted around the internet.

I faxed all of the documentation back to the number they gave me, and two days later I got a message on my phone saying they had reviewed the case and determined that they had good news: they could assist me by paying the parts cost and leaving the $55 labor for me to pay. That's not what I felt like I had been told initially, so I called back to talk to the case manager. That's when things started getting really surreal.

First, I had to wait on hold 15 minutes for someone to answer the phone. When they finally answered, they offered to transfer me to the case manager, but I somehow got disconnected at the time of the transfer. So, I call back, wait another 15 minutes, and finally get to the case manager, over 30 minutes after I first started trying to call.

I started to tell the case manager that I felt like I had been told something differently at the start, and that's when I found out I wasn't even talking to the same person I had initially. Apparently, the first case manager I had talked to was someone filling in for my real case manager, and I was only just now talking to my real case manager for the first time.

I had a list of about 6 reasons why I thought Toyota should cover the full cost. I was fully prepared to have a calm reasonable conversation about each point and to chalk up the $55 to my stupidity for not insisting on something in writing if they didn't agree with my points. However, a calm reasoned discussion wasn't even remotely possible. I started to try to explain each part of my position, but this person instead on cutting me off halfway through every sentence to say what the Toyota position was and why they weren't going to change. I did a fair bit of interrupting myself, but only because I thought I had been cut off and was trying to finish my point. I absolutely cannot stand when someone won't let me finish my sentence. To me, it's the worst kind of insult that you can give to someone you're talking to and shows that you honestly don't care at all about what they have to say.

I finally broke down and begged please, just let me finish my sentence because it's making me way more upset than I was when I placed the call. After that she did make a couple of attempts to ask if I was done before responding, and I was able to go through all of my points:

• I think Toyota told me something different when I first called, and based on what they said, I had the expectation that the repair would be covered.


• This was a really good deal at this dealer, and if I had gone to another dealer with a higher parts cost or been charged the diagnostic fee, Toyota would have been reimbursing a lot more than what they're offering here, so quibbling over the remaining $55 seems cheap.


• Even at $55, that's way more than I've ever had to pay to replace any other headlight in any other vehicle I've ever owned so it seems slightly unreasonable.


• The HID option was a very expensive option and is sold partially on the idea that the lights would last many times longer than a conventional headlight. If I knew beforehand that I would have to replace the headlights more often than a conventional headlight at a cost many times greater, I would have been a lot more reluctant to get this option. Based on how this option is sold and how the technology works on other vehicles, I would expect a life of much greater than 69,000 miles for the capsules.


• I paid a huge chunk of money to buy the Toyota Platinum Care Extended Warranty so that I would specifically not have any repair costs in the first 100,000 miles. The factory warranty covers replacement of the capsules in the first 36,000 miles, and the extended warranty is sold as covering everything the factory warranty does. Turns out the extended warranty specifically excludes "bulbs", and they use this exclusion to not cover the headlight capsule replacement. I can totally understand them not including bulbs, they same way I wouldn't expect them to cover brake pads or tires or other wear items. I would never expect the extended warranty to replace a burned out taillight, for example. However, we're not talking about a "bulb" in the regular sense here. We're talking about a capsule of glass filled with gas and vaporized metal and electrodes to energize the whole process. The cost alone makes it clear we're not talking about a regular bulb. Also, the fact that it can't be replaced without removing the bumper makes it clear that we're not talking about your garden variety taillight bulb here.


• From the reports on the internet and with the NHTSA, it's apparent that there are a large number of similar failures indicating a model wide defect. It's clear that this is below Toyota's standards. It's clear that Toyota is aware of the problem. Therefore, Toyota should be the one who would want to make it right.

I got some good answers to some of these points as well as some silly answers. The extended warranty argument was countered by passing the buck and saying that they're a different division of the company, and she couldn't speak for them. That's understandable, but the car, the dealer, and the warranty all say Toyota, and when I have a problem involving all three, I still don't know who to call. If this corporate Customer Experience Center isn't it, then what is?

My expectation of the HID life and the value of purchasing the option isn't valid, because they don't specifically warranty an expectation. Fair enough. If it was just me, I would accept that. But, other cars don't have this problem. And, when it's happening to a lot of people and Toyota knows that but doesn't fix it, and it's a problem only the dealer can fix, it starts to look like Toyota cares more about padding the dealer service departments than it does in keeping the customer happy.

The cost options didn't sway the case manager at all, because she explained that the reason Toyota's asking me to pay the labor is not because Toyota can't afford the total cost but because they want me to share in the cost of the repair. That want to make sure that I pay something. Even though they would have to pay extra for the diagnostic and pay $350 for the part somewhere else, they'd still have me share the cost of a repair that's half what it would cost elsewhere. It was explained that this was because it was so far out of warranty that they felt it was fair that I contribute some amount toward the cost myself. I countered with the fact that as far as I'm concerned it's still in warranty, and I would expect to foot all of the cost if it was my fault or if it wasn't in warranty, but both of those arguments led back into the other arguments again, which kept going around in circles. This led directly into another round of cutting me off before I could say anything.

I tried to go back to my first point, which was that the first rep told me something different. I wanted to see if I could talk to first rep to figure out why they would have said something different. That's when the case manager accused me of changing my story.

She said that I never said the first rep said anything at all and that I was just assuming they would take care of it, and that I said I just had an expectation that they would take care of it. I said that I had said nothing of the sort; that I had said the first rep specifically said "We'll take of it" and that's why I would have had the expectation that they would, in fact, take care of it. I said the most likely situation is that the case manager didn't hear anything I even said about the first rep initially because she was too busy interrupting me. The case manager said we should "just be honest" and that she "didn't appreciate" what I was doing by changing my story. Basically, stopping just short of calling me a liar. It's weird, because she wasn't accusing me of lying about what the first rep said. That would have been normal because of course nothing the first rep said was documented. No, this crazy person was accusing me of lying about what I previously had said the first rep said, like she was so proud that she was able to take down my whole argument by catching me in a lie or something.

I told her how upset this was making me, and that it's not helping anything when a customer calls in already upset about one problem and you do something to make them upset about something else. She said "I'm sorry you're having personal problems". That just floored me. "What do you mean, personal problems?", I stammered. She said, "You just said you were already upset about something else." I told her, yes, I was upset about having to pay to fix my car. That was the something else, and now, I'm more upset about the way this conversation went and that this person is completely incapable of communicating with someone else in a respectful way.

So, lessons to be learned here: First, don't believe anything anybody at Toyota tells you until you get it in writing. I suspended my normal skepticism about such things becuase the first rep was so accommodating, and I was so trusting of Toyota. Second, while some have been getting satisfaction by going through the Customer Experience Center, whether you're satisifed with your experience clearly depends on who your case manager is. Lesson for Toyota: There's a way to say no and yet still be respectful toward your customers, avoiding pissing them off even further.

As for me, I started the call bummed that I was going to be stuck with $55, but willing to accept it if necessary. I ended the call about 100 times more upset than I was at the start. I hope the check for reimbursement for the part still comes, because at this point I'm skeptical of whether or not that's even going to happen and whether this person just put the brakes on that.

Now I'm 100 times more determined to get reimbursement for the $55 than I was at the start of the call and intend to explore whatever other avenue I can find to seek reimbursement.

I still love my car. I'm not in the market for a new car right now, so I don't know if it would dissuade me from getting another Toyota. I can tell you that I no longer have any faith that the "Customer Experience Center" actually cares about customer service. I would definitely think twice about getting another Prius with the HID option, but it turns out I don't have to think about that at all. In a seeming acknowledgment of their HID problem, the 2010 Prius has removed the option for HID headlights.