Ah, the glorious hamburger. A staple of American cuisine. For a product so simple, it’s amazing how different two places can make a hamburger taste. My standard burger is a double cheeseburger, with bacon, ketchup, and pickles. All of the burgers ranked below will be based on that combo, unless otherwise noted.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve visited quite a few “renowned” hamburger locations, so I feel like I am now well-qualified to rank American hamburgers. My friend Matt has really broadened my horizons and taken me to places that I probably would not have visited otherwise, mainly due to location. Hopefully over the coming years I can check out additional places.

My rankings, in descending order:

5. Shake Shack — New York City. I had some high hopes for this place. Word on the street was that this place was legit. It was pretty good, but just didn’t live up to expectations. I would probably list In-n-Out with the same ranking. Too much hype, not enough substance to deliver. Of course, that won’t stop me from visiting both places.
4. Burger King. I know, seriously, Burger King? No joke, though. Of the “low-end” fast food chains, Burger King is my favorite. I look at McDonald’s as almost an imitation hamburger, at this point.
3. Spangles — Wichita. A local delight found in Kansas. I don’t know what it is about this burger that makes it so good, but it really hits the spot.
2. So Long Saloon — Manhattan, KS. Another local place, but it’s impossible to leave their burger off of any list. I literally feel bad for people who don’t live here and can’t experience this place. Plus the small, intimate atmosphere and typical long wait just seems to make the experience that much better. Their Saloon Burger comes with one patty.
1. Five Guys Burgers & Fries. No doubt about it, the best burger in the land. What is it about this burger? It’s not hard to explain… the burger is just damn good. Plus, I love how minimalistic the ordering process is. You pick the number of patties, you pick your toppings, they make the burger, end of story.

Honorable mention to some burgers that narrowly missed the cut: Wendy’s is not far off from Burger King in terms of fast food, a local place named Big D’s has a quality burger that upon first taste was quite high on my list but hasn’t held up as well upon repeat visits, and 8oz. Burger Bar in Los Angeles makes a fine burger. You really can’t go wrong with any of these.

Update June 27, 2010:

We are now through the group stages and halfway through the round of 16, so now is a good time to take a look at how my predictions are coming. First of all, France and Italy were terrible picks. How did I not see that coming? The Italians are so old that it should have been obvious that they wouldn’t make it to the quarterfinals. And France is terrible without Zinedine Zidane. That fact was proven in the 2002 World Cup as well as in Euro 2008.

However, those errors notwithstanding, I’m feeling pretty good about my Netherlands pick. I still think they can get past Brazil and go all the way to the final. Argentina and Germany are also looking strong. Looking forward to how it all plays out.

Update July 12, 2010:

Bummer, my pick didn’t quite work out, but at least I picked the Final matchup correctly. See you in Brazil in 2014!

Now that I have some data to refer to, I can start to make adjustments and set goals. The good news is that I had already started trying to drink diet soda whenever possible, but in practice I am not doing a great job at that. That will be one of my goals throughout the year.

After the first month, here is what the data for January said:

Geektool is definitely an application for advanced users. I’m not going to explain exactly how to use it. All I wanted to do was share the few scripts I’m using at the moment.

Stock Quotes

Displaying the stock quote for Apple, in the format of: Apple: 197.53 +7.66 (4.03%). I have this set to update every 1,800 seconds (30 minutes) since I don’t want to hit Google’s servers too often.

curl http://www.google.com/finance?q=AAPL | sed -n '/price-panel style/,/ Close/p' | sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/</N;//ba'| sed '/^$/d' | sed -e '$!N;s/\n/ /' -e '$!N;s/\n/ /' | head -1 | sed 's/^/Apple: /g'

Calendar

I wanted a calendar that would highlight the current date in a different color. This script will highlight the current date in yellow. If you want a color other than yellow, change the 33 value to a different ANSI value. I have this set to update every 86,400 seconds (1 day). You’ll also want to use a Fixed Width font so that the dates line up properly. I use Menlo.

cal=`cal`; today=`date "+%e"`; echo "${cal/${today}/\033[1;33m${today}\033[0m}";

Weather

Probably my favorite scripts. This fetches a small image from Yahoo! and displays it along with the current conditions and a forecast for tomorrow. I update the conditions every 3,600 seconds (6 minutes). I also added the degree symbol (°) in a couple of places to spiff it up. There are multiple scripts, just change 66502 to your zip code:

Current conditions

curl "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=66502&u=f" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|F<BR)' | sed -e 's/Current Conditions://' -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's/<\/b>//' -e 's/<BR \/>//' -e 's/<description>//' -e 's/<\/description>//' -e 's/\(.*\) F/\1°F/' | tail -n1

Forecast

curl "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=66502&u=f" | grep -e "Forecast:" -A 2 | tail -n 2 | sed -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<BR \/>//' | sed "s/\(.*\)\.\ \(.*\)/\1\?\2/" | tr "?" "\n" | sed "s/High\:\ \(.*\)\ Low\:\ \(.*\)/\?H\: \1°\  L\:\ \2°/" | sed "s/\?\(.*\)/\\1/"

Fetch the current condition image

curl --silent "http://weather.yahoo.com/united-states/kansas/manhattan-12786862/" | grep "forecast-icon" | sed "s/.*background\:url(\'\(.*\)\')\;\ _background.*/\1/" | xargs curl --silent -o /var/tmp/weather10.png\

Display the current condition image (use File instead of Shell)

file://localhost/var/tmp/weather10.png

• In August, I visited New York City for the first time. What an experience. It seemed like I walked 30 miles in four days, but I saw so much. From the Empire State Building to Wall Street to the Seinfeld restaurant, I felt like everywhere I turned there was a famous spot. Many photos were taken. Will definitely go back at some point. I must say that the compass/GPS combo on the iPhone 3GS was incredibly handy in a big city.
• In September, I was lucky enough to be able to see one of my favorite bands, Phoenix, live in Omaha, NE. They played an awesome set and were genuinely excited to be performing in an unfamiliar place. Note that Phoenix is from Paris, France and doesn’t see the Midwest of the United States very often.
• Halo 3: ODST came out and many hours of fun were had by all.

So I guess that’s about all that was noteworthy. For now, enjoy a video I shot of Phoenix performing “1901” with my chrome Flip MinoHD.

iPhone Upgrade

I upgraded from my original (read: badass) iPhone to the iPhone 3GS (formerly known as the 3G S). I’ve been using it less than a week, and my first impressions are:

• it is noticeably faster (duh)
• the compass fails frequently
• the voice control is decent
• the auto-focus on the camera is nice
• the video recording feature is better than I expected

I’m still unsure if it was worth the $200 upgrade cost, not to mention the $10.00 in extra data charges since my previous phone did not require a 3G plan, but time will tell. I ended up choosing the black finish. Now I just need to figure out what to do with my other iPhone.

Roger Federer wins career Grand Slam

No further commentary necessary. The guy is a tennis god. I’m not going to lie, I almost cried when he won at Roland Garros.

Cristiano Ronaldo says adios to Manchester United

Great news if you’re a Liverpool supporter, like me, since this guy has been terrorizing the Premier League the last few years. Maybe without Ronaldo and Tevez running riot, Liverpool can finally win the league.

Pennsylvania

I traveled to Pennsylvania to visit my good friend Matt who lives in State College, PA. We attended our final(?) nine inch nails show on June 10 in Burgettstown, PA (just outside of Pittsburgh). Matt gave me a decent tour of Pittsburgh, but I’d say we were both more interested in the concert than the sights of the Steel City. I was really excited that I got to attend my final show with him, since he and I both saw NIN for the first time in 2000 in Kansas City, then again in 2008 in Philadelphia. All three shows were great.

This Burgettstown show was only two weeks after my previous Kansas City show, but the two shows couldn’t have been more different. First, the venue in Kansas City was relatively small (~8,000 people) whereas this place held ~20,000 with the open lawn. Second, there was no pit in KC so it seemed very subdued. We had pit tickets for Burgettstown so it felt like your typical NIN concert. Lastly, the crowd in PA looked like they were there for a Willie Nelson show. No offense to the PA folk, but I saw some odd stuff when we were driving to the venue.

Since NIN encourages cameras for this tour, we decided we’d bring in some equipment to get some high quality video. You can check out my flickr photostream for an idea. I must say that the Flip minoHD is a great little camera. Good thing Matt brought two. As promised, here is one of our videos, and you can view the rest of our videos on YouTube. For your enjoyment, here is “Burn” in HD glory.

Since this is their (supposedly) last tour, I knew I needed to check them out at least once having seen them twice last year on the epic Lights in the Sky tour. Fortunately they came to Kansas City this time, only two hours away and since I’d seen them multiple times before I knew the secrets of scoring quality seats.

I don’t follow a lot of bands, but from what I can tell, NIN takes care of their fans better than anyone. Fans who sign up through their website (totally free) get access to tickets before anyone else, and the seats are always the best in the house. They limit these tickets to two per user, and print your name on the tickets which you must pick up the day of the show. I obviously have no data to back this up, but I would assume that the scalping of these tickets is almost non-existent. Other acts would be wise to follow NIN’s template.

Next week I’ll be heading up to Pittsburgh to visit one of my best friends and we’re planning on recording the entire show in HD since NIN encourages bringing cameras. Hopefully that works out nicely. If so, I’ll plan on posting most of the footage here. Below is a photo of NIN playing “The Becoming” in Kansas City.

Even though the two above mentioned pages are very basic at this point, I feel better after going through the exercises in order to set up each page. Working with both APIs forced me to learn some PHP and, surprisingly, a good deal about the general structure of WordPress itself.

Over time I’ll improve upon each page, but for now at least there’s some basic functionality there.

She worked most of Saturday off and on and had made some really good progress. Today she finished the back of the case and putting everything together. I figured she would want to make another one for her iPhone, but she doesn’t want to do another one. Without further ado, here are the pictures of the finished product. It definitely turned out great.

Update: She did another case that actually blows this one away, in my opinion. The first case has icons that are 6×6, whereas the new one is 7×7. The icons really stand out so much better. See the newer one on my flickr photostream.

“You’ll never walk alone.”