Jack, our building's repairman, stopped by yesterday to unclog a drain. For the second time, he's seen my baby daughters and told us that at that age (9 months), they can kill a snake with their bare hands. This is always the first thing he says about them. Not that they are cute, or growing nicely, but that they can kill snakes.
But perhaps this is why you never see anyone who has both a pet snake and a baby in the house...
Today some coworkers and I had lunch at Chaat Cafe, on 3rd St. and Folsom in San Francisco. Right by the Moscone Center. I believe I've eaten at the Berkeley Chaat Cafe before, and it was good. This was one is larger, and has a selection of about 8 or so chaat's (vegetarian Indian snacks), with about that many wraps and a small selection of curries. I tried the Papri Chaat and a Lamb Wrap. The Papri Chaat was delicious, kind of crunchy, milky, and with a healthy dose of a strong chutney. The wrap was also good, but not as good as the one in Vic's Chaat House in Berkeley. I found the naan used in the wrap was a bit chewy for my tastes, as if it had been sitting around for too long. But on the whole, it was quite tasty, and I would recommend it for anyone who is in the area and wants a fairly quicky bite to eat. Prices are reasonable, about $3.50 per Chaat (two is probably enough for lunch), and around $6 for the wraps.
Last month a patch was sent into the emacs devel mailing list. It enables antialiasing on X windows for emacs, something I've wanted for a very long time. There are plenty of display bugs (perhaps related to proportional fonts), and display is slower than normal. If you want to build this font, I had to hand-patch it in, and also uncomment the BLOCK_INPUT and UNBLOCK_INPUT lines (as suggested in a followup message).
Screenshots are here (not by me).
Over the weekend, I attempted to grill something. Usually, this is kind of a no-brainer, but I had run out of charcoal and decided to try some hardwood charcoal. I never used hardwood charcoal, but how different could it be?
The first thing I did was light the charcoal in a chimney starter. I didn't read the instructions on the bag, of course. Hey, I'm an engineer, we never read instructions, we just get mad at other people for not reading them. So after about 20 minutes the charcoal is red-hot. Success! Or so I thought. But wait, should I wait for it to ash over? Did hardwood charcoal do that? I wasn't sure, so I let it sit there for another ten minutes, after which it didn't seem to ash over at all. OK, well enough is enough, I dump the charcoal into the barbecue pit. After I clean the grating, I put the chicken on, put the grill cover on, and come back in 15 minutes to test it. The grill is cold. What the fuck?
So I put another batch of charcoal in my chimney starter and light it. This time I read the instructions. It says 10 minutes should be enough for them to get red-hot, and after they get red-hot, put them in. Seems simple enough. But after 10 minutes, they were not red hot. They did have plenty of smoke though, so after a few minutes more, I decided to just dump it in my barbecue pit. I put the chicken back on, and the cover back on, and for the next 30 minutes, smoke pours of my grill. Looks goods. And it was good, the chicken was in fact cooked in that time. But at the end of it, smoke stopped coming, and the grill cooled down rapidly.
The next day, there was still much whole charcoal in my grill. I probably can just re-use it. But I'm still puzzled about the properties of hardwood charcoal. Supposedly it's faster burning, and hotter than the charcoal briquettes, but that doesn't explain how charcoal can go from red-hot to no heat in a ventilated barbecue pit in just a few minutes. Personally, I blame this whole thing on George W. Bush.
Ebert has a great new essay on Leone's movie "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". I'm not sure I agree with all of his points. I don't believe the leadup to the 3-way shootout was supposed draw attention to itself. I just thought it was a great, slow, buildup of tension (although somewhat marred by the audience noticing Lee van Cleef's finger that is missing a joint during this scene). My favorite duel. Or is it a truel?
The San Mateo branch of Joy Luck Place has opened this weekend. I dropped by and had some of their dim sum items. I was excited. Being able to walk around and eat some dumplings as a snack is something I thought I would only be able to do if I lived near Chinatown. They had a small selection of dim sum items and other stuff like chow mien and Hunan-style eggplants. When I went there, they only had about half of what would eventually offer. But just the dim sum they offer is a huge step for San Mateo. They didn't have any of their barbecued pork, or their custard tarts, or any of their other dessert items. What they did have, however, was quite tasty. I had shrimp & lobster dumplings, potstickers, and barbecued pork buns. Everything was delicious. The shrimp tasted fresh, and the barbecued pork was succulent. On the downside, it was a bit expensive. Stay tuned for further reports when I eat a complete meal there.
Found an interesting page today about Laibach's covers of other songs. Laibach always have the best covers and most inventive cover songs. Yes, cover songs can be inventive. Laibach often changes the melody completely, or writes new lyrics, or translates it into German, or even makes a whole new song completely. Even straight covers are done in this Teutonic nationalistic style that is frequently hilariously at odds with the original songs intent, as in their cover of Queen's
Due to my newfound interest in getting as many mp3's as possible, I have remembered that band's frequently put free mp3's on their websites, and I've never even checked out the websites of my favorite bands. I feel old.
So far I've found Foetus's mp3s (my all-time favorite musician), Boyd Rice's low-quality mp3s (a fascist, possibly racist jerk, but a smart and funny one), Current 93's mp3s (whose website is as strange as their music), Negativland's audio files of various sorts, and Ween's web radio station.
Some other bands that don't have mp3's but are interesting anyway are Mojo Nixon's, the Dead Milkmen (many of whom seem to be doing web development now), Coil, Nurse with Wound (hey he looks my old friend Hal), Billy Childish, and Laibach. Among others.
I'm impressed with the work these guys put into their webpages. Then again, I only wrote up the good ones, which tend to be of the Industrial genre, or the more well-known punk bands. I have a feeling that exploring the world of lesser known punk bands online would lead to many webpages that look like they were put together at Kinko's at 3 am.
For my 30th birthday, my parents quite generously gave me an iPod. It was a great gift. I've previously had a mp3 player, Creative Lab's Nomad, but they screwed me by never coming out with drivers for it besides the Windows 98 drivers. If they are under the impression that I will stay with Windows 98 for the rest of my life just because of their mp3 player, they have another thing coming. I've never bothered to contact them to ask them if they did have that impression, but I'm sure they do, and now they know they have another thing coming.
The iPod is great: very thin, easy controls, and good sound. The only problem I have with it is if I place the iPod in the dock, and I'm not logged in, it will sit there and display "don't remove the iPod from the dock" until I log in, which is kind of annoying. But now I just don't put it in the dock until I log in, so problem solved.
I've uploaded all my music to iTunes. Not all, actually, just the ones I thought were worth it, which was about half of all songs. I even bought a song from the ITunes store, Fishbone's Skankin' to the Beat. It was great. But almost nothing else I like is on the store. No Dead Milkmen, no Mojo Nixon, no Foetus, no Laibach, no chutney music at all (they problem took one look at the cheapo Chutney albums with titles like "Yes Boss!!! Chutney time" and threw them straight in the trash). So they need to keep expanding the selection.
Anyway, now I'm one of those people you see with headphones on all the time. I'd feel stupid-looking if it wasn't for the great trail blazed by countless stupid-looking yuppies that use those handless cell phone accessories.