the internet is for porn

I overheard this conversation between two of my coworkers on Friday afternoon:

coworker #1:	...and then you open up an incognito window...
coworker #2:	Incognito window?
coworker #1:	How have you never used incognito windows? Okay, so when you open one up, it's like a totally different user profile, so you can log into multiple accounts using the same browser. Plus, when you close one, Chrome deletes all its cookies, its cache, and its history. It's really useful.
coworker #2:	(thinks a second) So, it's for porn.
coworker #1:	Well, yeah.

ouch

me:	When I graduated, in 2000...
coworker:	2000?! Wow, I wasn't even in high school then.

living up to the hype

A couple weeks ago, D and I took two of our friends to Cyrus for a belated birthday dinner. We'd been telling them all last year about how it was our new favorite restaurant, and how awesome the bread was, and the cheese cart, and the dessert cart, and on and on, ad nauseum.

Naturally, as we approached Healdsburg, I started to psych myself out. Of course the food could not possibly be as good as I'd remembered! What was I thinking?

Luckily for me, it was that good.

We ordered the eight-course menu, but first we were served a plate of five canapes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, & umami, just like last time), followed by a scallop amuse bouche:

There were three scallops; one was raw, one marinated, and one seared, so it was interesting to compare them in both taste and texture.

I'm not going to do a full menu rundown for the rest of the evening, but I do want to mention some of the highlights...

The foie appetizer was seared with pear coulis and lentils:


I think it was just as good as last year's flambe-ed version:


This lobster dish was one of my favorites. It was served with daikon, blood oranges, and tamarind ponzu sauce:


There was an option to add shaved truffles to some of the dishes, so I chose to do so with my chicken. They were quite liberal with the shavings, but I was a bit disappointed with the taste; I felt like the cooked bits of truffle and the truffle oil were much more fragrant than the raw truffle:


The cheese plate was as generous as I'd remembered (more so, because there were four of us). My favorite was an ash-covered Loire Valley goat cheese called "Sainte-Maure de Touraine" which I'd never had before; it's the gooey one in the front right:


Of course, we were too stuffed to eat all of these mignardises, but we did take the rest home. I especially love jelly-like candies, and these were lychee and raspberry-flavored...yum!

Texas BBQ, revisited

I'm not sure how it happened exactly, but a few weeks ago, a bunch of my coworkers decided they had to have some real Texas BBQ. In the end, an order was placed with Salt Lick. D and I had just been to the Round Rock location over Thanksgiving, but I'm not one to pass up meat, so I signed us up anyway.

Last Saturday, the order arrived. I'm not sure exactly what was in it, but there were I think three or four racks of pork ribs, plus plenty of sausage, turkey, beef brisket, bean soup, baked beans, and someone had made fresh cornbread. There were about twelve of us total, and we managed to polish off most of the meat, but couldn't finish the remaining brownies, pies, and cakes that we'd brought for dessert.

It was a good time and the food was yummy enough, but I do think that the reheating process made the ribs a bit tougher than usual (they were shipped fully smoked). The sausage was my favorite; it was delicious. Makes me want to plan another Memphis Minnie's outing.

hey, that's us

This news snippet caught my eye today:

The National Weather Service issued a rare tornado warning for Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties this afternoon.

I honestly don't remember the last time there was a tornado warning in the Bay Area.

really?

I'm all in favor of sending aid to Haiti, but I really wonder if solar-powered audio Bibles are what the disaster-stricken Haitians need most? Might I suggest that the money could be better spent on, I dunno, clean water, food, blankets, or medical supplies? Sigh.

blast from the past

Over the holidays, I dug up an old cassette case at my parents' house, and brought it home to use for storing board game cards. (As an aside, Dominion, Intrigue, and Seaside fit together perfectly in a case designed for 30 cassettes.)

Looking for a place to store the instructions, I unzipped the outside pocket and found a booklet full of coupons: "$2 off compact discs or VHS videotapes, good at any Wherehouse until November 30, 1990". Those coupons had been expired for nearly twenty years! I threw them away, anyway.

no comment

a holiday celebration

I usually spend the winter holidays in Taiwan with family, but this year we were all together in the Bay Area, since my sister was getting married on New Year's Day.

What this meant for me:
- I was one of (two) maids of honor, so I had built the wedding website. Luckily most of the site was completed way, way before the wedding. The other maid of honor had to make the slideshow, and as she was a perfectionist about it, she was still tweaking it on the morning of the wedding. (It was awesome, though.)
- I was partially responsible for figuring out what to do with everyone on New Year's Eve. The wedding was in SF so there were a variety of parties and events nearby, but we also didn't want to pay cover, and we didn't want everyone to be super hungover at the wedding. We ended up partying in the groomsmen's suite until 1-2am (six bottles of champagne and one bottle of tequila seemed to suffice), at which point half of the bridesmaids went to bed. The other half went to a house party down the street and got to sleep at 4am. We were up around 6am for hair and makeup. It was pretty brutal.
- I gave a toast at the wedding. I don't really mind speaking in public much (having done a billion demos at the Media Lab way back when) but I talk really fast, and half of the guests were flying in from Taiwan. I decided it was a good idea to have translations projected behind me, which meant I had to finish writing the speech several days before the wedding. Of course, other people were busy too, so the translations were being revised up until few hours before the wedding.
- I also did some assorted manual labor, like scoring and folding placecards, wrapping vases, etc. but I think my mom took on the brunt of that work.

The rest of the weekend went pretty smoothly, with only a few hiccups:
- One of the groomsmen's wife got quarantined in Seoul due to vomiting, and was unable to make the wedding. She may or may not be pregnant again; we're not quite sure.
- The best man got trashed at the rehearsal dinner and puked his guts out. As a result he drank very little at the wedding itself, which is perhaps a good thing.
- The valet service lost my dad's Mercedes after the rehearsal dinner. At first my dad was pretty okay as the restaurant comped him some drinks, but after over an hour of searching, the police got called in, the valet guy called my dad a liar, and things got ugly. My dad actually missed the countdown because he was still waiting at the restaurant, before they finally found the car, a few minutes into the New Year. We eventually got a couple hundred dollars of additional compensation, but methinks we will not be returning to that restaurant, or using that valet service ever again.
- We took some wedding party photos at Yerba Buena Gardens. During the shoot, we noticed some creepy guys hiding behind bushes taking photos of us. Eventually we scared them off, but I'm sure they had lots of photos already. Oh well.
- As my sister and her husband were doing additional pre-ceremony photos in various locations around the city, it started to sprinkle a bit. Luckily the dress she'd chosen was pretty forgiving, and there was no visible damage.
- The bridesmaids had nothing to do between 2-4pm, got sleepy, and some tried to nap in the bridal suite. Napping without crushing your expensively and elaborately styled hair is basically impossible.
- During the reception, my brother discovered yet another creepy guy hiding between the curtains and the windows in the ballroom. He was also taking photos. He ran off before my brother was able to accost him. What's with the creepy photo-taking wedding crashers?
- All of us were pretty much dead on our feet by the time the wedding ended around 1am, but we still helped clean up a bit, went back to our rooms to wash the pounds of makeup and hairspray out, and then got up in time for the 11am brunch the next day. The photos from that morning are probably less than flattering.

The wedding itself was gorgeous, of course (given that my sister is a total perfectionist). D was the officiant, and he was pretty great, if I do say so myself.

Some photos of the reception decor...

escort card display:


tablescapes:



the lounge area next to the dance floor:

drivers

I was reading an article this morning that says that when riding in cars, women are passengers 29% of the time, while men are only passengers 14% of the time. (I believe these numbers apply to the US only.)

Disregarding the fact that this means an abysmally low amount of carpooling, I was a bit surprised that women are driven around twice as much as men. Then again, I'm probably biased because with my parents, my mom is almost always the driver. My sister gets carsick easily, and my dad drives more aggressively, so when we were kids, my mom had to drive to prevent my sister from puking. (Not that my mom is a passive driver; I often get passed by her when we're caravan-ing, and I'm usually going 80.) These days, my mom drives because my dad's vision is terrible; he's always asking us to read street signs for him.

I myself drive probably half of the time (maybe less than half of the distance). D hates city driving and only recently mastered parallel parking, so any time we're headed for San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, or even Marin sometimes (passing through SF on 19th Avenue can be a bitch), I automatically drive. I'm also responsible for driving in bad weather (Tahoe, rain, fog), and to 49er games, as Candlestick parking is no joke. D makes up for it by taking on most of the South Bay: Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose, Milpitas, Fremont, etc.

On the other hand, my sister seems to dislike driving, and while she and her husband were staying at my parents' house last year, I noticed that he would do most of the driving. Last week, I realized that neither of them like driving much...a few times when we were leaving dinner, I saw her pass the keys (to my parents' car) to her husband, who promptly passed them back to his younger brother, who drove them all home.

unwinding

The holidays were a mad whirl of activity as my sister got married and we were deluged with relatives. Slowly starting to get back to normality...

We had a few last dinners with family this week, one of which I cooked myself. It turns out that 3.5 lbs of chicken marsala is barely enough for ten people, even with pasta, garlic bread, salad, and green beans on the side. Either that or it was really good.

On Friday night we went to a friend's dinner party. We were supposed to play games, but we got to chatting and stayed until midnight but never opened the box. I don't remember the last time that happened!

Before all the cousins left town, we of course had to pay a visit to Music Tunnel, so we squeezed that in last night.

We had dinner at Barracuda, in the Castro. I picked the restaurant based on a friend's recommendation, even though I'd never been there. Things started off great when I found parking a block away (on a Saturday night!). Everyone liked it, and it wasn't too expensive, especially for Japanese food. I think my favorite thing was the "Phudon", which was udon with kobe beef and foie gras in it. Not a big fan of foie generally but it added great flavor to the broth.

Karaoke was nice and relaxing with only seven; we stayed five hours and had all pretty much lost our voices at 3am so we didn't stay until closing. Good times.