So, I was reading one of those slideshow lists on MSN.

23 Great Road Trips Worth the Gas

Now, the ninth of the those Road Trips is Fort Worth to Oklahoma City. Now, I don't mean to insult either city (as a Texas Longhorn I reserve my insults for Norman, OK), but I don't see 200 miles up I-35 much of drive. Now, I should point out that they called them Road Trips, but it seems to me that a great Road Trip should also be a great drive.

So, what makes a great drive? I think we can come up with a few rules for a great drive, and hours on an interstate won't be part of it.

1. Scenery
   
   For me, it is hard to imagine a great drive through the Nevada desert.
   
   I need a quick sidebar here to explain that almost every year of my childhood I was tossed into the back of a station wagon and hauled from California to Utah. Most of those years that meant driving across Nevada on I-80...twice. The stretch of I-80 from Lovelock to Wendover is still, 35 years, my definition of a boring, depressing stretch of road, and the antithesis of a great drive. Close sidebar.
   
   Now, the scenery doesn't have to be spectacular, but it certainly adds to the pleasure of the drive if the scenery is easy on the eyes. Also, I don't much care what the scenery is, mountains, hills, forests, seashore, desert. Just as long as the views out the windshield are nice. Personally, I think that the best drives include scenery that is down right distracting, but that is just me.
   


2. A good road
   
   Now, there are two parts to this. First, the road needs to be in good repair, and well constructed. It isn't going to be a great drive if you spend most of your time dodging potholes. Treacherous is not a word that I associate with a great drive either. A road that is too narrow, or lacks any sort of improvements is not really going to give a good driving experience.
   
   But, I think a great drive requires more than a solid well maintained road surface. When driving, straight is boring, at least if it is too straight for too long. It is possible for a road to be too windy, though a windy road can be a fun all its own, but a great drive requires turns. A windy road presents us with continually changing vistas, which helps immensely with #1. A windy road also means that we work a little while driving, which, for me at least, increases the pleasure of the drive.
   


3. Light traffic
   
   Traffic will kill a good drive faster than anything I know of, so any truly great drive will have to avoid frequently travelled roads. If other people know about it and use it, then it needs to be removed from the itinerary. Now, sometimes, almost every road gets busy, so we should not remove a road from our list of great drives because we encounter traffic once, but the greater the traffic, the less great the drive.
   
   Another sidebar. I am a big fan of Top Gear (the UK version) and they are terribly annoyed with Caravans. In England they don't seem to have the huge motorhomes that we have hear, but they do have smaller ones, and it seems that every summer, thousands of Brits pack up their caravans (usually trailers) and campervans (motorhomes) and head out across the country. Unfortunately, they seem to clog up the very roads that the Top Gear presenters love to drive on. They tend to go slowly, and long lines of traffic get backed up behind them on Britain's smaller roadways.
   
   In the US, I think our trailer and mobile home campers tend to stick a bit more to the freeways, but I think you can see that spending your "great drive" going slowly behind someone pulling a camping trailer is not going to add to your experience.
   


4. Interesting places
   
   The places you can see from your car are one thing. The places you can get out and see along the way are another. They may not technically be part of the drive, but unless the drive is one of a few short hours, then drive is going to include stops, and interesting places to visit along the way are going to increase the enjoyment of the trip.
   
   A trip up the California coast highway (Highway 1) is nice. A trip up the coast with a stop at Muir Woods National Monument is better. It may be a nice drive with a good picnic spot, or a good restaurant, or a quaint B&B for an overnight stay, but something that improves the trip, while your not driving, can turn a nice drive into a great one.
   


5. A fun-to-drive car
   
   If you watch Top Gear, you might imagine that the only way to enjoy a great drive is in a powerful sports car. A Ferrari or Porsche may be an excellent car for a great drive, but I don't think it is necessary. All that is required is that you enjoying driving the car on the roads of your great drive.
   
   Back in #2 I talked about good roads, and the key thing is that you do not want to spend your drive fighting the road. You also don't want to spend your drive fighting your car. I don't think a Ferrari is required, but I don't think that a pickup truck or a Minivan is going to add much to the drive. They really key thing is that YOU enjoy driving the car on the roads that you take.
   


6. Tune-age
   
   Or should it be spelled tunage? I think music can be a great addition to a great drive, but upon reaching this part of the essay, I considered changing the title, but adding conversation to the title seemed overly long, and Sound just didn't seem to say enough. If you have a Ferrari, then the sound of the engine may be more than enough accompaniment to your drive, but in most cars, something else may add to the enjoyment of the drive.
   
   Conversation with a passenger may be even better than music. On a longish drive, a passenger gives you someone to share the experience with, which I think will increase the enjoyment of a good drive. If you don't have a passenger, then music can be another good addition to your drive. A specific sort of music is not required, just something you enjoy.
   


7. More than just A to B
   
   The purpose of a great drive is itself, the journey, so any truly great drive must be about more than just going from point A to point B. You may in fact need to get to point B, but a great drive is unlikely to be the fastest or easiest way to get there. The freeway is faster, but a freeway drive is something to be finished as quickly as possible. A great drive should be something that you enjoy, were the journey is the goal, and the destination is just the end of the journey.

Well, I think that finishes up my look at what makes a great drive. I haven't taken all that many, but the items above are the things that I can point to that have on occasion turned a trip from point A to point B into a great drive.

Buffet King

Buffet King
5451 N. IH 35
Austin, TX

I was looking for a Chinese Buffet that wasn’t too far from work, and I found Buffet King. I had noticed Buffet King a few months ago, before they open while visiting Office Max at Capital Plaza but never found the time to try it out. The restaurant is quite large and well appointed. That may not last (that being the way of buffet restaurants IMO) but for now, in its first year of operation, it looks nice. It is very bright with a lot of dark wood paneling. The price is about on a par with other large buffets, $8.00 without drink, and I had my buffet with only water, because they have made the awful decision to serve Pepsi and their only diet offering was Diet Pepsi…bleah. So, with one strike against them, I approached the buffet.

I was in the mood for Chinese, so that was where I started. For me, Chinese food means Sesame Chicken, Fried Rice, Egg Roll and Hot and Sour Soup. As I searched, I discovered that the buffet is huge. There were two long salad bars I one with green salad and the fixings, and another for fruit, pudding and the like. There were also two long buffets of Chinese with fish selections, various beef and chicken choices, eggrolls, won ton…well, all the usual Chinese buffet suspects. There were also enchiladas, pizza and sushi.

Well, as I said before, Chinese, for me, means Sesame Chicken and I had no trouble tracking it down, and that is where the first chink in the armor appeared. The Sesame Chicken sauce was red, and thin. Next to the Sesame Chicken was General Tso’s Chicken I which was closer to the right color for Sesame Chicken, but also very thin. The fried rice was nearby, but full of large chunks of onion, which I am not fond of.

Well, so they aren’t doing so well, but I find the egg roll and the Hot and Sour Soup and head back to my table. The sauce may be a bit thin and the color isn’t quite right, but it tastes okay, and the Hot and Sour Soup is good, not great, but good. The fried rice tastes good, but I have to fish out the onions. The egg roll is surprisingly good. Steam tables and heat lamps are not the best friends for an egg roll, and most Chinese buffets are plagued by semi-soggy eggrolls. These were above average on two different trips to the buffet.

On my second trip to the buffet and I tried some of the battered chicken that goes with sweet and sour, and I found the cream cheese wontons, which gets a big thumbs up from me. I tried a slice of soggy garlic head, and a Chinese donut, but for most of my eating, I stuck to the Sesame Chicken.

Two more things that I didn’t really try, one end of the restaurant is a big Mongolian stir fry bar, and the only thing I got from the desserts was a small bowl of ice cream. The seemed to have, large selection of cookies, but they looked store bought.

I walked out of Buffet King very full. I wasn’t the best Chinese I’ve ever had, but it was good. Nothing that I picked up was inedible, though most of it could have been better. I’ll probably try Buffet King again.

Great Austin Burger Hunt - Short Stop

Short Stop 12
3811 North IH 35

Sometimes, the exterior and the food don't match. Such was the case with Hill-Berts (link). Unfortunately, such was not the case with Short Stop.

I used to frequent Short Stop when I worked at Dell, not all that often, but quite a few times over the ten years I worked there. I thought I would give it a try and present the results to whoever may be reading these pages.

I ordered the standard double burger, my usual way, no pickles, onions or tomatoes. They do live up to their name, and the burger arrived quickly, with my order of fries. Opening a short stop is not for the faint of stomach. It didn't look good. The bun was nearly squished flat. Also, I am trying to figure out how they managed to wilt the lettuce before they put in on the burger, because I unwrapped it less than ten seconds after they handed it out to me, and the lettuce was already wilted. It was not a brilliant start.

But, my first bite raised the bar a bit. The meat was well cooked, and had a bit of crunch from being cooked on a flat top grill. A couple of more bites were enjoyed, but then I had to look for the cheese, which I couldn't taste. Well, the cheese was there, but it really wasn't doing much for the burger. This is the problem with American Processed Cheese. It is almost cheese in name only.

The burger was filling, but it was not something I enjoyed all that much. The fries were somewhat limp, but they were tasty, and they tossed some salt packets in the bag without me needing to ask for them, so thumbs up to Short Stop for that.

It the search for a quick and relatively cheap meal, Short Stop might make my list. In the search for Austin's Best Burger....it is at the bottom of the list so far.

Photography

Two different posts on Gizmodo got me thinking about photography today, and so I went in search of some Ansel Adams quotes. These quotes and more can be found on Brainy Quotes.

• A good photograph is knowing where to stand.


• A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.

A college professor taught me the first part of this. He told a story about a student how came back from Summer Vacation. The student was excited about a photograph he had taken, and when the professor say it, he was not impressed. The student responded to the professor's lack of enthusiasm with...

"I guess you had to be there."

Next quote...

• A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

It seems rather inappropriate to add to any quote by Ansel Adams, but it seems to me that a great photograph also must express how you feel to the viewer. I am sure Ansel Adams would agree.

• There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

Oh, it seems that he did.

• Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

I think this may be changing, thanks to Photoshop.

• Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

I think that a lot of it has to do with the first quote, and with the long experience of someone with an incredible eye for a good photograph.

• There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

I went searching for the last quote below, but the other seemed appropriate to go with it.

• Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.


• The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

We sometimes get annoyed when we find that a photographer, or possibly just someone who found a picture, has altered that photo in some piece of software, and yet, what is photo software but a digital darkroom. I watched an interview with Ansel Adam's son where he talked about all the time that his father spent in the dark room correcting God's mistakes in tonal relationships.

Is it wrong to crop a photograph to make it better? What about the digital equivalent of dodging and burning? Obviously, Photoshop can do much more than this, but how much of what is done is just like the adjustments a photographer would make in creating a print from his negative?

It all started with this week's Shooting Challenge on Gizmodo. I followed the link to a blog about Black Card Photography and it mentioned that most photography contests will disqualify any photograph altered in Photoshop. But, I am betting that if you submit a print of a picture that you took with a film camera, that no one will complain if you massaged it in the darkroom.

This seems a little unfair.

Maybe, what is needed is a photo editing program that mimics only those techniques you can perform in a darkroom.