Just Some Thoughts

We had dinner last night with two friends, prepared by a professional chef, but we didn’t go to a restaurant.

A while ago, Rachel entered a drawing at the gym. It is a franchise operation, with locations up and down the Eastern seaboard. The contest was sponsored by Balducci’s, a New York gourmet food store that has been expanding into the area here. Top prize? A cooking demonstration and dinner for four at your home by Balducci’s executive chef. Turns out this wasn’t just top prize, it was the only prize, and Rachel won!

So last night we got together with our friends Dave and Daria at their home (they have a huge kitchen) and the chef who came down from New Jersey, and we cooked up a storm!

On the menu was encrusted pan fried brie, served with mesculin mix and berry mostard; quail, stuffed with figs and chicken sausage, poached and then braised and served with spetzel and french green beans; and for dessert, apple tarte tartain, served with creme anglaise.

Nothing was pre-prepared — we made it all. Chris, the chef, headed the team, but we all participated in the prep and cooking. It was organized chaos and man was it fun and so good!

One of the more interesting things was the order in which we prepared each piece of the meal. Chris pointed out that when you eat in a restaurant, probably 80% of the food is prepared before you order. It is finished and “reheated” before it is served. Reheated is the wrong word to use, I guess. Elements of the meal are prepared ahead of time and assembled in a Just In Time process that would make any major manufacturer jealous.

Chris joined us for dinner at our request and we talked the night away. We all learned a lot about the realities of culinary school, the career path of kitchen staff, and even some of the economics of running both a restaurant and a gourmet store like Balducci’s.

Thank you Washington Sports, Balducci’s, Dave & Daria, and especially Chris!

ckagy Other stuff

It’s been a heckuva year. Goodbye 2005, and hello 2006!

ckagy Other stuff

This is outrageous!

Pat Robertson, a religious leader in the U.S., calls for the assassination of Hugo Chavez (see this article on CNN).

Think for a moment. If this was Mullah Omar making these kind of statements, the FBI would be all over him like a cheap hooker and he’d be in jail at least (if not classified as an enemy combatent). But no, this is Pat Robertson, well respected Christian (?!) broadcasting personality; his comments get dismissed as those of a private citizen.

This double-standard is incredibly hipocritical. Religious leaders publiclly calling for assassinations on national media should not be tolerated no matter their affiliation.

ckagy Other stuff

The movie Sideways has recieved a lot of good press and awards in the couple months that it’s been out. This afternoon, I finally saw it. I didn’t get it. For only one of the characters, Maya, could I develop any sympathy – the other three main characters where not at all likeable. The story was similar to Under the Tuscan Sun, but without the beautiful scenery and the development of the characters. It was really quite mediocre.

ckagy Other stuff

Web designers have begun to pick up on a fun technique to update sections of a web page in real time. This update gets done without redrawing and reloading the whole page. See — XMLHttpRequest for The Masses” href=”http://allinthehead.com/retro/241/xmlhttprequest-for-the-masses”>XMLHttpRequest for The Masses for a discussion of what’s happening.

Pretty cool, but the question I have is whether or not this will work with screenreaders used by blind folks. If it doesn’t, then the use of XMLHttpRequest in this way may not meet the Section 508 accessability requirements which would mean it might be a no-no for U.S. Federal Goverment web sites. If the screen readers can’t recognize changed text embedded in a web page, then it might be difficult to use this technique in a valid way.

ckagy Other stuff

Okay, so I’ve been using “Spurl”:http://www.spurl.net and “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us for a few days now, and I’ve got to admit that I really like the sidebar they’ve got for “Firefox”:http://www.getfirefox.com. It’s more handy than the bookmark menu in the browser, and I’ve got access to the same set of stuff at work or home. So far, so good.

I’m not sure what the “social” aspect of this gets me, though. I can see of other people have bookmarked this same item. Okay, that’s fine. All it means is that it’s popular. Is it old or out of date? Popularity lists would seem to do little good, because once an item shows up on a list of “hot” items, chances are it will stay there because it has increased visibility.

Open my eyes! Help me see why this is such cool stuff after all.

ckagy Other stuff

On Saturday night I splurged a little and went to a jazz concert at the Kennedy Center. Peter Cincotti is one of the up and comming jazz pianists, and at 21 years old is pretty impressive. Listening to much of his concert I kept being reminded of early Billy Joel – that’s not a bad thing, but I was expecting more of a Harry Connick.

His stage presence was pretty good for such a young kid. He told a cute story about opening for Ray Charles.

According to the folks last night, Peter’s got two CDs out. I’m going to have to find one and see what he sounds like in the studio.

ckagy Other stuff

I’ve been playing around with a couple online bookmarking sites these past couple days. “Spurl.net”:http://www.spurl.net/ and “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ appear to be two of the more popular.

These sites basically let you move your browser favorites online so you can access them anywhere. You can also categorize things a bit, too. So far, so good. What I think is really cool, conceptually, is that your bookmarks can also be made available for others to “see”:http://del.icio.us/ckagy. They can also be cross-referenced with the “categories”:http://del.icio.us/tag/astronomy others have set up.

You end up with a nice dynamic web of information. From this you can extrapolate which topics or pages are getting a lot of “attention”:http://www.spurl.net/discover/hot.php, or see what other people have bookmarked in your same topic “area”:http://del.icio.us/tag/tutorials+photoshop.

Very cool, but it strikes me as a solution in search of a problem. What can I do with this other than move from computer to computer and still have all my bookmarks?

ckagy Other stuff

Check out this (better) map of the election results. Given that the vote was so tightly split in many parts of the country, it is something of a fallacy to simply color states blue or red. Princeton used shades of blue, red and purple to represent the split of the vote and paint a more representative picture.

ckagy Other stuff

“Andy”:http://www.raggedcastle.com/webcrumbs is hanging out in Amsterdam at a conference, taking some pictures and having a good old time from the sound of it. He even ate raw herring and _liked it_! I always knew he was a freak…

ckagy Other stuff