Sander’s Weblog

Cafe La Haye does not need another write-up. However, I have to mention them because we couldn’t remember when last we had a meal out where every course, every dish, was so on the mark.

From the Grilled Peach and Prosciutto Salad to the Hand-Torn Papardelle, to the Angus Hanger Steak you could cut with a fork, everything was delicious. The desserts were simply to die for: the Blackberry and Raspberry Fruit Crisp was a simple concept, but so, so well executed. The Chocolate Silk Cake was in delightful harmony with its pecan and walnut crust and the salt accent does amazing things to bring out the flavors. We were hard pressed to not lick our plates.

Finally, it was all very reasonably priced. If you plan to hit downtown Sonoma, Cafe La Haye comes warmly recommended.

Over the past couple of weeks, more than a thousand wildfires have burned in California. Most were set off by lightning strikes two weeks ago. The air has been really smoky, burning our throats. Sunsets have been really murky.

As of this week about 400 fires remain. I got a good look at this one today from my flight, from just south of Bakersfield looking northeast.

Tonight, Josh Fix and his band will play the second of four shows at Arlene’s Grocery on 95 Stanton Street in New York. I haven’t been there but we’re great fans of Josh and you should go check it out. And then tell your friends so you can all pack the house next week. Tons of music on Josh’s website.

The other day, trying to sleep in yet another hotel room. There was a periodic blinking light in the smoke alarm… more like a small flashbulb. The front of the flatscreen TV (nice, they even had some HD content) had a steady red LED, and somewhere in the back there was an orange blinking LED which cast a periodic fan of light through slits in the enclosure onto the wall. My laptop has an LED around the power connector that lights up orange when it’s charging, green when it’s charged. A white LED in front periodically waxes and wanes while the computer is asleep, like it’s breathing. My phone has a small red LED while it charges, which turns green when it’s charged. The clock radio had a large, easy-to-read red LED display, and the snooze button lit up bright orange.

With all the flashing, blinking and breathing, and the plethora of colored lights in general, it was like trying to sleep in Times Square.

Now that you can get Green Eggs and Ham at IHOP, I’m completely overwhelmed by the carpet-bomb marketing campaign for the cartoon based on the Dr. Seuss book. I want to know when I can buy a Theed at my local Macy’s or Gap. I need one. So I can hide under it.

So we’re on vacation on Maui, hanging out in downtown Lahaina. The first night, we wanted something quick after arriving late… so we picked Cheeseburger In Paradise. This turned out to be the wrong choice. They have a great location, but their burgers are atrocious: processed meat product patties cooked well done that taste as if they could be made of anything except cow. Yuk. Their coconut shrimp appetizer is OK, but don’t go there for the burgers.

Tonight, Maui redeemed itself by guiding us to the Cool Cat Cafe. The burgers served in this unassuming fifties themed diner are actually tasty, made of real meat cooked a sincere attempt at medium rare (they managed medium; we didn’t complain), and a good chunk of change cheaper than at the aforementioned tourist trap.

Lahaina itself can be summed up this way: yes there are souvenir shops, jewelry stores and art galleries, interleaved with timeshare sales desks, but one block away the streets don’t have sidewalks. Yes there are resorts but the town’s grammar school is right on the beach and a town that can keep development in check to this extent makes a great place to visit.

I have a new PC under my desk, and it seems that I now have my X setup the way I want it. The problem was with the dual head support: I wanted one desktop stretched across the two monitors, so I can drag windows across from one monitor to the other.

The default configuration merely mirrored one screen onto two monitors: a waste of desktop real estate. What I had before did put different X displays on the monitors: good but not great because I couldn’t drag across. On my old machine I could use the Xinerama extension to achieve the what I wanted, but turning that on made the driver for the new card (ATI’s proprietary fglrx) crash when the screensaver kicked in.
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So this e-mail message from Paypal landed in my Hotmail. What makes this blog-worthy is that it actually, really came from Paypal. It was not a spam zombie attack, phishing scheme, virus or other type of malware, but a real, honest missive about their privacy policy. Go figure.

Today the research project of our friend Oliver is featured on the front page of the MIT website. He recently received his Ph.D. in Physics from MIT and there is an article on his research into twodimensional electron systems. Congratulations, Oliver.

Image sourced from MIT website.

Big, bloated web server process hiding in the corner