October 2004 Archives

About a year and a half ago, when I realized that I had eaten in more than 100 San Francisco restaurants, I started a project of writing up a series of short reviews. Unfortunately, the project stalled about six months later, after about 50 reviews. However, this Blog gives me a chance to finish in style. But first, I'll start over in order to remove the reviews of the defunct, and to fix a few mistakes I made last time.

Absinthe - Great atmosphere, I am always expecting to see Oscar Wilde and Lord Douglas sitting together in a corner booth. Very creative wine list with a good selection of half-bottles. (One night, I found a 1/2 btl of '01 Vieux Telegraph Chateauneuf-du-Pape). Fries are good, Coq au Vin is good, and Seafood appetizers are a plus. Good, friendly staff. Highly recommended.

Aperto - Small and pleasant Italian café in Potrero Hill; now overshadowed by Chez Papa and his relatives. But, I ate there and had a good salad and pasta. If this restaurant were in my neighborhood, I'd be happy. Recommended.

Azie - Exquisite industrial/Asian space. Creative menu was once one of the very best in the city. I had an excellent meal here with a heirloom tomato salad, and Steamed Fish with baby bok choy, Thai chili, and scallions in Black Bean sauce, served with Jasmine rice. You can still get excellent food here, but the signs of decay seem obvious. Neither of my entrees is still on the menu. The once renowned butter-poached lobster was replaced by olive-oil poached lobster and now the lobster is gone altogether. Plus, the kitchen now closes at 9:30 on weeknights! Recommended w/downhill watch.

Looking around on the Internet is like panning for gold. There is a lot of dirt out there, but there are some real treasures than might change your life. Google Desktop is one, and GuruNet is another. Google Desktop will find anything on your computer in less than a second. Can MS Explorer Search do that? GuruNet allows context sensitive access to a web-based Encyclopaedia from anything on your desktop.

We seem to be in another intensive Internet/Creation technology period. I'm not sure Microsoft can keep up this time.

Amazon.uk has a list of some of Tom Waits' favorite albums, courtesy of a Guest Edit. This list is both what you would expect, and "Where did he find that?"

The California Coastal Records Project, is an amazing website containing more than 12,700 photographs of the California coast from the Oregon to the Mexican border. They have recently added a series of photos of the coast in the 1970's taken by the State Department of Boating and Waterways. They have tools to compare the two series and see what has happened to the coastal areas in the last 30 years. It is very entertaining to browse along the coast looking at places one has been and places where one might want to go.

This site is also interesting from a technology standpoint. The current series of photos were taken from a helicopter using a GPS system linked to a Nikon digital camera, which is linked via Fireware to an Apple Powerbook computer with a big hard drive. Read the propeller-head details here.

When I started my career, I was in accounting. I used to describe my job as spending fifty-percent of my time fixing mistakes and fifty-percent making new ones. (Trust me, this is funny to a beginning accountant). When I found myself doing programming I changed that to forty-percent debugging, and sixty-percent bugging (I was a better programmer than accountant).

This blog is new, and I am certain that I haven't got it all working just like it should. If you find something broken, send me an email!

People used to be more private. They had affairs, delusions, rages and observations on the currents of the day just like we do, but in those less modern ages people confided only to a mute, bound, locked and hidden diary or, perhaps a to close friend in a gossip session over tea or at the club.