Dinner in Paradise...

Dinner in Paradise...  Last night we had dinner at a restaurant in Logan that we've never tried: Le Nonne (which, apparently, is Italian for “The Grandmothers”).  Summary version: we're kicking ourselves for not having tried this before!

Our appetizer (left) was fresh ahi, raw, with asparagus and Parmesan cheese.  It was outstanding.  With it was a round of fresh Italian bread with a pesto topping, also outstanding (and refilled immediately when we finished the first two rounds).  My entree (middle) was thinly sliced pork “medallions” in a white wine reduction sauce – amongst the top five pork dishes I've ever had.  Debbie's entree (right) was fettuccine with a creamy, cheesy sauce, hunks of roasted garlic, and a pile of delicious mushrooms.  Her entree was suffused with an intense mushroom flavor, and my mouth is watering right now just remembering the couple of forkfuls I sampled.  Wonderful stuff, it was!  We ordered creme brulee for dessert, and I'm sad to say that it was our only disappointment.  It's not that it was bad – it wasn't – it just wasn't nearly as superlative as the rest of our meal had been.  It doesn't have either the egginess or the creaminess of a truly outstanding creme brulee.

The meal was a bit pricey, at least by Logan standards – we paid almost $90 including tip for the two of us.  That's over double the tab at any other place we frequent, and because of that we won't be coming here often.  But we will be back again, for sure!

When we got home we fed the dogs, and that reminded me to talk about the new food bowls we got for Race and Miki.  The two of them, but most especially Race, have a habit of gulping their food down just as fast as they can shovel it into their maws.  Race can do this so quickly that his throat gets clogged up, and he ends up spitting up a cup or so of food, then re-eating it – not the most pleasant thing to watch (or hear).  I stumbled across these food bowls on Amazon, designed to stop exactly that sort of gulping behavior.  The design looked plausible, and clever, so I bought two of them.

They work remarkably well!  Both Race and Miki now take longer to get their food in them than good old Slow Mo'i, who eats at the pace of a snail with arthritis.  No more gulping.  No more food spewing all over the place.  No more spitting up.  Recommended for anyone with gulping dog syndrome!

Theoretical limit exceeded?

Theoretical limit exceeded?  Well, it was only theoretical, right?

Weird happenings on Saturn...

Weird happenings on Saturn...  The rings tell the story...

The U.S. is still bombing...

The U.S. is still bombing ... the places where “We’ve ended two wars.”   Glenn Greenwald, not exactly a conservative demagogue, takes Obama to the woodshed...

The “Wil can fly!” site...

The “Wil can fly!” site ... has launched, and the calendars are for sale now.  Alan just announced that the final proof has been approved and the print run authorized.  We're looking forward to seeing our calendar soon!

Classic bug reports...

Classic bug reports...  I had some geekly fun with this site.  One gem:

R. Clint Whaley 2007-03-09 20:22:32 UTC

I'd like to welcome the newest members of the bug 323 community, where all x87 floating point errors in gcc come to die! All floating point errors that use the x87 are welcome, despite the fact that many of them are easily fixable, and many are not! We're all one happy family, making the egregious mistake of wanting accuracy out of the most accurate general purpose FPU on the market!

Cheers,
Clint

Much more like that through the site I linked to!

Sorting colors...

Sorting colors ... is much more difficult than you might imagine!  Years ago I worked on a compression scheme for a remote control product that was specific to color displays.  My objective was to use 8 bit palette to represent a screen snapshot when the screen was using 24 bit color.  This is very similar to the color sorting problem: I needed to identify 256 colors that were as close as possible to all the colors used on the 24 bit screen.  Knowing how “close” two colors were to each other was the key.  As the linked article details, this isn't the simple numeric problem you might imagine – how we perceive colors is quite different than how we represent colors in standard numeric encoding schemes (RGB, HSL, CMYK, etc.)...

Eston Kohver is back home in Tallinn...

Eston Kohver is back home in Tallinn...  He was freed in a prisoner exchange strongly reminiscent of the Cold War spy swaps.  Kohver was captured by the Russians just over a year ago...

Peeple...

Peeple ... a new web application launching in November, will let anyone “rate” anyone else, and view the ratings of anyone on the site.  This is much like Yelp lets you rate restaurants and other local businesses, and review those ratings.

I've often wondered why nobody had done this before.  It seems like such an obvious opportunity.  There's an obvious variant as well: rating employees of a particular company, where the reviewers are identified as either customers or other employees.

It's obvious that this will be abused by angry people, or those with a grudge.  You see this sort of thing on Yelp all the time, and even on product ratings at Amazon.  Nevertheless, the ratings still provide good information – and usually the abusers can be easily identified, often simply by the tone of the review.  Some sites with ratings allow the ratings to be reviewed, and this is a great way to help filter out the abusers.

I think there's great promise in something like Peeple. 

As a businessman, I'd have loved a way for my customers to give me anonymous feedback about my customer-facing employees.  The kind of blunt, honest feedback you see in product reviews is almost impossible to obtain about employees today.  I'd also have liked to know what employees thought about their managers.

As a consumer, I'd like to be able to give feedback about great (or not so great) experiences I've had with particular people at the places I do business with.

Where things really start to get interesting, though, is on the strictly personal level.  Imagine, for instance, all your neighbors being rated – and them rating you.  Will this lead to better behavior?  Will it lead to “wars”?  Will it reduce or increase conflict between people?

I'm inclined to think that more information is better in nearly all circumstances, Anthony Weiner and the Clintons (and their ilk) excepted.  Some people will never care how they're perceived by others, and Peeple won't change that.  Most people do care, though ... and Peeple's public shaming and recognition mechanism might just make a positive difference...