For dinner, needed something light. Found BJ’s Brewery website, I had seen it in the Marriott list, and considered it. It is a chain, so I was not real hopeful. Tonite, it was raining, don’t want to go far. They have “PIRANHA® PALE ALE CHILI”. Sold.
So I drive the 0.1 mile, and go in. The parking lot is insane at 6PM. Don’t know why. Basic brewpub decor, ask at the desk – they have food at the bar. Pretty busy for a Monday night.
Finally muscle into the bar in front of the four TVs. Three basketball games and a “classic” NFL game from 1985 – Bears vs. Green Bay. Whoopee. Read my book a bit – “Digital Fortress” by Dan Brown.
Takes a while before the bartender notices me. The dude to my left comes in after, gets called first. Orders house vodka tonic. Likes it. I order a Russian stout. Also the Chili + house salad with balsamic.
Chili? Good, not great – a little too mushy. Not hot, but warm. Eh.
Stout? Good.
Then I asked for a half a HARVEST HEFEWEIZEN®. He said he didn’t have halfs – but brought me a “tasting” glass – 3/4 a pint. Boy, he got a good tip.
Oh, my. Exploded with flavor. Wonderful. Sweetish, but a hint of bitter. As they say, no lemon required. Tastes like it is already living in the glass. Gotta get Art here to try it.
After I pointed out and he passed a bunch of places to eat on the way back from Point Reyes, Art said he had a place in mind, good Chinese. Fine. He is Filipino, and knows Chinese.
So we head down the 101 to Millbrae, and exit into an ethnic wonderland. Chinese shops, produce vendors, various restaurants, all rolled into a sleepy downtown area (on a sunday night).
We parked in a municipal parking lot, and walked a few blocks to the Shanghai Dumpling Shop. We entered, a waiter looked up, Art flashed two fingers, and the waiter motioned to a booth.
The interior is bright yellow, and over the kitchen is a bright red roof. Nothing dark here. Tables in the middle of groups. We arrived early, and people kept coming in, mostly Asian but many other ethnicities, brought together by good food. A nice place. A woman came out of a back room with a huge bowl full of something ground. I suppose it was dumpling filling.
The menu was a trip. Their translator was obviously not familiar with English, or not a marketing major, or he would not have “Boiled Tendon” or “Pork Esophagus” on the menu. My favorite was the three types of eels. Ick. Art says the fried ones are like fried calamari. I could do that.
Art and I got the Xiao Long Bao (Shanghai Soup Dumplings), which were excellent, served in a bamboo steamer right off the pot, and the Green Onion Pancake, which was really a round flat french Fry, also good, but very dense as some reviewers have mentioned. Then we split the beef in satay sauce over rice noodles, cooked in a clay pot, bubbling. Yum. We thought about the sesame chicken, but I can get that at home. Then again, I might just go back and try it. No booze, but lots of good tea.
Leaving, we stopped in Dean’s Produce next door, and picked up some apples and plums. Lots of interesting cheeses, and Romanian and European stuff. Olive oils. Made me wish I did not have to pay $100 to fly it all home.
Then Art suggested a Chinese ice cream parlor, so we walked three blocks to the Sweet Indulgence Dessert Cafe at the corner of Broadway and La Cruz. We walked in and the place was empty. It hat bright color, funky plastic cone furniture and a collection of manga toys in the case by the counter. Posters of the drinks on the wall so you could point and ask. A cute Asian woman came out from the back and I asked her what was good. Art explained that I was from Chicago. That said it all.
She recommended the jasmine tea with tapioca. I don’t remember details, but it came cold or hot with balls of tapioca in the bottom, with a big fat straw to suck it down. So as you slurp, the balls of tapioca slide up the straw (thanks to the angled cut at the bottom of the straw. That took me a while to figure out). The tea (with cream) was good, the tapioca was interesting, but tasty. Kind of fun. Art had some sort of shake. There was a case with what looked a lot like gelato, but the flavors of Red Bean and seaweed did not sound like gelato I know…
We went back and talked with her at the anime filled counter. She is a Hong Konger, owns the place with the other woman in the back, and they are struggling with everyone else on the block with the economy. Then a bunch of kids came in and ordered tea and stuff from the case.
She is going to Chicago to study at a French pastry school. For 5 days. Then she has to come back and work. Late nights. I give her a lot of credit. She wants to go to France to learn pastries. I do wish her well.
Shanghai Dumpling Shop – 455 Broadway – Millbrae, CA
Dean’s Produce – 451 Broadway – Millbrae, CA
Sweet Indulgence Dessert Cafe – 298 Broadway – Millbrae, CA
Our 2009 CR-V with AWD has gotten 31 mpg on the trip to work, but much less on the way home. I suspect the trip to work is downhill.
There are two Trip displays, A and B, with independent average mpg displays. Trip A is the one I reset to check short trips. Trip B I leave and it becomes a cumulative measure.
Today my A and B values were 23.4 mpg. I suspect this is what I will get on average based on the driving I do. Honda estimates 21 city / 27 highway. So we are bit better, and much better than the van (15mpg downhill) but not as much as I’d hope.
This is a documentary about scientists sending a telescope into space to look 6-10 billion years into the past. On a balloon. From Sweden and Antarctica. Actually, seeing the Antarctica stuff is worth it, the rest is better. Lou and I screened the movie as part of the Fermilab lecture series with Mark giving some background before the movie and the two brothers answering questions afterwards.
Paul and Mark Devlin are two science brats – their father is a high-energy physicist and they spent a lot of time at FNAL with Dad. Paul made the film, Mark the science. Good thing they are both bald, cause what they had to go thru would have made me rip out my hair.
Mark is really a good speaker, smart and engaging. Worth seeing in person. It is an entertaining hour, even better if you are into tech. The Fermilab crowd ate it up.
I checked out the DVD – it is only for a Educator license for schools for $250. Most interesting – the f-bombs are bleeped, and it comes in two versions, one with the discussion about God (pro and con) removed. I guess science in education is OK as long as it doesn’t interfere with your religious beliefs…
A small boy in the audience asked if they ever got the glove back. Brought down the house. See the movie and understand…
In the pre-talk, Mark mentioned he had been on the Colbert Report so I looked up this video
Our AVG subscription was expiring and I was having 2nd thoughts about renewing – it was periodically crashing Bette’s underpowered computer. Ralph at work recommended Kaspersky Internet Security, and I got a trial of that and ESET Nod32 Security to try out. Both were well reviewed. ESET has a more techie interface, and a smaller memory footprint (important for little machines) and I wanted to like it more, but both machines started crashing randomly on startup and when the computer went into screen save or hibernate after installation. So we went back to Kaspersky and so far it is running great. Plus I have the option to not install the email or IM filters at installation since PocoMail does not use PST files or such – as soon as the infected file hits the disk it is detected.
I did find a good Forbes article on Anti-Virus, and from that found a nonprofitreview of AV software where ESET and Kaspersky both do well but behind two others I never heard of. Ralph plus it works sez I think we will do Kaspersky.
First I had the Foule platter. Good and a lot of food for 8 bucks.
“warm fava beans richly seasoned with garlic, lemon and cumin. ” It comes with a hard-boiled egg boiled in tea which gives it a brown color clear down to the yolk, and a bright pink pickled something. With hummus and pita. Yum.
Leslie is a fellow North Shore transplant, we chatted about Evanston, Skokie, good deli and our wedding reception hummus.
Again on the Square at lunchtime. Ordered the Shakshouka which they didn’t have before. It was worth the wait, with two eggs poached in a spicy salsa with warm pita wedges. Yum.
Note: don’t go if you are in a hurry. She likes to talk (which I don’t mind), and depending on the line, it can take 15 mins for them to cook. Worth the wait.
So I am trying to archive the check scans. TIF files named “donation-2010-DEP01-01.TIF” to identify the year, deposit batch number (01) and the scan number within the batch.
I first just entered the keywords using Thumbs Plus 7. Pain. TP8 is not much better – cannot keep the image open while I add the keywords. Small monitor.
Then I tried the user variables in Photo Mechanic. This was better, but I would need to change the settings for the user variables for each deposit.
Then I considered the filename. I can read the data right out of the filename using the variables. For the file donation-2010-DEP01-01.TIF, I use a caption definition:
Note the lost 2nd arguments and closing braces on some of the keyword terms.
I researched a bit in their forums and found a similar problem in this article, Colon in Keywords. It was mentioned there that PM 4.6.2.1 had a problem with leaving colons alone in keywords, and 4.6.3 (recently released) fixed these problems. So I downloaded and installed 4.6.3 and the vertical pipes now work, but the problems with the closing braces are still there. Boo. I might have to go back to user variables.
Saturday night I posted a question on the Camera Bits forum. Sunday morning Kirk the developer posts a “I’m on it” message. Then he posts that yes, it’s a bug, it will be fixed, here is the workaround. Nice. I post a followup. He posts one an hour later.
A good reason to support little companies with specialized software. Now I just scan, rename the file, and apply the Stationery Pad. Bam! Fill in the donors – done.
I need to do some testing, so let’s try installing Windows XP Pro into a Virtual Box VM to avoid trashing my production system. Which is pretty trashed anyway, and has a big frosty pre-ordered (cheap) Windows 7 waiting when I finally get around to researching a driver for my now non-supported HP LaserJet 3150 MFP – but that is another time…
Fire up VirtualBox and create a new VM. I picked the defaults except for 512M of RAM – gotta be careful to not run anything else – set the CDROM to physical drive E, and a growable HD 8Gb. The usual.
Now boot the new VM with the XP Pro SP3 CD (slipstreamed from the SP2 CD). It does its thing, and hit a certain point while it is loading drivers and locks. Hard. Click the close (X) button, VBox asks do I want to reset the VM? Sure. It locks. Hard. I try to kill all the processes and then restart VBox. There is a conflict with an open semaphore file, so I check again and sure enough there is still a VBox process, which cannot be killed. I shut down, Explorer disappears. Luckily a Task Manager box is still up. Finally the “Shutting down Windows” message comes up. Off to Candlelight Ski in Rush Creek. Three hours later, it is still shutting down. I figure most of the stuff has been saved at this point – reset button it is. Now boots ok. Whew.
The message implied some driver was not cooperating, and I questioned the USB stuff. So I run through the options and turn off any non-vital hardware. Audio, USB, no 3D acceleration. Restart the VM and the install. Now (the upgrade) asks for a previous version CD. Find my copy of Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. Yes.
Set networking to Bridged and run the install. Works great.
Moral: turn off all the extra hardware. You can add it later. Or not. I sure don’t need to.
So I wanted to buy the sheet music for “Lust” by Tori Amos. I love the piano music and wanted to learn it – to play, not to sing.
I started with Google, found several music sites, and prepared to pay. Seems to be about $4.50. Ok, I can deal with that.
Started with I had purchased “Time out of Mind” by Steely Dan and “Holly and the Ivy” by George Winston using the Solara viewer from FreeHand Music. They don’t have the piece. Fair enough.
Then off to Musicroom, where I found the pience, changed currency to USD then signed up, and then found that I could not by that item from the US. Thanks for telling me up front! I love wasting time!
Then finally, I did a new Google search, found Musicnotes.com and installed yet another stupid viewer. I was able to finally purchase it and print it. What a waste of time.
Until the publishers and artists finally decide to let us get whatever we want whenever we want it EASILY for a fair price, the piracy will continue. In the meantime, have fun in bankruptcy.
