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Touch of Thai in Dixon

dave — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:23:58 +0000

See my Yelp Review of Touch of Thai

Good food and inexpensive. Recommended.

221 W. First St.
Dixon, IL 61021

Saturday – Pigeon Point

dave — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 22:22:12 +0000

Finally made it to the Pigeon Point Lighthouse.

Sam’s Chowder House

Prius Road Test

dave — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:35:34 +0000

We rented a Prius at CLT for Sara’s wedding from National Car Rental. We showed up, the dude said “pick any car”, just like in the commercial. Took us 15 minutes and reading the manual to figure out that you have to press the brake BEFORE pressing the Power button. Or else you get an error message that does NOT explain the problem. Aargh. Here are some other notes.

Zippy. Powerful enough. Some issues up hills. We did many fast starts to beat people around turns to change lanes with no problem.

Cheap interior. Leaning on the console while rearranging your body causes alarming cracking noises. From the console, not the body. Not sure if it was broken or normal.

Fully equipped with audio aux jack and 12V plug in the console. Too bad I forgot the audio cable for the MP3 player. Lots of cup holders. Seats comfortable, normal three hour pains. Kinda low for folks with hip issues like me but doable.

We sat in traffic on the way from Charleston back to CLT for two extra hours and filled it up on $8 of gas. And that lasted enough to look full where we turned in the car, 50 miles later.

Controls sometimes confusing. Why is Reverse to the front, and Drive to the rear? Not intuitive to me. Hard to see miles till empty – small numbers, and a symbol, not letters.

Very loud – the car, not the motor. Love the shark sneakup. Hate the road noise.

Summary: If you drive a lot it, especially stop and go, and don’t care about loud – do it. I wish they would be a little clearer on the 5 year-$10K battery packs.

LA Burritos, circa 1985

dave — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:39:37 +0000

Back in the dark ages, circa 1985 or so, I worked for Richard Spielman Precision Electronics, on the north side of Chicago. The owner, Richard Spielman, was a great guy, an atheist, an entrepreneur, and a foodie before his time, as trips to restaurants were part of our all-night construction binges. (He has also disappeared from the face of the earth.) We made light-beam devices for counting linen, and one of our installations was at ALS ? (Associated Laundry Services? Systems?) in Los Angeles.

So when install time came, we shipped 30 boxes via UPS, checked a box of tools and an oscilloscope, and the 386 PC that ran the thing, 100 floppy disks (3 sets of backups because something always went wrong) and flew to Los Angeles.

Commercial laundries are generally very industrial, but this place was forbidding. Even the hotel parking lot was behind barbed wire, and you had to push a button to open the gate. Not a good neighborhood.

But that didn’t stop us from venturing out in search of food. Richie found this burrito place, and I was wondering about it the other day. I can’t remember what happened ten minutes ago, how will I remember this?

So google “Los Angeles Burritos”. They flip up. I find Rick’s, a longtime favorite of Steve Dahl. Ten pages later, click off to Yelp. Same search. On page 11, “El Rey Tacos“. I remember Tacos El Rey. Boy that whacks a brain cell. Read the 2nd review. “I wasn’t brave enough to try the GARBAGE BURRITO.” I think this is it…

King Blvd and Normandie (again with Normandie…) Bad neighborhood. So far everything fits. Check Google Street View. Could be. As the Magic 8-Ball says, “Answer Hazy”.

AFAIK, this is it. One piece of history, complete.

Twins vs Seattle

dave — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 22:13:51 +0000

On our trip to Minneapolis, Sam got some free (to us – $62 to the season ticket holder) tickets for the Twins vs Seattle at the new Target Field. We were to go Saturday night. Of course, his plant melted down the day before and he needed to go in Saturday to relieve the chief troubleshooter, and Bette bailed, so Lou and I went. Karin dropped us off on the triangle outside the park, and we mooshed in with the herd of humanity.

The park is nice, new. Crowded. We had seats in Section 111, Row 24, on the right side behind home plate up at the top of the lower section. I could sit on the top of the chair to change positions. Nice. 85 degrees, no wind. A bit warm. I got a Summit ale and peanuts – all the food counters were packed. Supposedly the food was good. Maybe later.

The first inning was the game – Twins scored three runs, and that was it. Some nice plays. We got up in the 3rd inning and walked around to see the park from the different vantage points. You could only see the Jumbotron from the side where our seats were. THey have the same electronic displays we saw at United Center displaying ads and scores the whole game. Lots of ads, everywhere. Ick. I took a picture for a guy and his dad. I bought a $1.50 peach from the lonely farm stand.

Twins win in just over 2 hours, coming to within 1/2 game of the White Sox, currently in first place. We pushed our way out, called for a pickup, and the girls were in the car already on the way back from Plymouth. In ten minutes we saw them at the light and hopped in.

A nice afternoon at the park.

Thursday – Kuya’s, Google and Dessert

dave — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:31:51 +0000

Art came by after a meeting downtown. He is ethnic Chinese, but grew up in the Philippines, so he thinks of Filipino food as home cookin’. So we headed off to Kuya’s, a place he heard about, only a few blocks from the hotel, once we found it. Parking was a little challenging, found out later they have a lot in back.

It is a wonderful Mom and Pop place, but a very long room – hard to look around. Booths down one wall, and long tables down the other, and there were several larger parties using them.

The waitress came out and was very friendly. Art ordered Lumpiang Shanghai (Ground Pork Egg Rolls). They are about the diameter of a Chap-Stik, 2 inches long, fried, and filled with pork. You get a plate of about 20. Yum.

We tried to find something that this Haole could deal with. Art picked Pork Adobo (Marinated Pork chunks in soy sauce, vinegar, & garlic) which sounds a lot like something in Mexican places, and a vegetable plate (Pinakbet, Mixed Vegetables cooked w/ Shrimp paste, Pork, & Shrimp) with Okra and eggplant. This was served with garlic rice.

Art wanted to get the Halo-Halo Special dessert, but we were both full, and Art had some food left over to take home. Maybe next time.

Yes, they have wine – I had a house Cab. Ok. They don’t have beer. Strange. Art said a San Miguel would have been good, but they have it at Trader Joe’s.

As a Yelp reviewer said, interesting restrooms. I’ve seen much worse. Art said he would bring his brother back there, so I guess the food passed inspection, and you don’t eat in the restroom.

Then we drove off to Mountain View and other points to see the high tech sites, the Google campus, a Microsoft building, LinkedIn, and Yahoo.


Microsoft Office	Yahoo Office	LinkedIn Office

Cupertino for One Infinite Loop, the main Apple campus. I always liked that street name.

One Infinite Loop

Of course, the best were the Google buildings “pi” and “e”. Geeks.

Buildings Pi and e

Then it was off to Golden Island Cafe for dessert. I had a Red Bean & Sweet Tofu dessert. The waitress brought the cream on the side, but I used it. It was excellent. I think Art had a Sago of some sort, but I am not sure. Art?

Kuya’s Asian Cuisine
460 San Mateo Avenue, San Bruno, CA 94066
Golden Island Cafe
146 E 3rd Ave, San Mateo, CA 94401

Michael’s Uptown Cafe

dave — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:20:17 +0000

I just found notes on this – must be from 2003 – our Sarah’s friend was finishing college at IU in Bloomington IN, and we went to visit her. She was working on the Little 500 (think the movie) and we managed to drag her for dinner. So I found these notes in an old notebook:

I had salmon – OK, with pilaf. Excellent sweet corn salsa. Bette had pesto ravioli with goat cheese. I got to try one. Yum.
Salads are ala carte for $7.50. Wine was in small glasses for $6. For three people, $110. Nice place, but seems a little much $$$ for what you get. Maybe lunch is better.

Michael’s Uptown Cafe
102 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN 47408

Qt Training Report II

dave — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:50:50 +0000

The Qt WebKit stuff looks really nice. 40 lines to add a lite but featured browser, and you can have Javascript call C++ and vice versa – so buttons in HTML can start C++ processes, and C++ can modify the DOM directly ala Ajax. Social embedded should be a piece of cake. He showed an app with a contact book showing a small google map for a person based on their address or location. Harder part might be authentication and security.

Just downloaded some of the KDE project to see how a BIG project handles Qt builds via CMake

Qt Training Report I

dave — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:47:16 +0000

So far so good – Monday was architecture, Tuesday was specific core libraries and classes. We do exercises on the computer a couple of times a day to demonstrate topics. Today we did one on creating a paint application using the Qt libs. Tricky.

I have done all successfully without too much trouble. My background in Win32 API, MFC, core products, MSVC and the two weeks of playing in the code have helped a lot conceptually. The QtCreator IDE is OK, but the instructor, Romain, a Frenchman who just started up this office recently, prefers to use Eclipse. I have been playing with the C++ toolchain in Eclipse and checking it out and trying to do the exercises using it.

8 Attendees, three from Nokia (the new owners of Qt) who are here to replace the Symbian GUI with Qt on Nokia phones. One consultant learning. Two guys from Georgia, the country, not Atlanta who use it in their product already.

The Georgians, Zurab & Zurab, and I went into SF last night and ate at the wharf and looked around, and saw the GG bridge. When we got back we split some Georgian cognac and talked about the their work on the new Nokia phone that runs Qt apps – but it has 40G of memory and is real fast. Not your average phone now, but mobile and small devices seems to be an area that Qt is really hitting hard. Romain says the consulting market is pretty good for Qt programmers.

Tomorrow and Friday we should be getting into more specific questions where I will bring up my issue list. Some of them have already been answered.

Romain highly recommended CMake, a build system for C++ projects, and has specific support for Qt apps. It handles platform and compiler changes transparently and is good for large libraries like ours. I am playing with that on a background thread – there is a Hudson plugin also.

Pictures

BJ’s Brewhouse

dave — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:42:06 +0000

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.