March 29, 2008 – 10:15 am
What is it about a good restaurant that makes you (or me, at least) feel the desire to try and convince everyone else you know to go there?
Last night, our second trip to The Melting Pot secured its place at (or at least near) the top of the list of my favorite places to eat. It really is a unique dining experience; so much variety throughout the various courses, but it all still fits together and everything is excellent. It’s interesting how the “communal cooking” process almost forces you to slow down and savor your meal and your company, too.
You can get a visual sample / walkthru of what it’s like on their web site (assuming you have the Flash player installed and enabled), but nothing beats actually going and doing it. So, go and do it!
In case you didn’t hear about it (I didn’t until yesterday - quite a bit behind on the news), Arthur C. Clarke passed away a few days ago.
He was one of my favorite sci-fi writers, for reasons too numerous to list here. His influential ideas, such as the often quoted three laws of prediction, span the boundaries between imaginative story telling and real world science, theory, and philosophy.
In my opinion, he brought out the very best in the genre of science fiction by telling stories in a manner that actually inspires hope for the real-world future, and stirs a desire to challenge the boundaries of what we know and accept to be the limits placed upon us and our world.
Like many others, my fascination with his work began with the movies (2001 and 2010). I was later thrilled to spot the third book in the series (2061) in a used book store for 50 cents, and I didn’t even know it existed before that moment. I devoured it and then quickly sought out the final book in the series (3001). The latter two never made their way to the motion pictures, but are still just as interesting and thought provoking as the first two.
Here’s hoping that the generation(s) of scientists and creative thinkers he inspired will go on to discover and achieve some of the great things they have been allowed to dream about because of the stories they’ve read, and that his work will continue to foster the imaginations of people for ages to come.
March 26, 2008 – 11:16 pm
You may remember my optimistic review of Mugshot a while back. In the six months that have transpired since then, I’ve kept using it, in hopes that the negative aspects I was willing to put up with would get ironed out.
Unfortunately, things haven’t progressed very far at all. In this day and age I find it less and less acceptable for a system like this to not offer (complete) RSS feeds to keep up with the content. Heck, even e-mail notices would be an acceptable alternative, but as of right now, there are still several key parts of the system that you can only see by using the client app or going directly to their site in a browser.
I orginally believed that the saving grace would be its open nature; that some eager developer out there would step in and provide the features that I (and I’m sure others) perceive as “missing”. No luck, unfortunately. Occasionally, I’ve even briefly pondered doing it myself, but the fact is there’s only so much time in the day, and for me, there’s not enough for this. Further, as evidenced by the glacially slow progress of the API, it doesn’t even seem that Red Hat is really behind it all that strongly either.
I’ll still keep my account and check it periodically, but only because there are a few people that post stuff and share links using that system exclusively (at least as far as I can tell) that I want to keep up with. I honestly would have dropped it altogether a while ago if not for that.
But, as I do continue to use it, every time I have to switch over to their app or website directly it stands out in sharp contrast to all the other similar services I don’t have to do that for. Here’s hoping they get better.
PS - maybe someone will see this post and comment, pointing me to a vibrant community of third party apps built to address the stuff that I’m looking for that I just haven’t found yet. Keeping my fingers crossed…
March 24, 2008 – 10:04 pm
Just a short note to restart the posting habit on this: I put five pounds back on during the time I was gone and the week before it, but since I’ve been back I’ve managed to get back to where I started. So, as of today I’m officially back on track and 22 pounds lighter than when I started. Still got a ways to go, but I’m looking forward to getting back into “serious” mode for another round.
I’ve been running the alpha build of the next version of Ubuntu for a while now, and the other day I encountered a situation that surprised me by revealing how ugly the web has gotten lately. As is the case when running an alpha release, occasionally some parts are updated before others, and in this case Firefox 3 was updated to a version that the AdBlock Plus extenion hadn’t supported yet (although that update came the next day).
It was odd how many sites are covered with (and aesthetically ruined by) ads. Even the ones that fit in (in terms of style and/or context) are still extremely annoying when you’ve gotten used to not seeing them. I guess the ad blocking extension (plus others like NoSscript) has been sheltering me to the degree that I didn’t notice how bad it was getting.
Anyone else notice this? If you are browsing the web without these kind of extensions, why?
Well, I haven’t posted much on this yet so far, and I don’t know if I’ll get time to do much posting anytime soon; maybe after I get back I’ll go into more detail on all the stuff.
Right now I’m just basically getting time to catch my breath and do a few quick posts, catch up on feeds, etc., because it’s been basically a solid week of good technical learning. There’s a huge amount of new stuff to explore, and (as usual with these types of things) the main challenge is resisting the urge to jump in and start a hundred new little side projects to explore all the new stuff, and ending up staying up all night, etc.
On the non-techie front, the plane ride up was pretty bumpy. Going from LA to San Jose airport they use the smaller planes, so you really feel the turbulence quite a bit. A couple people I talked to on the plane that make the trip regularly did say that it was rougher than usual, so at least that’s encouraging for the upcoming ride back.
I’ve got a rare chunk of free time now tonight, so I think I’ll spend the rest of it catching up on non-programming related stuff (for a bit of balance), head out to grab some dinner, and then maybe watch a few of the Star Trek episodes I brought with me.
Well, my regular routine has been a bit disrupted lately, starting last week with Martha being gone and continuing into this week with me being out of town.
I did try to get back on track a bit while I’m up here by tracking down a small local gym that gave me a deal for a 7 day pass for $20. This was substantially better than the “big” fitness chains that have locations around here were offering (basically either ~$70 for a whole month or $10 per day). So, if you’re ever in the Silicon Valley area for more than a few days, I recommend “Fitness 19″.
One good thing is that I’ve been going twice a day (morning and afternoon). I’m hoping that will offset the restaurant eating to some degree, but I’m looking forward to getting back home soon.