Over the Edge

April is always tough, between taxes, Passover, Holy Week, and the hangover and cleanup from the same. We now resume our regular posting.

If you come into this page directly, please let me suggest that you click on the "Dan Rosenbaum Home" link. The Web site that contains this Weblog has undergone significant renovations. You may find them interesting.

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I'm migrating away from the increasingly abandoned Radio Userland toward the better-supported Movable Type. Getting content from the old blog to the new one is going to be a little bit of a process, I'm afraid.

Until I get everything straightened out here, you can still see my historical content at the old Over the Edge site. Update: Move completed. Everything over there is now over here, and clicks to the old site will be redirected here. The root URL -- www.danrosenbaum.com -- remains active and links to this blog.

Sorry for the extra clicks. I'll get it cleared up (and make this place look a little more lived-in) as soon as I climb the learning curve here.

All the posts from my old Radio blog at www.danrosenbaum.com have, by some miracle, made it here intact. Thanks go to Bill Kearney's script. But, dude, would it have killed you to include some end-user instructions like "Step 1: Face the computer and put your hands on the keyboard"?

Next step is to pretty up the environment -- hang some pictures on the wall, put up the curtains, hook up the stereo, move the furniture around. Things like that.

If you're looking for something to read in the meantime, take a look at that Newspapers and the Net link over there by the "Recent Posts" link down on the right. It got kind of buried in the transition.

Leaving aside the fact that the idea of "one-day potty training" is, well, so much ca-ca, this clip from Good Morning America illustrates just how sexist people are being about Katie Couric taking over the CBS Evening News.

If Charles Gibson, who himself just ascended to the anchor chair at ABC, gets off scot-free for this piece, no one can reasonbly complain about Couric's gravitas.

Cute kid, though. And you've gotta love the crew's reaction at the end.

When I was writing the FierceVoIP newsletter, I met the founders of GrandCentral. I'd been looking for a service like this for decades: a single phone number that could find me anywhere. That founders Vincent Paquet and Craig Walker are genuinely nice guys with a social conscience was icing on the cake.

Rumors had been flying for about a week, but the companies announced today that Google bought GrandCentral. Congrats to Craig and Vincent; it's nice to see good work pay off.

But why did Google want GrandCentral, anyway?

Google's stated goal is to organize the world's information. Its ability to do that with textual information worries me not at all, and its ability to do that with mapping and video doesn't really bother me, either. I'm a little bugged that I've given Google permission to follow me around the Web, but I can rationalize that by telling myself that it will help Google help me search.

But GrandCentral, used to its fullest, can associate me with phone numbers I call, phone numbers (and -- when they're in the GC phone book -- people and addresses) who call me. GrandCentral stores voicemails; doesn't Google do voice-to-text transcription, too? And when I pick up an incoming GrandCentral call, Google can then tell where I am at that very moment.

Total Information Awareness, indeed.

Consider that when a company or governmental entity (or, for that matter, a matrimonial lawyer) wants dirt on someone, the first thing they try to do is pull phone records. Phone records are incredibly revealing.

GrandCentral is a great service that can revolutionize the way you use your phone. But Google's owning it just kind of creeps me out. Maybe some things are better left unorganized.

People in and around mid-Atlantic states and Southeast. apparently know all about the Five Guys hamburger chain. But unlike the storied west coast In-n-Out restaurants that its fans fetishize, I've never picked up much buzz about Five Guys, though lord knows I've gone out of my way for an In-n-Out double-double. The chain just opened its second New York store, at 138 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights (there's apparently another in College Point, Queens -- who knew?); it won't stay a secret up here for long. It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to call Five Guys the East Coast In-n-Out.

It tough to judge a restaurant's operation in its first week. When I checked it out earlier today, there about five times as many workers as were strictly necessary to serve customers. Because of all the training -- and some of the trainees looked like they'd never seen a kitchen before -- food was a little slow coming out. (At least, it had better have been slower than usual; tomorrow's July 4 and there'll be about a quarter million people walking past the place's front door.) But when the food arrived, it proved to be well worth the wait.

First, the fries. Freshly cut, skinny, skin-on, fried in peanut oil. There was about 1000 pound of fresh potatoes, packed in 50 pound bags, stacked in the dining room. The burger patties are thin, about four inches in diameter; the standard burger is a double stack. Also fresh; they claim to not use frozen meat, and it tastes it. There's no "secret sauce," the way there is at In-n-Out, but there's a full range of condiments as well as A-1 and hot sauce. No condiment bar; they prepare the burgers to spec.

There will probably be some traffic flow problems at this particular store. You order at the front (two registers) and pick up at the back, where the place narrows. That's where the drinks fountain is, too, so there will almost certainly be a lot of pushing as people wait for their food and then fill their soda cups, then have to push their way back to the front of the place. There are 16 seats at tables and about the same number at counters along the front window and east wall.

Five Guys is up nine steps from the street. It's worth the climb. The place is across the street from Grand Canyon, a neighborhood hamburger-based diner that's been there since 1983. I love Grand Canyon and all things being equal, I'd rather support neighborhood businesses. But Five Guys is awfully good stuff, and my days at Grand Canyon may be numbered.

If you're not in Brooklyn or Queens, take heart: the web site says they're coming to Levittown on Long Island soon, and are already in the Albany area in Niskayuna and Glenmont, with Rensselaer coming.

Over in the swamps of Jersey, they renamed what was once the Brendan Byrne Arena and was then the Continental Airlines Arena after Izod, the popular leisureware of the 70s and 80s. (The news angle is that someone's suggesting that the building will be more valuable, not less, when there are no pesky tenants left.

But look at the photo. All the place needs now is one of those little crocodiles that adorned the Izod shirts, and the look will be perfect. (I'd even forgo the pink or green color. So not Jersey.)

And yes, I know that the croc was because of the long-standing and now-ended licensing deal with Henri Lacoste, the tennis player. Gimme a break.