WombatNation

Sadly, in 2008, Oakland lost two restaurants that served excellent fried chicken. Having grown up in South Mississippi, I know my way around deep fried poultry, and I can tell you that the cooks at The Southern Cafe and Declancy’s Welcome Table knew what they were doing. Both closed mid year, but somehow I soldiered on.

Tonight my wife and I found a suitable, albeit more expensive, replacement at Casa Orinda. It’s an Italian restaurant with a Western theme (no Ennio Morricone background music, though), but they serve a wicked fried chicken plate. The mashed potatoes and gravy are delicious and the biscuit with honey is divine.

The place was packed early on a Sunday night, so we ended up eating at that bar, which is generally fine by me. The friendly bartender even shared some info on how the chef gives the biscuits a really buttery flavor without using much butter.

And they’re not a one trick pony, either. The orecchiette with broiled chicken and portobello mushrooms in a marsala sauce was also very, very good. The beer lineup, all in bottles, was just okay, though I did enjoy a Lagunitas IPA. Probably not the best pairing with the orechiette, but it was what I was in the mood for.

And thanks to the best of 2008 list at Oakland Magazine for tipping me off to Casa Orinda’s fried chicken.

One of the things I really love about my Audi is that it has heated seats. While the SF Bay area isn’t the coldest place on the planet, it can still get pretty cold. Well, at least for a couple of weeks out of the year.

The surface area of a seat on a bike is quite a bit smaller than for a car, yet in chillier northern regions of the country, I can imagine that the first minute or so in the saddle on a bike that has been waiting for you in the wintry wonderland could be bracing. That’s why I like the thinking of the person who designed this heated bike seat.

As far as I know, this is not a manufacturer’s equipment option. If you’re thinking of customizing your ride with one of these, I recommend looking for one with a bit of heat-conductive padding. Maybe some wadded up mylar sheets. At least up front on the point.

via: Makezine via: Momentum

One of the many pleasures of our September trip to Europe was the thermal baths at Szchenyi in Budapest. The building was beautiful and the number of baths was amazing. Hanging out in the enormous outside thermal pool as the steam lifted into the night skies was particularly awesome.

Here’s a photo of me enjoying the baths.

Alright, alright, this wasn’t at Szchenyi. It’s in Yamanouchi, Japan (Photo by EPA at http://telegraph.co.uk). And those are macaques, but surely you recognize the resemblance.

Maybe I just haven’t been noticing all along that major US airlines are flying rust buckets, but when I looked out the window of a recent United Airlines flight from Houston to San Francisco, I was pretty amazed to see the sorry state of the wing. A few patches of paint had peeled away to expose what appeared to be rust and quite a bit of the upper surface of the wing appeared to have only the thinnest layer of paint remaining.

I went to the gorgeous Grand-Lake Theatre in Oakland tonight with wife and friends to see Quantum of Winter Solstice. I was totally expecting an educational film on astronomy, so the guns, car chases and boring villains were quite the surprise. However, I did take solace in the kick-out-the-jams performance of the organ player who rises up from the orchestra pit with his Mighty Wurlitzer Organ and then descends again just before the movie starts. That’s something you don’t get at the 38-screen multi-megaplex at the suburban mall.

Spoiler Alert:

I accidentally wrote Soiler Alert, at first. But that would be more apropos to the Baby Brigade at the Parkway Speakeasy.

Bond movies often have intriguing villains and well thought out storylines that meaningfully build to a climactic conclusion. Well, before the bit where Bond gets busy with the beauty pageant contestant, martial arts expert, nuclear physicist, gun/knife toting woman he’s been fighting/flirting with for most of the movie. Quantum Solace, in contrast, seemed to primarily be about Bond’s quest for revenge over a dead girlfriend being played out indirectly against a poorly explained pack of bad guys who seemed to be wedged sideways into the plot because there simply “has” to be an evil cabal in every Bond flick.

And usually the axis of evil has cooked up some plan that will result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people unless they get paid a huge ransom. Or will simply result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people because the bad guys are unrepentant misanthropes. However, Dominic Greene of the bashful evil supergroup Quantum has his sights set a bit lower. In the midst of arranging for a military coup in Bolivia, he tricks the new dictator into agreeing to pay double the going rate for municipal water.

WTF??? That’s the frickin’ evil plan? Is Quantum the secret name of EBMUD? After all, they raised our rates. I don’t think it was double, though. Heck, the real life Aguas del Tunari consortium in Bolivia raised rates by 35% after taking control of the water supply.

There’s has been a long history of water issues in Bolivia. In fact, when the little bit of a plot that was there played out and revealed a dictator trying to come back to power, I immediately thought of General Hugo Banzer.

An amusing aside for me was that Greene ends up being left by Bond to die in the Atacama desert (footage was shot in Chile rather than Bolivia) with a can of motor oil to drink when he gets thirsty. Many years ago Sandra and I were stranded in the Atacama desert when the truck that our guide was driving completely broke down before dawn on the way to the geysers near San Pedro de Atacama. Fortunately, the driver’s thermos of hot tea was more refreshing than motor oil. We also had to walk only about 7 miles before being picked up and brought back to town.

Some of my vegetarian friends say they won’t eat anything with a face, thus allowing them to opt out of fish, but still snack on oysters and clams. Well, I will eat things with a face, but not if the face is still smiling at me. Maybe I’m crazy, but doesn’t this look like a ploy to convince kids that cannibalism is okay? Eating clowns, sure, but other kids? I don’t think that’s right.

[Via TreeHugger via Green as a Thistle]

For the last month or so I’ve been playing around with Arduino (”open-source electronics prototyping platform “) and Processing (”open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions”). Both are very, very cool. The Arduino programming environment is based on Processing, so learning both isn’t much extra effort.

So far with Processing I’ve mostly been working with existing code examples to talk to code I’ve written that runs on the Atmel microcontroller on the Arduino board. I’ve lately been hacking with the Minim library for working with audio, inspired by a link on someone’s Twitter feed to someone else’s experiment with Minim and an Arduino. I’ve cleaned up and reformatted his code in my own fetishistic manner, and now I’m looking to extend it. After all, I’ve got a pile of LEDs begging to be soldered to something.

On the Arduino front, I’ve been working my way through Ladyada’s tutorial and the first couple of chapters of Tom Igoe’s book, Making Things Talk. At first I was kind of annoyed when I realized how incomplete the explanations where for some of the projects. But then I decided that that just motivated me more to figure things out for myself. And they’re really not that incomplete, anyway.

Arduinos are quite inexpensive, so if you’re the least bit motivated to combine your programming experience with some basic electronic hardware hacking, I highly recommend checking them out. I bought most of my gear from Adafruit and Spark Fun.

In September when we were in Bled, Slovenia, I spotted this ramp at the main intersection in town. While I’m, of course, happy to see that the main shopping area is accessible to people in wheelchairs, I was equally happy that bicycle racers are also welcome and accommodated for. Hopefully everyone queues up single file, though.

After using the built-in self upgrade feature of Eclipse to go from 3.4 to 3.4.1, I was no longer able to launch Eclipse. Instead of the happy Ganymede splash screen, I got a poorly formatted dialog saying “The Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library.” I discovered that the problem was that eclipse.ini had not been updated to point to the updated launcher library. Here’s how to fix it.

1. Open a Finder Window to the Applications directory, or wherever you installed Eclipse
2. Expand the plugins directory
3. Scroll down to the directory starting with the name “org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_”
4. Copy the text of the name following “carbon.”. After the update, mine was 1.0.101.R34x_v20080731.
5. Right click Eclipse.app and select Show Package Contents
6. Expand the Contents and MacOS directories
7. Open eclipse.ini in a text editor
8. Look for two lines that look like

--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_1.0.100.v20080509-1800

9. Change the part after “_” to the text you copied above
10. Close and save changes to eclipse.ini
11. Restart Eclipse

In case you weren’t aware of this, you can also edit eclipse.ini to change the vmargs Java will use when launching Eclipse. For example, if Eclipse itself is running out of heap, you might want to boost the min and max heap size with something like:

-Xms64m
-Xmx512m

Of course, you should also click “Show heap status” in the General section of the Preferences dialog so you can monitor how much heap is being used and can force a GC before a big compile. You shouldn’t boost the min heap size from the default, though, unless you blow past it pretty quick and experience initial sluggishness as the heap keeps getting expanded.

This afternoon I volunteered at the Alameda County Community Food Bank with some Voxify co-workers as part of a work sponsored event. We processed 2500 pounds of food and were able to completely sort and shelve 1500 pounds of that total. It was a great experience and I highly recommend helping out, especially this time of year and with the current state of the economy.

Food banks used to get most of their food from grocery overstock. However, improved technology and better supply chain management software has cut off much of that source. In addition, second tier grocery chains now buy up most of the remaining oversupplies, as well as items close to their expiration dates, for resale at deep discounts. That doesn’t leave much on the table for the food banks.

I was stunned to learn that approximately half the food that ACCFB now distributes is fresh produce. The great thing about it is that fresh produce is a much healthier source of nutrition for those most in need of a good meal. However, it also brings added cost with respect to storage, distribution and short shelf life. If I remember correctly, ACCFB now has a 120,000 square foot refrigeration room at their new location. They also have two big trucks devoted to deliveries that allow them to deliver the produce, along with other foods, while it is still good.

Food donations aren’t enough to cover existing needs, though, so ACCFB also buys food. Since they buy in such huge quantities, they have significant purchasing power. ACCFB is a member of Feeding America, formerly known as America’s Second Harvest.

While donating food to food banks is a great idea, I don’t recommend buying food solely to donate it. Your money will go a lot farther if you allow them to pool it with other donations and buy much more food for the same amount. Also, it allows them to better fill the gaps in what they currently have on store. However, if you’ve already bought non-perishable food and it’s still in good shape, but you don’t expect to eat it, then definitely donate it.

ACCFB is also planning a demonstration kitchen for their new facility. This is really important, because a lot of the organizations and people receiving the now much greater amount of fresh produce aren’t always prepared to cook a variety of healthy recipes. This educational training is a very admirable new part of the outreach effort of ACCFB.

Of course, I’ve simplified the flow of food through ACCFB. They have a great one page flow of food diagram in a PDF file that tells more of the story.

One of the many interesting parts of volunteering at ACCFB is learning about the pig’s bin. Food without ingredient lists, open bags of pasta or cereal, etc., all go in a huge plastic bin to later become pig slop. However, four items are not allowed in the pig’s bin.

• coffee
• chocloate
• top ramen
• cup noodle soup

Even if coffee isn’t bad for them, I can understand farmers not wanting their pigs to be hopped up on caffeine. Chocolate is bad for dogs, so it’s not a stretch to imagine it being bad for pigs.

But if Top Ramen and Cup Noodle soup isn’t suitable for pigs, then why do so many college students and others subsist on so much of it? Maybe it’s the incredibly high sodium content (at least in the “flavor” packs) that makes it bad for pigs. Maybe they don’t want to cure the ham until later. I couldn’t find much about it on the interwebs, though I found one article that reports that farmers are picking up the scrap ramen and noodles from the floor at a Nissin plant. The article wasn’t clear as to what animals were being fed the noodles. Next time I volunteer at ACCFB, I’ll ask why they ban the sodium bombs from the piggies.