Call me when I can drive to Disneyland from San Francisco with nothing more than 10 minutes to top off. Current and planned pure electric cars get maybe 200-250 miles on a charge, and take upwards of three hours to fully charge. Even super-powered chargers you might find at a filling station are planning 30 minute charges.

Hybrids or range extended vehicles which use a gas tank solve this problem, but for many of them (e.g. the Chevy Volt), you’re going to get 40 miles on the battery and 300 miles on the gas tank, which kind of defeats the point.

They’re great for the commuter who drives 15 or 20 miles round trip a day, and can plug in on either end of that commute, and I wouldn’t mind having a Tesla roadster (only $101,500!), but I don’t see the current crop of cars competing for my cash just yet.

Like many Malbecs, this wine has an inky darkness to it, a deep, deep purple on the edges, almost black as it pools, with a strong plummy or jammy taste. It is the perfect companion to many meals, including tonight’s, my first use of my new Big Green Egg.

I haven’t spoken of my Big Green Egg yet, as it’s only a couple of weeks old, and, other than a test-firing to make sure it “works”, I hadn’t used it before tonight. What is the Big Green Egg? In few words, it’s a ceramic outdoor griller and smoker, shaped, yes, like a big, green egg. I bought it for an absurd amount of money after a few friends swore how good it was. I’d been wanting to buy a new grill to replace my crappy $40 metal bowl, and I’m not a big fan of gas cooking.

(The Egg has a “following” that seems as “cultish” as that of Mac users. No surprise, then, that I’m drawn to it. I’ll have unboxing and set-up pix shortly.)

Tonight, as I pondered dinner, and despite the fact that I went to Forbes Grill Steakhouse on Saturday and I’m going to 5A5 next Saturday, I felt the need to fire up The Egg and sizzle some steak on it.

The economy has done some bad things to a lot of people, but one of the good things its done is made good steak cheap. How cheap? How about Prime grade New York and Ribeye steak for under $10 a pound? Thanks to Costco, I was able to stock up on three or four pounds of each, for less than the cost of one 12 oz. cut of each at a high-end steakhouse.

Tonight I fired up The Egg, and in 20 minutes it was at a roaring 600 degrees. Whew! I sprinkled a New York steak with some kosher salt and fresh ground pepper on both sides, and let it sit while The Egg came up to temperature. Then three minutes on each side with the flames caressing it, and then a couple of minutes “baking” with the fire dialed down, and it came out slightly north of “medium” on the edges.

The uncut steak shown here isn’t slathered with sauce; that color comes from The BGE, which produced a fantastic crust, while remaining moist and juicy. The steak was chewy without being leathery, and despite my initial fear that it had been overcooked and ruined, it was only slightly above temperature.

(Next time, I’ll limit it to two minutes on each side, and two minutes “baking”, so it’s pinker. I know, for a steak lover, I still don’t like it to far below medium. Better than a decade ago when I wasted a good cut at “well done”. Shudder.)

The 2008 Zolo Malbec was in fact the perfect companion to the New York steak. It neither overwhelmed it, as a Zinfandel might, nor succumbed to it, like a wonderfully subtle Pinot Noir might do.

In all, it was a enjoyable meal, and I’m looking forward to more pairings of Big Green Egg and my wine collection.

I’m not a big fan of Chardonnay, finding them generally bland and soft (aka “buttery”). This 2007 Mietz Cellars Chardonnay, however, is a more acidic style, which I find much more interesting, yet it remains an easy drink, making it perfect for an evening sitting on the couch with a loved one after a home-cooked meal of Spice Hound-infused turkey tacos.

Mietz is part of the Family Winery cooperative, and this bottle is part of the cooperative’s wine club I joined in January.

Beyond the strangeness of dreaming I’d been sent to jail, what was particularly strange was the amount of freedom the inmates seemed to have.

Several times, I left the jail to go home so I could find books, magazines, and other forms of entertainment that would prevent me from being bored during my incarceration.

It seemed I could leave during the day, as long as I was back in the evening, and I could do as I wanted in the cell.

I recall selecting books I had always wanted to read, along with books which were in tatters from decades of use.

One book that stood out was a handbook for amateur magicians, which I’ve owned since I was a teenager. I learned dozens of slight-of-hand and other tricks from that book. And after choosing that book and returning to jail, the next day when I walked out again, it was to bring back a deck of cards.

I have no idea what the dream means. I thought perhaps it represented my desire to live a life of leisure, free to read and learn.

I thought perhaps it represented freedom during the day and inflexibility at night.

No matter how I ponder this, I can’t come up with a good explanation.

(But I wouldn’t mind six months off….)

It’s kinda like sending you a “hey, check this out!” email or iChat message.

If the headline or description intrigues you, click on the headline to go to the original site. My goal is to get you curious enough to read or watch the links.

I hope you enjoy the new style. It’s an experiment in short-form, near-daily posting.

If you find stuff I might be interested in, you can bookmark it in Delicious.com and then tag it with “for:jasonian”. It’ll show up in my Delicious Inbox. Or send it to me the old fashioned way via email or iChat.

I’ll still have more personal, longer-form entries too. And I’m working on a way to hide the Clips for those who don’t care for them.

Finally, I turned off comments on the site. Too much spamming. If you want to comment on something I wrote, I encourage email or a response and link back at your own site. The “#” symbol is a perma-link to each entry.

They are, of course, working on an iPhone app. It will use the new “MapKit” feature in iPhone OS 3.0 to show 650 wineries along with your current location. Sure to be a boon to regulars and tourists alike.

[M]y Administration has identified a number of areas in which greater equality can be achieved under existing law by extending to the same-sex partners of Federal employees many of the same benefits already available to the spouses of heterosexual Federal employees.

The President also comes out against the atrocious Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA):

Unfortunately, my Administration is not authorized by existing Federal law to provide same-sex couples with the full range of benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples. That’s why I stand by my long-standing commitment to work with Congress to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act. It’s discriminatory, it interferes with States’ rights, and it’s time we overturned it.

And he plans more equality:

I am also proud to announce my support for an important piece of legislation introduced in both Houses of Congress last month — the Domestic Partners Benefits and Obligations Act of 2009. This legislation will extend to the same-sex partners of Federal employees the same benefits already enjoyed by the opposite-sex spouses of Federal employees.

Small battles lead to big changes. Slow but steady wins the race.

Well, I don’t mind being wrong, if I’m legitimately wrong. It’s a learning opportunity.

So more accurately, I hate being told I’m wrong when I’m not.

It happened today, while I was killing time on Facebook. (Why was I killing time on Facebook? A very good question I have no answer to.)

Anyway, I took the “Famous Logos” quiz because someone in my circle had taken it. I figured I’d get all (or at least the vast majority) of them right.

Unfortunately, the author of the quiz neglected to do his or her homework. Question 3 of the quiz was this:

See the problem? The right answer isn’t there. I was forced to choose a wrong answer, which resulted in this:

(I chose Toyota, because the actual right answer, Lexus, is the luxury brand of Toyota.)

The logos are so different I’m not sure how they could be mistaken for each other:

I ended up with 10 out of 13 correct, or 77%, rather than 11 out of 13 correct, or 85%, making me a little more “wrong” than I actually am.

You didn’t see the illusion because you weren’t expecting one. You assumed I wasn’t fucking with your head and that this hallway is actually a normal hallway. Those assumptions work great until you walk into a wall.

The videos with the story are also great, bringing back memories of seeing them in Vegas several months ago. I’d definitely see them again.

Game-wise, the "full body" fighting looks great, the facial and voice recognition is very cool. Some of the zero-controller games and interactions (like the racecar example) look contrived. I don't think I'd want to sit there for ten minutes so I can play pit crew and change tires for five seconds, nor would I want to keep my hands in a driving position for an extended time. There's only so much "real life experience" I want while relaxing.

The Annals of Diagnostic Pathology is peer reviewed.

As it turns out, the exercises synonymous with strong, attractive abs may not be the best way to train your core—and may be doing damage to your back.

You have to watch what you eat:

If you want to burn your fat mass, make sure you have a combination of weight training and cardiovascular, but 90 percent of good abs is your nutrition.

And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn't have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (some might argue), was not more communism, but more public-spirited pigs.

The entire rejection letter is beautifully written.

(By-the-way, the edition I linked to above is from the Everyman’s Library, my favorite collection of hardcover classics.)

The Pre, which goes on sale Saturday, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it’s the iPhone remixed.

I'd consider it if I wasn't wedded to my iPhone.

A challenge in film is conveying how something feels, not how it exists in reality. Research trips can be a blessing and a curse: the blessing in that visiting an actual place surpasses what you can get from video and photos alone, the curse in being too much a slave to the actual place. Imagination and feeling should dictate everything, not reality.