Fish, Which is My Favorite Dish

  • Breakfast Burrito Quest: Chris’s Burgers La Puente

    Look. They all can’t be winners. Some places have to be in the middle. Its just the way it goes you know?

    On the weekends I go for long rides through the SGV. Whenever I pass this place, in the morning, its packed. All the tables outside are full. But, these rides are not appropriate for having a brick of a burrito in your stomach, so I never stopped to see what was doing.

    One day I needed to drop the kiddo off at school, so I decided to take a big detour and get burrito from this place. Even on a Thursday morning it had it’s crowd of regulars, promising. The dude taking orders was gruff, but cool.

    This place has a more interesting style of cooking the eggs than most other places. They crack, and mix the eggs for each order, its not all in a pitcher of orange fluid. Its not totally mixed, so there’s still some white streaks. They pour it out to just the right size to fit the tortilla’s “core”. Little bit of crisp around the edge. great.

    Now the potatoes, this is where the burrito falls flat. They we’re there, yes, but mostly as thin mush layer. Not much texture, flavor or seasoning, No crispy bits. Not even a hit of saltiness.

    The tortilla itself was fine, nothing crazy, not flakey nor doughy, just a middle of the road tortilla, slightly toasted. There was bacon in it, like the tortilla, it was perfectly adequate. Some crisp with a smidge of chew. But otherwise run of the mill.

    There was no salsa included, so I can’t weigh in much on that part. Dang, that really helps out, and lacking that is a big hit to flavor town.

    Portion size was just right, not a belly buster, but your not really left for wanting when your done.

    Overall it was not a bad burrito, but it also wasn’t one that stands out for any particular reason. Totally fine in every way, but not one that you would write home about, and I would not want to deal with a weekend crowd for it. But will say, I like the way they cook their eggs, that will be added to the ideal breakfast burrito.

  • Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025)

    Look, I’m a Sam Rockwell mark, especially when they let him just run with it. Michael Pena (even though we lost him to scientology) he’s still one of the few Mexicans on the big screen, so I gotta support. Gore Verbinski? check. A title that’s a vague reference to online video games. Sign me up.

    Its well made, looks good, craftsmanship wise all is good. But, this movie wants to do a little too much for 90 minutes.

    The TLDR: 12 monkeys meets Groundhog day and they learn that they both hate AI and cell phones.

    For a while it touches on “phone bad”, cool, ya. Then it goes into “AI bad” ok, still here. It goes a little into “clones bad” territory, but that just turns into a thing about being force fed ads.

    Along that path, there’s just so much left up in the air, unsaid, or just unconnected to anything. After a couple flashbacks, the movie sets on its path to get something done and things happened, then it eventually stumbles across the finish line. There’s characters that show up to be creepy, but just end up with zero pay off, no cool back story, just dudes doing what they are told.

    The movie kind of touches on the “good luck have fun” part as a sort of game show audience chant thing, but there’s never any sort of tie in. Then I thought, oh maybe there will be some gamer twist, but that too was unfulfilled.

    I figured it out the movies twist too soon and blurted out what I thought was going on, and I ended up being right. Boo, I’m a big dummy, if I’m figuring your shit out early, get back to the drawing board.

    I figured out years ago that social media is bad, and hey, maybe don’t live with your phone in your hand all the time right? But I can’t help but feel that the people who this movie ‘targets’, for a lack of a better term, are just going to get turned off by having the mirror pointed at them in such a way, if they even have enough media literacy to see it.

    over all, meh. Watch it on a plane, and forget you watched it later that day.

  • A Tale of Two Radios

    Or why I learned to read up on a radio before I buy it.

    Luckily this is about cheap radios, and not mid/high-tier handhelds, like the Yaesu I continue to ask myself why I bought. I do a bit of HAM radio-ing (is that how you say it?). Radio stuff is fun, I’ve gone deep enough to get my ‘general’ license so I have access to all the bands so I can talk to people hundreds of miles away.

    One of my favorite things is APRS, which is a form of packet radio that sends out a telemetry packet with GPS info at set intervals. I run it on bike rides, hikes and road trips. Other people tuned in can pick up those packets, and there are also some devices out that also log the contact to the internet. There’s some fun paths out there from days out, vacations, and trips to my favorite camping weekend.

    Recently I really learned to love a good Baofeng. They had a bad rep for a while, but they’ve cleaned up their act, and now they set the benchmark for cheap-but-good radios. Can’t go wrong with UV-5R.

    Their easy to program, their scan feature aligns with how my brain works – truth be told, they are the only one I understand.

    But since they are cheap and easy to program you don’t die inside when something happens to it. No biggie, $20 and a couple days later and you have a new radio. In fact, I end up buying the two pack and usually end up giving the other one away.

    So in my head, I’m thinking a UV-5R is almost the perfect little radio to carry around, if only it had APRS. I do a quick search and find the Baofeng BF-F8HP PRO, $60 bucks, it’s got GPS, great. let’s get it.

    It arrives a couple days later (one of the few benefits of Southern California – everything is here so you get it fast). Its a chonky boy, but not a deal breaker, I flash it with my saved repeaters and other frequencies.

    I start to go through the menu, not seeing anything about APRS, not worried though, different radios handle it differently. I found where to put my call sign in, a glimmer of hope. But nothing about APRS. Keep digging. Not finding anything on my own, I get on the internet and get the user manual. Search through it, no mention of APRS. Oh no, doubt sets in.

    I do a deeper dive on the user manual, and find out all you can do with the GPS is send an APRS-like packet to a set of predefined contacts/radios on the same frequency. But you can’t tune into the default US APRS frequency and decode what’s coming in and your certainly not sending any packets out.

    Fudge. this isn’t THE radio, and I’m out $60. Why would I carry this bigger thing that is just as good as a much smaller, lighter radio. Not going to return it though, will hold onto it in case it’s an alternate firmware that opens up APRS, or if I just need a radio for an experiment or project.

    I’m convinced there’s another Baofeng out there that can handle APRS. I find the 5RH Pro, I confirm it has GPS and APRS support, its only $30? Its almost the same as the BF-F8HP, it has 1 extra button and a different knob. Cool, let’s go.

    A couple days later it shows up. I’m excited. I charge it, and later that night I sit down, and plug in my info for APRS, and get things configured. I tune to the frequency, and almost immediately get some packets. I send out a couple, cool. great. This works. Lets plug it on the computer and get all my presets on there.

    Get Chirp running, go to pull from the radio, and can’t find this radio in the menu. Go to the internet, see what others have found.

    Sinking feeling. Turns out this radio is not compatible with Chirp, and does not look like anyone is going to be able to set it up. The company recommends another set of software that only works with a small sub set of their ‘pro’ radios. I’m not doing this. I had to do it to program my Yaesu. I’m not installing single radio specific software. No.

    What a burn. I’m $90 in, and don’t have THAT Baofeng radio, I don’t think it exists right now, and I’m not going to just keep buying radios, I already have a bunch as-is.

    Both of those radios are so close, the hardware is there, the body is willing. But the software mind says otherwise. I know I can use a cable and some external gear to open up that functionality, but I’m already the antenna weirdo out in public, I don’t need to be an antenna and wires weirdo out in public. I’ll hold onto them, put them away, and maybe use them to make some DIY repeater or something later on.

    In the mean time, I have two daily radios that cover my needs:

    • VGC VR-N76 is a full featured radio, mid tier price, but can’t argue with its capability.
    • UV-5R small, solid and $16.

    If anybody out there at Baofeng is listening, take the UV-5R Mini, remove the light, put a GPS antenna there and setup the firmware to handle APRS. You would have the new benchmark for a solid radio. Then we can start talking about putting KISSTNC in radios.

  • Seaside Boardwalk

  • Arcadia Beach

  • Outbound

  • 3 Mules

  • Few miles in

    So far so good, saddle needs breaking in, but big tires nice, who would have thought. I like the gear ratios, but it on a whole is shifted down, with more climbing, and less speed. but I got a road bike for speed. This thing is joy to take into climbs.

  • New Bike Day 2026

    Happy new bike day to all who celebrate!

    This year its a Canyon Grizl CF7 ESC, with the funky funky bars.

    Pretty much stock for now. Only part that has been swapped out is the saddle, I was not into the stock one, squishy. Accessory wise, I added the Garmin mount that’s part of the steerer stack and the front rack.

    Wow, tire size makes such a big difference, aside from my cargo bike, all my other bikes have either 23 or 28mm wide tires, and neither provide much cushion. The stock 40mm (I think) that come on this are not great (seem to drag at +16mph), but offer a nice ride.

    The split seat post is interesting, but not the best for angle adjustment, would be cool if that was decoupled, but that would just add more weight. maybe make the saddle mount similar to what Thompson does for theirs – 2 screws handle both the angle adjustment, and fastening down the saddle.

    Super stoked to expand where I can go on a bike, I can take off from home, do some road riding, hit some gravel/dirt for a couple miles, then cruise back home on the streets. An all in one solution that does not require a car. There’s paths around here and some good alternate routes, excited to explore.

  • Escape

    Idlywild is nice.