Month: January 2006

A day of enormous wonderfulness

Well, not really.  I spent too much of the day doing yet more of the migration to my new system image; I think I’ve got all of the critical stuff done, though.

I did have a chance to talk with the Executive Director of the JCC about the music in the exercise room there; all too often, it’s been far too loud — at times, loud enough to penetrate my headphones.  And they’ve also put it on rap channels more than once, which I think is unsuitable for the JCC (even though they have avoided the “xl” channels on XM).  I’ll see what happens as a result of this conversation.

I’m glad it’s been quiet at work, but the pace is starting to pick up.  It’s a good thing I’ve gotten the housecleaning done!

Kushi Tsuru for lunch and a 61st birthday party for dinner

Diane had to pick up a “Book Club in a Box” this afternoon from the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco, so we all drove up together, planning to have lunch somewhere nearby.  The people in the library recommended a place called King of Falafel on Divisadero, but they didn’t answer the phone, so we went with our original plan: go to Japantown and look around for a place.

We found parking easily enough at Japan Center’s garage.  Diane and I had stayed at the Hotel Mikayo there once, before we moved to California, but we didn’t remember any restaurants, so we just went into the Center itself and looked around.  We saw one sushi bar which looked quite appealing, but they didn’t have anything Jeff would eat.  We saw a Behihana (it didn’t say “Benihana of Tokyo”), but moved on.  Eventually, we chose Kushi Tsuru — it looked busy, though there wasn’t a line, and their menu had something for all of us.

Jeff, as usual, got the chicken teriyaki, and he was pleased.  Diane and I got bento boxes with salmon teriyaki and maguro sashimi.  The salmon teriyaki was good; the sashimi was blah, and there didn’t seem to be any wasabi available.  I’d try somewhere else next time.

After lunch, we drove home and got ready for a friend’s triple-threat party:  her 61st birthday, her near-retirement, and the burning of her mortgage (and she had a separate cake for each of the three events).  Besides friends, family, and food, she also supplied a balloon-maker and a magician, Tye the Magic Guy.  I’m not much of a balloon guy, but I enjoyed Tye’s show, despite (or maybe because of) the groaners in his patter.  All in all, a good evening.

They’re not all gems

We continued our exploration of Costco’s wines tonight, with the Kirkland Signature Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2004.  It was perfectly drinkable and innocuous, if a little sweet, but I’d rather have the slightly less expensive Cloud Piercer from Trader Joe’s.

And “less expensive” may be a more important consideration soon than it has been lately; we had a second roofer look at our roof, and he agreed that it’s not worth repairing.  He also gave us an estimate; inflation has hit roofing over the last 18 years! 

There’s another afternoon I’ll never get back

My ThinkPad has been somewhat slow and flaky lately, and it’s clearly software.  The installation of Windows on it is over a year old, and so it (and I) are suffering from Windows rot.  Since it was a slow week at work, I decided to take advantage of the quiet and install a fresh image on a new disk, and then copy and reinstall what I needed.

Good plan, but it’s one which is very tedious to execute.  I have a list of about 70 apps to reinstall; I’m less than halfway through it (and let’s not even think about the long list of Firefox extensions that I haven’t installed yet….).  And, in at least one case, even though everything is installed, something isn’t working right, so I’ll have to swap the disks, boot to the old system, and look at the registry and the environment to see what’s up (it’s Emacs, so I suspect it’s an environment variable, not a registry item).

But I will say this — the new installation boots much faster than the old one!

Shabbat Shalom!