Sadly, this is a typical bs yuppie restaurant which coopts a Japanese name, yet serves poor imitations of Japanese dishes. It's a real shame too, since the space it so amazing. One more piece of advice - if your waitresses are from Long Island and don't speak Japanese, don't make them welcome the patrons with 'Irasshaimase!' - there's nothing authentic about it, it's just insulting, or ridiculous, or both.
Food-wise, I had only unaju, which was total crap. Come on guys, you can get the sauce from the freakin' supermarket! Why are you trying to mess with it when you don't understand it?!
The bar is cool, but I'd never eat there again. Oh, I just remembered - my vodka tonic was weak too! Sigh...
2007-12-31
Review of Sobakoh
Just before I sadly left behind my beloved Nakameguro, I went to my favorite soba restaurant, which is absolutely excellent - we'll leave that one for another time. Also, two weeks before I had eaten a wonderful kakesoba in Saitama-ken. I might have been all soba-ed out, but I just can't get enough! So, when I got here to the Big Apple, naturally I wanted to find only the best. According to some random articles Sobakoh is *the* place. Well, let's move on to the food.
To start, my friend and I ordered a misogindara (sea bass) which was very tasty, but a bit on the sweet side. I then moved on to kakesoba. The soup was reasonable - I especially liked the addition of a slight bit of citrus (whose name escapes me presently). The soba itself, unfortunately, I feel was overboiled! The noodles were even a bit 'short', having broken up. That was a bit of a showstopper for me. I am very willing to give it another try, and get zarusoba, which might have a better chance of maintaining structural integrity.
The soba-dude in the window is a nice touch, but ultimately it's not about the show, it's about the food!
To start, my friend and I ordered a misogindara (sea bass) which was very tasty, but a bit on the sweet side. I then moved on to kakesoba. The soup was reasonable - I especially liked the addition of a slight bit of citrus (whose name escapes me presently). The soba itself, unfortunately, I feel was overboiled! The noodles were even a bit 'short', having broken up. That was a bit of a showstopper for me. I am very willing to give it another try, and get zarusoba, which might have a better chance of maintaining structural integrity.
The soba-dude in the window is a nice touch, but ultimately it's not about the show, it's about the food!
Review of Otto's Pizza
I am always looking for a good pizza! While walking around the East Village the other day I passed Otto's Restaurant Enoteca Pizza, what might be a decent Italian restaurant with a decent pizza. Despite the fact that they have the cohones to call themselves an 'Enoteca', mostly to appeal to rather clueless patrons, I decided to give it a shot. I was interested in one and only one dish, Pizza Margherita, which they claimed is D.O.C. (Denominazione di Origine Controllata). Let me cut to the chase. It was *fine*, but very unexceptional. The most positive comment I can make is that "at leats they were trying to make Pizza Margherita", as opposed to 99.99% of the pizzerias around here which don't give a crap about what exactly they're making.
More detailed pizza comments are as follows. The cheese seemed like the real deal, mozzarella di buffala, though it was rather skimpy. The sauce was not bad, in that there was nothing bad about it, for example too much sweetness, but it was also unexceptional. The real problem was the crust, which resembled a dried out pitta bread. Clearly these guys know nothing about what a proper pizza crust is supposed to be like! Thin, yes, but also moist, chewy, glutinous! Come on people, how hard can it be?! I'm not a pizzaiolo but for fuck's sake, at least I know the theory of making a proper pizza dough!
Anyway, given the state of the crust, I am unlikely to visit Otto's again. Oh, I almost forgot - I figured out what 'enoteca' means. It means that they gouge you with 15-20 USD glasses of wine. :-)
More detailed pizza comments are as follows. The cheese seemed like the real deal, mozzarella di buffala, though it was rather skimpy. The sauce was not bad, in that there was nothing bad about it, for example too much sweetness, but it was also unexceptional. The real problem was the crust, which resembled a dried out pitta bread. Clearly these guys know nothing about what a proper pizza crust is supposed to be like! Thin, yes, but also moist, chewy, glutinous! Come on people, how hard can it be?! I'm not a pizzaiolo but for fuck's sake, at least I know the theory of making a proper pizza dough!
Anyway, given the state of the crust, I am unlikely to visit Otto's again. Oh, I almost forgot - I figured out what 'enoteca' means. It means that they gouge you with 15-20 USD glasses of wine. :-)
Yet Another Perversion of Nature
I just saw this infomercial for the Bowflex Treadclimber. Now, those of you who know me already know that I'm not a big fan of exercise machines, but I think this one takes the cake!
Here's the new cycle of energy waste. People eat too much food, which did itself require a substantial amount of energy to produce, and thereby become fat. Now, being dissatisfied with their newly acquired girth, they embark on vigorous exercise routines, some of which involve machines which themselves require energy to operate! I thought it already sufficient that the bodies of humans have been perverted into heaters - isn't that, after all, what we're doing when we eat too much and then 'burn it off' - now it seems that the heater itself needs more power yet! Doesn't this situation strike anyone else as incredibly stupid?
On a slight tangent, I recently read an article about the diet of the medieval man of Europe. Apparently this diet consisted of nearly 5000 calories per day, composed mostly of bread, meat, lots of vegetables, and copious amounts of relatively weak ale. Sounds pretty good eh?! Well, let's not forget that the typical medieval man also did physical labor for over 14 hours per day! Most people these days barely do 30 minutes of physical activity per day. Clearly we should do more, normal, natural physical activity. We don't need machines for that! We have legs and feet!
Finally, we should be eating only as much as we need to sustain our typical daily lifestyle, not more. That probably means no more than 2500 calories for most of us - I daresay 2000 for the vast majority!
Oh well, just my thoughts eh. I have been known as a person who loves food and has many cravings. However, I have over time acquired the ability to control my cravings, and especially to contend myself with smaller portions. It requires only will.
Here's the new cycle of energy waste. People eat too much food, which did itself require a substantial amount of energy to produce, and thereby become fat. Now, being dissatisfied with their newly acquired girth, they embark on vigorous exercise routines, some of which involve machines which themselves require energy to operate! I thought it already sufficient that the bodies of humans have been perverted into heaters - isn't that, after all, what we're doing when we eat too much and then 'burn it off' - now it seems that the heater itself needs more power yet! Doesn't this situation strike anyone else as incredibly stupid?
On a slight tangent, I recently read an article about the diet of the medieval man of Europe. Apparently this diet consisted of nearly 5000 calories per day, composed mostly of bread, meat, lots of vegetables, and copious amounts of relatively weak ale. Sounds pretty good eh?! Well, let's not forget that the typical medieval man also did physical labor for over 14 hours per day! Most people these days barely do 30 minutes of physical activity per day. Clearly we should do more, normal, natural physical activity. We don't need machines for that! We have legs and feet!
Finally, we should be eating only as much as we need to sustain our typical daily lifestyle, not more. That probably means no more than 2500 calories for most of us - I daresay 2000 for the vast majority!
Oh well, just my thoughts eh. I have been known as a person who loves food and has many cravings. However, I have over time acquired the ability to control my cravings, and especially to contend myself with smaller portions. It requires only will.
2007-03-19
RPC over JMS with Load Balancing
I've been working on putting together a very simple way to do RPC such that they're load balanced to a set of servers implementing the interface in question. After not to much reading, I realized that this path has been trod on before. It took me a little time, but I did manage to put together a test using ActiveMQ http://activemq.apache.org/, Lingo http://lingo.codehaus.org/, and Spring http://www.springframework.org/. ActiveMQ provides the JMS Queues and consequently the load balancing. Lingo provides a request/reply mechanisms using JMS Queues, which normally provide only oneway asynchronous messaging. (That's not 100% true, but we'll not get into the details.) On top of all that, Spring Remoting can export any POJO implementing a Java interface as a service. There are a few too many layers to this whole thing, coupled with a bit too much use of reflection for my taste, but it does work. Now to test its performance...
2007-03-15
More MogileFS
After a brief look through the source code, it was relatively easy to add Secure URLs, for use with lighttpd and mod_secdownload. I added another VARCHAR column to the host table, for the secret to be used for generating the URLs, then modified various APIs and the URL generation function.
MogileFS
Today I [re]discovered MogileFS, from Six Apart, http://www.danga.com/mogilefs/. Upon closer inspection it seems to be a like a sort of Amazon S3 Lite. It does file replication and provides one level of indirection, just like S3. The only thing missing, for my needs are secure URLs, for controlling access to files, and preventing deep linking. Otherwise, it seems to have all the right stuff. Metadata and data access happen over different channels, so the performance should be reasonable. In fact, media files are accessed directly via HTTP, through lighttpd or Perlbal, so that should be quite fast.
In the beginning...
These days it seems that anybody who's anybody in IT has a blog. Here goes nothing! ^_^ This will likely serve as a repository for the notes that I normally take on paper (and eventually lose) or the ones I write in random text files. Maybe some of my notes will be useful to others as well.
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