I was in the mood for steak on Saturday night, so I tried out a recipe (really more of a method) I saw on Food 911. It turned out fabulous, and was very easy.

Filet Mignon with Mushrooms

Perfect steak. Be sure to start with a high quality filet. Based on Filet Mignon with Mushrooms and Sauce Pinot Noir. NOTE: requires butcher’s string

Ingredients

• 2 (6-ounce) filet mignon steaks
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 2 bacon strips
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 pound assorted mushrooms, such as shiitake, crimini, and chanterelle, stemmed and halved
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic
• 2 sprigs fresh rosemary

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Season both sides of the filet mignon generously with salt and pepper. Wrap a piece of bacon around the sides of each steak and secure with butcher’s twine. In a large heavy, ovenproof skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat until almost smoking. Place the steaks in the hot pan and cook until well seared on 1 side, about 3 minutes. Turn the steaks over, there should be a nice crust on top. Add the mushrooms, garlic, and rosemary; give everything a good stir. Transfer the pan to the oven. Roast for 10 to 12 minutes or until the steaks are cooked medium-rare.

When walking in the skyway you can’t help but overhear bits of conversations as people walk. Today as 2 middle aged guys passed me I heard one say to the other, “Well, I sent Jim 8 cans of energy drink, some chapstick, baby wipes…”. I can’t begin to imagine the context.

They are up in the air and where the action is at…musings while walking through the skyways today.

Walking around downtown Minneapolis one would think there are very few places to grab lunch. The secret is the skyways – everything is up there. Every type of deli, fast food and coffee shop (and Jamba Juice!) can be found in the skyways. I have even found a tasty sushi place – better than Byerly’s, but just as cheap.

Skyways are a wonderful invention for MN – where 3/4 of the year it is too hot, cold, snowy, rainy, humid, or windy to walk comfortably outside. Nearly everyday I manage to get away from work for a nice walk through the skyways. The IDS skyways (one going in each direction out of the building) truly are amazing.

Today it is flurrying outside. Near Orchestra Hall there was a guy in the skyway playing “Winter Wonderland” (or is it “Let it Snow”?) on an accordion. Only in Minnesota.

I had forgotten how much these “demotivational” posters crack me up until last night - nephew Jeff was over and he reminded me of them. Today I went to the site and found this one that I had never seen before. It just seems so fitting. And I like the cat.

For the past few days I have been working on a frustrating problem with Internet Explorer 7 - two websites that my company created and supports are totally unusable in IE7. The pages take a long time to load, and when they do load they continue to use more than 50% of the CPU. After some hunting, testing and searching I finally narrowed it down to how PNG’s are being used. I have not found any other documentation about my exact problem, so I will attempt to document it here.

Unlike older versions of Internet Explorer, IE 7 supports png file format. This is great – unless you did not rely on the star html hack for png background images in your CSS. For example, I am currently working on a site that uses an opaque png file as a background of the main content area. It used CSS something like this (which I did not write, but was tasked to fix):

.opaque_box {
  filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='../image/ trans.png', sizingMethod='scale');
}

/* IE ignores styles with [attributes], so it will skip the following. */
.opaque_box[class] {
  background-image: url(../image/trans.png);
  }

This css worked fine with IE 6, but brings IE to its knees. It can literally lock-up your computer. When I get a chance I will try to put together a test page to demonstrate this behavior. Work-around is to use either the star html hack or conditional comments to target IE pre-version 7:

* html hack
The bad news is that it is no longer supported, so all css hacks that target IEWin will no longer apply in IE7. But, in the case of png support this is a good thing.

/* IE versions 6 and earlier will apply this rule */

* html .opaque_box {
  filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='../image/ trans.png', sizingMethod='scale');
}

Conditional comments
Conditional comments only work in IE on Windows, and they are perfect for giving special instructions meant only IE. The basic structure is the same as an HTML comment (). So other browsers will see them as normal comments and will ignore them. The following code will include a stylesheet for IE version 6 or less:

Special syntax (I accidentally used lte instead of lt, which had me stumped for half an hour):

• lt: less than
• gt: greater than
• lte: less than or equal to
• gte: greater than or equal to

More details on conditional comments
More on IE7 and CSS: MSDN and p.i.e..

1. What did you do in 2006 that you’d never done before? Bought a house. Commuted to work via city busy.
2. Did anyone close to you give birth? Nope.
3. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006? More organization
4. What dates from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Winter Olympics - working nights. Buying our first house. Picking out Pepper. Last day at Widgets. San Francisco trip. Staying up all night for a Wii.
5. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Winter Olympics
6. What was your biggest failure? Not keeping in touch with friends and family
7. What was the best thing you bought? House. Pepper.
8. Where did most of your money go? House - and new stuff for the house.
9. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Cheese. Travel. New kitten!