Brian's Braindump

I know I'm probably a horrible person for hating school buses, but I do. I can't help it. I hated them when I had to ride them to school, and now that I drive to work, I really can't stand them. I realize there's probably not another solution to the transportation issue. I'm just sayin'.

They cause a *lot* of traffic. Seriously. Yesterday, I left my house at 7:15 and got in at 7:45 because I got caught behind 4 buses. Today I left at 7:10 and got in at 7:28 because I got caught behind *no* buses. 18 minutes vs. 30 minutes is a significant difference. For reference, when I come in at 4am for downtime at work, it takes me something like 13 minutes.

What really bothers me is that bus drivers mostly have chips on their shoulders and use the flashing lights to exert their power over 9-to-5ers. They make arbitrarily long stops, they wag their fingers at drivers, they stop to talk to crossing guards while we wait, blah blah blah. They did this when I rode the bus too. Bus drivers mostly seem to hate the world... the kids included.

Well, at least I can long for summertime, along with the kids on the bus. If nothing else, we can bond on that, even across generational lines. Summertime is wonderful. No buses at all, no matter what time I leave for work.

:-)

So my commitment to be smoke free is proving much stronger than my commitment to keep this blog updated ;-) Sorry 'bout that.

I've gained some weight. I've done a lot of things to make sure my mind never wanders in the direction of smoking. It's kind of like a mentality migration. It's hard to do mostly because of inertia issues. Your brain is so used to doing certain things on a certain schedule that it becomes troublesome to change. For a few days there I was even what I would call... depressed. There was a definite 'mourning' that went on. It was weird.

All that's gone now. Don't forget, though, I only smoked a half pack a day, so I was a light smoker, really. I would've been surprised if I had been still feeling big-time withdrawal effects after a month.

What's great now is:
1. I sleep about a million times better. I don't know why that is.
2. I never smell like smoke, which is good because nobody I work with smokes, and I didn't like smelling like smoke.
3. I don't have to go outside and freeze my butt off so I can smoke.
4. My whole body seems to function a lot more smoothly in general.
5. My brain is able to focus a little better (this after about a week of not being able to concentrate at all).

Well, good luck to anyone else out there taking the plunge. It's hard, but it's worth it.

Right. So. I don't smoke. It's a little depressing at times, but that never lasts long. Right now I'm going through my insomnia stage, which I believe will be followed by flu-like symptoms. I'm already coughing up.... stuff.

My guess is I have about another month or so where my body decides to do things that are both unpredictable and generally unpleasant, and then I'm more or less in the clear. :-)

Man, my worst fear has come true. Blogger is becoming *evil* from a usability perspective, and here I am trapped, because if I switch, all of those posts basically go away... or at least the old URLs become completely invalid. Maybe I just chalk it up, import the posts into something that isn't tied to a service at all, and move on.

As of now, I can't even get blogger to publish to my site. This worked before they moved from "beta" to "production", which I refer to as "alpha" in this case. This is horrible. Wish me luck.

If anyone has moved from blogger to wordpress or some other blog and found a way to make it go smoothly, let me know.

My sister in-law lives with her boyfriend in NY, on the upper west side. I lived in NY for a while too, and worked there on and off for years. My favorite thing about the city is the food. There's a lot of it, a lot of different kinds of it, and a good bit of it is really good stuff.

So we went to stay with my sis in-law and went out to Telepan, which just opened in 2006. Reservations are highly recommended, though they aren't walk-in hostile either. They have a wonderful bar, with an adjoining area with a few tables that they reserve just for walk-ins.

Getting back to the bar, I have to say I was pretty impressed. The service was friendly, and the bar was a great way to take in the rest of the atmosphere, which was really comfortable and unpretentious, which pretty much describes our whole experience there. While the wine list will serve well all but the snobbiest tasters, I was esepecially impressed by the list of beers they make available. I was planning on having wine, but couldn't pass up the 750ml bottle of Saison Dupont Farmhouse Ale, which was excellent, and at that size, easily lasted from pre-dinner drink to just before coffee.

Telepan serves American food that's anything but boring. The four of us all had the 4-course taster menu, which allows you to pick an appeteizer, a mid course, an entree and a dessert for about $50. The taster portions of the 4-course menu (along with a couple of other random complimentary servings of bread and finger foods) left us all stuffed to the gills.

I had the winter vegetable and bread soup to start. Any time I'm in a restaurant with a menu full of unique items, I like to see what they do with soup, because soup is often neglected and left to be ordinary by run-of-the-mill places. If you run a restaurant, and you're not targeting the early-bird crowd, please stop serving soup that comes from a 5-gallon bucket. Telepan did not disappoint. I loved it. Winter veggie and bread soup was robust and very flavorful, but not at all heavy. I also got to try the gnocchi and the stuffed shrimp, both of which were also wonderful. Everyone was all smiles, and the service continued to be nothing short of fantastic.

My mid course selection was the Lobster Bolognese. It was very good, and the portion size was perfect. A small lobster tail perched atop a small nest of pasta and a very nice bolognese. Not that heavy crap you get in Italian places shoved into repurposed diners in Jersey that say "Italian" right in their name. This was really nice bolognese. Though I say the portion size was perfect, I really felt like it was a tease. It was great.

My main course was the dry-aged sirloin. I almost ordered it medium, then caught myself, realized I was in the city and not being served by a chef who was working at Red Lobster three months ago, and changed to mid rare. It was prepared absolutely to perfection. It was very tasty, and the brown gravy was skillfully prepared. I think the *cut* of meat could've actually been better, but it was certainly very good, the chef did the best that could be done with it, and sourcing consistently fabulous *anything* in a restaurant is non-trivial. Suffice to say that I did not feel at all, at any time, ever, that I was not getting my money's worth.

For dessert, I had the red wine pear with chestnut cream, and a double espresso. Usually, I order coffee, because I'm not a fan of the back room espresso machines in most "family" restaurants. You know the ones: they use the same terrible beans they use for regular coffee, but charge you three times more money, and it tastes terrible. Telepan, I'm happy to report, has good espresso.

The dessert really just made it to "ok". I really would've been shocked if the dessert blew me away, because dessert at any restaurant where it costs less than $25 just for dessert is often not mind-blowing. In fact, dessert even over $25 is often not mind-blowing. Maybe I'm just not a dessert guy. I will say this: the pear was good, and the chestnut cream was fantastic. I loved that. I just expected the flavor of the pear to be nicely complemented by the wine, and didn't find that flavor to be there.

I really want to point out that one of the things I feel I'm paying for when I go to restaurants that are $25-$35 a plate is the service. Great service can make up for a lot of other things, or it can destroy the experience at a restaurant with great food. Telepan didn't have much in the way of shortcomings, food wise, *and* the service was truly excellent. Everyone we interacted with at Telepan, from the Maitre D', to the bartenders, to the waiter, bread server and bus staff all gave off an air of pride in the place and in their work, without giving off snobbish vibes or being completely robotic. It's that rare balance that reflects back an image of a restaurant that is world class, but still unassuming and modest. The city has a way of destroying that comfortable feel in restaurants as they age. I hope this doesn't happen at Telepan.

Well, I think I'm over the hump. Historically, day 4 is a really bad day for me in quitting smoking. Yesterday *did* suck pretty bad, but I'm past it now, and still smoke free. Still lots of cravings, hard to concentrate, fatigued, whatever. Lots of oddball symptoms associated with quitting smoking, but the one fantastic thing I notice every time I quit: I sleep like a champ. It makes the whole thing worth it.

Wish me luck as I go into week 2 on Monday.

So blogger is no longer in beta. In launching their first non-beta version, however, Blogger has actually broken several things, several peoples' blogs, and generally made a huge mess of things.

After being prompted by shiny-clicky things to upgrade to the new version of Blogger, a great many bloggers were greeted with error pages, wrong pages, blogs with the wrong profile displayed, blogs they couldn't log into, blogs with missing or broken "new and improved" features, and in some cases, worse.

A friend of mine is on a "team blog", where all of the authors are anonymous. Unfortunately for one of the authors, since he happened to be the first one to use the blog after the new blogger rollout, he happily clicked on all of the prompts to upgrade the blog, and then realized that things had gone horribly wrong. Two things, specifically, went bad:

1. The profile on his personal blog was replaced with the anonymous blog's profile, and
2. He was now the permanent, unremovable owner of the team blog that he did not ever want his name affiliated with.

Sweet. So this guy was actually fearing for his job until he figured out how to remove the profile from all of the blogs he belonged to completely. He was never warned that clicking to upgrade could cause various sorts of failures, and he was never told that he would now be the permanent owner of the blog until he searched the help later trying to assess the damage that was done.

For my own blog, you'll notice that my theme has changed. It changed, in fact, about 10 times over the past two weeks, because I was trying to figure out why the long-awaited "labels" feature was only half-working on my site. Turns out that it's because the blogger folks did a half-ass job, and labels are only supported in a half-ass way by blogger unless your blog is published at blogspot.com. Namely, while I can label each post, I cannot present my readers with a list of available labels for them to use. Before you ask, the answer to your question is "yes, every other blog you can think of has done this, properly, forever".

The big irony here, of course, is that I chose to use blogger in part because it made it easy to publish a blog at my own URL without having to maintain blogging software on my site myself. Now, it turns out that my blog is a second-class citizen because I decided to take advantage of that feature. What's more, the blogger help on the issue of labels being unavailable says that it's not likely that a sidebar labels menu will ever be available to blogs being published remotely.

Sweet. Thanks.

I kind of resolved not to make any real resolutions this year. Part of this is because my dark side sometimes gets the sense that my fate is sealed, so why bother? The other part is just that, with me, resolutions are generally things I think up on the first day of the year and forget by the third day of the year. I'm more of a 'take it day by day' kind of person. So the only idea for a resolution that I had this year was to make *daily* and *weekly* resolutions.

For example, I recently quit smoking (yes, again) and I know that every morning when I wake up I have to resolve not to smoke for yet another whole day. Another example is from last week, when I made it my goal to get a project to a point where others could do something with it, which I did - 5 minutes before leaving on the last day of the week - but I did it. The point is, I do a whole lot better, and am a lot more productive, when I take the first hour of my day and set goals for myself to accomplish. This idea doesn't scale much past a week though, so to make a resolution beyond a week is, to me, just kidding yourself.

Ever try to follow through on a monthly goal? I've never made it past a weekly one. Oh sure, I've had long term projects and accomplished them over the period of many months, but I never looked at it that as a monthly goal, really. That's senseless. I break them down and accomplish the weekly goals that lead to the end goal.

Let's face it, making a resolution that you're supposed to stick to for 365 days is just downright intimidating. I can't believe anyone ever sticks to them. I never have. That's a large feat when looked at from afar. For my brain, it's better if I break things down into smaller tasks.

Labels: me stuff

Happy new year, all. Now back to work!

Ok, so before I went back to work, I read my buddy's blog (http://onefreevoice.com), and he started a Technorati Profile, which I didn't know existed. I went to check it out, and created a profile myself.
Technorati Profile

Ok. NOW back to work :-)