I had an interesting experience yesterday flying back from a quick visit to San Francisco... A Chinese woman was seating in the aisle seat, next to another woman, and I was in the window seat, so I could easily hear the conversation beetween the two women.
The Chinese woman struck up a conversation and quickly moved on to a question: "Is it incorrect to say 'speak wrongly' in English, for example: 'People in America don't correct you when you speak wrongly' ?"
It turns out the Chinese woman was in San Francisco for an English class and had chatted to someone earlier that evening while waiting for the plane. She had lamented the fact that people generally don't correct non-native English speakers when they make mistakes. People are too polite or forgiving and let things slide, assuming they understand the gist of what the non-native speaker is saying. The other person, thus encouraged to be critical of her mistakes, had told her "You can't say 'speak wrongly', that's not correct English. You should say 'speak wrong'..."
So, fast-forward to the conversation next to me in the plane, and the Chinese woman has just posed the question to the American woman next to me. "Yes, that's correct. Wrongly isn't a word", she said. I could tell the Chinese woman was puzzled and trying to make sense of this - she had been using wrongly for several years. (I should add that in general her English was good, with a fairly heavy Mandarin accent though).
The Chinese woman seemed to have a superior grasp of English grammar and asked the other woman "But isn't wrong an adjective? Can you use it as an adverb too? 'Speak wrong' means that wrong is an adverb, right?" The American woman seemed a bit confused at this and admitted that English was never her strongest subject in school, so the academic discussion ended there.
It should be obvious that I was squirming in my seat and wanting to butt in, but I wasn't sure how to enter the conversation and not make the woman in the middle of us feel bad, plus I would then be talking over her to the Chinese woman, possibly for much of the rest of the flight... So I stayed quiet.
Needless to say, wrongly is a word and can be replaced by "incorrectly" in the Chinese woman's original usage: "Speakign English incorrectly". I hope she does a check in her dictionary when she gets home, or asks her English teacher. Then she can confidently correct people when they tell her she's "speaking wrong" in future! :)
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Using RED for fair bandwidth usage
George Ou recently wrote an article titled "Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control" which starts off (my emphasis added):
All this is quite topical given Comcast's attempts to throttle peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on their network, the FCC's involvement, and Comcast's recent promise to "stop meddling".
Nate Lawson wrote two great blog posts to address George Ou's article - effectively saying that the TCP/IP stack does not need to be swapped out and we don't need a complex new protocol to deal with the congestion problem. A simple option is to use RED (Rapid Early Discard) and Nate goes on to explain why this would work. Nate's 2nd post addresses Check the out here:
Bob Briscoe (Chief researcher at the BT Network Research Centre) is on a mission to tackle one of the biggest problems facing the Internet. He wants the world to know that TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) congestion control is fundamentally broken and he has a proposal for the IETF to fix the root cause of the problem.
All this is quite topical given Comcast's attempts to throttle peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on their network, the FCC's involvement, and Comcast's recent promise to "stop meddling".
Nate Lawson wrote two great blog posts to address George Ou's article - effectively saying that the TCP/IP stack does not need to be swapped out and we don't need a complex new protocol to deal with the congestion problem. A simple option is to use RED (Rapid Early Discard) and Nate goes on to explain why this would work. Nate's 2nd post addresses Check the out here:
Thursday, March 06, 2008
3D graphics in Excel
Cutting-edge computer games use different graphics subsystems -- so-called 3D graphics engines. Source (used in Half Life 2), Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament), idTech 4 (Doom 3), CryENGINE2 (Crysis) or Clever's Paradox engine are well-known among the players and the game industry experts.
It's time to learn a new 3D game engine name: Microsoft Excel.
See the full article here, and be sure to check out the movies too.
My hat is off to you, sir!
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
They don't break plates here...
In Cape Town I used to enjoy going to some of the great Greek restaurants, and was always amused at the custom of smashing plates. (You can image how cool this seemed to me as a kid). Most of the restaurants would charge a small fee per plate you broke, and it was not too common to see people doing it, but rowdier parties and group celebrations would often end with ouzo, music, dancing and plate-smashing.
So, it is fairly interesting to note that in Seattle, not only are Greek restaurants less common than in SA, but plate-throwing is unheard of. It looks like the custom is on the way out everywhere. For example, in the UK restaurants have switched to less dangerous activities like tossing flowers, mainly to avoid the risk of injuries to customers and law-suits.
PS: You know you're in a Seattle Greek restaurant when you see salmon on the menu :-)
So, it is fairly interesting to note that in Seattle, not only are Greek restaurants less common than in SA, but plate-throwing is unheard of. It looks like the custom is on the way out everywhere. For example, in the UK restaurants have switched to less dangerous activities like tossing flowers, mainly to avoid the risk of injuries to customers and law-suits.
PS: You know you're in a Seattle Greek restaurant when you see salmon on the menu :-)
Monday, February 25, 2008
Ag Pleez Deddy
This song by Jeremy Taylor became a part of South African culture to the extent that even though I was born a decade or mroe after it was released, I still grew up hearing and singing it.
Here's a YouTube video of the older Jeremy Taylor singing a shortened version, so even the readers from the UK and US and A can appreciate its glory!
In telling {A} about this song, I realized my memory of the lyrics was a bit fuzzy, so I was happy to find them online. Have a look at the full lyrics here (be warned, some of the words would be percieved as racist/non-PC now). That website also has some nice details on the song.
Here's a YouTube video of the older Jeremy Taylor singing a shortened version, so even the readers from the UK and US and A can appreciate its glory!
In telling {A} about this song, I realized my memory of the lyrics was a bit fuzzy, so I was happy to find them online. Have a look at the full lyrics here (be warned, some of the words would be percieved as racist/non-PC now). That website also has some nice details on the song.
The joys of wedding registry shopping at JCPenny's
Warning: Shameless whining and venting ahead.
This past weekend {A} and I went to the local shopping mall to get our wedding registry kick-started. We had some some research and planning in advance and knew which dinner set we wanted, and the prices that Macy's and JCPenny's charged for said set. (Let's refer to JCPenny's JCP from now on - they seem to like that abbreviation too...)
Needless to say, JCP was cheaper than Macy's. (For my SAfrican readers, JCP is kind-of equivalent to Mr.Price, whereas Macy's is more like Stuttafords or Woolies). So, off to JCP we went... To do a wedding (or general gift) registry, JCP has gone the totally automated, inpersonal route. (The first warning sign). A PC kiosk asks you for your pertinent info and then plays a "training video" with the audio so low you practically need to plaster your ear to the case to hear anything. Lovely... Part of the training video related to dinnerware, and instructed us to use the "Dinnerware Selection Book" at the kiosk to find the set we wanted ("choose from our extensive collection" yadda yadda), and then use a bar-code scanner gun to read the bar-code of the set we wanted. All well and good, but the afore-mentioned book was no-where to be found.
Thinking "outside the kiosk", we searched around the actualy dinnerware display area, but came up empty-handed. A helpful cachier redirected us to the customer-support / catalogue counter (which was next to another gift registry kiosk - a good sign I though). The person behind the counter looked at us blankly as we explained what we were looking for, and we very quickly realized she had never heard of this book. So, I resorted to Plan C (or perhaps Plan D, I lost track...) We used the telephone on the side of the registry kiosk to talk to - gasp! - a real person!
The helpful chap on the other end of the line informed us that the book should be under the keyboard at the kiosk, or very close to it. I informed it was not there. He then suggested I speak to the store manager... So, back to the person at the catalog counter to chase down the manager. For some reason the manager was only available over a walkie-talkie. (I guess phones are passe?) Luckily the counter-person cranked up the volume so that we (and everyon in a 1-mile radius) could hear the manager: Evidently the book had been discontinued in January 2008, and we were SOL (sweet outta luck). No apologies. No mention of an alternative. No humble admittance that the kiosk video is out-dated and misleading...
So, {A} and I were left feeling incredibly frustrated and disappointed. We decided to not register for anything at JCP and instead went to Macy's and were almost ready to not register for any dinnerware at all (since Macy's didn't have the color we wanted available online and their price was almost double JCP's ). A real person took our personal details and walked us through using the bar-code scanner (uh, thanks) and we then started browsing. Most of the linen and bed stuff was not our style, so we had difficulty getting started, but the kitchen department fixed that, and we soon had a lot on our list.
We had also asked the store assistant whether the dinnerware we wanted was available in the color we liked, and yes, he was able to find it! Despite the price being higher, we added it to our registry, and got a nice surprise when we got home and checked our list online: the dishes were the exact same price as JCP had been offering! So, after all that mental anguish, we were able to get what we wanted, with great service, and without paying more!
This past weekend {A} and I went to the local shopping mall to get our wedding registry kick-started. We had some some research and planning in advance and knew which dinner set we wanted, and the prices that Macy's and JCPenny's charged for said set. (Let's refer to JCPenny's JCP from now on - they seem to like that abbreviation too...)
Needless to say, JCP was cheaper than Macy's. (For my SAfrican readers, JCP is kind-of equivalent to Mr.Price, whereas Macy's is more like Stuttafords or Woolies). So, off to JCP we went... To do a wedding (or general gift) registry, JCP has gone the totally automated, inpersonal route. (The first warning sign). A PC kiosk asks you for your pertinent info and then plays a "training video" with the audio so low you practically need to plaster your ear to the case to hear anything. Lovely... Part of the training video related to dinnerware, and instructed us to use the "Dinnerware Selection Book" at the kiosk to find the set we wanted ("choose from our extensive collection" yadda yadda), and then use a bar-code scanner gun to read the bar-code of the set we wanted. All well and good, but the afore-mentioned book was no-where to be found.
Thinking "outside the kiosk", we searched around the actualy dinnerware display area, but came up empty-handed. A helpful cachier redirected us to the customer-support / catalogue counter (which was next to another gift registry kiosk - a good sign I though). The person behind the counter looked at us blankly as we explained what we were looking for, and we very quickly realized she had never heard of this book. So, I resorted to Plan C (or perhaps Plan D, I lost track...) We used the telephone on the side of the registry kiosk to talk to - gasp! - a real person!
The helpful chap on the other end of the line informed us that the book should be under the keyboard at the kiosk, or very close to it. I informed it was not there. He then suggested I speak to the store manager... So, back to the person at the catalog counter to chase down the manager. For some reason the manager was only available over a walkie-talkie. (I guess phones are passe?) Luckily the counter-person cranked up the volume so that we (and everyon in a 1-mile radius) could hear the manager: Evidently the book had been discontinued in January 2008, and we were SOL (sweet outta luck). No apologies. No mention of an alternative. No humble admittance that the kiosk video is out-dated and misleading...
So, {A} and I were left feeling incredibly frustrated and disappointed. We decided to not register for anything at JCP and instead went to Macy's and were almost ready to not register for any dinnerware at all (since Macy's didn't have the color we wanted available online and their price was almost double JCP's ). A real person took our personal details and walked us through using the bar-code scanner (uh, thanks) and we then started browsing. Most of the linen and bed stuff was not our style, so we had difficulty getting started, but the kitchen department fixed that, and we soon had a lot on our list.
We had also asked the store assistant whether the dinnerware we wanted was available in the color we liked, and yes, he was able to find it! Despite the price being higher, we added it to our registry, and got a nice surprise when we got home and checked our list online: the dishes were the exact same price as JCP had been offering! So, after all that mental anguish, we were able to get what we wanted, with great service, and without paying more!
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Poetic booze advice from around the world
There are a few verses in different languages that all purport to give advice about what to drink when (i.e. which order to drink things in). The sad thing is that they can't quite agree amongst themselves:
- English: Beer after wine and you'll feel fine; wine after beer and you'll feel queer
- German: Bier auf Wein das lass sein; Wein auf Bier das rat' ich Dir. (Roughly: Don't touch beer after wine; but wine after beer is fine)
The French notably ignore beer and instead focus on red versus white wine:
- Blanc sur rouge, rien ne bouge; rouge sur blanc, tout fout le camp. (Roughly: White on red won't go to your head; red on white and you're out for the night.)
This page on the Gaurdian website goes into more detail on these and other sayings.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The Perry Bible Fellowship
{A} and I went to Portland this past weekend for a little post-Valentine's-day break. This of course meant we visited Powell's, and one of the fun things I discovered there was the Perry Bible Fellowship - wickedly funny cartoons for fans of The Far Side. ("The Trial of Colonel Sweeto" is the book.)
Friday, February 15, 2008
1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc
No, sadly this is not a personal tasting note of the '47 Cheval Blanc. (I should be so lucky!)
Slate has an interesting article by Mike Steinberger on how a "defective wine from an aberrant year" became (by all accounts) a great wine. It's a nicely written piece...
Slate has an interesting article by Mike Steinberger on how a "defective wine from an aberrant year" became (by all accounts) a great wine. It's a nicely written piece...
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Dual-booting Vista and Ubuntu / Linux
I recently decided to fresh-install my laptop, and decided this time I'd like to have it dual-boot Vista and a Linux distro (I chose Ubuntu 7.10 after playing with it for a while, but what I write about below should work with almost any current *nix distro).
The tricky thing was that I wanted to keep using Vista Bitlocker Drive Encryption (BDE), since my laptop has a TPM and having the drive encrypted means I don't need to worry as much about having my laptop stolen and all my data being up for grabs. BDE is a bit tricky to set up at the best of times, but luckily at work we have a Remote Installation Services (RIS) server that makes it a lot easier.
So, I booted my laptop, selected a network boot, and selected the Vista Bitlocker setup from the RIS menu. This re-paritions your drive and creates two partitions for Windows to use (one small one for the Bitlocker boot stuff, and the main one for your Vista install). I selected the manual setup option so I could create two more partitions for Linux to use (one for extfs3 and one for swap). Then The Vista setup trundled along and within an hour I had a nice Vista setup (with Office 2007 installed already - how sweet it that!?)
At this stage, BDE is not yet enabled on your Vista drive - you need to go into the control panel and enable it. But I knew I wanted to hold off until my Ubuntu install was done, otherwise when the Ubuntu install changed the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the hard drive, Bitlocker would "throw a wobbly". (Yes, that's the technical term)
The next step was to insert the Ubuntu 7.10 CD and reboot the machine from it. The Ubuntu install is very slick and went without any hitches. Now when my laptop rebooted, I was presented with the GRUB boot loader, which let me choose between Ubuntu or Vista.
Now at this point I should mention that I subsequently found out that this is not the best order to do things. This blog has incredible information, but sadly I only found out about it after I had installed Vista and Ubuntu. The preferred order is to install Ubuntu first, then install Vista... (That way the Vista boot loader is one sitting in the MBR) However, using the information from the afore-mentioned blog, you can quite easily get the system working even if you've installed things in the "wrong" order like I did.
The key pages to read for instructions are this one and this one. The modified steps I used, based on the info in these pages, is then:
The tricky thing was that I wanted to keep using Vista Bitlocker Drive Encryption (BDE), since my laptop has a TPM and having the drive encrypted means I don't need to worry as much about having my laptop stolen and all my data being up for grabs. BDE is a bit tricky to set up at the best of times, but luckily at work we have a Remote Installation Services (RIS) server that makes it a lot easier.
So, I booted my laptop, selected a network boot, and selected the Vista Bitlocker setup from the RIS menu. This re-paritions your drive and creates two partitions for Windows to use (one small one for the Bitlocker boot stuff, and the main one for your Vista install). I selected the manual setup option so I could create two more partitions for Linux to use (one for extfs3 and one for swap). Then The Vista setup trundled along and within an hour I had a nice Vista setup (with Office 2007 installed already - how sweet it that!?)
At this stage, BDE is not yet enabled on your Vista drive - you need to go into the control panel and enable it. But I knew I wanted to hold off until my Ubuntu install was done, otherwise when the Ubuntu install changed the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the hard drive, Bitlocker would "throw a wobbly". (Yes, that's the technical term)
The next step was to insert the Ubuntu 7.10 CD and reboot the machine from it. The Ubuntu install is very slick and went without any hitches. Now when my laptop rebooted, I was presented with the GRUB boot loader, which let me choose between Ubuntu or Vista.
Now at this point I should mention that I subsequently found out that this is not the best order to do things. This blog has incredible information, but sadly I only found out about it after I had installed Vista and Ubuntu. The preferred order is to install Ubuntu first, then install Vista... (That way the Vista boot loader is one sitting in the MBR) However, using the information from the afore-mentioned blog, you can quite easily get the system working even if you've installed things in the "wrong" order like I did.
The key pages to read for instructions are this one and this one. The modified steps I used, based on the info in these pages, is then:
- Step 1 – Install GRUB on the Linux partition (outside of MBR) (See step 1 here)
- Step 2 – Get a copy of Linux boot sector (See step 2 here)
- Step 3 - Boot into the Vista Recovery Environment (RE) using the Vista DVD / RIS server. You'll need to run bootrec.exe and tell it to fix the MBR record. (See this page for info)
- Step 4 - You should be able to reboot from the hard-drive and Vista will load automatically (there will be no option to boot Ubuntu since Vista doesn't know about it yet...) Log in to Vista, and...
- Step 4 - Set up Windows Vista Boot Manager to boot Linux. (See step 4 here)
- Step 5 - Enable BitLocker on Windows Vista (See step 7 here)
(I also removed Vista from the GRUB boot menu, since we're now using the Vista loader to boot into Vista. This is pretty easy to do, just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and remove the Vista entries form the end of the file).
Step 4 will take a few hours as it needs to encrypt the hard-drive contents, but once that is done you should be set...
Monday, February 11, 2008
Slate video blog
I don't normally go for the viral-video thing and don't subscribe to many video blogs (WineLibraryTV is the only one). Slate have managed to get me hooked, though. Their Slate V video blog is a great way to see the best videos doing the rounds, without having to dig through the dreck on Youtube.
Some recent highlights:
Some recent highlights:
- Drunk History 2 and 2.5
- Tom Cruise / Hilary Clinton mashup
- "Ch-ch-changes" US Presidential mashup
Some ones that haven't made it to Slate, but that {A} introduced me to:
- "Charlie bit my finger"
- Harry Potter Puppet Pals - "The Mysterious Ticking Noise"
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Ubuntu 7.10 on Microsoft Virtual PC
File this under the "dear-god-it-shouldn't-be-so-hard" department...
It turns out that installing Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux 7.10 under Microsoft Virtual PC is a bit of a bugger. Luckily there are some helpful lads on the Web that have blogged instructions on how to fix things:
It turns out that installing Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux 7.10 under Microsoft Virtual PC is a bit of a bugger. Luckily there are some helpful lads on the Web that have blogged instructions on how to fix things:
- This blog entry is pretty good but for some reason I had problems getting the "-- i8042.noloop" option to work after Ubuntu was installed on my hard drive - the boot would just hang.
- This one is a good 2nd source of info, and it covers topics like enabling the network card and sound in VPC, plus using the text console to edit your config (nice when the mouse doesn't work).
- There is also a good comment from someone called Dan that explain how to change the Grub settings "properly", and how you shouldn't really remove the usplash package.
Between these three I was able to get a system working. Good luck to you should you be attempting the same thing. Some of this should be fixed in newer versions of the Linux kernel so hopefully there will be less pain for others in the future :)
TV in a dry,dry season
There's not much decent on TV at the moment, mainly due to the Writer's Guild strike dragging on. You know times are lean when the most entertaining thing on TV is "American Gladiator" and "The Biggest Loser" goes from 1 hour episodes to 2 hours...
Further adding to my sense of ennui is news that Battlestar Galactica is now due bug in April, but there are a few glimmers of hope. Somehow they managed to get a new episode of "House" out this week (there are three new episodes scheduled). How did they manage that?
There are a few surprises though, like the new AMC series "Breaking Bad". This is a deliciously black comedy from one of the producer's of "The X-Files" (Vince Gilligan). The show stars Bryan Cranston (the dad from "Malcolm in the Middle"), and tells the story of a high school chemistry teacher that has a bit of a mid-life crisis and decides to cook crack. Great writing, photography, music and acting in the pilot episode really grabbed me. (And it helps that I am a fan of dark comedies). I'm hooked - the DVR is set to record the rest of the season (which sadly has been cut short due to the afore-mentioned strike).
For more info, check out the show's blog here.
Further adding to my sense of ennui is news that Battlestar Galactica is now due bug in April, but there are a few glimmers of hope. Somehow they managed to get a new episode of "House" out this week (there are three new episodes scheduled). How did they manage that?
There are a few surprises though, like the new AMC series "Breaking Bad". This is a deliciously black comedy from one of the producer's of "The X-Files" (Vince Gilligan). The show stars Bryan Cranston (the dad from "Malcolm in the Middle"), and tells the story of a high school chemistry teacher that has a bit of a mid-life crisis and decides to cook crack. Great writing, photography, music and acting in the pilot episode really grabbed me. (And it helps that I am a fan of dark comedies). I'm hooked - the DVR is set to record the rest of the season (which sadly has been cut short due to the afore-mentioned strike).
For more info, check out the show's blog here.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Geek humour
This image was part of someone's email signature at work.
Can you guess which famous poet and playwright inspired this?
Can you guess which famous poet and playwright inspired this?
Thursday, January 24, 2008
It's a small world (sort of)
When I was a kid, my first PC was a pretty crummy 4.77 MHz XT. Some of my friends were very cool and had fast AT machines with sound cards (mostly Sound Blasters), and I was very envious, especially when my friends and I discovered MOD files (tracked music).
MOD files originated on the Amiga computer, I believe, and allowed you to play complicated multi-track music on low-end PCs by mixing different samples of instruments, voice, etc. and doing clever things like changing the pitch. Some of the MOD files were very impressive, especially those by a tracker call U4ia. A blog post I stumbled on has some basic info about him, and reminded me about the first MOD-playing program I used - ModPlay.
By then I had upgraded to an AT machine (one with a Turbo switch - "Who would want to ever turn that off", I wondered?) ModPlay could play music through the PC speaker, but the quality was not very good, and at the time I couldn't afford to buy a Sound Blaster card. Luckily for me, ModPlay came with instructions on how to build your own simple D/A converter, which connected to the parallel (printer) port. For the cost of a few IC's, resistors, and capacitors I was able to build a pretty decent 8-bit "sound card", which I hooked up to the cheap "all-in-one" stereo we had at home. The sound was incredible - better than most of my friend's sound cards! :)
I was interested to see that the author of ModPlay (also named Mark) now works as a Security Response Lead at RedHat. That's pretty similar to what I do now, so once again the Web leads around in strange circles...
MOD files originated on the Amiga computer, I believe, and allowed you to play complicated multi-track music on low-end PCs by mixing different samples of instruments, voice, etc. and doing clever things like changing the pitch. Some of the MOD files were very impressive, especially those by a tracker call U4ia. A blog post I stumbled on has some basic info about him, and reminded me about the first MOD-playing program I used - ModPlay.
By then I had upgraded to an AT machine (one with a Turbo switch - "Who would want to ever turn that off", I wondered?) ModPlay could play music through the PC speaker, but the quality was not very good, and at the time I couldn't afford to buy a Sound Blaster card. Luckily for me, ModPlay came with instructions on how to build your own simple D/A converter, which connected to the parallel (printer) port. For the cost of a few IC's, resistors, and capacitors I was able to build a pretty decent 8-bit "sound card", which I hooked up to the cheap "all-in-one" stereo we had at home. The sound was incredible - better than most of my friend's sound cards! :)
I was interested to see that the author of ModPlay (also named Mark) now works as a Security Response Lead at RedHat. That's pretty similar to what I do now, so once again the Web leads around in strange circles...
Sunday, January 20, 2008
The Case of the Weird Copenhagen
Yesterday {A} an I were out and about and stopped off at Tully's (a local coffee chain). I noticed this odd-looking copenhagen in their pastry fridge and felt compelled to take a picture :)
This reminded me of the "real" copenhagens from my childhood in SA, especially the ones my mom used to get for her coffee shop in Cape Town. I think she got hers from a nice little bakery in town called French's, and they looked more like this...
Now that's what a copenhagen should look like! For extra yumminess you could get these toasted - they'd be cut in half and toasted on one of those large flat-top sandwich grills and then covered with butter. Ahh....
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
A nice poem (snippet)
I caught NPR's Writer's Almanac today and liked the poem that was read at the end, A Color of the Sky by Tony Hoagland. The last two stanzas especially appealed to me:
Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Great movies abound
The past few weeks have been very good in terms of movies - this time of year is usually packed with Oscar contenders, so almost all of them are on by want-to-see list.
I saw Charlie Wilson's War last weekend and enjoyed it. Tom Hanks is great (as usual) and the movie moves along at a brisk pace despite covering lots of ground. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, so the dialogue is beautiful. The film's "message" is serious, but the rest of the film is quite light an entertaining, so it almost suckers you into the final punch.
Another surprise highlight was Walk Hard. I went into this movie expecting nothing - maybe just a few laughs. What a pleasant surprise! There were some laugh-out-loud moments, some great songs (spot-on parodies of several decades of music), jibes at pop culture, and movies about musicians. (It helps if you've seen movies like Walk The Line or know a bit about Elvis, Johnny Cash, The Beatles...)
The most recent film was There Will Be Blood which I saw this past weekend. I went in to the movie in an unusually good mood which I think helped me appreciate the film more :) The film is unusal to say the least - don't expect a standard period piece or rags-to-riches story showing the benfits of hard work and determination. Go in expecting an artistic, gripping, gritty and startling film that sucks you in from the first few seconds. (A jarring note on strings announces the start of the film without any fanfare, and your nerves are instantly unsettled...) The first 20 minutes take place without any dialogue, but are still totally engrossing. When Daniel Day-Lewis' character finally did speak I found myself grinning and thinking "This is going to be reallllly good".
(OK, to be honest, I was telling myself that about 5 minutes into the film:) )
Kudos to Johnny Greenwood for the amazing soundtrack, Paul Thomas Anderson for (another) brilliant film, and Daniel Day-Lewis for a great performance!
PS: Stay for the credits and listen to the incredible closing music from Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major (Op.77)
I saw Charlie Wilson's War last weekend and enjoyed it. Tom Hanks is great (as usual) and the movie moves along at a brisk pace despite covering lots of ground. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, so the dialogue is beautiful. The film's "message" is serious, but the rest of the film is quite light an entertaining, so it almost suckers you into the final punch.
Another surprise highlight was Walk Hard. I went into this movie expecting nothing - maybe just a few laughs. What a pleasant surprise! There were some laugh-out-loud moments, some great songs (spot-on parodies of several decades of music), jibes at pop culture, and movies about musicians. (It helps if you've seen movies like Walk The Line or know a bit about Elvis, Johnny Cash, The Beatles...)
The most recent film was There Will Be Blood which I saw this past weekend. I went in to the movie in an unusually good mood which I think helped me appreciate the film more :) The film is unusal to say the least - don't expect a standard period piece or rags-to-riches story showing the benfits of hard work and determination. Go in expecting an artistic, gripping, gritty and startling film that sucks you in from the first few seconds. (A jarring note on strings announces the start of the film without any fanfare, and your nerves are instantly unsettled...) The first 20 minutes take place without any dialogue, but are still totally engrossing. When Daniel Day-Lewis' character finally did speak I found myself grinning and thinking "This is going to be reallllly good".
(OK, to be honest, I was telling myself that about 5 minutes into the film:) )
Kudos to Johnny Greenwood for the amazing soundtrack, Paul Thomas Anderson for (another) brilliant film, and Daniel Day-Lewis for a great performance!
PS: Stay for the credits and listen to the incredible closing music from Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major (Op.77)
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
New Year's Resolutions
I don't usually post these for all the world to see, since that makes it extra embarrassing when I fail to accomplish them. Several friends have taken the plunge, though, so I feel more inspired this year - so here goes!
- Get all the wedding and honeymoon planning done, and then remember to have fun!
- Exercise more. It's actually quite fun! Specifically, I'd like to:
- Go to gym 3+ times a week
- Find a good yoga class and go at least once a week
- Hike more in the summer, go backpacking at least once
- Ride a bike to/from work spring-fall
- Lose some weight. 10-20 lbs would be nice. Should be easy if #1 is done. My goal is to lose 10lbs a month which means I should be done by end of Feb. :)
- Meditate 3+ time a week for at least 30 mins.
- Take dancing lessons (enough so that by July I can dance well enough to feel confident)
- Take French lessons and get my vocab and grammar back to the point where I can hold a basic conversation and read news, etc.
- Keep in touch with my friends in far-away-places more often.
- Make more of an effort to socialize with friends. Have them round for dinner, drinks, movies or poker more often - once a month or more.
Happy Tweede Nuwe Jaar!
Yes, it that time of the year again! The Kaapse Klopse are doing their annual parade in Cape Town today - sadly I'll have to rely on the web to get a sense the spectacle.
So far I'm having a tough time finding pictures, so I'm using one I found for last year's post.
So far I'm having a tough time finding pictures, so I'm using one I found for last year's post.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Merry, uh, Holidays
Or Season's Greetings! Or Happy Hannukah! Or Happy Eid ul-Adah!
In celebration of the holidays, I bring you "The Spirit of Christmas" (and in Russian for those that prefer).
In celebration of the holidays, I bring you "The Spirit of Christmas" (and in Russian for those that prefer).
Good info on veg*n diets
We have a vegan/vegetarian (hence veg*n) distribution list at work, and one of the regular topics that comes up is good sources of protein. The next-most popular topics are iron and vitamin B-12, since many meat-eaters think that veg*ns can't possible get enough of these nutrients.
It turns out that with a little research/education, and a varied diet, you can meet all of your dietary needs with a veg*n diet.
In terms of education, the Internet has lots of good information... So much that it's hard to know where to start or who to trust. I'd recommend starting with the pages on the Vegan Society website.
It turns out that with a little research/education, and a varied diet, you can meet all of your dietary needs with a veg*n diet.
In terms of education, the Internet has lots of good information... So much that it's hard to know where to start or who to trust. I'd recommend starting with the pages on the Vegan Society website.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Brown really was a dumb idea
I rememebr when the first Zunes came out and everyone looked at the brown colour and went "Whaaaat?!"
Some folks said brown was an "in" colour (lots of fashion designers were using brown that year), and that Microsoft was riding the crest of the coolness wave and differentiating the Zune from the white iPod.
Cue 2007... The new Zunes are out, and brown is nowhere to be seen...
The old Zunes are on deep clearance (e.g. $109 on Buy.com). What colour is left?
You guessed it : Brown!
When all life on earth is extinct, there will be "mint in box" brown Zunes left as a testament to Man's ingenuity.
Some folks said brown was an "in" colour (lots of fashion designers were using brown that year), and that Microsoft was riding the crest of the coolness wave and differentiating the Zune from the white iPod.
Cue 2007... The new Zunes are out, and brown is nowhere to be seen...
The old Zunes are on deep clearance (e.g. $109 on Buy.com). What colour is left?
You guessed it : Brown!
When all life on earth is extinct, there will be "mint in box" brown Zunes left as a testament to Man's ingenuity.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Woodinville St. Nick's wine-tasting
Last weekend, a few friends and I sent to Woodinville for their annual St. Nicholas Open House. The event ran over both Saturday and Sunday, but we only did one day - next weekend I think I'll try to make it to both days, since there are far too many wineries to fit into one day. As it was, we did pretty well, visiting around 10 wineries in about 5 hours.
I had only basic knowledge of the area's wineries, having been to Chateau Ste. Michelle and Columbia Winery a few times, and having heard about a few of the bigger wineries like Januik.
We skipped most of these big names, but did stop in at the Januik / Novelty Hill winery, which is very impressive and modern. This was in contrast to our first stop of the day at DeLille Winery (which was one of the venues we looked at for our wedding). DeLille was very cozy and had lots of wood and country ambience (kudos for the huge roaring fire on a wet snowy day!). They also had passed hors d'ouevres and a cheese selection to die for... I didn't think their wines were that amazing, though (they have lots of awards, so I guess I'm not smart enough to appreciate their wines?)
Other wineries we tried were:
I had only basic knowledge of the area's wineries, having been to Chateau Ste. Michelle and Columbia Winery a few times, and having heard about a few of the bigger wineries like Januik.
We skipped most of these big names, but did stop in at the Januik / Novelty Hill winery, which is very impressive and modern. This was in contrast to our first stop of the day at DeLille Winery (which was one of the venues we looked at for our wedding). DeLille was very cozy and had lots of wood and country ambience (kudos for the huge roaring fire on a wet snowy day!). They also had passed hors d'ouevres and a cheese selection to die for... I didn't think their wines were that amazing, though (they have lots of awards, so I guess I'm not smart enough to appreciate their wines?)
A slight peeve at DeLille was that they stamped your St. Nicks booklet for every glass of wine you tasted, which was rather tedious and seemed cheap. (How many people would have abused their hospitality and drunk too much wine? No other winery felt the need to be this fastidious.)
Back to Januik / Novelty Hill: Their tasting was held in the actual winery, with loads of stainless steel fermentation tanks and oak barrels stacked to the ceiling. Their wines were clean, fruity and generally very good, but I thought they lacked some "character" and tasted a bit generic. (We were tasting their more everyday wines, which no doubt are made in a more approachable style). I did like their Cab Sauv and they had a very good Rose wine that we all liked. There was also a guy selling amazing savoury shortbread that came in several flavours, and each went very well with a particular kind of wine. A nice idea, and his stuff worked very well with wine (unlike some savoury biscotti we tried in Oregon this summer).
Other wineries we tried were:
- SilverLake (their adjoining tasting room also had incredible fruit wines from the Hoodsport Winery, and yummy chocolate truffles). We bought some blackberry and raspberry wine, which have already been had and enjoyed :)
- Facelli Winery, which is a small family-run winery tucked away in an industrial park. Their tasting room was small and a little cramped, but the family was on hand pouring their wines and very friendly.
- Northwest Totem Cellars were pouring their wines at the old Hollywood School House. They were defintely the most laid-back and inviting of all the wineries, not even looking at our St. Nick's booklet. They had an awesome folk band playing, and their wines were quite good. (I think I liked their Low Man Red the best, but the Cab Sauv was very nice too). Their first reds are being released this month, so keep an eye out for them!
- DiStefano Winery had some good wines and great food - their pumpkin soup was very welcome as the rain poured down outside.
The highlight of the day for me was the discovery of Pomum Cellars. The setup was basic but inviting and the wine-maker was on hand pouring his creation. Apparently they had some amazing cheese, but I missed it completely as I tasted the one wine they had out - they 2004 Shya Red. This was the only wine I tasted all day that made me go "Wow!". It's a Bordeaux-style blend with more of an old-world style and lots of character. I had a great time talking to the winemaker about how he got into the wine business, and his plans for the future. Since he's from Spain, he is working on some Spanish varietals and will have a Tempranillo coming out soon (next year?). I'm really excited to see what their future wines are like and would recommend trying their wines if you have the chance.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Columbia Winery moving
I just noticed this story on the Seattle Times website about the Columbia Winery in Woodinville. They are moving from their current iconic location, and will be looking for a new retail/sales location in or around Woodinville. The production facilities will move to Eastern Washington.
I also didn't realize that Columbia are owned by Constellation Brands. I've just finished reading The House of Mondavi about the Mondavi family and the collapse of the Robert Mondavi's wine empire. It was eventually bought by Constellation...
The book is great, by the way. Very readable and full of interesting anectdotes and facts about the wine industry. If you're interested in wine or rags-to-riches-to-rags* biographies, check out this book.
* OK, not rags in the end exactly, but you get the idea.
I also didn't realize that Columbia are owned by Constellation Brands. I've just finished reading The House of Mondavi about the Mondavi family and the collapse of the Robert Mondavi's wine empire. It was eventually bought by Constellation...
The book is great, by the way. Very readable and full of interesting anectdotes and facts about the wine industry. If you're interested in wine or rags-to-riches-to-rags* biographies, check out this book.
* OK, not rags in the end exactly, but you get the idea.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Costco spam
Sigh... I love the marketing spam many companies feel inclined to send their customers. Costco is one of the more persistent ones, sending a weekly email advertising their latest Chinese imports. As is legally required, they include an "unsubscribe" link in the email, and I tried (in vain) to unsubscribe today.
Frack me, but they've managed to make this way more complicated than needed. I guess they really don't want you to unsubscribe!!!??
- You can't unsubscribe by replying to their email. You must click on a link they provide in the email...
- The unsubscribe link is invalid and clicking on it does nothing. (The URL starts with "../" which is not a good sign :) )
- Their email includes a customer service email address, so I sent them a request to send me working unsbscribe link...
- This is the reply I got from the customer service "robot" :
- Clicking on the link they provide eventually leads to nice error message:
Thank you for contacting costco.com.Please note your e-mail has not been submitted to customer service as we have upgraded our e-mail system.Simply click here and follow 3 easy steps to submit your question. Our goal is to provide immediate assistance and continue to add features to improve the customer service experience.If the above link does not work, paste the following link into your browser: https://costco.egain.net/system/web/custom/initialPage.html?lang=en-US&topnav=&whse=BC
This is an automated response and any replies sent will not receive assistance.
Sincerely,
Costco Wholesale
Frack me, but they've managed to make this way more complicated than needed. I guess they really don't want you to unsubscribe!!!??
Friday, December 07, 2007
Office make-over
On Wednesday morning, after the ice-hockey game, I came in to work to find my office door looked a bit different:
The entire door was wrapped in gift wrap and had a nice bow around it. Inside, I found almost every object in my office wrapped in gift wrap! My chair, notice boards, monitors, keyboard and mouse, even my (empty) water cup and pen! This picture doesn't really do it justice (and I had unwrapped a few things by the time it was taken), but you get a rough idea:
I had no idea who had done this (yes, I'm slow) - initially thinking my boss or colleagues were pranking me. Then I recognized a few holiday decorations from our house (the reindeer), and a note on one monitor finally solved the mystery: My fiancee and friends had pranked me while I was out watching the ice-hockey! (It turns out they were not all watching the Sound of Music as they had said....)
Thanks to all the "naughty people" that did this! It was a huge surprise and made my day!
In closing, here's the light-up snowman head:
The entire door was wrapped in gift wrap and had a nice bow around it. Inside, I found almost every object in my office wrapped in gift wrap! My chair, notice boards, monitors, keyboard and mouse, even my (empty) water cup and pen! This picture doesn't really do it justice (and I had unwrapped a few things by the time it was taken), but you get a rough idea:
I had no idea who had done this (yes, I'm slow) - initially thinking my boss or colleagues were pranking me. Then I recognized a few holiday decorations from our house (the reindeer), and a note on one monitor finally solved the mystery: My fiancee and friends had pranked me while I was out watching the ice-hockey! (It turns out they were not all watching the Sound of Music as they had said....)
Thanks to all the "naughty people" that did this! It was a huge surprise and made my day!
In closing, here's the light-up snowman head:
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Picnik chuckle
I used the Picnik photo-editing application for the first time last night (it's the one that Flickr partners with, so it's the easiest way to tweak your Flickr pictures).
I must say I was mightily impressed. For a web app, it was slick, intuitive and worked nicely. (Granted I only cropped an image, but still, compared to the Windows picture editor it's a step or two ahead).
The loading screen is worth seeing - they've definitely followed the light-hearted tone used by Flickr for their website. So, in keeping with the name "Picnik", the loading screen informs you that the program is:
I must say I was mightily impressed. For a web app, it was slick, intuitive and worked nicely. (Granted I only cropped an image, but still, compared to the Windows picture editor it's a step or two ahead).
The loading screen is worth seeing - they've definitely followed the light-hearted tone used by Flickr for their website. So, in keeping with the name "Picnik", the loading screen informs you that the program is:
- Laying the blanket
- Buttering the bread
- Planting trees
- Warming the breeze
- etc.
Luckily ants and yellow-jackets are not mentioned...
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Ice Hockey
I went to my first ice hockey game last night, and had a fun time. Luckily my friends K & R wer there to explain the intricacies of the game to me, otherwise I would have been pretty lost.
It turns out ice hockey is blindingly fast and quite exciting to watch. I spent most of the evening trying to follow the puck around the court and figure out what random event had caused players to be sent to cool off. There was only one real fight during the game, no teeth went flying and there was no blood on the ice. The crowd was pretty bloodthirsty, and would rise and cheer whenever a player from the visiting team, the Tri-City Americans, got checked hard into the "glass" surrounding the ice.
Despite starting out well, the Seattle Thunderbirds slipped from the initial lead to a 2-2 draw and the game went into a 4-on-4 sudden death period, with the Tri-City Americans finally scoring a goal and winning 3-2. I have to say, the visitors outplayed the home team and deserved to win.
I suggested we drive out to the Tri-Cities for the next game, and keep supporting the winning team...
Some other random observations:
It turns out ice hockey is blindingly fast and quite exciting to watch. I spent most of the evening trying to follow the puck around the court and figure out what random event had caused players to be sent to cool off. There was only one real fight during the game, no teeth went flying and there was no blood on the ice. The crowd was pretty bloodthirsty, and would rise and cheer whenever a player from the visiting team, the Tri-City Americans, got checked hard into the "glass" surrounding the ice.
Despite starting out well, the Seattle Thunderbirds slipped from the initial lead to a 2-2 draw and the game went into a 4-on-4 sudden death period, with the Tri-City Americans finally scoring a goal and winning 3-2. I have to say, the visitors outplayed the home team and deserved to win.
I suggested we drive out to the Tri-Cities for the next game, and keep supporting the winning team...
Some other random observations:
- It's amusing to see the make-up of the teams, though. Take the Tri-City Americans, for example. Only 2 of the 23-strong team are from the USA, most being from Canada. I guess Canada was annexed and I missed the news ? Only 1 of the 23 Seattle Thunderbird players are from the USA, and none call Washington State home. It's kind of weird to see the fans get so, well, fanatical in support of the "local" team versus the visitors, considering they are basically two Canadian teams :)
- The visiting team had the coolest player names: T.J Fast and Colton Yellow Horn. They also had the funniest name: Brett Plouffe.
- Ice hockey fans like to shout "You suck!" a lot. The smart ones add a name to end, so everyone knows who the suckee is. A few people seemed to think everyone sucked, which was a bit severe, I thought.
- Food and beer cost and arm and a leg. I guess that helps to keep the crowd from getting totally hammered?
- The game is interrupted every two minutes to plug some sponsor or other, usually thinly masked as a give-away or competition for the fans. The "half-time" shows were quite cute, though: 5-9 year-olds playing "bunch-puck", and the crowd throwing pucks onto the ice, trying to get them through the sun-roof of a car.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Favourite mustard?
What's your favourite mustard?
I'll freely admit that I'm a mustard snob. French's doesn't cut it, and I often make the trip to our local German deli to buy some good German mustard instead. Luckily, A shares my passion, and we've gradually been exploring and discovering new mustards that meet our high standards :)
For me, good mustard should be quite hot, but flavourful and not overpowering, not vinegary, and only a little sweet (if it's sweet at all).
I grew up really liking the Gundelsheim mustard in a glass mug. (You get a free coffee mug once the mustard is gone, how cool is that!?)
Colman's English mustard was also a regular condiment - great with cheddar cheese or roast beef. (This stuff is very hot though, and clears your sinuses out like hot horseradish).
In the USA, A and I discovered the Dijon mustard at Trader Joe's. It's really yummy and packs much more flavour than the ubiquitous Grey Poupon. (Some people call it "super hot", but they must not have had Chinese mustard or Colman's... hehe)
The German deli I mentioned earlier (Liebschen, in Bellevue) has some good mustards, including several varieties made by Thomy that come in metal tubes. The Tomy Scharfer Senf is great and became our new favourite a few months back. It's a bit too pricey to put in/on everything, though.
I am now eagerly awaiting some French "Tubissime" mustard that I ordered. (Made with Orleans vinegar and Guerande salt, and hand-made in small batches, probably by cute little french maids in flouncy skirts).
I'll freely admit that I'm a mustard snob. French's doesn't cut it, and I often make the trip to our local German deli to buy some good German mustard instead. Luckily, A shares my passion, and we've gradually been exploring and discovering new mustards that meet our high standards :)
For me, good mustard should be quite hot, but flavourful and not overpowering, not vinegary, and only a little sweet (if it's sweet at all).
I grew up really liking the Gundelsheim mustard in a glass mug. (You get a free coffee mug once the mustard is gone, how cool is that!?)
Colman's English mustard was also a regular condiment - great with cheddar cheese or roast beef. (This stuff is very hot though, and clears your sinuses out like hot horseradish).
In the USA, A and I discovered the Dijon mustard at Trader Joe's. It's really yummy and packs much more flavour than the ubiquitous Grey Poupon. (Some people call it "super hot", but they must not have had Chinese mustard or Colman's... hehe)
The German deli I mentioned earlier (Liebschen, in Bellevue) has some good mustards, including several varieties made by Thomy that come in metal tubes. The Tomy Scharfer Senf is great and became our new favourite a few months back. It's a bit too pricey to put in/on everything, though.
I am now eagerly awaiting some French "Tubissime" mustard that I ordered. (Made with Orleans vinegar and Guerande salt, and hand-made in small batches, probably by cute little french maids in flouncy skirts).
Mind 'ow you search...
My colleague Robert Hensing linked to an interesting and scary article about "evil" results in search engine queries being used to infect people's machines.
Ways to stay safe(r):
Ways to stay safe(r):
- Use Vista on a 64-bit machine with hardware DEP enabled, and UAC enabled
- Run as a normal user (not an admin)
- Don't install anything when a website prompts you, unless you know and trust the website, are really are sure it's something you need, and it's signed by a trusted publisher.
- Uninstall Quicktime :)
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Beowulf
A and I saw Beowulf this past weekend, and really enjoyed it. The animation is astounding, and the script while mostly faithful to the poem also has some nice twists and additions.
This review by Henry Gee covers the movie perfectly.
Not so much fun were the four teenagers in front of us in the cinema. They seemed to be terminally addicted to text-messagign on their cell phones, and would pull them out every minute or two to machine-gun a new message. I have no idea why they felt the need to send messages during a movie they paid to see! Eventually a cinema usher cam over and asked them to not use their phones, but this led to much nattering and the girls leaving and making a noise in the hallway outside the theatre.
This review by Henry Gee covers the movie perfectly.
Not so much fun were the four teenagers in front of us in the cinema. They seemed to be terminally addicted to text-messagign on their cell phones, and would pull them out every minute or two to machine-gun a new message. I have no idea why they felt the need to send messages during a movie they paid to see! Eventually a cinema usher cam over and asked them to not use their phones, but this led to much nattering and the girls leaving and making a noise in the hallway outside the theatre.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Housing in South Africa
The PRI (public radio) program The World recently had two segments on housing in South Africa. You can listen to the segments here:
- Irish vulunteers building houses for the poor.
- Interview with Desmond Tutu about the ruling ANC government.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Acquiring a taste for wine
I stumbled on this article from the Seattle Times' Pacific Northwest Magazine: Acquiring a Taste.
It features a nice beginner's guide to wine tasting, ten tips to improve, and a list of wine clubs and events if you want to be part of some organized tastings.
It features a nice beginner's guide to wine tasting, ten tips to improve, and a list of wine clubs and events if you want to be part of some organized tastings.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Blind tastings
Slate has a new article by Mike Stenberger which talks about blind wine tastings. This bit was amusing:
The article is worth reading - Mike makes some good points about the pros and cons of blind wine tastings.
Speaking of wine, Happy Birthday to Gary! (A day late...)
Blind tastings can serve both as rites of passage—the exams for both the Master of Wine and the Master Sommelier degrees include blind tastings—and as ritual hazings. Within wine circles, nothing cements a reputation quite like acing a blind tasting. Years ago, British wine writer Oz Clarke was served a mystery red. After much sniffing and sipping, he said he couldn't decide whether it was the 1982 Paul Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle or the 1983. There was a reason he couldn't make up his mind: The glass contained a blend of both. But such triumphs are rare; more often than not, blind tastings yield embarrassment.
The article is worth reading - Mike makes some good points about the pros and cons of blind wine tastings.
Speaking of wine, Happy Birthday to Gary! (A day late...)
New Zune
Microsoft released the new models of the Zune media players yesterday, and the reviews seem generally positive. One thing that has kep me from buying a Zune (apart from the bulky hardware and crappy PC software, ahem) was the lack of a subscription service.
I've been very happy with Napster's subscription service and my old Creative Zen Micro. For around $15 a month I can download and listen to pretty much any album, and then purchase ones I really like if I want them on CD. The Napster software works well, and the Zen Micro is a decent music player.
I'm happy to see that the new Zune software now includes a subscription service, called Zune Pass. For some lame reason, Microsoft decided to "hide" the monthly price for Zune Pass. You won't find it here or in the FAQ. Instead, you need to go to this Microsoft Support article. Weird... Perhaps we show you the price once you've created a Zune account, but personally I'd like to know the cost before going through the rigmarole of setting up an account (and handing over my personal info).
Now, if there's a way to get TV shows off of my Comcast DVR and onto the Zune, that would be nice. Anyone got that working yet? :)
I've been very happy with Napster's subscription service and my old Creative Zen Micro. For around $15 a month I can download and listen to pretty much any album, and then purchase ones I really like if I want them on CD. The Napster software works well, and the Zen Micro is a decent music player.
I'm happy to see that the new Zune software now includes a subscription service, called Zune Pass. For some lame reason, Microsoft decided to "hide" the monthly price for Zune Pass. You won't find it here or in the FAQ. Instead, you need to go to this Microsoft Support article. Weird... Perhaps we show you the price once you've created a Zune account, but personally I'd like to know the cost before going through the rigmarole of setting up an account (and handing over my personal info).
Now, if there's a way to get TV shows off of my Comcast DVR and onto the Zune, that would be nice. Anyone got that working yet? :)
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Rodrigo y Gabriella
Yum Lass and I saw Rodrigo y Gabriella live last night at the Paramount. A truly incredible show! I'd seen them earlier this year at Bumbershoot, but last night left their earlier show behind in the dust.
If you like guitar music and haven't heard of them, check them out - They play what you might call acoustic heavy-metal flamenco music.
My only criticism is that some of their songs sound too much alike, are a bit rambling and "bitty", and basically just vehicles to show off their amazing technical skills. (I was spoilt growing up listening to Tananas and Tony Cox in South Africa).
The flamenco guitarwork and driving rhythms are very catchy though, and the sheer energy they put into their performances is breathtaking. They are also capable of playing with a lot of sensitivity, and I found myself liking their slower songs best (like their take on Take Five, and Floyd's Wish you were here). The solo stints they did as the other took a well-deserved break were incedible (especially Gabriella's solo).
Speaking of Tony Cox, I just noticed he has a new album out (with Benguela), so I'll ask South African Santa to send me a copy...
If you like guitar music and haven't heard of them, check them out - They play what you might call acoustic heavy-metal flamenco music.
My only criticism is that some of their songs sound too much alike, are a bit rambling and "bitty", and basically just vehicles to show off their amazing technical skills. (I was spoilt growing up listening to Tananas and Tony Cox in South Africa).
The flamenco guitarwork and driving rhythms are very catchy though, and the sheer energy they put into their performances is breathtaking. They are also capable of playing with a lot of sensitivity, and I found myself liking their slower songs best (like their take on Take Five, and Floyd's Wish you were here). The solo stints they did as the other took a well-deserved break were incedible (especially Gabriella's solo).
Speaking of Tony Cox, I just noticed he has a new album out (with Benguela), so I'll ask South African Santa to send me a copy...
Friday, October 26, 2007
Monkey's Wedding
One of the interesting bits of South African English is the term "monkey's wedding" for a sunshower (rain falling when the sun is shining). It turns out there is a common theme in the folkloric names for a sunshower - many cultures talk about weddings between animals. (See this Wikipedia page).
Whenever I see a sunshower I still automatically think of "monkey's wedding" - it's amazing how phrases like this from your childhood get cemented in your head. Anyway, now some of my American friends will have a clue what I mean when I say this...
Whenever I see a sunshower I still automatically think of "monkey's wedding" - it's amazing how phrases like this from your childhood get cemented in your head. Anyway, now some of my American friends will have a clue what I mean when I say this...
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Time to eat out a lot in Seattle (again)!
25 for $25 is back - except it's now called Dine Around Seattle. NWSource has a nice overview of the new restaurants on the list.
I'll definitely be going to a few of my favourites (like Barking Frog, Zoë and Yarrow Bay Grill), and maybe try a new place or two as well. (It's a fairly low-risk way to try a fancy new restaurant).
Speaking of Zoë, Yum Lass and I had a great meal their last Friday. It's been a while (2 years?) since we were last there, and they didn't disappoint. The chef's focus seems to have moved from seafood to meat, and his menu reminded me a lot of Mario Batali's Babbo (which is fresh in my mind after having just read "Heat"). I decided to be daring and try meat for the first time in ages (I've been pescatarian for a few years), and I ordered the wild boar pasta. (What made me cave in and eat meat? I think a mixture of the cold weather and a desire for something really hearty, descriptions of artisinal meat and boar pastas from "Heat", and a certain moral flexibility...)
The pasta was delicious, but seemed to stick around in my system for a day or two in an odd way, so I don't feel a need to eat meat again. Who knows, perhaps it'll be a 7-year-itch thing?
I'll definitely be going to a few of my favourites (like Barking Frog, Zoë and Yarrow Bay Grill), and maybe try a new place or two as well. (It's a fairly low-risk way to try a fancy new restaurant).
Speaking of Zoë, Yum Lass and I had a great meal their last Friday. It's been a while (2 years?) since we were last there, and they didn't disappoint. The chef's focus seems to have moved from seafood to meat, and his menu reminded me a lot of Mario Batali's Babbo (which is fresh in my mind after having just read "Heat"). I decided to be daring and try meat for the first time in ages (I've been pescatarian for a few years), and I ordered the wild boar pasta. (What made me cave in and eat meat? I think a mixture of the cold weather and a desire for something really hearty, descriptions of artisinal meat and boar pastas from "Heat", and a certain moral flexibility...)
The pasta was delicious, but seemed to stick around in my system for a day or two in an odd way, so I don't feel a need to eat meat again. Who knows, perhaps it'll be a 7-year-itch thing?
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Queue up the Queen song
'coz We are the Champions of the World! :)
South Africa won the Rugby World Cup final! Woohoo!
Normally I'm not much of a sports fan, but the 1995 Rugby World Cup was truly memorable, and managed to convert me somewhat to being a patriotic rugby fan.
I had a few friends around today to watch the match almost-live* and had a great time. Much beer was drunk during the match, and a celebratory dram of scotch followed in honour of their victory, so I had a nicely fuzzy Saturday afternoon.
* I ordered on pay-per-view and recorded it on the DVR so we started watching 30 mins after the game started.
South Africa won the Rugby World Cup final! Woohoo!
Normally I'm not much of a sports fan, but the 1995 Rugby World Cup was truly memorable, and managed to convert me somewhat to being a patriotic rugby fan.
I had a few friends around today to watch the match almost-live* and had a great time. Much beer was drunk during the match, and a celebratory dram of scotch followed in honour of their victory, so I had a nicely fuzzy Saturday afternoon.
* I ordered on pay-per-view and recorded it on the DVR so we started watching 30 mins after the game started.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Deep thoughts about the American "Kitchen Nightmares"
I confess to really enjoying the UK "Kitchen Nightmares" series. I generally enjoy Gordon Ramsay in whatever show he does - even the American "Hell's Kitchen" was not too bad (although the most recent series was pretty lame).
For those unfamiliar with "Kitchen Nightmares", the premise is a simple "reality TV" format where Gordon is brought in to rescue a failing restaurant. He spends one week working with the owner, chef, servers, etc. sorting things out, and usually manages to turn things around by the time he leaves. He then pops back a few months later (seemingly unannounced) to check on how things have progressed. This is the cherry on the pudding for me - I like to see what advice has stuck, and what has been forgotten; who has stuck to their promises, and who has been forced out (or quit).
The UK show is quite simple, with what feels like no scripting, minimal editing or "saucing up" and often some really good drama as relationships are forged under intense pressure in a short time. Chefs that are resistant and hate Ramsay at first often get won over and become his best friends by the end of the week. Lowly kitchen helpers are recognized as having great potential and given their chance to move ahead in their career. Really inspiring stuff.
So, back to the American version. It's pretty bad - not a huge surprise given it's on FOX and seems to be done by the Hell's Kitchen bunch. What do we get?
For those unfamiliar with "Kitchen Nightmares", the premise is a simple "reality TV" format where Gordon is brought in to rescue a failing restaurant. He spends one week working with the owner, chef, servers, etc. sorting things out, and usually manages to turn things around by the time he leaves. He then pops back a few months later (seemingly unannounced) to check on how things have progressed. This is the cherry on the pudding for me - I like to see what advice has stuck, and what has been forgotten; who has stuck to their promises, and who has been forced out (or quit).
The UK show is quite simple, with what feels like no scripting, minimal editing or "saucing up" and often some really good drama as relationships are forged under intense pressure in a short time. Chefs that are resistant and hate Ramsay at first often get won over and become his best friends by the end of the week. Lowly kitchen helpers are recognized as having great potential and given their chance to move ahead in their career. Really inspiring stuff.
So, back to the American version. It's pretty bad - not a huge surprise given it's on FOX and seems to be done by the Hell's Kitchen bunch. What do we get?
- Almost continuous background music that tries to manipulate your emotions and whip up the tension but just gets on your nerves,
- Tedious re-hashing of footage, especially after the frequent ad breaks. Episode 2 was particularly bad, with a 5min+ sequence of "re-runs" in the middle of the episode. Trust me, guys, I can remember what happened 5 minutes ago and how we got there...
- A scripted feel. Some of the scenes seem contrived and designed to inject arguing and swearing into the show. One of the refreshing things about the UK version is how nice Gordon is. Sure, he drops the f-bomb and s-bomb quite often, but he's not as shouty, and seems to use anger on when it's really needed. The US version seems to be trying to get everyone - Gordon and the restaurant staff - to the point of exploding.
- No return visit. The episodes end with Gordon's trade-mark "summing up" monologue, expressing hope that things will continue to go well now that he's righted the ship. We get no check-up to see if things actually have continued to do well.
- Loads of money thrown at the problem. I guess I should be happy that there is no overt sponsorship/advertising in the show, but each episode (there have been two so far), has featured Gordon bringing in experts and/or large sums of money to fix things. That doesn't feel right, and is in contrast to the UK show, where the restaurants are pretty much on their own. (In one episode of the UK show, Gordon asked the vain chef to sell his car's vanity plate to get more funds to put into the renovation of the restaurant). In the US series so far we've had: a complete new kitchen provided for free, a total redoration, professional steam-cleaning of the kitchen, and a "consulting chef" to do the actual cooking.
In closing, here's an interesting thing I noticed after the 2nd episode, which featured Dillon's Indian restaurant in New York (now called Purnima). From the start of the show it's clear the restaurant is atrocious before Gordon arrives. So, I looked around for some old reviews (pre-Gordon and Vikas Khanna) on the web. Nada. The closest I could find (and the address matches Purnima) is Dillon's, but the menu doesn't have anything remotely Indian. (Perhaps only the American menu made it online? They had what looked like two menus, one with Indian items). Here's the official website for Dillon's - the page came up blank for me for a while, but the Google cache still a copy.
It also looks like Dillon's is a theatre venue of sorts None of the stage/theatre stuff was mentioned in the show which is odd... This NY Magazine review also doesn't mention Indian food (or flies or cockroaches).
Which makes me wonder - was the Indian Dillon's a very recent start-up that took over the Dillon's Bar location (likely)? Did Purnima manage to get the old reviews taken offline (not likely)? Or did "Kitchen Nightmares" create the place and it never really existed? :)
Thursday, September 27, 2007
DAWG algorithms and Scrabble source code
I've noticed that quite a few people reach this blog looking for information on DAWG and Scrabble algorithms - I wrote about this topic here.
What I didn't mention in that old post, and have only just re-discovered on the net, is Graham Toal's amazing archive of resources for wordgame programmers. You'll find the original Appel & Jacobson paper, source code for building DAWG of various flavours, and even full Scrabble game source code. There's also a wordgame programmer's newsgroup if you want to bounce questions or ideas off of people that have similar interests.
Now the incentive to write the game again myself is a little less compelling! :)
What I didn't mention in that old post, and have only just re-discovered on the net, is Graham Toal's amazing archive of resources for wordgame programmers. You'll find the original Appel & Jacobson paper, source code for building DAWG of various flavours, and even full Scrabble game source code. There's also a wordgame programmer's newsgroup if you want to bounce questions or ideas off of people that have similar interests.
Now the incentive to write the game again myself is a little less compelling! :)
Gary does South African red wines
Gary Vaynerchuck (of Wine Library TV fame) tastes three South African reds in this episode.
I'm not familiar with any of the wines he tasted, and haven't seen them available here in Seattle. I also wonder how he picked them- randomly, or based on what he's heard?
The only "established" winery in the bunch is Rustenberg. He does taste a Pinotage :)
I'm not familiar with any of the wines he tasted, and haven't seen them available here in Seattle. I also wonder how he picked them- randomly, or based on what he's heard?
The only "established" winery in the bunch is Rustenberg. He does taste a Pinotage :)
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
The oyster's revenge
For some reason I keep ordering fresh oysters and paying for it. Not always, but a large percentage of the time.
The worst offender was the Rogue-owned pub in downtown Issaquah. A and I used to live around the corner and loved going there, and one evening I decided to try their "oyster shooters". I didn't quite understand what I was getting into until it arived - a tall shot glass filled with tomato cocktail and oysters. The oysters were hidden - no way to check they were fresh - so I took a swallow. As soon as the oyster hit my mouth I knew something was off, but for some reason I swallowed anyway. I left the remaining few and tried to ignore the taste of old kitchen cloths that was lingering in my mouth. Needless to say, I didn't feel too good that night.
Cut to this past weekend when A and I spent the night on Orcas Island at the Rosario Resort. We were there to take a look at their wedding facilities, which looked very nice on their website, but sadly didn't live up to expectations once we were there in person. ("Faded glory" was my quick summary of the whole place, and their service was bad).
But back to the oysters. We decided to grab a bite to eat in the bar (since the restaurant was about to close and made it clear we were not welcome). The bar was loud, mostly filled with people watching football on the incongruous large TV screen above one fireplace (way to kill the atmoshpere!) I noticed fresh local oysters on the menu and decided to try them (how often do you get to have local oysters from the Orcase or San Juan islands?) They arrived on a bed of ice cubes (okaaay) and looked good. In fact, they were almost all delicious and I was feeling quite pleased with myself. Then I got to #6 - the last one, and noticed some "stuff" left in the water and juices in the oyster shell. Nothing too alarming, I thought, so down it went. It didn't taste bad, but wasn't quite right somehow, and sure enough, later that night I was making repeat visits to, umm, powder my nose.
Based on my past experience, it seems 50% of raw-oyster-eating outings are likely to go badly. If you're going to take the plunge, I'd say stick to a really good restaurant (which sadly seems to also imply expensive), or do them yourself.
If my readers know of any good local (Seattle) places for fresh oysters, let me know! E&O in the W hotel has the top spot in my experience, but I think they lost their chef a while back, so who knows how hey are now...
The worst offender was the Rogue-owned pub in downtown Issaquah. A and I used to live around the corner and loved going there, and one evening I decided to try their "oyster shooters". I didn't quite understand what I was getting into until it arived - a tall shot glass filled with tomato cocktail and oysters. The oysters were hidden - no way to check they were fresh - so I took a swallow. As soon as the oyster hit my mouth I knew something was off, but for some reason I swallowed anyway. I left the remaining few and tried to ignore the taste of old kitchen cloths that was lingering in my mouth. Needless to say, I didn't feel too good that night.
Cut to this past weekend when A and I spent the night on Orcas Island at the Rosario Resort. We were there to take a look at their wedding facilities, which looked very nice on their website, but sadly didn't live up to expectations once we were there in person. ("Faded glory" was my quick summary of the whole place, and their service was bad).
But back to the oysters. We decided to grab a bite to eat in the bar (since the restaurant was about to close and made it clear we were not welcome). The bar was loud, mostly filled with people watching football on the incongruous large TV screen above one fireplace (way to kill the atmoshpere!) I noticed fresh local oysters on the menu and decided to try them (how often do you get to have local oysters from the Orcase or San Juan islands?) They arrived on a bed of ice cubes (okaaay) and looked good. In fact, they were almost all delicious and I was feeling quite pleased with myself. Then I got to #6 - the last one, and noticed some "stuff" left in the water and juices in the oyster shell. Nothing too alarming, I thought, so down it went. It didn't taste bad, but wasn't quite right somehow, and sure enough, later that night I was making repeat visits to, umm, powder my nose.
Based on my past experience, it seems 50% of raw-oyster-eating outings are likely to go badly. If you're going to take the plunge, I'd say stick to a really good restaurant (which sadly seems to also imply expensive), or do them yourself.
If my readers know of any good local (Seattle) places for fresh oysters, let me know! E&O in the W hotel has the top spot in my experience, but I think they lost their chef a while back, so who knows how hey are now...
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Phishing
I got a nice little phishing email today. I don't get too many, and luckily the mail had been filtered by Outlook automatically - the offending item was in my Junk Mail folder.
The message was also forced into plain-text mode, so the fake URL for PayPal was clear, but I decided to paste it into IE7 anyway, just to see how the Phishing Filter handled it. Sadly the website was not automatically recognized as a phishing site (I submitted it, so hopefully it will be recognized soon)
To recognize that this is a phishing page, notice the server address (the stuff after http://) is a weird domain name ending in .co.kr. The :81 is a port number - almost all normal websites won't have this in their URLs. Ignore anything after the '/' following the port - that looks like PayPal, but in fact it can be whatever the bad guy wants.
Incidentally, some phishing sites use server addresses that look more valid, such as www.paypal.somefunkyname.co.kr.
The phishing page is pretty brazen. First you have to "log in" with your email and password (anything you enter will be accepted). Then you are prompted to hand over all your private information: name, address, DOB, phone, credit card number + CVV2 and ATM pin. Why anyone would give their ATM PIN to a website purporting to be PayPal I don't know - perhaps the phishing folks just though they might get lucky?
They also ask for the last six digits of your SSN - I guess they don't ask for the whole thing since people are used to entering the last few digits only, and think this is safe. No-one apart from your employer and the IRS should ever need your SSN - even the last four digits! (And I think with the last six digits, the bad guys can figure out the remainder based on your ZIP code/State of residence).
I hope people now know to never enter this sort of personal information on a website - especially one linked to in an email.
The message was also forced into plain-text mode, so the fake URL for PayPal was clear, but I decided to paste it into IE7 anyway, just to see how the Phishing Filter handled it. Sadly the website was not automatically recognized as a phishing site (I submitted it, so hopefully it will be recognized soon)
To recognize that this is a phishing page, notice the server address (the stuff after http://) is a weird domain name ending in .co.kr. The :81 is a port number - almost all normal websites won't have this in their URLs. Ignore anything after the '/' following the port - that looks like PayPal, but in fact it can be whatever the bad guy wants.
Incidentally, some phishing sites use server addresses that look more valid, such as www.paypal.somefunkyname.co.kr.
The phishing page is pretty brazen. First you have to "log in" with your email and password (anything you enter will be accepted). Then you are prompted to hand over all your private information: name, address, DOB, phone, credit card number + CVV2 and ATM pin. Why anyone would give their ATM PIN to a website purporting to be PayPal I don't know - perhaps the phishing folks just though they might get lucky?
They also ask for the last six digits of your SSN - I guess they don't ask for the whole thing since people are used to entering the last few digits only, and think this is safe. No-one apart from your employer and the IRS should ever need your SSN - even the last four digits! (And I think with the last six digits, the bad guys can figure out the remainder based on your ZIP code/State of residence).
I hope people now know to never enter this sort of personal information on a website - especially one linked to in an email.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
2007 Cannes Lions winners
The 2007 Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards for film/TV are worth taking a look at. For starters, there's the Dove Evolution ad which won the grand prix, but don't ignore the Gold, Silver and Bronze winners.
Here are some good ones (with my favourite first):
(Quicktime is required to view the clips)
Here are some good ones (with my favourite first):
(Quicktime is required to view the clips)
Friday, September 07, 2007
South African auto ads
I recently was browsing around on YouTube looking for South African TV snippets, and found two distinctly different but memorable advertisements.
This one is for Ford, and has some fun with the "new" South Africa:
This one for VW is more sentimental and almost avoids being an auto ad until the last few seconds. VW ads in South Africa have a long track record of excellence, what with the David Kramer "volksie bus" ads. I might have to blog about that in them future :)
(Shockwave required to view the movies)
I must say these seem more interesting and memorable than the auto ads I've seen in America.
This one is for Ford, and has some fun with the "new" South Africa:
This one for VW is more sentimental and almost avoids being an auto ad until the last few seconds. VW ads in South Africa have a long track record of excellence, what with the David Kramer "volksie bus" ads. I might have to blog about that in them future :)
(Shockwave required to view the movies)
I must say these seem more interesting and memorable than the auto ads I've seen in America.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Gem squash
Here's a shot of a nice gem squash (ignore the weed on the left).
This one is about the size of a large orange, and is ready to be eaten, but we left it on the plant to ripen fully so we have some fresh seeds for next year.
It's interestingly that Wikipedia says gem squashes are a domesticated form of two wild squashes found in the souther USA and Mexico. For some reason I've never seen seeds for sale up here in Seattle - perhaps they are only sold in the south?
This one is about the size of a large orange, and is ready to be eaten, but we left it on the plant to ripen fully so we have some fresh seeds for next year.
It's interestingly that Wikipedia says gem squashes are a domesticated form of two wild squashes found in the souther USA and Mexico. For some reason I've never seen seeds for sale up here in Seattle - perhaps they are only sold in the south?
Monday, September 03, 2007
Crowded House at Bumbershoot
The first concert on Saturday at Bumbershoot was Crowded House, and they were great! The new drummer, Matt Sherrod, was incredible - subtle and unobtrusive when he needed to be, and with lots of nice inventive touches when he stood out from the band.
The band seemed to be in good spirits and joked with the audience playfully, especially Nick Seymour's interaction with the fans in the front of audience.
I had hoped Edde Vedder would joined them for a few songs, and was not disappointed.
It was interesting seeing the audience make-up. There were lots of younger folks there that didn't know who Crowded House were, and of course plenty of older folks like me that were huge fans. (I smiled as I overheard one lady telling her friend about the Finn Brothers albums). Hopefully they have made some new fans, although their current album is not the energetic, hook-laden gem that their earlier albums were, so I doubt they'll be getting major airtime on popular radio stations.
The band seemed to be in good spirits and joked with the audience playfully, especially Nick Seymour's interaction with the fans in the front of audience.
I had hoped Edde Vedder would joined them for a few songs, and was not disappointed.
It was interesting seeing the audience make-up. There were lots of younger folks there that didn't know who Crowded House were, and of course plenty of older folks like me that were huge fans. (I smiled as I overheard one lady telling her friend about the Finn Brothers albums). Hopefully they have made some new fans, although their current album is not the energetic, hook-laden gem that their earlier albums were, so I doubt they'll be getting major airtime on popular radio stations.
More green tomatoes
Here's another photo with some fat green tomatoes. Some of these are now going yellow and should turn red soon.
Green tomatoes
Here's a photo from about a week ago showing the tomatoes in our garden box. As you can see they're still quite green, due mainly to the strangely cool summer we had.
Since the picture was taken they have grown a little and we have one or two showing some signs of colour, but it's not clear whether we'll have vine-ripened tomatoes before the weather turns cold.
Luckily, they do driped if you pick them at this stage (as long as they're bug enough) - they just don't taste as good.
Since the picture was taken they have grown a little and we have one or two showing some signs of colour, but it's not clear whether we'll have vine-ripened tomatoes before the weather turns cold.
Luckily, they do driped if you pick them at this stage (as long as they're bug enough) - they just don't taste as good.
Friday, August 31, 2007
The balloon ride that wasn't
Yesterday, A and I were meant to go on a hot-air balloon ride in the evening. Sadly, the weather changed at the last minute, the winds became unfavourable, and the company running the outing had to cancel it. Hopefully we'll have better luck some time next week!
Since we were in the area, we decided to have dinner at the Purple Cafe in Woodinville. All I can say is yum! I've always like the Purple in Kirkland, and this one is no different. Great food, service, and yummy wine. The clientele was fun to watch too - lots of middle-aged folks trying to look cool and impress. I was often reminded of the phrase "mutton dressed as lamb" :)
I had the tasting flight of old-world wines and saved some quick tasting notes on CT : 2005 Renato Ratti Docetto d'Alba Colombe, 2005 Bodegas Fontana La Mancha Mesta, 2005 Abel Clément Vacqueyras, 2003 Heron Merlot.
Since we were in the area, we decided to have dinner at the Purple Cafe in Woodinville. All I can say is yum! I've always like the Purple in Kirkland, and this one is no different. Great food, service, and yummy wine. The clientele was fun to watch too - lots of middle-aged folks trying to look cool and impress. I was often reminded of the phrase "mutton dressed as lamb" :)
I had the tasting flight of old-world wines and saved some quick tasting notes on CT : 2005 Renato Ratti Docetto d'Alba Colombe, 2005 Bodegas Fontana La Mancha Mesta, 2005 Abel Clément Vacqueyras, 2003 Heron Merlot.
Monday, August 27, 2007
God-awful Pinotage: 2005 Zarafa
Hopefully this won't become a new series on my blog...
Trader Joe's had a new South African wine that caught my eye this past weekend: 2005 Zarafa Pinotage for $3.99. The price was eye-catching, and I vaguely remembered hearing about this wine somewhere, so I though "What the heck!", and bought a bottle.
Sadly, it was the worst Pinotage I've yet tasted, and one of the worst wines I've had. Here's what the good folks on Cellatracker think of it, and you'll find a few reviews on blogs, like this one. As the one commenter mentioned on that blog, the terrible smell is indicative of "Brett", so I guess you could view this wine as an interesting case-study to train your nose and palate to recognize it.
The sad thing is that for many people this was their first Pinotage ever. (OK, judging by the 3 blogs I checked out). I wonder if they will now be turned off towards Pinotage forever? I hope not! Check out Peter May's great Pinotage blog for some decent ones to try, and don't be put off .
Trader Joe's had a new South African wine that caught my eye this past weekend: 2005 Zarafa Pinotage for $3.99. The price was eye-catching, and I vaguely remembered hearing about this wine somewhere, so I though "What the heck!", and bought a bottle.
Sadly, it was the worst Pinotage I've yet tasted, and one of the worst wines I've had. Here's what the good folks on Cellatracker think of it, and you'll find a few reviews on blogs, like this one. As the one commenter mentioned on that blog, the terrible smell is indicative of "Brett", so I guess you could view this wine as an interesting case-study to train your nose and palate to recognize it.
The sad thing is that for many people this was their first Pinotage ever. (OK, judging by the 3 blogs I checked out). I wonder if they will now be turned off towards Pinotage forever? I hope not! Check out Peter May's great Pinotage blog for some decent ones to try, and don't be put off .
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Camping trip: mushrooms aplenty
I went camping this past weekend with A, her mom and nieces, and Mr. D.
The cmapsite we settled on was Old Fort Townsend State Park, just outside Port Townsend on the Olympic Pensinsula. Lots of nice rocky beaches to explore, old forests to hike though, and an old military fort with lots of interesting history.
We stumbled on several interesting mushrooms during out hikes - including a group of what looked like agaricus augustus.
There was also an interesting orange fungus growing on the side of a tree:
The full set of public pictures is here (mostly mushrooms for now).
The cmapsite we settled on was Old Fort Townsend State Park, just outside Port Townsend on the Olympic Pensinsula. Lots of nice rocky beaches to explore, old forests to hike though, and an old military fort with lots of interesting history.
We stumbled on several interesting mushrooms during out hikes - including a group of what looked like agaricus augustus.
There was also an interesting orange fungus growing on the side of a tree:
The full set of public pictures is here (mostly mushrooms for now).
Pits of Despair and the weather
I got a chuckle out of Eric Lippert's recent blog post titled "C++ and the Pit of Despair". Any blog post about programming that manages to work in a referenc to the movie The Princess Bride is OK by me!
Eric also posted some interesting entries on weather. Thanks to him I now have a much better understanding of how clouds form and why the common thought that "cold air can hold less water than warm air" is misleading. Check out Talking About The Weater, Part One and Part Two.
Eric also posted some interesting entries on weather. Thanks to him I now have a much better understanding of how clouds form and why the common thought that "cold air can hold less water than warm air" is misleading. Check out Talking About The Weater, Part One and Part Two.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Tomato gradient
I'm back from a weekend camping trip (a little wet, but fun!) I was doodling around on Flickr instead of uploading pictures, and stumbled upon this picture, which made me smile.
Our own tomoatoes are growing like crazy, but not yet ripening - I wonder if we will have enough sunshine and heat in the remaining few weeks of summer to get them fully ripe?
In other gardening news, our gem squash is doing very well, and we should have enough to let some produce seeds for next year... Thanks to my mom for bringing seeds with her from South Africa! :)
Our own tomoatoes are growing like crazy, but not yet ripening - I wonder if we will have enough sunshine and heat in the remaining few weeks of summer to get them fully ripe?
In other gardening news, our gem squash is doing very well, and we should have enough to let some produce seeds for next year... Thanks to my mom for bringing seeds with her from South Africa! :)
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Looking for a place to eat in Seattle?
(Or elsewhere, really...)
I stumbled on a great website today: Urbanspoon (this link goes to their page for Seattle, but they have other US cities too).
Their idea is simple: list restaurants in a city, with links to the website and menu (if available). Include linked excerpts from professional reviews, reviews from blogs, and allow visitors to vote on whether they like a place.
The website includes a map view (so you can quickly see where stuff is and what's close to you), groups restaurants by neighborhoud and type of cuisine, and is just generally fuzzy and friendly to use.
Definitely a nice tool for visitors to a city, and even for someone like me that is sometimes looking for a new place to try.
I stumbled on a great website today: Urbanspoon (this link goes to their page for Seattle, but they have other US cities too).
Their idea is simple: list restaurants in a city, with links to the website and menu (if available). Include linked excerpts from professional reviews, reviews from blogs, and allow visitors to vote on whether they like a place.
The website includes a map view (so you can quickly see where stuff is and what's close to you), groups restaurants by neighborhoud and type of cuisine, and is just generally fuzzy and friendly to use.
Definitely a nice tool for visitors to a city, and even for someone like me that is sometimes looking for a new place to try.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Micro-loans in South Africa
Marketplace on NPR this week had an interesting segment about micro-loans in South Africa, and an American nonprofit firm that provides collateral to enable the loans.
Check out the Shared Interest webpage for more info, and to donate some $$$ :)
PS: It's also fun to listen to this segment to hear the journalist trying to pronounce "Grabouw" (which is mis-spelled "Gerbouw" on the webpage).
Check out the Shared Interest webpage for more info, and to donate some $$$ :)
PS: It's also fun to listen to this segment to hear the journalist trying to pronounce "Grabouw" (which is mis-spelled "Gerbouw" on the webpage).
Huge statue of Shaka Zulu on the way
A huge statue of King Shaka is planned for the coast in Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa.
It'll be bigger than the the Statue of Liberty and the statue of Jesus in Rio de Janiero. The plan is to have it finished in time for the 2010 Soccer World Cup - we'll see how things go, though.
I wonder if this will make it the largest statue of a person in the world? At 106m tall, it looks like it will be 2nd tallest, with this statue of the Buddha in Japan taking the #1 slot.
It'll be bigger than the the Statue of Liberty and the statue of Jesus in Rio de Janiero. The plan is to have it finished in time for the 2010 Soccer World Cup - we'll see how things go, though.
I wonder if this will make it the largest statue of a person in the world? At 106m tall, it looks like it will be 2nd tallest, with this statue of the Buddha in Japan taking the #1 slot.
30-second skip works!
Woohoo! The nicest thing about the updated Comcast DVR software is that 30-second skip works!
I had "hacked" my remote a while back and reprogrammed one button we never use to send the command to jump ahead 30 seconds . (If you're looking for info on how to do this yourself, go here.)
With the old DVR software, hitting the button would just bring up a "not supported" message - but the new software happily jumps ahead. Not quite up to the level of my old ReplayTV unit (which would skip adverts automatically), but I'm quit happy.
I had "hacked" my remote a while back and reprogrammed one button we never use to send the command to jump ahead 30 seconds . (If you're looking for info on how to do this yourself, go here.)
With the old DVR software, hitting the button would just bring up a "not supported" message - but the new software happily jumps ahead. Not quite up to the level of my old ReplayTV unit (which would skip adverts automatically), but I'm quit happy.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Comcast DVR updated
Yay! Our Comcast HD DVR finally got the software update (see my previous post here).
I had a quick look at the new UI this morning, and it looks pretty slick. The response time is definitely better, and the interface is much mroe intuitive.
I'll have to see whether the box still reboots randomly (some discussion at work indicates that you can swap out the DVR box for a newer model for free, and the new models are a lot more robust). Hopefully that won't be needed though (I'd lose all my recorded shows! sob!)
My only niggle so far is the new Search functionality under the main menu. The way you enter program titles is a bit odd, and it's harder to find results. (I tried searching for "Hell's Kitchen" and it took ages to find it...)
I had a quick look at the new UI this morning, and it looks pretty slick. The response time is definitely better, and the interface is much mroe intuitive.
I'll have to see whether the box still reboots randomly (some discussion at work indicates that you can swap out the DVR box for a newer model for free, and the new models are a lot more robust). Hopefully that won't be needed though (I'd lose all my recorded shows! sob!)
My only niggle so far is the new Search functionality under the main menu. The way you enter program titles is a bit odd, and it's harder to find results. (I tried searching for "Hell's Kitchen" and it took ages to find it...)
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Strange word of the day: Bowser
Today I was talking to some colleagues from the UK that have been effected by the recent flooding. They mentioned getting water from something called a bowser. Hmm... That's an odd word - the only thing I could think of was Bowzer from Sha Na Na.
It turns out it's a large water tank (e.g. 250 gallons), usually towed behind a truck and able to be left and re-filled if needed. (See Wikipedia too). It seems to originate from Australia and New Zealand, and originally applied to gasoline tanks.
So there you have it.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
You've got mail!
From a friend's iPhone:
I hope he can "mark all unread", otherwise he's going to be busy for a while!
I hope he can "mark all unread", otherwise he's going to be busy for a while!
Monday, August 06, 2007
Training your palate for wine, the Vaynerchuk way
Gary Vaynerchuk is always interesting to watch - his Wine Libary TV video podcasts are fresh, funny, and informative.
For something a little different though, take a look at this segment from his recent appearance on the Conan O'Brien show (a late-night talk/comedy show in the US). Nuts! :)
Slate have an interesting article on The 'Chukker too.
For something a little different though, take a look at this segment from his recent appearance on the Conan O'Brien show (a late-night talk/comedy show in the US). Nuts! :)
Slate have an interesting article on The 'Chukker too.
Best coffee in Oregon?
Every time A and I visit central Oregon, one of the things I look forward to most is coffee.
Not just any coffe, mind you: Allan Brothers Coffee.
They have stores in Albanym Eugene, Corvallis, Ashland and Salem. There stores are called Beaneries, e.g. The Ashland St. Beanery. If you hear someone from one of these towns saying "I'm going to the Beanery", or "Let's meet at the Beanery", now you'll know what they mean.
Coming from Seattle, and being descended from a coffee-holic, I'm a bit of a coffee snob. Allan Bros are definitely up there with the best coffee I've ever had - they are maybe not quite as good as Vivace Espresso in seattle if you want a plain espresso, but there espresso is still really good: smooth, mellow, not acidic, and really flavourful. Their flavoured drinks are where they really shine, though. Their mexican mocha's are incredible, and the Borgia is my all-time favourite drink. (It has chocolate and orange - including real orange rind). Their food is also yummy (and affordable).
Another nice thing about Allan Bros. Beaneries is that their stores are laid-back and inviting. They are usually close to universities, and full of students and people hanging out, reading, surfing the web (they have free wireless). There's no pressure to scram once you're done drinking your coffee, and they have an open mic with music, poetry, etc. on the weekends.
Starbucks, and even my favourite big chain Tully's, both fail miserably at creating a true coffee-shop atmosphere. Luckily there are some independant coffee stores in Seattle that do get it (but mostly around the University District, Downtown and Capitol Hill). The Eastside sadly needs a good coffe-shop.
Not just any coffe, mind you: Allan Brothers Coffee.
They have stores in Albanym Eugene, Corvallis, Ashland and Salem. There stores are called Beaneries, e.g. The Ashland St. Beanery. If you hear someone from one of these towns saying "I'm going to the Beanery", or "Let's meet at the Beanery", now you'll know what they mean.
Coming from Seattle, and being descended from a coffee-holic, I'm a bit of a coffee snob. Allan Bros are definitely up there with the best coffee I've ever had - they are maybe not quite as good as Vivace Espresso in seattle if you want a plain espresso, but there espresso is still really good: smooth, mellow, not acidic, and really flavourful. Their flavoured drinks are where they really shine, though. Their mexican mocha's are incredible, and the Borgia is my all-time favourite drink. (It has chocolate and orange - including real orange rind). Their food is also yummy (and affordable).
Another nice thing about Allan Bros. Beaneries is that their stores are laid-back and inviting. They are usually close to universities, and full of students and people hanging out, reading, surfing the web (they have free wireless). There's no pressure to scram once you're done drinking your coffee, and they have an open mic with music, poetry, etc. on the weekends.
Starbucks, and even my favourite big chain Tully's, both fail miserably at creating a true coffee-shop atmosphere. Luckily there are some independant coffee stores in Seattle that do get it (but mostly around the University District, Downtown and Capitol Hill). The Eastside sadly needs a good coffe-shop.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Don't chuck this chardonnay!
I was amazed to see that the 2005 Charles Shaw Chardonnay recently won double gold and Best Chardonnay at the California State Fair. That's not bad for a wine that sells for $1.99 is California and $2.99 up here in Washington (hence the nickname "2-buck Chuck").
The wine is only sold at Trader Joe's - a small grocery chain we love going to. I'd expect most customer's won't start buying more Chuck
The article on Avenue Vine goes into some depth, and say that the State Fair judging panel is slightly different to most wine competitions, which might explain why Charles Shaw did so well:
It's also interesting to note that the Bronco Wine Company (which makes Charles Shaw wines and a lot of others) is based, not in Napa, but in Calfornia's Central Valley. Apparently most of California's grapes are grown here, and there are many wineries - perhaps it's worth planning a wine tour to contrast with Napa :)
The wine is only sold at Trader Joe's - a small grocery chain we love going to. I'd expect most customer's won't start buying more Chuck
The article on Avenue Vine goes into some depth, and say that the State Fair judging panel is slightly different to most wine competitions, which might explain why Charles Shaw did so well:
Since the state fair uses wine professionals as judges and the wines are tasted blind, the results stand on their own. Some 270 2005 Chardonnays were evaluated, so Two-Buck had plenty of competition. Still, I’m wondering if this bottling of Two-Buck is really that good. Or whether, more likely, that this is a result of a clean, fruity, non-oaked Chardonnay that has enough appeal to win the approval of a panel of judges? [...]
The California State Fair competition is dismissed by some critics as representing broad-based consumer tastes rather than the palates of true wine connoisseurs. But Pucilowski, who has organized the competition for more than two decades, said he draws judges from a number of professions, including winemakers and restaurant owners.
There’s no question that for many critics, too many Chardonnays are too oaky and there are questions about whether the wines are true to their appellations. Or whether, in the extreme, all Chardonnays taste alike, in which case it’s not only conceivable that Two-Buck could emerge a winner. It did.If you’re wondering why this matters, well, here’s why. Think what you may about a $1.99 wine, but Two-Buck is impacting the market. It has sold 300 million bottles in five years and it continues to put downward pressure on wine prices, and at the end of the day, that’s great news for wine drinkers.
It's also interesting to note that the Bronco Wine Company (which makes Charles Shaw wines and a lot of others) is based, not in Napa, but in Calfornia's Central Valley. Apparently most of California's grapes are grown here, and there are many wineries - perhaps it's worth planning a wine tour to contrast with Napa :)
Friday, August 03, 2007
Flight of the Conchords on All Songs Considered
I just saw that today's edition of NPR's All Songs Considered podcast features Flight of the Conchords. Take a listen here.
How walkable is your house?
K introduced me to a cool Google Maps mashup yesterday: Walkscore.com
The idea is that you enter your home's address (or a prospective future home's address) and it figures out how many shops, libraries, parks, cafes, etc. are within walking distance. The end result is a score out of 100, and a nice map showing all the local amenities.
For example, my house gets a paltry 8/100 (not surprising since it's in the middle of a suburb on the east side of Seattle). Work gets a more respectable 34/100, and a friend's house in downtown Kirkland got an amaxing 97/100!
It's also useful just to find "interesting" places around an address - something Google Maps doesn't do very well on it's own.
The idea is that you enter your home's address (or a prospective future home's address) and it figures out how many shops, libraries, parks, cafes, etc. are within walking distance. The end result is a score out of 100, and a nice map showing all the local amenities.
For example, my house gets a paltry 8/100 (not surprising since it's in the middle of a suburb on the east side of Seattle). Work gets a more respectable 34/100, and a friend's house in downtown Kirkland got an amaxing 97/100!
It's also useful just to find "interesting" places around an address - something Google Maps doesn't do very well on it's own.
"I'm delighted you have survived another night..."
I've been meaning to plug the Jeeves alarm clock for a while now. What could be better than waking up to the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry's voice every morning?
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Cute snail
This could have waited until I blogged about our trip to the Oregon Caves, but I liked the picture so much I thought I'd jump the gun and post it now.
We met this little guy coming down the path from the cave exit, and for once my camera's macro mode worked well! Click though to the larger picture to see nice texture on the snail's body and shell...
If you're wondering about the picture's title, that's the name I came up with for lolcat-style pictures featuring snails.
We met this little guy coming down the path from the cave exit, and for once my camera's macro mode worked well! Click though to the larger picture to see nice texture on the snail's body and shell...
If you're wondering about the picture's title, that's the name I came up with for lolcat-style pictures featuring snails.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Wine bottle shortages
Jason over at Stormhoek has an interesting blog post about the sharp rise in the cost of glass wine bottles around the world, the current shortage in South Africa, and how this is affecting Stormhoek. (The brief version: they have wine in tanks that they can't get out to their customers...)
As Jason says, this is something you never think about - after all, glass should be cheap to make, and not something you'd think would be hard to get your hands on. It's only when the supply is cut off (or price-fixing starts happening) that you realize how limited your options are.
As Jason says, this is something you never think about - after all, glass should be cheap to make, and not something you'd think would be hard to get your hands on. It's only when the supply is cut off (or price-fixing starts happening) that you realize how limited your options are.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
New Crowded House album
As a quick follow-up to this post, I received the new Crowded House album a while back, and have finally gotten to listen to it this week. So far, I can say that I definitely like it, but it is one of those albums that doesn't blow you away on the first listen. It's will be a bit too restrained and introverted for some CH fans: It's mostly full of quiet ballads and fairly low-tempo songs, and feels like a Neil Finn solo album more than an old Crowded House one.
So far my favourite track is Silent House, but others will no doubt grow on me :)
For a more in-depth look at the album, see this review which gives the history of the album, and hits the nail on the head in describing how this album relates to the previous solo work by Neil.
So far my favourite track is Silent House, but others will no doubt grow on me :)
For a more in-depth look at the album, see this review which gives the history of the album, and hits the nail on the head in describing how this album relates to the previous solo work by Neil.
Holiday highlights: Brookings, OR
After spending a few days in Ashland, we headed off to the Oregon Caves and Redwood National Park (more on those later), and stopped for the night in Brookings, OR. This is a cute little coastal town just north of the California border on highway 101. The weather is so good here that the area has been dubbed the Banana Belt. Brookings even has an eponymous weather effect.
We stayed in a great B&B, the South Coast Inn. We stayed in the Sea View apartment, which was totally private and really comfy - it included a kitchen and small lounge leading onto a great balcony with view of the bay. We didn't use the kitchen this time, but if you want a place with the option of cooking in, I recommend this place. The hosts were really friendly too, which is good!
A lowlight of our stay was dinner at the local Italian restaurant, Bella Italia. Our hosts at the B&B recommended it, but the food was very disappointing, and the staff seemed to not care much about us. We had heard from our B&B hosts that the owners of Bella Italia had just opened a new steak/seafood restaurant in town, so I thought that perhaps they were stretched too thin, and their old place had slid... Now with some Googling, I see Bella Italia is for sale, so perhaps that explains things :)
After dinner, we headed out to a nearby beach park to watch the sun set. As you can see from the pics, the light and sky were amazing, and we also got to enjoy some weird jumpy shrimp pinging across our feet!
We definitely need to come back again!
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