Sub'r Bowl Review: Blimpie

[NOTE: This blog posting is very belated, and it is significantly shorter than the other Sub'r Bowl posts.]

This week's sub shop in the Sub'r Bowl is Blimpie, which you might find in anywhere from a franchise store in New York City to a Hess gas station in Florida. Blimpie rounds out the National Chain, over 1000 Locations Division, as well as the Sub'r Bowl itself!

Sub'r Bowl Review: Main Street Pizza

It comes as a surprise to all of us participating in the Sub'r Bowl that the Local Pizza Shop Division has had the tightest scoring of highly rated sandwiches. We now come to our final contender in the division, Main Street Pizza, and it doesn't disappoint. Two trips were required to fit the participant's schedules, and I was fortunate enough to go both times.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Jason's Deli

Jason's Deli was a popular choice when we first decided on the Sub'r Bowl contender list. I'm not sure why that is, since, to my knowledge, Jason's Deli doesn't actually advertize or sell subs on their menu. Well, that's not entirely true, as they do have a couple of items under a "Subs" section on their menu; but it didn't look promising, and I was expecting very little.

Sub'r Bowl Review: W. D. Deli

This week begins the final round of the Sub'r Bowl. W. D. Deli isn't strictly speaking a sub shop, but we were coming up short on reputable places to fill out the Local Sub Shop Division. However, since you can order any sandwich combination you like on a hoagie roll, you might call it the ultimate customizable sub shop. It's all in how you look at it.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Cerroni's The Original Purple Garlic

It's week 12 of the Sub'r Bowl, which, due to an earlier mix-up in the schedule, ends this round in the Local, Pizza Shop Division. The original schedule had featured VJs Pizza, which is a place none of us had heard of but had great reviews — until recently. Apparently the place changed owners, and now the web site is gone and the intarwebs are full of complaints. So for the second time in this division we went to an alternate, Cerroni's the Original Purple Garlic.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Quiznos

As the nearest competitor in terms of sheer national presence, this week's Sub'r Bowl visit to Quiznos was anticipated to be a head to head comparison to the super-chain Subway in the National Chain Over 1000 Locations Division. To my surprise, even though I think I would prefer a Quiznos sub to that of Subway, the scoring came out remarkably similar.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Thundercloud Subs

Although Thundercloud Subs is somewhat more than local but less than chain, it is nonetheless the third competitor in the Local Sandwich Shop Division. This shop has 28 locations, mostly in Austin, with two in the San Antonio area. You don't get to that level of success without doing a few things right, so we were about to see how they stacked up to the rest of the competition in the Sub'r Bowl.

Decoding a Rotary Encoder

I recently acquired a rotary encoder to use as an input device for my hardware project. Knowing that such encoders make use of Gray code, I cracked open my Digital Design textbook and began coding a sketch for my Arduino. It wasn't as straightforward as I had hoped.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Jimmy John's Gourmet Sandwiches

Although last week was technically half way through the Sub'r Bowl, due to the shop being in the "wrong" Division, I consider this week's review of Jimmy John's Gourmet Sandwiches to be the half way point. For some reason I was dreading a visit to the National Chain Over 1000 Locations Division, but sometimes it's nice to be wrong.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Lenny's Sub Shop

This week's Sub'r Bowl review is for Lenny's Sub Shop, which is actually in the same Division that we hit two weeks ago. We were supposed to be visiting a shop in the "National Chain Over 1000 Locations" Division, but this was actually my fault. I mistakenly thought Lenny's was in that division (and I couldn't be more wrong: only about 200 locations in 20 states), but in the grand scheme of things it's not really that important, and we had a good lunch.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Florio's Pizza

For the second round in the Pizza Shops Division of the Sub'r Bowl we hit Florio's Pizza. I'm a fan of their New York style pizza, but I'd never had any of their subs before. Greg had been going on since the beginning of the Sub'r Bowl about how he wanted to try Florio's, not only because he loves the pizza, but also because he had heard the subs were good. Well, he finally got his wish.

Splitting a Path to a list in Python

At work today I needed to split a file path into it's various directory and subdirectory components using Python. While the result of os.path.split can be inversed with os.path.join, they don't do what you might intuitively think they do. A cursory search on Google, while turning up various and sometimes overbuilt solutions, didn't give me a quick and dirty function to accomplish this task, so I wrote one myself.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Firehouse Subs

The next visit in the Sub'r Bowl is Firehouse Subs. It's the second shop we've hit in the National Chain, Under 1000 Locations Division. I had never been to one of these before, although I was aware of them, so I was interested to see what they had to offer.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Boston Subworks

The naysayers of our group didn't think it would last 2 weeks, but this week marks the beginning of round 2 of the Sub'r Bowl, bringing us back to Division C, local sandwich shops. We decided on Boston Subworks, my favorite place in town for a cheese steak sandwich.

AnyPWM Revisited

In my original post, I presented an Arduino sketch that could output PWM on any digital pin. It occurred to me spontaneously that the code was horribly inefficient, both in size and execution. So I've refactored the code a bit, and now it appears to work at least as well as the built in PWM functions.

PWM on Any Digital Pin on Arduino

I recently got an Arduino to play around with. It's been a few years since I've done some electronics hacking, and I wanted to get back into the hobby. There are tons of low cost embedded microcontrollers to play with these days, compared to when I was back in college, so I decided to give the Arduino a try. My first experiment was to emit PWM signals on any of the digital output pins.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Subway

The Sub'r Bowl contender this week is the most well known but least anticipated Subway, the king of Division A and, well, just about every sandwich shop in existence. With more than 33,000 stores, that's now more locations than McDonalds!

Sub'r Bowl Review: Ray's Pizzaria

This week's challenger is an alternate that's stepped up to be first in the Pizza Shop division: Ray's Pizzaria (sic, herein referred to as simply "Ray's," because the misspelling of pizzeria makes my spell checker and baby Jesus cry). Ray's is previously the Blanco location of Goomba's Pizzeria (correctly spelled) but is supposedly run by the same people. I don't really know what that means, since there is a specific owner of Goomba's, but this is a review of a sandwich, not restaurant history.

Sub'r Bowl Review: Earl of Sandwich

My second review for the SUB'r Bowl is the Earl of Sandwich. It's in the National Chain Restaurant, Under 1000 Locations division.

Sub'r Bowl Review: R&B's Taste of Chicago

This is my first review for our little "SUB'r Bowl" we're playing at work. Each week we try a different sub shop from one of 16 sub places, broken up into 4 "divisions" and 2 "conferences." The first place we tried was R&B's Taste of Chicago.