View from the Mountain

The Elusive Great Saturday Morning Breakfast

The older the you get the more that you find excuses to go out to eat. The pandemic has complicated that by putting all sorts of pressures on restaurants, not the least of which is staffing. My mother and almost every lady that I have met including my wife has held that breakfast is their favorite meal to enjoy outside the home.

Turns out that getting a good breakfast delivered to your table in a timely fashion is much harder than one might expect. I am of the opinion that I can cook a better breakfast for up to half a dozen people than you can find just about anywhere. That's the case as long as you don't want pancakes or waffles, then I give in and agree to a meal at iHOP.  We roll the dice with service and hope for the best.

We lived on the side of a mountain in the county outside of Roanoke, Virginia, for over twenty wonderful years. It was a wonderful place to raise a family. We moved to the Carolina coast for the next sixteen years so I could bring a few dreams to life. We had a favorite breakfast place at the coast which we could enjoy during the nine months that the tourists were gone, but it closed as favorite restaurants sometimes do.  We moved to a small town just west of Winston-Salem in the winter of 2021.  It is near where I grew up in the fifties and sixties. For the last two years we have looked for a breakfast spot to call our own. We have come close, but there are no winners yet.

We thought we found one in Winston-Salem.  It had been open since 1963 which just happened to the year that I got shipped off to military school in Tennessee.  The first couple of times we went it was great.  The third time, the service was the worst I endured in a while.  We were some of the last few customers in the restaurant as we watched as a couple of waitresses stand around chatting while our food cooled on the window by them. When our food did come, no surprise, it wasn't hot. My grandson had to wait another fifteen minutes for his waffle. We were finished eating by the time he had his food. He had eaten food off our plates while waiting for his waffle.  The place was closing as he finished eating.  We haven't been back.

There's a new restaurant opening near us. We have hopes it will be better.  Actually, if I could tell them what to do, it would be to emulate the waitresses that used to serve us at the Famous Anthony's Restaurant in SW Plaza in Roanoke, Virginia.

Walking into what we consider our home-away-from-home Famous Anthony's this morning, we found it packed with customers who were all being taken care of by the very energetic crew of waitresses. What always amazes me is how each waitress connects with her customers in a personal way and makes certain that they get what they want from the kitchen. The other impressive thing is how they work as a team. Sometimes there is a hostess, but sometimes there isn't. It doesn't matter, you always get seated quickly. Then someone will get your drinks, and it might be your waitress or another waitress who has figured out that you need something to drink. Your coffee cup might get filled by your waitress or another one who happens by and sees that you need coffee.

If you can sit back and watch it for a moment, the waitresses have time for personal interactions with each other while still delivering exceptional service to their customers. They might be occasionally irreverent towards management and even joke at some of us regulars, but it creates a wonderful atmosphere. As much as we like the quick, reasonably priced food, we really go there because we feel at home. We know many of the waitresses by first name, Wendy, Ginger, Janelle, Tasha, Jean, and Robin, last but certainly not the meekest. There are other whose faces we know, but we just haven't caught their names yet. We even know some of them well enough to tell when they have run into some challenges at work or home. Yet in spite of the many times we have gone there, it is the rare time we don't get absolutely great service.

There are restaurants that might have fancier menus or even some food that I might like better, but there is just no place where I think you will find a better team of waitresses. You might find some individual people who excel in other places, but this is a whole group of individuals who through their cooperation and dedication to doing more than a good job create an exceptional experience just as the Fishmongers do.  (Full article on Teams That Work)

That particular Famous Anthony's also had very good food.  I still have not found an omelet that I like better than their Chicken Philly omelet (that excludes the ones that I cook myself like the one pictured).  I have not been back to that Famous A's in Roanoke in over a decade and I am sure those waitresses have moved on to something better. Still I have the memories of being a valued customer there.

Teamwork really is important in all sorts of businesses. That is a lesson I learned in my early days after college when I moved to Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, business owners rarely have the skills to create an atmosphere that fosters teamwork.  I was part of some great sales teams at Apple.  Then the company's philosophy changed to have teams compete against each other for the same business.  Imagine the customers who sit down and have two different waitresses vying for their order. Confusing?  It is absolutely confusing, and the worst way to run a business. There was sales magic at Apple during the early years, but like all magic, it was easily destroyed.

The omelet at the top of post is a recent breakfast.  I do omelets much differently than most people.  I call my omelets cold-pan omelets to distinguish them from the hot pans that the French often use for their omelets.

1. Put a pat of butter, and a tablespoon of grape seed oil in your non-stick pan on your stove burner, turn the burner on medium for about ninety seconds and then turn off.
2. Spread an ounce or so coarsely grated cheese over the bottom of the pan after you have evenly distributed the oil-butter mixture.
3. If I am using precooked sausage like what is in the one pictured, I just cut it in pieces. If I am adding mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, or onions, I precook in another pan.  Mushrooms work well in the microwave as long as you drain them.
4. Next I beat two or three eggs (local eggs so it depends on the size) and a splash of water in a bowl until I can't beat them anymore. I love egg whites but they make omelets fall apart unless you are very careful.
5. Now I pour my eggs carefully into the pan where the cheese has melted on the bottom. Here I usually grind some black pepper into the pan and often add some red pepper flakes.
6. Next I distribute my sausage, ham, bacon or whatever across the pan with the eggs- the omelet pictured had turkey and chicken sausage
7. I usually  find a piece of cheese (whatever needs using- blue cheese, cheddar and feta are favorites) that I crumble into the pan
8. I am also fond of spreading a thin last layer of spinach across the bottom of the pan- sometimes I added chopped green onions. When the lid goes on, they steam nicely.
9. Finally on top of the spinach and/or green onions, I sprinkle a little more shredded cheese.
10. Then I put a cover on the skillet and turn the heat on and set it at medium.
11. I put bread in the toaster oven, and I put my plate on top of the toaster oven.
12. I pour myself another cup of coffee and set the table.
13. Around three or four minutes later (depends on your stove, burner and how fast you are cooking) I check the omelet. If it is almost done. I turn the burner off, remove the pan from the burner and put it on a hot pad- leaving the lid off.
14. My toast is now ready, I take it out, spray with olive oil and put it back in for another minute in the toaster.
15. I take a non-stick spatula and work it under the omelet from the edges until it is ready to slide out of the pan.
16. I bring over my plate, slide half the omelet out of the pan onto the plate and fold the rest over.

If your omelet gets brown, try using less heat.  I like salsa with my omelets.  Omelets are for experimenting so go for it.

 

Adding Fiber To Your Life

Fiber connectivity can make a huge difference in your life. When we started planning our move, my first requirement was that we find a home with fiber connectivity. It was not a snap decision. My work career in technology will hit four decades in 2022, and all of those years have revolved around a home office. Recent changes in what is expected from home office workers have reinforced the lessons learned from years of trying to stay connected enough to do my job.

Like many people who have been on a cable modem for decades, my experience has been a roller-coaster with some very frustrating experiences. Our most recent home before the move was in a new subdivision serviced by a national cable company. By the time we moved in February 2021, our speeds had increased to 488 Mbps down and 24 Mbps up. Because of bundling our phone service also was delivered by cable modem. The numbers looked impressive on the surface.

However, with a job that involves clients in over twenty states and a home office over seven hours driving away from our corporate office, experience had taught me that I could still expect problems with video conferencing which had become critical to meeting the needs of our clients since the pandemic.

Video conferencing with our cable modem, even with the best speeds that my cable modem company could deliver, involved using both the phone and my computer to establish a video conference link. Other collaborative tools like Slack were not consistently reliable when making phone calls or sharing screens. Even worse, sharing files was anything but instant since many of the proposals I prepared often reached sizes that were unimaginable just a few years ago. I depended on tools like Box for sharing files and an unreliable Internet connection is a nightmare when sharing files or screens in real time.

When we got to the point of making an offer on a new home, we had two homes with fiber connectivity and one with DSL. We quickly discarded the DSL home and bought one of the fiber homes. Having a symmetric 500 Mbps fiber connection provided by our local telephone company has taken connectivity worries out of my life and office. Now when I am joining a video conference whether through Zoom, Teams, or GoToMeeting, all I do is click a link for crystal clear voice and video. I no longer tie up our home phone line for audio in what can only be described as often frustrating video conferences where my participation was often flaky because of connectivity problems.

My biggest worry beyond office connectivity in making the switch to fiber was my wife and how she would take to streaming. What we could get through streaming turned out to be far more flexible and entertaining than I expected. While my wife cannot see all of her favorite shows live, she has not had to give up any shows and and she has found a far broader choice of shows. We get local live television through Paramount+. We rotate through a number of streaming services, cancelling them sometimes for several months until their content has been refreshed. My wife who is somewhat reluctant with technology changes has learned how to stream the shows that she wants without help from me. 

In our previous home, our cable service had the most basic TV service, the best Internet, and nationwide phone service. It took constant vigilance and regular arguments with the cable company to keep our bills under $180 per month. By the time we moved, our efforts to stay within the $180 meant we not longer had PBS, and saw only a very few sports events. Even the Weather Channel had disappeared from our service.

In addition to the monthly expense, an average of once a month, I went through an often frustrating reset of my cable modem due to loss of connectivity. I also had to switch out my cable modem every few years. At least twice during those switches, I lost connectivity for a day or more due to problems getting the new modems configured.

I do not miss my cable bills or the headaches. I love our fiber connection.

Our current costs with symmetric 500 Mbps (which not everyone needs- we have 29 connected devices in our home), nationwide/Canadian VOIP telephone service and a monthly budget of $40 in rotating streaming services is $140. Every service that we have now is better than what we had before. The almost $500 in annual savings is certainly a welcome bonus. We experimented with streaming while we were on cable, and there is no doubt in my mind that streaming is far better with the fiber than what we had in our previous house. We just don't have buffering issues now. I have also found that a simple large battery backup allows me to run our fiber network during power outages. There have been NO connectivity battles and I have not even talked to our Internet service provider since I signed up for service ten months ago.

With all that and what fiber to the home can provide now and in the future, I do not see us ever buying another home without fiber.

David Sobotta is a VP and Senior Broadband Analyst with WideOpen Networks which is currently building fiber to the home in Blacksburg, Virginia. He and his wife live in a very rural subdivision in Davie County near Mocksville, NC.

Empty Promises

I don't want to be the old guy complaining about other people trying to earn a living. I would like to provide some constructive criticism that might make all of our lives easier.

I spent nearly twenty years at Apple and anyone who knows me will quickly tell you that I am no Steve Jobs fan. I saw him do things that were nothing but mean and contributed nothing to the great products that came out of the company.

However, the one thing that I learned of value from time within the Steve Job's orbit is that the hardest thing is to say no to things that you might like to do but aren't in your sweet spot. I would add that if you cannot do something with passion and precision, find something else to do.

Obviously sometimes you really need money and I understand those pressures because I have had my back to the wall with a payment or bill due.  I have been lucky that I have always found ways, one time I sold our bulldozer, to keep going until better times. Those better times have always taken me to opportunities where I was proud to work and more importantly eager to do my best.

Before you get the idea that all my work has been easy, I farmed for ten years. I shoveled a lot of manure over those years. Sometimes I would come to the house so dirty that my wife would hose me off and make me change clothes in the woodshed before I could come in the house.

Whether I was repairing the round bale hay grapple with a welder, vaccinating a cow, or cutting a field of day. I tried to keep my eye on the big picture. That means I tried to do things in a way that I did not have to go back and do them all over. That is known on the farm as one step forward and two steps backward.

It is an easy lesson to learn on the farm. It someone asks you to do something that is nice to do but you cannot do it right without compromising the important things in your life, say no. That does not mean saying no to everything.

I still remember the time that some people from our little church asked me to move a small building to the front of the church so the sanctuary could have some protection from cold when the door was opened. I could not do the move exactly when they wanted it, but I found a time that would work for us all.  We got it moved.  It looked a little funny with a big tractor with dual rear wheels driving around with a small building on a round bale carrier, but we moved it.

So here is the problem today. People take jobs and commit to doing the work, then they don't do the job. Some never master what it takes to do the job. Some pretend to do the job. Others do not even bother to show up. We have been amazed when trying to hire students to do data entry as part time jobs. It is not hard work, yet continually people commit to working x-number of hours but only work half that. Then there are those who promise but never show.

The problem is widespread. We have been taking the newspaper for our whole married life. We took the Winston-Salem Journal when I was in elementary school-over six decades ago. We have always taken the paper and had some form of home delivery. A few weeks ago, our carrier changed.  The first change was that he/she quit putting the paper in the newspaper box. Most of the time it is in the driveway but sometimes it is in the yard or the ditch. I can handle that but I am not very happy about it.  What I cannot take is the paper not being delivered.  We have missed more deliveries in the last couple of months than the last sixteen years. I know at least one hard worker whose great work habits started as a young newspaper delivery person.

We all know that there is an epidemic of contractors and service providers who will take your call and promise to show up to do an estimate or even a job and then never show. We had pressure washing done recently. The company promised to come back to do touch ups. We have not seen them despite calls and promises.

Still there are people and companies out there who believe in doing what they say and making certain that they do a great job. Our lawn service, Candido Landscaping, has impressed us with their hard work, attention to detail, and their commitment to doing exactly what they promised.

If our country is going to prosper, we need more people like them - willing to work and do a great job because that is what they expect of themselves and they will accept nothing less.

The Five Shirt Day

An overlooked challenge of the pandemic is that it has been very hard on clothing, specifically shirts. I have never been easy on clothing. I have a long history of getting dirty.  When we lived on the farm, my wife, Glenda, was known to sometimes hose me down and make me take my dirty clothes off in the woodshed before I could come into the house. Back in my lawn mowing days on the North Carolina coast, not only did I come in encrusted in dirt from a yard that was more dust than grass at times but I also ended up fishing, walking on the beach, gardening and working at my desk. It all required a lot of different clothes, but I am not sure that I ever had a five shirt day.

The pandemic has made it more challenging to do almost everything except work from home. The statement that clothes make the man or woman has changed to shirts make the man or woman.  With Zoom and Team conference calls, how you look on video is what matters these days and our video cameras only show us from us from the face down to our desks.  So we pay attention to the shirts that we wear.

The day that I wore five shirts started out normally. I got up and put on the somewhat tattered shirt that I had on before we went to bed. We will call it shirt number one. It was a fine shirt for a simple breakfast. There was little danger that dropping some of my egg and toast on that shirt would make it worse than it already was. I planned to change shirts after breakfast anyway before work but I forgot. I went up to work and happened to check on the delivery of some long-sleeved tee shirts I had ordered from Lands End. I was surprised to see that according to FedEx the shirts were at the front door.  Since I had forgotten to change after breakfast I got myself downstirs and changed into one of my new shirts. Then I went back to work in what we will call shirt two. I took part in a Zoom seminar call but the only video was the presenter so I was properly attired.

However, when I came down to lunch, Glenda did not even let me get into the kitchen before she said, you cannot eat lunch in that new shirt. Since I wanted to go on a walk, I changed into a light sweatshirt (shirt three) and went for my walk fully expecting to change into the shirt that I had on at breakfast but as is often the case, the shirt I had on in the morning was already in the laundry so I put on another lunch-approved shirt (shirt four).  I had lunch and with an impending Zoom call after lunch, I changed once again. This time I knew that I would be part of the presentation so I put on my WideOpen Networks shirt (shirt five) pictured above.

Mid-afternoon finally arrived as I went down and changed back into the shirt (shirt four) that I had worn at lunch. I have managed to stick with shirt four through the evening. Shirt five is hanging back in the closet. If all goes well, I will manage to stay out of shirt six, my nightshirt, until after midnight or tomorrow when I hope to get by with only three or four shirts.

Streaming is Like Self-Serve Fuel Pumps

Technology changes like ATMs and self-serve gas pumps arise not because they were designed to immediately make our lives easier. Technology change almost always puts more pressure initially on the end users than it does on the people deploying the changes. In the case of ATMs and gas pumps, a lot of people lost jobs. I suspect it took most people a while to get used to both changes and that does not include the people without jobs. I know it me a while to adjust.

It had been easy just to drive up to the gas pump and not worry about getting gasoline on my hands or clothes before a sales call. It was also easy (at least when the Cable was working) to spend years in the simple-minded world of cable TV. When we first started using cable TV, there was no cable Internet. We got our first Internet connection through a dial-up modem on a telephone line.

A number of years ago, I started streaming with a Roku box. Netflix was the first service we tried. Since those early years, I have used many streaming services and devices but we always could fall back on cable TV.

Then we moved in February 2021. As part of our move we cancelled our cable service on February 1. We never even made contact with a cable company when we moved. There was no need because we were relocating to a home with a great fiber Internet connection. We signed up for a 500 Mbps symmetric fiber Internet connection and went all in on streaming.

The world of streaming in not as easy as turning on the TV and changing channels with a flipper. However, it is not impossible even for those less technical than me.

The first thing you need to do is to buy a new smart TV unless you have bought one in the last year or two and have yet to be able to figure it out. It might well be all you to embrace streaming. The next step is to cancel your cable subscription at the end of the month. Going cold turkey is an important step. Otherwise you might fall back into what is easiest but not cheapest. Your Internet will likely cost you more once you stop “bundling” with the cable company but you will still end up saving money.

Unless you pick an all-encompassing streaming service like YouTube TV, your choices of streaming services should be viewed as more whim than long term commitment. With a couple exceptions, most of our streaming choices only last a few months.

One of the exceptions is Paramount+. Because we can get live local TV for the news, we have yet to cancel Paramount+. Other services, even Netflix stay on a rotating schedule. We subscribe when we hear something interesting is about to be broadcast. Sometimes we ignore a service for months.

The other exception is Amazon’s Prime video. It comes built into our Prime membership. One of the other tricks to streaming is that we manage many of the subscriptions through Amazon. Now it doesn’t always work because there are raging battles for position in the industry. I believe HBO Max and Prime just had a falling out. You cannot get Apple TV on Amazon Prime because Apple wants you to manage your subscriptions on their Apple TV hardware. However, if you do use Prime, you can sometimes find channels on sale. We have tried a couple for 99 cents per month.

Currently, we subscribe to Britbox, PBS Masterpiece, Acorn TV, Paramount+ and Apple TV. The average cost is $5.99 per month for a total $29.95. When added to our $84. 99 symmetric 500 Mbps Internet , our entertainment expense without telephone or Prime Video is $114.94. Prime membership costs us $119 a year and I feel comfortable allocating it the same $4.99 a month that I pay for Apple TV.

With that our entertainment costs are $119.98 monthly if you allocate all of the Internet costs to entertainment. However, I work from home and use the Internet for work at least three times as as much as I use it for watching TV. I could easily say my entertainment Internet cost is $21.99 a month and my business cost is $63. Using that logic, streaming services (Britbox, PBS Masterpiece, Acorn TV, Paramount+, Apple TV & Prime Video) cost $34.94 and Internet for them costs $21.99 for a total of $56.93 per month. If you throw in the full Internet, the services rise to total of $119.98 monthly.

A lot of people use their cell phones for home phones, but since we have fiber, we bought an Internet VOIP service. It costs us $12.67 monthly for unlimited calling to the US and Canada. It includes voicemail, fax, and a number of other features. The line is used almost exclusively for outbound business calls.

However, if you are looking to compare a complete triple play cable modem Internet, cable TV and phone system to ours, our total cost with all entertainment & Internet costs would be $119.98 plus $12.67 for a monthly total of $132.65.

There are three or four months out of the year when we watch Netflix now at $17.99 per month. However, we work to keep our streaming costs under $40 per month so we will pause two or three of the other services when we are using Netflix.

Before we moved our typical cable bill for Internet, phone, and as little TV as we could get was close to $180 per month in 2020. Even then we were still using Amazon Prime Video and some Netflix on top of that. Our costs for all of it was around $200 per month.

Conservatively, we are saving $65 a month from our previous bills. On top of it all we have better Internet service and our phone calls are crystal clear. I can also do multi-point video conferences straight from my computers. The saving are almost identical to the $65 a month we are saving on our two cell phones after we switched from Verizon to the Google FI service.

Our total communication charges are now less than $200 a month including cell phones. At one time it was over $330. We are saving over $1,500 a year.

Today we have a more flexible system. We often watch our local news on an iPad Pro on the kitchen table. You have to be smart about streaming and it takes some learning but with a little practice, you can watch a very wide variety of shows and save significant money. Just like ATMs and self-service gas pumps were in their day, streaming is the wave of the future. You can embrace it now or cling to the old ways until they practically disappear.

Our TV hardware includes the following, LG - 65” Class CX Series OLED 4K UHD with Smart webOS TV and a Fire TV Cube — 4K Ultra HD - 2019 release. The Fire TV cube is under $100 and allows you to control some of the TV with your voice. There are TVs with Fire TV/Alexa built-in. We tried the LG Web TV interface but preferred the Fire TV interface that we were already using on another older TV. You can buy less expensive Fire TV devices. I am not sure how they compare. There is no exact way to put all this together and when you sign into the services make sure that you keep your passwords straight. I guarantee you will need them especially when you start turning services off and trying new ones.