dresese

Crafts in St. Louis

According to a post in the The Commonspace Blog, my friend Greg Svendsen is selling ceramics now, at The Shop (in St. Louis). I have a bowl he made for me, and it's a great looking rustic sort of thing, perfect for slices of a nice Italian bread. Next time I'm in St. Louis I'll definitely go and stop by The Shop, which is evidently at Spring and Wyoming.

Also, my mother is selling some jewelry she designed herself at, last I heard, Plaza Frontenac. She's sold quite a few pieces already, and I'm looking to help her set up some small e-commerce site for it.

Good luck and good sales to both of them!

Double Subway Craziness

Today I went down to take a subway to Elmhurst to go eat some Malaysian food. When I arrived, all the trains were running local, and two trains were waiting and accepting passengers. I went to the one on the express track, when it informed me that the other train would be leaving first. So I quickly move across the platform to the other train, only to be confronted with a loud sermon by one of those annoying subway preachers.

As an aside, the demographics of those preachers are quite curious. All of them are older Jamaican women. I've never seen a male preacher, a white preacher, or in fact even a non-Jamaican preacher. However, within that demographic range, some of them sit mostly quietly, sometimes letting out a few loud sentences of "praise". Some stand and preach, and one in particular is just batshit crazy, screaming "Praise Jesus!" while running up and down the subway car with her arms flailing wildly. I've encountered her about three or four times so far.

This one was one of the normal ones, which means that she was completely obnoxious without actually being scary. So as I jump in the subway car, notice a loudly talking Jamaican woman, hear a few words and decide it's not worth it. I jump back out again while I hear the announcement that the doors are about to close. I run over to the next car and get in, much relieved.

A few minutes later, someone announces their presence, asking for money. At least I assume that is what they are asking for, this guy's voice is so slurred I can't make out any words. So I do what I normally do in these situations, which is continue to read my book. The man stops by me, asks me for money (I think that's what he said), and when I said no, he gets mad at me and says something. I would have been a little concerned or freaked out, but I couldn't understand a word he said to me. I just looked at him and resumed reading my book. He traveled to the end of the subway car, and went through the door between the cars, and entered the same car that the subway preacher was in.

Now this is an interesting situation. I've never seen two people do their shticks at the same time in the same car. What would happen? Would this guy just pass on through, not interrupting the Jesus-woman? Or would they do some sort of crazy-person verbal battle, with her warning him of the dangers of hell, and him giving her an incomprehensible tongue-lashing? It was almost interesting enough that I wish I could see what was going on. But it wasn't to be, and now I'll never know what happens when a subway beggar meets a subway preacher.

Taste of West Lake

Ben and I went to eat in Flushing last weekend. After wandering around Main Street for about half an hour, we had about six great-looking restaurants we wanted to try. We eventually settled on Taste of West Lake, because neither of us has had that regional cuisine before.

The restaurant was downstairs, in a plain-looking room with a few long tables and a bar. The menu was not extensive, having a list of 8 or so West Lake specialties, about 6 appetizers, 6 desserts, and about 10 or so regular items.

We ordered a variety of dishes. one of the highlights of which were a set of 4 giant pork belly cubes.

When eating this pork belly, I started out by eating a lean piece that was falling away. I found it tough and dry, although it had good flavor. After finishing that, I couldn't see how eating the rest of it would be an enjoyable experience. However, when I ate a mouthful with both lean and fat layers, the whole thing magically transformed into a succulent, juicy piece of meat. Amazing how the two kinds of layers to the pork belly and complement each other so well, and essentially fool the tongue.

Probably the most interesting dish we got was the raw salted crab. It came with a sweetish dipping sauce that I could not identify. The sauce was a good complement to the salty meat. But the crab meat, being raw, was amazingly tender. In fact it was nearly liquid, and a complete delight to eat.

Another interesting dish was the shrimp with tea leaves. It sounded more interesting than it was. As you can see, there are tea leaves there, but the shrimp itself didn't seem to pick up any of the flavor. Don't get me wrong, it tasted very nice. But nothing special, I think.

When I was taking the pictures of the food, an amazed waitress came up and said "Hey, why are you taking pictures?" I was sort of at a loss what to say. Was she mad at me? Or just curious? I couldn't tell, so I said "I'm just like taking pictures of food." Then, to make myself seem a little less strange (or perhaps more so?), I added "I put these pictures on my internet site". This made her very happy, and she thanked me. Which I felt a little strange about. I didn't tell her that hardly anyone reads these things, and most of them that do read it don't live anywhere near Flushing. So I guess my taking pictures of the food was really as crazy as it initially appeared to her.

Casa

One thing I've missed in New York is great espresso and cappuccinos. New York just doesn't have the same cafe culture as on the west coast, and besides the ubiquitous Starbucks, there isn't many good places to choose from. But I have had some good coffee here. One of the latest places I've been going to is Casa, around 40th St and 9th Ave, right by the Port Authority overpass.

I went by there yesterday, as the 9th Ave. international food fair was in full swing outside, and met my friend Adam.

Casa has probably the best cappuccino's and espressos I've had in New York. The most well-regard barrista there is Andrew, who is evidently a real coffee geek. He's there most of the time on the weekends. However, I've had fairly good luck with the other barristas as well, so it seems like most of them know what they are doing.

Ah, look at that espresso. You can see that wonderful brown crema on top, a great sign. How many times have I gotten espresso in New York and gotten no crema at all, or a fairly wispy one? Ah, so many espressos wasted.

Here is Andrew making Adam's cappuccino. Evidently the espresso machine you see is one of the best you can buy. It has pipes going down to the basement, where they have some sort of system to deliver steam or something like that.

Above you can see Casa's owner, in the red Caffe Trieste shirt. It's a good sign that the owner is a fan of that place.

There it is, a great cappuccino. No latte art, but that's OK, what really counts is the foam, which in this case was silky smooth, and super sturdy. Great stuff.

Tebaya

As my coworker "dB" mentioned on his blog, we ate lunch at Tebaya (on 19th St. near 7th Ave) on Friday, a tiny but elegant Japanese counter which specializes in chicken wings, but has Teriyaki burgers, potato mochi, and other items as well.

I had the chicken wings, which were deep fried, then coated with a semisweet black pepper sauce. The wings were great, very juicy. Because of the sauce, the wings were not super crunchy, but it was fine because the sauce added a lot. Best of all, it was quite reasonably priced at around $6 for 8 chicken wings.

Out of our group of 5, we all had a wide range of things. The menu was only about 6 items, so we probably covered it. Many got the Teriyaki Burger, which was said to be great. But most of all people liked the potato mochi.

I'll be going back very soon, I'm sure.

Tiger installed

Well, I backed up everything worth saving on DVDs. Burning DVDs is slow, about 1.5 hours to burn and verify, and probably a good half hour just moving things to the disk image before burning. So at about 2 hours per DVD, and with 5 DVDs to burn, plus counting that I wasn't just sitting there waiting for things to finish, it took me all day to backup. But by 11pm on Saturday, I had erased my disk, and installed Tiger.

The next day, Sunday, I installed everything, and of course realized I had forgotten some critical items like my precious .emacs file! But luckily my .emacs file is so precious I use variants of it on multiple machines, so I managed to restore it.

So far, it looks great. Things are speedy, although that may be also due to cleaning out all the clutter while reformatting. Dashboard is nice, but slow to update things when you go to the dashboard pane. Spotlight is also nice so far, and has some of the same neat usability features as Quicksilver.

One other praise for Apple. I made a differently named account on my newly formatted hard drive than I had before. There were surprisingly few places where I had to edit configuration files or XML directories to make things work. Most of the places I did have to edit were in third-party programs. So good work, Apple!

Tiger problems

I got my copy of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and attempted to install last night. Unfortunately, it does a thorough disk check, and it found an error on my disk that could not be repaired. It didn't say what it was, though. Damn you, Apple, give me an error message I can do something with! But wait, what's this? The install includes a copy of Disk Utility you can run separately, as well as Terminal? Yay, Apple, all is forgiven. I ran Disk Utility, and it didn't give me much more information, just another notice saying I had an unrepairable error on my hard drive, and an error number (-9972). I then opened the terminal and ran fsck (which is the same thing Disk Utility does, but I ran it with additional debug flags to get more info). It informed me of an error "invalid alternate VHB at 0". This sounds bad.

Many people have had the same -9972 error. Almost no one has seen "invalid alternate VHB at 0", though. Usually the -9972 means you either have to run Disk Warrior to repair your disk (which costs money), or you should back up everything, reformat and reinstall. In some cases, your hard disk is just screwed, perhaps just starting to go bad. I think I'll do the cheaper option, and back up everything to DVDs, and restore it later on. I could use to make backups anyway.

I think it's going to be a long weekend.

More on confusing bathrooms

You heard it here first, folks. Now the Times picks up the story with an article on different restaurants confusing restrooms. They do mention wd~50, and the scary thing is, at first that place didn't even have a sign saying to push on the wooden panels.

I think in a few years this will be a trend looked on with some amusement. Ah, yes, 2005, the time when New York high-end bathrooms became unusable...