obligatory obscure reference

Since moving to Pittsburgh I’ve been exposed to the constant refrain of, “How do we get businesses/people to come to Pittsburgh?” Since any answer requiring Pittsburgh to change is probably going to be ignored, I think there’s a different question we need to ask. That question is, “How can we make Pittsburgh, PA a place that new residents speak highly of when they’re back visiting their home towns?”

I’m one of those people — I spend a fair amount of time back in California or at least emailing/chatting with friends of mine in San Francisco, Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc.

Lately I feel like I’ve been as frustrated with Pittsburgh (and Pittsburghers) as not. For every sales pitch I make to a friend back in Cali involving low property prices and access to local farm produce I seem to have an equally horrid story about things like the idiocy of stopping on on-ramps instead of merging, the massive taxes with no open records laws or other ways of finding out where my money goes, or the state bureaucracy in general.

Today I got bit by a combination of two things — the Pittsburgher attitude of “what do you mean you didn’t know that, everyone here knows that?” and a state bureaucracy from hell. We’re (you’re) not going to be able to convince people that this is a great place to move to until stories like this stop being what newcomers tell when we’re back visiting our friends in other states. Maybe that requires changing state and local government or maybe it just means not treating newcomers to Pittsburgh like we’re aliens or mentally challenged.

Those of you who’ve never lived in Pennsylvania will probably be surprised by how vehicle registration works. First off, you don’t go to the local Department of Motor Vehicles or Department of Public Safety to register your car in the state. Nope, the only thing you can do at a PENNDOT office is deal with driver’s licenses. All vehicle registrations must be done at the state capitol in Harrisburg, PA.

No, I’m not making this up. Vehicles can only be registered at the state capitol.

That’s pretty out of the way for most of us. To make things easier, the state has allowed certain companies, known as “messenger services”, to do the business of taking your paperwork to the capital for you. And no, it’s not free, nor even cheap.

This week I finally got around to registering a vehicle I bought while out of state after moving to PA. It’s a vintage bike, there’s only one dealer in town for this make, and it’s a good 30-45 minute drive away so I call ahead to see what I need to bring. Title, PA driver’s license, and proof of insurance, then pass safety inspection. Since it’s an obscure bike, I’m going to the dealer on the off chance I need some random part to pass inspection.

Today I roll into the dealership, paperwork in hand. First surprise: I have to pay PA sales tax on any purchase made in another state. (So, when I’m on vacation, do I need to pay tax for gifts I buy and bring back to my friends here?) It takes a good 30 minutes to do all the paperwork and then the clerk says, “ok, now I need two checks. One for $x for the state and one for $y for us.”

This caught me off guard, and since I rarely carry my checkbook these days I just kinda sputtered, “Uh, what? Nobody said anything about bringing checks when I called. Can’t I use a charge card or an ATM card or something?”

The clerk was not apologetic, but explained in that slow way you talk to people you think aren’t paying attention, “We can’t give the messenger service a credit card, we can only give them checks.” It wasn’t condescending as much as, “how can you not know that you need to pay for this by check? Everyone knows that you have to have a check.” Hell, I didn’t even know what a “messenger service” was until today, much less that I needed to pay for things with checks.

So, 3 hours driving/waiting and still no title transfer, no inspection, no nada. I go back tomorrow — with a checkbook this time — in hopes of finishing this.

This isn’t the sort of story that my friends back home need to hear. They need to hear how trivial it was go to to PENNDOT and drop off all the paperwork at once. They need to hear that when someone who didn’t grow up here is trapped in some sort of bureaucratic nonsense that the locals will be sympathetic, not just throw up their hands and say, “sorry, that’s just not how it works here”.

[tags]bureaucracy, penndot, pennsylvania, pittsburgh, rants[/tags]

Wondering if this has happened to anyone else….

I applied the most recent Apple Security Update on a PowerBook G4 15″, and after reboot, there’s a pixel-wide vertical stripe on the display. I’ve tried resetting the PRAM, rebooting, booting from install discs, booting into 9.2, letting it cool off, etc. Nothing has made it go away.

I guess it could be a coincidence, but someone else had the same thing happen and posted about it on the Apple discussion forum. I can understand a software upgrade triggering a disk failure by trying to use parts of a hard drive that are damaged, but how could it manage to trash a graphics adapter or display?

[tags]powerbook, security update, vertical stripe[/tags]

…just working on other, not-so-geeky things and posting about them in my design journal.

However, I got my hands on a Hitatchi HM55B, so maybe I can play with that over the weekend when nobody’s looking.

Ask yourself — what’s the point of your company’s security mechanisms and processes? Which ones are about security, and which ones are about legal coverage or shifting blame to another entity in the event of a breach?

The other day I wanted to wire some money to pay for a motorcycle I was buying from an individual. I went into the local branch of my brokerage and initiated the wire transfer paperwork. I showed them my Driver’s License and my US Passport as secondary ID, I knew the answers to the various secret questions about my account and past activity, but there was a problem.

Because the amount was over a certain threshold (quite small, in my opinion) my signature on the form had to be notarized. Never mind that I signed it in front of them, that my signature matched my ID, and that they’d photocopied my ID, I had to have a notary public stamp and sign the signature form.

What did the notary public do? They looked at my ID, pulled out a different form that I didn’t have to sign, stamped that form, and took my $10 payment. They couldn’t stamp the original form because there was no space for a notary stamp and they are only allowed to use that space on an original form.

What benefit does the brokerage gain from this little LARP quest to meet someone and go through a simple ritual? After I returned with the notarized second sheet of paper, we even changed information on the original form — I’d written down the wrong bank name for the payee and forgotten to fill in the date. They didn’t verify the notary name and signature before accepting my form, they just clipped it all together and started the wire transfer.

My guess is this had little to do with proving that I was who I said I was — it was pretty clear from both of my IDs and my knowledge of random facts about the account that I was the account holder. It’s my opinion that it was about covering their legal ass if there was ever a charge of fraud down the road (“My twin brother did it, it wasn’t me!”). The agents didn’t validate my ID, they relied upon a (supposedly) trustworthy third party, so if there’s fraud, it’s not their fault.

I wonder if the person who thought up this protocol realizes how easy it is to fake something like a notary stamp and signature — they’re trivial compared to a US Passport or state Driver’s License. If the fraud is going to involve more than a few grand, why would I let one more forgery stop me? Think about it — if I know enough about the person I’m ripping off to answer all the secret questions and fake a US Passport and Driver’s License, I can probably manage faking the notary stamp as well.

Do I feel better about my account security thanks to this little waste of time? Nope. I just feel $10 poorer and a bit guilty that I paid the seller a day later than I said I would.

[tags]security theater[/tags]

Ok, this was stupid fun and really easy. I’m relearning the Morse code — I originally learned it using the excellent ARRL CDs. As part of re-learning it, I thought it would be fun to see if I could learn it visually as well, by looking at a blinking LED. It kinda makes my brain hurt, but it actually might be doable.

So here it is, my simple Morse Code arduino sketch.

I think I might try parsing Morse next, it’s a much more interesting problem…

[tags]arduino, morse[/tags]

Ok, this was a bit more fun and geeky. The SHT15 is a temperature/humidity sensor made by Sensirion. I bought mine from Sparkfun, and at $42 it’s a bit pricey, but it’s pre-mounted on a breakout board saving me a nasty soldering job.

The SHT15 isn’t as fragile as a lot of other electrical components — you can get it wet, put it in the sun, etc. I’ll probably just mount it at the end of some very long leads and not bother putting any sort of protective case on it.

Being the rocket scientist that I am, I didn’t download the specs until I decided to actually write code. Turns out that the SHT15 uses a serial protocol developed by Sensirion; but they were kind enough to post some sample code for the 8051 so it wasn’t too hard to get working on the Arduino.

If you’re trying to get this working, take a look at my Arduino sketch. Writing code to read serial protocols using clock and data pins isn’t for the newcomer, but it isn’t terribly difficult if you know a bit of C, bit-wise operations, and have sample code to reference along with the timing diagrams.

[tags]arduino,hacking,sht15[/tags]

So, yet another day where the single-party government’s fight over how many people should get free cars and how high the reimbursement cap for private use vehicles is front page news.

This is completely embarrassing.

Imagine, if you will, that a rich pal of mine is visiting from the San Francisco Bay Area this week scouting out potential business locations or startups to fund. They pick up the paper a few times while they’re here and they see the continual “battle” played out on the front page between the Mayor’s office and Council over use of city vehicles and high reimbursement caps and they ask me for some background.

What do I tell my pal? That things are so f-ing great here, that our roads are in such good shape, we have such good public transportation, the schools are so well run, and that the crime rate is so low that the only thing council has on their agenda is finishing off a few minor budget items? Or that years of single-party rule have created a government so inefficient and unconcerned with the City of Pittsburgh that feel the best use of their time is a long, public debate about how many city employees get free cars and how many hundreds of dollars a month they can be reimbursed for private use of vehicles?

No number of boards or committees or projects or events designed to convince business to move here can make up for our elected officials acting like petty children in public. Between this, the no-bids process for putting up signs, and giving the poor, penniless Steelers a few million to build new facilities while they pay Big Ben over a hundred million I’m beginning to see why Pittsburgh might have a problem attracting new businesses.

[tags]pittsburgh, rants[/tags]

Reading the ADXL 3xx is pretty straightforward — give it power, run lines from the x,y,z pins to three analog pins, and do analogRead()s on the pins.

What’s a bit trickier is dealing with the sensor values. Resting flat on my desk, the x, y, and z values all vary on each read. It’s only by one or two steps, but it’s still noisy and could introduce a lot of jitter into your code. One way of eliminating/reducing noise is to take a running average of sensor readings, then use those to make your decisions.

Here’s an example Arduino sketch that reads the sensors, computes a running average, then displays the previous average, average, and current raw value for each axis.

A couple of related notes:

• The power you give the ADXL needs to be the same as the reference voltage on your Arduino. If you power the ADXL directly from the Arduino, then everything is fine. If you power it from another source, you might need to use the external power reference features on the Arduino.
• While you put power to the ST pin, the ADXL will force all three outputs to the middle value. This is useful for calibrating the ADXL by reading what it things its middle values are for each axis. However, it’s not something the average person will probably care much about, I find it useful as a “is it really working” test while I’m debugging a circuit.

[tags]adxl,arduino[/tags]

[Note: After I started writing this, Mike Madison, author of Pittsblog, wrote a nice piece on Sushi and Pittsburgh 2.0. His point of view is thinking about how to get people to move to Pittsburgh and develop an economy, I’m looking at it from reporting how things are and what to expect if you move/visit here.]

I’ve been told that if I’d moved here 10 years ago, I would have been seriously unhappy about the restaurant selection. While I don’t consider myself a foodie, I am a person that enjoys a wide range of dining choices, fresh food prepared properly, good service, and I don’t mind paying a few extra bucks to get it. Pittsburgh isn’t San Francisco or New York City in terms of range and quality of restaurants, but there are some really great restaurants in Pittsburgh. The trick is learning how to find them, learning whose opinion to trust, and, sadly, having access to a car.

Pittsburgh has benefited from a number of new restaurants opening up in the past decade that cater to both people like me and the real foodies. From the high-end restaurants like Eleven and Soba (owned by the misleadingly named Big Burrito Restaurant Group), Mio, and Willow to less-fancy-but-still-excellent places like Red Room Cafe and Remedy Restaurant and Lounge, Pittsburgh is catching up with other cities in the number and quality of contemporary restaurants.

It’s not as if there weren’t good restaurants here before — Pittsburgh boasts a number of high-end restaurants, many of which have been in operation for decades. The problem is that many of these places have been here for decades and really haven’t changed that much. The fare is often traditional Italian or continental cuisine with good but expected dishes: veal scallopine, fish-of-the-day Oscar, various cuts of steak with sides of potatoes, salads heavy on the dressing, and I think you can probably guess the rest of the menu. I’ve had dinner at Monterey Bay and Grand Concourse and the food was great, the service was excellent and there’s really nothing to complain about. Except that it’s pretty much the same menu that I’ve been looking at for most of my adult life. I think it’s safe to say that if I never had fish-of-the-day Oscar again, it wouldn’t upset me very much.

So what’s different about the newer restaurants and why am I so happy they’re located in Pittsburgh? It’s primarily because they are striking out in areas being ignored by the traditional establishments fixed in the 1960s American Dining Mindset. As an example, Eleven makes an effort to support the Slow Food movement by buying fresh greens and meats from local farmers and as a result their specials will vary with the season. They also create new dishes with ingredients that you might not recognize or that you wouldn’t thought of combining unless you’re a veteran of the original Iron Chef; for example sharp cheddar ice cream served with hot apple pie, or in-house cured lamb bacon served with a green salad. (I know, I know, “lamb bacon”? It is amazingly good, trust me on this.) At the same time, Eleven has a $12 hamburger on the lunch menu that is all the evidence you need for using good beef to make a hamburger.

Unfortunately, if you really want to enjoy the wide range of restaurants in Pittsburgh, you’re going to need a car, or at least a friend with a car. Many of the better restaurants are out in the ‘burbs or in an area of town not well served by the bus. (The taxi infrastructure is effectively non-existent, don’t think you’ll leave a restaurant, go to the curb and hail a taxi.) If you need wheelchair access, call ahead, as Pittsburgh is one of the least-ADA friendly cities I’ve ever lived in. Newer buildings are great, but a lot of restaurants are in older buildings that have never been updated.

Two things that I’m still getting used to are planning ahead for weekends and dealing with smoking. If it’s 2pm on Saturday, you’re probably not going to get a reservation at Soba, Elven, Mio, or any other place that isn’t a 9-10pm seating. You can go hang out in the bar and take your chances on a table opening up, but be prepared to eat at the bar. Which brings up another issue — smoking is still allowed in the bars of restaurants, so if you care about such things, you might want to scope out how far your “non smoking” table is from the smoking area. At Kaya, there’s only a few feet between where people can smoke and the handful of non-smoking tables and at some Mad Mex restaurants the bar is directly beside the non-smoking area with only a counter to divide the two. Things are changing, however, as Eleven and Soba both have smoke-free bars, meaning you can actually go out for a drink in Pittsburgh and not come home smelling like an ash tray.

So if you’re thinking of moving here and you like contemporary continental and American food, you’re in pretty good shape. Some of the restaurants are as expensive as those in SF or NYC, but others are cheaper or have larger portions. If I order a steak, I plan on only being able to eat half of it and using the rest for a sandwich the next day. It’ll take a few trips to various places, but soon you’ll enjoy some of the Pittsburgh friendliness that people talk so much about, the waiters will start to remember your names and you theirs.

Now the bad news.

If you know your sashimi from your nigiri, like your Thai food “Thai hot”, or enjoy a good ceviche as an appetizer instead of nachos, things are a bit bleak.

So-Called “Ethnic” Food

“Ethnic”, and by that I mean anything not European, Eastern European or American, is where things start to go sour. Pittsburgh suffers from a mid-20th Century view of “ethnic” food — bland and Americanized. It’s not that Pittsburghers are stupid or malevolent, they just haven’t benefited from a large immigrant population opening up restaurants and therefore haven’t developed the taste and experience that goes along with a large, diverse, ethnic restaurant scene. The European immigrant cultures that have been here for a century have really done well with their own cuisines with places like Lidia’s and Grand Concourse and the like; but Pittsburghers haven’t been exposed enough to non-European immigrant cultures to understand that there should be a difference between a pirog and a gyoza or that not everything should be smothered in sauce.

I don’t think it’s all in my head, either. Part of what drove me to write this was an amazingly ignorant review of a new Japanese restaurant. The well-meaning reviewers complain about bland agedashi tofu and factually state that udon noodles are made of buckwheat. The thing is, agedashi tofu is a very light dish based on the delicate flavor of tofu and comes with a very light sauce so that you have a chance to taste the tofu. Contrary to the reviewers’ statements, udon noodles are made of wheat, not buckwheat. (It’s soba that are made of buckwheat.) It could be that they knew what they were talking about and the editor introduced these mistakes; in either case, I’d be embarrassed if this was the first restaurant review one of my visiting friends got their hands on. “No, really, not everyone here thinks like that!”

So it should come as no surprise that Nakama Steakhouse and Sushi Bar is regularly voted “best sushi” by Pittsburghers. Truth is, it’s easily some of the worst sushi I’ve ever had, and that includes sketchy, all-you-can-eat sushi places. Nakama is basically a big bar on one side with a lot of hibachi tables on the other and a tiny “sushi bar” in between. If I lived on the south side, it’d probably be a great place to have a beer with friends, but that’s not the same as “best sushi”.

Like Thai food? There’s decent Thai here, but set your expectations low in terms of prices and service. I finally convinced Noodle Hut that I like my food “Thai hot”, but it took a few attempts and explaining that I learned to eat Thai food in California before I got anything reasonably spicy. Bangkok Balcony is pretty good, but there’s often no correlation between the “scale of 1 to 10” and how spicy my food is and they usually up-charge us to call drinks even when we ordered well drinks.

How about Mexican? There’s Mad Mex, a tex-mex chain owned by Big Burrit, with several restaurants spread throughout the area. I like Mad Mex plenty and go there often, but I’ve yet to find a place in town that serves a good mole poblano or fresh ceviche. Mad Mex is great tex-mex, but I also like Mexican cooking based on seafood or good marinades and taco places that make their own tortillas or buy local, fresh tortillas.

But there is hope

There are a handful of good ethnic places if you’re willing to look. Chaya in Squirrel Hill serves some of the freshest sushi and tastiest Japanese food I’ve ever eaten, and I’m including the decade or so I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area when I make that comparison. It’s cramped and BYOB, but I’ll gladly wait in line and BMOB to enjoy their food. Noodle Hut in Regent Square is amazingly tiny with a long wait, their takeout service is amazingly well-organized. Silk Elephant is a Thai tapas place that opened recently, and while it’s pricey, the food is excellent. Across the street from the exceptionally underwhelming Lulu’s on Craig St is the amazingly good Little Asia. We haven’t scoped out all the Indian places yet, but I’ve heard there are some good places outside the city limits and that the same is true for middle eastern cuisine.

A note about service

After living here a couple of years, I am finally beginning to understand what “entitlement culture” means when it comes to customer service in stores and restaurants. We used to eat at Bangkok Balcony on a regular basis, then one evening we were seated for dinner, waited 10 minutes to have our order taken, then have the table next to us get seated, order, and served food and pay their bill before our food even showed up. Twice I had to ask a manager where our food was, and by the end of the evening, we just got a “sorry about that” from the manager. We’ve had similar bad service at a couple of other places and again, only a brief apology, so I don’t think it’s just Bangkok Balcony. I think it’s something in the local culture where customer service isn’t necessary for a business to keep its customers. I’ve never lived in a city before where a manager didn’t at least comp your drinks or something if your waiter severely screwed up your dinner.

The high-end places (Soba, Grand Concourse, etc) have amazing service, and the service in smaller places like Remedy and Point Brugge Cafe is just as good, but upscale is no guarantee of service. At Azul one evening we watched our waitress eat dinner at the bar and chat with her friends, back turned to us, while we waited to order, have our drinks refreshed, etc. The manager (owner?) sat nearby the entire time this was going on, so it’s not as if the waitress was unsupervised. Her boss simply didn’t care about making sure she paid attention to customers.

I don’t know if Pittsburghers simply don’t know what good service and therefore fail to demand it or if they have just grown used to it and are willing to tolerate bad service. Either way, be prepared to make a fuss from time to time and don’t take it too personally. Like I’ve said before, Pittsburghers can be amazingly friendly one-on-one, but in business situations that can easily change. If you’re treated poorly in a restaurant, don’t immediately assume it’s because you’re not from around here or that your skin’s the wrong color, it could just be that the place has extremely bad service.

A few final thoughts…

Pittsburgh has some amazingly good American, Italian and continental restaurants and a handful of equally good ethnic restaurants. Good restaurants are not always easy to find, and you can’t always trust the local reviews and restaurant polls, but as you start making friends, ask them where they go and why they like it. It won’t be long before you start making acquaintance with many of the staff at your favorite places, and they’ll often recommend other places or tell you where they eat and what they order. You can’t put much faith in the way the restaurant looks from the outside or through the window, as there are a lot of restaurants opening in everything from bars to old churches, but that’s part of the fun of exploring, right? Get used to calling ahead for weekend reservations or to find out the BYOB status, scope out the smoking situation in advance, and you’ll have an easy time of things.

We’ve had some wonderful experiences in restaurants since moving here, it just took a little bit of effort and a little risk taking.

[tags]pittsburgh,restaurants,reviews[/tags]

This was so easy it wasn’t even funny. I think I spent more time discovering that I was trying to read the wrong pin than I did actually getting this to work. The main reason I’m posting it is so that people considering this rangefinder can see just how easy it is to use compared to some of the other rangefinders out there.

This reads the voltage from the AN (analog) pin on the Maxbotix LV-EZ1 Ultrasonic Range Finder (I got mine at SparkFun). Connect power and ground on the Maxbotix to a reference ground and power, then connect the AN pin to the analog input of your choice.

Here’s a simple program to read the sensor and report the range in inches on serial:


//-*-C-*-
// read values from a LV-MaxSonar-EZ1 sensor
// this is for the Arduino MINI -- change the pin values to suit your board.
// jet@flatline.net
// 1 Dec 2007

[tags]arduino,maxbotix[/tags]