Listening to...

Jonathan reminded me about the group The Postal Service - they have some really good songs on their album Give Up. You can download a free mp3 copy of the song Such Great Heights from their website.

They will see us waving from such great heights
"Come down now," they'll say
But everything looks perfect from far away
"Come down now," but we'll stay

Ironically, I heard this song a while back on the Garden State soundtrack, but it was a cover performed by Iron and Wine. I mistakenly though that Iron and Wine wrote the song, and that Postal Service later covered it - it's the other way around. I recommend hearing both versions - the lyrics are more evident in the Iron and Wine version, but the beat on the original is infectious.

So, Postal Service are currently on rotation in my Yahoo! Music playlist. I also discovered a similar band that I've been enjoying today: Grandaddy.

PS: The Google music search thingy rocks! It reminds me of the good days of CDNow.com, when you get artist discographies and bios easily. After Amazon bought CDNow, the info was hidden in the ads and clutter of Amazon's pages...

Viking Marching Band

At Keshav & Carrie's New Year's Eve party, Ramsey suggested we check out this video (alternate link and more info here)
Warning: weird music and animation, SFW though...

In honour of the movie, we came up with this cocktail that evening:

The Viking Marching Band
1 Mandarin orange, juiced (in South Africa, you'd use a naartjie)
1 shot of vodka (you know you want the good stuff...)
1/2 shot rum (spiced dark rum is best)
splash of grenadine syrup (less really is more in this case)
Pomegranate juice (4 oz / 125 ml or so)

Directions:
Mix everything in a shaker with ice, and shake well. Pour into a martini glass.

These were really popular... hic!

Seasonal ales

There are many seasonal brews that come around each winter, and some specially made for Christmas, so I thought I'd recommend some of the better ones I've tried this year.

Belgium makes an astounding number of Christmas beers, mostly double or trippel ales that are wonderfully rich and warming. Bottleworks in Seattle have a great selection, and when I stopped by a few weeks ago, the had some 1-year old Corsendonk Christmas Ale. I tried it last night, and really enjoyed it! It's mellow, smooth, a little nutty and spicy and not too fizzy. It reminded me a little of the Rogue Hazelnut brown ale, so try that one too if you like the Corsendonk...
Some of the newer Belgian beers can be really fizzy, I think the aging makes a big difference... I tried an Orval a few days previous and it was disappointingly fizzy.

Speaking of Bottleworks, they have recently opened a Belgian-style bar/cafe in Fremont, called Brouwer's, and I'm dying to try it. Perhaps there will be some moules et frites in my Christmas long-weekend!

Being a Seattle-ite, I can't write about beer and leave out the great Northwest microbrews that come out this time of year. Favourites from past years are the Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, Redhook Brewery Winter Hook Ale and the Bridgeport Ebenezer Ale. I've recently tried the Pyramid Brewery Snow Cap Ale, but this was too bitter and hoppy for my tastes, and not very fruity or rich, so it isn't high on my list of winter ales.

Update: 1/3/2006
A quick note on some other beers I've tried in the past week or so.

A Pacific NW one that's very yummy is the Widmer Snow Plow. Very smooth and malty, nice and warming. It's sort of like Guiness-lite. (Not as bitter and charred)

Another great Belgian beer (not seasonal, though) was a bottle of Kwak . Something about the name appeals to my juvenile sense of humour. (Which is still intact despite my great age...)

I can re-publish!

As if by magic! No errors!
I wonder if it's a coincidence that I contacted Blogger support a day or two ago? I never heard back from them, but everything seems happy now.

Well, with that fixed, I'd better not waste time. Back to the interesting stuff! Thanksgiving pics and snow pics to come this weekend!

Publishing woes...

I'm still hitting the "Broken Pipe" error when trying to re-publish my blog - even after moving the website to a new server with plenty of space. I'm beginning to suspect that Blogger is to blame. It looks like I am able to post new entries fine, but re-publish the entire blog fails. It would be nice if they gave you more diagnostics information...

Time to look into hosting my own blogging server?

Pfft! Another test

Blogger is lame and won't let me publish my blog after I change my template, so I have to publish an entry instead...

Freaky pizza recipe

Apparently, Americans think you're weird if you put tuna on your pizza! (My girlfriend had previously only seen this in Germany, and teases me whenever I try to make tuna pizza at home).

Last night I tried something new, and it turned out relaly well, so here's a quick recipe.
Ingredients:

• Pizza dough (make your own, or buy some ready-made dough, e.g. at Trader Joe's)
• Trader Joe's Indian Relish
• 1 cup of shredded cheese (I used a Spanish sheep/cow's milk cheese from Trader Joe's)
• 1 Small can of tuna (in water), drained
• 1 zucchini, sliced into 1-2mm thick slices
• 1/4 red onion, sliced
• Olive oil
• Salt & pepper to season

Roll out the dough and put it on a baking sheet or pizza stone. Spread the relish on the dough (not too much, it should just cover the dough, but you don't need a thick layer everywhere). Spread the tuna over the pizza, cover with shredded cheese, then the zucchini and onion. Drizzle with a little olive oil and season with salt and pepper.

Bake in a 425F oven for 15 minutes or until the pizza is slightly brown around the edges and the cheese is bubbly.

The Indian relish gives this a nice spicy, fruity tang. You could substitute a good fruit chutney instead (like Mrs. Balls Chutney from South Africa)

"I got the Blue Death"

Another quick plumber story befor I forget... (See "The week from Hell" for the setup to this)

When the plumber came out last Wednesday (after the flooding and general mayhem on Tuesday), he complained about having "the blue death" while on his phone in the parking lot. I thought I had mis-heard and perhaps there was an illness in his family...
Later it turned out his phone had gotten wet the previous day, and his screen was now on the fritz and only showed an eerie blue glow.

He probably was trying to say "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD) - referring to the bugcheck (kernel crash) screen Windows is infamous for. I think "Blue Death" sounds far better, though.

I wonder what colour the bugcheck screen in Vista is?

Time for a "Sea change"?

Bill Gates' memo to senior execs at Microsoft was leaked to the press this week. In it he calls for a "sea change" within the company - which made me wonder what the origin of that phrase is?

World Wide Words to the rescue! (More at http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sea1.htm)
The phrase is a quotation from Shakespeare. It comes from Ariel’s wonderfully evocative song in The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Michael Quinion runs World Wide Words and has a brilliant weekly newsletter on words and language, plus several books.

Sony DRM fun

If you read Slashdot, you've no doubt seen this, but if not... Mark Russinovich's blog aired some of Sony's dirty laundry last week, when he outlined how one of their copy-protected CD's installs a kernel-mode rootkit on your machine without your knowledge.

His initial analysis is really interesting, as is his analysis of the "patch" and phone-home behaviour of the rootkit, and his follow-up to the counter-claims from the software's developers.
The ability to effect change by complaining on your personal blog depends on havign an audience, and having credibility. It's cool to see the effect these postings have had - Sony are scrambling to fix this and the press coverage means more people will be aware of CD copy-protection and copy-protection in general.

Update - Nov 9th: The next round from on Mark's blog is here, in which he slices and dices the uninstall process that SonyBMG makes you jump through.

Update - Nov 14th: Sony will no longer manufacture any CDs using this DRM technology, and is re-evaluating their DRM initiative. Microsoft's Anti-Spyware tool will include a signature to recognize the rootkit and allow it to be removed.

The Week from Hell

Last week was a doozy! (If you're South African you may think "doozy" think that has something to do with the Dusi Canoe Marathon, but they just sound the same).

I was going to go into the gory details with a long post last week, but I think a bulleted list is better. It's still long and fairly gory - sorry. Here goes:
Tuesday:

• Plumber finally came to install new water heater. Price had already jumped from $1000 initial quote (on the phone) to $2500 (after adding all the stuff required to bring it "to code").
• Plumber did lots of soldering (pronounced "saw-der-ing" in the US) and found out that blowtorch + fire sprinkler head = BOOM!
• Fire sprinkler heads dump a LOT of water when they go BOOM! Plus, the fire alarm sounds and you have to call 911 to get the Fire Department out to shut off the sprinkler.
• Fire Department came out, were very friendly, and shut off the alarm. They actually didn't do much else - the plumber shut off the fire sprinkler and called in water damage restoration folks.
• New water heater could now be installed in the soggy tranquility following the Fire Department's departure. Only one problem- it's too big to fit in the "closet" in my condo. (By about 2 mm)
• Plumber: "It's not going to fit. I can't do it... I'll have to call the office... They ordered the wrong heater..."
  Me: "Are there any smaller hydronic water heaters that we could try?"
  Plumber: "Nope, they are all bigger now thanks to the new energy-efficient burners. You won't find a smaller one." (Later proven to be BS when I saw my downstairs neighbour's unit - but then they have a larger closet and easier plumbing too, so they definitely got lucky!)
• Me: "How about you rotate it this way a little so the side pipes don't get stuck on the wall?"
  Plumber: "Nah, that won't work... Never... It's the laws of physics" (This was favourite quote of his - apparently heat rising is also a law of phsyics!)
  Me: "Let's try"
  
• Plumbing proceeds without too much more drama. The fire sprinkler guy comes out to put a new sprinkler head on (after all the soldering is done), and re-pressurizes the system. The water damage restoration folks come out and put fans a dehumidifiers in my unit, and the two below me... Water damage is not too bad - and we're due to get new carpets soon anyway :)
• Still waiting to hear from the Lowe's carpeting contractor.
• End of Tuesday...

Wednesday:

• Spent the night in a jet-engine turbine - at least that's what the fans sounded like.
• I notice a leak from one of the pipes connected to the water heater - way up next to the ceiling and the fire sprinkler head that went BOOM the previous day. Also, my hydronic heating system makes a chunka-chunka-chunka noise when it's turned on - the pump is not happy. Call the plumber - he can come out around lunch time... I head in to work, leave early, meet the plumber, and realize I don't want him to solder and risk the fire sprinkler going off again, so I call the fire sprinkler guy. He can come on Thursday at 2pm. So, we re-schedule for then.
• Still waiting to hear from the Lowe's carpeting contractor.

Thursday:

• Another night in the jet turbine. Steerpike is starting to get brave and will actually walk into the lounge within a few feet of one of the fans, but Thandi is still shell-shocked and hides in the bedroom.
• Plumber comes out at 2pm. Fire-sprinkler guy comes out and shuts off the fire sprinkler system's water. He wraps the sprinkler head in a wet rag (if only we'd thought of that on Tuesday!) Plumber does some soldering, cuts out a flow check valve, solders in some pipe so now my water heater looks a bit like a Frankenheater.
• Everything gets re-connected. All seems well!
• We finally get ahold of the carpeting contractor - they can come out on Saturday. In the meantime our old carpet and floor is drying out slowly. (The carpet is dry already, but as we'll see on Saturday, the sub-floor is still damp)

Friday:

• Alyssum's car won't start, so I need to get up WAY TOO EARLY and give her a ride to work. (Getting up at 6:30am is probably even earlier than sparrow-fart...)
• To prepare for Saturday's carpeting fun, we so a few more runs down to our storage unit to get rid of furniture we won't need for the next week or two.
• I check my bank accounts online around midnight, and notice my credit card is strangely under water... A theme of the week, maybe? Some skelm (crook) in South Africa has helped themselves to $4500 from an ATM using a copy of my credit card! Technically, you wonder how that works... Did they get my credit card info from an online database (hacked a web merchant?), and then make a card? How did they get the PIN? Are they able to program their own?
  Frantic attempts to call my bank prove fruitless - their 24-hour support number is really a 10-hour support number with 14-hour voicemail. Still, their website lets me go "WTF?!" for each unauthorized charge.

Saturday:

• Call the bank in the morning, explaing the credit card fraud. They cancel my card and let me know there are some more pending charges to watch out for. Later VISA call me and run through the same thing. This will be my 2nd new card due to fraud this year. All this re-affirms by view that the credit card system is fundamentally broken and I'm amazed VISA and the other companies haven't moved to a more secure system yet. "Verified by Visa" sounds good, but no-one is using it yet - how about forcing all online vendors to use it? How about fixing in-store credit purchases so that the clerk can't make a copy of your card number and then party on it?
• Carpeting went smoothly, and while we had to move everything left in the condo 3 times (once into the lounge, then into the bedrooms, then back), we had stripped out enough stuff that it was not too bad.

Mark surely-nothing-more-can-go-wrong?

South African Wine mega-tasting

From Spittoon, "The biggest South African tasting in the UK ever I believe."
Some nice tastign notes from wines I'm not familiar with...
An Eben Sadie wine is one of them: The Sadie Family Palladius, 2004. I'd never heard of him before coming to the US and only did so by way of Garagiste, but am looking forward to tasting some of his wines in the coming months.
Boutique wines seem to be the next big thing in SA?

Bought a house!

Yes, A and I made an offer last Friday and it was accepted! We're almost 7 days into the process after our offer was accepted last Staurday!

• The house is really nice, still! I was wondering if I'd get cold feet when we went during the house inspection.
• Speaking of the inspection, it went fairly well. The roof needs replacing, but we pretty much knew that. The siding on the southern side needs paining this year and some boards need replacing next year.
• The furnace needs a service
• The water heater is old (20 years old!) It's a miracle it hasn't died yet!

Now there's no excuse for not getting the condo ready for sale. So, we've rented storage and spent a busy Tuesday night moving many large and heavy things into storage. This weekend will be spent moving more stuff, and doing some work on the condo.

Listening to...

I noticed some intersting new albums came out on Yahoo! Music today:

• The Dandy Warhols "Odditorium or Warlords of Mars"
• David Gray "Life In Slow Motion"
• Sigur Ros "Takk..."
• Tracy Chapman "Where You Live"
• Paul McCartney "Chaos & Creation In The Backyard"

So far, I've listened to some of "Chaos..." and like most of it. He definitely knows how to write pop! I love "Takk..." - I need to explore more of their albums.

Other recent discoveries of note are Michael Penn (brother of Sean Penn), who does great pop/rock in the vein of Neil Finn/Finn Brothers.
Eels are also incredible, with quite a range of style and emotion over their albums. Their new album "Blinking Lights and Other Revelations" was reviewed in NPR and got me hooked.

Dinner @ 8: Purple Cafe, Kirkland

A group of 7 went to the Purple Cafe in Kirkland last night for dinner. They're part of the Dinner at 8 promotion running in September. The place was packed (even more than usual) but we had a reservation and they seated us promptly. The noise level was a little uncomfortable, and made talking hard, but hopefully they'll return to normal after the promotion is over.

This place is a great choice for wine lovers. Their wine list is extensive, and they have a huge selection of wines by the glass, so you can explore new wines without committing to a whole bottle. That said, we decided to get a bottle to share: Folie a Deux Menage a Trois (2003 I think, around $30 at the restaurant). This was a very smooth, soft red with not much structure or character, but very easy to drink. Definitely a decent wine, but nothing exceptional.

I decided to order off their main menu, and had the crab wontons to start, then the lobster macaroni bake. The wontons were very good (a little oily), but the sauce they were served with was an odd choice and didn't work in my opinion. (It was a creamy ranch-style sauce with not much flavour. I'd have preferred an asian soy/citrus/ginger/chilli concoction.) The lobster bake was disappointing - it very oily and had very little cheese flavour - I expected a good rich cheese sauce, instead there was a oil-slick at the bottom of the dish. The lobster was good, though. The final nail in the coffin was the presentation - topped with deep-fried carrot and leek jullienne, and so hot that about 30 mins later I was still waiting for each mouthful to cool down before I could eat it. I'd avoid the deep-fried garnish and use a wider, shallower baking dish so it cools quicker.

Other ordered from the $20 fixed menu, and seemed to like their food. A ordered an apple and stilton salad to start and a pesto pasta for mains, which were both very good. Finally, the desserts looked good, although no-one seemed to rave about them. Our server forgot to ask me or A about dessert, so we didn't have any, and also never checked to see how we were enjoying our food, so service was spotty. (Skipping dessert probably was better for the waist-line though...)

Overall, an average meal out, made memorable by the nice wine and company. (It turns out we can get into quite a frenzy talking about Judge Roberts and his Supreme Court nomination).

Wine: 2001 Fleur Du Cap Cabernet Sauvignon

Region: Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa
Score: 90%
Price: $10
Colour: Inky red
Nose: Medium blackberry with some smokiness and must/damp leaves.
Taste: Medium to heavy finish, velvety, smooth mouth feel. Good structure, well integrated tannins that are start out strong and fade as the fruit and smokiness becomes apparent. The fruit is quite subtle and there's also some gaminess and mustiness on the palate. After 30 mins of breathing, the attack is much smoother. This is a nice "meditation wine" or would go well with red meat, stews, etc.

Links: Fleur du Cap's website, their notes for this wine

Technorati Tags: wine wine tasting food & wine

Happy Birthday TAR!

Today marks the 40th "birthday" of the Tibetan Autonomous Region in China. I wonder how many Tibetans were really celebrating? If you read the Chinese reports (like this one), everyone is ecstatic and the economy is booming.

Foreigners weren't welcome though... Some snippets from the Sydney Morning Herald:
"Ceremonies marked the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Tibetan Autonomous Region in 1965, which followed the "peaceful liberation" of Tibet by the People's Liberation Army in 1951 and a failed uprising in 1959 when the Dalai Lama fled to India.
Foreign tourists have in effect been barred from Tibet as China celebrates its widely resented rule of its restive population under a system of administration presented as autonomous self-rule. Travel agents in Lhasa said the processing of the special permits foreigners need to enter Tibet has been halted until September 10"

This article outlines the changing relationship between Nepal, India & China, and how this affects the Tibetan liberation movement.

Brand-spanking New Name

I hope you like the new name for this blog. (So far at least one person has commented positively, so that's good) I'm also trying to get RSS feeds working (via Feedburner), so hopefully IE7 will recognize this page as having a feed, and more people will potentially be able to subscribe.

Plugging my Flickr site

I have some pictures up on Flickr here.
Here's a nice one from our recent trip to South Africa on the right. (Click on the image to go to Flickr and leave a comment...)

Currently we're still going through the South Africa pictures, so there are not that many public ones, but we should have them sorted and available by the end of this week, so check back.

Flickr is truly an amazing site and makes it very easy to find interesting pictures - either using tags that people add to their photos, or groups sharing a theme, e.g.:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/monkey_business
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/issaquah

Redmond Saturday Market

Last Saturday we went to the Redmond farmers market for some groceries and breakfast. Their selection of fresh produce is better than the Issaquah market, which has more crafts, plants and "made things".

We had some scrumptious pancakes for breakfast (crepes, I guess, since they were made on a large flat griddle and ultra-thin). Alyssum and I shared a goat-cheese, spinach and roasted pepper crepe, and then shared a crepe suzette for dessert. (The latetr was made with yummy orange butter cream and real Grand Marnier).

Produce-wize we got lots of tomoatoes (for fresh salsa), some chillis, two bunches of baby beets, and a half-flat of raspberries. Some of the raspberries are now sitting in vodka infusing, so we'll see how that turns out. We also got some great boursin-style herbed goat cheese spread. (At $8 it was pretty pricey - why is the cheese at farmer's markets so expensive?) Plus a great bunch of flowers that is lasting well so far...

Other markets I'd like to try are the Columbia City market that Seattle Bon Vivant often writes about. (I don't shop with $60+ tote bags, though)

Links: http://www.redmondsaturdaymarket.homestead.com/
Other markets: http://dnr.metrokc.gov/wlr/farms/farmers_markets.htm